the story as thoroughly as Henny and Sam, little Ernie is the one with the power to make you think about his future. He is obsessed with money, because his mother is obsessed. He knows exactly what is in her purse, demands to know what she has spent it on if there are a few cents gone after a trip into town, and saves up his pocket money, such as it is, in a hiding place under the floorboards. But his mother steals it from him, one day when she is desperate. Will she put it back? he begs, he demands, and she says she will … Evie, the other daughter, ‘Little-Womey’, is being tutored by her father into being the perfect female, but we feel she will survive. The twins and Thomas are very much themselves – we can imagine their futures as adults. The new baby is a hate-child if ever there was one, but not much is made of his unfortunate beginnings, and he seems to survive adequately on no nurturing at all, or none that is recorded.
When you put down this book at last and emerge into the light of a day very dull by contrast, as is as if you have left not only this densely imagined swarming world of Pollits and Collyers but your own childhood too, where a smashed cup or a burned blouse or an overheard matter of gossiping women is a revelation of life’s dangers and richness.
And when these children grow up, will they remember the preposterousness of po’ little Sam, and poor clever demented Henny, and the poverty so extreme a teacher could not believe what she saw, or will they know they were in an Eden where children ran about naked among animals and birds, where their ears were filled with shouts of rich and resounding language, where it was only an exuberance of temperament for mother and father to scream insults and threats of death, and where a sister, as ugly as a crippled beast, wrote verses ‘after Confucius’:
A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,
No mere return for courtesy but that our friendship might outlast the grave.
Well, there are no households, no families, like that now, intoxicated with words, for poetry has been silenced by television, and poverty is no longer redeemed by the world of imagination entered by opening a book.
The Man Who Loved Children may be read for its evocation of a lost world as much as for its great virtues. For it is a great novel, one that is always being rediscovered and then for some reason slips away out of sight, and then is found again. Christina Stead is a great writer. Beside her name is a list of novels, each one unlike the work of any other writer and unlike each other, and perhaps that is why she is not finally accepted into the company of great writers. It is hard to understand, though. There are formally accepted canons of Best Books, Best Writers, for that time – the thirties and forties – and some of them are nowhere near her size in scope and magnificence.
For Love Alone continues the story of the ugly duckling, under another name, with a different family, and in a different country – Australia. But here she is, love-hungry, lonely, stuffed with talent and ambition, tormented by the penny-pinching poverty of the thirties, longing to escape to London and the company of fellow spirits – which she eventually does. Now the picture is the same in ‘feel’ and atmosphere as D. H. Lawrence’s evocation of talented, poor and fiercely independent souls. The People with the Dogs so strongly creates New York it is easy to believe you have lived there yourself even when, like myself, you have not lived there more than a few days at a time. I could walk into one of these rooming houses as if I had never left it, a friend of these people and their dogs. Letty Fox: Her Luck is about the anarchic relationships in New York in a time of sexual revolution. These women are ‘free’, but really a woman’s luck still depended on men: if she was going to live well, she needed a well-heeled man.
Every one of Christina Stead’s novels is unique and unforgettable. This one, The Man Who Loved Children, is reckoned her best. And it is. But sometimes it seems that the last one of her novels you have read is her best. This may happen with a great writer. As I look along my shelf of her books, it is difficult not to write eulogistically about every one of them.
Kalila and Dimna – The Fables of Bidpai
The claim has been made for this book that it has travelled more widely than the Bible, for it has been translated through the centuries everywhere from Ethiopia to China. Yet it is safe to say that most people in the West these days will not have heard of it, while they will certainly at the very least have heard of the Upanishads and the Vedas. Until comparatively recently, it was the other way around. Anyone with any claim to a literary education knew that the Fables of Bidpai, or the Tales of Kalila and Dimna – these being the most commonly used titles with us – was a great Eastern classic. There were at least twenty English translations in the hundred years before 1888. Pondering on these facts leads to reflection on the fate of books, as chancy and unpredictable as that of people or nations.
The book’s history is as fascinating as its contents, and would make a pretty volume on its own.
The first English translation was done in the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas North – he who translated Plutarch into a work which was the source of Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Roman world. North’s Plutarch was popular reading: so was his version of Bidpai. In the introduction to the reissue of this translation in the nineteenth century, Joseph Jacobs of Cambridge (Jews have been prominent in the movement and adaptation of the book) concludes: ‘If I go on further, I foresee a sort of mental dialogue which will pass between my reader and myself: “What,” the reader will exclaim, “the first literary link between India and England, between Buddhism and Christendom, written in racy English with vivacious dialogue and something resembling a plot. Why, you will be trying to make us believe that you have restored to us an English Classic!” “Exactly so,” I should be constrained to reply, and lest I be tempted into this temerity, I will even make a stop here.’
And he did stop, but by then he had written a very great number of pages. I have been handed over by Ramsay Wood a vast heap of many versions of the Fables of Bidpai – some of them rare and precious – to aid me in this task of doing an introduction, and the first thing to be noticed is that the introductions tend to be very long: it is clear that the authors of them have become beguiled and besotted with the book’s history. As I have. For one thing, it has lasted at least two thousand years. But it is hard to say where the beginning was – suitably for a book whose nature it is to accommodate tales within tales and to blur the margins between historical fact and fiction.
One progenitor was the Buddhist cycle of Birth Tales (or Jātaka Stories) where the Buddha appears as a monkey, deer, lion, and so on. Several of the Bidpai tales came from this cycle. Incidents that occur in Bidpai can be seen in sculptures around Buddhist shrines dated before 200bc. The Buddha himself took some of the Birth Tales from earlier folktales about animals. But there is no race or nation from the Egyptians on – or back, for we may surely no longer assume that current information regarding ancient history is all there is to be known, or all that we will come to know – that has not used beast-fables as part of its heritage of instructional material. And so the genre is as ancient as mankind itself. Sir Richard Burton, who like all the other orientalists of the nineteenth century was involved with Bidpai, suggested that man’s use of the beast-fable commemorates our instinctive knowledge of how we emerged from the animal kingdom, on two legs but still with claws and fangs.
Another source or contributor was that extraordinary book, the Arthaṡāstra of Kautilya, which is suspected of dating from about 300 bc. It is not easy to lay one’s hands on a copy, and this is a pity: at a time when we are all, down to the least citizen, absorbed, not to say obsessed, with sociology and the arts of proper government, this book should take its place, not as the earliest manual on the subject, but as the earliest we know of. It describes in exact and even pernickety detail how properly to run a kingdom, from the kind of goods that should be available
