Silences by Shelly Fisher Fishkin

capacities, in the diaries (and lives) of those femalebloodkin of great writers: Dorothy Wordsworth, Alice James, Aunt Mary Moody Emerson.
    And where there is no servant or relation to assume the responsibilities of daily living? Listen to Katherine Mansfield in the early days of her relationship with John Middleton Murry, when they both dreamed of becoming great writers: **
                 The house seems to take up so much time. . . . I mean when Ihave to clean up twice over or wash up extra unnecessary things, I get frightfully impatient and want to be working [writing]. So often this week you and Gordon have been talking while I washed dishes. Well someone’s got to wash dishes and get food. Otherwise “there’s nothing in the house but eggs to eat.” And after you have gone I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stovesand “will there be enough to go around?” And you calling, whatever I am doing, writing, “Tig, isn’t there going to be tea? It’s five o’clock.”
                       I loathe myself today. This woman who superintends you and rushes about slamming doors and slopping water and shouts “You might at least empty the pail and wash out the tea leaves.” . . . O Jack, I wish that you would take me in yourarms and kiss my hands and my face and every bit of me and say, “It’s all right, you darling thing, I understand.”
    A long way from Conrad’s favorable circumstances for creation: the flow of daily life made easy and noiseless.
    And, if in addition to the infinite capacity, to the daily responsibilities, there are children?
    Balzac, you remember, described creation in terms of motherhood. Yes,in intelligent passionate motherhood there are similarities, and in more than the toil and patience. The calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new using of the past; the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity. All almost certain death to creation—(so far).
    Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need (though for a while, as in any fullness of life,the need may be obscured), but because the circumstances for sustained creation have been almost impossible. The need cannot be first. It can have at best, only part self, part time. (Unless someone else does the nurturing. Read Dorothy Fisher’s “Babushka Farnham” in Fables for Parents .) More than in any other human relationship, over-whelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptable,responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as one’s own (love, not duty); that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives themprimacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption,not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil. The rest has been said here. Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockage—at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.
    When H. H. Richardson, who wrote the Australian classic Ultima Thule, was asked why she—whose children, like all her people, were so profoundly written—did not herself have children, she answered:“There are enough women to do the childbearing and childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.” I remember thinking rebelliously, yes, and I know of none who can bear and rear my children either. But literary history is on her side. Almost no mothers—as almost no part-time, part-self persons—have created enduring literature . . . so far.
    If I talk now quickly of my own silences—almostpresumptuous after what has been told here—it is that the individual experience may add.
    In the twenty years I bore and reared my children, usually had to work on a paid job as well, the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist. Nevertheless writing,