The Man Who Loved Children (5 page)

The process the book calls Louie is that of a child turning into a grown-up, a duckling turning into a swan, a being that exists in two worlds leaving the first world of the family for the world outside. The ugly duckling loves the other pretty ducklings and tries to save them from the awful war between the father duck and the mother duck—though the war is ended by Henny’s act, not Louie’s. Yet Louie knows that they are not really her brothers and sisters, not really her parents, and serenely leaves them for the swan-world in which, a swan, she will at least be reunited to her real family, who are swans. Or do swans have families? Need families? Who knows? Louie doesn’t know and,
for a while,
doesn’t need to care.

The last fourth of the book makes Ernie, the child closest to Henny, a queer shadow or echo of Henny. The episodes of Ernie’s lead, Ernie’s money box, and Ernie’s beating bring him to a defeated despair like Henny’s, to a suicide-in-effigy: he makes a doll-dummy to stand for himself and hangs it. But all this is only a child’s “as if” performance—after Henny’s death the penniless Ernie is given some money, finds some more money, forgets Henny, and starts out all over again on the financial process which his life will be.

The attempted murder and accomplished suicide that are the conclusion of Henny and the climax of
The Man Who Loved Children
are prepared for by several hundred events, conversations, speeches, phrases, and thoughts scattered throughout the book. Henny’s suicide- or murder-rhetoric; the atmosphere of violence that hangs around her, especially where Sam and Louie are concerned; the conversation in which she discusses with her mother and sister the best ways to kill oneself, the quickest poisons: these and a great many similar things have established, even before the sixty or seventy pages leading directly to Henny’s death, a situation that makes plausible—requires, really—her violent end. And yet we are surprised to have it happen, this happening as thoroughly prepared for as anything I can remember in fiction.

It is no “tragic flaw” in Henny’s character, but her character itself, that brings her to her end: Henny is her own fate. Christina Stead has a Chinese say, “Our old age is perhaps life’s decision about us—” or, worse, the decision we have made about ourselves without ever realizing we were making it. Henny’s old age may be life’s decision about Henny; her suicide is the decision she has made about herself—about life—without ever knowing she was making it. She is so used to thinking and saying:
I’ll kill myself! Better kill myself!
that when Louie gives her the chance she is fatally ready to take it. The defeated, despairing Henny has given up her life many times, before that drinking of the breakfast cup of tea with which she gives it up for good. What life has made of Henny, what Henny most deeply is, drinks—she is never more herself than when she destroys herself.

Many things in her life are latent or ultimate causes of Henny’s death; but its immediate, overt causes—the series of extraordinarily imagined and accomplished finalities that leads to this final finality, that demands as its only possible conclusion Henny’s death—all occur in the sixty or seventy pages before that death. At the beginning of the series, there is finality in the episode in which Henny feels her heart break “for good and all”; in the episode in which the aging Henny becomes, suddenly, “a dried-up, skinny, funny old woman.” Miss Aiden’s visit makes the reader see that this family sinking into poverty has become, without his realizing it,
poor,
abjectly, irretrievably poor. Everything valuable is gone, Henny’s dearest possessions have been sold or pawned: the treasure drawers are empty.

Next day Ernie finds his money box empty, blankly sobs, and Henny, who has stolen the money, cries “Ugh-ugh” and tries to comfort him. She has stolen, from the child she loves most, the one thing that is indispensable to him. When Henny, later on, begins to beat Ernie over the head, and goes on hysterically beating him until she faints, it is as if she felt so guilty about him that it is unbearable to her to have him exist at all. The life in which what has happened can happen is more than Henny can endure—she tries to obliterate Ernie and life, and then faints, momentarily obliterating herself.

The awful end of her affair with Bert Anderson is a kind of final, public, objective degradation of Henny; she begs for a last trifle, nothing almost, and the world refuses her even that. The long nightmare-ish episode of the rendering of the marlin into oil is the final incarnation of all the senseless busy-nesses with which Sam has tormented her: “one marlin had been enough, with their kneading, manuring, trotting about, plastering, oiling, and dripping, to give Spa House a scent of its own for many years to come.” But nothing else in
The Man Who Loved Children
has the empty finality of Henny’s last game of solitaire. She has played it her whole life and never once won; now she wins. “The game that she had played all her life was finished; she had no more to do; she had no game.” And, a little later, Henny breaks down as she has never broken down before: “ ‘Ai, ai,’ cried Henny, beginning to cry like a little girl, and putting the dressing gown to her face, ‘ai, ai!’ ” The world has been too much for Henny, the old woman has changed back into a child. As there has never before been anything child-like about Henny, the scene has a pitiable finality. The quarrel with Sam which follows (a quarrel monotonous with Henny’s repetitions of
kill everybody, kill myself
) is the last, the worst, and the most violent of their quarrels. The next morning Henny admits to Ernie that she will never be able to pay him back, and says with a perplexed, wondering conclusiveness: “I don’t know what to do.” Ernie is Henny’s main connection to life, her only connection to hope and to the future: when life makes her steal his money, beat him until she faints, and then tell him that she can never pay him back, what is there left to her but the “All right, I will!” that is her last word to life?

After you have read
The Man Who Loved Children
several times you feel that you know its author’s main strengths and main weakness. The weakness is, I think, a kind of natural excess and lack of discrimination: she is most likely to go wrong by not seeing when to stop or what to leave out. About most things—always, about the most important things—she is not excessive and does discriminate; but a few things in
The Man Who Loved Children
ought not to be there, and a few other things ought not to be there in such quantities.

When you look at these passages that—it seems to you—ought not to be there, it is as if you were seeing an intrusion of raw reality into the imagined reality of the book: some actual facts are being rapidly, scrappily, and vivaciously described. You don’t feel that these had to go into the book, nor do you feel that they have been through the process of being created all over again that the rest of the material of the book has been through. They are, so to speak, God’s creation, not Christina Stead’s; and Christina Stead’s fairly effective reporting of this first creation is a poor substitute for her own second creation. Such accidental realities seem to have slipped into the book unquestioned—or perhaps, when a part of the author questioned them, another part answered, “But that’s the way it really was.” (One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.) Another sort of unrequired and consequently excessive passage seems to be there because the author’s invention, running on automatically, found it easy to imagine it that way; such a passage is the equivalent, in narrative, of a mannered, habitual, easily effective piece of rhetoric.

Isn’t there a little too much of the Pollits’ homecoming party, of Henny’s tirades, of Sam’s dream-sermons? Aren’t these slightly excessive representations of monstrously excessive realities? Aren’t there a few too many facts about Annapolis and Harper’s Ferry, about Henny’s more remote relatives? When Christina Stead is at her worst—in
The Man Who Loved Children
she never is—you feel that there is just too much of Christina Stead. At its worst her writing has a kind of vivacious, mechanical over-abundance: her observation and invention and rhetoric, set into autonomous operation, bring into existence a queer picaresque universe of indiscriminate, slightly disreputable incidents. Reading about them is like listening to two disillusioned old automata gossiping over a cup of tea in the kitchen.

Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. Some of the faults of
The Man Who Loved Children
are the faults a large enough, live enough thing naturally has; others (those I have been discussing) are the faults a book of Christina Stead’s naturally has—they are, really, the other side of her virtues. An occasional awkwardness or disparity is the result of her having created from an Australian memory an American reality; but usually you are astonished at how well acclimated, recreated, these memories are. Two or three Joyce-ish sentences—one seems consciously and humorously Joyce-ish—make you remember that the rest of the sentences in the book are pure Stead. What Louie reads and quotes and loves is more what she would have read in 1917 than in 1937; but objecting to
that
is like objecting to Tolstoy’s making the characters in
War and Peace
his own contemporaries, not Napoleon’s—Christina Stead understands that it is only her own realities, anachronistic or not, that can give Louie the timeless reality that Louie has.

A reader of
The Man Who Loved Children
naturally will want to know something about Christina Stead. I know only what I have found in reference books or guessed from her novels. Let me repeat some of the first: it will have for the reader the interest of showing where Sam and Louie (and, no doubt, Henny) began.

Christina Stead was born in Australia, in 1902. Her mother died soon afterwards, her father remarried, and she “became the eldest of a large family.” Her father was a rationalist, a Fabian socialist, and a naturalist in the Government Fisheries Department. As a girl she was particularly interested in “fish, natural history, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley … the sea … I had plenty of work with the young children, but I was attached to them, and whenever I could, told them stories, partly from Grimm and Andersen, partly invented.”

She went to Teachers’ College, disliked teaching, took a business course at night, went to London in 1938 and worked there, went to Paris in 1929 and worked there for several years. She had been a public school teacher, a teacher of abnormal children, a demonstrator in the psychology laboratory of Sydney University, and a clerk in a grain company; in Paris she was a clerk in a banking house. She lived in the United States during the late ’30’s and early ’40’s, and now lives in England. Her husband is William Blake, the author of several novels and of the best and most entertaining textbook of Marxian economics that I know. In 1934 Christina Stead published
The Salzburg Tales
; in 1935,
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
; in 1936,
The Beauties and the Furies
; in 1938,
House of All Nations
; in 1940,
The Man Who Loved Children;
in 1944,
For Love Alone
; in 1946,
Letty Fox, Her Luck
; in 1948,
A Little Tea, a Little Chat
; in 1952,
The People with the Dogs.

Her books have had varying receptions.
House of All Nations
was a critical success and a best-seller;
The Man Who Loved Children
was a failure both with critics and with the public. It has been out of print for many years, and Christina Stead herself is remembered by only a few readers. When the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer’s most profound and imaginative book, he may unconsciously work in a more limited way in the books that follow it; this has happened, I believe, to Christina Stead. The world’s incomprehension has robbed it, for twenty-five years, of
The Man Who Loved Children;
has robbed it, forever, of what could have come after
The Man Who Loved Children.

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling,
we’d
have known that
Moby Dick
was a good book—why, how could anyone help knowing?

But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own
Moby Dick?
What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on
us
for not having liked?” What do we say then?

But if I were asked something easier—to name a good book that we don’t read and that the people of the future will read—

I’d be less at a loss. In 1941 I bought two copies of
The Man Who Loved Children,
one to read and the other to lend. In the long run a borrower of one died and a borrower of the other went abroad, so that I have nothing left but a copy from the library. Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I don’t know a better novel than
Crime and Punishment
—still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depressed him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of
Remembrance of Things Past
unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.

But
The Man Who Loved Children
has been a queer exception. I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see that there were things wrong with it—a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it—but they felt that, somehow, the things didn’t matter.