How Poet and Novelist May Sarton’s Personal Life Messed Up Her Legacy

By Gabriella West

In 1997, Wisconsin academic Margot Peters published a highly effective biography of LGBTQ novelist and poet May Sarton (1912-1995), born Eleanor Marie Sarton in Belgium to a Belgian father and an English mother. But it's effective in the manner of a hit job. Even Benjamin Moser, who published what was essentially a contemptuous biography of Susan Sontag in 2019, wasn't as cruel as this. My theory is that the elderly Sarton rather impulsively jumped at the chance to have an academic do her biography, always desperate to create a legacy as she was. It backfired.

Slim, dark-haired, and androgynous, the young May Sarton, who grew up in Cambridge, MA, had many things going for her. She was an intelligent, ambitious poet who burst out into the world, refusing to go to college, and joined Eva Le Gallienne's New York-based repertory theater company instead. She then moved on to start her own theater company. After it failed, she went off to England in the mid-1930s. It's here that she was at the height of her femme-fatale powers, meeting and schmoozing with Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen (and bedding Bowen!); the Cresset Press in London published her first novel, The Single Hound, when Sarton was only twenty-six. Her first book of poetry, Encounter in April had been published the previous year. Having amassed tons of literary contacts, including a passionate, long-simmering relationship with both Aldous Huxley’s older brother, Julian, a biologist, and his Swiss wife, Juliette, she looked to be someone who would have a brilliant career... Then things were thrown off by World War II breaking out, and Sarton sailed back to the States and her parents, whom she lived with part of the time. An affair with poet Muriel Rukeyser as she did war work in New York livened up this uncertain period.

But Sarton's lifelong fatal flaw was her neediness, as well as her drive to make conquests. Peters traces the roots of her issues back to her parents, who were a mismatched couple (a self-absorbed Belgian-refugee scientist, a thwarted English creative designer six years older than him who may have been bisexual herself). They neglected May during her childhood at certain important points, passing her off to family friends. While Sarton's father, George, became a Harvard professor and wrote exhaustive tomes on the history of science, her mother, Mabel, was never able to achieve much in America and was completely dependent on her husband for money. Sarton herself had terrible money problems for years and became increasingly unstable. She took off on a tour of the U.S., lecturing at small colleges about poetry, which was an adventurous and rather risky thing to do.

But the gamble seemed to pay off. In the early 1940s while travelling in New Mexico, she met a lovely older woman called Judy Matlack, a college teacher and Quaker, with whom Sarton achieved a kind of domesticity back in Cambridge for about fifteen years. Out of that period came quirky, endearing books like The Fur Person. (They both adored cats.) Judy was there for her when her mother died of cancer in 1950, a huge emotional blow for the only child, who inherited Mabel’s passionate love for colors and for gardening.

But alas, Sarton had started being compulsively unfaithful to the primarily asexual Judy, particularly during summer trips abroad... and ended the relationship, moving to poverty-stricken Nelson, New Hampshire, after her father died, and purchasing a house. This adventure in rural living was the start of a whole different life for Sarton, and she took advantage of it and her increasingly successful new persona as a “solitary” and self-reliant female artist. But, as Peters reveals, she was actually miserable and furious during most of the 1960s because Cora duBois, the anthropologist whom she’d hoped to lure into living with her in New Hampshire, and whom she’d dumped Judy for, was ultimately not in the least interested and instead stayed with her lover in Boston. Some of the relationship details get quite ugly here. Always willing to teach, she taught writing for a few years at Wellesley and began stalking the female president of the college, who coolly evaded her. She was marginalized there, and the department eventually dropped her.

Peters is very good on the way Sarton used the other women in her life to garner constant attention and validation. Still, the biography becomes excruciating as Sarton gets older and needier. Suddenly, the once-charming ingenue couldn’t have relationships anymore... she drove lovers and friends away with her rages and emotional meltdowns. Judy, who stayed close, now had dementia and had to be institutionalized. Sarton felt abandoned. She found a new therapist, a cultured older lady whom she started to pursue romantically, but the therapist also developed dementia. During this rocky period in the early 1970s Sarton left Nelson and moved to York, Maine, even further off the grid, and rented a house near the sea from a lesbian couple for the rest of her life. She had become financially comfortable due to her royalties from her final publisher, Norton, but her health slowly began to fail and she was diagnosed with breast cancer in her sixties, which seemed cured but slowly metastasized. She also began to brood obsessively over the fact that her poems weren’t reviewed or included in the literary canon. A close friendship she nurtured with poet Louise Bogan didn’t help, as Bogan wouldn’t review her books. (She did enjoy a supportive relationship with the feminist academic and novelist Carolyn Heilbrun, who became her literary executor.)

It was, admittedly, a crazy life, but May Sarton did manage to write a number of excellent novels, such as Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), and many books of poetry. However, her quietly addictive journals, such as Journal of a Solitude (1973) and Recovering (1980), may be the one thing that will give her literary posterity. They brought her fame and an adoring readership during the feminist 1970s that is hard to imagine now. Unfortunately, the biography trashes the carefully crafted image of serene-older-lady Sarton in the journals completely. She was even abusive to some of her pets.

In the end, I felt sorry for May Sarton, whose failing health (cancer, stroke, heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome) made her last few years predictably miserable. (She kept receiving honorary degrees right up until the end, though!) She continued churning out journals, too, and Norton kept publishing them. Old age and friendship had become her new topics, though most of these friendships were local and transactional. About old age, she was unsparing.

One ambiguous relationship lingered on: Julian Huxley had died in 1975, but Juliette lived into her nineties; they reconnected after his death, and Sarton insisted on going over to London to see her even when she herself was in a wheelchair. In her mind, at least, Juliette had become her great lost love. Once Juliette died in 1994, Sarton, I believe, no longer had the will to live. It is worth reading Dear Juliette: Letters of May Sarton to Juliette Huxley (1999) to plumb the depths of this complicated, intimate relationship, which was physical only briefly, exploding disastrously in the late 1940s when a furious, spurned Sarton threatened to tell Julian about their affair. It was true that Juliette had previously taken a male lover with Julian’s knowledge, but Sarton seems to have misjudged the strength of their bond, and also the level of Juliette’s commitment to her. (The tricky thing is that she was still officially with Judy while all of this was going on!)

In Juliette’s 1987 memoir, Leaves of the Tulip Tree, Sarton is not mentioned at all. It was another hurt she had to swallow. But she bore it with dignity, understanding, I think, all the stress that she had put Juliette through decades earlier and Juliette’s innate desire for privacy. These were eminent figures, after all: Julian, the first director-general of UNESCO, had been knighted before his death, and Juliette was Lady Huxley. It was complicated territory for them both to navigate later in life; Juliette sent back her letters with the implication that she knew that Sarton would one day publish them, and Sarton had the opportunity to revisit her impulsive, ardent younger self. Was there a sadness in it, for her? There must have been, but also a joy that she had not been entirely erased or forgotten, and that she had once been part of a stimulating, intellectual bohemian world.

May Sarton certainly earned her place in the queer literary landscape, at any rate. But for the last twenty-plus years in the U.S., thanks in part to Peters, she has been somewhat wiped off the literary map. Peters coldly concludes that "while not a great writer," Sarton was a writer who appealed to many people. I don't believe Peters ever wrote another literary biography after this one. Honestly, I wondered why she took the job. It seems an act of opportunism on her part.

You can't fault Margot Peters for telling the truth, of course—and maybe Sarton would have understood what another opportunist had to do. But as with Moser's jarring Sontag biography (Sontag slept around, she lied, she even smelled bad!), you feel they stepped in the door champing at the bit to ridicule and expose the subjects of their biographies. It creates a bad feeling for the reader; I know that I, personally, feel impressed by what Sarton was able to achieve. As for Peters, who lived until 2022, her Wikipedia page reveals that she ended her own long life self-publishing poorly selling detective novels, which would have raised a wry smile from Sarton, who always had exquisite taste.