Dear Marjorie,
It’s true that Henny is a terrible person, but the literature of both sexes is full of terrible mothers. Even mothers who aren’t really so awful, like the one in Sons and Lovers, are presented as if they are the responsible for everything that’s gone wrong in the life of their child, the writer, with nary a thank you for what’s gone right, like the fact that Our Boy or Our Girl has written the very book you hold, dear reader, in your hands! (What if D.H. Lawrence’s mother had said, “Sure, son, go be a miner like your Dad, who needs an airy-fairy education?” Would he have thanked her for that?) Whole careers–that of Angry Young Man John Osborne, for example, who wrote Look Back in Anger–have been based on rage at Mom.
As you suggest, The Man Who Loved Children is a highly autobiographical book, but what’s interesting is that although Stead has drawn an unsparing portrait of her stepmother, it is also, in a curious way, detached and even forgiving. She can acknowledge not only that Henny is a desperate and floundering victim, but that she is also the unacknowledged mainstay of the family and even, in a funny way, the better parent: At least she doesn’t push her own chewed food into her children’s mouths! In a weird way, it’s a loving portrait–Stead never belittles Henny, never suggests that if she only pulled her socks up, all would have been well, never blames her for Sam Pollit’s failings, and, most remarkably, never suggests that she has damaged Louie, who walks away from her nightmarish family into the freshness of the morning, unscathed and without guilt. On the contrary, Henny has given Louie a kind of ruthlessness that will serve her in good stead. Amazingly, after all the terrors and horrors that have come before, The Man Who Loved Children is a book with a happy ending.
Try that one on with today’s literature of family dysfunction! In a contemporary novel, a daughter like Louie would be destroyed for years because her mother beat her and mocked her, because she was fat and had to wear shabby clothes to school, because her father called her stupid and read her poems out loud to the other children as a joke. When I think of what The Man Who Loved Children would have been in the hands of a lesser, more conventional artist, I am all the more filled with admiration for Christina Stead. There is not an ounce of self-pity in this entire book–instead, there’s a pity for humanity, mixed with a wild, almost Henny-ish relish for the comic and terrifying extremes of life.
I think the character of Henny is a very feminist creation, actually–she is what you get when you bottle up a wife’s tremendous energies in miserable and unequal marriage, when you arrange society so that women are trapped in the house. And if I ever teach again, this book is going right at the top of my syllabus. I wonder if the problem with teaching this book isn’t less Henny’s character than that it just offers more domestic excruciation than many professors want to handle. (All right class, for next time, read up to the passage where Sam gets the children up so they can listen to Henny’s agonized shrieks in childbirth.) Stead certainly makes you notice all that is reserved and genteel and unstated in other writers’ fiction. Maybe I’m not the only person whose initial response to the prospect of reading this book is: I don’t want to know.
Speaking of gentility, you mentioned money as something that is missing from much fiction. I think that’s a 20th century thing; the great 19th century writers go on about it at length: It’s fundamental to Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot (as you mentioned), the Brontes (that Jane Eyre is poor and plain is the most important fact about her, except to herself), and of course all the French novelists, Balzac most famously. It’s even there in Woolf and E.M. Forster–although there it’s mostly a preoccupation of subsidiary working-class characters who are often rather snobbishly depicted–not to mention George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh and Sinclair Lewis and Dreiser, and have I left anyone out? I think the shyness of novelists about money and its role in the lives of fictional characters is a recent phenomenon having to do with anti-realism, the elevation of the novel as an art form, and the interests of contemporary readers, which tend more to sex. Or possibly some other reasons. Or maybe it isn’t even true.
It’s interesting, though, that Christina Stead, for whom the economics of the Pollit family was such a concern, was something of a communist (not a party member, but a sympathizer). She lived for decades with an ex-banker-turned-writer who under the name of William Blake wrote An American Looks at Karl Marx, which I am assured by my friend the Last Marxist is the wittiest and cleverest and clearest guide to Marx’s thought he’s ever read. (And he’s read a lot of them.) You certainly don’t see explicit left-wing politics in The Man Who Loved Children, but you can see she is interested in demystifying economic relations within the family and in laying bare the material base on which the cultural superstructure of the Pollit family has been erected. Although, being a novelist, and a very great one, she might not put it like that.
I’ve enjoyed this tremendously, Marjorie, and I look forward to your last words. Perhaps between us we can move The Man Who Loved Children into triple digits on Amazon.com.
Cheers,
Katha
