held the parents, thirteen children, servants, nursemaids, tutors – one lived there with his wife and two children – governesses, relatives and many visitors. There were also the disciples, who expected to be fed and, often, housed, sometimes for weeks. They would fit themselves into the servants’ rooms in the attic – what happened to them? – or doss down in the corridors. It was usual to have 30 people sit down for a meal. Comfort of the sort we take for granted there was none. Privacy, which we have learned to need, was not easily got. Tolstoy had his study but it was permeable by anyone who decided they had the right – Sonya, and his chief disciple, the appalling Chertkov, and people demanding spiritual counselling. Once out of his study, then he was part of everything. The quarrels of adults, the squabbles of children, the crying of babies, the arguments of the disciples must have reverberated in those wooden walls. The countess understandably complained of ‘nerves’ and surely Tolstoy was entitled to them too.
Thirteen children. Thirteen. Thirteen. Four, dead. We are not talking about a peasant woman, a farm woman, with expectations for a hard life, but an educated sensitive woman who could never have dreamed of the kind of life she in fact had to lead.
There is a tirade in The Kreutzer Sonata about the unhappiness that children bring, mostly the misery of the fear of them dying: the slightest indisposition could become a serious illness. In both Anna Karenina and War and Peace the difficulties of childbearing and childrearing are depicted. Tolstoy was not a father removed from the burdens of the family. How could he have been, in that house? He knew all about pregnancy and morning sickness, and milk fever and cracked nipples. He knew about the discomforts of breast-feeding and sleepless nights. His great novels accepted life’s ills, as they accepted its delights, everything is in balance, in proportion; but somewhere, at some point, it became impossible for him to stand his life. A skin had been ripped off him: it must have happened. It is often enough suggested that Sonya Tolstoy was a bit demented; though we must remember that she copied out War and Peace and all the other novels, many times, while she was carrying and giving birth and nursing and serving her Leo who, she complained, insisted on his marital rights before she was even healed after childbirth. Surely Leo Tolstoy became a bit demented too, quite apart from the old man’s infatuation with his disciple Chertkov, who was like a horrible caricature of himself.
Those of us who have known people with clinical depression, or suffering the dark night of the soul, have heard descriptions of spiritual landscapes so dreadful that attempts at consolation ring as false as badly tuned pianos. And so they are received by the sufferers who look at you with a contempt for your superficiality. ‘What I am feeling now, that’s the truth’ they may actually spell out to the stupid one. ‘When you are depressed you see the truth, the rest is illusion.’ So one feels reading The Kreutzer Sonata. Here is a landscape of despair – no exit! Remember the cage he had made for himself, this highly sexed man. Sex – bad. Sex with a pregnant or nursing woman – bad. No sex outside marriage. A recipe for guilt and self-hatred. The wasteland he describes that lacks any joy, pleasure – one hardly dare use the word love – is the truth. So be it.
Let us imagine ourselves back in that house. It is night, supper over, the visitors and disciples in their nooks and corners. The older children are still up, studying or playing, and their voices are loud and so are their feet on the wooden floors. The little ones are in their rooms with their nurses and are as noisy as small children are.
Tolstoy wants to be a husband tonight – so he puts it. God is not coming to his aid in his battles with lust.
Sonya’s newest baby is six months old. She is afraid that she is pregnant again. She has to be in a state of conflict as her Leo approaches, smiling and affectionate: carefree sex has not yet been invented in the world’s laboratories. She has never known it, never, in her long married life. If she is not pregnant already then she may become so tonight. 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
