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 l
istening 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 … The book follows the children into the cold beds they warm, goes with them into their dreams: when you read about Louie’s hard-soft nightmare or the horseman she hears when she wakes in the middle of the night, you are touching childhood itself.
VI
There is a bewitching rapidity and lack of self-consciousness about Christina Stead’s writing; she has much knowledge, extraordinary abilities, but is too engrossed in what she is doing ever to seem conscious of them, so that they do not cut her off from the world but join her to it. How literary she makes most writers seem! Her book is very human, and full of humor of an unusual kind; the spirit behind it doesn’t try to be attractive and is attractive. As you read the book’s climactic and conclusive pages you are conscious of their genius and of the Tightness of that genius: it is as though at these moments Christina Stead’s mind held in its grasp the whole action, the essential form, of The Man Who Loved Children.
Say that you read: “As Henny sat before her teacup and the steam rose from it and the treacherous foam gathered, uncollectible round its edge, the thousand storms of her confined life would rise up before her, thinner illusions on the steam. She did not laugh at the words ‘a storm in a teacup.’ ” You feel an astonished satisfaction at the swift and fatal conclusiveness, the real poetry—the concentration of experience into a strange and accurate, resonant image—of such a passage. Doesn’t one feel the same satisfaction with, wonder at, some of the passages I have already quoted? But quotation gives no idea of what is most important in Christina Stead’s style, its simple narrative power—she tells what happens so that it happens, and to you. The direct immediate life of most of her sentences is in extraordinary contrast to the complicated uneasy life of others; as her content varies, her style varies. Ordinary styles have the rhythmical and structural monotony of a habit, of something learned and persisted in. A style like Christina Stead’s, so remarkable for its structural variety, its rhythmical spontaneity, forces you to remember that a style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. Often a phrase or sentence has the uncaring unconscious authority—how else could you say it?—that only a real style has. But few such styles have the spontaneity of Christina Stead’s; its own life carries it along, here rapid and a little rough, here good-humoredly, grotesquely incisive, here purely beautiful—and suddenly, without ever stopping being natural, it is grand.
Her style is live enough and spontaneous enough to be able to go on working without her; but, then, its life is mechanical. When her style is at its worst you have the illusion that, once set in motion, it can rattle along indefinitely, narrating the incidents of a picaresque, Pollit-y universe with an indiscriminate vivacity that matches theirs. (You remember, then, that where everybody’s somebody, nobody’s anybody—that Christina Stead is, on her father’s side, a Pollit.) But, normally, you listen to “the breeze, still brittle, not fully leaved”; see a mountain graveyard, “all grass and long sights”; have a child raise to you its “pansy kitten-face”; see a ragged girl fling out her arms in “a gesture that somehow recalled the surf beating on a coast, the surf of time or of sorrows”; see that in the world outside “clouds were passing over, swiftly staining the garden, the stains soaking in and leaving only bright light again.” You read: “Bonnie stayed upstairs sobbing, thinking she had a broken heart, until she heard soft things like the hands of ghosts rubbing her counterpane and soft ghostly feet unsteadily shifting on her rug; and, looking up, she saw Evie and Isabel staring at her with immense rabbit eyes. In a little crockery voice, Isabel asked, ‘What are you crying for?’ ” Louie’s dying uncle tells her the story of Pilgrim’s Progress; “and occasionally he would pause, the eyes would be fixed on her, and suddenly he would smile with his long dark lips; the face would no longer be the face of a man dying of consumption, with its burning eyes, but the ravishment of love incarnate, speaking through voiceless but not secret signs to the child’s nature.” Sometimes one of her long descriptive sentences lets you see a world at once strange and familiar, Christina Stead’s and your own: the romantic Louie looks out at the shabby old Georgetown of the 1930’s and sees “the trees of the heath round the Naval Observatory, the lamplight falling over the wired, lichened fence of the old reservoirs, the mysterious, long, dim house that she yearned for, the strange house opposite, and below, the vapor-blue city of Washington, pale, dim-lamped, under multitudinous stars, like a winter city of Africa, she thought, on this night at this hour.” As you look at the landscapes—houses and yards and trees and birds and weathers—of The Man Who Loved Children, you see that they are alive, and yet you can’t tell what has made them come to life—not the words exactly, not even the rhythm of the words, but something behind both: whatever it is that can make the landscapes live and beautiful, but that can make Ernie sobbing over his empty money box, and Henny beginning to cry, “Ugh-ugh,” with her face in her hands, more beautiful than any landscape.
VII
Christina Stead can perfectly imitate the surface of existence—and, what is harder, recognize and reproduce some of the structures underneath that surface, and use these to organize her book. You especially notice, in her representation of life, two structural processes: (1) A series of similar events, of increasing intensity and importance, that leads to a last event which sums up, incarnates, all the events that have come before. It is easy to recognize and hard to make up such an event; Christina Stead has an uncanny ability to imagine an event that will be the necessary but surprising sum of the events before it. (2) A series of quantitative changes that leads to a qualitative change: that is, a series of even
ts leading to a last qualitatively different event that at once sums up and contradicts the earlier events, and is the beginning of a new series. And Christina Stead depends almost as much on the conflict of opposites—for instance, of Sam with Henny, the male principle with the female principle, the children with the grown-ups, the ugly duckling with the ducks. She often employs a different principle of structure, the principle that a different point of view makes everything that is seen from that point of view different. Her book continually shows the difference between children’s and adults’ points of view, between men’s and women’s, between Henny’s relatives and Sam’s relatives, between Sam’s and anybody else’s, between Louie’s and anybody else’s, between Henny’s and anybody else’s—when Henny comes home from shopping and tells what happened on the trip, the people and events of the story seem to the children part of a world entirely different from their own, even if they have been along with Henny on the trip. A somewhat similar principle of organization is the opposition between practice and theory, between concrete fact and abstract rationalization, between what people says things are and what they are. And Christina Stead, like Chekhov, is fond of having a character tell you what life is, just before events themselves show you what it is.
The commonest and most nearly fundamental principle of organization, in serial arts like music and literature, is simply that of repetition; it organizes their notes or words very much as habit organizes our lives. Christina Stead particularly depends on repetition, and particularly understands the place of habit in our lives. If she admits that the proverb is true—Heaven gives us habits to take the place of happiness—she also admits that the habits are happiness of a sort, and that most happiness, after all, is happiness of a sort; she could say with Yeats that in Eden’s Garden “no pleasing habit ends.”
The Man Who Loved Children Page 3