Dear Katha,
I share your gratitude that we stumbled on the good fortune of reading The Man Who Loved Children. I loved it from the moment I started the sentence, near the bottom of the first page, that describes the way the children surge into the house when Henny comes home from an outing: “They poured into the house, bringing in dirt, suppositions, questions, legends of other children, and plans for the next day.” Yet I have to say that reading it is in some ways unbearable. Its evocation of the life of one family–the unhappy family of Tolstoy’s mention–is so attentive, so full of the true violence and passion that fill the locked room of “Pollitry,” as Sam likes to call it, that I felt when I got to the end that I had been swallowed by a whale and then spat up on shore.
It really is an act of genius to render family life so perfectly, with its private economy and all its cross-alliances and helpless repetitions–above all, with a grasp (or memory?) of the way the world really looks to a child. The same people who like to consign women writers to the doily-lined shelves at the back of the shop conceive of anything related to family as “domestic” fiction, a dainty realm in which nice linear relations between family members have nice simple effects. Domestic fiction is usually thought of as a small canvas, in which even seething and betrayal are accomplished quietly.
But The Man Who Loved Children is big and noisy and smelly and messy, like a war novel, or the saga of a civilization (which is in fact what it is). Stead often reminds us, through her imagery, of how the family encloses and seals off its members. (“Just as Louie had got to the last three steps and had stopped to stare out at the wan, withered, and flourishing world, seen through the blue, yellow and green panes of the pointed hall window, and at the fire-bellied newts in the aquarium, Henny’s raucous shout came from the kitchen.”) I think it’s that combination, of insularity and explosion, that makes it such a powerful book.
And what a place to be sealed into! Sam, that “vague, eclectic socialist,” is a monster through and through. I can’t do better than Randall Jarrell, of course, in describing Sam’s narcissism: “Sam asks for everything and with the same breath asks to be admired for never having asked for anything. … he is so idealistically, hypocritically, transcendentally masculine that a male reader worries, ‘Ought I to be a man?’ ” Jarrell writes of Henny that “your heart goes out to her, because she is miserably what life has made her, and makes her misery her only real claim on existence. Her husband wants to be given credit for everything, even his mistakes–especially his mistakes, which are always well-meaning, right-minded ones that in a better world would be unmistaken. Henny is an honest liar; even Sam’s truths are ways to get his own way.”
But the experience of reading the novel allows you none of Jarrell’s comic distance. These days we would say that Sam has boundary issues. … But that hardly prepares you for what it’s like to read the breakfast scene in which Sam (“your poor little Sam,” as he often calls himself, when addressing his brood) amuses himself by chewing his food and them forcing it into his children’s lips with his own:
Mottled with contained laughter, he stretched his mouth to hers, trying to force the banana into her mouth with his tongue, but she broke away, scattering the food on the floor and down the front of her much spotted smock, while everyone clamored and laughed. Sam himself let out a bellow of laughter, but managed to say,
“Get a floor cloth, Looloo-girl: you ought to do what I say!”
You’re right: If this were Jane Smiley, Sam would be sneaking into the girls’ beds at night. I’m so accustomed to this element in contemporary fiction that in a couple of passages I actually thought this was where Stead was heading. But she’s so good that she shows up our contemporary focus on the incest plot as a sort of cartoon representation of the kind of intimate harm the Sams of the world inflict.
But a part of the book’s genius is that it conveys how mesmerizing Sam can also be, to a child. His invented languages, his blandishments, his rituals and celebrations, his spinning of theories and rich descriptions of the natural world–these constitute both his magic and the source of his authority.
Henny, of course, has her own bleak magnetism, and I loved Stead’s many descriptions of it:
What a dreary stodgy world of adults the children saw when they went out! And what a moral, high-minded world their father saw! But for Henny there was a wonderful particular world, and when they went with her they saw it: they saw the fish eyes, the crocodile grins, the hair like a birch broom, the mean men crawling with maggots, and the children restless as an eel, that she saw.
But one of my few reservations about the book is wrapped around Henny–wretched, hysterical, sad, unflinching Henny. Stead observes her with something like tender dispassion. But I came to feel there was simply too much of her–too many of her passionate tempers, rendered fortissimo. It has the desired effect, which is to show the battering quality of her fury. But trimming that emphasis by a third would have had the same effect.
And it seemed an odd choice when Stead showed such wily restraint in describing the children’s love for Henny, and hers for them. It is almost tacit, woven in–mostly assumed, just as the world always does with mother love, but a condition of her life that isn’t nearly enough to make up for the rest.
This feels, however, like a quibble about such a big gift of a book. Did you have any reservations, or shall we spend the next few days scaring up as many new Christina Stead readers as we can?
Cheers,
Marjorie
