The Man Who Loved Children (4 page)

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 listening 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.

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.

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 events 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.”

Her book, naturally, is full of the causal structures in terms of which we explain most of life to ourselves. Very different from the book’s use of these is its use of rhythm as structure, atmosphere as structure: for instance, the series of last things that leads up to Henny’s suicide has a dark finality of rhythm and atmosphere that prepares for her death as the air before a thunderstorm prepares for the thunderstorm. Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation;
The Man Who Loved Children
is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.

A person is a process, one that leads to death: in
The Man Who Loved Children
the most carefully worked out, conclusive process is Henny. Even readers who remember themselves as ugly ducklings (and take a sort of credulous, incredulous delight in Louie) will still feel their main human-ness identify itself with Henny: the book’s center of gravity, of tragic weight, is Henny. She is a violent, defeated process leading to a violent end, a closed tragic process leading to a conclusion of all potentiality, just as Louie is an open process leading to a “conclusion” that is pure potentiality. As the book ends, Henny has left, Louie is leaving, Sam stays. Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth. A man who repeats himself is funny; a man who repeats himself,
himself,
HIMSELF, is funnier. The book dignifies Henny in death, dismisses Sam with:
And he lived happily ever after.
The Pollits’ wild war of opposites, with Henny dead, becomes a tame peace. Even Louie, the resistance, leaves, and Sam-the-Bold, the Great I-Am, the Man Who Loved Children, is left to do as he pleases with the children.
For a while:
Sam has laid up for himself treasures that moth and rust can’t corrupt, but that the mere passage of the years destroys. Children don’t keep. In the end Sam will have to love those hard things to love, grown-ups; and, since this is impossible for Sam, Sam won’t despair, won’t change, but will simply get himself some more children. He has made the beings of this world, who are the ends of this world, means; when he loses some particular means what does it matter?—there are plenty of other means to that one end, Sam.