I've read it, so you don't have to: Julie Phillips' The Baby On The Fire Escape

I started writing this series to highlight interesting, important, and/or educational resources I came across and thought others might like. But, you know, without them necessarily reading all the books themselves. Maybe a brief summary is all somebody needs. And if, somebody else treats my digest as an amuse-bouche and then ends up reading the whole book, even better.

In this installment of #IHRISYDHT, I present a book I loved very much. If you are interested in women’s lives, go read this book!

Published just in 2022, this is a series of thoughtful essays about the intersection of ‘Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem’ (this is also the book’s subtitle).

I said it was a series of essays but that’s not entirely correct: in a very impressive, intricate way, Julie Phillips weaves together deeply thought-provoking ideas and assertions about art in general and art created by women, in particular, and she juxtaposes it with the lives and artwork of several important female artists of the 20th century: Alice Neel, Doris Lessing, Ursula K.Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Angela Carter. There are honorable mentions of many more, including Elizabeth Smart, and Susan Sontag, among others.  

How these women/artists approached their Muse? How they reconciled the need for artistic expression with their roles as mothers? This is a fantastically well-researched book and I ended up following several authors or sources mentioned in passing. Furthermore, it introduced me to a few artists who – I am ashamed to admit - I had no idea existed (I am looking at you, Audre Lorde) and who now enriched my life.

The book has its own rhythm, it offers essays focused on certain questions such as body autonomy or finding time, and these essays are then followed by a vignette of sorts of a female artist illustrating the points discussed in the essay. It is not a series of biographies per se which I found very clever. I went ahead and read up more about several of the artists presented here because this book left me wanting to know more about them, and yet at the same time the vignettes themselves were the exact right amount of information necessary to illustrate a point. It’s a formidable feat of restraint on the author’s part.

The book opens with ‘The Mind-Baby Problem’ essay which explores the following: If, in order to be an artist, one must be singular in their focus and delivery, and one needs to lean into who they are and share that perspective with the world, what happens to an artist when they have a baby? When the artist’s identity and singularity change? That profound shift in identity that women who become mothers experience since the beginning of time changes how they view the world, and, more importantly, how they view themselves. (That equation can be also expanded to include the variant: How the world changes its perception of the artist, who is now also a mother).

The first chapter is a must-read for anybody interested in the history of art and pondering the questions of female artists such as why don’t we have more of them? Did women never create? Why do we have so little written about the mother-child space, keeping it further unexamined?

Phillips offers several interesting arguments; in this context, she quotes from Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work: “The experience of motherhood loses nearly everything in its translation to the outside world. In motherhood, a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings, and like sounds outside a certain range they can be difficult for other people to identify”(p.6). She continues: “In queer theory, mothers are too ‘heteronormative’, while African American writing emphasizes the primacy of mothers, but often in a context of community building rather than an individual creative agency”.

I truly enjoyed the Mind-Baby essay, even though the author eventually calls in a tone of desperation: “I can’t believe that mothering is beyond representation. I think making mothers mysterious is another way of keeping them unacknowledged. It also sounds like one of my kids complaining that they can’t find their favorite shirt. Where have you looked? Have you tried looking harder?”   

In the second essay (The Presiding Genius of Her Own Body), the author discusses the other side of motherhood: the ability to have or the lack of access to abortions or contraceptives. This is a full-spectrum, incredibly layered issue, of course. Some women who wanted to create art and dedicate their time and focus to it were forced to give it up when they became pregnant. Some really wanted to do both, to be mothers AND artists, and found it incredibly challenging or impossible. Some women did not want to be mothers, or not at the time when they became pregnant, and the books address the temporal and the socio-economic disparities of those who could and those who could not have an abortion. Because one answer to the question of why we do not have more female artists is obvious: because women were, until about 5 minutes ago, too busy delivering and caring for children and families, and since that was a full-time job there was hardly any time left to develop the skill or carve out space for art.

(And, let’s not forget, if one had the luxury to dedicate time and resources to the development of fine skills and art, then this was reserved for a handful of individuals from the very top economic echelon of society and even then it was an oddity.)

The essay sections of the book are phenomenal – they make you stop and think about time and making time, the merciless drag of chores of keeping a house, and the choices women are and aren’t allowed to make. They are jampacked with riveting ideas and also little-known facts. For example, did you know that condoms were so expensive that when D. H. Lawrence lost his virginity in 1910, one packet cost him 5 shillings from his 40 shillings weekly salary as a teacher? (The invention of latex condoms made the price drop).

And did you know that it wasn’t until 1929 that scientists ‘discovered’ when ovulation occurs? It is not incidental that the surge in female artists happens in the 1920s when the first effective birth-control method for women (the diaphragm and cervical cap) became available. Available does not mean to everybody and it certainly does not mean that they were socially acceptable or even legal. When Ursula Le Guin got married in 1953, all forms of contraception were still illegal in France.

I won’t list all the chapters and all the artists, but I will highlight two:

First, the American painter Alice Neel (1900 – 1984). Go look up Neel’s oeuvre and read more about her life. What a complex lady that was! Born the fourth of five children in a lower-middle-class family of a Railroad clerk, she started painting to escape the world around her. She was sent to a secretarial school, got a job, and saved up until she had enough to enroll in the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She met a charismatic Cuban artist named Carlos Enriquez on a painters’ retreat and they got married in 1925. Alice’s first daughter died of diphtheria just before her first birthday. Alice’s second daughter, Isabetta, truly suffered for her mother’s art. Alice Neel was truly divided and she later said: “I always had this awful dichotomy, I loved Isabetta, of course, I did. But I wanted to paint.”

Alice left her daughter with her in-laws in the marble-floored mansion and peacocks in the gardens back in Cuba, while she ran away to Paris and then back to the US. Carlos’ family is most likely behind the rumor from the book title, claiming that it was Alice who left Isabetta on a fire escape outside her New York apartment when she was engrossed in painting. Alice’s younger children denied this as a fabrication but noticing Isabetta’s story is heartbreaking. Especially, since Alice later had more children and grandchildren and became an important figure on the NYC art scene in the postwar era and particularly when the second-wave feminists discovered her. Neel painted many scenes from the lives of immigrants and minorities and enjoyed acclaim and was considered by many a motherly figure. Yet Isabetta never reconciled with her mother and died of suicide. For what it’s worth, this storyline is not given very significant space in the book. But I clung to it, waiting for more details and explanations. Did Alice Neel regret leaving her daughter in Cuba and not mending the relationship? Not reaching out when her daughter moved to Florida? Was she traumatized for life by the death of her first child? Was she preoccupied with the very real challenges of living alone and raising two sons in a dilapidated apartment in a Caribbean neighborhood in New York with limited resources trying to keep painting? She painted gay couples, immigrant mothers, children, Andy Warhol, and just about everybody in between [1]

Phillips closes the chapter with a description of one of Neel’s latest paintings at the end of her career. The octogenarian did a nude self-portrait and held nothing back. It’s raw and real. It’s what we want art to be. But, at the same time, as an audience, we are not willing to accept that in order to get to this rawness, the artists often lead raw, unconventional lives. We don’t like that, particularly if they are women. By the end of her life, Alice Neel wrote of herself and her art: ”What will they think of me afterwards? You know, I had to do this. I couldn’t have lived, otherwise.” (pp.55)  

Here's a flyby of some of the other artists in this gem of a book:

o  The writer Doris Lessing (1919 – 2013) who is known as the woman who abandoned her two children to pursue a writing career. She did leave her children. She was also brought up by an absent mother in colonial Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), married at 19, and left an unsuitable marriage at the time when the law gave her no legal rights to her children (1940s). She was politically radical – read: supporting anticolonialism – and wanted to fight the ‘color bar’ – the Rhodesian version of the apartheid.

o  The writer Ursula Le Guin, who – unlike many others in this collection – loved the idea and reality of a family and mothering of her three children but who was also lucky to have a partner who would put the children down every night and supported his wife’s literary efforts. Le Guin remained adamant about separating the worlds of writing and family.

o  Alice Walker (1944 - ), the author of the beloved The Color Purple, would date white men (and marry one) in an act of self-realization and defiance.   

I first listened to the audio version of this book. The narration is fine but I found myself rewinding it several times when something struck me as brilliant, or I wasn’t sure I heard correctly, or most often because there was too much information or names, particularly in the essay sections, that I wanted to recall. This is my trouble with non-fiction audiobooks. So, as per usual (this happens maddeningly often, to be honest), I eventually bought the hard copy. I would recommend either format, depending on your personal preference.

There are many artists who come alive and whose stories remind us that a lot has changed in the past several decades. My favorite illustration of this is when one of the women in the book contemplates driving somewhere with her small child but realizes that one of her major challenges on that trip would be diaper management. How do you go for several days with cloth diapers and no way of washing them?

For this reason alone (this nudge to recognize through the stories of women before us, and how far we’ve come, and how fortunate and privileged we are in the 21st century), this is a great read.

Did you know that Susan Sontag almost lost her son in a divorce battle because her husband accused her of being lesbian and that was grounds for losing custody? (By the way, Sontag does not come out great in the little snippet about her in the book, a somewhat confirmed bias for me, personally).

The one other artist I’d like to shine some spotlight on is the poet Audre Lorde (1943 – 1992). Another fascinating woman who truly was living the adjective fierce decades before pop culture discovered the term.

It sometimes feels that it’s only in the last few decades that women are living empowered narratives and finding their voice. And while this is true, perhaps, in general, the Baby on the Fire Escape is filled with the lives of women who were the trailblazers and lived by their own rules at a time when society was not prepared for them. Audre Lorde was a daughter of West Indian immigrants, earned her BA, and became a librarian in the 1960s. She was bisexual, black, unapologetic, and outspoken. She always knew she wanted to have children, so she married a long-time friend Richard, who was white and gay. They had two children together and raised them with the help of an extended chosen family of friends (the couple divorced in 1970).

I found this particularly fascinating, as the chosen family has been a big theme in the gay communities and this shows how far back its roots go.

Audre was a born poet. She describes in a bit published on the Poetry Foundation page how she spoke in poetry since her teenage years. She’s memorized various poems and when asked how she was doing, for example, she would start reciting a poem that somewhere contained a line that described her feelings.

Lorde was fierce in her quest to live an authentic life, whether as a poet, mother, partner, professor, or cancer patient. She recorded her lived experience and that allowed many to find themselves in her words. Most of the people discovering Lorde’s writing didn’t see themselves represented this way before.

I ended up reading some of Audre Lorde’s poems and while I appreciate the poetry, I was more into her essays, particularly her collection ‘A Burst of Light’ (1988).

At one point, Julie Phillips says: “The most important question about creativity and art is also the most unanswerable. Did Alice Neel’s mothering make her art better? Many creative mothers have argued that their relationship with their children has deepened their sensibility, broadened their range, and brought them – as Ursula Le Guin put it ‘closer to the bone’.”

Based on my own experience, I do believe that the shift that happens when a woman becomes a mother is tectonic in power and impact. The fact that we now might have more female artists who are able to portray that experience and portray the world through their lens is a gift to all of us.

The Baby on The Fire Escape won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of NPR's Best Books of 2022. It is easily one of my top 10 picks of the last decade, and I can already tell I will be coming back to it repeatedly. Go read it, too!

[1] Alice did not hold a job and the only reason we have her art today is because she was one of the artists who benefited from the New Deal. In 1933, the Works Progress Administration – a government agency that was tasked with creating jobs during the Depression, set up The Federal Art Project Alice was paid a living wage to turn in a painting every six weeks. Sadly, many of her projects from that period were destroyed.