Nonfiction
At Eighty-Two:
A JOURNAL
By May Sarton. W.W. Norton.
May Sarton, the poet who charted her late-middle and old age in a series of published journals, died in July, leaving behind the last of them, "At Eighty-Two." Sarton worried about this book: "It is a description of severe depression," she writes in one entry, "and I have been wondering even if it should be published."
Such doubts won't be shared, however, by the many readers already addicted to her daily musings. As in her earlier journals, Sarton recounts mostly mundane occurrences -- conversations with her many friends, books she reads. She shares poems and snippets of fan mail; she admires her cat. Her low days stem not from a prescient suspicion that she is living her last full year, but from tallying up regrets. Regret one: that she is "nowhere as a poet" and "a failure" because her fans are "ordinary people," not reviewers. Regret two, ironically (as she occasionally realizes): that she's uncomfortably busy getting published and being revered.
Beset by the frailties of age, she rarely steps out to her beloved garden. Still, she's showered with flowers and notes from devotees, and she so delights in life's small pleasures that -- despite weeping over bum reviews and endangered species -- she rarely seems truly depressed. "Yesterday was a dismal, absolutely dismal day," begins a typical sentence, "except for the fact that a bunch of flowers and a beautiful pink cyclamen came for me." Alternately cranky, whiny, nostalgic, appreciative, thrilled, Sarton is both childish and appealingly childlike. Which may be why, although this isn't the strongest of her journals, we miss her when the final page is turned.
-- Beth Wolfensberger
Robertson Davies
MAN OF MYTH
By Judith Skelton Grant. (Viking)
There was always something theatrical about the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, who died two weeks ago at age 82. He began acting and writing plays as a child and was one of Canada's best-known playwrights long before his novels -- "The Deptford Trilogy,'' "The Rebel Angels,'' "What's Bred in the Bone'' -- brought him international literary acclaim.
But more than most celebrities, he always cut a figure, with his formal old-fashioned clothes, his courtly accent and his flowing God-the-father hair and beard -- out of place (despite his Canadian settings and themes) and out of time. In this fortuitously-timed biography, Judith Skelton Grant, who has made the explication of Davies her life's work, traces for the first time, in meticulous (and often tedious) detail, the origins of the Davies myth and mythos.
Davies was born in the tiny Ontario village of Thamesville (the model for Deptford) and raised by his well-read and relatively arty parents in the equally provincial town of Renfrew. His father published the local newspaper. Davies was unathletic and intellectually precocious; his schoolmates were contemptuous of his physical inadequacies and suspicious of his mental gifts. Like so many artists, he grew up feeling both superior and alone.
His defense, according to Grant, was to cultivate a powerful inner life and a defiantly eccentric persona with which he managed to make his way in the world. And though he seems to have come into his own only after leaving for England and Oxford University, he had imbibed provincial life with all its strange personalities and the deep and conflicting influences it "bred in the bone.''
Davies was always fascinated by the grotesque, the eerie, the mythical. He was deeply influenced by Carl Jung's theories of universal archetypes and the collective unconscious. According to Grant, he believed writing was a way to understand the self. But he was also fascinated by the larger social world, by the great tension between the personal and the public, the provincial and the cosmopolitan.
Davies, whose novels offered a generation of readers a very specific vision of what it might mean to be a Canadian, was, like the Canada of his imagination, the product of that tension. Like Canada, emerging from its isolation, yet anxious to preserve an identity separate from its more worldly neighbor, the man behind the enigmatic Davies myth was a gregarious and public creature who also valued a private and eccentric imagination.
--Joan Smith
