"Who are they, those we have loved and suffered from. . . and whose
essential being has remained mysterious. . .?" In these twelve
celebrations of vanished parents and friends who shaped her life
and values, Sarton strains through scattered images and events to
locate "essences." During her early middle years in the Thirties
and Forties, friendship was a communication of being rather than a
sum of transactions, and an aspiring writer was apt to seek out
friends with outsized passions and not a little art. "Being with
Edith made everything become poetry," Salton remarks of a
"Mozartian" mentor of her youth, and these are "poetic" portraits
conveying above all the style, emotive thrust, and aura of
personalities. She offers tributes to her scholar father, George
Sarton, and her artist mother. She remembers insulated lives and
some literary meteors: Elizabeth Bowen and Louise Bogan (the
heights and some very bitter low points are recorded), S.S.
Koteliansky ("Kot" of the Bloomsbury periphery), and the elderly
dying poet Jean Dominique ("refined into light, into ash"). Place
is given full play as reflecting the person's inner life, and
ceremony and ritual - from Kot's tea-making to pouring wine in
rural France - are cherished as acts in and out of time. In the
heat of Sarton's commitment, these twelve persons seem molded into
static objets d'art, but the book is honest and moving nonetheless.
(Kirkus Reviews)
"Its revelations, its tender frankness, its acutely sensitive observations recommend [this book] to Sarton's growing legion of readers." —Choice May Sarton's celebrations in this book center around the friendships that flowered in her life from age twenty-six to age forty-five—between the end of
I Knew a Phoenix and the beginning of
Plant Dreaming Deep. Her subjects include her father, the noted science historian George Sarton; people in the arts—Elizabeth Bowen, Louise Brogan, Jean Dominique; and people who lived lives remote from the center—Marc, the vigneron of Satigny, in the foothills of the Jura mountains, and Quig, the painter of Nelson, New Hampshire.
"Buy this book and enjoy one by one and at leisure Sarton's sensual evocations of person and place, lit by occasional tantalizing flashes of the author herself, in and out of love, up and down the world from Belgium to Maine." —Library Journal
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