Childishness and complexities and culture

Johanna Basford page from her Colouring Gallery,
colored by Philip

The invention of Mother's Day

Sunday was pleasant, with flowers and chocolates and a necklace so pretty it could have been a flower--most of all, a dinner with my husband and sons (our daughter was off in Montreal.) The familiar rumor is that Hallmark invented Mother's Day, but in fact it was a daughter, Anna Jarvis, who eventually attacked the commercialization of the holiday and thought that tributes should be heartfelt and homemade. No doubt she would have disapproved of my gifts, though perhaps not of Sunday dinner; I enjoyed my day, mainly because my sons came out to celebrate.

(Side note: Are there any great poems about mothers? Poems by Heaney and Plath and Poe and more, surely, come to mind. I think of Yeats's worn mothers, their daughters with ribbons in their hair--the mothers can't warn or fix a thing! If you like some poem about a mother, please leave the title and author.)

But Anna Jarvis brings up the idea that so often what starts out as a lovely thing becomes co-opted and degraded, doesn't it? And that goes for every little wisp and strand of culture.

Kidnapped

Currently I am listening to two books I've read before, The Woman in White or Kidnapped, when I fold laundry (one of my least-favorite things to do.) In Kidnapped, I'm just up to the point where David Balfour must defend his life for the first time. And I'm thinking about how different the book is from popular young adult books of our own day, though it has adventure and a teen protagonist. David Balfour begins as a very adult sort of child who has already suffered losses and is seen off in the world by the kindly Mr. Campbell, minister of Essendean. He goes off on foot to find the House of Shaws. He is no fool and does not trust his Uncle Ebenezer, but his downfall comes when he persuades himself that his uncle may mean some degree of good to him--even though his uncle tried to kill him earlier by sending him up rotten tower stairs in the dark--and he also feels a desire to step on board a ship. David suffers both physically and mentally for indulging his desire and distrusting his own instincts. Quite soon he faces another situation where he must assess right and wrong and make a moral, high-cost decision about whom to support and whether to be brave, and he sides with the outnumbered Alan Breck Stewart, even though he fears that it may cost his life and even though Stewart is a Jacobite, while David is a Whig. But it is a giant leap into adulthood, where David opposes the child-killing Shuan and the ongoing evil of Captain Hoseason.

The horror of what he has been forced to do in the battle of the roundhouse wrings David's heart, but Alan Breck Stewart is full of frolic and poetry. It is Alan who is the child, and David who is full of civilized unrest and regret and grief. And I'm looking forward to "the flight in the heather," which no less a stylist than Henry James admired. Up ahead in the tale, things become quite murky, and it's difficult to sort the moral threads, and to know exactly what Alan Breck Stewart is, and whether he is on the side of right and the angels or not. The moral crux cut through by love in Kidnapped is as fundamental to the book as the one in that other great boys' book, Huckleberry Finn.

Stevenson in a modest mode, to James, 1884

I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of my work; rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water.

We could use such "a lout and a slouch." It's like thinking of Auden on vacation, learning Icelandic.

Complexities and the adult

I'm thinking about Stevenson in the light of Susan Nieman's article about the infantilization of Western culture.

Each of us has to take some responsibility for this collective madness. As individuals, we are scared to read “difficult” books or attempt other challenging activities. As the Enlightenment’s two greatest philosophers, Rousseau and Kant, argued, growing up is a challenge.

Real adult activity takes effort and often courage. Colouring in someone else’s designs is always easier than making your own, just as forming your own opinions – after gathering and weighing information – is always harder than parroting other people’s views. This is why Kant wrote that thinking for oneself is the key to growing up. 

The moral complexity of the relationship between Balfour and Stewart: is it equaled in our "young adult" novels? According to Nieman, more than half of the young adult books sold are sold to adults, and most of those report buying them to read themselves. In a world awash in Marvel hero movies, infinite games, artists who can't paint or sculpt, writers who want to shock an unshockable world with heightened sex and violence, and coloring books for adults, do we even desire morally complex relationships in any kind of novel? Does anyone care if entertainment wrestles art to the ground and skips away triumphant?

All of this leads me to conclude that I am really a minor character in Gawain and the Green Knight, unseen, occasionally bringing out a serving dish but mostly scribbling in a back room by the fire, leaves in my hair. I send you greetings from the leafing castle.

More from Basford's gallery of fans.
Colored by Lynn Lamont
with Staedtler Noris Club pencils.

You asked, no. 10: children and books

Mary Bullington, "Creation," 2013
Mixed media collage of painted papers
on monotypes and painted paper
(acrylic, gesso, oil pastel, india ink)
25" x 22"

In response to a request to interview some of my painter friends, I have been interviewing Mary Boxley Bullington. As she, in turn, insisted on interviewing me, a part of the You asked series will be composed of our questions to each other. This question is rather close to You asked, no. 1, but as that one is collecting a lot of readers, the yoking of motherhood and the arts is clearly a burning question for many. So here goes, though there will no doubt be a bit of overlap.

***

Bullington: 
How on earth did you find time to write all those books while having and raising 3 children?

Youmans:
I wrote a book with my first baby on my lap. Once I had two children, that idea didn't work so well. At times I have dispensed with sleep, though I don't recommend this as a way of proceeding. It probably impairs baseline health and will make the books more wild. I drafted The Wolf Pit on very little sleep because for several years prior, any spare time had been taken up by general over-busyness, two long-distance moves, and a problem pregnancy. My lively youngest child wasn't yet in school. Nor was he particularly sleepy. A little more sleepiness would have been helpful and obliging of him, but it wasn't in his nature, and so that was fine.

The questions of finding time and whether to have children are important to any artist who is a woman. It is essential to remember that children have no need for a writer (or other sort of artist) in their lives. It is essential to recall that they have a deep need for a mother. Not infrequently, children present syndromes or issues that turn out to be quite time-consuming. Of course, many of our great, now-historic women writers were childless--Woolf, Austen, Dickinson, Wharton, Emily and Anne Brontë, George Eliot, etc. On the internet, one can still learn that young women sometimes mourn that their children stop their writing, or diminish their ability to write. We live in an era of falling birthrates in the West, particularly in Europe, where many people are choosing to have no children and to enjoy the subsequent leisure time and increased wealth that comes with living without them. Having children is a decision, one with a cost.

For me, having children meant having a bigger life, a more challenging and profound and beautiful and even more painful life. After all, without life, there is no art. The question was whether I was willing to patch together scraps of time and quilt together books in them, whether I had the mental concentration to write books in that scattered way, and the discipline to write late at night. And yes, it turned out that I did. I should add that three of my books were impelled by the obsessions of my children. Also, fragments here and there ought to have footnotes to their credit. But even if those things were not true, the simple yielding to a larger life was transformative to me.

A final tribute: I would not have thirteen books and a batch of nigh-finished manuscripts if my husband did not cook dinner most of the time. He took over much of the cooking when my middle child was two, and life became busier than before, and he never quit. He's a stellar cook and baker. Am I properly grateful? Yes, I am.

You asked, no. 1: motherhood and the arts

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Maze of Blood

The reflections about more life (motherhood) being helpful to a writer (and an artist) might be good to have out there, too. When I was a new mother, it seemed like my hands might be tied forever. It made me scared. Two more children later, I realized how much more material I had, and how many more things I felt strongly about. Reassurance from seasoned creative mothers could be so helpful to a new creative mothers who might be feeling the panic, or helplessness. I remember looking online at the time for artist mother role models who were pulling this off successfully, and having trouble finding examples. --artist Kim Vanderheiden

I often notice writers or artists talking about how their children are keeping them from work. Just last week I read a piece by a highly successful young writer with a Guggenheim and several books in her bag. But now she has a baby and can't seem to write something she likes. Well, really, is that a huge surprise or a tragedy? I doubt it.

You know, this idea that we have to do our art every day is an idea custom-made for men. Made for men! It does not fit the average mother's life. If a mother cannot manage it, fine. She will do what she can. Mothers are needed by children, while writers and painters and so on are simply not needed by children. Not needed. At all. Oh, children might enjoy spotting a mother's book or painting in a shop or gallery, but it's not important to their lives. A mother is deep down vital to their lives.

Some of us are obsessed. I seem to be one of those. There's no particular virtue in being obsessed, just as there's no particular virtue in not being obsessed. I wrote my first book (my first published book) with my first baby on my lap. My second book was written on the landing of the stairs. We were in a condo for a year, and I could see into the sunken living room through stair railings, and sometimes I encouraged my children to play there when I wanted to write a little. I also used nap time, and I stayed up late to write.

Obviously, I wrote that book in little bits and pieces. No doubt that affected the book. And no doubt having small children affected the book. I've had people tell me that Catherwood made them cry, or made them stop reading for a week because they were grieved. Somebody told me that they were amused to see that an Amazon review of the book said it was almost too heart-wringing! Why? Because I had a son of two and a baby daughter. To love more (and in a new way) is to be bigger than before. I had more to care about, more to lose, more to feed my writing. All my intense mother-love rained down on that book. More life should never be a mistake for an artist of any sort because art craves a sense of life and energy.

But if a woman simply can't do her work with small children for an extended period, that's okay, too. She's getting bigger on the inside all the time (and I'm not talking pregnancy, though that sometimes happens as well.) Motherhood stretches us. It's joyful and wild and full of work and difficulties and exhaustion. Children sometimes turn out to have syndromes or deficits a mother never expected. And even without those difficulties, children and parents learn that the song is right: growing up is hard to do. Always. Challenges can be good for us as artists, if we don't insist on having our own way. Because children aren't about letting a mother have her own way. But they are about growing, and they will make a mother grow too. And that's good for the work.

Sometimes even the obsessed can't manage. I have to confess that it was harder for me to write something sustained when we moved back South when my children were small, and it wasn't just because I wanted to go outside and play. Some passages in life are simply more difficult than others and impossible to plan for. My children needed me in new and different ways as they grew, and they slept less. I kept writing, but I think of the years between the second and third book as years when I wrote a lot of work that I threw away later or stockpiled. Lots of poems, lots of sketches. My husband was doing some intense training that meant I didn't always have a lot of help. My father became quite ill with the disease that would kill him ten years later. And I was very sick during my third pregnancy and afterward. We also moved three times in the space of five years. I sold two houses as a result, while my husband left for new work a thousand miles away, well before the children and I moved. That was a whole lot of upheaval and change to manage.

Extreme measures can occasionally feel possible for short bursts of time. When we moved to Cooperstown, I unpacked the whole house, all but my writing room. I put my computer on my writing table and wrote a novel, The Wolf Pit. I wrote it after my three children were in bed, after I had finished the laundry, after everything else that needed to be done was done. My husband was already a grand cook, and he really took over when we moved. So I didn't have that job to do any more. Managing was still hard. I sometimes finished a night's work at 4 a.m. Then I erupted out of bed (seemingly about five minutes later) to wake my children at 7:00, in order to see the older two off to school. When I was done with my draft, I caught up on sleep, unpacked my writing room, and started tinkering and revising in little bits of time during the day. The book came out from FSG right after the tragic day we call 9-11. It got a nice national award and some great attention, but the timing was terrible, of course. I've never quite recovered from the bad timing because publishing and book-selling are governed by numbers (so thank you for supporting my in-print books.)

Now when I am not writing, I don't worry. I think of myself as fallow. I am like a field that will produce in a great explosion of spring. But perhaps it is not spring yet. Perhaps in a month I will be writing a novel, wishing to be with it all the time. Perhaps I will be having a crazy sluice of new poems. I am old enough that I have faith that what has drifted away will return again because I know my own patterns, and how I work best.

A good parallel example of how to keep going and manage to work daily shines through Luisa Igloria's post about daily writing on The House of Words series: it's here. Luisa has four daughters and a busy professional life, and she has managed at least a half hour per day for her writing for years. I don't know if she could have managed it when her children were younger. I expect if painting had been her thing, she might be doing a tiny oil painting or a sketch or a small woodcut in her bits of time, as she likes to complete something each day. And she would be, as a result, able to do better and better work on that scale, and be more ready for any bigger work as well.

We all need to have threads running to others who love what we love, and those threads can steady us and give us someone who has sympathy with our situation. People like Luisa have been important to me. I want to make beauty, do the occasional teaching gig, and be a mother, and Luisa's life is a kind of parallel to mine, except that I quit teaching full-time long ago, and so she juggles even more than I do. Luisa and I chat frequently, and we share woes and joys that come with motherhood and being writers. We're happy or sad for each other, depending on the event, and that's wonderfully helpful. I live in a place with few writers, so it's especially sweet for me. Similarly, my local friendship with painter Ashley Norwood Cooper is one where we get together to talk about a life in the arts, leaping about from children (three each) to work to goals. We live in a fairly obscure place, so it's lovely to know someone living a somewhat parallel life. I have many other friends in the arts, but knowing a good number who are trying to be mothers and also make their art feels helpful to me.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for both men and women in the arts is the fact that most of them are to varying degrees invisible as artists, so that their work is little known, or less well known than it should be. We live in a winner-takes-all time where few are pushed and promoted. Artists look around and often see that lesser work is puffed and promoted and feel that it is hard to go on. Plenty of women feel that the game is tilted toward men, but plenty of men are left out of the inner circle of marketed and promoted artists, too. A woman who feels that way and also has a few children may feel her path is just too difficult, that she is too alone in what she longs to achieve. That's another reason why constructing a circle is so important--to spend time with other people who want to bring art into the world. Because the danger with a degree of invisibility is disappearing. To know and be known by others the artist respects is a way of having the work become bright and visible, and that is always encouraging. After all, no art is quite finished without its right audience.

On Mother's Day--

Raphael, Sistine Madonna detail via Wikipedia, public domain
Remember the bereft Nigerian mothers--their girls stolen--and all mothers who mourn.
There is little enough we can do for any of them; Amnesty International petition here.
I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me.
They have clung to me all my life. --Abraham Lincoln

Happy Mother's Day--

My mother's hands, at some finishing work on a piece fresh off the loom.
She is also a great gardener, particularly with native plants.
She used to be head of Serials at Western Carolina University's Hunter Library.
She lives on top of a mountain next to the sky...

Gardenias for Kate Deriso

The Pot Boy has not yet moved from the fire. If you have a question, leave it in the question box, one post below… When he moves, all will be answered!

***

Today is the birthday of my paternal grandmother, Kate Deriso Youmans of Lexsy, Georgia. In the past decade I’ve heard that her grandparents owned much of Treutlen County and were big slave-owners. Evidently they lost everything after the Civil War and were pitiful and often starved in their old age. I found the idea that they had been owners of land and slaves very startling because I had long connected my grandma's past history with the sort of plow-mule poverty that features in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the accompanying photographs by Walker Evans. The shack at Lexsy was crowded with flowers and trees and a great shining hedge that shaded the porch; it is a primary place in my imagination, a place out of time—the sort of place where people do the same things in the same way for hundreds of years.



Kate Deriso Youmans was a Primitive Baptist who lived hard and close to the bone; she was a sharecropper in the Depression and for most of her life, and she could make fried chicken and cakes and pies like nobody's business. At the farm, we would go out on adventures to gather food, crossing a stream to collect the wild sweet plums, yellow and clear red, or toting buckets for berries. My grandmother carried a cudgel against cottonmouths and rattlesnakes from the swamps. It seemed to be that she was always busy shelling lady peas or canning peaches or capping blackberries, her arthritic fingers never at rest. Her table was always a bumper crop.

She gave birth to six children. In her youth, she was called "Little Bear" because she was willing to defend them with her fists if she had to do so. Willie, a little boy nicknamed “Peter Rabbit,” died of meningitis in the wagon on the way to the doctor. The others grew up and became what they became. My daddy became tailgunner and a chemist and then a Professor of analytical chemistry. He is dead, and she is dead, and the world is still spinning and flowering and burning and needing all the things that it needs so desperately.

In speaking of her, I have limited what she is. She rode wagons under the stars, she pushed children from her body, she buried a child, she plowed a mule and labored in the hot Georgia sun, she did infinite things I do not know. Widen all that I have said by a thousand miles on foot and add a million over-heated suns, and you and I might get an inkling of what that life was like.

Credit for photographs: The gardenias are courtesy of "xymoneau" or Dez Pain of Australia and www.sxc.hu/. I believe I've used some of xymoneau's images before...







***

Here is how my day is going:

Hokay,

I start out the outer-world part of my day by running two blocks to the bus-stop to hand R the forgotten dowel for her dratted art project: all this dressed in my bathrobe, tucked under a long coat. The thermometer says 10 below zero--dunno if I believe it, but it's cold. Fine. Done. Can sit down and work on the FAFSA form at last.

Phone rings at 8:15.

"Hi Mom."

"Hi B. What did you forget?"

"My backpack."

Oh, only a two thousand pound backpack... Only a thing as big as a small icehouse that straps to one's backside. Only every single book and notebook and pencil needed to attend high school.

Sigh.

The wackiness never ends.