Me, Myself, and I: Three's a Crowd

I've been rereading Doris Grumbach's Fifty Days of Solitude (Beacon, 1994), about an extended period she spent alone (more or less) while her partner Sibyl Pike was away on a long book-buying trip.  The two had relocated to Maine years before with their bookstore from Washington DC.  It was the winter of 1993, and Grumbach was 75 years old.  (She's now in her late nineties, still alive and still writing.)  Grumbach hoped to work on a novel she was writing, and limited her interaction with the world to mail, the radio, recorded music and movies, and books, though at times she had to talk to people, as when she went into town to pick up mail.  Since I've been known to fantasize about living alone in the countryside and watching snow pile up outside, I found her situation attractive and read the book soon after it was published.

As I recall, I liked it better the first time I read it.  It's interesting to compare Fifty Days of Solitude to May Sarton's early journals, when she was living alone in Maine, though she was just as connected to other people, neighbors and correspondents, as Grumbach is.  As with Sarton, I'm most pleased by Grumbach's reflections on aging, since I'm ten years younger than she was when she conducted this experiment and wrote about it.  But many of her comments bug me.  She's prone to complain about the horrors of "the world today," for example, though those horrors have always been there, but Americans lacked electronic media to report them to us.  I sometimes believe that if there is such a thing as information overload, it lies more in the pileup of atrocities, disasters, and general human misery that the news media collect and deliver.

The radio news, in a single day while I was alone: Disastrous floods in southern California.  Two trains collide in Gary, Indiana, and six persons are decapitated.  One hundred fifty miles from Ankara, Turkey, an entire village is buried in snow.  The United States and its allies bomb Iraq, killing many civilians.  An Estonian ship breaks up near Finland, spilling two hundred thousand gallons of oil.

... and more.  But such things have always happened.  If an epidemic wiped out a village in northern India in 1770, say, the news wouldn't have traveled far or fast, and North Americans wouldn't have seen video footage on TV.  If a farmer in North Dakota in 1890 went mad from anxiety over a bad harvest and cut his family to pieces with a scythe, the crime would have been reported in local newspapers, but probably wouldn't have made it to Sargentville, Maine.  Even in Grumbach's and my lifetimes, the newspapers have been full of such stories, but people tend to forget them.  When I see summaries of the news from the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, I'm struck by how many terrible things were happening and recorded then; but I'd forgotten about them.  Evidently so did Grumbach.

The same goes for her lament about youth.

For the young: To be left alone with themselves when they are too unsure to respect the self they have been persuaded by the world to dislike, those who feel unworthy in the eyes of their families, what a terrible condition that is.  The dismayingly high number of suicides among young persons attests to the consequences of such destructive isolation, that is, to their insurmountable loneliness.

I'm skeptical about this.  The number of suicides is hard to know for sure, because so often they are ambiguous or covered up.  It's even harder to know why kids (or adults) kill themselves.  Is it because of "insurmountable loneliness"?  I don't know, and I don't think Grumbach knew either; nor do I think that the self becomes more "sure" with age -- it certainly doesn't seem to be so for Grumbach at 75.  There was a flurry of panic in the early 90s about youth suicide in the US, and it was never clear if more teenagers were killing themselves than previously, why they were killing themselves, or whether diminished media attention to the problem meant that the numbers were smaller or that the media had moved onto the next Shiny Thing.  But I grew up in rural Indiana pretty isolated, a gay bookworm, and though I often felt lonely I never contemplated suicide, nor did I feel that bad most of the time.  And right now I'm reading George Eliot's 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss, set in rural and village England a few decades before it was written.  I gather it is largely autobiographical, and its depiction of a young girl's alienation and isolation shows that the problem is not particularly new.  Eliot's depiction of the superficially better-adjusted folk around her doesn't make them enviable either: they are mostly half-educated, indifferently religious, obsessed with propriety, and fall apart when life doesn't go their way.  I would expect the same to be true of many of Doris Grumbach's Maine neighbors.

But also stuff like this:

When I lived in cities, surrounded on every side by people, served by them constantly, I never knew the names of the person who sold newspapers at the corner, delivered them to the door in the early hours of the morning, collected the garbage, waited on me in the grocery store, delivered UPS packages and the mail.  Rarely did I see their faces, or if I did, they were still, somehow, invisible, a part of the anonymous fog of the overpopulation that pushed upon me from every side.

Here, now, I knew the names and life histories of everyone who had ever come to the house, to plow after snowstorms, ... [etc.]

I can relate, but I suspect that in Grumbach's case, as it certainly is in mine, this was her hangup, not an inevitable part of city life.  I'm getting over it as I get older, and I wonder if it wasn't also true for Grumbach, aided by the move to a new environment.  Right now I'm in a very large city, Seoul, and despite my linguistic deficiency, I recognize and am recognized by the people I buy hot chocolate from each morning, the people in the restaurants where I have lunch, the person at the convenience store across the street, some people in the neighborhood, and elsewhere.  Names are good, and I'm learning them, but I don't think they're absolutely necessary; recognition is.  The same is true in the mid-sized city where I live, by the way.  As I get older my shyness is, thankfully, wearing away.

Cities have their disadvantages; so do small towns and rural areas.  But wandering around Seoul impresses me again with the achievement that big cities are.  They don't just happen, they must be organized and kept working by intense human intelligence and physical effort.  I think this achievement is often slighted.

Speaking of George Eliot, Grumbach quotes from Middlemarch: "There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it."  Grumbach comments:

Determined = formed? or, directed?  But not, I thought, forever.  There may be a time, as now, when the search for the inward being cuts it away from determination by others, frees it for the moment from direction from the outside, gives it stasis, and more than that temporary peace.

I disagree very strongly.  Even shut up alone in her house, and even if she'd stopped listening to the radio or reading her mail, Grumbach would have been connected to and sustained by other people, such as those "who come to the house, to plow after snowstorms, to put up gutters and rototill the garden, to mow down the meadow and to fix the plumbing, the electricity, the telephone, the antenna and the steps."  She knew this.  That she was limiting direct, face-to-face contact with others for fifty days didn't change it.  For that matter, Eliot wrote of "what lies outside" the creature.  That means not just people but the house, the land, the weather, the air and water and living things that inhabit the environment.  I don't believe we are ever freed from direction (which is different from control) from the outside, no matter how fondly we imagine that we've achieved it; or that we ever achieve "stasis" while we live.  Grumbach has a curiously material sense of the self, as if it were a physical organ somewhere inside her, and that's odd, given what she has to say about Christian and Buddhist spirituality as part of her practice in her solitude.

Fifty Days of Solitude isn't a bad book, though; like many books I disagree with, it gives me something to push against, and poses questions I can then answer for myself.  There's no reason why Grumbach and I should have the same answers.

Declarations of Dependence

I've added May Sarton's journals to my list of reading projects.  Or rather, re-reading projects, since I've already read them all, mostly as they were published.  In my thirties and forties they were interesting primarily for her account of aging; I'm now slightly older than she was when she began writing journals for publication, so it will be interesting to see how my perspective has changed.  Another interesting aspect in the later journals, especially after her 1986 stroke, was how she had to learn to depend on other people.  That made a big impression on me when I first read them, but I expect to learn more now that I'm old myself.

But what got me started this time was something I'd heard about these books, and wanted to check for myself.  Her first journal, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968) describes her move to a house of her own in (or near) the village of Nelson, New Hampshire.  Determined to live alone, she aimed to write honestly about herself, including her anger and temper -- a somewhat daring course for a woman writer.  But she found that most readers didn't notice her anger in that book, it was too well masked.  I think of Sarton as a ladylike writer, and her anger up to this point was expressed in repressed, ladylike ways.  In Journal of a Solitude (1973), which I'm reading now, Sarton resolved to make her anger more explicit.  I wanted to see how well she'd kept that resolution, and if I could tell the difference between the tone of the first book and the tone of the second.

I can see how she worked hard not to censor herself, to mention her anger -- indeed, her rages and tantrums, the words she herself used for certain moods.  This is a good thing, but as the word "tantrums" suggests, she had trouble putting her anger into context.  It doesn't help that she still censored herself in certain areas, not entirely of her own choosing I suspect: for example, she refers often to the woman she was romantically involved with at the time as "X," and is careful not to make it explicit that X was a woman.  Her partner of many years, Judy Matlack, is mentioned several times by her first name only, and their relationship is never specified.  Sarton and Matlack had broken up when Sarton moved to Nelson, but they remained close, and they often spent weekends together until Matlack's death.  (She spent her later years in a nursing home, where Sarton visited her even after Matlack no longer recognized her, as I remember from the later journals.)  This reticence makes it difficult for Sarton to delve into the sources of her anger, at least for print, and makes her outbursts seem isolated and sometimes puzzling.

(I noticed that it was in Journal of a Solitude that Sarton made her famous reference to her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing as "a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality ..."  Geez, what a list of negative virtues!  It has been a long time since I read Mrs. Stevens, and I imagine I'll be rereading Sarton's novels after I get through the journals, but as I recall Mrs. Stevens wasn't all that interesting.  Nor, in fact, was she a novelty: there were quite a few non-sex-maniacal lesbians in fiction before her.  Like Gore Vidal's account of his homosexual novel The City and the Pillar, Sarton toots her own horn a bit too stridently here.)

At the same time, it's clear that her anger often puzzled her: she wrote repeatedly that on some mornings she woke up in tears, for no reason she could name.  I don't judge her for this -- I have my own temper, and I honor her honesty in admitting that she could be difficult to get along with, in ways I recognize in myself -- nor do I try to diagnose her.  As she became older and her health declined she often came across in the journals as merely querulous, but then she had plenty to complain about, and I was always impressed at her determination to keep working and traveling as long as she could.  I hope to do as well myself.

The other thing I notice on this reading is that although Sarton often refers to her solitude, how she has chosen to live alone to dedicate herself to work, and her frequent loneliness, she hardly seems solitary to me.  As I mentioned, she kept in close touch with her ex, she had various love affairs, and she had an extended network of friends both personal and professional.  Her solitary life in these journals is frequently interrupted by visitors, usually but not always on the weekends, and by travels around the country to give readings and lectures.  Sometimes fans come knocking on her door.  She also has neighbors, who helped her get settled into her house, mow her grass, plow the road after snowfall, and look in on her periodically to make sure she's all right; her portraits of these people are often quite touching.  But then she complains regularly that she can't get any work done because of all the interruptions!  It's a fair complaint, but it undermines her protestations of solitude.  Oh well, I experience similar ambivalence about living alone, so I read a lot of this with recognition.  Like Sarton, I live alone, but I'm assuredly no hermit, nor would I want to be.  Maybe the meaning of "solitude" needs to be clarified.  I remember that while Thoreau lived "alone" and solitary at Walden Pond, he still went into town each day to gossip, and he took his laundry home for his mother to wash.  Even the desert hermits of the early Christian church lived in connection with monasteries and churches, and probably passed few days without seeing fellow religious, pilgrims, and servants bringing them their meals.

So, I'm enjoying this renewed acquaintance with the "solitary" May Sarton.  May my own old age be as fulfilling and productive.