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 Miss Aiden, Louie’s beloved teacher, comes to visit and finds a poverty that 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
