The task before me was to join 15 other bloggers in the "infertility/pregnancy loss/adoption/parenting-after-infertility/assisted conception community," read with them P.D. James' novel Children of Men, and respond to several questions of the group's invention, all with an eye towards conversation about how this book takes on a civilization with infertility at its failing core.
I want to write here about Children of Men, even if belatedly, because this is a rich conversation about beginning and ending, what we hope for and what we lose, and what, in the process we are willing to risk.
"Do you think
this was based on James' own experiences with infertility?"
A large part of my job as a writer and a teacher of writing is to stand up in front of students and teach them about the nature of fiction. That there is such a thing as invention. Writers really do make things up. Really. Just like that. Not everything a writer writes is thinly disguised autobiography, despite what Oprah Winfrey or many a first novelist might lead you to think. But of course the question of connecting experience and authorship is always, actually, more complicated than quick denial. Writers mine their own pains, listen carefully to others'. We combine stories like alchemy. We bring together small characteristics of 12 different people we know with 4 strangers we've noticed on the bus or buying a newspaper or spitting on the street to build a believable character into the pages. If there were no truth in our fictions, they simply wouldn't work and feel true.
What can save you to make the argument you want is if you can find the author herself claiming personal history or experience along certain lines. But even with my super-duper express-lane university library access to newspapers, scholarly journals, magazines, and specialty publications, I can't find James talking about infertility, much less how it fits into her own life. I hear her talk about morality, religion, feminism*, the writing process, justice, fascism, and the role of mystery. But about sperm and egg? Only that she ran across a scientific article mentioning a decline in male sperm production possibly being linked to pollution.
So, there's that. A dead end. But this question stirs trouble for me, because throughout reading this book, I couldn't keep from asking myself what the author's experiences were, whether she was writing out of the earned authority of experience with infertility. I'm so well trained not to ask these questions in the midst of reading, to go willingly into the emotional truth of a story, that being almost physically pulled back to those questions section by section caught me by surprise. Despite what I know about writing, what I teach and preach in my classes, it mattered more than it should just who P.D. James really is, out here in the real world beyond those pages she's handwritten (no luck on the ovarian history, but I can tell you with confidence she avoids the word processor and any "machine devised by man" for getting her words on the page)**. I got angry with her—personally—and her portrayal of the "desperate" women engineering christenings for cats and pramming dolls down the sidewalk. I looked for clues in the book itself, found her dedication of the book to her daughters a kind of fertile statement and positioning. I am completely, totally aware this deduction isn't fair. But still I want, I think, to believe she doesn't, deep down, know what she's talking about, because in this case—because I can't separate my own story and way of conceiving other stories apart from the experience of loss—it seems, whether or not it should, that it matters.
A few questions posted by my fellow bloggers focused on the role of sex in the book and in our individual lives: "One of the story's responses to mass infertility was that couples stopped having sex since there didn't seem to be any point in it. How has IF affected your sex life with your partner? Did you have different experiences at different times along the way?" and "In the book...[w]ith the decline of humanity's fertility, there is also a decline in the physical pleasure of intercourse. The State has to actively encourage pornography to get people to 'enjoy' sex. In the novel Theo assumes that because people are freed from the act of trying to conceive, people should be 'liberated' and more uninhibited, yet the very opposite happened. Sex becomes synonymous with comfort rather than physical pleasure-in fact, it's relayed that women associate sex with physical pain rather than pleasure…."
I sat through a wedding where the minister mentioned the "blessings of children" and the "go forth and multiply" idea so many times throughout the short service that I about squeezed all the blood out of my husband's hand to keep myself seated and not storming right on out of the sanctuary. It was as if the whole idea of marriage and building a life and love together were far secondary to the production of a baby. And this, my friends, was a mainstream but supposedly liberated, contemporary church. I was shocked at how steeped religion still is (and I don't think this issue is limited to Christianity), how invested in women as producers of heirs, and that their worth in life and marriage—the very success of the marriage, even—lies with that product. James' book hews close to this idea that without a "purpose" behind sex, desire goes cold.
For me, sex and procreation have usually been uneasy bedmates. All that consternation of whether the pill was going to fail and when my period arrived late (ha! if only I'd known then what I know now, I could have saved myself years of worry) brought an edge of worry to the proceedings. And then, with infertility, came the charting, the watching, the checking, the double-checking, the eventual doldrums of the sex act under the stalking of an elusive egg.
The best sex I've ever had has been when I wasn't concerned, one way or the other, about sex having anything to do with baby.
James leaves little room in her book for the idea of sex as pleasure outside what feel like old strictures of why sex exists for "grown-ups," at least as defined by the Christian scripture. There's a decidedly strange take on homosexuality here—Theo's insistence against his attraction for Xan, the outing of Theo's father, the note about his mentor, Jasper, being not gay, but merely academic—that closes out any discussion of the sex operating outside the bounds of traditional Christianity's strictures about sex. Women "increasingly intolerant and critical of men" turn not to one another but against the very idea of pleasure. In this sphere of James, there are no gay men, no lesbians, no heterosexual couples who find pleasure, in the ways we know humans do, in the acts of touch and of bodies coming together. While this may serve her storyline's purposes, this dislocation of people and decline in pleasure simply because conception doesn't occur doesn't ring true for the physical companionship we want and need or for the very real range and reality of human sexuality.
And hell, if I knew the world were coming to an end, I would have lots and lots of sex. Good sex at that.
A few other questions
focused on children and their rearing, on the privilege afforded the youth:
"In Chapter 7, Jasper Palmer-Smith says to Theo within a tirade about
society, 'Now, for the rest of our
lives, we're going to be spared the intrusive barbarism of the young, their
noise, their pounding, repetitive, computer-produced so-called music, their
violence, their egotism disguised as idealism. My God, we might even succeed in
getting rid of Christmas, the annual celebration of parental guilt and juvenile
greed.' … Do you
think this has become a true generalization of the youth in America today? If you have children now, how do you
plan to raise your children so that this statement does not pertain to them? If
you do not yet have children, how would you parent your children so that this
description does not fit them?" and " The Omegas are portrayed as
cruel, self-obsessed and cold. Do you suppose that's a function of the way they
were raised (as the last generation of children) or something inherent in them?
Do you think that infertility has an effect on parenting?"
A few days ago The Washington Post reported that this generation of young people marks the most narcissistic yet. The article notes that "In an analysis of personality surveys given to U.S.college students during the past 25 years that asked for responses to statements such as 'If I ruled the world, it would be a better place,' [Jean] Twenge and the other researchers concluded that there's been a moderate but significant generational change. In other words, young people today are somewhat more likely to be self-absorbed, attention-seeking and power-hungry." There's a bravado built into being young—a rash risking. A know-everything, unjadeable positioning. An assumption of the world—and so it has always been. But with this narcissism comes, too, a breakability, a deep confusion about their real place in the world once they enter into real adulthood and true thinking—the art of questioning past assumption. I see this every day in my classroom, among those students targeted by Tenge's study. And perhaps those children—because college-aged or not, most of them really are still children and think of themselves in those terms, so closely connected to their parents by cell phone and text message and e-mail and visits home throughout the semester—exhibit it more than others, through their extreme privilege, attending the college now with the most expensive price tag in the country. But I also see young people determined to open up outside of themselves, their own petty concerns, and how for many of them that can be a heart-rendering act. There is kindness and generosity and hope among each generation, no matter the louder "barbarism." If they are worse, it is our job to teach them not to be so. More than just parents need to parent our children.
The cliché is that the mother and father who have struggled with infertility and loss spoil the child and deny this precious offspring nothing. I have no idea who among my students are IVF babies, voodoo babies, Clomid babies, pray-to-whomever-for-a-miracle babies, IUI babies, injectible babies, adopted babies, surrogate babies…. But somehow I don't think that the line of fertile versus infertile—how that child arrived into this world—is what really determines the child's eventual place in the world.
What do I want for the child to come? Confidence in her world, but not cruelty. The ability to ask the tough question but also to take in the tough answer, no matter how hard it might be to hear at first. Generosity of spirit. Understanding. Strength and conviction with a solid tempering of empathy. A deep love for the very fact of life. How will I teach her that? Only by stumblings, leading, I can only hope, to a surer step. Learning to walk along with her. Letting her teach me how to speak, how to master language. Allowing her to show me how to fall in love with the world. So that when she, too, reaches the age of pushing against the world, believing it means nothing, holds nothing more for her, I can remind her of what she taught me: that this world is marvelous and miraculous, and that it can never be taken for granted, because each day we earn it with our breath and blood. Each day we gain and we lose. Each day we start again, and end. Each day, if we're lucky, we live and live fully. Surely, mother to daughter, to ask her to live and live well, that can't be too much to ask?
6. Would you be able to go through all
that Julian went through in order to have her baby in peace and safety?
In James' book, the character of Julian keeps secrets, seeks out help amidst grave danger, insists on a certain kind of birth at high cost to those around her. She seems keenly aware of the fact that no matter how much a child might be wanted in that world, the fact of the birth of a child into an infertile world is a disruption and dislocation that could cause more trouble than one human could imagine. It's enough, as we see here, to betray and, in turn, be betrayed by a husband; to get people killed along the way; and even to topple a government.
My pregnancy, thank goodness, has been much less dramatic. No one, as far as I know, has risked death merely by being in my pregnant presence, and the United States seems somewhat secure in its democracy (I'm holding my tongue here on the current administration's tendency towards fascism…that's for another entry altogether). But now, in my seventh month, there's a kind of fierceness about birth I find myself working into. The past has gotten me here. The trouble and pain—physical, emotional, spiritual—of infertility has built into me an instistence about having this child in "peace and safety." Those months where I buckled over in sudden cramps after going off the pill and the gp doctor could prescribe nothing but a digestive medicine, the rounds of Provera that wanted to send me off the roof, the acupuncture by Madame Pincushion whose few English words amounted to telling me I should "Quit work. Make Baby."
And then, the hospitals. The terrible, terrible hospital experiences of my first miscarriage. The oncologist's registering my father in that long ward, telling us it was for recuperation from infection but telling the nurses it was for him to die. I know better than to believe a hospital is a safe place, and so while I'm choosing a hospital birth, it's a choice I make with both care and consternation.
Infertility teaches you not to count on anything. It teaches you always to get numbers, data, do research. Never to settle for the unsure diagnosis or the vague lab result. Listen to your gut—literally and figuratively—when it tells you that the treatment isn't right. Infertility welcomes the good doctor and appreciates him or her, but always keep up the wary eye.
It's been a
strange thing to turn from one book to another—from The Children of Men to Ina
May's Guide to Childbirth. It's no surprise to read in Ina May Gaskin's
book of the women who, in similar late stages of pregnancy, ditch their
traditional doctors and head down to The Farm in
I would do just about anything if it meant the safe passage of this child out into the world, and that determination—foolhardy and selfish as it might seem to some—is the other child I carry, conceived and grown from loss in ferocious hope of keeping.
A note from the head honcho of the book tour: "Intrigued by this book tour and want to read more about Children of Men? Hop along to more stops on the Barren Bitches Book Tour by visiting the masterttp: list at Stirrup Queens: http://www.stirrup-queens.blogspot.com/2007/03/read-along-barren-bitches-book-tour-2.html
Want to come along for the next tour? Sign up has begun for tour #3 ( The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger), and all are welcome to join along. All you need is a book and blog."
*P.D. James on whether she considers herself as a feminist: "I
am a feminist in so far as I want a fairer deal for women, equal opportunity,
equal pay, a more just society. And I have a great attraction for members of my
own sex. But it seems to me that some radical feminists today are against men,
and they dislike being women, and I can't go along with that. The truth is that
there are no easy answers to some fundamental questions: we are biologically
designed to bear children, and the children have great need of us, especially
in their early years. This makes it more difficult for women to pursue careers
on equal terms with men. Paradoxically women today have a much harder life than
had our mothers and grandmothers, although there is more equality between the
sexes. In the past, women had extended families, and good reliable nannies.
Today we don't have such help, and careers are open to women at the very time
when it is difficult to pursue them without risk of damage to their children.
As a result women are stretched physically and emotionally, working hard to
hold down a job and have a family. Somebody has to run a household, and the
woman is the heart of the family, however good the husband may be at sharing
the chores. It may be that women have to make difficult choices, give up work
and stay at home for a few years until the children go to school. So often this
so-called independence means that you are paying someone close to do your work--you
go out to work in order to earn money to pay the woman who is looking after
your children. She is enjoying your children instead of you!"--P.D. James in an interview with Shusha Guppy, Paris Review Summer 1995, Vol. 37, Iss.
135, p. 52.
** Notes on her writing process are from "A Conversation
with...P.D. James" by Lewis Burke Frumkes, The Writer, June 1988, Vol. 111, Iss. 6, pp. 17-20.
Comments