Dear Katha,
I liked your comparison of this book with To the Lighthouse but am unable to add value to it. I blush to confess that I remember very little about reading that novel beyond a generalized memory of loving it. We’ll have to do another Slate “Book Club”: Books We Read But Sort Of Forgot.
But what an interesting question you raise about feminist neglect of Christina Stead. Now that I think of it, I felt slightly odd all the way along about including The Man Who Loved Children in our Hall of Shame for Unread Classics for the simple reason that no professor or syllabus had ever suggested to me that I should read it. And it does seem triply strange that it isn’t an absolute pillar of the women’s studies canon.
I have the uncomfortable sense that the last of your proposed reasons strikes nearest the truth: that Henny is too awkwardly nasty a character for comfort. I fear backing myself into a feminist-bashing, neo-con-ish corner with this line of inquiry, but it’s true: Henny isn’t just a character who happens to have been dealt an oppressive fate; she isn’t a person with a tragic flaw; she’s a person whose entire being has been warped by life experience, rendered into a sort of toxic essence of all her worst parts. Stead obviously does mean to make a feminist point with this portrait. But it isn’t one that allows even a residue of any comforting notions about female transcendence.
In doing my own quick background reading on Stead, I note another great seam in critical writing about her, which is the question of how heavily autobiographical her work is. A 1994 biographer, Hazel Rowley, noted that Sam Pollit is very closely modeled on Stead’s father, David Stead, who was a Fabian socialist, a naturalist, and the founder of the New South Wales Government State Trawling Industry. (Hence the virtuoso series of scenes in which the families boils a marlin for oil, making the entire house forever reek of fish oil, a sort of final indignity.) Rowley placed great emphasis–too much, many critics thought–on revenge as a motive for Stead’s work, asserting that she sometimes worked herself into rages at her characters’ real-life counterparts in order to be able to write. (Whereas Stead herself noted, with charming understatement, that her portraits of Sam and others were “not wholly complimentary” to the originals.) Like Louie in the book, Stead lost her mother at an early age and had a stepmother by whom she felt unloved; she, too, had to look after a brood of younger siblings.
But if these are the roots of this book, it’s all the more remarkable what a large vision Stead had of Henny’s predicament in the family. She’s a huge force in the family’s life, like a volatile weather system. But she is also invisible in her endless toil, and especially in her responsibility to keep the family afloat once Sam has lost his job. The way the end of the book sees Sam tut-tutting over Henny’s “profligacy” is the last, bitter joke on a woman who, as you note, was set up from her girlhood. How did Stead divine the way the mother feels when her children descend on her, or the rage she feels at Sam’s glib, no-fault approach to styling himself the devoted parent of the house? One hint lies in the tiny, circumscribed affinity that Henny and Louie feel for each other as Louie reaches adolescence. “I detest the child but I’m sorry for her, which is more than you are,” Henny tells Sam. “I beat her, but I don’t lie to her.”
And on Louie’s side, “Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooched in to see [Henny.] Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.” So there’s a kind of transcendence, after all, in what Louie makes of Henny’s despair.
One other (random) thing I want to note is how wonderfully Stead writes about money. It is strange how little fiction there is that reflects the resonance money really has in life. (Middlemarch comes to mind, but how many titles spring after it?) The family’s economic decline, the scenes in which the Pollit children come to see that they are really poor, and the climactic one in which poor young Ernie–who defends himself through the careful accretion and management of money–discovers that his mother has stolen his last little savings, have a magnificent realism. For all the book’s lyricism and rendering of character through great operatic masses of talk, it is so brilliantly rooted in the concrete: the family’s last drinking glass, the smell of fish oil, the mysterious treasure of Henny’s sewing drawers.
But as to your final suggestion that everyone be required to read this book before getting a marriage license, I plan to pass it on to the gang that promotes those newfangled Covenant Marriages. Only the hardiest souls would make it to the altar. …
Best,
Marjorie
