AN UNREAD BOOK
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
A MAN ON A PARK BENCH has a lonely final look, as if to say: “Reduce humanity to its ultimate particles and you end here; beyond this single separate being you cannot go.” But if you look back into his life you cannot help seeing that he is separated off, not separate—is a later, singular stage of an earlier plural being. All the tongues of men were baby-talk to begin with: go back far enough and which of us knew where he ended and Mother and Father and Brother and Sister began? The singular subject in its objective universe has evolved from that original composite entity—half-subjective, half-objective, having its own ways and laws and language, its own life and its own death—the family.
The Man Who Loved Children knows as few books have ever known—knows specifically, profoundly, exhaustively—what a family is: if all mankind had been reared in orphan asylums for a thousand years, it could learn to have families again by reading The Man Who Loved Children. Tolstoy said that “each unhappy family is unhappy in a way of its own—” a way that it calls happiness; the Pollits, a very unhappy family, are unhappy in a way almost unbelievably their own. And yet as we read we keep thinking: “How can anything so completely itself, so completely different from me and mine, be, somehow, me and mine?” The book has an almost frightening power of remembrance; and so much of our earlier life is repressed, forgotten, both in the books we read and the memories we have, that this seems friendly of the book, even when what it reminds us of is terrible. A poem says, “O to be a child again, just for tonight!” As you read The Man Who Loved Children it is strange to have the wish come true.
When you begin to read about the Pollits you think with a laugh, “They’re wonderfully plausible.” When you have read fifty or a hundred pages you think with a desperate laugh, or none, that they are wonderfully implausible—implausible as mothers and fathers and children, in isolation, are implausible. There in that warm, dark, second womb, the bosom of the family, everything is carried far past plausibility: a family’s private life is as immoderate and insensate, compared to its public life, as our thoughts are, compared to our speech. (O secret, satisfactory, shameless things! things that, this side of Judgment Day, no stranger ever will discover.) Dostoevsky wrote: “Almost every reality, even if it has its own immutable laws, nearly always is incredible as well as improbable. Occasionally, moreover, the more real, the more improbable it is.” Defending the reality of his own novels, he used to say that their improbable extremes were far closer to everyday reality than the immediately plausible, statistical naturalism of the books everyone calls lifelike; as a proof he would read from newspaper clippings accounts of the characters and events of a Dostoevsky novel. Since Christina Stead combines with such extremes an immediately plausible naturalism, she could find her own newspaper clippings without any trouble; but the easiest defense of all would be simply for her to say, “Remember?” We do remember; and, remembering, we are willing to admit the normality of the abnormal—are willing to admit that we never understand the normal better than when it has been allowed to reach its full growth and become the abnormal.
Inside the Pollit family the ordinary mitigated, half-appreciative opposition of man and woman has reached its full growth. Sam and his wife Henny are no longer on speaking terms; they quarrel directly, but the rest of the time one parent says to a child what the child repeats to the other parent. They are true opposites: Sam’s blue-eyed, white-gold-haired, pale fatness is closer to Henny’s haggard saffron-skinned blackness than his light general spirit is to her dark particular one. The children lean to one side of the universe or the other and ask for understanding: “Sam’s answers were always to the point, full of facts; while the more one heard of Henny’s answer, the more intriguing it was, the less was understood. Beyond Sam stood the physical world, and beyond Henny—what?”
Like Henny herself are Henny’s treasure drawers, a chaos of laces, ribbons, gloves, flowers, buttons, hairpins, pots of rouge, bits of mascara, foreign coins, medicines (Henny’s own “aspirin, phenacetin, and pyramidon”); often, as a treat, the children are allowed to look in the drawers. “A musky smell always came from Henrietta’s room, a combination of dust, powder, scent, body odors that stirred the children’s blood, deep, deep.” At the center of the web of odors is their Mothering, Moth, Motherbunch, “like a tall crane in the reaches of the river, standing with one leg crooked and listening. She would look fixedly at her vision and suddenly close her eyes. The child watching (there was always one) would see nothing but the huge eyeball in its glove of flesh, deep-sunk in the wrinkled skull-hole, the dark circle round it and the eyebrow far above, as it seemed, while all her skin, unrelieved by brilliant eye, came out in its real shade, burnt olive. She looked formidable in such moments, in her intemperate silence, the bitter set of her discolored mouth with her uneven slender gambler’s nose and scornful nostrils, lengthening her sharp oval face, pulling the dry skinfolds. Then when she opened her eyes there would shoot out a look of hate, horror, passion, or contempt.”
To the children she is “a charming, slatternly witch; everything that she did was right, right, her right: she claimed this right to do what she wished because of all her sufferings, and all the children believed in her rights.” She falls in a faint on the floor, and the accustomed children run to get pillows, watch silently “the death-like face, drawn and yellow under its full black hair,” the “poor naked neck with its gooseflesh.” She is nourished on “tea and an aspirin”; “tea, almost black, with toast and mustard pickles”; a “one-man curry” of “a bit of cold meat, a hard-boiled egg, some currants, and an onion”—as her mother says, “All her life she’s lived on gherkins and chilies and Worcestershire sauce. … She preferred pickled walnuts at school to candy.” She sews, darns, knits, embroiders. School had taught her only three things, to play Chopin (“there would steal through the listening house flights of notes, rounded as doves, wheeling over housetops in the sleeping afternoon, Chopin or Brahms, escaping from Henny’s lingering, firm fingers”), to paint watercolors, and to sew. It is life that has taught her to give it “her famous black look”; to run through once again the rhymes, rituals, jokes, sayings, stories—inestimable stones, unvalued jewels—that the children beg her for; to drudge at old tasks daily renewed; to lie and beg and borrow and sink deeper into debt; to deal the cards out for the game she cheats at and has never won, an elaborate two-decked solitaire played “feverishly, until her mind was a darkness, until all the memories and the ease had long since drained away … leaving her sitting there, with blackened eyes, a yellow skin, and straining wrinkles.” Marriage, that had found Henny a “gentle, neurotic creature wearing silk next to the skin and expecting to have a good time at White House receptions,” has left her “a thin, dark scarecrow,” a “dirty cracked plate, that’s just what I am.” In the end, her black hair swiftly graying, she has turned into “a dried-up, skinny, funny old woman” who cries out: “I’m an old woman, your mother’s an old woman”; who cries out, “Isn’t it rotten luck? Isn’t every rotten thing in life rotten luck?”
All Henny’s particularities, peculiarities, sum themselves up into a strange general representativeness, so that she somehow stands for all women. She shares helplessly “the natural outlawry of womankind,” of creatures who, left-handed, sidelong in the right-handed, upright world of men, try to get around by hook or by crook, by a last weak winning sexual smile, the laws men have made for them. Henny “was one of those women who secretly symphathize with all women against all men; life was a rotten deal, with men holding all the aces.” Women, as people say, take everything personally—even Henny’s generalizations of all existence are personal, and so living. As she does her “microscopic darning,” sometimes a “small mouse would run past, or even boldly stand and inquisitively stare at her. Henny would look down at its monstrous pointed little face calmly and go on with her work.” She accepts the “sooty little beings” as “house guests” except when she wakes to smell the “musky penetrating odor of their passage”; or when she looks at one and sees that it is a pregnant mother; or when the moralist her husband says that mice bring germs, and obliges her to kill them. She kills them; “nevertheless, though she despised animals, she felt involuntarily that the little marauder was much like herself, trying to get by.” Henny is an involuntary, hysterical moralist or none; as her creator says, “Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world.” And yet, and so, your heart goes out to her, because she is miserably what life has made her, and makes her misery her only real claim on existence. Her husband wants to be given credit for everything, even his mistakes—especially his mistakes, which are always well-meaning, right-minded ones that in a better world would be unmistaken. Henny is an honest liar; even Sam’s truths are ways to get his own way.
But you remember best about Henny what is worst about Henny: her tirades. These are too much and (to tell the truth) too many for us; but if anything so excessive is to be truthfully represented, that is almost inevitable. These tirades are shameful, insensate, and interminable, including and exaggerating all that there is; looking at the vile world, her enemy, Henny cries: “Life is nothing but rags and tags, and filthy rags at that. Why was I ever born?” Before long the reader has impressed upon his shrinking flesh the essential formula of Henny’s rhetoric. A magnifying word like great is followed by an intensive like vile, filthy, rotten, foul: Henny’s nose has been shoved into the filth of things, so that she sees them magnified, consummately foul, as Swift saw the bodies and the physiological processes of the people of Brobdingnag. At the “mere sight of the great flopping monster” her stepdaughter, Henny cries out: “She’s that Big-Me all over again. Always with her eyes glued to a book. I feel like snatching the rotten thing from her and pushing it into her eyes, her great lolling head. … She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice! I beat her until I can’t stand—she doesn’t notice! When I fall on the floor, she runs and gets a pillow and at that I suppose she’s better than her murderer of a father who lets me lie there.”
The girl sewing a fine seam, the watercolor-painter, the piano-player has stepped from the altar into the filth of marriage and child-bearing and child-rearing; and forever after she can tell the truth about it—the naked, physiological, excremental truth—only in physiological, excremental terms. It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes: the hag Henny stares out at “the darn muck of existence,” the foul marsh above which the dwellings of men rise on precarious stilts, and screams at it her daemonic tirades. She knows. Whatever men say, women know; as an old woman says chuckling, an accessory to the fact: “Life’s dirty, isn’t it, Louie, eh? Don’t you worry what they say to you, we’re all dirty.” Sometimes even Henny absently consents to it: “she looked vaguely about, sniffing that familiar smell of fresh dirtiness which belongs to mankind’s extreme youth, a pleasant smell to mothers.”
When Henny is “defenceless, in one of those absences of hatred, aimless lulls that all long wars must have,” she looks at us “strangely, with her great, brown eyes,” and even her husband’s “heart would be wrung with their unloving beauty.” Our own hearts are wrung by Henny: when, “beginning to cry like a little girl, and putting the fold of her dressing gown to her face,” she cries, “Ai, ai”; when she feels “a curious, dull, but new sensation,” and awakening from “a sort of sullen absence … knew what was happening: her heart was breaking. That moment, it broke for good and all”; when, no longer able to “stand any of this life any longer,” in a sort of murderous delirium she beats her favorite child “across the head, screaming at him, ‘Die, die, why don’t you all die and leave me to die or to hang; fall down, die; what do I care?’ ”—while her son, “not thinking of defending himself,” cries “brokenly, in a warm, pleading voice, ‘Mother, don’t, don’t, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, don’t, please, please, Mother, Mother’ ”; when her love affair—an affair like a piece of dirty newspaper—reaches its abject public end; when, a few days after death, “the image of Henny started to roam … the window curtains flapped, the boards creaked, a mouse ran, and Henny was there, muttering softly to herself, tapping a sauce pan, turning on the gas. The children were not frightened. They would say, laughing, somewhat curious, ‘I thought I heard Mothering,’ and only Ernie or Tommy … would look a bit downcast; and perhaps Chappy missed her, that queer, gypsylike, thin, tanned, pointed face with big black eyes rolling above him”; and when, last of all, the storms of July thunder above her grave, and “it was as if Henny too had stormed, but in another room in the universe, which was now under lock and key.”
There is something grand and final, indifferent to our pity, about Henny: one of those immortal beings in whom the tragedy of existence is embodied, she looks unseeingly past her mortal readers. The absurdity and hypocrisy of existence are as immortal in her husband Sam.
All of us can remember waking from a dream and uselessly longing to go back into the dream. In Sam the longing has been useful: he has managed to substitute for everyday reality an everyday dream, a private work of art—complete with its own language, customs, projects, ideology—in which, occasionally pausing for applause, he goes on happily and foolishly and self-righteously existing. As he reads about Henny the reader feels, in awe, how terrible it must be to be Henny; as he reads about Sam he blurts, “Oh, please don’t let me be like Sam!” Sam is more than human; occasionally he has doubts, and is merely human for a moment—so that our laughter and revulsion cease, and we uneasily pity him—but then the moment is over and he is himself again.
Often Henny, in defeated misery, plunges to rock-bottom, and gropes among the black finalities of existence; up above, in the holy light, the busy Sam, “painting and scraping and singing and jigging from the crack of dawn,” clambers happily about in the superstructure of life. There among his own children, his own speeches, his own small zoo, pond, rockery, aquaria, museum (“What a world of things he had to have to keep himself amused!”), the hobbyist, naturalist, bureaucrat, democrat, moralist, atheist, teetotaler, ideologue, sermonizer, sentimentalist, prude, hypocrite, idealist Sam can say, like Kulygin: “I am satisfied, I am satisfied, I am satisfied!” If he had not been married he would not have remembered that he was mortal. Sam “was naturally light-hearted, pleasant, all generous effusion and responsive emotion. … Tragedy itself could not worm its way by any means into his heart. Such a thing would have made him ill or mad, and he was all for health, sanity, success, and human love.”
Sam’s vanity is ultimate: the occasional objectivity or common decency that makes us take someone else’s part, not our own, is impossible for Sam, who is right because he is Sam. It is becoming for Sam to love children so (Henny says in mockery, “The man who loves children!” and gives the book its title), since he himself is partly an adult and partly a spoiled child in his late thirties; even his playing with words, the grotesque self-satisfying language he makes for himself, is the work of a great child, and exactly right for children. After he has had to live among adults for eight months, he seems sobered and commonplace; but at home among the children, he soon is Sam again. At home “the children listened to every word he said, having been trained to him from the cradle.” He addresses them “in that low, humming, cello voice and with that tender, loving face he had when beginning one of his paeans or dirges”; his speech has “a low insinuating humming that enchanted the sulky ear-guards and got straight to their softened brains.” The children listen open-mouthed; but Sam’s mouth is open wider still, as he wonders at himself. “Were not his own children happy, healthy, and growing like weeds, merely through having him to look up to and through knowing that he was always righteous, faithful, and understanding?” It is wonderful to him that he originates independently the discoveries of the great: “The theory of the expanding universe … it came to me by myself. … And very often I have an idea and then find months, years later, that a man like our very great Woodrow Wilson or Lloyd George or Einstein has had it too.”
Kim was the Little Friend of all the World; Sam is its Little Father. He wishes that he “had a black baby too. A tan or Chinese one—every kind of baby. I am sorry that the kind of father I can be is limited.” A relative objects, to his not sending the children to Sunday school, “When they grow up they will have nothing to believe in.” Sam replies: “Now they believe in their poor little Dad: and when they grow up they’ll believe in Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Einstein.” Their poor little Dad is for the Pollit children a jealous God, one who interferes with everything they do and still is not satisfied, but imports children from outside the family so that he can interfere with them. He makes each of the children tell him what the others are doing “in the secrecy of their rooms or the nooks they had made their own. With what surprise and joy he would seize on all this information of his loving spies, showing them traits of character, drawing a moral conclusion from everything!” Sam loves and enjoys the children, the children admire and enjoy Sam; and yet there is nothing too awful for him to do to them and feel that he is right to do to them—the worst things are so mean and petty, are full of such selfishness and hypocrisy, are so impossible, that even as you believe you cry, “It’s unbelievable!”
We can bear to read about Sam, a finally exasperating man, only because he is absolutely funny and absolutely true. He is so entirely real that it surprises the reader when an occasional speech of his—for instance, some of his Brave New World talk about the future—is not convincing. Perhaps different parts of his speech have different proportions of imagination and fancy and memory: it doesn’t seem that the same process (in Christina Stead, that is) has produced everything. But Sam is an Anglo-Saxon buffoon, hypocrite, quite as extraordinary as the most famous of Dostoevsky’s or Saltykov-Schedrin’s Slavic ones. Sam asks for everything and with the same breath asks to be admired for never having asked for anything; his complete selfishness sees itself as a complete selflessness. When he has been out of work for many months, it doesn’t bother him: “About their money, as about everything, he was vague and sentimental. But in a few months he would be earning, and in the meantime, he said, ‘It was only right that the mother too should fend for her offspring.’ ” One morning there are no bananas. “Sam flushed with anger. ‘Why aren’t there any bananas? I don’t ask for much. I work to make the Home Beautiful for one and all, and I don’t even get bananas. Everyone knows I like bananas. If your mother won’t get them, why don’t some of you? Why doesn’t anyone think of poor little Dad?’ He continued, looking in a most pathetic way round the table, at the abashed children, ‘It isn’t much. I give you kids a house and a wonderful playground of nature and fish and marlin and everything, and I can’t even get a little banana.’ ” Sam moralizes, rationalizes, anything whatsoever: the children feel that they have to obey, ought to obey, his least whim. There is an abject reality about the woman Henny, an abject ideality about the man Sam; he is so idealistically, hypocritically, transcendentally masculine that a male reader worries, “Ought I to be a man?”
Every family has words and phrases of its own; that ultimate family, the Pollits, has what amounts to a whole language of its own. Only Sam can speak it, really, but the children understand it and mix phrases from it into their ordinary speech. (If anyone feels that it is unlikely for a big grown man to have a little language of his own, let me remind him of that great grown man Swift.) Children’s natural distortions of words and the distortions of Artemus Ward and Uncle Remus are the main sources of this little language of Sam’s. As we listen to Sam talking in it, we exclaim in astonished veneration, “It’s so!” Many of the words and phrases of this language are so natural that we admire Christina Stead for having invented them at the same instant at which we are thinking, “No, nobody, not even Christina Stead, could have made that up!”—they have the uncreated reality of any perfect creation. I quote none of the language: a few sentences could show neither how marvellous it is nor how marvellously it expresses Sam’s nature, satisfies his every instinct. When he puts his interminable objections and suggestions and commands into the joke-terms of this unctuous, wheedling, insinuating language—what a tease the wretch is!—it is as if to make the least disagreement on the part of the children a moral impossibility.
His friend Saul says to Sam: “Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world.” It is true; and the world he creates is a world of wishes or wish-fantasies. What Freud calls the primary principle, the pleasure principle, is always at work in that world—the claims of the reality principle, of the later ego, have been abrogated. It is a world of free fantasy: “Sam began to wonder at himself: why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker.”
Bismarck said: “You can do anything with children if you will only play with them.” All Bismarck’s experience of mankind has been concentrated into knowledge, and the knowledge has been concentrated into a single dispassionate sentence. Sam has, so to speak, based his life on this sentence; but he has taken literally the children and play that are figurative in Bismarck’s saying. Children are damp clay which Sam can freely and playfully manipulate. Yet even there he prefers “the very small boys” and “the baby girls”; the larger boys, the girls of school age, somehow cramp his style. (His embryonic love affair is an affair not with a grown-up but with the child-woman Gillian.) He reasons and moralizes mainly to force others to accept his fantasy, but the reasoning and moralizing have become fantastic in the process.
In psychoanalytical textbooks we read of the mechanism of denial. Surely Sam was its discoverer: there is no reality—except Henny—stubborn enough to force Sam to recognize its existence if its existence would disturb his complacency. We feel for Sam the wondering pity we feel for a man who has put out his own eyes and gets on better without them. To Sam everything else in the world is a means to an end, and the end is Sam. He is insensate. So, naturally, he comes out ahead of misunderstanding, poverty, Henny, anything. Life itself, in Johnson’s phrase, dismisses him to happiness: “ ‘All things work together for the good of him that loves the Truth,’ said the train to Sam as it rattled down towards the Severn, ‘all things—work—together—for the good—of him—that loves—the TRUTH!’ ”
Sam is one of those providential larger-than-life-size creations, like Falstaff, whom we wonder and laugh at and can’t get enough of; like Queen Elizabeth wanting to see Falstaff in love, we want to see Sam in books called Sam at School, Sam in the Arctic, Grandfather Sam. About him there is the grandeur of completeness: beyond Sam we cannot go. Christina Stead’s understanding of him is without hatred; her descriptions of his vilest actions never forget how much fun it is to be Sam, and she can describe Sam’s evening walk with his child in sentences that are purely and absolutely beautiful: “Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father’s head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the day-shine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”
A description of Louie ought to begin with Louie knew she was the ugly duckling. It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling!—it is almost as if the grown, successful swan had repressed most of the memories of the duckling’s miserable, embarrassing, magical beginnings. (These memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he once was more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is.) Stumbling through creation in awful misery, in oblivious ecstasy, the fat, clumsy, twelve- or thirteen-year-old Louie is, as her teacher tells her, one of those who “will certainly be famous.” We believe this because the book is full of the evidence for it: the poems and plays Louie writes, the stories she tells, the lines she quotes, the things she says. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces. We do not have to take on trust Louie’s work, and she is real to us as an artist.
Someone in a story says that when you can’t think of anything else to say you say, “Ah, youth, youth!” But sometimes as you read about Louie there is nothing else to say: your heart goes out in homesick joy to the marvellous inconsequential improbable reaching-out-to-everything of the duckling’s mind, so different from the old swan’s mind, that has learned what its interests are and is deaf and blind to the rest of reality. Louie says, “I wish I had a Welsh grammar.” Sam says, “Don’t be an idiot! What for?” Louie answers: “I’d like to learn Welsh or Egyptian grammar; I could read the poetry Borrow talks about and I could read The Book of the Dead.”
She starts to learn Paradise Lost by heart (“Why? She did not know really”); stuffs the little children full of La Rochefoucauld; in joyful amazement discovers that The Cenci is about her father and herself; recites,
A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,
No mere return for courtesy but that our friendship might outlast the grave,
indignantly insisting to the grown-ups that it is Confucius; puts as a motto on her wall, By my hope and faith, I conjure thee, throw not away the hero in your soul; triumphantly repeats to that little tyrant of her fields, Sam-the-Bold:
>The desolator desolate,
The tyrant overthrown,
The arbiter of other’s fate
A suppliant for his own!
Louie starts out on her own Faust, a “play, called Fortunatus, in which a student, sitting alone in his room in the beaming moon, lifts his weary head from the book and begins by saying,
The unforgotten song, the solitary song,
The song of the young heart in the age-old world,
Humming on new May’s reeds transports me back
To the vague regions of celestial space …”
For the teacher whom she loves Louie creates “a magnificent project, the Aiden cycle … a poem of every conceivable form and also every conceivable meter in the English language,” all about Miss Aiden. She copies the poems into an out-of-date diary, which she hides; sometimes she reads them to the children in the orchard “for hours on end, while they sat with rosy, greedy faces upturned, listening.” As Henny and Sam shriek at each other downstairs, Louie tells the children, lying loosely in bed in the warm night, the story of Hawkins, the North Wind. Most of Louie’s writings are so lyrically funny to us that as we laugh we catch our breath, afraid that the bubble will break. At Hawkins, a gruesomely satisfying story different from any story we have read before, we no longer laugh, nor can we look down at the story-teller with a grown-up’s tender, complacent love for a child: the story is dark with Louie’s genius and with Christina Stead’s.
Best of all is Tragos: Herpes Rom (Tragedy: The Snake-Man). Louie writes it, and the children act it out, for Sam’s birthday. It is written in a new language Louie has made up for it; the language-maker Sam says angrily, “Why isn’t it in English?” and Louie replies, “Did Euripides write in English?” Not only is the play exactly what Louie would have written, it is also a work of art in which the relations between Louie and her father, as she understands them, are expressed with concentrated, tragic force. Nowhere else in fiction, so far as I know, is there so truthful and satisfying a representation of the works of art the ugly duckling makes up, there in the morning of the world.
Louie reads most of the time—reads, even, while taking a shower: “her wet fingers pulped the paper as she turned.” Her life is accompanied, ostinato, by always has her nose stuck in a book … learn to hold your shoulders straight … it will ruin your eyes. Louie “slopped liquids all over the place, stumbled and fell when carrying buckets, could never stand straight to fold the sheets and tablecloths from the wash without giggling or dropping them in the dirt, fell over invisible creases in rugs, was unable to do her hair neatly, and was always leopard-spotted yellow and blue with old and new bruises. … She acknowledged her unwieldiness and unhandiness in this little world, but she had an utter contempt for everyone associated with her, father, stepmother, even brothers and sister, an innocent contempt which she never thought out, but which those round her easily recognized.” The Louie who laconically holds her scorched fingers in the candle-flame feels “a growling, sullen power in herself … She went up to bed insulted again. ‘I will repay,’ she said on the stairs, halting and looking over the banisters, with a frown.” When the world is more than she can bear she screams her secret at it: “ ‘I’m the ugly duckling, you’ll see,’ shrieked Louie.”
Most of the time she knows that she is better and more intelligent than, different from, the other inhabitants of her world; but the rest of the time she feels the complete despair—the seeming to oneself wrong, all wrong, about everything, everything—that is the other, dark side of this differentness. She is a force of nature, but she is also a little girl. Heart-broken when her birthday play is a shameful failure, like so much of her life at home, Louie “began to squirm and, unconsciously holding out one of her hands to Sam, she cried, ‘I am so miserable and poor and rotten and so vile [the words rotten and vile are natural, touching reminiscences of Henny’s tirade-style] and melodramatic, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I can’t bear the daily misery …’ She was bawling brokenly on the tablecloth, her shoulders heaving and her long hair, broken loose, plastered over her red face. ‘No wonder they all laugh at me,’ she bellowed. ‘When I walk along the street, everyone looks at me, and whispers about me, because I’m so messy. My elbows are out and I have no shoes and I’m so big and fat and it’ll always be the same. I can’t help it, I can’t help it … They all laugh at me: I can’t stand it any more …’ Coming to the table, as to a jury, she asked in a firmer voice, but still crying, ‘What will become of me? Will life go on like this? Will I always be like this?’ She appealed to Sam, ‘I have always been like this: I can’t live and go on being like this?’ ”
And Sam replies: “Like what? Like what? I never heard so much idiotic drivel in my born days. Go and put your fat head under the shower.”
To Louie the world is what won’t let her alone. And the world’s interferingness is nothing to Sam’s: Sam—so to speak—wakes her up and asks her what she’s dreaming just so as to be able to make her dream something different; and then tells her that not every little girl is lucky enough to have a Sam to wake her up. To be let alone! is there any happiness that compares with it, for someone like Louie? Staying with her mother’s relatives in the summer, she feels herself inexplicably, miraculously given a little space of her own—is made, for a few weeks, a sort of grown-up by courtesy. And since Louie has “a genius for solitude,” she manages to find it even at home. Henny may scold her and beat her, but Henny does leave her alone (“It is a rotten shame, when I think that the poor kid is dragged into all our rotten messes”), and Louie loves her for it—when Sam talks to Louie about her real mother, Louie retorts, “Mother is my mother,” meaning Henny.
At school Louie “was in heaven, at home she was in a torture chamber.” She never tells anyone outside “what it is like at home … no one would believe me!” To the ordinary misery of differentness is added the misery of being the only one who sees the endless awful war between Henny and Sam for what it is: “Suddenly she would think, Who can see aught good in thee/ Soul-destroying misery? and in this flash of intelligence she understood that her life and their lives were wasted in this contest and that the quarrel between Henny and Sam was ruining their moral natures.” It is only Louie who tries to do anything about it all: with a young thing’s fresh sense and ignorance and courage she tries to save the children and herself in the only way that she knows—what she does and what she can’t quite make herself do help to bring the book to its wonderful climax. It is rare for a novel to have an ending as good as its middle and beginning: the sixty or seventy pages that sum up The Man Who Loved Children, bring the action of the book to its real conclusion, are better than even the best things that have come before.
As he looks at Louie Sam “can’t understand what on earth caused this strange drifting nebula to spin.” By the time we finish the book we have been so thoroughly in sympathy and in empathy with Louie that we no longer need to understand—we are used to being Louie. We think about her, as her teacher thinks: “It’s queer to know everything and nothing at the same time.” Louie knows, as she writes in her diary, that “everyday experience which is misery degrades me”; she mutters aloud, “If I did not know I was a genius, I would die: why live?”; a stranger in her entirely strange and entirely familiar family, she cries to her father: “I know something, I know there are people not like us, not muddleheaded like us, better than us.” She knows that soon she will have escaped into the world of the people better than us, the great objective world better than Shakespeare and Beethoven and Donatello put together—didn’t they all come out of it? Louie is a potentiality still sure that what awaits it in the world is potentiality, not actuality. That she is escaping from some Pollits to some more Pollits, that she herself will end as an actuality among actualities, an accomplished fact, is an old or middle-aged truth or half-truth that Louie doesn’t know. As Louie’s story ends she has gone for a walk, “a walk around the world”; she starts into the future accompanied by one of those Strauss themes in which a whole young orchestra walks springily off into the sunshine, as though going away were a final good.
As you read The Man Who Loved Children what do you notice first? How much life it has, how natural and original it is; Christina Stead’s way of seeing and representing the world is so plainly different from anyone else’s that after a while you take this for granted, and think cheerfully, “Oh, she can’t help being original.” The whole book is different from any book you have read before. What other book represents—tries to represent, even—a family in such conclusive detail?
Aristotle speaks of the pleasure of recognition; you read The Man Who Loved Children with an almost ecstatic pleasure of recognition. You get used to saying, “Yes, that’s the way it is”; and you say many times, but can never get used to saying, “I didn’t know anybody knew that.” Henny, Sam, Louie, and the children—not to speak of some of the people outside the family—are entirely real to the reader. This may not seem much of a claim: every year thousands of reviewers say it about hundreds of novels. But what they say is conventional exaggeration—reality is rare in novels.
Many of the things of the world come to life in The Man Who Loved Children: the book has an astonishing sensory immediacy. Akin to this is its particularity and immediacy of incident; it is full of small, live, characteristic, sometimes odd or grotesque details that are at once surprising enough and convincing enough to make the reader feel, “No, nobody could have made that up.” And akin to these on a larger scale are all the “good scenes” in the book: scenes that stand out in the reader’s memory as in some way remarkable—as representing something, summing something up, with real finality. There is an extraordinary concentration of such scenes in the pages leading up to the attempted murder and accomplished suicide that is the climax of the book: Ernie’s lead, Louie’s play, Louie’s breakdown after it, Ernie’s money box, Ernie’s and Louie’s discoveries before Miss Aiden comes, Miss Aiden’s visit, Henny’s beating of Ernie, the end of Henny’s love affair, Henny’s last game of solitaire, the marlin, Sam and the bananas, the last quarrel. That these scenes come where they do is evidence of Christina Stead’s gift for structure; but you are bewildered by her regular ability to make the scenes that matter most the book’s best imagined and best realized scenes.
Without its fairly wide range of people and places, attitudes and emotions, The Man Who Loved Children might seem too concentrated and homogeneous a selection of reality. But the people outside the Pollit household are quite varied: for instance, Louie’s mother’s family, Sam’s and Henny’s relatives, some of the people at Singapore, Henny’s Bert Anderson, the “norphan” girl, Louie’s friend Clare. There are not so many places—Washington, Ann Arbor, Harper’s Ferry, Singapore—but each seems entirely different and entirely alive. As he reads about Louie’s summers the reader feels, “So this is what Harper’s Ferry looks like to an Australian!” European readers are used to being told what Europe looks like to an American or Russian of genius; we aren’t, and we enjoy it. (Occasionally Christina Stead has a kind of virtuoso passage to show that she is not merely a foreign visitor, but a real inhabitant of the United States; we enjoy, and are amused at, it.) Because The Man Who Loved Children brings to life the variety of the world outside the Pollit household, the happenings inside it—terrible as some of them are—do not seem depressing or constricted or monotonous to the reader: “within, a torment raged, day and night, week, month, year, always the same, an endless conflict, with its truces and breathing spaces; out here were a dark peace and love.” And, too, many of the happenings inside the family have so much warmth and habitual satisfaction, are so pleasant or cozy or funny, are so interesting, that the reader forgets for a moment that this wonderful playground is also a battlefield.
Children-in-families have a life all their own, a complicated one. Christina Stead seems to have remembered it in detail from her childhood, and to have observed it in detail as an adult. Because of this knowledge she is able to imagine with complete realism the structures, textures, and atmosphere of one family’s spoken and unspoken life. She is unusually sensitive to speech-styles, to conversation-structures, to everything that makes a dialogue or monologue a sort of self-propagating entity; she knows just how family speech is different from speech outside the family, children’s speech different from adults’. She gives her children the speeches of speakers to whom a word has the reality of a thing: a thing that can be held wrong-side-up, played with like a toy, thrown at someone like a toy. Children’s speech-ways—their senseless iteration, joyous nonsense, incremental variation, entreaties and insults, family games, rhymes, rituals, proverbs with the force of law, magical mistakes, occasional uncannily penetrating descriptive phrases—are things Christina Stead knows as well as she knows the speech-ways of families, of people so used to each other that half the time they only half-say something, imply it with a family phrase, or else spell it out in words too familiar to be heard, just as the speaker’s face is too familiar to be seen. The book’s household conversations between mother and child, father and child, are both superficially and profoundly different from any conversation in the world outside; reading such conversations is as satisfying as being given some food you haven’t tasted since childhood. (After making your way through the great rain-forest of the children’s speech, you come finally to one poor broomstick of a tree, their letters: all the children—as Ernie says, laughing—”start out with ‘Dear Dad, I hope you are well, I am well, Mother is well,” and then they get stuck.”) The children inherit and employ, or recognize with passive pleasure, the cultural scraps—everything from Mozart to Hiawatha—that are a part of the sounds the grown-ups make. Father and Mother are gods but (it is strange!) gods who will sometimes perform for you on request, taking part in a ritual, repeating stories or recitations, pretending to talk like a Scot or a Jew or an Englishman—just as, earlier, they would pretend to be a bear.
Christina Stead knows the awful eventfulness of little children’s lives. That grown-ups seldom cry, scream, fall, fight each other, or have to be sent to bed seems very strange to someone watching children: a little child pays its debt to life penny by penny. Sam is able to love a life spent with children because he himself has the insensate busy-ness of a child. Yet, wholly familiar as he is, partly child-like as he is, to the children he is monstrous—not the singular monster that he is to us, but the ordinary monster that any grown-up is to you if you weigh thirty or forty pounds and have your eyes two feet from the floor. Again and again the reader is conscious of Christina Stead’s gift for showing how different anything is when looked at from a really different point of view. Little Evie, “fidgeting with her aunt’s great arm around her, seemed to be looking up trustfully with her brown eyes, but those deceptive eyes were full of revolt, mistrust, and dislike”; she averts her gaze from her aunt’s “slab cheeks, peccary skin … the long, plump, inhuman thigh, the glossy, sufficient skirt, from everything powerful, coarse, and proud about this great unmated mare … “Oh,’ thought Evie to herself, ‘when I am a lady with a baby, I won’t have all those bumps, I won’t be so big and fat, I will be a little woman, thin like I am now and not fat in front or in the skirt.’ ”
One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grown-up; he believes, even, that being a grown-up is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grown-up live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grown-ups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grown-ups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the giant or ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grown-up looks to a child.
Grown-ups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them. Henny’s oldest boy Ernie (to whom money is the primary means of understanding and changing the world; he is a born economic determinist, someone with absolute pitch where money is concerned) is one of Christina Stead’s main ways of making us remember how mistaken and hypocritical grown-ups seem to children. Ernie feels that he sees the world as it is, but that grown-ups are no longer able to do this: their rationalization of their own actions, the infinitely complicated lie they have agreed to tell about the world, conceals the world from them. The child sees the truth, but is helpless to do anything about it.
The Pollit children are used to the terrible helplessness of a child watching its parents war. There over their heads the Sun and the Moon, God the Father and the Holy Virgin, are shouting at each other, striking each other—the children contract all their muscles, try not to hear, and hear. Sometimes, waked in darkness by the familiar sounds, they lie sleepily listening to their parents; hear, during some lull in the quarrel, a tree-frog or the sound of the rain.
Ernie feels the same helpless despair at the poverty of the family; thinking of how many children there already are, he implores, “Mothering, don’t have another baby!” (Henny replies, “You can bet your bottom dollar on that, old sweetness.”) But he does not really understand what he is saying: later on, he and the other children look uncomprehendingly at Henny, “who had again queerly become a large woman, though her hands, feet, and face remained small and narrow.” One night they are made to sleep downstairs, and hear Henny screaming hour after hour upstairs; finally, at morning, she is silent. “They had understood nothing at all, except that mother had been angry and miserable and now she was still; this was a blessed relief.” Their blank misunderstanding of what is sexual is the opposite of their eager understanding of what is excremental. They thrill to the inexplicably varying permissiveness of the world: here they are being allowed to laugh at, as a joke, what is ordinarily not referred to at all, or mentioned expediently, in family euphemisms!
The book is alive with their fights, games, cries of “You didn’t kiss me!”—”Look, Moth, Tommy kissed you in the glass!” But their great holidays so swiftly are gone: the “sun was going down, and Sunday-Funday was coming to an end. They all felt it with a kind of misery: with such a fine long day and so many things to do, how could they have let it slip past like this?” And summer vacation is the same: the indefinite, almost infinite future so soon is that small, definite, disregarded thing, the past!
On a winter night, with nothing but the fire in the living room to warm the house, the child runs to it crying, “Oo, gee whiz, is it cold; jiminy, I’m freezing. Moth, when are we going to get the coal?” (Anyone who remembers his childhood can feel himself saving those sentences—those and so many more of the book’s sentences.) And as the child grows older, how embarrassing the parent is, in the world outside: “Louie looked stonily ahead or desperately aside.” And, home again, the parent moralizes, sermonizes—won’t he ever stop talking?—to the child doing its homework, writing, writing, until finally the parent reads over the child’s shoulder what is being written on the page of notebook paper: Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up …