The House by the Sea

The House by the Sea

A Journal

May Sarton

F
OR
B
EVERLY
H
ALLAM
and M
ARY
-L
EIGH
S
MART

Preface

W
HEN I MOVED
to this house by the sea in May of '73 I had it in mind to keep a journal, to record the first impressions, the fresh imprint of a major change in my life, but for a year and a half the impulse to be silent and to live into this new place before speaking about it remained very strong. For months the sea was such a tranquilizer that I sometimes wondered whether I had made a fatal mistake and would never be able to write again. The
Journal of a Solitude
had been a way of dealing with anguish; was it that happiness is harder to communicate, or that when one is happy enough there is little incentive even to try to sort out daily experience as it happens? I became haunted by something I read years ago to the effect that when the Japanese were in a period of peace they painted only fans.

Why, then, had I made the move, left Nelson and my friends there, left village life that had taught me so much, left “the hills of home,” the only house I shall ever own, the garden I had created with so much labor over fifteen years? Why move into a much larger house at a time in my life when it might have seemed sensible to pull in my horns?

Such major decisions are made on instinct rather than reason, and in them chance plays a part … after all, it had been quite by chance that I landed in Nelson in the first place, for fifteen years ago I had looked in vain for a house by the sea—houses by the sea with any privacy, with any considerable land, were beyond my means. As I think it over now, I realize that the decision to leave Nelson had been ripening in me for over a year. I knew it was time to go, time for radical change.

Of course there were reasons. My house was right on the village green, too exposed; too many strangers in the last years found their way to my door. At the end I began to feel I lived in a museum and had become a target for public curiosity—flattering perhaps, but hard to handle. If I turned such visitors away I felt guilty, and if I asked them in I felt invaded. Another reason was that both Quig and Perley Cole had died and, with them, two of the major friendships born of that place. But the most imperative reason was that I had been through a traumatic personal experience in Nelson in the last two years there, and the house itself felt contaminated by pain.

Nevertheless I might have stayed on had it not been for an extraordinary act of chance, and an extraordinary act of friendship that made major change as easy as the opening of a door. Had the guardian angel been at work? It did seem so when my friends Mary-Leigh Smart and Beverly Hallam came over from Ogunquit, Maine on April 9, 1971, to pick up a monotype of Bev's for her retrospective show. They were full of excitement as they had just bought an old estate on the coast near York and were in the midst of making plans to build a modern house right on the rocks. They described vividly the combination of open fields, rocky beaches, ponds, a swamp, and the big woods at the back, and showed me photographs, and I listened. Later in the day I told them of my depression and that I seemed to be at a dead end in my own life. Then Beverly, with a twinkle in her eye, said, “Take another look at the old house.” I still did not understand what she was suggesting. They had mentioned that there was a house on the place, but I had not really paid attention so I looked again at the photograph of a shingled, many-windowed house set back on a knoll against big trees, looking down to the sea across a long field.

“Why don't you come and live there, rent it from us, and settle in?”

It was a staggering moment. Now that I might be able to move, would I dare? How could I leave Nelson, after all? Did I really want to?

I arranged to go over and have a look. And once I had stood on the wide flagstone terrace and looked out over that immensely gentle field to a shining, still, blue expanse, the decision was taken out of my hands. I had to come. The landscape, not the house at first, was the magnet … after all, Mrs. Stevens, a character in a novel of mine who bears some resemblance to me, felt that the sea was her final muse.

I had two years in which to dream myself into the change, sell Nelson, and pull up roots. And before the next year was out I had sold to Nancy and Mark Stretch, whom I felt at once would be the right people for the village—young, determined to live a country life and bring up the children they hoped to have in just such a village. Mark was then an apprentice to a cabinetmaker and would make the barn into a workshop.

Meanwhile I went back and forth to Wild Knoll, measuring walls for bookcases, closing off one big porch to make wall space for the old Belgian furniture, laying a yellow rug in the library (to remind me of the yellow floor at Nelson), choosing colors for the rather dark kitchen, feeling my way into large spaces. Eleanor Blair suggested that I make one large bay window into a plant window, and that has worked better than I could have dreamed. It is really like a small greenhouse, filled with flowering plants all year long. My one anxiety when I first walked through the empty rooms, so large and full of light, was where to find the shelter I need for my work. And when I finally climbed to the third floor, there it was—a room paneled in soft beige-colored pine, under the eaves, the small windows looking down on the grassy path to the sea on one side and into the treetops on the other, for the house stands high on a knoll.

“The grassy path …”

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore. It is the signature of the place, and also perhaps of its former owner, Anne Robert.

It was she who came here and turned a rather modest house into a lordly “summer cottage” by building out on each side the wings of enclosed porches, by laying the great terrace and its stone wall, and enclosing the formal garden with flowering bushes and trees. It was she, no doubt, who installed casement windows and had built the curving fence, a bower of purple and white clematis in June; she perhaps who planted the big pines, spruce, hemlock, and oaks at the back, so the house stands against, and is sheltered by, a small forest.

I feel her presence everywhere and it is a wholly beneficent one. I like to think she would be glad to know that someone is working in her garden again, planting bulbs and tree peonies and azaleas, keeping it all alive. She loved this place and her love of it and happiness in it have been contagious.

I knew from the first moment, in May of '73, a few days after the move that “I have slipped into these wide spaces, this atmosphere of salt and amplitude, this amazing piece of natural Heaven and haven, like a ship slipping into her berth.” But it was a year and a half later when I felt ready to start a journal. It was designed to be the record of my happiness here. But a journal cannot be planned ahead, written as it is on the pulse of the moment. I could not know that in 1974–75 I was to lose three of my oldest friends, nor that in the spring of '75 I would be nearly incapacitated by a long siege of virus infection in my throat. So what began in joy ended by being shot through by grief and illness, although the leitmotif is still the sea, and the house by the sea, and the garden by the sea.

When I first decided to come, I also made the very important decision to bring a dog with me, my first dog … this house is far more isolated than the house in Nelson. I was to be here alone for the first year while Mary-Leigh and Bev's house was a-building, and a dog, I felt, would be just the companion I needed. Also, I had fallen in love with Pixie, a Sheltie belonging to the Frenches up the road in Nelson, and had begged them to let me have a puppy when she had her first litter. In this way Tamas came into my life, Tamas Sea Island March Wind, to give him his full name. At three months of age he began to live with me, sleeping beside me at night and playing in a playpen by my desk while I worked. When he was six months old, he and I went to school together, so that by the time we moved into this big house, he was a very gentlemanly well-behaved dog.

I was totally ignorant about dogs. I had fallen in love with one special dog, Tamas' mother, but knew nothing about the breed except that they were sensitive and beautiful. But luckily for me Shelties (Shetland shepherds) are by nature guarders not hunters, so Tamas can be let out safely at all times, even when I go away for half a day, and will never run off. He also shepherds Bramble, the last of the wild cats, whom I had tamed at Nelson. For her, his arrival as a small barky puppy was traumatic. For three weeks she would not come up on my bed and stayed out most of the time. But Tamas learned, learned not to bark—how moving it was that afternoon when he approached Bramble, sitting beside me on a couch, and swallowed his bark! I saw him do it, saw the impulse come, and then be quelled. And for a while that day they sat side by side, and then, little by little, became fast friends.

Every day we set out together in the late morning after the stint at my desk is done, and walk through the woods, making a large circle on dirt roads, around the swamp and home again. They both sleep on my bed at night, Bramble coming in through the window when she wants to and often leaving before dawn. Solitude shared with animals has a special quality and rarely turns into loneliness. Bramble and Tamas have brought me comfort and joy.

There is another member of the family who comes here for a day or so every month, Judith Matlack, with whom I shared a house in Cambridge for many years, and who is now in a nursing home in Concord, Massachusetts. For thirty years or more she has been the closest thing to family in my life. Without her presence, even though her mind is failing and she has no memory of all our journeys to Europe together and all our summers in Nelson, there would be no Christmas and no Thanksgiving, and I would feel like an orphan. This journal is a partial record of what it is like to experience senility close to home.

In the years at Wild Knoll my life has expanded rather than narrowed. Not only is this house larger and more comfortable than the Nelson house, but my life inside it has changed. I find myself nourished by the visits of many friends, friends of the work who have written me for years and finally turn up from South Dakota, or Ohio, new friends, old friends who are passing by, for everyone comes to Maine sooner or later! I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.

Wild Knoll

October 1976

The House by the Sea

Wednesday, November 13th, 1974

A
T LAST
I am ready to start a journal again. I have lived here in York for a year and a half, dazzled by the beauty of this place, but I have not wanted to write about it until today. Perhaps something cracked open in Europe (I went over for a month in mid-October); for the first time I can play records, and poems are shooting up. For two years I have not been able to listen to music because opening that door had become too painful after the hell of the last two years in Nelson. But I have been happy in this place from the very first day. And every day since then I have woken at dawn to watch the sun rise.