{"id":65821,"date":"2014-01-29T14:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T19:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=65821"},"modified":"2014-01-29T15:00:34","modified_gmt":"2014-01-29T20:00:34","slug":"the-pram-in-the-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/29\/the-pram-in-the-hall\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pram in the Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Silver_Cross_Balmoral_Coach-Built_Pram\"<\/a>

Photo: Silver Cross UK, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the most popular quotations about creativity and parenthood is Cyril Connolly\u2019s: \u201cThere is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.\u201d This aphorism, snobbish in its dismissal of human distraction, has been passed down through generations of artists as a black warning banner\u2014Have Children, Be Creatively Screwed Forever.<\/p>\n

Having a child isn\u2019t easy, of course. When my son, Julian, was born sixteen months ago, I became intimately acquainted with sleep deprivation and time constraints. The third night after we\u2019d brought him home, I remember being in bed, so mentally and physically exhausted that when I looked up at where the ceiling and the wall met, I saw the seam crack open, revealing a horizon of white light and red lava.<\/p>\n

I slept in naps, and although I found the first several months to be brutal and strange and basically a new realm of reality, my role as a father worked as a kind of energizer. The pram in the hall was no \u201csomber enemy\u201d\u2014rather, because I was baggy-eyed, vein-drenched in coffee, and blindly stepping into the new world of fatherhood, producing work had never felt more important to me. I was creatively explosive, if a little loose and wild. I can\u2019t remember showering or looking in the mirror for weeks. Given the sudden constrains on my time, the pockets in which I could work were like mines where I hacked away with a speed I\u2019ve never experienced before, discovering and polishing work.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s been most difficult, really, is balancing the weird mix of father and writer online, where the community I know is mostly childless. This online world, which I love and cherish, is also detached and ironic and so image-based that being a dad doesn\u2019t seem to fit. To age out, a writer must pass through three stages: First, you turn thirty, thus becoming \u201conline old.\u201d Second, you get married. Third, you have a child. I\u2019ve done all three, and now I\u2019m having to define myself online: Am I a writer or a dad or a husband? Can I be all three? <\/p>\n

Shortly after my wife gave birth, I commented on a friend\u2019s Facebook status; my friend\u2019s response was, \u201cHey, look at this Dad on here.\u201d It wasn\u2019t meant to slight me, but there was something there, something that said I was now more dad than writer. In our culture, fatherhood means baggy khakis and cars with side-impact airbags\u2014it\u2019s something of a joke.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, the few writer-fathers I know online either make self-deprecating quips about their fatherhood or simply never post about being a father. I\u2019m not comfortable with either approach.<\/p>\n

The balance is hard to find. Being a writer\u2014especially one who doesn\u2019t make a living from his work\u2014already involves a kind of guilt trip, but if you\u2019ve ever felt neglectful for spending too much time in your head, dreaming up ideas, or moving around in a world you\u2019ve created, imagine amplifying that guilt ten times\u2014because you now have a little person who\u2019s reality depends on you being in reality. Countless times I\u2019ve caught myself lost in my own thoughts while my son stares at me, wondering when I\u2019m going to come back to him.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t help that many of the male writers I\u2019ve admired\u2014not only as creators, but, strange as it sounds, as father figures of a sort\u2014have fearfully adhered to the \u201cpram in the hall\u201d sentiment. For example, here\u2019s David Foster Wallace in The Pale King<\/i>:<\/p>\n

\n

Reynolds\u2019s own professed take on marriage\/family was that from boyhood on he had never liked fathers and had no wish to be one \u2026 Sylvanshine had found himself locking eyes with thirty-year-old men who had infants in high-tech papooselike packs on their backs, their wives with quilted infant-supply bags at their sides, the wives in charge, the men appearing essentially soft or softened in some way, desperate in a resigned way, their stride not quite a trudge, their eyes empty and overmild with the weary stoicism of young fathers. Reynolds would call it not stoicism but acquiescence to some large and terrible truth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And here\u2019s Don DeLillo, who never had children, in my favorite of his books, Libra<\/i>. (Keep in mind, this paragraph is completely isolated, with large chunks of white space above and below; it\u2019s one of only a few like this in the entire novel.)<\/p>\n

\n

A family expects you to be one thing when you\u2019re another. They twist you out of shape. You have a brother with a good job and a nice wife and nice kids and they want you to be a person they will recognize. And a mother in a white uniform who grips your arms and weeps. You are trapped in their minds. They shape and hammer you. Going away is what you do to see yourself plain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that every male writer, say, my father\u2019s age, is dark on parenthood, but it seems that so many are. In 1962, Cormac McCarthy had a son, and in order to concentrate on his writing he told his wife\u2014who was already responsible for all housework and caring for the baby\u2014to get a day job, too. She soon filed for divorce. As a father, William Burroughs was much more Jack Torrance than Danny Tanner: he accidentally shot his son\u2019s mother, introduced him to drugs and alcohol, and exposed him to situations where grown men made sexual advances on him. The list of accusations reads like a nightmare, and it culminates with Burroughs\u2019s son drinking himself to death at thirty-three.<\/p>\n

There is some light on this topic. I\u2019ve discovered many writer-fathers who not only continued to produce work, but produced work that is richer and more interesting because<\/i> of their fatherhood. William Vollmann has a daughter. He rarely mentions her in interviews, and I can\u2019t recall a single instance where she appears explicitly in his writing, but Vollmann once told an interviewer that having a child was the most fulfilling part of his life; he enjoys having her in his studio as he works. Vollmann has always been prolific, but arguably his best work, the National Book Award\u2013winning Europe Central<\/i>, was written while his daughter was a small child. J. M. Coetzee, Thomas Pynchon, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, Martin Amis, Richard Brautigan, and Vladimir Nabokov are all fathers who created powerful work after having children. For the right man\u2014and for plenty of men\u2014the pram in the hall has the opposite effect of Connolly\u2019s: it\u2019s a motivator.<\/p>\n

I do realize that I\u2019m writing this from a place of privilege, as a white, educated male with a relaxed day job that allows me the brain space for ideas such as this very piece. Trying to imagine myself as a full-time, stay-at-home mother, trying to work on a novel with an infant attached to my breast, sends a chill through me. It would be much harder to get work done.\u00a0My wife, Melanie, is our son\u2019s primary caregiver, a full-time student, and works part-time as a massage therapist. Where I can come to the office and grab a cup of coffee, she has little to no time with her own thoughts. Doris Lessing, echoing Connolly, became so frustrated with her children that she left two of them with her father and moved away: \u201cThere is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I believe in the magic of fiction and I want to believe that it can connect with the magic of children, with all its weirdness and imagination-play, in a positive way. I want to believe it\u2019s possible to adhere to more than one image\u2014that you don\u2019t have to choose between parent or writer. In fact, I want to believe that writers can make the best kind of parents. J. G. Ballard once described his ambitions as a writer: \u201cI wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.\u201d But he raised three children as a single dad. His daughter, in 2011, said, \u201cMy father was a kind, clever, and imaginative parent who, far from regarding his three children as an impediment to creativity, thought of us as an inspiration.\u201d Ballard created some of his best-loved work as a father. He never complained. He was a writer and a father and was proud to be both.<\/p>\n

Shane Jones is the author of several novels, including <\/em>Light Boxes (2010). His next novel, <\/em>Crystal Eaters, will be published in June.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most popular quotations about creativity and parenthood is Cyril Connolly\u2019s: \u201cThere is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.\u201d This aphorism, snobbish in its dismissal of human distraction, has been passed down through generations of artists as a black warning banner\u2014Have Children, Be Creatively Screwed Forever. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":639,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[12710,154,1889,12709,8321,12711,75,12712],"class_list":["post-65821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-cyril-connolly","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-don-delillo","tag-fatherhood","tag-j-g-ballard","tag-william-borroughs","tag-writing","tag-writing-online"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDo Fathers Make Good Writers? 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