Suppose George Eliot had not become a famous novelist: what then would have happened to this marriage in which it was Lewes’s role to guide, encourage, protect the most celebrated woman in England? Probably it would have been the same, although on a less grand and public stage; instead of the novelist, Lewes would have protected the diffident translator and essayist, soothed the tired editor. There is no doubt he was profoundly respectful of his chosen lady; he understood everything pained and precious in her nature, saw that striking union of dutifulness and imagination. They had, after all, been introduced by Herbert Spencer.
This grand alliance did not fail to irritate many people. A rival novelist, Eliza Linton, was furious about it. She thought their airs were impossible, their solemn importance not to be endured. Mrs. Linton had met George Eliot before the latter was famous and she says about her: “I will candidly confess my short-sighted prejudices with respect to this to-be-celebrated person. She was known to be learned, industrious, thoughtful, noteworthy; but she was not yet the Great Genius of her age, nor a philosopher bracketed with Plato and Kant, nor was her personality held to be superior to the law of the land. . . . She was essentially underbred and provincial. . . .”
Poor Mrs. Linton had reason to complain. She was not only a rival novelist but, you might say, a rival divorcée. “There were people who worshipped those two, who cut me because I separated from Linton. . . .” Envy and outrage make Mrs. Linton slyly fascinating. (One needn’t fear corruption because of the impossibility of anyone succeeding in making George Eliot look foolish and small.) And sometimes Mrs. Linton sums it up perfectly. She writes, “. . . she had the devotion of a man whose love had in it that element of adoration and self-suppression which is dearest of all to a woman like George Eliot, at once jealous and dependent, demanding exclusive devotion and needing incessant care—but ready to give all she had in return.” Also it is Mrs. Linton who has left us George Eliot gravely announcing, “I should not think of allowing George to stay away a night from me.”
•
Leslie Stephen thinks George Eliot’s powers were diminished by Lewes’s efforts to shield her from criticism, to keep her in a cozy nest of approval and encouragement. But Stephen’s opinion is based upon his belief that her later novels are inferior to the earlier ones. Stephen didn’t much like Middlemarch, nor did Edmund Gosse—both preferred the early work. It is hard to feel either of these men had anything more than respect for George Eliot. They were formidable, learned figures, great personages themselves. Something in the Warwickshire novelist fails to attract them. They seem put off by the grandness of her reputation—it makes them uneasy, even somewhat jealous. Gosse says “we are sheep that look up to George Eliot and are not fed by her ponderous moral aphorisms and didactic ethical influence.” It is Gosse’s opinion that Middlemarch is “mechanical,” it is “unimaginative satire” and “genius misapplied.”
Astonishing that the truest lovers of this “ponderous” and “ethical” writer are the baroque aesthetes Proust and Henry James. And always the strange lover, Lewes, like someone from Dostoevsky taking over duties at the Priory, their house. Before his connection with George Eliot, Lewes had been mad about Jane Austen.
1955
THE NEGLECTED NOVELS OF CHRISTINA STEAD
IT IS ANNOYING to be asked to discover a book that is neither old nor new. When it must be admitted that the work lacks, on the one hand, the assurance of age and, on the other, a current and pressing fame, our resistance grows and our boredom swells. We feel certain we don’t want to read a book no one else is reading or has read. The work being offered to us appears cold and flat, like a dish passed around for a tardy second helping. It is gratifying to our dignity to be able to turn down the offer.
There are many roads to neglect—simple neglect itself, early and late, is far from being the only way. Very often we find that a writer has produced a number of books that were, on publication, well and even enthusiastically received and yet somehow the years passed and the reputation, the fame, the consideration did not quite take hold. The public mind, friendly enough at first, turned out to have been but briefly attracted; the literary mind was, at the moment, fixed upon other points with the helplessness and passion we have all experienced, the realization that our delight is kept in its course by some radar of history or fashion. That there is a good deal of luck, accident, “timing” and sheer chaos in these matters hardly anyone would deny. People used to say they wanted to be either rich or poor, anything but shabby-genteel, and in the same way a state of extremity is perhaps to be sought in the arts. Attacks upon great work have very nearly the same weight as praise—bon chat, bon rat. It is a painful but honorable destiny to be laughed at, scorned as a madman, slandered as immoral or irresponsible or dangerous. Even refusal, being entirely ignored, has in its own way a certain cold and bony beauty.
The notion of a large or small masterpiece lying about unnoticed—a Vermeer in the hayloft—has always stirred men’s hearts. To be attacked or to be ignored offer at the least certain surprising possibilities for the future; the work may be dramatically discovered or excitingly defended, reclaimed. The common and lowly fate of most books is shabby gentility. They are more or less accepted, amiably received—nearly everyone is kind about effort and genial in the face of a completed task—and then they are set aside, misplaced, quietly and firmly left out, utterly forgotten, as the bleak phrase has it. This is the dust.
The dust seems to have settled rather quickly upon the works of Christina Stead. Her name means nothing to most people. The title of one of her novels, House of All Nations, occasionally causes an eye to shine with cordiality and it may be noted that good things have been heard about this book even if it is not possible to remember precisely what they are. Is it perhaps a three-decker affair by a Northern European once mentioned for the Nobel Prize? The title of her great novel, The Man Who Loved Children, doesn’t sound reassuring either; the title is in fact, one could remark, not good enough for the book, suggesting as it does a satisfaction with commonplace ironies. (But no title could give a preview of this unusual novel.)
At the present time none of Christina Stead’s work is in print. Her name never appears on a critic’s or journalist’s list of novelists, she is not a “well-known woman writer”; she has written about finance, about Salzburg, Washington, Australia and yet neither place nor subject seem to call her image to the critical eye. Upon inquiring about her from her last American publisher, the information came forth with a tomba oscura note: all they had was a poste restante, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1947. The facts of her biography seem to be that she is Australian, has lived all over Europe, and lived in America for some time and may still do so. She is, as they say, not in the picture, not right now at least, and therefore one cannot learn much about her past or her future. Yet when The Man Who Loved Children appeared in 1940, Rebecca West said on the front page of The New York Times Book Review that Christina Stead was “one of the few people really original we have produced since the First World War.” Statements of that kind are not a rarity in the public press: the novelty of this one is that it is true. The dust, grimly, meanly collecting, has fallen upon a work of sheer astonishment and success.
The Man Who Loved Children has not been completely buried—it has a small and loyal band of friends. Yet that quaint locution is misleading, because it makes the book sound like a fine but frail old lady living in retirement and occasionally appearing for tea with the selected few. The Man Who Loved Children is not a small, perfect, witty book, but a large, sprawling, vigorous work marked by a novelistic, storytelling abundance, the wonderful richness of character and texture the critics are always irritably demanding. It is all this, all story and character and truth and directness, and yet it has been composed in a style of remarkable uniqueness and strength, of truly radical power and authenticity. This book is a genuine novel in the traditional meaning of the term; it is a story of life, faithfully plotted, clearly told, largely peopled with rea
l souls, genuine problems; it is realistically set, its intention and drive are openly and fully revealed; it is also a work of absolute originality.
There has never been anyone in American literature like the great, talkative, tearful, pompous, womanish father, Samuel Clemens Pollit. Sam is a bureaucrat of the office and the home; he has one of those greedy and restless minds that takes in and chews up everything in sight, like a disposal unit attached to the sink. He expresses himself vividly and tirelessly; his conversation is a rich mash of slogans, baby talk, snatches of old songs, remembered bits of information and nonsense. His very glands secrete his own special cant, his own mixture of self-loving exuberance, sensuality, windy idealism, nature lore, and public service. Pollit works as a naturalist in Washington, D.C., in the employment of the government. Perhaps one could not seriously describe The Man Who Loved Children as a political novel, but in its vastly suggestive way it has something to do with Washington and with politics. It is not easy to imagine Sam Pollit in any other situation except the one he has here. His free-wheeling, fantastic talents, his active but moderately proportioned ambitions, his dignity and his moralizing fit like a glove his government-post life; a bureaucracy can use his blandly conniving and optimistic nature and assure him a well-settled if not remarkable career. Although he has some specialized knowledge, he is roundly and exhaustively general, like an encyclopedia. His wife sees him as a sort of force who has come into his career, his marriage, his self-satisfaction by the back door. He is “a mere jog-trot, subaltern bureaucrat, dragged into the service in the lowest grades without a degree, from mere practical experience in the Maryland Conservation Commission, and who owed his jealousy-creating career to her father’s influence in the lobbies of the capital.”
Sam Pollit’s overwhelming cantish vitality is probably not a political thing in itself, but it comes from the lush underside, the slushy, rich bottom soil of the political terrain. His every sentence is a speech to his public, his family is a sort of political party to be used, fulsomely praised, and grotesquely subjected to uplifting sermons. He is literally swollen with idealistic feelings and self-love, with democratic statement and profound self-seeking. He is as fertile of lofty sentiments as he is of children. His little ones clamor about him, blushing and laughing, like an office force, working away, pretending to be playing all the while. Here is an example of Pollit’s fatherly method of expressing himself to his brood:
“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, over the pond pine ragged in the peat and the lily swamps of Anacostia, by scaffolded marbles and time-bloodied weatherboard, northeast, northwest, Washington Circle, Truxton Circle, Sheridan Circle to Rock Creek and the blunt shoulders of our Georgetown. And what does he find there this morning as every morning, in the midst of the slope, but Tohoga House, the little shanty of Gulliver Sam’s Lilliputian Pollitry—Gulliver Sam, Mrs. Gulliver Henny, Lagubrious Louisa, whose head is bloody but unbowed, Ernest the calculator, Little Womey . . . Saul and Sam the boy-twins and Thomas-snowshoe-eye, all sun-tropes that he came galloping to see.”
Henny Pollit, the sour mother of Sam’s children, is a disappointed daughter of a good and prosperous Maryland family. She is always in debt, always lazy, untidy, hysterical. Although created upon the familiar lines of the disappointed and disagreeable wife, Henny seems completely without antecedents of the literary sort. She is grand and terrifying and inexplicably likeable as she mutters to herself, plays patience, swills tea all day, and screams at the children. As a mother, Henny seems to experience only the most rudimentary maternal feelings; she is as verbose as her detested husband; she is sloppy, mysterious, shabby, a convincing character made up of fantastic odds and ends, leathery grins, stained fingers, squalid lies and brutal hopes. Where Sam presents his family the fruits of his endless moralizing, his flow of nonsense, proverb and hypocrisy, Henny gives them day in and day out the hatred and insult of her heart, the chagrin, anger, poverty, ugliness, and rudeness of the world as she knows it. When she goes downtown she returns with tales of an adventure in a street car and “a dirty shrimp of a man with a fishy expression who purposely leaned over me and pressed my bust . . .” or outrageous descriptions of people
to whom she would give the go-by, or the cold shoulder, or a distant bow. . . or a polite good-day, or a black look, or a look black as thunder, and there were silly old roosters . . . filthy old pawers, and YMCA sick chickens . . . and all these wonderful creatures, who swarmed in the streets, stores, and restaurants of Washington, ogling, leering, pulling, pushing, stinking, over-scented, screaming and boasting, turning pale at the black look from Henny, ducking and diving, dodging and returning, were the only creatures that Henny ever saw.
Henny’s fights with her husband are epics of insult, suffering, and sordid vitality. But there is no way of scoring a point on Sam because he is made of words and will not bleed. After a nightmare family collision he goes right on with his imitations of various accents, his horrible but somehow admirable begetting of children, his exploitation and yet honest enjoyment of these children, his reminiscences. No matter what has happened he sleeps comfortably, his bedside table littered with “pamphlets from the Carnegie Peace Foundation, scientific journals, and folders from humanitarian leagues.”
The Man Who Loved Children is sordid and bitter. In it Henny commits suicide, one of the little boys shows his feeling about life by hanging himself in effigy, the stepdaughter, Louie, is worked like a horse by the entire household, Aunt Bonnie is exploited and maltreated in the same fashion. The father’s oily vanity and ghastly pawings, the mother’s lies and shabby dreams: such is actual material of this novel. The grim unfolding of the drama is, nevertheless, done in such a magical, abundant, inventive manner that the reading is a pleasure from beginning to end. The dialogue is realistic and plausible and at the same time humorous, original, and exciting in a way that is hardly inferior to Joyce. Sometimes the language is more nearly that of England than of America: people “post parcels,” drink tea morning, noon, and night, have “elevenses,” etc. Still the reader does not find these English turns objectionable—they seem merely another example of the author’s incredible gift for amusing and vivid and interesting language. The real triumph of the book is Pollit. He is modern, sentimental, cruel, and as sturdy as a weed. There is no possibility of destroying him. After every disaster, he shoots back up, ready with his weedy, choking sentiments. In the end he is preparing to go on the radio with his “Uncle Sam Hour” and it is inconceivable that the adventure should fail. On the other hand, it will be the tough flowering of all Pollit’s coarse reality.
The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead’s masterpiece, but all of her work is of an unusual power. House of All Nations is an excellent, interesting novel, large in scale, intelligent, and splendidly detailed. In a novel like The Salzburg Tales one can literally say there is talent to burn, and the talent is burned in it. These beautifully composed tales are told by people of all sorts and nationalities who are in Salzburg to see the annual presentation of Hofmannsthal’s Everyman. It cannot be called a complete success and yet it would have taken anyone else a lifetime to produce such a strangely gifted failure. The Salzburg Tales is long, stately, impressive, and unreadable. Her last novels, For Love Alone and Letty Fox, are also unusual and considerable works. It would be nearly impossible to start out with this author’s prodigious talent for fiction and end up without writing something of its own peculiar force and distinction.
In the vast commerce of fame and reputation certain authors are pushed to the front of the counter like so much impatient, seasonal merchandise. It is idle to complain about this and in trying to put Christina Stead’s work back on the market one need not insist that she replace anyone, even though there are some highly qualified candidates for retirement. A reminder of her existence
should be advertisement enough, especially in the case of such a “genuine article.”
1955
AMERICA AND DYLAN THOMAS
HE DIED, grotesquely like Valentino, with mysterious, weeping women at his bedside. His last months, his final agonies, his utterly woeful end were a sordid and spectacular drama of broken hearts, angry wives, irritable doctors, frantic bystanders, rumors and misunderstandings, neglect and murderous permissiveness. The people near him visited indignities upon themselves, upon him, upon others. There seems to have been a certain amount of competition at the bedside, assertions of obscure priority. The honors were more and more vague, confused by the ghastly, suffering needs of this broken host and by his final impersonality. No one seems to have felt his wife and children had any divine rights but that they, too, had each day to earn their place on the open market in the appalling contest of Thomas’s last years. Could it have happened quite this way in England? Were his last years there quite as frenzied and unhealthy as his journeys to America? He was one of ours, in a way, and he came back here to die with a terrible and fabulous rightness. (Not ours, of course, in his talents, his work, his joys, but ours in his sufferings, his longings, his demands.) “Severe alcoholic insult to the brain,” the doctors said.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 7