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.”
IV
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.
V
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.
The Man Who Loved Children Page 2