Saturday, September 15, 2018

Writers, Mothers and Sons

I cannot think of many cases in which a mother and a son have acquired some fame by writing, and in most of those, I don't know what either thought of the other's efforts. What did Rebecca West think of Anthony West's books, or he of hers? Anthony Trollope thought that his mother's most famous work, The Domestic Manners of the Americans, was unduly harsh, and he had reservations about her fiction, but he expressed his gratitude and admiration for the way in which she kept a family going with her writing:
I do not think that the writing of a novel is the most difficult task which a man may be called upon to do; but it is a task that may be supposed to demand a spirit fairly at ease. The work of doing it with a troubled spirit killed Sir Walter Scott. My mother went through it unscathed in strength, though she performed all the work of day-nurse and night-nurse to a sick household;--for there were soon three of them dying.
Frances Trollope lived long enough to see a number of her Anthony Trollope's books published. I don't know that there is a record of what she thought about them, though he writes of the days before he had published that
 I knew that she did not give me credit for the sort of cleverness necessary for such work.
All this came to mind when I looked into the introduction of  On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings, where I found
[The dean of the philosophy faculty of the University of Jena] quickly circulated a letter announcing the dissertation while mentioning that its author was the son of 'the well-known authoress, Frau Hofrätin Schopenhauer.'...

Unfortunately, the published dissertation earned, at best, lukewarm reviews. Indeed, the most stinging might have come from the young man's mother, who asked sarcastically whether his book was for pharmacists. Schopenhauer retorted that his work would still find readers when not even a single copy of her writings could be found in a junk yard. Undaunted, Johanna Schopenhauer spat back, 'Of yours, the entire printing will still be available.'
I had not known that Johanna Schopenhauer was a writer--had not for that matter known her name. The Gutenberg project offers a book of travels that she wrote.

In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer asserts that intellect is inherited from the mother, character from the father. He certainly thought well of his own intellect, and must have been compelled to rate his mother's high. What made her think of  pharmacists? Did the the word "root" suggest it?

2 comments:

  1. Not exactly literary ... but Charles Todd is pseudonym for mother-son mystery writing team.

    ReplyDelete
  2. The name is new to me. I suppose they must approve of the each other's writing, else why continue together.

    ReplyDelete