is incredible to her. The Pollits lack everything, she thinks: ‘I had no idea that there was a place as primitive in the whole world.’ She had expected a decayed gentility, nothing like this threadbare misery – which, strangely, the family do not seem to see. But what Miss Aiden does not understand is that beyond the ugly home-cemented back porch is an orchard wilderness, and birds, and creeks and a river – the wildness that has been the children’s safe place and is their heritage.
Not long ago a camera team in some frightful South American urban slum handed over a camera to children, so they could photograph their infinite deprivation from their own point of view and their situation would not always be seen through the eyes of rich visitors from the fortunate world. But what the children chose to film were scenes of themselves and their friends playing in the water of an old cracked fountain – a joyous scene. They did not know their poverty was extreme, and wanted to commemorate happiness. Louie is sent every year for the summer to her mother’s family, the Bakers, another once well-off, now impoverished, clan. We are ready to be sorry for her, immersed for weeks at a time with these mean, sternly religious people, who resent the improvident Pollits, and resent her, for they know she is there because Henny wants to get rid of her and sees these visits as a way of having one less mouth to feed. But Louie is happy with all the family pressures off her, she chooses not to notice the ungenerous mutterings. For her this other family is a paradise she longs for all the year, and when at last they refuse to have her, it is a tragedy for her.
So insistent a claim do Henny and Sam make on the tale that it is easy to overlook the prodigal variety of the other Pollits and the Collyer relatives who come and go, each of these lives written and offered to the reader with the same sense of epic importance that lives do have to the livers of them. A visit from any one of these people brings into the story that sense of the extraordinariness, the mysteriousness of existence which so easily gets lost as the days go round. Even a tiny scene of a servant girl talking with Louie suggests so much more than the important (to them) exchanges of two little girls competing to sound interesting, for here, though only suggested, is the tragedy of the young girl Nellie, who is thrown out in disgrace, turned out like a dog, because she has told Louie she is a bastard, herself hardly knowing what the word means. Where did this ‘sloppy and cheerful’ little girl come from? A reformatory, for that’s where people got their servants. ‘A love-child,’ mutters Henny, disgustedly imagining sordid couplings. And where did she go? What happened to her?
Or three women, Henny, her sister and Sam’s sister, sit gossiping through a long afternoon, creating worlds of lives and people, while Louie listens – but they do not know she is there. This is how talk is used in Ulysses (the Irish one) to create a matrix of events, thick and complex, painting a picture of a culture, a society.
Aunt Bonnie, Sam’s sister, is a minor character. She is used by the Pollits as a servant, but her life is explosive with drama. When she scorches, as she irons it, Henny’s only decent blouse, a relic of her gracious living, it is a crisis like a war or an earthquake. She gets thrown out too, only to become pregnant. It is Sam, who loves children, and wishes he could have a hundred, who defends the disgraced woman while the other Pollits draw aside their skirts.
The children are each one an individual. Of them all, apart from Louie who pervades the story as thoroughly as Henny and Sam, little Ernie is the one with the power to make you think about his future. He is obsessed with money, because his mother is obsessed. He knows exactly what is in her purse, demands to know what she has spent it on if there are a few cents gone after a trip into town, and saves up his pocket money, such as it is, in a hiding place under the floorboards. But his mother steals it from him, one day when she is desperate. Will she put it back? he begs, he demands, and she says she will … Evie, the other daughter, ‘Little-Womey’, is being tutored by her father into being the perfect female, but we feel she will survive. The twins and Thomas are very much themselves – we can imagine their futures as adults. The new baby is a hate-child if ever there was one, but not much is made of his unfortunate beginnings, and he seems to survive adequately on no nurturing at all, or none that is recorded.
When you put down this book at last and emerge into the light of a day very dull by contrast, as is as if you have left not only this densely imagined swarming world of Pollits and Collyers but your own childhood too, where a smashed cup or a burned blouse or an overheard matter of gossiping women is a revelation of life’s dangers and richness.
And when these children grow up, will they remember the preposterousness of po’ little Sam, and poor clever demented Henny, and the poverty so extreme a teacher could not believe what she saw, or will they know they were in an Eden where children ran about naked among animals and birds, where their ears were filled with shouts of rich and resounding language, where it was only an exuberance of temperament for mother and father to scream insults and threats of death, and where a sister, as ugly as a crippled beast, wrote verses ‘after Confucius’:
A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,
No mere return for courtesy but that our friendship might outlast the grave.
Well, there are no households, no families, like that now, intoxicated with words, for poetry has been silenced by television, and poverty is no longer redeemed by the world of imagination entered by opening a book.
The Man Who Loved Children may be read for its evocation of a lost world as much as for its great virtues. For it is a great novel, one that is always being rediscovered and then for some reason slips away out of sight, and then is found again. Christina Stead is a great writer. Beside her name is a list of novels, each one unlike the work of any other writer and unlike each other, and perhaps that is why she is not finally accepted into the company of great writers. It is hard to understand, though. There are formally accepted canons of Best Books, Best Writers, for that time – the thirties and forties – and some of them are nowhere near her size in scope and magnificence.
For Love Alone continues the story of the ugly duckling, under another name, with a different family, and in a different country – Australia. But here she is, love-hungry, lonely, stuffed with talent and ambition, tormented by the penny-pinching poverty of the thirties, longing to escape to London and the company of fellow spirits – which she eventually does. Now the picture is the same in ‘feel’ and atmosphere as D. H. Lawrence’s evocation of talented, poor and fiercely independent souls. The People with the Dogs so strongly creates New York it is easy to believe you have lived there yourself even when, like myself, you have not lived there more than a few days at a time. I could walk into one of these rooming houses as if I had never left it, a friend of these people and their dogs. Letty Fox: Her Luck is about the anarchic relationships in New York in a time of sexual revolution. These women are ‘free’, but really a woman’s luck still depended on men: if she was going to live well, she needed a well-heeled man.
Every one of Christina Stead’s novels is unique and unforgettable. This one, The Man Who Loved Children, is reckoned her best. And it is. But sometimes it seems that the last one of her novels you have read is her best. This may happen with a great writer. As I look along my shelf of her books, it is difficult not to write eulogistically about every one of them.
Kalila and Dimna – The Fables of Bidpai
The claim has been made for this book that it has travelled more widely than the Bible, for it has been translated through the centuries everywhere from Ethiopia to China. Yet it is safe to say that most people in the West these days will not have heard of it, while they will certainly at the very least have heard of the Upanishads and the Vedas. Until comparatively recently, it was the other way around. Anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai, or the Tales of Kalila and Dimna – these being the most commonly used titles with us – was a great Eastern classic. There were at least twenty English translations in the hundred years before 1888. Pondering on these facts leads to reflection on the fate of books, as chancy and unpredictable as that of people or nations.
The book’s history is as fascinating