Time Bites: Views and Reviews. Doris Lessing
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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.
How can things possibly get worse for this family? They do. In the end it has to collapse. Meanwhile, do they understand how very badly off they are? Henny does, for she has always understood exactly how the family stands, and how her husband is seen. But