"It came to me one night that it had to be something useful, needed, and close to home, something I could invest in and make grow, something I could control for a change. That night I began to dream of a women's bookstore, a bookstore which would be not only a place for buying books, but a meeting place, a welcoming refuge where people could browse and talk. Maybe there could be a fireplace and a table with comfortable chairs around it. As soon as I began to imagine this I realized it was exactly what I must do and I did not sleep a wink, my head was so absorbed in thinking and planning."--May Sarton, The Education of Harriet Hatfield
Then, somehow, I forgot about her.
My negligence--unforgiveable it seems to me now--has come up because I am re-reading Sarton for the first time in three decades, and Harriet Hatfield's bookstore is just one of many things I realize I've been missing.
When I was in my late 20s, I discovered Journal of A Solitude, which set me off on a Sarton reading pilgrimage. Although her journals--The House by the Sea, Recovering, At Seventy--were favorites, I also loved many of her novels--Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, The Small Room, A Reckoning.
I thought less of Sarton's poems then, but probably didn't try hard enough. She called poetry her "most important" work, and given that Virginia Woolf was among her early fans, I think I was just dead wrong about them. Lately I've revisited the poems, with more positive results. Maybe I'm ready now.
There are many people who don't read May Sarton; I hesitate to add "anymore" because her readership was always small, if devoted. She understood what it meant to be an uncategorizable author. She often bristled at labels that might have garnered her more attention--woman writer, lesbian writer. Her readership has been young and old, male and female. In an interview, she once said, "it is a mistake to believe that I'm not read by men. More and more I hear from men.... People think of me as a woman's writer but that is not really true."
She could be mischievous in acknowledging her place in the literary world, as in this passage from The House by the Sea: "It is very hard to see oneself in the hard light of reality through someone else's eyes. Auberon Waugh in the Evening Standard in London opens a long sneer of a review of Crucial Conversations, 'May Sarton is an American lady of 63 who has been writing novels for 36 years without anyone paying very much attention.' That is the truth; yet it made me laugh, it is such a caricature of how I see myself."
I've decided to pay attention to Sarton's work again. During my initial encounters with her books when I was young, I felt she was speaking directly to me. That is a special experience for any reader. Now that I'm nearly the age Sarton was when she wrote The House by the Sea, I've been stunned by how much it still speaks to me, if in a different tone.
Sarton would understand, having said, "people don't read the journals to discover me; they read the journals to discover themselves." What she might have hoped is that the journals and novels would lead me to rediscover her poetry. I'm trying. There is so much to read--an astounding 50 books in her bibliography. And I'm just getting started... again.
If I could handsell her work now, I would. Maybe that's what I'm doing here as I contemplate Harriet Hatfield's bookshop moment: "I had to laugh at myself for thinking I could embark on such a venture with no business experience whatever, but it felt like an instinct as powerful as a cow's instinct to eat grass. That is what made me laugh, the certainty that I was at the same time a little crazy, no doubt, and absolutely right that this was the adventure for me, godsent, in fact. Hatfield House: A Bookstore for Women was the name that came to me after dawn."--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)