hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren

Lisa Hill at the ANZ Litlover's blog has written a series of posts about the first lines of books, and she suggests that I should do the same. "How about starting an opening lines series for Christina Stead’s books," she wrote, and I wrote back: "That’s not a bad idea. I could begin with Seven Poor Men of Sydney and work my way forwards."

The hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland lies curled like a scorpion in a blinding sea and sky. At night, house-lamps and ships' lanterns burn with a rousing shine, and the headlights of cars swing over Fisherman's Bay. In the day, the traffic of the village crawls along the skyline, past the lighthouse and signal station, and drops by cleft and volcanic gully to the old village that has a bare footing on the edge of the bay.

This was Stead's first novel, published when she was in her early thirties. It came out in 1934, the same year as The Salzburg Tales. Tales is her Decameron, a series of short stories told by different characters. That book arrived in January and Seven Poor Men in October, but Poor Men was something she had been working on for years, while Salzburg Tales had been written at the request of the publisher who picked up Men, a man named Peter Llewelyn Davies whose family had once been befriended by J.M. Barrie. Seven Poor Men is extravagant, he suggested. Write something normal. We'll introduce you to the world with that.

The author prefaces her opening lines with a chapter-heading description of the action to come - Fisherman's Bay. First days of the first poor man. An October night's dream. A stirring sermon has no effect on an ill-fated hero - and the reader can perceive immediately her energy, her desire to eat up everything and be everything: a teller of folk stories, and a social realist as well, occupying both the realm of story and the realm of the real world - a hugely ambitious writer. October night's dream is a nod to Shakespeare, one of her favourites.

The scene-setting is beautifully done, the bounce of "hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren" is daring, with its absence of commas (in other words, hesitations), and it is rhythmic, springing through the syllables: hah oh rr oh or and then the snap of the b on barren, letting us loose with the low smooth roll of the en. She whips the reader through the landscape with the same certainty that Ann Radcliff shows in The Mysteries of Udolpho - that consuming, roaming eye, searching for contrasts. Here's Radcliff:

To the south, the view was bounded by the majestic Pyrenees, whose summits, veiled in clouds, or exhibiting awful forms, seen, and lost again, as the partial vapours rolled along, were sometimes barren, and gleamed through the blue tinge of air, and sometimes frowned with forests of gloomy pine, that swept downward to their base. These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

Stead gives you day and night, taking in the artificial world and the natural world, not distancing one from the other, as Radcliff does in her books, but mating them. Everything has presence - the headland is a scorpion, waiting for action, and then we get real action: swinging headlights, traffic that crawls (reminding the reader that we started wih scorpions, crawling things) and then a dramatic drop and a vulnerable man-made environment, the "old village" with its "bare footing." Everything here is exciting.