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your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has. But few such styles have the spontaneity of Christina Stead’s; its own life carries it along, here rapid and a little rough, here good-humoredly, grotesquely incisive, here purely beautiful—and suddenly, without ever stopping being natural, it is grand.
    Her style is live enough and spontaneous enough to be able to go on working without her; but, then, its life is mechanical. When her style is at its worst you have the illusion that, once set in motion, it can rattle along indefinitely, narrating the incidents of a picaresque, Pollit-y universe with an indiscriminate vivacity that matches theirs. (You remember, then, that where everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody—that Christina Stead is, on her father’s side, a Pollit.) But, normally, you listen to “the breeze, still brittle, not fully leaved”; see a mountain graveyard, “all grass and long sights”; have a child raise to you its “pansy kitten-face”; see a ragged girl fling out her arms in “a gesture that somehow recalled the surf beating on a coast, the surf of time or of sorrows”; see that in the world outside “clouds were passing over, swiftly staining the garden, the stains soaking in and leaving only bright light again.” You read: “Bonnie stayed upstairs sobbing, thinking she had a broken heart, until she heard soft things like the hands of ghosts rubbing her counterpane and soft ghostly feet unsteadily shifting on her rug; and, looking up, she saw Evie and Isabel staring at her with immense rabbit eyes. In a little crockery voice, Isabel asked, ‘What are you crying for?’ ” Louie’s dying uncle tells her the story of Pilgrim’s Progress ; “and occasionally he would pause, the eyes would be fixed on her, and suddenly he would smile with his long dark lips; the face would no longer be the face of a man dying of consumption, with its burning eyes, but the ravishment of love incarnate, speaking through voiceless but not secret signs to the child’s nature.” Sometimes one of her long descriptive sentences lets you see a world at once strange and familiar, Christina Stead’s and your own: the romantic Louie looks out at the shabby old Georgetown of the 1930’s and sees “the trees of the heath round the Naval Observatory, the lamplight falling over the wired, lichened fence of the old reservoirs, the mysterious, long, dim house that she yearned for, the strange house opposite, and below, the vapor-blue city of Washington, pale, dim-lamped, under multitudinous stars, like a winter city of Africa, she thought, on this night at this hour.” As you look at the landscapes—houses and yards and trees and birds and weathers—of The Man Who Loved Children, you see that they are alive, and yet you can’t tell what has made them come to life—not the words exactly, not even the rhythm of the words, but something behind both: whatever it is that can make the landscapes live and beautiful, but that can make Ernie sobbing over his empty money box, and Henny beginning to cry, “Ugh-ugh,” with her face in her hands, more beautiful than any landscape.
VII
    Christina Stead can perfectly imitate the surface of existence—and, what is harder, recognize and reproduce some of the structures underneath that surface, and use these to organize her book. You especially notice, in her representation of life, two structural processes: (1) A series of similar events, of increasing intensity and importance, that leads to a last event which sums up, incarnates, all the events that have come before. It is easy to recognize and hard to make up such an event; Christina Stead has an uncanny ability to imagine an event that will be the necessary but surprising sum of the events before it. (2) A series of quantitative changes that leads to a qualitative change: that is, a series of events leading to a last