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Mothers With Devil Tongues
In the past months, a couple of writers have been written about significantly enough so that even I would notice. One of them, Muriel Spark, died in April and the other, Martha Gellhorn, while dead for a while, has just had a large collection of her letters published and widely reviewed (it crops up on a bunch of those lists of "books I'll read this summer" where literary types submit their picks to newspaper surveys).
What struck me, in reading about each of these women- whose work I have read (but not extensively) is how incredibly savage they were in print to their sons. This is not at all to diminish their extraordinary talent and courage and the facts of the lives they made for themselves that are fascinating. Spark is known for her novels (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, anyone?) and Gellhorn was a novelist, war reporter (covering the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War), and journalist. Her numerous marriages include one to Ernest Hemmingway.
Both women don't seem to have become parents by accident. (Gellhorn actually adopted her son, Sandy in 1949; it is interesting to note that she had a stepson, also named Sandy) but each gave up on motherhood in a fundamental sense. Both of them seemed to find anything that smacks of domesticity boring and stifling, and perhaps given the times in which they lived and their inability to see beyond themselves made their children the worst logical extension of their fears of being trapped. Spark left her son, Robin, with nuns in Rhodesia (where she had been living with her husband) when she divorced and returned to England, and a year later settled him with her parents in Scotland while she lived in London. For her part, Gellhorn enlisted her mother to supervise her son and later tended to leave him in the care of a subsequent husband's household and boarding schools.
I'm glossing over all of this and not doing any justice to the nuances of Spark's and Gellhorn's lives because that's not really what struck me when I read about them. What I found shocking was how absolutely cruel both women decided to be to their sons when they were grown.
Muriel Spark and Robin had a falling out over whether Spark's mother had ever been Jewish (Spark, a Catholic, denied this categorically), and Spark pressed her disgust with her child hard, dismissing his work as an artist. In a newspaper interview that was subsequently quoted in her New York Times obituary she said: "He can't sell his lousy paintings, and I have had a lot of success. He keeps sending them to me and I don't know what to do with them. I can't put them on my wall. He's never done anything for me, except for being one big bore."
It is unclear what sorts of spats developed between Martha and Sandy Gellhorn (though sources have suggested that Gellhorn's difficulties were profound; her obsession with slimness may have been tough to handle- a version of her will apparently made his inheritance contingent on his weight). Kate McLoughlin in her Times Literary Supplement review of Gellhorn's collected letters comments on an incredibly bleak moment:
"`You are a poor and stupid little fellow in my eyes,' she informed him, `I have no respect for you, and at present little affection." These letters are scarifying, not least because their presence here shows that Sandy Gellhorn kept them and the sadness in the last sections of the volume is her silence towards him." Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 2006)
So my question is not whether these women should have had children or not. I'm not particularly interested in that. But why did they feel they could be so vicious, so cruel to their kids? What reward is there in that? Even if they felt their sons were kind of dim, what is the point of pulling out the butcher knives? How must these sons have felt when their mothers publicly dismissed everything about them? How awful to know that the world will find them either victims of their glittering mothers, or pathetic disappointments.
I'm not a fan of canned sentiment, but Spark's and Gellhorn's behavior is unimaginable to me. I understand the feeling of being impatient and inclined to snap. It is an old friend of mine that surges into my throat periodically, but thinking people stupid is a luxury best kept private. Sharing contempt outside of a psychoanalytic situation is cruel and unproductive. And for these women to eviscerate their children publicly on the one hand, and in print on the other is such a monstrous abuse of power. How awful that instead of being inclined to protect or at least be kind to their children they felt compelled to tear at them in ways that make one cringe. They each did remarkable things and while their feelings were certainly their own to have, the things they said to their sons only diminishes them.
(For the record, both sons have managed to navigate the waters their mothers churned up with dignity. Here is an article where Robin Spark handles unpleasant questioning about his mother's estate quite well. And Sandy Gellhorn and Sandy Matthews (his step-brother) gave Caroline Moorhead complete access to their mother's letters and writings so that Moorhead could write a biography and edit collections of Gellhorn's letters.)
posted by Elise at 10:44 AM
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When I told my mother I was pregnant the first time, her response included "they turn on you, you know". At the stage of the game we're in, with cuddly toddlers putting their chubby arms around our necks and sputtering "I yov you mommy", it is hard to know all of the difficulties we'll encounter in our relationship with our child and difficult to imagine that it could ever turn so sour. Yet such sourness seems rather common, actually, and how many of us in our 30s and 40s are putting our (often chubby) arms around mom and dad and saying "I love you, in spite of all the mistakes you've made and the pain I've felt because of it".
11/14/2006 2:14 PM
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