The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online

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?
VIII
    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