If you talk to enough women who are fascinated by the interplay between motherhood and creative endeavors, you will get the recommendation to read Julie Phillips’ “The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem.” If you are lucky, your library will acquire a copy, and you can read it without investing mullah in a work whose integrity you question (some books people recommend are just not very good).
Despite trepidation, I enjoyed it. For anyone with a penchant for human interest stories, Phillips provides a truly impressive level of detail. Taking as her subject about a dozen or so mother creatives, she delves into their work, biographies, and letters to examine the specifics of how these women developed their femininity, became mothers, and kept their working hours. She happens upon reflective quotations capturing precisely what different mothers thought at particular moments about their art, their children, and themselves.
Some of the collected quotations are wonderfully thought-provoking. Take, for example, a reflection from playwright Sarah Ruhl: “There was a time, when I first found out I was pregnant with twins, that I saw only a state of conflict. When I looked at theater and parenthood, I saw only war, competing loyalties, and I thought my writing life was over. There were times when it felt as though my children were annihilating me…, and finally I came to the thought, All right then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow. And then I could breathe. I could investigate pauses.”
With these and other artists, Phillips considers art and motherhood as existing in the pauses and interruptions. Another marvelous quote comes from Barbara Hepworth, a sculptor and mother of four, “lived a life of work and the children were brought up in it, in the middle of the dust and the dirt and the paint and everything.” She said, “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children…One is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one’s mind.”
Phillips writes that poet and eccentric Diane Di Prima “thought of her work and her motherhood as arising from one source, openness to experience.” Phillips add, “She called it being ‘available, a woman’s art I saw as a discipline, a spiritual path. To be available, but stay on course somehow.”
In an illustration of this principle in action, Phillips recounts:
One night at a party at Allen Ginsberg’s, Diane said she was leaving because her babysitter expected her. From the floor, a stoned, sprawled Jack Kerouac proclaimed: “Di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter, you’re never going to be a writer.” She believed she wouldn’t have been a writer if she stayed. To write and to come home on time, she argued, required “the same discipline throughout”: a practice of keeping her word.
This captures the experience of many mothers: that their art comes about because of, not despite their children.
Phillips’ study suffers from an avowed refusal to pass value judgments of any kind on the subjects. There is a clear connection throughout the book of the dysfunction of the individual women’s own upbringing and the complexity and chaos of the families they created in adulthood. Some ways are better than others for raising happy and resilient children. Some degree of functionality is required to undertake creative endeavors and live in the world.
Phillips also seems at times to mistake unconventional choices as artistic ones when sometimes they are just disordered. Alice Neel’s choice to live with a cruel, violent, and drug-addicted man was not a necessary condition for her artistic flourishing. His destruction of dozens of her paintings in a fit of rage and paranoia demonstrates that he was, in the end, a great setback to her artistic progress and a liability, not some necessary catalysts to an unconventional artists’ life in the stuffy mid-twentieth century.
Women like Ursula Le Guinn, on the other hand, have what frankly seems a charmed life in some respects. From the home of a supportive and nurturing father, Le Guinn went out into the world and married a man who appears in the accounts offered even-tempered, dependable, encouraging, and helpful. It’s almost as though the father and the choice of husband have something to do with one another and are more than a mere coincidence, like getting struck by lightening twice.
It is amusing how literally Phillips takes her subject. She ends the work with Angela Carter, crowned as the apotheosis of all mother-creatives. She unapologetically lived an alternative lifestyle, swore so much she made many people uncomfortable, and got to have her cake and eat it, too, by putting her career solidly before motherhood while still managing to have a baby in her early 40s. Sadly, she died not long after due to lung cancer.
There is in Phillips’ discussion of Carter’s maternity no comment upon the obviously maternal undertones of her relationship with her partner and father of her child, a man who was more than a decade younger than she. She, a worldly wise woman in her thirties, lured a boy of 19 into a clandestine relationship that she seemingly did not acknowledge even to close friends until after moving away and realizing she wanted to be with him.
Can we really offer no meaningful reflection on how decades of thwarted motherhood through contraception and abortion prompt women to express their maternal impulses in other ways? It’s not grasping at some Freudian interpretation to see Carter’s relationship with a man so much younger, rather than just some unconventional arrangement, as directly tied to her longing to be a mother and some seemingly unexpressed urge to nurture someone.
Phillips’ work is probing and nuanced. It suffers from a total lack of value judgment, leaving it to the reader to sift through a lot of bad or mediocre ideas about motherhood and art to find some gems that get to the heart of the matter.
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