DATE: Sunday, May 25, 1997                  TAG: 9705150638

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY EDITH R. WHITE 

                                            LENGTH:   83 lines

SARTON SOUGHT, SEIZED ATTENTION

MAY SARTON

A Biography

MARGOT PETERS

Alfred A. Knopf. 474 pp. $30.

``Pay attention. I exist,'' was May Sarton's message to the world. In 57 Books, she inscribed in poetry, fiction (A Reckoning, As We Are Now) and memoir (After the Stroke) her passionate concern with herself, her loves, her sufferings, her successes, snubs and powerful ambition.

Margot Peters, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin whose specialty is Victorian literature, got to know Sarton near the end of the writer's life and received permission to do her biography. Her book was to appear only after Sarton's death.

``I know my biographer will be my enemy'' wrote Sarton, who died in 1995 at age 83.

Certainly the task of sorting through Sarton's journals, letters, diaries, articles, interviews and tapes would be daunting. But Peters, who has written biographies of Charlotte Bronte, George Bernard Shaw, the Barrymores and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, has worked the extravagant amount of material into an account that flows well. She portrays the dynamic writer and her lesbian lovers objectively.

Though Sarton was 43 when she first consulted a psychiatrist, Peters begins by showing why Sarton had a terrible need to seduce and abandon friends and lovers. It was, writes Peters, because she was trying to compensate for the neglect of her parents.

May Sarton was born in Belgium in 1912 to a beautiful, frail, highstrung mother. Mabel Sarton's first concerns were fulfilling her own artistic ambitions and waiting upon her husband, the brilliant science historian, George Sarton. Like his only daughter eventually would, George Sarton put his creative work before family and friends. Mabel found her baby ``dear but very tiring,'' a ``little windmill of activity.'' The Sartons placed May in the care of friends, and the child learned early to attach herself fiercely to older women.

World War I forced the Sarton family to take refuge in England, and then to follow George to the United States. At 17 May went to a theater performance by Eva Le Gallienne and was infatuated at once. She left school after graduation and followed her idol, who recognized May's energy, love of life and burning ambition, and gave her parts to play and theater jobs.

After five years of disappointment and failure, however, Le Gallienne gave May a pen as a parting gift. It was a prophetic gesture.

Money was always a problem in the Sarton household, George Sarton never giving his wife enough funds. May held this ``meanness'' against her father, along with his coldness. She was also furiously jealous because her father claimed all of her mother's attention. Though May came to admire the scholarly achievements of her distinguished father, she had a love-hate relationship with him, and never really loved any man.

To write poetry May Sarton apparently had to be passionately in love, and for all of her life she lived at a frenetic pace, aggressively pursuing her ``Muses.'' In Europe, which she often visited, she shared a cup of tea and more with such literary figures as Elisabeth Bowen, Hilda Doolittle, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.

In the United States, Sarton had attachments to Muriel Rukeyser, Louise Bogan, and many not so famous women. Though she was often short of money and had to borrow from friends, Sarton showered her loves with letters, gifts, flowers and poems.

The cataloging of May's affairs in Sarton: A Biography is exhaustive. Peters quotes passages of poems to show the writer's state of mind and emotion, and dubs her ``Dona Juana.''

Sarton's greatest sorrow was that her poetry was never seriously reviewed nor included in major anthologies. ``Go slow, prune, revise,'' advised Louise Bogan, eminent critic. But May was too volatile and compulsive to heed.

It is ironic that May Sarton, who had no college education, spent years lecturing on university campuses. Even in her 80th year she was reading her poetry to enchanted audiences who gave her standing ovations. Her many fans wrote, visited, sent flowers and gifts and drained her energy. But they also raised her self-esteem.

Peters lets us see the aging May, still demanding center stage, using her friends, suffering fits of depression. But at 82, she was still publishing books, though she was so feeble she had to dictate her words. For all her seeking of Muses for her poetry, it is Sarton's prose that brought her the attention she craved. MEMO: Edith R. White is a Norfolk storyteller, artist and librarian.

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