Doloroso and allegro
Philip Hensher
MISCONCEPTIONS by Naomi Wolf Chatto, £12.99, pp. 282, ISBN 0701167270 A LIFE'S WORK by Rachel Cusk Fourth Estate, £12.99, pp. 224, ISBN 1841154865 Books about having children, when they resort to the author's own personal experience, often take on an aggrieved tone. No one told us, they cry; no one told us that you become the size of a bus and you lose half your IO and all your status in society and don't sleep for a year. No one told us at all; something should be done about it.
Actually people do talk about it, all the time. It's just that to childless people the world of nappies and meningitis scares and 4 a.m. feeds is not that fascinating, and you tend to switch off a bit. So the challenge for Rachel Cusk and Naomi Wolf, who have both written about their childbearing experiences, is to see if they can interest someone like me. My child-caring experiences are limited to demonstrating, to the stunned admiration of my mpotaine (that charming Italian word which means 'a crowd of nephews and nieces') how to stick chips up your nose. Nothing human is alien, one hopes, but Bob the Builder comes fairly close.
Naomi Wolf, you feel, really does think that having children is a complete scandal and something should be done about it. Whiny and gormless, her book traces an inadvertently hilarious odyssey of a humourless bore through the travails of pregnancy. Tape-recorder in hand, she interviews new mothers, obstetricians; nags at expensive doctors; travels to idyllic cottages at the ends of dirt roads to marvel at groups of supportive women helping each other through birth (but still prefers a nice clean hospital herself); and finally, most amusingly, puts forward some proposals to improve the awful situation whereby women have to have children and have to look after them. (Naomi has a nanny, of course, but she dutifully wrings her hands about the fact.) In between, there are various nightmarish glimpses of life in the Wolf family, where the embarrassment never ceases:
My brother Aaron is a hands-on father. He would take Yardena, his two-year-old girl, to a city park where the grass falls away in all directions. He would put her down on the top of a hillock and say 'Go and conquer! All this is yours!' And oh, how she believed him, tilting back her little head and crowing with victory. He called her Mastodon Girl, and she staggered upright and roared, her power travelling from lungs to throat to outstretched limbs, the primeval forest of her imagination shaking at her approach. He lifted her up and swung her around. 'Fly free, little dove! Fly free!'
Naomi's proposals, in the end, boil down to getting money from the government, sharing toys with your neighbours' children and something about candles and scented baths; Naomi is awfully keen on various tropical birthing rituals:
The women place the four finished garments on a mat and strew over them the white leaves of a lily. Then they breathe a prayer into the fibres of the clothing, exhorting a white bird to hover over the place where the pregnant woman will be ceremonially bathed.
My sympathy, however, goes to the hardbitten New York doctors whose lavish rudeness to Naomi is reported in richly enjoyable detail.
Rachel Cusk's book, on the other hand, is a complete delight, the book of somebody who sees the whole absurdity of complaining about motherhood, and capably conveys its pleasures, too. She is a natural, dry, wisecracker, a sort of metaphysical wit with a gift for timing the punchline:
Most childcare books begin, like science fiction, with a sort of apocalyptic scenario in which the world we know has vanished, replaced by another in whose principles we must be educated. The vanished world is the mother's own. It is the world of her childhood, and her own mother was its last living inhabitant A chain of command has been broken. We will never know what these mothers whispered to their daughters, what secrets they handed down over the years. Something about leaving babies in prams at the bottom of the garden, we think.
The book is a series of brilliant little comic scenes, each casting Cusk as the fallguy at the mercy of her wailing baby and its ceaseless hunger; the comedy is about helplessness, really, and sometimes Cusk becomes her own victim, as when she visits a toddlers' group of supreme naffness in Oxford, and is suddenly seized with a form of Tourette's syndrome — -to my concern I found myself embarked on a lengthy denunciation of [Oxford] which I was apparently unable to curtail'. The hideous comedy of a baby who stops feeding only to start crying culminates when Cusk finally silences it by bursting noisily into tears herself. No one else is any help at all: doctors just say, 'That is strange', with mild interest; Cusk's mother, appealed to for support, 'said she couldn't remember. None of you ever cried, she said vaguely, and then added that she might have got that wrong.'
Interspersed through this elegant, charming slapstick of nightmare neardisasters is a series of readings of classic poetry and fiction. It seems a slightly odd thing to do, but it has a haunting effect; each of the passages quoted is very short, as if there is no time any longer to read a whole poem or a novel, and throughout there is a sense of mild regret that the world of leisure and thought has been brutally removed, 'Row, row, row the boat' is no substitute for a quiet hour with The House of Mirth. The most startling passage is on the line in Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight, 'save that at my side/My cradled infant slumbers peacefully'. Cusk expresses amazement that Coleridge could write a poem with a baby in the house, and admits, too that 'like many childless people I had never noticed the baby'. She's right; I'd never noticed it either. The admirable thing about her very funny, human and sympathetic book is that it does make you see what having babies is like; and to carry that out needs a continuing, sceptical, satirical intelligence.
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