I read awhile back about Angelica Garnett’s death at MobyLives, and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind since. She was Vanessa Bell’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece, and until she was eighteen she thought her father was Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell. Her real father, her mother informed her, was the painter Duncan Grant, but Vanessa asked that Angelica not address this with Clive, and as the Guardian notes, “for some reason” Angelica never approached Grant either. Instead she’d end up marrying one of her true father’s ex-lovers, David Garnett, a man who upon seeing her as a baby wrote to Lytton Strachey that he already thought of marrying her 20 years hence. She had no idea of the novelist Garnett’s involvement with her father. As one of my mentors would say, oy. Oy.
This kind of story strikes me as unimaginable today. Family secrets are of course eternal, along with complicated personal entanglements. But artists don’t do quite so much communal living — at least, not that I’m aware of — and the discourse around mothering today is so fraught and complicated. To a lesser extent this is true of parenting writ large, but we can’t let the gendered nature of the stuff off the hook. It is terribly hard to imagine being a distracted, uncommitted sort of mother if only because it’s not the fashion to be. You don’t need me, a childless person, to tell you this, but of course there are reams of paper devoted to the intersection of writing and mothering, in equal measure complaining of how hard it is to do both and extolling the virtues of mothering. On fathering, not quite so much.
I can’t offer you any further information on the topic except to stand over here and say, it all seems daunting, this mothering and writing thing. Everyone wants you to devote yourself to both, and it seems you do too, which just all seems terribly exhausting. I want everyone to cut themselves more breaks and pour themselves more drinks and surrender to the impossibility of all of it. At least, that’s what I am doing at the moment, and the only thing I mother is my cat. She, by the way, thinks I do a poor job of it. C.f. this morning, when I got up to compose this post and she hadn’t any kibble left. She marched across my keyboard with evident dissatisfaction; I lost a whole paragraph in this post. I cursed at her and put her on the floor. Her ears briefly went back but then she settled and jumped back up next to me on the couch and began rubbing my arm. The short-term memory thing comes in handy, at times, as does my near-monopoly over the food stocks.
For her part, Garnett would, late in life, exorcise her Bloomsbury childhood via memoir. Her book was entitled Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood; it is not in print in the U.S. that I’m aware of. (I smell an e-book deal!) This, I think, must be the great writer-parent nightmare; the later memoir. Somewhere there are moms and dads who do not fuck you up, but I can’t think of any at the moment. It’s possible their kids don’t become writers and artists, a shame. Either that, or they bury their coffins in therapy.
