The Man Who Loved Children (2 page)

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
…
”