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

effective reporting of this first creation is a poor substitute for her own second creation. Such accidental realities seem to have slipped into the book unquestioned—or perhaps, when a part of the author questioned them, another part answered, “But that’s the way it really was.” (One of the most puzzling things about a novel is that “the way it really was” half the time is, and half the time isn’t, the way it ought to be in the novel.) Another sort of unrequired and consequently excessive passage seems to be there because the author’s invention, running on automatically, found it easy to imagine it that way; such a passage is the equivalent, in narrative, of a mannered, habitual, easily effective piece of rhetoric.
    Isn’t there a little too much of the Pollits’ homecoming party, of Henny’s tirades, of Sam’s dream-sermons? Aren’t these slightly excessive representations of monstrously excessive realities? Aren’t there a few too many facts about Annapolis and Harper’s Ferry, about Henny’s more remote relatives? When Christina Stead is at her worst—in The Man Who Loved Children she never is—you feel that there is just too much of Christina Stead. At its worst her writing has a kind of vivacious, mechanical over-abundance: her observation and invention and rhetoric, set into autonomous operation, bring into existence a queer picaresque universe of indiscriminate, slightly disreputable incidents. Reading about them is like listening to two disillusioned old automata gossiping over a cup of tea in the kitchen.
    Ruskin says that anyone who expects perfection from a work of art knows nothing of works of art. This is an appealing sentence that, so far as I can see, is not true about a few pictures and statues and pieces of music, short stories and short poems. Whether or not you expect perfection from them, you get it; at least, there is nothing in them that you would want changed. But what Ruskin says is true about novels: anyone who expects perfection from even the greatest novel knows nothing of novels. Some of the faults of The Man Who Loved Children are the faults a large enough, live enough thing naturally has; others (those I have been discussing) are the faults a book of Christina Stead’s naturally has—they are, really, the other side of her virtues. An occasional awkwardness or disparity is the result of her having created from an Australian memory an American reality; but usually you are astonished at how well acclimated, recreated, these memories are. Two or three Joyce-ish sentences—one seems consciously and humorously Joyce-ish—make you remember that the rest of the sentences in the book are pure Stead. What Louie reads and quotes and loves is more what she would have read in 1917 than in 1937; but objecting to that is like objecting to Tolstoy’s making the characters in War and Peace his own contemporaries, not Napoleon’s—Christina Stead understands that it is only her own realities, anachronistic or not, that can give Louie the timeless reality that Louie has.
    A reader of The Man Who Loved Children naturally will want to know something about Christina Stead. I know only what I have found in reference books or guessed from her novels. Let me repeat some of the first: it will have for the reader the interest of showing where Sam and Louie (and, no doubt, Henny) began.
    Christina Stead was born in Australia, in 1902. Her mother died soon afterwards, her father remarried, and she “became the eldest of a large family.” Her father was a rationalist, a Fabian socialist, and a naturalist in the Government Fisheries Department. As a girl she was particularly interested in “fish, natural history, Spencer, Darwin, Huxley … the sea … I had plenty of work with the young children, but I was attached to them, and whenever I could, told them stories, partly from Grimm and Andersen, partly invented.”
    She went to Teachers’ College, disliked teaching, took a business course