Ryder

The book has fifty chapters and almost no plot. It moves by set piece: a sermon, a birth, a wedding-eve quarrel, a nightmare, a lullaby, a chapter written as a Chaucerian tale with its own footnotes glossing the Middle English. Chapters are titled like an eighteenth-century novel's — "Rape and Repining!", "Sophia and the Five Fine Chamber-pots", "Fine Bitches All, and Molly Dance" — and each one changes register completely. Barnes is showing what she can do, and the pleasure of the book is watching her do it.

What holds it together is a household. Sophia Grieve Ryder, born to a father who fathered fourteen children and a mother who went mad bearing the last of them, runs a salon out of her bedroom and, when the money goes, keeps the family alive by writing begging letters signed "Mother". Her son Wendell has never earned more than thirty shillings and ninepence in his life and has decided that one woman is not enough for any man. Amelia de Grier marries him and follows him from London to a two-room log cabin in the hills above the Hudson. Kate-Careless arrives in 1897 and stays.

The autobiography is not hidden. Barnes was born in 1892 at Cornwall-on-Hudson, taught at home rather than sent to school, and grew up in a house where her father's mistress lived alongside her mother; her grandmother Zadel Barnes, a journalist and suffrage campaigner, did most of the teaching. Wendell, Sophia and Amelia are those three people at one remove. Barnes went back to the same household thirty years later in her verse play The Antiphon, and never explained either book.

The censorship is printed on the page. Under the Comstock obscenity laws parts of the book could not go through the United States mail, and rather than let the Post Office decide, Barnes and Liveright cut it first and marked every cut: twelve passages replaced by rows of asterisks, five of her drawings removed. Liveright printed her foreword objecting to the arrangement. The asterisks are still there in the first edition — one row sits in the middle of the Chaucerian chapter about Wendell's occupations, another in the middle of Amelia's speech while she is giving birth — and they are the most modern thing in the book.

It opens with a sermon. "Jesus Mundane" is four pages of biblical pastiche addressed to an ordinary believer, telling him not to go with fanatics, not to reach beyond the image, and not to bargain in figures he does not understand. No character has appeared yet.

Then the family. Sophia Grieve Ryder is the daughter of Jonathan Buxton Ryder, a Connecticut book-dealer, and of Cynthia, who bore fourteen children and lost her mind somewhere in the middle of it. Sophia grows up sharp and coarse and funny, commissions five chamber-pots with a rude verse lettered in gold under the lip, and by 1900 is running a salon out of her bedroom in London, its walls papered several inches deep in overlapping pictures of everyone she admires. Her second son Wendell is born in 1865. She tells him, when he is old enough, that he was not fathered by her husband at all but by Beethoven, who walked into her in a dream and out the other side without stopping.

Wendell fails at the one job he ever holds — three weeks as a drug clerk, ten shillings and threepence a week, sacked — and resolves never to work again. He keeps that promise. What he does instead is think, and breed. A long chapter in Chaucerian verse, with footnotes, lays out his occupations: fathering children as though dealing a pack of cards, black for daughters and red for sons, until he has fifty-two; contriving devices; running a mail-order advice business under an invented name; travelling in his head so vigorously that he has to be excused from carrying coal.

Amelia de Grier is a Tittencote girl, the favourite of twelve children of a builder who liked his furniture better than his wife. Her mother's one piece of advice is to let no man touch her, to keep her legs in her own life, and never to have children. Amelia goes up to London at twenty-four with a small legacy, studies violin badly for eight months, meets Wendell over a garden wall, hands her legacy to his mother, and sails for America. Her sister Ann spends their last night together weeping that Amelia will be eaten by savages and that the ear will come home by post.

In America the household is a two-room log cabin above the Hudson: two beds down, two beds up, one stove, a ladder Wendell cut himself, and a picture of Beethoven on the wall. Amelia goes down the hill each day to char in the mansion of Wendell's respectable brother, because Wendell will not work and Sophia is prostrate with grief over a husband she has thrown out. Then Kate-Careless comes — a street-organ singer's daughter who has been a child actor, run off with a landscape painter, and kept house on a houseboat on Lake Erie until she got tired of fishing him out of the water. Sophia tells her to call her Mother, and Kate moves in.

The rest is the household running. The two women bear children on the same night in different rooms while a labourer in the upper field remarks that the singing is a damned literal song and he has heard it before. Wendell keeps his children out of school and, summoned to explain himself, tells the school board what he is raising and then invites the whole room to look into their own well, where three rats and a cat are floating. Dr Matthew O'Connor, the family physician, delivers the babies and talks — about his twelve brothers and sisters, about Father Lucas's confessional, about the three great moments of history, and, at length, about himself.