‘There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’
So claimed British writer Cyril Connolly, these days remembered primarily for the above quote. In 1938 he wrote a critical and autobiographical volume entitled Enemies of Promise in which he scratched around for an understanding as to why he'd failed to produce a masterpiece of literature, unlike his old school pal Eric Arthur Blair (otherwise known as George Orwell), despite being widely recognised as a leading talent and distinguished critic of his age. He is buried, presumably beneath a vine producing only sour grapes, a brisk walk from where I write this blog entry.
I wish to publicly address his famous quote, and declare it nonsense. Partly.
It’s true that creativity has many an arch-nemesis, but I think it’s pretty unfair to blame it on the kids. Children, for sure, are exhausting - mentally, physically, financially - and no one would begrudge the suspension of serous literary pretentions during their early years, but if Disney+ and Netflix can afford your eyeballs then five-hundred words a day, for example, isn't going to be too onerous a minimum word count. And, if it is, then I suspect the problem might actually be you, rather than your snotsome offspring.
Furthermore, if JG Ballard could steal the time to write The Atrocity Exhibition as a widowed single parent of three, or Toni Morrison publish a book every three years with two sons, rising at 4am to write before work, or JK Rowling write four Harry Potters as a single mum, then the ‘pram in the hall’ excuse starts to look pretty limp, doesn’t it?
Yes, Doris Lessing abandoned her two children (much like the literary characters within John Updike’s Run Rabbit Run, Hanif Kureski’s Intimacy, or Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter) to commit herself to her literary cause, but so many men have taken this approach it’s barely worth listing them (Dickens fathered ten children then left them all to the missus while he banged out Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and an obese library of other classics while his youngest were still suckling), and the fact that Doris Lessing’s name stands out is as much to do with the misogynistic society we roll around in as it is the rarity of a woman doing so, despite plenty of examples of female writers who opted out of motherhood, such as Hilary Mantel, Simone de Beauvoir, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf.
Each to their own, essentially.
Many writers, of course, thrive on the family dynamic, with their best work, arguably, coming about as a direct response to parenthood.
Michael Chabbon pounces immediately to mind, a man who’s written fourteen books but claims he ought to have eighteen to his name (‘you lose a book for every child’ the father of four claims). His latest book, Pops, is about his children. Or Tony Parsons, whose Man and Boy came about as a result of becoming a single parent, caring for the son Julie Birchill walked out on. Or Julie Myerson, who took things to a controversial extreme when she wrote The Lost Child; a True Story, in which she called out her teenage own son’s abusive behaviour and pot habit, leaving herself open to accusations of betraying ‘not just love and intimacy, but also motherhood itself’, as a reviewer in the Sunday Times put it.
Having children changes your relationship with planet Earth to such an extent that not writing about parenthood seems unthinkable to me, yet a conflict between the familial and the literary is understandable. Anything that gets in the way of writing is unwelcome if you’re against a deadline or the urge is strong. Lockdown fatigue is my biggest enemy at the moment, and homeschooling the two younglings isn’t always rock and roll.
There are moments, I’ll admit, when embracing the mythology of the self-destructive bachelor sounds falsely appealing. After Byron’s wife gave birth to his first child he declared that he was ‘in hell’, and Hemingway reportedly asked a bartender for a glass of hemlock after his own marriage ceremony.
But family life enriches so much more than it diminishes. It might well eat away your time, and yet storytelling’s rich pageant requires an understanding of parenthood, just as it requires an understanding of childhood, of heartbreak, of violence, or a thousand other human experiences. It’s all tools for the toolbox. A reader deserves fully-rounded characters that possess a human touch, for reasons of empathy, verisimilitude, and family life provides an abundance of stories and frustrations from which to draw.
Sombre enemy of good art? No, the pram in the hall provides gist for the provider. If you consider it the antithesis of your art, you also consider the pub or working for a living or eating meals or sleeping the enemy of art too, or anything that makes us who we are and the mortal conditions we cast our collective fishing rods into as a species.
Franz Kafka died (two years younger than I am now), after a lifetime of writing in his spare time while working for an insurance company, never even knowing he’d fathered a son with a Jewish woman in Berlin, and only achieved significant success as a writer after his death.
Truly, he had the worst of both worlds.
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