Time Bites: Views and Reviews

No wonder prostitutes were popular, to take the strain off such marriage beds: so Leo himself once said, but now he has changed his mind and says that prostitution is wicked. Why should poor innocent women be degraded by the filthy lusts of men?

To read this book now is like listening to a scream of anguish from a hell women have escaped from, and men too. But, wait a minute: it is in what we call the West that people have escaped, or most of us. When we read that a woman in Africa, or India, or anywhere in the poor countries of the world has had eight children, and three died, then the world of Yasnaya Polyana and The Kreutzer Sonata is not so far away.

The Man Who Loved Children (#u49eb7384-7820-5f54-a6e4-9a2ba17836bc)

Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in – visitors, and particularly not relatives – for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness they complain of is extreme. Our storyteller, Christina Stead, opens The Man Who Loved Children, this magnificent novel of family life, by taking us at once into the Pollit family and a child’s-eye view of it, forcing us to postpone questions like, ‘But are these people really so unusual?’ and ‘Why are their fates and destinies so important to me?’ Which is rather how we feel living for a while among Eugene O’Neill’s characters. Mother has just returned from one of her mysterious outings into the world, and the children, who have been hanging about waiting for her, pour into the house at her skirts, full of a gabbling curiosity about her person, her adventures, what she has bought, all portrayed with such a power of physical truth that you are forced to remember and to say, yes, that is what it was like, being small: your parents were like Fates, arbiters of all life and not only yours, and you watched them like spies and waited for revelations – a look that told of hidden-from-you happenings, a hand fidgeting like an unwilling prisoner on a chair arm or held around a teacup for the comfort of its warmth.

Henny, the mother, sits leaning her face on her head and stares into the distance, ‘a commonplace habit which looked very theatrical in Henny, because of her large, bright eyeballs and thin, high-curved black eyebrows. She was like a tall crane in the reaches of the river, standing with one leg crooked and listening. She would look fixedly at her vision and suddenly close her eyes.’ Henny gets up, scatters her children off her skirts – ‘Oh, leave me alone; you’re worse than your father’ – and retreats upstairs to one of her headaches or, worse, a mood like a thunderstorm filling the house with angry electricity and danger.

‘I should have been better off if I’d never laid eyes on any of them,’ Henny grumbles, excluding them from her room where she dwells among cupboards full of treasures from her young-lady past, or letting them in to play with fans and scarves and dresses, and to ask her fascinated and thwarted questions; for unlike their father, she is full of secrets and dark places, and she dwells inside the musky smell of her room, ‘a combination of dust, powder, scent, body odours that stirred the children’s blood, deep, deep’. Or they watch her lay out the cards for her endless game of solitaire, muttering, ‘A dirty cracked plate: that’s just what I am!’

‘I wish your mother would stop playing patience, that makes her look like an old witch or an old vixen possum,’ father Sam says in a gently benevolent voice. For his benevolence is, on principle, all-encompassing. ‘Mother Earth,’ he whispers, ‘I love you, I love men and women, I love little children and all innocent things, I love, I feel I am love itself – how could I pick out a woman who would hate me so much!’ As indeed she does, blaming him for everything.

They are enemies to each other, like hostile animals, gene enemies. The house seems like an abode of animals. Henny describes her husband’s family as chickens with their heads cut off. Her children know her chameleon eye, ‘the huge eyeball in its glove of flesh, deep-sunk in the wrinkled skullhole, the dark circle round it and the eyebrow far above’. When Henny mutters in her frustrated rage it is like ‘the trusty stirring of some weed-grown sea animal, bottom-prisoned by blindness’. All men are dogs, she remarks, stating an obvious – to her – truth, and to her lover – if he deserves that word – she says, ‘Oh! What a life! What a man! Oh, you make me sick! Bert, you’re big as an elephant with the soul of a mouse.’

Sam, the father, keeps a zoo of small mammals and snakes, which he and the children cherish, but which Henny hates. For one thing, snakes bring bad luck. He has an aquarium, an aviary; he is a humanist and a lover of all life – the zoo is merely an extension of his many children, who are woken in the mornings and summoned to him by whistles they have to respond to, based on the calls of birds. When yet another babe is born, as a result of a fight between husband and wife that could easily have ended in murder, first of all the father chooses the whistle he will use to command the newcomer, a phrase from some bird’s song, and then husband and wife begin a new fight over the child’s name.

Sam teaches birds to sing new songs. A catbird learns the flycatcher’s call to use in his own repertory, and listens while Sam and the boys school him in new calls. For Sam has to control not only his brood of children but this natural world all around him. He wakes at night, sees through the panes ‘the tussle of cloud streak and sky spark’ and hears that some marauder is fluttering the nestlings. ‘Hist, hist!’ he says – ‘and reduced the twig world to silence.’

This is an ancient rattlebag of a house, and all around it are trees and shrubs and birds and birdsong, and beyond is the world of water: pond, creeks and the river. This is Sam’s element, where he plays, for if what he does in the house has to be categorised as work, for it would fall down without him, he experiences it as fun, all physical enjoyment, which he shares with the children. ‘The morning was hot, and Sam had nothing on beneath his painting overalls. When he waved his golden-white muscular hairless arms, large damp tufts of yellow-red hair appeared … The pores on his well-stretched skin were very large, his leathery skin was quite unlike the dull silk of the children’s cheeks …’ And he sings as he works and the children sing with him.

It is from inside a paradise of physical happiness that he chants his hymns to life and the beauties of his fellow man, while upstairs his bitter wife, dark and skinny like a witch, hisses out her loathing to all the world. And he says to her, ‘You devil of rust and rot and boring. You will not smash my family life. You will carry your bargain through to the end. You will look after my children …’ And she says to him, ‘You took me and maltreated me and starved me half to death because you couldn’t make a living and sponged off my father and used his influence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries …’

Our common experience, tutored by knowing psychology, insists that such enmity, such violence, bred by the venom engendered by the incongruity of these two, the parents, must damage the children, for both Sam and Henny in their various and unique ways threaten their very existence. Sam believes – it is the spirit of the times – in euthanasia for the unfit, and while the children joke, they must feel threatened, particularly the ‘monster’ Louie, told she looks like a gutter rat by this child-lover, her father, who proposes to weed out ‘the misfits and degenerates’. And Henny says often she will kill herself and all of them. And yet it seems they are immune, experience the parental threat as no more than part of the rich emotional diet of this household.

Are they immune? ‘Die, die, why don’t you all die and leave me to die or to hang; fall down, die; what do I care? I beat my son to death …’ (this to her favourite child, Ernie) ‘it’s no worse than what I have to endure’ – and she beats him while her eyes start out of her head. ‘I’ll kill you children that make me go out of my mind …’

But the odd thing is that the reader is made to feel part of something as grand and impersonal as Greek tragedy. Easy to imagine these terrible lines declaimed in a stone amphitheatre, to silent crowds, and – yes – masks would not be inappropriate, so much are these antagonists archetypes.

‘I’d drink his blood but it would make me vomit.’

Then he, ‘I had long shuddering days … when it was as if the north wind was blowing all day, when I thought of our home here on the heights, exposed to all the winds of our anger and hate …’

Louie: ‘What will become of me? Will life go on like this? … I can’t live and go on being like this.’

Ernie, to his mother: ‘Mother, don’t, don’t … Oh, Mother …’

It is like being admitted into some frightful Victorian melodrama, reading this book, but one made ordinary and even commonplace due to the intensity and inevitableness of it. There seem no ordinary moments in this family, their element is exaggeration and hyperbole, but that is right and suitable because their natures and situation are extreme.

The children’s dispositions, no different from any others’, are given room by the theatricality of the parents and – here we reach the heart of the book, and this family – fed by the intemperate and inventive language to which the house resounds, day and night. Sam never uses an ordinary sentence. One feels that to say ‘Let us all go for a walk’, or ‘It’s time for breakfast’, would be beyond him, precisely because it would expose him, for he is protected by his invented language, part taken from Artemus Ward and part from Uncle Remus, and full of added baby phrases and lispings. Quite sickening it has to sound to a stern modern reader, but the children delight in it. So hard is it for an outsider to penetrate, that Christina Stead translates some of it for us, but the children know it as they know the weather. ‘Bin readin’ a find stor-wy, Little Womey,’ says Sam to his second daughter, ‘ ’bout a fine woman en a fine little girl. Good sweet story – makes your pore little Sam burst into tears.’ For he feels no shame about describing himself as ‘yo’ po’ little Dad’, is not afraid of ridicule, for these children of his are his safe place where he takes refuge from the world he apostrophises as fine and ideal and full of his bothers and sisters but at which he cautiously peeps out from behind the screen of baby talk and his family.

‘I married a child,’ says Henny, who, whatever else she might be, is certainly not a child. This is her charitable assessment of him, in a softer moment, while she is perhaps telling her children rhymes from her plantation girlhood. But more often she sees him as ‘something filthy crawling in the sleeve of my dressing gown; something dirty, a splotch of blood or washing-up water on my skirts. That’s what he is, with his fine airs and don’t-touch-me and I’m-too-good-to-drink. The little tin Jesus!’ But he doesn’t talk baby language to her, only the language of mutual loathing.

All this, don’t forget, was before every home had a radio, let alone television. This was that pure and pre-Fall condition we describe as ‘They made their own amusements.’ Language, the enjoyment and discovering of it, was the chief employment of this family. You can fairly hear the relish in Henny’s ‘Silly old gobblers with their dirty hair like a haystack in a fit’, or Sam’s ‘This Sunday-Funday has come a long way … it’s been coming to us, all day yesterday, all night from the mid-Pacific, from Peking, the Himalayas, from the fishing grounds of the old Leni Lenapes and the deeps of the drowned Susquehanna.’

Some of these passionate complaints sound like the lines of a part-song or ballad:

‘The night of our marriage I knew I was doomed to unhappiness!’

‘I never wanted to marry him: he went down on his knees!’

‘She lied to me within three days of marriage!’

‘The first week I wanted to go back home!’

‘Oh Louie, the hell, where there should have been heaven!’

‘But he stuck me with his brats, to make sure I didn’t get away from him.’

Chants, part-songs, word-play, riddles, jokes – these are all part of everyday living. ‘Ole Miss Jones, rattles her bones, over the stones: she’s only a porpoise that nobody owns,’ says Sam. And Henny sings,

Like his father, like his father,

He has the cut of a kangaroo

Probably it is this feast of words, beginning at the moment this nest of children wakes, going on all day and into the night, that insulates them against the bolts of lightning from the mother’s room to strike the father dead, and the shouts of raging reproach that rise from the garden where Sam is working, to reach his wife. Words rolling off the tongue, words as an intoxicant, words as sustenance, words sonorously or rhythmically filling every room of the house, and the children waiting for them, just as they wait for their father’s own special whistle for each of them – and wait, too, it is hard not to conclude, for the exuberant invective of Henny.

Surely this must be the ideal cradle and nursery for a writer? And here she is, the budding writer Louie, who must be at least a version of Christina Stead herself. Yet while seeing child Christina here, one has to think that this creation of an apprenticeship into the word is, must be, a literary artifice as well, because Louie is so much the archetype of ‘the artist’. No feature of the fabled creature is lacking; from her pitiful situation of being a stepdaughter, to the wicked stepmother Henny who genuinely loathes the child even while she pities her and her clumsiness. For Louie cannot lift a cup without letting it slip, cannot take a step without turning an ankle or lift a mouthful of food without spilling it down her front.

This lumbering galumphing deformed baby elephant of a girl, hating her ugliness, dreaming of beauty – she must break the reader’s heart, you would think, but no, for the power of the enchantment that lies over these pages is so great that she seems an animal who is really a princess, and she herself knows she is the ugly duckling who will be a swan. And while she is love-hungry, and Henny so cruel to her it is hard to bear, this is the child Henny relies on, sending her for her medicines and her cigarettes and, too, the little bottles of spirits, which Sam never knows about, for Louie does not betray her, and nor do the other children. Sam is a bigoted teetotaller.

The strongest of bonds, this one, between the tormented, demented Henny and the ugly child. It is their cleverness, perhaps, for they are both clever, both continually coming up against the stupid sentimentality of the man who may love children, and by extension all of humanity, but who never understands what is under his nose. Louie knows that in Henny’s balefulness is a strength that feeds her too, and she is grateful to Henny for ignoring her, for solitude is what Louie craves most.

Louie is no sweet, biddable, patient little girl. There is more than a hint of what sustains her, and in what ways she colludes with Henny, when a neighbour, an old woman, asks Louie to help her kill a cat who is a burden. Louie is prepared to fill a bath with water and sit with her feet on a board that holds the struggling drowning cat under. There is a dream or nightmare quality to this sequence, precisely because of the absence of any feeling in Louie. She goes through it as if there is nothing else to be done, and no one else capable of doing the deed, and it is in fact a rehearsal or foreshadowing of her final confrontation with Henny.

In many novels from the American thirties you enter this world of language, of literature; it is often an intense poverty, lit by the imagination and by dreams. This was the Slump, and everywhere hopes were being dashed and lives cramped and spoiled. But there were books, there was poetry, and teachers who cherished talented pupils, who could see the merit in the most ugly of ducklings because of their passionate love of words. And here it is again, the schoolroom invoked so strongly you have to feel you are in it. For this is Christina Stead’s most special gift; there has never been a writer who can take you so strongly into a room, or a house, or a street that you are immediately part of. Here you feel as if you might yourself start defending poor Louie against a snobbish girl, or even against Henny herself.

Henny … pounced on her and scolded her for her appearance, her dirty dress, her cobbled stockings and down-at-heel shoes, her loose straggling hair … and puffed expression (‘you look as if you spent the night in self-abuse, I’ll make your father speak to you’). She rushed into the girl’s room to look out a clean dress for her … and suddenly came out screaming that she’d kill that great stinking monster, that white-faced elephant with her green rotting teeth and green rotting clothes …

‘But,’ you may easily imagine screaming back, ‘the girl has no clothes, she begs for a new dress to go to school in and you say there is no money, and what girl is going to look after herself if she is told she disgusts her mother?’

Louie is not the only girl in this school with only one dress and broken shoes. Many of them are very poor girls, and what could be more touching than the way they are considerate of each other, and how a girl who comes to school in despair because of her dress in shreds is tended and sheltered? And meanwhile these outcasts are drunk on language, and when Louie has a crush on her teacher and then on a best friend she writes

The Indian starling, flashing in the shade

Is like your eye, all flecked with gold and blue …

Which the father reads and calls sickening tommyrot. The saddest of ironies, for Sam has taught his tribe love for books and words and poetry, but here is the real thing, he has given life to a poet, and he is disconcerted, for he is unable to recognise what he is seeing.

Louie writes all the time and we are given samples. Never has an apprentice writer’s work been so well documented. Is it below the belt to speculate whether these romantic verses and plays were Christina’s own? Yes, probably, but all the same, what we read is more talented than what is usually ascribed to an aspiring adolescent. Sam is not only upset by what Louie produces, he sees it as a threat, and he reads her hidden diaries and her poems – destroys her secret life, which she creates so as to have some kind of belief in herself. He sucks the life out of her, demanding total love and allegiance, even that she will devote her life to him. Her defence against him is cruel and final. Demanding to see what she has written down while he is delivering one of his speeches about the beauty of life, he reads only, ‘Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up …’ She tells him that none of his children will ever confide in him. When asked to promise that he and she will march through this cruel life together, she says, ‘No, I will have nothing to do with you.’

What are the bones of fact here? – for it is easy to experience this novel as submission to a wonderland of language and events. The first and most surprising fact is that it was an Australian writer – Christina Stead, brought up in Sydney – who created this novel which is as American as Steinbeck’s or Faulkner’s. Surely Faulkner himself would applaud Henny, the gimcrack southern belle from Baltimore, with her genteel dreams and pretensions, who had expected so much better for a husband than a minor bureaucrat – it does come as a surprise that Sam actually has an office job, does not spend all his time on his house and his garden and his animals. And his children. Sam knows, the children know – they are continually being reminded – that this abounding family life of theirs is a descent from a high estate, that their mother was once beautiful, a dark thin young lady in a ruffled silk dressing gown, but this beauty has disappeared, and in her place is this witch, an angry grubby Henny who screeches and drudges. No fairy story has ever told of a more powerful transformation than this of Henny’s, the beauty from Baltimore.

Henny’s father has always given her money, and she has always begged for more. What do you do with it? he complains. She is a spendthrift he says, why can’t she manage? But how can a woman manage with seven children and a husband who despises money, admires poverty? The great draughty old house is not paid for by her unworldly husband but is her father’s. She begs and borrows, she uses money-lenders, she is forever in debt, she sells her body to a rich friend, a businessman, who finally tires of her perpetual money troubles. All this to keep food on the table and her children clothed. Meanwhile the family live in confidence of future plenty, for when the father dies of course Henrietta, his favourite, will be left not only this house but a fortune. When the old man does die he is proved to have been as improvident as his daughter, for there is no money, and even this poor house has to be sold to pay debts. The man who loves children and thinks poverty is beautiful takes them to an even seedier house, in a neighbourhood so low Henny knows she has reached the worst. Now nothing is left of her gracious southern-lady self, her pretty ways are all gone, and the treasures in her secret drawers which the children loved so much are sold – laces, ribbons, flowers, jabots, belts, hairpins and combs, buckles and false jewels, stockings and the little pots of rouge and mascara – which Sam anathematises – all gone, and, too, the last of Henny’s silver and valuables.

Meanwhile Sam is still happy as the day is long, for he has kept belief in a beautiful world to come. The idealistic dreams of the political thirties do seep down here, but in Sam Pollit they are not contained in a political party but float wide and free, in these nets and webs of words. ‘When the time for man comes … he will see and rise to the light – there is no need of revolution, but only of guidance, and … we will reach the good world, the new age of gold.’

He has a stroke of luck – so he thinks. His department sends him to Malaya, to the glamorous East, where he amazes all the locals, who see themselves as oppressed by the white man and his ways, by apostrophising the brotherhood of man. ‘You are but an ebonized Aryan … and I am the bleached one that is fashionable at present.’ And he congratulates himself thus: ‘What a gift he has been given … to love and understand so many races of man! – and why? His secret was simple. They were all alike …’ Meanwhile the representatives of the brother races in question are puzzled by him. He is a good man, they think, but they do not seem able to get the simplest fact about the life they lead into his head. His superiors are not puzzled, they are furious. Sam Pollit, floating on clouds of elation inflated by love, offends white people, and does not know it, for are not his views so obviously true and good? He has never known, either, that he has had enemies who resent him, because of his ‘socialist’ views and his contempt for everything they value. His behaviour in Malaya gives them an excuse to unseat him. And indeed his behaviour is inexcusable – for anyone but a grown-up child who has never been able to see himself as others see him. His enemies not only use the obvious excuses to get rid of him but attribute to him all kinds of dark financial dealings. Now indeed he is ‘po’ little Sam’ but he is too high-minded to defend himself against the scandal. When asked why not, when begged to fight for himself for the sake of his wife and family, he says he will not lower himself by descending to the level of his enemies.