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 understands what is under his nose. Louie knows that in Henny’s balefulness is a strength that feeds her too, and she 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
