"What in the name of my testicles," he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, "is this dish on the menu?"
Filippo glanced casually in Dario's direction. "What in the dick are you talking about?" (Che cazzo dici?) he asked lightly, continuing the line of genitalia metaphors that so robustly characterize male Tuscan exchnges.
"You fat head of a penis," Dario said loudly. "Why is this on your menu?"
You don't tell a romantic that it can all be explained by economics--especially when the romantic is your host. What's more, the romantic might be right: maybe it wasn't all economics. Maybe economics itself was a metaphor, a pseudo-scientific way of acounting for something much more mysterious, this profound, dark thing Giovanni referred to as the Tuscan soul.
I had this idea that giving birth might unleash my artistic fertility. I don’t think it had any basis in reason or experience. I guess it was more like wishful thinking. Certainly it has not happened. The difficulty of balancing motherhood and artistic endeavor is weighing on me particularly heavily right now. I want to have a second child, for various reasons, but I recognize that those plans are incompatible with my desire to carve out space in my life for writing.Spark provided for her son financially and would drop by in Edinburgh from time
to time, but she never even tried to combine a mother’s usual responsibilities
with those of a writer. She remained on red alert against that enemy of promise,
a son’s need for a full measure of love. The pram in the hall could squash
someone else.Of course, rarely is anyone much detained by the parental flaws of
male writers—of Spark’s contemporary Saul Bellow, say. But the case of Spark
chimes interestingly with that of Doris Lessing. Lessing was born in 1919,
married at the age of 19, languished in Southern Rhodesia, abandoned (two)
offspring in search of freedom, and ended up in postwar London trying to care
for a third child while making a living and a professional name for herself. (If
Virginia Woolf had trouble finding a room of her own, imagine being broke and
un-Bloomsbury.) In one of her memoirs, Lessing suggests: “Writers, and
particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to
work.” This sounds like an understatement, particularly in relation to the last
pre-feminist generation, to which she belonged. Dipping into it, we see that
Penelope Fitzgerald, a mother of three, did not publish until the age of 58,
that Iris Murdoch and Flannery O’Connor and Patricia Highsmith were childless.
Spark may not have been alone in associating motherhood with artistic and
personal annihilation.
