![]() True, in some of these cases the decision not to start a family may have had some relation to the author’s gender or sexuality at that moment in history, when neither single women nor gay men were considered legitimate candidates for parenthood. Seuss, Margaret Wise Brown, James Marshall, Ezra Jack Keats. Even a surprising number of the great children’s book authors and illustrators of the past century never had offspring of their own: Maurice Sendak, Dr. When I was younger, with fewer dependents and more literary ambition, I recall angstily counting on my fingers how many of my favorite writers had never had children. But in considering this question I can only consult my own experience, which is that of trying to do the best, most creative work possible while also living in an apartment with two other humans and a dog, all of whom (like me) require food and attention at perplexingly frequent intervals and leave messes of every description in their wake. I’ll get back to you on that question as soon as I’m done picking these rainbow sequins up off the floor one by one, then sorting this mountain of discarded clothes into boxes marked “to be repaired,” “donate to Goodwill” and “rags.” Not that I intend by that autobiographical opening to elevate my weekly film reviews or nonfiction book-in-progress to the status of art of any kind, “great” or no. In that sense, great art and domestic responsibilities are as like each other as my elaborate meal plans are like the chapter outlines of my maximalist novel.ĭana Stevens Credit. Yet the reality is that art and domestic work are both likely to go uncompensated or poorly compensated, and under such circumstances, both have to be approached with love and rigor to be done well. It is true that taking care of domestic responsibilities often receives the stamp of cultural approval, particularly in societies where no welfare state exists to share domestic burdens. Here one notices the similarities between art and its supposed enemy. The rewards of such “unproductive” labor cannot be quantified, and its measure can be taken only in the well-being of others. What makes domestic labor seem so spectacularly unrewarding is the fact that it is both uncompensated and looked down upon, falling into that category designated “unproductive” labor by Adam Smith, work of the sort that “adds to the value of nothing.” This is why “domestic” in gross domestic product refers to the boundaries of a nation where the captains of industry go forth busily rather than to the confines of one’s home, where the traditionally feminine labor of nurturing and caring takes place. Washing dishes three times a day may feel like drudgery (it often does to me), but is no more destructive to the creation of art than pointless meetings at the office (often dominated by those without domestic responsibilities) or the effort of trying to figure out another software interface in order to pay a bill or get paid. If domestic responsibilities appear singularly detrimental to artistic practice, it is not because of the repetitive tasks they involve. And there, I think, is the lie foisted upon us, not least by artists themselves. This is surely why so many of the great writers we recall replicate the following pattern: single and/or childless if women, absolved of domestic responsibility by their partners if men, or just so very wealthy as to outsource most domestic responsibility down the class ladder. How could that be reconciled with anything other than lunacy or asceticism? What could the planning of meals and the sorting of laundry ever have to do with writing a maximalist novel? Yeats characterized William Blake’s artistic quest. The long hours, the uncertainties, the obsessions, the beating upon the wall for truth, as W.B. Still, if I scoff at Connolly’s image, partly from the perspective of a single father who has seen his child outgrow the pram, I too have thought that domestic responsibilities could not be in harmony with art. There is no hope of producing great art if that eerie pram remains parked in the hallway, forever awaiting its occupant - a reliably stalled child who matches the stalled work of art, never changing, never growing beyond his pram. Yet if this idea of the artist as an unfettered spirit persists, its reliable oppositional principle remains, almost a century after Connolly wrote his screed, the practice of domesticity. ![]() One thinks of the Romantics, of bohemianism, of Baudelaire sleeping late into the morning. ![]() The idea of the great, undomesticated artist is itself, of course, one of the enduring fictions handed down to us by the industrial age, a kind of compensatory mechanism for the routinized drudgery on which modern life is built.
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