Out from Down Under

By R. Z. Sheppard

MISS HERBERT

by CHRISTINA STEAD 308 pages. Random House. $8.95.

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

by CHRISTINA STEAD 527 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$12.50.

Feminist novels today tend to present women in two ways: as either prisoners of gender or lately freed to pursue Tom Jones' pleasures and echo Alexander Portnoy's complaints. Christina Stead's Miss Herbert belongs to a less transitory category. It is a novel about an Englishwoman that does not discriminate on the basis of sex.

At 73, the Australian-born author has published more than a dozen books of fiction that have slowly earned her a reputation as one of the world's most skillful writers. Stead is a connoisseur of the seven deadly sins. She possesses a special genius for decorating the interior of a character's mind, no matter how pinched by wrath, avarice, sloth, pride, lust, envy or greed. Her masterpiece is The Man Who Loved Children (1940), the story of the unhappiest family dwelling in literature since the House of Atreus.

Love Portraits. Miss Herbert, Stead's newest novel, is less ambitious. It is about a foolish woman, carefully framed and lighted so that the outside world exists only as dim periphery. The focus is entirely on the beautiful Eleanor Herbert, a variation on the Steadian observation that the English are not self-conscious hypocrites. Instead, as the author once wrote, they display "a natural ingrained double face from birth. They're the Western Chinese: old and smooth with deceit."

Eleanor Herbert is a consummate self-deceiver. In her youth she entertained a succession of university students on the grounds that "there was no harm in making love, if they could first refer to Bertrand Russell." Imagining herself to be a literary talent, she rewrote a story 23 times until it grew "simpler, clearer, more barren each time."

Her marriage followed similar lines until her husband, the stuffy director of a spurious religious society, ran off. In her 50s, still attractively statuesque, Miss Herbert takes up with a kinky London publisher whose idea of a good time is to make her strike "love portraits" against his collection of mummy wrappings and poison rings. The activity gives her a calm feminine feeling "that for the first time she was beginning to understand 'mature sex.' "

Sympathy is not a necessary virtue in an excellent writer. In Miss Herbert, however, Stead reveals a touch of the sadist. She sets her victim up in revealing scenes and then dispatches her with hatpins of stainless prose. Miss Herbert expires totally unaware that she is leaking fatuous optimism, banalities and supercilious prejudice. In fact, her last recorded words are a threat to write an autobiography that "will open some eyes."

Readers who wonder why the author stretches Miss Herbert over 300 pages will also wonder why the book is difficult to put down. The reason is that Stead has constructed her trap with extraordinary craftsmanship and provided the perfect bait: a woman persuasively beautiful enough to arouse envy in the female and interest in the male.

Such responses to Stead's late-period divertimento fade before The Man Who Loved Children. After 36 years, the novel retains the power to strike pity and terror. When it was first published in 1940, the world had a new war on its mind. A second edition in 1965 received wider attention in the U.S., though the fate of a woman chained to a champion male chauvinist boar still seemed minor compared with civil rights, an expanding Asian war and the youth revolt at home. The appearance of a third hard-cover edition this year is not a literary event so much as a good occasion to reintroduce a timeless novel whose time nevertheless seems to have arrived. The book has marital bouts to rival Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf? But it is much more. Stead not only provides the thousand details of a family's life but also conveys the confusions of affection and hatred that lock the household in a centripetal grip.

The story is set in Washington, D.C., during the mid-'30s--long before equal rights amendments, abortions on demand and the slipknot as a fashionable marriage bond. The novel's tragic heroine is Henny Pollit, mother of seven and a hag by her 35th birthday. Her husband Sam is a repulsive specimen of a manly exterior disguising a dangerous infantilism. He is a frustrated bureaucrat in the Department of the Interior who labors under the delusion that he is a successful father. He talks to his children in a kind of gibberish, a combination Pollitese dialect and baby talk: "Hear in the Buzzum of my famerly I am enjoying muyself at peas with awl mankind and the wimin folks likewise." He also cheerfully espouses fascist visions of a glowing new world where inferior human beings will have to make way by stepping into "lethal chambers."

Kenny's rages against Sam and her fate flash through the book like lightning before the storm. In an age when "Ms." meant only manuscript, Christina Stead described Henny as "one of those women who secretly sympathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces." Kenny's only trump card is suicide, which she plays with a shocking spontaneity that burns her despair deeply into the reader's mind. That The Man Who Loved Children was written without a note of melodrama is a mark of Stead's great style--a synthesis of intense realism and classical detachment that still seems totally original.

It is a style, wrote Randall Jarrell in his introduction to the second and third editions, that "you don't read so much as listen to as it sweeps you along." This is certainly true in The Man Who Loved Children. But Stead has also varied her style without diminishing its effectiveness. The House of All Nations (1938), a novel of international finance set in Paris, moves for 800 pages with the crispness of new bank notes. There is a quick surgical precision to the character studies in The Little Hotel, a companionable novel of shabby gentility in a fourth-class Swiss hotel.

The variety of settings in Stead's work reflects the 45 years she has lived away from her native Sydney--in England, France and the U.S. The solid financial background that gives The House of All Nations its authority was gained during the late '20s when Stead worked in a Paris bank. She was also married to a banker, William Blech, who wrote novels himself under the pseudonym of "William Blake." He died in 1968 and a few years later Stead returned to Australia. She now lives with her brother, a labor union official, in an extension to a small brick house in the Sydney suburb of Hurstville.

Christina Stead will be 74 in July but is not yet ready to retire. In fact she is finishing a new novel entitled I'm Dying Laughing. "It is," she remarks, "about some American friends who were caught in the Red-baiting of the '30s. He was from a rich family and she was a moneymaker. As things were then, a lot of the best people were radical, but they got lost on the way because of her moneymaking. It's a great theme. People getting torn apart by this political whirlpool, dismembered by the imperatives of American life--get rich, have everything."

Stead still claims to have socialist tendencies, a legacy from her father who combined radical opinions with marine biology. On the feminist movement, the creator of Henny Pollit keeps a philosophical distance: "It's a very old thing," she observes. "I'm all for bettering and equalizing conditions and pay for women, but I'm not interested in all the funny business that goes on."

R.Z. Sheppard

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