Books: Out from Down Under

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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.