May Sarton with Polly Thayer Starr’s portrait Miss May Sarton (1937), 1992, via the Cambridge Historical Society
On January 1, 1975, May Sarton, the American diarist, poet, and novelist, went up to the third-floor study of her house in York, Maine, and glanced out the window at its ocean view. She had just one daily task ahead—walking the dog at noon. When she opened a new calendar, the “only connect” epigraph from E. M. Forster’s Howards End caught her eye. Sarton began an entry in her journal by recording this moment and soon fell into a riff about solitude and detachment, one of the “mini-essays,” as she called them, that appear in her journals. The context of her thoughts that morning was the recent Christmas holidays and her sense of release after the departure of her guests.
Sarton moves deftly in her entry, with a kind of free association. From Forster’s admonition she procedes to Sybille Bedford’s biography of Aldous Huxley, which she had been reading, commenting on his vision of life (“he was able to create only a fragmented world”), and then recalls an afternoon in London, during the previous fall, with her friends Julian and Juliette Huxley (Aldous and Julian were brothers), whom she found to be “old now, old and self-absorbed,” set against happier memories of their youthful generosity during the years before the Second World War. Thoughts of friendship lead her to her latest novel, Kinds of Love, which had brought her
