The Man Who Loved Children

BY RANDALL JARRELL

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 those years. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby Dick was a good book. 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?

If I were asked to name a good book that we don’t read but that the people of the future will read, I’d answer, almost with confidence, The Man Who Loved Children. It is an American novel by the Australian writer Christina Stead: a novel that was a failure to begin with, that has been out of print for many years, and that after a quarter of a century is unknown. It is being republished this year, and I feel that this time it is going to be a success. But if it isn’t this time, it will be the next, or the next, or the next: a good enough book has all the time in the world.

Christina Stead grew up in Australia and came to Europe in 1928. She had been a public school teacher, a teacher of abnormal children, and a demonstrator in the psychology laboratory of Sydney University. In London she was a clerk in a grain company, in Paris a clerk in a bank. During the late thirties and the forties she and her husband lived in the United States. Between 1934 and 1938 she published The Salzburg Tales, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, The Beauties and the Furies, and House of All Nations. Many people, then, thought Christina Stead one of the best and most promising writers in English. House of All Nations was both a best seller and a critical success; I remember seeing it called the best financial novel ever written. When in 1940 she finished The Man Who Loved Children, she must have felt the satisfaction a successful writer feels when he finishes his best book.

The book was a complete failure: almost no critics liked it, almost no readers bought it. How Christina Stead felt about this vve don’t know; how she must have felt about it we do know. It took her four years to write her next novel, the slighter, largely autobiographical For Love Alone. It was mildly successful. Each of her next three books (Letty Fox, Her Luck; A Little Tea, A Little Chat; The People With the Dogs) was a little less successful than the book before. At present, Christina Stead lives in England; her last book was published thirteen years ago, and she herself is remembered by only a few readers. The Man Who Loved Children has been out of print for twenty years.

When the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer’s most profound and imaginative book, he may in spite of himself 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.

It seems to me as plainly good as Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past and War and Peace are plainly great. I call it a good book, but it is a better book, I think, than most of the novels people call great; perhaps it would be fairer to call it great. It has one quality that, ordinarily, only a great book has: it makes you a part of one family’s immediate existence as no other book quite does. When you have read it, you have been, for a few hours, a Pollit; it will take you many years to get the sound of the Pollits out of your ears, the sight of the Pollits out of your eyes, the smell of the Pollits out of your nostrils.

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN shows its reader a father, a mother, six children, and a stepchild. (Or, at least, they are that by day; by night — the reader’s night — the mother is woman, the father man, and the stepchild genius.) Inside the Pollit family the ordinary 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. “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, 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 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.” School had taught her three things, to play Chopin, to paint watercolors, and to sew. It is life that has taught her to give it “her famous black look”; 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 ease had long since drained away. . . .” Marriage, that 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 driedup, 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. 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.” She is miserably what life has made her, and makes her misery her only real claim on existence.

But you remember best about Henny what is worst about Henny: her tirades. These are shameful, insensate, and interminable; 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. 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 demonic tirades. She knows. Whatever men say, women know.

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 she feels “a curious, dull, but new sensation,” and awaking 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 kind 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, a few days after her 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.”

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.

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, rookery, aquariums, 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 Sam can say, like Kulygin: “I am satisfied, I am satisfied, I am satisfied!”

Even Sam’s playing with words, the grotesque selt-satisfying language he makes for himself, is the work of a great child, and exactly right for children; his speech “has a low insinuating humming that enchanted the sulky ear-guards and got straight to their softened brains.” They listen openmouthed; 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?” He makes each of the children tell him what the others are doing “in the secrecy of their rooms or in 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 yet 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!”

Bismarck said. “You can do anything with children if you will only play with them.” 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. His friend Saul says to him, “Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world.” It is true; and the world he creates is a world of wishes, 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.”

We read in textbooks of the mechanism of denial; surely Sam was its discoverer. There is no reality (except Henny) stubborn enough to force Sam to admit its existence, if its existence would disturb his complacency. We feel for him the wondering pity we feel for a man who has put out his own eyes and gets along better without them. To Sam everything in the world is a means to an end, and the end is Sam. So, naturally, he comes out ahead of misunderstanding, poverty, Henny, anything. Life itself, in Dr. 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-lifesize creations, like Falstaff, whom we wonder and laugh at and can’t get enough of. 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. Stumbling through creation in awful misery, in oblivious ecstasy, the fat, clumsy, twelveor thirteen-year-old Louie is, as her teacher tells her, one of those who “will certainly be famous.” You 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.

Your heart goes out in homesick joy to the marvelous inconsequential improbable reachingout-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; stuffs the little children full of La Rochefoucauld; repeats to that little tyrant of her fields, Sam-the-Bold:

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. 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: 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 invented for it; the languagemaker Sam says angrily, “Why isn’t it in English?” and Louie replies, “Did Euripides write in English?” In this play 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 duckling makes up, there in the morning of the world.

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. . . .” 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.

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”; 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 her story ends she is starting out on a walk, “a walk around the world.”

AS YOU read The Man Who Loved Children 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. 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 are entirely real to the reader, and reality is rare in novels.

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 knows the awful eventfulness of little children’s lives. 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.

Grown-ups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them. Henny’s favorite child, 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 Pollit children are used to the terrible helplessness of a child watching his 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.

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?” The book follows them into the cold beds they warm, goes with them into their dreams: when you read about Louie’s hardsoft nightmare or the horseman she hears when she wakes in the middle of the night, you are touching childhood itself.

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) still feel their main humanness identify itself with Henny: the book’s center of gravity, of tragic weight, is Henny. She is 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.

Louie is a child turning into a grown-up, a duckling turning into a swan. 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. Yet Louie knows that they are not really her brothers and sisters, not really her parents, and serenely leaves them for the swanworld in which, a swan, she will at last 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.

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. 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. Ernie is Henny’s main connection to life, her only connection to hope and 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?

Christina Stead’s main weakness as a writer is a kind ot natural excess and lack of discrimination.

Isn’t there a little too much of Henny’s tirades, of Sam’s dream-sermons, of the Pollits’ homecoming party? Aren’t there a few too many facts about Annapolis and Harper’s Ferry, about Henny’s more remote relatives? At its worst Christina Stead’s writing has a kind of vivacious, mechanical overabundance.

But 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, resonate image — of such a passage. 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.

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; you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it carries you along — fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in your own speed. You listen to “the breeze, still brittle, not fully leaved”; see a mountain graveyard, “all grass and long sights”; 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.” As you look at the landscapes 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 the robbed Ernie sobbing over his empty money box, and the robber Henny beginning to cry “Ugh-ugh,” with her face in her hands, more beautiful than any landscape.

There is a bewitching rapidity and lack of selfconsciousness 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. 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 rightness 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.