Wildly Alive

SPINSTER (242 pp.)--Sylvia Ashton-Warner--Simon & Schuster ($3.75).

This first novel by a woman in her forties is an astonishing work, one of the few rewarding books of a so-so season. The spinster of the title is Anna Vorontosov, a schoolteacher in back-country New Zealand. She is a small woman of uncertain age, whose passions are still young because she has never used them. Gifted but a little balmy, Anna primes herself for school each morning with half a tumbler of brandy, frequently gets the weeps, talks persuasively to trees and flowers, has stupendous headaches in Technicolor. Wildly alive, Anna flinches only at the thought of her empty womb. She knows her enemies, "all married women," and has a pronounced allergy to "smug men using women and then cruising off and leaving them to clean up."

When Anna was young and good-looking, an important man wanted her and she refused. Today, there is Paul, whose eyes are "great blue perfect things with lids like lips," and she refuses him also. The reason: neither would speak the magic phrase, "Will you marry me?"

Many Sires. Love repressed in one area bursts out in another. Anna swims through day after day in a sea of 70 children--white, Maori, and "the brown-white of the New Race"--who overflow her prefab schoolhouse. There are screams from little brown Ara: "Miss Vottot! Seven he's got a knife! He's cutteen my stomat!" Blossom's nose needs wiping, Matawhero's shirt must be tucked in, Dennis' lost pencil found, Twinnie's tears crooned away, lice plucked from Mere's hair. And more screams: "Miss Popoff, Seven he's trying to kill us all with the axe for nutteen!" Anna revels in the torrent of these different personalities, faces and colors. She thinks to herself that if she had ever borne children she would have wanted them this way--the "offspring of many sires."

Anna's inefficiencies--her forgetfulness about roll call, her chaotic classroom--are only surface disabilities. Absorbed in the agony of infant minds expanding under pressure, she is less interested in taming her Maoris than in finding the key to these hearts as virgin as her body. She becomes convinced that the words the youngsters respond to are not those in the pap-filled children's books but the ones drawn from fear and sex--from the vital reservoirs of life. Kiss, ghost, butcher, police, fight, jail--shown such words, the most stubborn of the nonlearners read and write.

Dangerous Activity. Author Ashton-Warner, a teacher for 17 years in Maori schools and an amateur painter and musician, has fashioned a strikingly individual style: her sentences come tumbling forth like precision acrobats, alive with imagery, sensuous perception, heroic echoes. The full-lunged children are so noisily present that, for many, reading Spinster will seem like living next door to an all-day playground. The adults are drawn as well, with acute observation of the irritable crankiness that so often accompanies dedication, and with a tragicomic sense that it is often the most trivial despair that most startlingly changes an existence.

Anna Vorontosov is a major literary creation, a woman forever leaping to the barricades against mediocrity. The joy of teaching has seldom been more beautifully described than in this book. It seems only right--and not melodramatic--that Paul, a fellow teacher who respects neither the minds nor the bodies of his pupils, should blow out his brains. It is Author Ashton-Warner's view that teaching is a most dangerous activity, particularly at the level where the untutored five-year-old first collides with the civilized world. They may seem adorable infants now, but they are the whores and murderers of tomorrow, or tomorrow's saints and scholars.

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