A WORLD OF LIGHT: Portraits and Celebrations

by May Sarton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 1976

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.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1976

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1976

Categories: NONFICTION