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BABY IN FIRE Escape
Creativity, Motherhood and the Mind-Baby Problem
by Julie Phillips
“Where do I want my vitality to go?” Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in 1962, 10 years after the birth of her only child. “Is it books, sex, ambition, love, anxiety or lust? It can’t be both.” In “Baby on Fire Ladder,” biographer Julie Phillips explores the conjecture in this chilling final line and explores the various ways in which 20th-century artist mothers have sought to have “both”—often in highly tense circumstances.
Phillips focuses on the intimate lives of six women born in the first half of the 20th century “young enough to experience the changes that come with feminism, old enough to be a mother of a lifetime” – Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker and Angela Carter. The chapters on each issue are interspersed with shorter chapters entitled “The Discomfort Zone,” in which Phillips brings together excerpts and anecdotes from a supportive voice chorus that deliver concise, often sober testimony about what Phillips calls the “mind-baby problem.” ”: the practical and psychological difficulty of combining motherhood with artistic (mainly literary) work. These women talk about their disintegrated concentration, their resentment at the shortened writing time, the disapproval of working mothers by the society, and the selfishness they feel when closing the door. There are also rarer voices who describe family life as something that stimulates their creativity. While Lorde saw both motherhood and poetry as “part of one’s daily life,” Le Guin angrily responded to a friend who described motherhood as a “brainless enslavement paradigm”: For the author, having children was “scary, empowering, and violent.” demands intelligence.
The question that drives Phillips’ book is not whether these women are good writers or good mothers, but what conditions can ensure that creativity and home life strike a viable balance. For Lessing, the problem with motherhood is not the job itself, but her expectations, her own desires and ambitions (straight, nuclear family. Lessing chose to leave her husband, knowing that she would lose her legal rights over her children: Phillips decided that she would leave Rhodesia alone to go to London). Paradoxically, she argues that it’s the only way she can imagine towards an integrated life of activism, writing, and motherhood. It makes the first two impossible. In contrast, Neel, a notable artist whose children are taken from her custody or terrorized by a series of abusive partners, finds meaningful It offers the most disturbing example of the persecution that occurs when incompatible demands clash without support.
This is a restless book that raises more questions than it answers. Phillips’ own indecision is evident: questioning the project, grappling with his tendency to judge, and asking what he’s looking for. The book is primarily an interrogation rather than an argument – a variety of experiences conceived along the lines of Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory of fiction” – yet the group format encourages the reader to seek out remaining connections and conclusions. difficult, on the other hand obvious. The motherhood experiences of these artists depend on their support networks, temperament, wealth and childcare arrangements; In the process of defining themselves as artists, those who become mothers try to reconcile the attractiveness of different identities and the accompanying benefits (psychological and financial) than those with established works. What emerges most strongly from Phillips’ work is the fact that invisible social structures have had generations of failed women, children, and art. We are all poorer for this.
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