The Man Who Loved Children
Read The Man Who Loved Children Online
Authors: Christina Stead
Christina Stead
Introduction by Randall Jarrell
AN UNREAD BOOK
BY RANDALL JARRELL
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.”