A Neglected Master

...He despised good-humoredly the people who allowed him to pick their pockets, but he thought it was right, proper, natural, he should do so...

...it also seemed to release the author, who gave us her first new book in 14 years, Dark Places of the Heart...

...After 10 years of marriage, too many children, never enough money, Sam and Henny Pollit have turned their home into a battlefield...

...and then he walked on indifferently, dropping all this behind him...

...Not only did the republication of The Man Who Loved Children release one of the superb novels of the 20th century from its premature obsolescence...

...He was a wonderful actor of concertos...

...Out of childish spite toward a longtime enemy, he bets everything on the British pound, though all signs point to its imminent collapse...

...The question keeps nagging anyone intrigued with Miss Stead's work...

...Writers &Writing A NEGLECTED MASTER BY PEARL K. BELL For many years before Christina Stead's great novel The Man Who Loved Children was reissued in 1965, a quarter of a century after it first came out, very few people had even heard of her impressive body of work...

...At the rotten center of her life is her mortal enemy, the overgrown child Sam Pollit who loves children because he loves nothing so much as himself...

...She is addicted to monologues, and in some of her less interesting books, like A Little Tea, A Little Chat, the speeches run on like a forgotten motor, monotonous and mindless...

...As Europe, ripe for the triumph of Fascism, staggers toward economic breakdown...

...In the end, in a surrealist stroke, the Banque Mercure's creditors are paying 208 lawyers from six different countries to sift through the rubble, and it is monstrously appropriate, the law being the grandest abstraction of all, that only the lawyers will come out ahead...

...She is constitutionally incapable of brevity or restraint, consuming words with spendthrift prodigality...

...There is such an oversufficiency of inventive richness in The Salzburg Tales, such a pyrotechnical brilliance of technique, that one can scarcely absorb it all...

...Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world," Miss Stead tells us...

...Nattering the livelong day about the end of injustice in "the One Great Nation" to come, Sam is tone-deaf to genuine suffering, to the shadows of melancholy and the ache of fear...

...Like Dickens, she is a marvelous mimic who can capture the sound of talk?always her mirror of characterwith phonographic accuracy, but her people are not caricatures, and there is never a hint of sentimentality in her view of human experience...

...The focus is money, flowing in and out of the Banque Mercure, a private banking house in Paris whose principal customers are avaricious speculators...

...Perhaps she was omitted on the technical ground that she is Australian, not English, but in that case why does the very up-to-date Penguin Companion include the Australian novelists Patrick White and Henry Handel Richardson...

...Marching...

...Yet the enigma of literary reputationwhy one writer leaves an ineradicably distinct mark on the mind of the world when another, often a good deal better, vanishes without a trace—remains an impenetrable maze of accident, luck and fashion...

...Miss Stead drew from the life of the disastrous Pollit family its angry violence and misery, as well as its humor, its necessary strains of affection, its tender and evocative poignancy...

...Though a small group of devotees tried to keep her reputation from slipping entirely out of sight and memory, Christina Stead was never to be found on any critic's list of outstanding contemporary writers...

...And now her loyal American publisher, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, has handsomely reissued her most ambitious novel, House of All Nations (787 pp., $10.00), published in 1938 and even briefly a best-seller until it, too, went under...

...even Randall Jarrell, whose essay on The Man Who Loved Children is the most beautiful love letter ever written by one author to another, allowed that she lacked discrimination...

...In the same way, like a gangster, he regarded morality as a poor trick of mean brains to excuse their failure...

...He took the hand of an aged prima donna and looked as if he would faint from excessive admiration...

...But most of the time the talk...

...With his bright innocence and uplift, he is a smiling, chirping domestic tyrant, working his children too hard under the pretense of play, meddling incessantly in every private corner of their lives...

...A pompous windbag idealist, full of insufferable Darwinian optimism about the inevitability of progress and the perfectibility of man, the nobility of science, truth, love, and Socialism, Sam is an unstoppable fountain of self-satisfied cant...

...Her father—like her best character, Samuel Clemens Pollit, the man who loved childrenwas a naturalist and Socialist who worked for the Government Fisheries Service...

...You put up the sign BANK and someone walks in and hands you his money...

...The best things in the book are the swift, wittily ruthless portraits that precede the tales...

...Not the least of her virtues is her infallible clarity...

...Yet the astonishing virtuosity that Miss Stead lavished on her debut only faintly suggested what she showed herself capable of doing, four and six years later, in her major novels...

...talk, talk is magnificently suited to her purpose: Henny Pollit's virulent, screaming tirades and Sam Pollit's holier-than-thou gassing in a language that is part baby talk, part Uncle Remus, part Artemus Ward, are the lifestream of The Man Who Loved Children...

...Miss Stead ticks off the Viennese conductor's giddy mannerisms to perfection: "He looked this way and that as he bowed obsequiously over his companion's conversation...

...Although she shares their sprawling vitality, she has never attempted Balzac's huge panoramas of society, or concerned herself with the religious and existential speculation of Melville...

...The eldest of seven children, Miss Stead was trained as a teacher but was unhappy with the work, and in 1928, at age 26, she left Australia for good...

...In the hands of a less fervently self-confident novelist, the scale and scope of House of All Nations would have been insanely reckless...

...The Salzburg Tales, is a virtuoso performance of some 40 monologues, a chain of narratives in the manner of Chaucer or Boccaccio, told by a haphazard assemblage of people who have come to Salzburg for the August festival of music and drama...

...For a time she became secretary to a grain merchant in London, then spent five years with a bank in Paris—the source of her brilliantly professional mastery of the world of money in House of All Nations...

...Why was this wonderful novel, as well as House of All Nations, ignored for so many years...

...She was born in New South Wales in 1902...

...And her first novel...

...That this vulgar distortion has gone on for so long casts some light on the strange fact that a writer whose career by now spans almost 40 years has yet to be granted the serious recognition, the long-overdue redress, she rightfully deserves...

...The time is the early 1930s...

...Yet her resemblance to these 19th-century titans is slighter than may at first appear...

...When it fails, his gaudy bubble bursts, his secret network of illegal stock speculation is exposed, and he skips to Estonia the one country that won't extradite him—leaving the ruins of the Banque Mercure to be picked over by the rats he has contemptuously abandoned...

...Her fellow-believers were only too eager to praise The Man Who Loved Children for precisely the wrong reasons...

...The images are demonically right, but she doesn't know quite when to stop...

...Each of these immense books, the one almost 800 pages long, the other over 500, was written with incredible rapidity in about two years, and it is still hard to believe that a single talent could have been so on fire with words as to summon the concentration and stamina needed to produce two such very different books in the brief period between 1936 and 1940...

...Though the novels that followed The Man Who Loved Children are distinguished by her compassionate intelligence, by the zest and unself-conscious exuberance that enliven everything she writes, none contains so formidable a presenceat once grotesque and inescapably credibleas Sam Pollit...

...The spoiled and pretty girl who married "the Great I-Am," as she calls him, has become a ranting, screaming, slatternly hag, worn out with drudgery, every nerve corroded with hysteria and hatred for the nasty deal fate has given her...

...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...

...After this savage, mesmerizing account of high finance, Christina Stead turned her obsessive attention to the wholly unabstract and sordid reality of domestic tragedy...

...But it was precisely this distortion of her accomplishment, I would contend, that throttled readers' curiosity about her work: The insistence of sympathetic Left-wing reviewers that the "solid structure of the novel comes from political ideology" accounts for the world's indifference, and not her Marxist thesis...

...House of All Nations and The Man Who Loved Children...

...Jules has parlayed a cynical axiom?There's no profit in working for a living"?into a fortune and power...

...On her return to Europe she roved all over the Continent, finally settling in London, her home since 1953...

...The facade is everything...

...In 1967, a collection of four new, very estimable novellas appeared under the title The Puzzle—headed Girl...

...To this day she remains shockingly absent from such supposedly inclusive reference volumes as the Oxford and Penguin Companions to English Literature...

...After marrying an American, William Blake, a novelist and writer on Marxian economics, she lived in the United States from 1937 until the end of World War II...

...With the Marxist imprimatur affixed to Miss Stead's work, no one bothered to investigate the grubby, exhilarating and overpowering reality of The Man Who Loved Children, at once too extravagant and too subtle to be confined by the reductionists' radical dogmatism...

...In his appalling complacency ("All things work together for the good of him that loves the truth"), his indefatigable capacity for survival, his coarseness and sentimentality, he is the stunning tour de force of Christina Stead's fictional world...

...was pretty much over...

...Christina Stead's life, as all her work clearly reflects, has been one of restlessly curious wandering...

...Describing the tragically possessed Henny Pollit's feelings about her house...

...As it is, with over a hundred chapters, and a more numerous crowd of crooks, frauds and degenerates, the book does not yield itself easily...

...All nine of her highly original novels, which she had been writing with such persevering industry since 1934, covering an extraordinary range of place, experience and literary versatility, had long been out of print, and a thick dust of neglect shrouded the author's name...

...One ironic factor may have been her own far from casual involvement in Communist politics...

...He is serenely without illusion about the nature of his success: "He thought of his business as a crooked roulette wheel, a confidence trick, and of himself as a clever pirate, and no more...

...Each afternoon the incongruous gathering—including a Viennese conductor, a Scottish lady doctor, an Italian singer, a French newspaperman, an American stockbrokerwalk together on the Kapuzinerberg and take turns telling stories...

...By 1940 the vogue for "politically correct" and es-thetically dreary fiction—like the thumping novels of Clara Weatherwax (Marching...

...As Elizabeth Hardwick, one of the few critics who made an effort in the 1950s to remind readers of Christina Stead's existence, described it: "The public mind, friendly enough at first, turned out to have been but briefly attracted...

...he is oblivious to the despaii that is driving his wife to suicide...

...Jules is insolently certain that he will always manage to remain afloat...

...He is monolithically awful...

...Miss Stead writes: "Every room was a phial of revelation to be poured out some feverish night in the secret laboratories of her decisions, full of living cancers of insult, leprosies of disillusion, abscesses of gmdge, gangrene of nevermore, quintan fevers of divorce, and all the proliferating miseries, the running sores and thick scabs, for which the flesh of marriage is so heavily veiled and conventually interned...

...The remarkable feat of House of All Nations is not so much the metaphoric device of making Bertillon's bank the emblem of gangrenous Europe between the two World Wars, but the way the enormous, closely woven structure of detail about international finance?stock quotations, exchange rates, bookkeeping manipulation, the sinister, seductive shape and smell of all that currency and coinageis gradually revealed to be a horrible abstraction, a mountebank tower of numbers that add up to zero...

...The Salzburg Tales, to her recent fiction, Miss Stead has been almost mechanically compared, by the tiny band that paid her any heed, to Dickens, Balzac and Melville...

...From time to time an admirer would attempt, without much success, to probe the mystery of Christina Stead's chronic obscurity...

...He regards his family as the jolliest of kindergartens and his wife as the cunning witch who will eat them all...

...She had made her indictment of the money magicians throb less with moral disgust than with her totally engaged absorption in how things and people work...

...In 1940 Isidor Schneider, the New Masses commissar of literary culture in the '30s and '40s, hailed the book as "a novelization of Engels' 'Origin of the Family,' " and even when the book was resurrected in 1965, Jose Yglesias argued that "it is Stead's Marxist point of view which has delayed her recognition...

...Character is Miss Stead's absorbing passion, and she pursues its elusive complexity on a grandiose scale, often getting so carried away that she overwhelms the reader...

...With the same comprehensiveness, the same intense memory and understanding...

...Happily, that course can sometimes be forced to change, and this has recently happened to Christina Stead...

...Jules Bertillon, the charming and inscrutable financial genius who directs the Mercure, sincerely believes that "It's easy to make money...

...From her earliest novel...

...But in the end Jules' willful, impetuous pride is his undoing...