Silences

by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

  A woman’s response to a child’s illness is part of her whole involvement with that child; it is not logical, perhaps, and yet it may be essential to that child’s belief that his mother cares for him. I cannot imagine continuing to work when one of my children is running a high fever or is in pain; my mind would be totally distracted. Nor can I easily imagine leaving him in someone else’s care; my thoughts would still be preempted.*

  —Sallie Bingham, author of the memorable The Way It Is Now, 1972—and no book since

  Why discourage women from the colossal swallowing up which is the essence of all motherhood, the mad love (for it is there, the love of a mother for her child), and the madness that maternity represents? For her to feel like a man, free from the consequences of maternity, from the fantastic shackles that it implies? That is probably the reason. But if I answer that men are sick precisely because of this, because they do not have the only opportunity offered a human being to experience a bursting of the ego, how would I be answered? That it was man who made motherhood the monstrous burden it is for sure. But to me the historical reasons for the burden and the drudgery seem the most superficial, because for those there is a remedy. And even if men are responsible for this enslaving form of motherhood, is this enough to condemn maternity itself?

  —Marguerite Duras, in an interview

  The meaning of work, and the need to learn to insistently be an artist in the midst of family is what I am now always trying to understand, and after each moment of understanding to painstakingly, always with great attention to detail, structure my time. In Adrienne Rich’s book on motherhood [read in galleys]* she uses portions of early diaries kept when her boys were young. She is always planning her time. I must not accept any social engagements. I must not do anything but work when not with the children. I must learn to sleep less. That is what it is like. I feel still caught in the middle, between that time when women will be able to devote themselves to work and have children and love . . . and the past, the physical and emotional crampedness. I have my desk in the middle of the living room and the apartment is mine at least four days a week for four hours each day** (not enough) but emotionally, I sneak off into a corner to grab an idea and promise to transform it into something whole. There is so much to be written about this motherhood and its holds on us. . . . My children are only two and six years old, still babies, whose bodies I yearn for every afternoon around four when I must go and get them.

  —a letter from Jane Lazarre, author of The Mother Knot, 1976

  Integration—and a Looking Back: A Question

  As you, the children of my body, have been

  my tasks, so too are my other works.†

  I am gradually approaching the period in my life when work comes first. When both the boys were away for Easter, I hardly did anything but work. Worked, slept, ate, and went for short walks. But above all I worked.

  And yet I wonder whether the “blessing” is not missing from such work. No longer diverted by other emotions, I work the way a cow grazes. . . . Perhaps in reality I accomplish a little more. The hands work and work and the head imagines it is producing God knows what, and yet formerly, in my so wretchedly limited working time, I was more productive, because I was more sensual; I lived as a human being must live, passionately interested in everything. . . . Potency, potency is diminishing.*

  Käthe Kollwitz, forty-three, rare in being great artist and mother. One wonders what work was lost to us, undone, in that “wretchedly limited” time. Her greatest work was still ahead, but then the strength began to be “wretchedly limited.”

  IF—needed time and strength were available simultaneously with “the blessing,” the “living as a human being must live” . . . (as, with changes, now could be).

  *“You must choose between your art and fulfillment as a woman, full personal life.” “Them lady poets must not marry, pal.”

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 33

  *Her artist-sister, and mother of three.

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 32

  *W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Damnation of Women” again.

  *Written in 1850; collected in 1868. In embryo it is Rebecca Harding Davis’s “The Wife’s Story,” as well as Story of Avis.

  **Known to us in our time because of Virginia Woolf’s reference to it.

  †Such efforts—such trying—do fight for both. But the battle, continued throughout her daughter’s long lifetime, is still to be won. The bounteous, productive, and successful Elizabeth Stuart Lyon Phelps never had children.

  *“. . . Again I feel as I used to when the children were sick, after the cause for real anxiety had passed and I stayed close by them, did everything for them, did not even think about my own work and was concerned only with being near them, physically, spiritually. Tending them back to health. This glorious feeling then of reconquest, the profound sense of happiness overlaying the lingering tremors of anxiety; they will stay; I shall keep them.”

  —Käthe Kollwitz, a diary entry, in her fifties

  *Of Woman Born, not yet published at time of this writing.

  **Circumstances that still few mother-writers have.

  †Diary, Käthe Kollwitz, Life in Art. Integration: that word “other.”

  *Diaries and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz.

  THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE

  Virginia Woolf and the Angel

  It was she who used to come between me and my paper . . . who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.*

  But Virginia Woolf never killed that aspect of the angel “extremely sensitive to the needs and moods and wishes of others”: she remained—an essential part of her equipment as writer (“I think writing, my kind of writing, is a species of mediumship; I become the person”). And—as is evident in Woolf’s diary and the reminiscences of those close to her—was usually characteristic of her personal relationships as well.

  More important to remember, Woolf recognized in the angel an artist-being having to be expressed for and through others; understood her human value in a patriarchal structure (had herself been a beneficiary).

  In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, (Mrs. Ramsay) enduring portraits of women constricted to the angel (and shown in their true powerlessness, division, exhaustion, narrowness), she celebrated—in anguish—their creative power (“making the moment something permanent . . . [making] the individual more whole and present”); their active professional qualities (“Domestic life is a profession and should be paid; motherhood is an exacting task.” “The difficult arts of family life”); their longings, latencies; their having to find fulfillment vicariously in varied contributions to others at a time when achievement for nearly all women could be only through others. She did not see them as submissive, passive, nor despise them for their constricted development. She knew, that born into her mother’s generation, almost inescapably her capacities and life would have gone as theirs; that in her own generation, too, she was an exception—and that chancily; barely.

  Some Manifestations of the Angel, 1800–1970:

  The Answering and Echoing Movements

  . . . the exceeding sympathy, always ready and always profound, by which she made all that one could tell her reverberate to one’s own feelings by the manifest impression that it made on hers. The pulses of light were not more quick nor inevitable in their flow and undulation than were the answering and echoing movements of her sympathizing attention.

  —Thomas De Quincey on Dorothy Wordsworth, 1827

  A perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife

  She is no more of an angel today than she had always been; but I can’t believe that by the accident of her death all of her unspeakable tenderness is lost to the beings she so dearly loved. . . . One can feel forever, the inextinguishable vibration of her devotion. I can’t help feeling that in those last weeks I was not tender enough with her—that I was blind to her sweetness and beneficence. . . .

  When I came back from Europe I was struck with he
r being worn and shrunken, and now I know that she was very weary. She went about her usual activities, but the burden of life had grown heavy for her, and she needed rest. There is something inexpressibly touching to me in the way in which, during these last years, she went on from year to year without it. If she could only have lived she should have had it, and it would have been a delight to see her have it. But she has it now, in the most complete perfection! Summer after summer she never left Cambridge—it was impossible that father should leave his own house. The country, the sea, the change of air and scene, were an exquisite enjoyment to her; but she bore with the deepest gentleness and patience the constant loss of such opportunities. She passed her nights and her days in that dry, flat, hot, stale and odious Cambridge, and had never a thought while she did so but for father and Alice. It was a perfect mother’s life—the life of a perfect wife. To bring her children into the world—to expend herself, for years, for their happiness and welfare—then, when they had reached full maturity and were absorbed in the world and in their own interests—to lay herself down in her ebbing strength and yield up her pure soul to the celestial power that had given her this divine commission.

  —Henry James in his Notebooks, after the death of his mother (1882)

  William Butler Yeats, “On Woman”

  May God be praised for woman

  That gives up all her mind,

  A man may find in no man

  A friendship of her kind

  That covers all he has brought

  As with her flesh and bone,

  Nor quarrels with a thought

  Because it is not her own.

  Sparing Him, And So On

  Ida, I want you if you can to come to me. But like this. We should have to deceive Jack. Jack can never realize what I have to do. He helps me all he can but he can’t help me really and the result is I spend all my energy, every bit, in keeping going, I have none left for work. All my work is behindhand and I can’t do it. I simply stare at the sky. I am too tired even to think. What makes me tired? Getting up, seeing about everything, arranging everything, sparing him, and so on. That journey nearly killed me, literally. He had no idea I suffered at all, and could not understand why I looked “so awful” and why everybody seemed to think I was terribly ill. . . .

  —Katherine Mansfield (a letter to her friend, Ida Baker)

  Katherine Anne Porter, on being asked:

  . . . But haven’t you found that being a woman presented to you, as an artist, certain special problems? It seems to me that a great deal of the upbringing of women encourages the dispersion of the self in many small bits, and that the practice of any kind of art demands a corralling and concentrating of that self and its always insufficient energies.

  I think that’s very true and very right. You’re brought up with the . . . curious idea of feminine availability in all spiritual ways, and in giving service to anyone who demands it. And I suppose that’s why it has taken me twenty years to write this novel; it’s been interrupted by just anyone who could jimmy his way into my life.

  —Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews

  *“Professions for Women.”

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 34

  FREEING THE ESSENTIAL ANGEL

  Virginia Woolf’s vision of the future

  I think of Sussex in five hundred years to come. . . . Things will have been scorched up, eliminated. There will be magic gates. Draughts fan-blown by electric power will cleanse houses. Lights intense and firmly directed will go over the earth, doing the work. . . .

  . . . And then there was the sudden dancing light, that was hung in the future . . . “Look, I will make a little figure for your satisfaction. . . . Does this little figure advancing . . . to the economical, powerful, and efficient future when houses will be cleansed by a puff of hot wind satisfy you?” . . . We cried out together: “Yes, yes,” as if affirming something, in a moment of recognition.*

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Women & Economics [1898], The Home, Its Work and Influence [1907]) is the pioneer and still almost the only exponent of ways whereby “this technologically and socially obsolete, human-wasting drudgery” could be eliminated (the essential angel freed), while still preserving human maintenance-of-life satisfactions where they are intrinsic. But as free, voluntary, expression of the self, not life-consuming necessity.

  *“Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor-car,” Collected Essays.

  ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 34

  WIVES, MOTHERS, ENABLERS

  To My Wife, Without Whom . . .

  My portion was to see to it that he [Thomas Mann] had the best circumstances for his work.

  —Katia Mann, of her husband

  All Gertrude had to do was be a genius.

  —Alice B. Toklas, of her services to Gertrude Stein

  Few have been the writer-women who have had George Eliot’s luck of “the perfect happiness of living with a being who protects and stimulates in me the health of highest productivity,”—but the writer-men in like circumstances are and have been many. And not only wives: mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, helper women, secretaries, housekeepers, watchers and warders.

  Not here the place to list the myriad women whose contribution was significant, sometimes decisive, to the development and productivity of writers.* But how many were of the silenced in the possible twelve?

  Remember the young women writers, their aspirant lives clogged in Love’s ambuscade—those who let their work go (his gifts are more important than mine**) in the belief that they would become of the tradition-hallowed “inspirer-beloved”; and those who had every intention of going on writing—and tried; both usually subsumed into the server-enablers; wives; mothers of children.* Mothers alone (in my not-exhaustive knowledge) who wrote seriously when girls, young women (or late in life) would fill a page.**

  Think too of the helper women, the famous enablers: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Harriet Monroe, Sylvia Beach, who—if only in autobiography or occasional pieces—disclosed a writing self of capacity. Yes, and Edith Mirrielees (founder of the Stanford Creative Writing Center) and nameless other magnificent teachers, way openers. And Martha Foley (of the Best American Short Story Annuals) who, more than any other single individual in my lifetime, has nurtured the story. “All I ever wanted to do was write.” In earlier years she did. But (common circumstance) there was a child and herself to support.

  I am haunted by the writer-wives (or long-time wives) of notable literary men: Eleanor Clark, Janet Lewis, Caroline Gordon, Jane Bowles,† Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Ellmann, Diana Trilling, Hope Hale Davis, Ann Birstein, Helen Yglesias.‡ Nearly every one, in their own distinguished way, evidencing quality, vision, capacity to contribute to literature, greater or as great as that of their men—but with marked contrast in productivity, influence, recognition.

  Wives, Mothers, Enablers: As with Her Flesh and Bone

  Melville’s Pierre again:

  . . . Delly brings still another hot brick to put under his inkstand, to prevent the ink from thickening. Then Isabel drags the camp-bedstead nearer to him, on which are the two or three books he may possibly have occasion to refer to that day, with a biscuit or two, and some water, and a clean towel, and a basin. Then she leans against the plank by the elbow of Pierre, a crook-ended stick. . . .—Pierre, if in his solitude, he should chance to need anything beyond the reach of his arm, then the crook-ended cane drags it to his immediate vicinity.

  Pierre glances slowly all round him; everything seems to be right; he looks up with a grateful, melancholy satisfaction at Isabel; a tear gathers in her eye; but she conceals it from him by coming very close to him, stooping over, and kissing his brow. ’Tis her lips that leave the warm moisture there; not her tears; she says.

  “I suppose I must go now, Pierre. Now don’t, don’t be so long to-day. I will call thee at half-past four. Thou shalt not strain thine eyes in the twilight.”

  Jorge Luis Borges:

  . . . My mother has always had a
hospitable mind. She translated Saroyan, Hawthorne, [Herbert] Read, Melville, Woolf, Faulkner. She has always been a companion to me and an understanding and forgiving friend. For years she handled all my secretarial work, answering letters, reading to me, taking down my dictation and also traveling with me. . . . It was she who quietly and effectively fostered my literary career. . . .

  Of Edmund Wilson:

  You would have loved the Wilson ménage. Elena has really effected a tremendous change in Edmund’s way of living. She really loves him, moreover! The little girl, Helen, is delightful; I must send her an Orlando book. The house couldn’t be more attractive; and Elena has evidently put real elbow grease into decorating it; scraping floors and walls and making curtains. There is a “parlor” with a good deal of Federal mahogany (E.’s mother’s) upholstered in yellow; a dining room with more mahogany against blue walls, plus lovely blue Staffordshire and silver; a “middle room” with more blue walls and blue chintz and linen; and Ed.’s magnificent study, with a bathroom attached, and a stairway to an attic, filled with overflow books. For the first time poor E. has attention, space and effectively arranged paraphernalia of all kinds.—Mary never really helped in the more practical ways; and E. has had a v. scrappy kind of life, down the years. Now all moves smoothly: tea on a tray for his “elevenses”; absolute silence in his working hours, and good meals at appropriate intervals. —Elena was v. hospitable, and fed me enormous luncheons (one of lobster), with highballs at tea-time. . . . They have a tiny sun-trap of a garden by the side-door, and Elena has a little vegetable garden, v. European, with lettuces and beans mixed with herbs and the zinnias.