Farther Away

I defer to Leonard’s extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring.

It’s a good joke; and yet the logic is somehow strangulatory. It’s the logic of “everything and more,” to echo yet another of David’s titles, and everything and more is what he wanted from and for his fiction. This had worked for him before, in Infinite Jest. But to try to add more to what is already everything is to risk having nothing: to become boring to yourself.

A funny thing about Robinson Crusoe is that he never, in twenty-eight years on his Island of Despair, becomes bored. He speaks, yes, of the drudgery of his early labors, he later admits to becoming “heartily tir’d” of searching the island for cannibals, he laments not having any pipes in which to smoke the tobacco he finds on the island, and he describes his first year of company with Friday as the “pleasantest year of all the life I led in this place.” But the modern craving for stimulation is wholly absent. (The novel’s most astonishing detail may be that Robinson makes “three large runlets of rum or spirits” last a quarter century; I would have drunk all three in a month, just to be done with them.) Although he never ceases to dream of escape, he soon comes to take “a secret kind of pleasure” in his absolute ownership of the island:

I look’d now upon the world as a thing remote, which I had nothing to do with, no expectation from, and indeed no desires about: In a word, I had nothing indeed to do with it, nor was ever like to have; so I thought it look’d as we may perhaps look upon it hereafter.

Robinson is able to survive his solitude because he’s lucky; he makes peace with his condition because he’s ordinary and his island is concrete. David, who was extraordinary, and whose island was virtual, finally had nothing but his own interesting self to survive on, and the problem with making a virtual world of oneself is akin to the problem with projecting ourselves onto a cyberworld: there’s no end of virtual spaces in which to seek stimulation, but their very endlessness, the perpetual stimulation without satisfaction, becomes imprisoning. To be everything and more is the Internet’s ambition, too.

The vertiginous point where I turned back in the rain was less than a mile from La Cuchara, but the return hike took two hours. The rain was now not just horizontal but heavy, and I was having trouble staying upright in the wind. The GPS unit was giving me “Low Battery” messages, but I had to keep turning it on, because visibility was so poor that I couldn’t maintain a straight line. Even when the unit showed that the refugio was 150 feet away, I had to walk farther before I could make out its roofline.

I tossed my drenched knapsack into the refugio, ran down to my tent, and found it a basin of rainwater. I managed to wrestle out the foam mattress and get it back to the refugio, and then I went back and unstaked the tent and poured off the water and gathered the whole thing in my arms, trying to keep the things inside it halfway dry, and hustled it back uphill through the horizontal rain. The refugio was a disaster zone of soaked clothes and equipment. I spent two hours on various drying projects, followed by an hour of searching the promontory, to no avail, for a critical piece of tent hardware that I’d lost in my mad dash. And then, in a matter of minutes, the rain ended and the clouds blew off and I realized I’d been staying in the most dramatically beautiful spot I’d ever seen.

It was late afternoon, and the wind was blowing out over the insanely blue ocean, and it was time. La Cuchara seemed more suspended in the air than attached to the earth. There was a feeling of near-infinity, the sun eliciting from the hillsides more shades of green and yellow than I’d suspected the visible spectrum of containing, a dazzling near-infinity of colors, and the sky so immense that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the mainland on the eastern horizon. White shreds of remnant cloud came barreling down from the summit, whipped past me, and vanished. The wind was blowing out, and I began to cry, because I knew it was time and I hadn’t prepared myself; had managed to forget. I went to the refugio and got the little box of David’s ashes, the “booklet”—to use the term he’d amusingly applied to his not-short book about mathematical infinity—and walked back down the promontory with it, the wind at my back.

I was doing a lot of different things at every moment. Even as I was crying, I was also scanning the ground for the missing piece of my tent, and taking my camera out of my pocket and trying to capture the celestial beauty of the light and the landscape, and damning myself for doing this when I should have been purely mourning, and telling myself that it was okay that I’d failed in my attempt to see the rayadito in what would surely be my only visit to the island—that it was better this way, that it was time to accept finitude and incompleteness and leave certain birds forever unseen, that the ability to accept this was the gift I’d been given and my beloved dead friend had not.

At the end of the promontory, I came to a pair of matching boulders that together formed a kind of altar. David had chosen to leave the people who loved him and give himself to the world of the novel and its readers, and I was ready to wish him well in it. I opened the box of ashes and threw them up into the wind. Some bits of gray bone came down on the slope below me, but the dust was caught in the wind and vanished into the blue vault of the sky, blowing out across the ocean. I turned and wandered back up the hill toward the refugio, where I would have to spend the night, because my tent was disabled. I felt done with anger, merely bereft, and done with islands, too.

Riding with me on the boat back to Robinson Crusoe were twelve hundred lobsters, a couple of skinned goats, and an old lobsterman who, after the anchor had been weighed, shouted to me that the sea was very rough. Yeah, I agreed, it was a little rough. “No poco!” he shouted seriously. “Mucho!” The boat’s crew were tossing around the bloody goats, and I realized that instead of heading straight back toward Robinson we were angling forty-five degrees to the south, to keep from capsizing. I staggered down into a tiny, fetid bunkroom beneath the bow and heaved myself onto a bunk and there—after an hour or two of clutching the sides of the bunk to avoid becoming airborne, and trying to think about something, anything, that wasn’t seasickness, and sweating off (as I later discovered) the antiseasickness patch I’d stuck behind my ear, and listening to water slosh and hammer against the hull—I threw up into a Ziploc bag. Ten hours later, when I ventured back out on deck, I was expecting the harbor to be in sight, but the captain had done so much tacking that we were still five hours away. I couldn’t face returning to the bunk, and I was still too sick to look at seabirds, and so I stood for five hours and did little but imagine changing my return flight, which I’d booked for the following week to allow for delays, and going home early.

I hadn’t felt so homesick since, possibly, the last time I’d camped by myself. In three days, the Californian woman I live with would be going out to watch the Super Bowl with friends of ours, and when I thought of sitting beside her on a sofa and drinking a martini and rooting for the Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who’d been a star at Berkeley, I felt desperate to escape the islands. Before leaving for Masafuera, I’d already seen Robinson’s two endemic land-bird species, and the prospect of another week there, with no chance of seeing something new, seemed suffocatingly boring—an exercise in deprivation from the very busyness that I’d been so intent on fleeing, a busyness whose pleasurability I appreciated only now.

Back on Robinson, I enlisted my innkeeper, Ramón, to try to get me on one of the following day’s flights. Both flights turned out to be full, but while I was eating lunch the local agent of one of the air companies happened to walk into the inn, and Ramón pressed her to let me fly on a third, cargo-only, flight. The agent said no. But what about the copilot seat? Ramón asked her. Couldn’t he sit in the copilot seat? No, the agent said, the copilot seat, too, would be filled with cartons of lobster.

And so, although I no longer wanted it, or because I didn’t want it, I had the experience of being truly stranded on an island. I ate the same bad Chilean white bread at every meal, the same nondescript fish served without sauce or seasoning at every lunch and dinner. I lay in my room and finished Robinson Crusoe. I wrote postcards in reply to the stack of mail I’d brought along. I practiced mentally inserting into Chilean Spanish the s’s that its speakers omitted. I got better views of the Juan Fernández firecrown, a splendid large cinnamon-colored hummingbird severely endangered by invasive plant and animal species. I hiked over the mountains to a grassland where the island’s annual cattle-branding festival was being held, and I watched horseback riders drive the village’s herd into a corral. The setting was spectacular—sweeping hills, volcanic peaks, whitecapped ocean—but the hills were denuded and deeply gouged by erosion. Of the hundred-plus cattle, at least ninety were malnourished, the majority of them so skeletal it seemed remarkable that they could even stand up. The herd had historically been a reserve source of protein, and the villagers still enjoyed the ritual of roping and branding, but couldn’t they see what a sad travesty their ritual had become?

With three more days to fill and my knees worn out by downhill hiking, I had no choice but to start reading Samuel Richardson’s first novel, Pamela, which I’d brought along mainly because it’s a lot shorter than Clarissa. All I’d known about Pamela was that Henry Fielding had satirized it in Shamela, his own first venture into novel writing. I hadn’t known that Shamela was only one of many works published in immediate response to Pamela, and that Pamela, indeed, had been possibly the biggest news of any kind in London in 1741. But as soon as I started reading it I could see why: the novel is compelling and electric with sex and class conflicts, and it details psychological extremes at a level of specificity like nothing before it. Pamela Andrews isn’t everything and more. She’s simply and uniquely Pamela, a beautiful servant girl whose virtue is under sustained and ingenious assault by the son of her late employer. Her story is told through her letters to her parents, and when she finds out that these letters are being intercepted and read by her would-be seducer, Mr. B., she continues to write them while knowing that Mr. B. will read them. Pamela’s piousness and self-dramatizing hysterics were bound to infuriate a certain kind of reader (one of the books published in response satirized Richardson’s subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” as “Feign’d Innocence Detected”), but underneath her strident virtue and Mr. B.’s lascivious machinations is a fascinatingly rendered love story. The realistic power of this story was what made the book such a groundbreaking sensation. Defoe had staked out the territory of radical individualism, which has remained a fruitful subject for novelists as late as Beckett and Wallace, but it was Richardson who first granted full fictional access to the hearts and minds of individuals whose solitude has been overwhelmed by love for someone else.

Exactly halfway through Robinson Crusoe, when Robinson has been alone for fifteen years, he discovers a single human footprint on the beach and is literally made crazy by “the fear of man.” After concluding that the footprint is neither his own nor the Devil’s but, rather, some cannibal intruder’s, he remakes his garden island into a fortress, and for several years he can think of little but concealing himself and repelling imagined invaders. He marvels at the irony that

I whose only affliction was, that I seem’d banish’d from human society, that I was alone, circumscrib’d by the boundless ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemn’d to what I call’d silent life … that I should now tremble at the very apprehensions of seeing a man, and was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow, or silent appearance of a man’s having set his foot in the island.

Nowhere was Defoe’s psychology more acute than in his imagination of Robinson’s response to the rupture of his solitude. He gave us the first realistic portrait of the radically isolated individual, and then, as if impelled by novelistic truth, he showed us how sick and crazy radical individualism really is. No matter how carefully we defend our selves, all it takes is one footprint of another real person to recall us to the endlessly interesting hazards of living relationships. Even Facebook, whose users collectively spend billions of hours renovating their self-regarding projections, contains an ontological exit door, the Relationship Status menu, among whose options is the phrase “It’s complicated.” This may be a euphemism for “on my way out,” but it’s also a description of all the other options. As long as we have such complications, how dare we be bored?

THE GREATEST FAMILY EVER STORIED

[on Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children]

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read The Man Who Loved Children. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?

To read The Man Who Loved Children would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, it’s about nothing of world-historical consequence. It’s about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that aren’t about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious, and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the family’s private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, you’re still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.

Even the word enjoying: Is that the right word? Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously good—is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity—and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop making fun of that violence! Who needs to read this kind of thing? Isn’t the nuclear family, at least the psychologically violent side of it, the thing we’re all trying to escape from—the infernal reactor into which, when outright escape is not an option, we’ve learned to stick our new gadgetry and entertainments and after-school activities like graphite rods, to cool the reaction down? The Man Who Loved Children is so retrograde as to accept what we would call “abuse” as a natural feature of the familial landscape, and a potentially comic feature at that, and to posit a gulf between adults and children far wider than their differing consumer tastes. The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours.

And then there’s your e-mail: shouldn’t you be dealing with your e-mail?

It will be seventy years this October since Christina Stead published her masterpiece to lackluster reviews and negligible sales. Mary McCarthy wrote an especially caustic notice for The New Republic, finding fault with the novel’s anachronisms and its imperfect grasp of American life. Stead had in fact arrived in the United States less than four years earlier, with her companion, William Blake, an American Marxist and writer and businessman who was trying to obtain a divorce from his wife. Stead had grown up in Australia and fled the country decisively in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. She and Blake had lived in London, Paris, Spain, and Belgium while she was writing her first four books; her fourth, House of All Nations, was a gargantuan, impenetrable novel about international banking. Soon after she arrived in New York, Stead undertook to clarify her feelings about her unbelievable Australian childhood by way of fiction. She wrote The Man Who Loved Children on East Twenty-second Street, near Gramercy Park, in less than eighteen months. According to her biographer, Hazel Rowley, Stead set the novel in Washington, D.C., at the insistence of her publisher, Simon & Schuster, which didn’t think American readers would care about Australians.

Anyone trying to revive interest in the novel at this late date will labor under the shadow of the poet Randall Jarrell’s long and dazzling introduction to its 1965 reissue. Not only can nobody praise the book more roundly and minutely than Jarrell already did, but if an appeal as powerful as his couldn’t turn the world on to the book, back in the day when our country still took literature halfway seriously, it seems highly unlikely that anybody else can now. Indeed, one very good reason to read the novel is that you can then read Jarrell’s introduction and be reminded of what outstanding literary criticism used to look like: passionate, personal, fair-minded, thorough, and intended for ordinary readers. If you still care about fiction, it might make you nostalgic.

Jarrell, who repeatedly linked Stead with Tolstoy, was clearly taking his best shot at installing her in the Western canon, and in this he clearly failed. A 1980 study of the hundred most-cited literary writers of the twentieth century, based on scholarly citations from the late 1970s, found Margaret Atwood, Gertrude Stein, and Anaïs Nin on the list, but not Christina Stead. This would be less puzzling if Stead and her best novel didn’t positively cry out for academic criticism of every stripe. Especially confounding is that The Man Who Loved Children has failed to become a core text in every women’s studies program in the country.

At its most basic level, the novel is the story of a patriarch, Sam Pollit—Samuel Clemens Pollit—who subjugates his wife, Henny, by impregnating her six times, and who seduces and beguiles his progeny with endless torrents of private language and crackpot household schemes and rituals that cumulatively serve to make him the sun (he is radiantly white, with yellow hair) around which the Pollit world revolves. By day, Sam is a striving, idealistic bureaucrat in FDR’s Washington. By night and on weekends, he’s the hyperkinetic lord of the family’s run-down house in Georgetown; he’s the great I-Am (Henny’s words), the Great Mouthpiece (Henny again), Mr. Here-There-and-Everywhere (Henny); he’s the Sam-the-Bold (his own name for himself) who insinuates himself into every pore of his children’s beings. He lets them run naked, he spits chewed-up sandwich into their mouths (to strengthen their immune systems), he’s unfazed by the news that his youngest is eating his own excrement (because it’s “natural”). To his sister, a schoolteacher, he says, “It’s not even right they should be forced to go to school when they have a father like me.” To the children themselves he says things like “You are myself” and “When I say, ‘Sun, you can shine!’ doesn’t it shine?”

To a wild degree, Sam makes his children accessories of and to his narcissism. There isn’t a more hilarious narcissist in all of literature, and, in good narcissistic fashion, while Sam imagines himself a prophet of “world peace, world love, world understanding,” he remains happily blind to the squalor and misery of his circumstances. He is a perfect instance of the Western-rationalist male boogeyman stalked by a certain kind of literary critic. Through the fine accident of being forced to set the novel in America, Stead was also able to map his imperialism and his innocent faith in his own good intentions directly onto those of the city he works in. He is literally the Great White Father, he is literally Uncle Sam. He’s the kind of misogynist who adores femininity in the abstract but feels himself “dragged down to earth—no, into the slime” by an actual flesh-and-blood woman, and who believes that women are too crazy to be allowed to vote. And yet, though monstrous, he isn’t a monster. It’s Stead’s genius to make palpable on page after page the childlike need and weakness at the core of his overbearing masculinity, and to make the reader pity him and like him and, therefore, find him funny. The language he speaks at home, not baby talk exactly, something weirder, is an endlessly inventive cascade of alliteration, nonsensical rhymes, puns, running jokes, clashing diction levels, and private references; quotation out of context can’t do it justice. As his best friend says to him, admiringly, “Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world.” His children are at once enthralled by his words and more sensibly grown-up than he is. When he’s ecstatically describing a future form of travel, projection by dematerialization, in which passengers “will be shot into a tube and decomposed,” his oldest son dryly declares: “No one would travel.”

The immovable objects opposed to Sam’s irresistible force are Henny and her stepdaughter, Louie, the child of his dead first wife. Henny is the spoiled, amoral, and now operatically suffering daughter of a wealthy Baltimore family. The hatred between husband and wife is heightened by the determination of each not to let the other leave and take the children. Their all-out war, aggravated by their deepening money troubles, is the novel’s narrative engine, and here again what saves their hatred from being monstrous—makes it comic instead—is its very extremity. Neurasthenic, worn-out, devious Henny, given to “black looks” and blacker moods, is the household “hag” (her word) who pours reality-based poison into her children’s eagerly open ears. Her language is as full of neurotic pain and darkness as Sam’s is full of unrealistic love and optimism. As the narrator notes, “He called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig: they had no words between them intelligible.” Or, as Henny says, “He only wants the truth, but he wants my mouth shut.” And: “He talks about human equality, the rights of man, nothing but that. How about the rights of woman, I’d like to scream at him.” But she doesn’t scream it at him directly, because the two of them haven’t been on speaking terms for years. She instead leaves terse notes addressed to “Samuel Pollit,” and both of them use the children as emissaries.

While Sam and Henny’s war takes up the novel’s foreground, its less and less secret arc is Sam’s deteriorating relationship with his eldest child, Louie. Many good novelists produce entire good oeuvres without leaving us one indelible, archetypal character. Christina Stead, in one book, gives us three, of which Louie is the most endearing and miraculous. She is a big, fat, clumsy girl who believes herself to be a genius; “I’m the ugly duckling, you’ll see,” she shouts at her father when he’s tormenting her. As Randall Jarrell noted, while many if not most writers were ugly ducklings as children, few if any have ever conveyed as honestly and completely as Stead does the pain of the experience of being one. Louie is forever covered with cuts and bruises from her bumblings, her clothes forever stained and shredded from her accidents. She’s befriended only by the queerest of neighbors (for one of whom, old Mrs. Kydd, in one of the novel’s hundred spectacular little scenes, she consents to drown an unwanted cat in the bathtub). Louie is constantly reviled by both parents for her slovenliness: that she isn’t pretty is a terrible blow to Sam’s narcissism, while, to Henny, her oblivious self-regard is an intolerable seconding of Sam’s own (“She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice!”). Louie keeps trying to resist being drawn into her father’s insane-making games, but because she’s still a child, and because she loves him, and because he really is irresistible, she keeps humiliating herself by surrendering.

More and more clearly, though, Louie emerges as Sam’s true nemesis. She begins by challenging him on the field of spoken language, as in the scene in which he’s expatiating on the harmonious oneness of future mankind:

“My system,” Sam continued, “which I invented myself, might be called Monoman or Manunity!”

Evie [Sam’s younger, favored daughter] laughed timidly, not knowing whether it was right or not. Louisa said, “You mean Monomania.”

Evie giggled and then lost all her color, became a stainless olive, appalled at her mistake.

Sam said coolly, “You look like a gutter rat, Looloo, with that expression. Monoman would only be the condition of the world after we had weeded out the misfits and degenerates.” There was a threat in the way he said it.

Later, as she enters adolescence, Louie begins to keep a diary and fills it not with scientific observations (as Sam has suggested) but with veiled accusations of her father, elaborately enciphered. When she falls in love with one of her high school teachers, Miss Aiden, she embarks on composing what she calls the Aiden Cycle, consisting of poems to Miss Aiden in “every conceivable form and also every conceivable meter in the English language.” As a present for her father on his fortieth birthday, she writes a one-act tragedy, Herpes Rom, in which a young woman is strangled by her father, who seems to be part snake; since Louie doesn’t know a foreign language yet, she uses a language of her own invention.

While the novel is building to various cataclysms at the plot level (Henny is finally losing her long war), its inner story consists of Sam’s efforts to hold on to Louie and crush her separate language. He keeps vowing to break her spirit, claiming to have direct telepathic access to her thoughts, insisting that she’ll become a scientist and support him in his altruistic mission, and calling her his “foolish, poor little Looloo.” In front of the assembled children, he forces her to decipher her diary, so that she can be laughed at. He recites poems from the Aiden Cycle and laughs at these, too, and when Miss Aiden comes to dinner with the Pollits he takes her away from Louie and talks to her nonstop. After Herpes Rom has been performed, ridiculously, incomprehensibly, and Louie has presented Sam with the English translation, he pronounces his judgment: “Damn my eyes if I’ve ever seen anything so stupid and silly.”

In a lesser work, this might all read like a grim, abstract feminist parable, but Stead has already devoted most of the book to making the Pollits specific and real and funny, and to establishing them as capable of saying and doing just about anything, and she has particularly established what a problem love is for Louie (how much, in spite of everything, she yearns for her father’s adoration), and so the abstraction becomes inescapably concrete, the warring archetypes are given sympathetic flesh: you can’t help being dragged along through Louisa’s bloody soul-struggle to become her own person, and you can’t help cheering for her triumph. As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for.

Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.

And yet the culture isn’t monolithic. Although The Man Who Loved Children is probably too difficult (difficult to stomach, difficult to allow into your heart) to gain a mass following, it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you. I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it. I might never have found my way to it myself had my wife not discovered it in the public library in Somerville, Mass., in 1983, and pronounced it the truest book she’d ever read. Every time I’ve been away from it for some years and am thinking of reading it again, I worry that I must have been wrong about it, since the literary and academic and book-club worlds make so little of it. (For example, as I’m writing this, there are 177 Amazon customer reviews of To the Lighthouse, 312 for Gravity’s Rainbow, and 409 for Ulysses; for The Man Who Loved Children, a much more accessible book, there are 14.) I open the book with trepidation, and then I read five pages and am right back into it and realize that I wasn’t wrong at all. I feel as if I’ve come home again.

I suspect that one reason The Man Who Loved Children remains exiled from the canon is that Christina Stead’s ambition was to write not “like a woman” but “like a man”: her allegiances are too dubious for the feminists, and she’s not enough like a man for everybody else. The novel’s precursor, House of All Nations, more resembles a Gaddis novel, even a Pynchon novel, than it does any novel by a twentieth-century woman. Stead wasn’t content to make a separate peace for herself, in a room of her own. She was competitive like a son, not a daughter, and she needed to go back, in her best novel, to her life’s primal scenes and beat her eloquent father at his own game. And this, too, is an embarrassment, since, however central competition may be to the free-enterprise system we live in, to cop to it personally and speak of it nakedly is very unflattering (athletic competition being the exception that proves the rule).

Stead, in the interviews she gave, was sometimes frank about how directly and completely autobiographical her novel was. Basically, Sam Pollit is her father, David Stead. Sam’s ideas and voice and domestic arrangements are all David’s, transposed from Australia to America. And where Sam is infatuated with an innocent girl-woman, Gillian, the daughter of a colleague, the real-life David fell for a pretty girl the same age as Christina, Thistle Harris, with whom he briefly had an affair, later lived with, and eventually, after many years, married. Thistle was the beautiful acolyte and flattering mirror who Christina herself could never be for David, if only because, although she wasn’t fat like Louie, she also wasn’t remotely good-looking. (Rowley’s biography has pictures to prove it.)

In the novel, Louie’s lack of good looks is a blow to her own narcissism. Her fatness and plainness are, arguably, what rescue her from her father’s delusions, impel her toward honesty, and save her. But the pain that Louie experiences in not being pleasing to anybody’s eyes, least of all to her father’s, is surely drawn from Christina Stead’s own pain. Her best novel feels finally like a daughter’s offering of love and solidarity to her father—you see, I am like you, I’ve achieved a language equal to yours, superior to yours—which is also, of course, an offering of white-hot competitive hatred. When Louie tells her father that she’s never told anybody what her home life is like, the reason she gives is that “no one would believe me!” But the grown-up Stead found a way to make readers believe her. The fully mature writer created a faithful mirror of everything her father and Sam Pollit least wanted to see; and when the novel was published, the person in Australia to whom she sent a copy wasn’t David Stead but Thistle Harris. The inscription read: “To dear Thistle. A Strindberg Family Robinson. In some respects might be considered a private letter to Thistle from Christina Stead.” Whether David himself ever read the book remains unknown.

HORNETS

In the early nineties, when I reached the point of having no money at all, I began to borrow people’s houses. The first house I sat belonged to a professor at my alma mater. He and his wife were afraid that their son, a student at the college, would throw parties in their absence, and so they urged me to consider the house my private and exclusive home. This was already something of a struggle, because it’s in the nature of a borrowed house that its closets will be hung with someone else’s bathrobes, its refrigerator glutted with someone else’s condiments, its shower drain plugged with someone else’s hair. And when, inevitably, the son showed up at the house and began to run around barefoot, and then invited his friends over and partied late into the night, I felt sick with powerlessness and envy. I must have been a repellent specter of silent grievance indeed, because one morning, in the kitchen, without my having said a word, the son looked up from his bowl of cold cereal and brutally set me straight: “This is my house, Jonathan.”

A few summers later, having less than no money at all, I borrowed the grand stucco house of two older friends, Ken and Joan, in Media, Pennsylvania. My orientation occurred one evening over martinis that Ken gently chided Joan for having “bruised” with melting ice. I sat with them on their mossy rear terrace while they enumerated, with a kind of mellow resignation, their house’s problems. The foam mattress in their master bedroom was crumbling and cratered; their beautiful carpets were being reduced to dust by an apparently unstoppable moth infestation. Ken made himself a second martini, and then, gazing up at a part of the roof that leaked during thunderstorms, he delivered a self-summation that offered me an unexpected glimpse of how I might live more happily, a vision of potential liberation from the oppressive sense of financial responsibility that my parents had bequeathed me. Holding his martini glass at a casual angle, Ken reflected to no one in particular, “We have … always lived beyond our means.”

The only thing I had to do to earn my keep in Media was mow Ken and Joan’s extensive lawn. Mowing lawns has always seemed to me among the most despair-inducing of human activities, and, by way of following Ken’s example of living beyond one’s means, I delayed the first mowing until the grass was so long that I had to stop and empty the clippings bag every five minutes. I delayed the second mowing even longer. By the time I got around to it, the lawn had been colonized by a large clan of earth-burrowing hornets. They had bodies the size of double-A batteries and were even more aggressively proprietary than the son in the first house I’d borrowed. I called Ken and Joan at their summer place, in Vermont, and Ken told me that I needed to visit the hornet homes, one by one, after dark, when the inhabitants were sleeping, and pour gasoline into the burrows and set them on fire.

I knew enough to be afraid of gasoline. On the night I ventured out to the lawn with a flashlight and a gas can, I took care to recap the can after I’d poured gas into a burrow, and to take the can some distance away before returning to throw a lighted match at the hole. In a few of the holes, I heard a piteous feeble buzzing before I set off the inferno, but my empathy with the hornets was outweighed by my pyromaniac pleasure in the explosions and by the satisfaction of ridding my home of intruders. Eventually, I got careless with the gas can, not bothering to recap it between killings, and there came then, naturally, a match that refused to be lit. While I struck it on the box, again and again, and then fumbled for a better match, gasoline vapors were flowing invisibly back down the slope toward where I’d left the can. When I finally managed to ignite the burrow and run down the slope, I found myself pursued and overtaken by a river of flame. It expired just short of the can, but it was an hour before I could stop shaking. I’d nearly burned myself out of a home, and the home wasn’t even mine. However modest my means were, it was seeming preferable, after all, to live within them. I never house-sat again.

THE UGLY MEDITERRANEAN