Must I Change My Life? (2)

Woolf summer ends, writer-parent life continues

“More than anything, perhaps, what creatures of illusion we are”—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Mother/Writer

A Room of One’s Own is so much stranger than I remembered. Here’s Woolf’s description of the costs of having children:

Making a fortune and bearing thirteen children: no human being could stand it. Consider the facts, we said. First there are the nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets.

Yesterday, an ordinary day on the weeks I have my kids, I woke very early to get myself and them ready for school (mostly badgering them and muttering to myself about the time), drove them to school (one starts at 7 am), pumped gas, drove to the other school where I was substitute teaching in PE (a dream gig), read snatches of a novel during breaks, overheard gossip, arranged for my oldest daughter to pick up the younger two, got home and ate a very quick bite and then took the youngest on a very unnecessary errand to Target, picked up food one had ordered, ranted about the Target errand in the car, apologized for ranting, arrived home again, attempted and failed to silence several bouts of bickering, scolded someone about socks, said and heard the sentence “I’m very overstimulated right now” a few times, took the younger two on another errand (now it was dark), was shocked by the nearly cartoonish appearance of the low-hanging and enormous moon, which one googled to find “waxing gibbous” and the other googled to find “harvest moon,” returned home again, had a fit of giggling begun by the youngest over the way I had refused a cookie before making more food, tidying the dishes, offering a life lesson about not counting one’s chickens before they hatch, insisting it must be bedtime soon, braiding some hair, and feeding the cats.

Absolutely none of this was productive. It’s just life, the constant task of living, the care for others that isn’t really care but is just being in life together, is just doing an unexceptional job of being a parent.

I’ve been meaning to write this letter for a few weeks, and have in the meantime been mulling over all sorts of things—books about divorce I’ve been reading and a related dive into the question of how to configure lives more unconventionally (the problem of marriage, of the nuclear family), the various challenges of rebuilding my life, in a time that at least feels world-historically bleak and I don’t even want to talk about the election, and now find that I’m reading books that are disturbing in different ways, but both of which seem to touch on the abyss—When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut and The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.

And I’ve been meaning to write about A Room of One’s Own, an essay I dismissed entirely as an undergraduate. I think at the time I believed it was reasonable to reject any claim about “woman,” which I thought had nothing to do with me. I didn’t think it would have much for me on this re-read, and instead I found a bizarre, meandering, enjoyable, and rich text, the central quotable premise of which seems to me, now, nearly, beside the point. Instead this is a lesson in reading—how a point you glean or reduce from a text cannot give you what immersion in the text can.

And, also, the point finally hit me. I understand my material conditions and limitations now. I am a mother. I have been a wife. And I do not come from money¹.

In my attempts to rebuild a life in a more unconventional way, to try to continue to have a life filled with friends, and art, and ideas², and to try to do all this while also having three children with no partner or financial safety net, I have also been looking at myself and my own doggedness, my own refusals, my own, perhaps, feral qualities, a seeing a person, when I view myself from the outside, who seems naïvely insistent on trying to live a life that might not be possible.

So much of the reasoning of Woolf’s text gets at how difficult it is to make great art when you are facing personal or domestic challenges in a way much more refreshing (to me, I’m sorry) than anything I’ve read on the subject of parent-writers/art-monsters for years.

Plus other things so obviously true I hate to note them: that the way we live right now affects whether people find it possible to be writers—or the way in which they will pursue writing—just as it affects our choices about becoming parents—and this has a massive effect on the art we, the whole of us, are making.

“What effect,” she writes, “poverty has on the mind, and what effect wealth has on the mind.” What effect is everything having on our minds! Yesterday, during my lunch break, I also read this beautifully done essay by Thea Lim in The Walrus, which considers, among other things, what effect the digital age is having on the mind, and what effect late-capitalism is having on the mind. To make art, one needs space, one needs money, and, for Woolf, one needs these things because without them one is so bound—if not by actual constraints then by mental ones—they cannot make art that tells the truth about experience.

Art Monster (forgive me)

Woolf takes fiction-writing very seriously, and her idiosyncratic views on what it should do and how the novelist might be able to manage this thrilled me. That to write a novel is important work and requires a great deal from its writer gives a person permission to care about her work³.

Imagination—freedom of mind—openness—energy: these are some of the things she talks about when describing the qualities of the best novelists, which are evident to her in their work. Since I am a person with nothing but material impediments at the moment, I’ll pretend that these things are not only available to those with money and space and time.

(I refuse to accept it, actually, and this refusal does connect also to a refusal to accept the call for productivity in all things, because the people in our lives, our children and our friends and our beloveds, offer us something so far outside of that terrible call, as to be, at this point, basically divine.)

This passage in particular was instructive to me about how one might write in the way Woolf believes we have to:

Thus when I ask you to write more books I am urging you to do what will be for your good and for the good of the world at large. . . What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or La Recherche du Temps Perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.

I mean, her own novel, as I wrote last month, has this very effect on me: I saw more intensely afterwards, the “world [seemed] bared of its covering and given an intenser life.”

If we are to be ambitious for anything, couldn’t it be that? To live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, whether one can impart it or not.

“The mind is certainly a very mysterious organ”

I want to speak, here, at the end, about mental illness and writing and to attempt to leave aside pertinent facts of Woolf’s biography to do so. In my Woolf reading group, we read A Room of One’s Own alongside Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic of early feminist literature, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a gothic horror story of what happens when a woman is forced to take the “rest cure” for her psychological ailments, and this rest from reading and writing only serves to unhinge her completely.

And here’s Woolf, on the horrors that might have faced her imaginary sister of Shakespeare:

For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

And I thought of a quote I heard many years ago, which may be apocryphal, Carl Jung saying that James Joyce would have been as incurably insane as his daughter Lucia was if he hadn’t written Ulysses⁴. This comment struck me at the time because I had gone through my own madness, and found writing to be something I needed to do, and found it frustrating when I saw people call this “using writing as therapy” as if this is what this meant. One of the members of our bookclub said that Jung had also written something about the fact that when we are meant for something being thwarted in that effort—whatever it might be—can lead to all sorts of miseries.

Well, without drawing a conclusion, I’ll just leave all that here. For the sake of my writing and my mind, I’ve been trying to do things that are unproductive. Hence this substack. Thanks for reading, if you are reading still.

1. I published an essay called Hole Digger earlier this year on the subject of money & writing & marriage in The New Quarterly. Clip of me reading from it here.

2. One of the footnotes I read somewhere mentioned that the woman Woolf based Clarissa Dalloway on was a person with an “art for friendship,” and I admit that one thing I very much want and feels very out of reach and nearly aristocratic from my current vantage is a home large enough where I might throw many parties, because I love my people, and I love a party.

3. Literature is so important to Woolf that she claims to a “conviction—or is it [an] instinct?—that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings.”

4. If anyone has any leads to the origins of this, please tell me!