Celia Paul’s Remarkable Removal
Maybe the only way to be a mother-artist is to send your kid to boarding school.
Lately I have felt desperately uninspired. And yet—the posts must still be written. This is, I think, one of the worst and most profound side effects of the blogging medium. The cadence of content creation calls, even as the water of my imagination has run dry, even as my enthusiasm for the inquiries I once held dear has disappeared. This is the trouble with art as life purpose: it is both fickle and nonessential. No one dies if the art does not get made, and the lack of immediacy easily masquerades as diminished importance.
As such, dedicating one’s life to art—especially in the sense of which I am speaking here, one that involves forgoing other serious, perhaps definitional life experiences in order to preserve space for art-making—can seem risky, if not outright delinquent. No one needs my work, not in the sense in which children need mothers or the human race needs specimens, and sometimes the work doesn’t even come. My scariest projection of future regret is a scenario in which I am neither writer nor mother: a woman without family or legacy. Having surrendered the former in order to preserve the latter, I realize too late that I’ve actually safeguarded nothing at all but possibility—an entity which turns out to be a fast-dwindling asset, a currency with a tendency to spend itself while its owner stands by, a woman acting sentry over the sunlight fading through a western window.
I know that my desire for both motherhood and writing springs from the deep-seated impulse to preserve the possibilities, to push finality off down the road.
When I think like this, I realize a truth about myself: if I could be sure of what would happen, of course I’d want to have them both. If I knew that having children wouldn’t derail me from writing—distract or overwhelm or simply relieve me of the burden of producing meaningful written work—of course I would want to be a mother.
On one hand, perhaps this is just the ambition in me talking; the child of ‘90s America; the young professional who was socialized to the background chatter of women “having it all.” I’m sure, actually, that this is a part of it: somewhere deep down, in a place at which I don’t choose to gaze too sharply, I believe I am entitled to everything I desire, all at once. But I also recognize in this truth the opposite of strength or drive—I see in it a weakness, the weakness of the woman grasping at the passing light. I know that my desire for both motherhood and writing springs from the deep-seated impulse to preserve the possibilities, to push finality off down the road.
If I forego motherhood in order to be a writer and then do not become one, I will have failed completely. But if I attempt motherhood now, it’s still possible I might create art. And if I don’t, at least I’ll have someone to blame.
*
With her memoir Self Portrait, painter Celia Paul tells a remarkable story of motherhood and art-making. A very famous contemporary artist whose work appears in the collections of the Met and the British Museum, Paul is also the mother of a son, a child she shared with the late Lucian Freud. In her book, she describes the central difficulty of balancing motherhood with artmaking in a manner that I suspect might incense some of the other women whose thoughts I’ve considered in this blog. She says,
“One of the main challenges I have faced as a woman artist is the conflict I feel about caring for someone, loving someone, yet remaining dedicated to my art in an undivided way. I think that generally men find it much easier to be selfish. And you do need to be selfish.”
And, in case there was any doubt about the parties who are typically on the receiving end of this kind of divisive love and care, Paul clarifies,
“I have felt this conflict most painfully with caring for my son.”
By framing the issue as one of attention divided, Paul makes the question of motherhood vs. art-making a zero-sum one—an all-or-nothing proposition in exactly the way that some of the other writers I’ve considered push back against. She says of her son,
“When I am with Frank I don’t have any thoughts for myself. All my concerns are for him. Therefore I am unable to work when he stays with me.”
The rest of the memoir demonstrates that, for Paul, this separation was neither theoretical nor metaphorical. She maintained it quite literally, living physically apart from her son for much of her career. In the chapter entitled “Being a Mother,” the first sentences Paul writes are:
“When I gave birth to my son, my mother willingly became his main carer. She offered to look after him in her house in Cambridge so that I could continue to paint.”
Recounting the details with the assistance of the diary she kept at the time, Paul relays the remarkable facts of her somewhat unconventional motherhood: three weeks after her son’s birth, she went back to her studio in London, leaving her son with her mother and ceasing to breastfeed. Until he went to boarding school, she traveled to visit him every other day, but he remained within the primary care of her mother, who, she writes, “sometimes resented the long hours she spent on her own with her grandson, though she loved him passionately.”
Reading the memoir, there is no doubt in my mind that Paul loved her son passionately, with exactly the kind of motherlove that is everyone waxes so poetic about. In the same chapter where she writes of leaving him, she also remembers feeling that:
“I would like to give up everything for him. I would like to be swept away and lost in this powerful tide of maternal love. I would like all my ambition and all my desires to be drowned with me.”
It’s not, in other words, because she doesn’t love him that she lives apart from him. It’s because she needs the separation acts as stopgap to consumption. She needs to keep herself apart in order to work. And continuing her work demands physical separation from her son specifically because she loves him so much: when he is there she can think of nothing else.
What she’s describing is, in some sense, a peculiar kind of selfishness. It’s a reluctant maintenance of identity in the face of a seductive dissolution. By no means was it easy for Paul to preserve her separation from her son. And yet—she credits it with her success as an artist. What many mothers might consider anathema, and what Paul herself describes as sacrifice, was the very thing necessary to being both mother and artist.
Paul’s is so far the only depiction of motherhood I’ve found that feels feasible to me. I can imagine myself wanting to be “swept away” by maternal love. I can also imagine that the only way to preserve the possibility of making art in the face of such a powerful swell would be to build a dam around myself. A dam that, perhaps, kept me from ever being fully one thing or the other.