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