The Man Who Loved Children (3 page)

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 She copies the poems into an out-of-date diary, which she hides; sometimes she reads them to the children in the orchard “for hours on end, while they sat with rosy, greedy faces upturned, listening.”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.’ ”