![]() In doing so, he’s demonstrated the enormous weight that “parenting” - a verb that only came into vogue in the 1970s - takes on for the highly educated, city-dwelling, and just somewhat neurotic members of his gender and class. Simply by virtue of the fact that Gessen doesn’t treat the occupants of those prams - in addition to now 7-year-old Raffi, Gessen and his wife (the novelist, publisher, and blogger Emily Gould) have 3-year-old Ilya - as an obstacle to his writing career, he’s done something unique and valuable. ![]() ![]() And in Raising Raffi, he makes it clear that he is very serious - if frequently confused and confounded - about what he calls the “simultaneously mundane and significant” act of fatherhood. He is a very serious writer and a very serious guy. Gessen is a novelist twice over, a translator of Nobel Prize-winning authors, a Columbia University teacher, and a literary journalist who covers the war in Ukraine for the New Yorker. Take one part 21st century Marxism, one part high-end literature, one part, uh, Harvard, shake well, then toss out and serve beer and cheap wine at the parties. He is best known for co-founding n+1 in 2004, a left-wing print and digital literary magazine that resembled those finely crafted cocktails that became popular in New York around the same time. Gessen, for those who weren’t physically or spiritually in Brooklyn during the first decade of this century, is in many ways the modern descendant of those literati. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote lovely if perhaps ill-advised letters to his only child Scottie, which probably didn’t quite make up for the years of alcoholism and mental illness that marked her childhood? Or William Faulkner, who put it bluntly when he told his daughter, “No one remembers Shakespeare’s children.” About a third of the way through Keith Gessen’s new parenthood book Raising Raffi: The First Five Years, a memoir of the early years with his first child, I began to wonder: What would it look like if literary lions of the past had decided to try their hand at fatherhood books? How about four-time-married Ernest Hemingway, whose youngest child once wrote, “I felt profound relief when they lowered my father’s body into the ground”? Or F. They could have it all, while female authors could not.ĭespite that, however, many of those male authors didn’t seem to make the best fathers. If literary merit was implicitly associated with freedom from familial responsibilities - if not necessarily freedom from a family - it gave male authors even more of a leg up than they already had. So men got the chance to be Writers with a capital W, and they could also be fathers, provided there was someone else there to do the most if not all of the actual work of parenting. Family life, he wrote, could only work for the writer if he had money and “a wife who is intelligent and unselfish enough to understand and respect the working of the unfriendly cycle of the creative imagination.” The pram in the hall was Mom’s problem, and it was her job to ensure that its occupant didn’t get in the way of Dad’s creative freedom. Sorry, did I say “they”? Writing in the 1930s, Connolly made it clear that the choice was only to be made by one category: men. Must they choose between the perfection of the life or the perfection of the work? It’s an astringent line, one still regularly asked of authors to this day. The burdens of domesticity, Connolly argued, would sap the promising writer of the time and oxygen they needed to achieve greatness at the only thing that really mattered, which was very much not their family. ![]() 1 barrier to literary greatness: children. “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” So wrote the English literary critic Cyril Connolly in his 1938 book Enemies of Promise, wherein he left no doubt about the identity of the No. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |