What Book to Read?

This, Stead’s best known book, was published in 1940 but largely ignored until it was reissued in 1965 with an introduction by the American critic Randall Jarrell, who hailed it as a masterpiece. A new edition (2010) has an introduction by Jonathan Franzen who is just as enthusiastic. They concede the book’s weaknesses, but find great strengths to weigh against these. I guess it’s a personal choice whether you can appreciate the great things about the book, or feel depressed by the awfulness being described, and disinclined to read further. Even Franzen questions whether ‘enjoy’ is an appropriate response to the book. Either way, I have to agree it contains some great writing.

The book covers a year or so of the life of the Pollit family, Henny and Sam, and their six – soon to be seven – children. The eldest, Louisa, is Henny’s step daughter. The story is episodic, in that there are a number of set piece scenes – sometimes in my view over-long – that describe the life of the family, rather than forwarding the action. Indeed there isn’t much action until the end, when some of what has arisen earlier comes together in the climax of the novel. Instead of action there is wonderful description of landscape and keen observation of behaviour – though few of the adult characters are presented as likeable people.

It’s pretty trite to use Tolstoy’s comment that ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ in relation to this story, but I’ll do it anyway. This is because Tolstoy has got it wrong; you can’t separate families into ‘happy’ and ‘unhappy’ in this way. This is the story of a very unhappy family: Henny and Sam fight frequently, openly and bitterly. Sam ‘called a spade the predecessor of modern agriculture, she called it a muck dig; they had no words between them intelligible’. ‘Ugly duckling’ Louisa is the butt of their malicious comments and jokes, in addition to which, being the eldest at eleven, she has to look after the younger children and wait on her mother. But the Pollit children don’t know they are unhappy, because they know no other form of living, and they are objectively happy at least some of the time. For Louisa it is when she can escape into books or daydreams. To me, this blending of the experiences of childhood is far more convincing than ‘all happy’ or ‘all miserable’. But the misery is certainly laid on thick; every humiliation or disappointment one can remember from childhood appears here magnified by a factor of ten. ‘They all laugh at me,’ cries Louisa in despair. Henny sees everything in the blackest terms: ‘Isn’t it rotten luck,’ she exclaims. ‘Isn’t every rotten thing in life rotten luck?’ Sam thinks he is the voice of reason, but he is as selfish and cruel as his wife. The baby-talk language he uses to his children makes me cringe in the same way as fingernails on a blackboard. Yet the children seem to love them both. Even the tragic climax grows out of love.

Knowing a bit about Stead’s life helped me better understand the book. It is to a significant degree autobiographical, with the character of Sam based on her father, David Stead, a marine biologist, who seems to have been a domestic tyrant. Louisa is modelled on Stead herself; her mother died when she was very young, and her father married again, producing a further six children. I don’t know if her step-mother treated her as Henny does Louisa, but I hope not – though Stead no doubt cherished some of Louisa’s ambitions and dreams. The adult Stead had left-wing leanings, eventually marrying William Blake, a German Jewish Marxist, but she is clearly no starry-eyed idealist; Sam’s doctrine of universal love, his ‘humane folly’, is unswervingly revealed as superficial nonsense. Franzen suggests that Stead’s treatment of Sam is at times funny; I didn’t find it so, but she is certainly satirizing such ideas. The book has no overt politics, but the slide of the family from gentile poverty into grinding want underlies the bitter climax of the story; money – having it, not having it and losing it run like a red thread throughout the book. Sam’s belief in eugenics is an even blacker mark against him when one remembers that Stead’s partner was Jewish.

One aspect of the book that interests me is that the story was originally set in Australia, but the setting was changed because Stead’s publishers in America – where she was living at the time – thought an American setting would be more appealing to American readers. Critics like Jarrell and Franzen – both Americans– see some inaccuracies in setting and language, but I was completely unaware of these. Indeed I find it hard to see how it could have worked as a story in Australia, though I suppose gentile poverty is the same the western capitalist world over.

It’s a challenging book to read just now, when the spotlight in Australia is being turned on domestic violence. As Franzen points out, Stead, who probably never heard the words ‘domestic violence’, treats what we would call ‘abuse’ as a natural feature of the familial landscape. I found it heavy going.

It is impossible to do justice to the book in a short review. Read Randall Jarrell’s introduction if you have the Angus and Robertson edition and you can read a long review by Franzen in the New York Times here. There is a good short biography of Stead in the Australian Dictionary of Biography here, and there are several full-length biographies of her, the most recent of which is by Hazel Rowley (1993). The New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Australian fiction is named  the Christina Stead Prize in her honour.