Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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The count and countess, Leo and Sonya, make sure the doors are shut, and hope the children won’t come up wanting something. The new baby is in the next room with his nurse. He is hungry and can be heard grizzling. Leo must be careful not to touch Sonya’s breasts, which are swollen with milk. She tried hard at first to refuse breast-feeding, and use wet nurses, because her nipples always crack, and nursing is a torture, but Leo insisted on her breast-feeding. And he must remember that her cracked nipples sometimes bleed, if he is impatient or clumsy. The baby is really going at it now: his hungry howls will bring the nursemaid in with him if she and Leo can’t get a move on. The nursemaid, a girl from the village, is singing a peasant lullaby, and the sound and the rhythms become part of Leo’s thrusting, which in any case has extra vigour because he rather fancies the girl. Oh God, thinks Sonya, please don’t let me get pregnant. Oh I do hope I’m not pregnant, my poor nipples will never get a chance to heal. In spite of her care, trying to shield her breasts with her hands, milk suddenly spurts all over the bed, herself, his hands. She is weeping with self-disgust and discomfort, but quite pleased she has this excuse to make Leo feel the greedy beast he is. The sheets will need washing: they were put on clean that morning. The girl who does the washing will complain again: too much washing with all these people as well as the children and it is so hard to get things dry, when the weather is bad, as it is now. Sonya’s weeping infuriates Leo, and he is full of guilt and self-dislike. She is thinking that all this milk is being wasted, though she is trying to stop it flowing, while the baby’s yells from next door are making it flow. The baby, who is now screaming, is a big feeder and not easily satisfied. ‘I’ll have to heat up a little milk for him,’ she is thinking. ‘I hope the children didn’t finish it all at supper. They never bring up enough milk for the house, how am I to manage with all these people?’ She tells Leo to get right out of bed and leave her in peace to clean up. Yes, he can come back later, if he likes, when she’s fed the baby. He says he’ll sleep in his study tonight. Yes, she thinks, you’ve got what you wanted and now you can forget me. She feels abandoned and punished.
He goes off, praying that God will answer his prayers and damp down his lusts.
This scene, or something like it, must have happened a hundred times.
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.
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