The Strays
Helena and I would like to invite you all to come and live with us here. We'd love to take in a few more strays, and we invite you all to quit your jobs and join our commune. Work and live side by side. So we can all thumb our noses at the rest of the world.
I found The Strays to be thoroughly compelling: Set in Melbourne and switching between the present and the height of the Depression, it tells the story of an artists' commune – a bohemian debauch of nudity and drugs and children left to fend for themselves – as seen through the eyes of Lily: the only child of poor, conservative parents, her friendship with the daughter of famous Modern artist Evan Trentham gave her a front row seat to the work of those who would overturn Australia's art scene and social order. While the artists and their efforts hover in the background, this is really the story of the friendship between Lily and Eva, and as with My Brilliant Friend or The Girls, it was the way that author Emily Bitto captured this friendship just right that so enchanted me.
There is no intimacy as great as that between young girls. Even between lovers, who cross boundaries we are accustomed to thinking of as at the furthest territories of closeness, there is a constant awareness of separateness, the wonder at the fact that the loved one is distinct, whole, with a past and a mind housed behind the eyes we gaze into that exist, inviolate, without us. It is the lack of such wonder that reveals the depth of intimacy in that first chaste trial marriage between girls.
Lily met Eva when they were eight; having moved to a new house and new school (due to her parents' declining fortunes), Lily would have been lost if Eva hadn't immediately offered her friendship. And the first time that Lily went to Eva's house, she understood that they were from two different worlds: In contrast to her own small suburban box, Eva's family lived on a rambling estate – her glamourous mother having been an heiress who was now often away acting as her husband's agent – and while their father roared and drank and threw paint in his studio, Eva and her sisters were left to see after themselves; playing in the fields until dark and scrounging dinner from a neglected pantry. Immediately, Lily understood that she was witnessing a bigger, more exciting way of life than her parents would understand, and although she missed her mother's loving ministrations, she soon transferred her loyalties to the Trentham family and spent as much time at the estate as she could.
When was it that I became a voyeur in their midst? I was the perfect witness, an unsuspected anthropologist disguised within the body of a young girl, surrounded by other young girls who were part of the family. Yet I was a cuckoo in the nest, an imposter who listened and observed, hoarding and collecting information.
Other artists would come and go from the Trentham estate, and when Evan decided they should get serious about forming a true collective to challenge the stodgy establishment, he invited a group of them to move into the house. Over the years, Lily grew to feel like a true family member (although she did experience acute jealousy when Eva and her sisters could resume a game as Lily was leaving for her own home, as though it didn't actually matter to them whether she was there or not), and when Lily's parents' financial situation became even more dire, she was invited to stay at the estate as well. Now fifteen, and in her own mind an honourary Trentham, when a scandal erupts that breaks apart the commune, Lily is shocked to discover that she has been banished as well.
It is strange which events leave those deep scars we carry with us over a lifetime. When Heloise talked about that night, even years later, it was with a bitter seriousness, a complete inability to see events other than as they occurred to her as a seven-year-old. It became a foundation myth, a lasting symbol of the troubled nature of Heloise's childhood, the real sufferings she endured, but also the way she experienced these sufferings, reliving them over and over until they wore away their own caged-animal paths within her.
From the prologue, we understand that Lily and Eva had a falling out (something like fifty years earlier), and as they are to meet again for the first time since that split, the narrative takes the form of Lily revisiting the journals she kept during the years with the Trenthams. I liked the irony of Lily recognising that Eva's younger sister Heloise always relived her childhood miseries through the eyes of the child she had been, while in effect, Lily is doing the same thing herself; as though she had gained no more perspective over the intervening decades than she had had as a teenager. And in her present-day relationship with her own adult daughter, Lily transfers some of the disdain that she had felt for her mother during her days at the estate:
I am angry with myself. I failed to speak from that compartment in myself, as that persona who represents motherhood the one who knows my daughter will always in some way look down on me; will not know my dark places and my desires, my ambivalences, even toward her; will think herself wiser, braver, more modern, her inner life more intriguing, her challenges more compelling; I have cherished the self who knows this and accepts it. It is without vanity, able to resist the urge to be understood.
As this is a close examination of girlhood friendships, mother-daughter relationships, and a thread about Lily (now a published art historian) considering writing a book about her experiences with the Trenthams in order to correct the official record that notes the Trentham women as “'events' that accounted for the prevalence of certain themes” in the work of important men, The Strays might have more appeal and relevance to the female reader. As for me, I enjoyed the whole thing.
