BOOK REVIEW : A Year in the Life of a Spirited Woman--Complaints and All : ENDGAME: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year, <i> by May Sarton,</i> W.W. Norton & Co., $22.95; 416 pages

A high-strung female friend was recently trying to remember a maxim--from British Prime Minister William Gladstone, or maybe it was Henry Ford. We decided that the exact advice was, “Never apologize, never explain.”

“Thank God,” she said. “I thought it was ‘Never apologize, never complain .’ I would have had to cut out more than half my conversation.”

May Sarton, as she reveals herself in this journal of her 79th year, has much in common with my high-strung friend. Sarton never apologizes, rarely explains, and spends more than half her book being a shameless, although sometimes very interesting, complainer.

Sarton was born in Belgium in 1912 and raised in Cambridge, Mass., where her father was a historian at Harvard. She has written 19 novels and nearly as many volumes of poetry. Her novels are well-made, in the old-fashioned sense, but never set the world on fire. Her poems are also old-fashioned, and more nice than interesting. She is best-known for her journals, especially “Journal of a Solitude” and “The House by the Sea,” which struck a nerve with readers, especially women readers, in the 1970s.

Sarton was one of first to write a lot about being a lesbian, and to write about being a woman living alone. In “Journal of a Solitude,” she had just ended 15 years living with a melancholy woman named Judy in Cambridge, and had moved by herself to a small town in New Hampshire. There was something very appealing about her intense description of the solo life--the flowers, the cats, the orderly house. There was something about her journals that was particularly appealing to heterosexual women who may have felt they were living with too many people, too few flowers and too much disorder.

“Endgame,” which takes Sarton from her 78th birthday, May 3, 1990, to her 79th, is the latest in the journal series. God forbid I should mistype and call it the last.

For most of “Endgame” is the lament of a woman who is very sick. She has lost 50 pounds and one doctor thinks that may be because she has lung cancer, but she decides not to find out for sure. Sarton has a fibrillating heart and chronic irritable bowel syndrome, which causes her to be stuck “on a plateau of constant discomfort.”

In “The House by the Sea,” the 65-year-old Sarton had moved on from New Hampshire to Maine and was gardening up a storm and often out tromping around the snowy paths and wind-swept beaches with her Shetland sheep dog. In “Endgame,” she lies in bed with an indulged Himalayan cat and can barely walk outside to pick the flowers someone else plants. She dictates her journal, not having the strength to sit up and type. “Under the surface,” she writes, “it is not a good life, but a singularly dull and depressed one . . . “

She complains about dragging the garbage bags and letting the cat out (he meows at 4 a.m. and she always gets up) and there are perhaps two days in the year when she doesn’t complain about the weather. But she takes the same passionate pleasure in her surroundings that she did 20 years before.

Some things in the larger world give her pleasure: the Civil War documentary on PBS, a biography of Sylvia Townsend Warner, and a memoir by John Updike that she gets a kick out of despising. She gets the most enjoyment, though, from things in her immediate vicinity. She delights in the Fra Angelico blue of the nearby ocean and in the blue satin of the pond she can see from her window. She spends extravagant expressions on what is close at hand. Of anemones in a vase, she writes, “They close at night and then in the morning when I wake up, there they are, like small gods by my bed.”

Maybe it’s unfair to fault the keeper of a journal for being self-involved. But there are journal keepers who let other people share the spotlight, and Sarton doesn’t.

“I very seldom meet anyone these days who is my equal,” she writes. “That sounds snobbish as I write it, but why not be honest?” People drop by, but she gives us no idea of why they’re significant to her, what they look like or what they say. An obviously nice woman named Susan Sherman takes a leave from her high school teaching job to come take care of Sarton for a few months. “Susan, so discreet and so sensitive to all possible needs, wafts in and out like a--I don’t know what to say--a sort of fairy presence--making good things happen.”

It’s very tough for Sarton, a lover of solitude, to learn to be dependent on people. She needs someone to drive her to town for shopping, to take out the garbage, to carry the laundry upstairs, and even to type out her journal.

Implicit in her story is the irony that before you leave life for the ultimate solitude, you have to lean on people more than ever. Sarton is often surprised to find her cheeks covered with tears. She is crying, she says, not from grief, but from frailty--”A kind of shame for having so little strength . . .”

She is one ornery old dame. Like her or not, you have to give her credit for persisting with her writing. “It is worth doing, I’m sure,” she says, “if only to give me a chance to see what’s really going on here.”