‘Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?’

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

Daphne Merkin writes in the New York Review Of Books:

* Whenever I pick up a new book by a woman I check the author biography on the back flap to see whether she has children. I’m not entirely sure why I do this and what, exactly, I am trying to gauge, but I think it has something to do with an abiding interest in how other women writers have arranged their lives and enabled their ambitions: Do they view writing as a sacrosanct vocation and themselves as secular nuns of a sort, for whom few distractions—especially one as time-filling as motherhood—are to be allowed? Or do they accept their creative aspirations as part of a larger, often messy whole that includes a child or children?

I go on to wonder whether the writers who don’t have children seem more productive—or perhaps even, in an instinctive process of self-selection, more talented. I have done this sort of accounting since well before I became a mother myself and continue to do so, unsure whether I admire the single-mindedness of women who forgo the maternal role or suspect that they might come to regret their choice one day. The decision to become a mother while pursuing a career as a writer or artist certainly affects the division of one’s labor; tackling the chores of motherhood while also trying to find the time and concentration to write or sculpt or paint is a supreme juggling act.

* I will never forget the time, years ago, when a younger friend of mine, the daughter of a leading book critic, told me that her writing teacher, known for her astutely observed short stories, advised the class that if the female students intended to become serious writers they should abjure having children (as she had). I wondered immediately whether such draconian pronouncements emanated from her inflated sense of her own talent, of a sort that brooked no diversion, or from a conviction that the one activity would inevitably wither in the face of the other.

* In his poem “The Choice,” W.B. Yeats presented a male artist’s options in drastic terms: “Perfection of the life, or of the work,” putting in succinct words the dilemma women have mulled before and ever since. What, then, is one to make of the various choices—some intently focused, some more slapdash—of all these undeniably gifted and independent-minded women? Are the ones who abstain from having children the ones most fully empowered to pursue their ambition? Or is this not the real question to be posed, mainly because there are no conditions whereby a particular writer or artist will be in full possession of her talent, whichever way she decides to live? Nonartistic issues will always impinge, no matter how much one tries to avoid them, and will end up shaping the course of one’s life.

Could it be, I find myself asking, that there is no real dilemma, other than an imaginary one? Some women may see motherhood as an imposed and idealized bondage, refusing to sacrifice the primacy of their work to its claims. Olsen, for one, came to insist, as Doherty writes, that “mothering and all its rewards took away from artistic inspiration and execution: you could not live in the world of your novel in progress and live with your children simultaneously.” And then there are women, like Sylvia Plath, who can’t imagine even the richest intellectual life without the generative impulse: “It is not when I have a baby, but that I have one, and more, which is of supreme importance to me,” she wrote in her journal in June 1959. “And for a woman to be deprived of the Great Experience her body is formed to partake of, to nourish, is a great and wasting Death.” Having children may not save a person, as it did not save either Plath or Sexton, but it may add to their portion of pleasure (if also drudgery).

As the mother of one child, a daughter—and as an aunt to twenty nieces and nephews—I have rarely tried to parse whether I would have written more if I had remained childless, if only because I know myself to be ceaselessly drawn to distractions in whatever form they arrive. If anything, I have pondered whether my life would have felt fuller and more intensely focused if I had had another child or two, the better to force me to schedule my time more fruitfully. Then again, perhaps my work doesn’t mean enough to me to give it the kind of sovereignty that Celia Paul and others like her do. Or perhaps, like Plath, becoming a mother was an experience I longed to have every bit as much as I longed to write. This might make me a victim of the patriarchy and its creation of the sacral myth of motherhood, or it might make me simply a writer and a mother, as proud of one kind of expression as the other.

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‘A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained’

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

Janet Malcolm writes:

Ten years earlier I had published a two-part article in The New Yorker about a disturbance in an obscure corner of the psychoanalytic world whose chief subject, a man named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, hadn’t liked his portrayal and claimed that I had libeled him by inventing the quotations on which it was largely based. So he sued me and the magazine and the Knopf publishing company, which had brought out the article as a book called In the Freud Archives.

In an afterword to a subsequent book, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), I wrote about the lawsuit, taking a very high tone. I put myself above the fray; I looked at things from a glacial distance. My aim wasn’t to persuade anyone of my innocence. It was to show off what a good writer I was. Reading the piece now, I am full of admiration for its irony and detachment—and appalled by the stupidity of the approach. Of course I should have tried to prove my innocence. But I was part of the culture of The New Yorker of the old days—the days of William Shawn’s editorship—when the world outside the wonderful academy we happy few inhabited existed only for us to delight and instruct, never to stoop to persuade or influence in our favor. As the Masson case wound its way through the courts—dismissed at first, then reinstated, and eventually brought to trial—the press-watching public became increasingly pleased by the spectacle of the arrogant magazine brought low by the behavior of one of its staff writers. While Masson gave over two hundred accusatory interviews, I—in dogged accord with the magazine’s stance of unrelenting hauteur—said nothing in my defense. Nothing at all. Nothing of course produces nothing, except further confirmation of guilt.

But it was at trial that the influence of The New Yorker proved to be most dire. There was a style of self-presentation cultivated at the magazine that most if not all staff writers had adopted and found congenial. The idea was to be reticent, self-deprecating, and, maybe, here and there, funny, but to always keep a low profile, in contrast to the rather high one of the persona in which we wrote. I remember my shock at meeting A.J. Liebling for the first time. I had been reading him for years and imagined him as the suave, handsome, brilliantly articulate man of the world that the “I” of the pieces portrayed. The short, fat, boorishly silent man I met was his opposite. I came to know Liebling and to love him. But it took a while to penetrate the disguise of innate and magazine-induced unpretentiousness in which he made his way through the world as he wrote his wonderful pieces narrated by an impossibly cool narrator.

When I took the stand at the trial in San Francisco in 1993 I could not have done worse than to present myself in the accustomed New Yorker manner. Reticence, self-deprecation, and wit are the last things a jury wants to see in a witness. Charles Morgan, Masson’s clever and experienced lawyer, could hardly believe his good fortune. He made mincemeat of me. I fell into every one of his traps. I came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent. I was at once above it all and utterly crushed by it. My lawyer, Gary Bostwick, succeeded in inflicting some damage on Masson—he portrayed him as boastful and sex-crazed—but it was not enough to offset the damage I had helped Morgan inflict on me. The jury agreed with the plaintiff’s accusation that five quotations in my article were false and libelous…

My visits to Sam Chwat were part of the half-year of preparation for the second trial, almost like a military campaign, to which Bostwick and I devoted ourselves. Sam was the Professor Higgins who would transform me from the defensive loser I had been in the first trial to the serene winner I would be (and was!) in the second one.

The transformation had two parts. The first was the erasure of the New Yorker image of the writer as a person who does not go around showing off how great and special he or she is. No! A trial jury is like an audience at a play that wants to be entertained. Witnesses, like stage actors, have to play to that audience if their performances are to be convincing. At the first trial I had been scarcely aware of the jury. When Morgan questioned me, I responded to him alone. Sam Chwat immediately corrected my misconception of whom to address: the jury, only the jury. As Morgan had been using me to communicate to the jury, I would need to learn how to use him to do the same.

There were some minor but not unimportant particulars Sam inserted into this new concept of myself as a guileful performer. I would need to dress differently. At the first trial I wore what I normally did when out of my work uniform of blue jeans, namely skirts or trousers and jackets in black or subdued colors, clothes that looked nice but didn’t draw attention to themselves. The idea was to be tasteful. Another No! The idea was to give the jurors the feeling that I wanted to please them, the way you want to please your hosts at a dinner party by dressing up. This would be achieved by a “menu,” as Sam called it, of pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves. The jurors would feel respected as well as aesthetically refreshed, the way they do by women commentators on TV who wear colorful clothes of endless variety. I did as Sam advised, and after the announcement of the verdict, when Bostwick and I went to speak with the jurors, they made a point of commenting on my clothes. They said that each day they looked forward to seeing what I would wear next, especially which scarf I would wear.

There was a seemingly small but all-important technical problem that, for a while, neither Sam nor I could solve. The witness stand was located midway between the interrogating attorney’s lectern on my right and the jury stand on my left. How was I supposed to perform for the jurors when I had to turn my back on them while being questioned? The answer came to me one day in a flash. I would position my chair so that it partially faced the jury. Thus, when Morgan questioned me I could reply over my shoulder, while remaining frontally connected to the jurors.

The second and most crucial part of the second-chance work was to make me faster on my feet under cross-examination, in fulfillment of the fantasy of saying what I should have said in the first trial instead of what I did say. Bostwick assumed that Morgan would repeat the questions that had served him so well, and he and I devised answers to them that brought l’esprit de l’escalier to a new level. At trial, Morgan did not disappoint us. He confidently asked the old questions and didn’t know what hit him when I produced my nimble new formulations. I remember one of the most satisfying moments. At the first trial Morgan had repeatedly tortured and humiliated me with the question: “He didn’t say that at Chez Panisse, did he?” I had wiggled and squirmed. Now I could answer him with crushing confidence.

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Changing Psychiatry’s Mind

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

Dr. Gavin Francis writes in the New York Review of Books:

David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” published in Science in 1973.

Eight researchers, including Rosenhan, presented themselves at twelve psychiatric institutions, complaining that they were hearing indistinct voices, saying “empty,” “thud,” or “hollow”—terms chosen because they had not previously been reported in the literature. All said that they were undistressed by their “symptoms,” but all were admitted. “Immediately upon admission to the psychiatric ward,” reported Rosenhan, “the pseudopatient ceased simulating any symptoms of abnormality.” Eleven of the twelve episodes of admission resulted in a diagnosis of schizophrenia and just one, having been admitted to an expensive private hospital, was given what was then considered a more upmarket diagnosis—manic-depressive psychosis. All asked to be discharged as soon as they arrived on the ward, professing their symptoms gone, but their inpatient stays ranged from nine to fifty-two days (with nineteen days the average). When eventually discharged, the supposedly “schizophrenic” patients were told that their diagnoses were confirmed but that they were now “in remission.” (Aware of how sticky, consequential, and pejorative these labels can be, all had used pseudonyms.)

Rosenhan’s pseudopatients took notes throughout their hospital stays, recording clinician and attendant behavior, and clocking the time staff spent with patients. No clinicians asked to see these notes, or expressed any interest in them. Among the many scorching insights of the study was that the more elevated a clinician was within the hospital hierarchy, the less time he or she spent with patients. Abuse of patients in full view of other patients was routine, but stopped “abruptly” in the presence of other staff. (“Staff are credible witnesses,” Rosenhan wrote. “Patients are not.”) Rosenhan also concluded that fellow patients were better judges of sanity than clinicians. (“You’re not crazy,” he quotes one fellow patient as saying. “You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.”)

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‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West’

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

Daphne Merkin writes in 2019:

* As one grows older and reaches one’s sixties and seventies, the world grows smaller and the air seems to thin, reminding one that mortality hovers. Although all of us sustain losses—of loved ones, friends and acquaintances—at some point in our lives, it is around this time that they begin to accrete, and at an accelerating rate. To be sure, all losses leave holes in the fabric of life, but there are some that suggest, more than others, the passing of an entire realm of discourse, a frame of reference that no longer holds. The one uppermost in my mind today is the end of a distinct period in American letters, when literary culture held sway in the surrounding society, commanding respect and bestowing prestige. It was a world peopled by impressive and varied figures such as Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and, in its impassioned involvement with the life of the mind, made my contemporaries dream of gaining admission to it. That sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including what once seemed to be a vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.

* There was a prickly, no-nonsense aspect of Jim [James Atlas] that alienated some people but which I enjoyed. For someone as passionate about literature as he was he had an endearing way of keeping its gratifications in perspective. About a year ago he joined a reading group that I was in and regularly sounded off about finding Henry James unreadable or some other revered novel too long. I still remember a conversation the group engaged in about an elegant, rather morose novel I loved called The Widow’s Children, by Paula Fox, in which Jim suddenly exclaimed about the characters we were so painstakingly trying to analyze: “They’re such losers! Who wants to be with such losers? I don’t.” His was the sort of unfiltered personality that allowed others to feel free to express their prejudices, however silly or catty they might sound, and his anti-bien pensant spirit countered any tendency one or the other of us might have had to become moralizing or righteous.

* The “life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling once called the life of the mind, may always have been more aspirational than actual. Trilling herself once told me, apropos of her writing, that there was no “echo” anymore (a sentiment she shared with Virginia Woolf, who wrote in her journal shortly before she committed suicide in 1941, “It struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing ‘I’ has vanished. No audience. No echo…”). Nostalgia, as we know, tends to wear rose-colored glasses and the world of the New York intellectuals was always as full of pettiness as profundity, with the troika of Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Sontag taking jabs at other members of the group like high-school mean girls. (Not to overlook a brawler like Mailer, who stabbed his wife at a party celebrating his mayoral candidacy.) But it was also a world marked by a commitment to ideas, an appreciation of great writing, a passionate interest in the visual arts, and, perhaps most of all, a belief that these things mattered. Both Barbara and Jim believed in its necessity and value, and helped keep that world aloft even as it was indisputably going into eclipse.

In a valedictory issue of Horizon, the magazine that Cyril Connolly, the British literary critic and memoirist founded, Connolly wrote: “It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.” That was in 1949 and the pronouncement was a bit hyperbolic, but not by much. The idea that one is living on borrowed time is not an easy one to recognize, much less accept, but these days the garden that once bustled with stimulating literary presences seems inhabited mostly by formidable ghosts. And the shadows that they cast seem ever longer.

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How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others

Posted on April 19, 2021 by Luke Ford

From the New York Review of Books:

* “People evangelize because they fear that the belief to which they have committed themselves may not be true.”

* For American evangelicals, the problem of God is endlessly a problem of the self. In the Horizon Christian Fellowship in Southern California, people spoke of intense personal difficulty, of self-destruction and despair followed by redemption. They told of “a wild ride through drugs, sex, alcohol, and depravity until they hit bottom,” at which point they finally turned to Jesus and were saved. The addiction narrative is so common that Luhrmann wonders if it affords an alarming glimpse into American, or at least Californian, life, but it might also be asked whether feelings of transcendence require a knowledge of abjection: you cannot be found if you already know where you are.

* American evangelicals speak to God about their feelings, and they do this because they assume their feelings matter… For American evangelicals, God is mostly about them. He is a friend, and, like a friend, he helps solve everyday problems—dilemmas about relationships, personal happiness, and the choices people make in life: “You can ask him what shirt you should wear and what shampoo to buy.”

* At a shul in San Diego for Jews who had recently become Orthodox, the word people used most often was “connection.” They felt connected “to an imagined community that included not only all Jews living, but all Jews stretching back generation upon generation.”

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