Word: sarton
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...Sarton's novel has had several weeks now to cool. The worn gossip of five years ago has been briefly recoined, passed once more from hand to hand. But presumably Miss Sarton wanted more than to intrigue the Harvard reader and annoy her former colleagues. Presumably she hoped to treat a very real Cambridge tragedy, lifting it to a universal problem with universal implications. It is as fiction, then, that Faithful are the Wounds must be judged, and it is as fiction that Faithful are the Wounds fails...
...Miss Sarton presents Edward Cavan, professor of English at Harvard and a man dedicated to his friends, his teaching, and his ideals. But these ideals demand too much from Cavan and he demands the same from his friends. He is uncompromising, the kind of man for whom even the term "liberal" is a reproach, and a sign of diluted vigor. Cavan commits suicide, but just as he was too intense to live, he is too intense to die. His friends cannot turn their eyes from his vision or pry his grip from their lives...
Much of her framework Miss Sarton could take from life, from newspaper reports and the talk of friends. But when she must supply her own talent, when her characters must think and feel as well as speak, then Faithful are the Wounds descends to inescapable banality. Only Julia Phillips, a professor's wife and life-long friends of Cavan's, seems more than a type or a convenient point of view. Mrs. Phillip is a sensitive woman, more emotional than intellectual. Miss Sarton seems to understand a woman like Julia Phillips. She can round out her character with evidences...
Because Miss Sarton is dealing with the effect of a single act on many people, she is necessarily repetitive. And because the people are not truly individual or apart from one another, her repetition becomes exhausting. To present nine developed people in a short novel is a challenge in itself, but to go within each of them, probing their thoughts, is a far greater undertaking. When her characters talk, Miss Sarton can invent the right phrases and do it well, for she has a poet's feeling for language. But when her creations must think, she relapses to one view...
...newly elected Phi Bota Kappa members will be initiated at a ceremony on March 23, at which Miss May Sarton, author and former Briggs Copeland lecturer at Harvard and Radcliffe will speak on "Poetry: the Land of Silence," and will give selected readings from her poetry...