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

at night, went to London in 1938 and worked there, went to Paris in 1929 and worked there for several years. She had been a public school teacher, a teacher of abnormal children, a demonstrator in the psychology laboratory of Sydney University, and a clerk in a grain company; in Paris she was a clerk in a banking house. She lived in the United States during the late ’30’s and early ’40’s, and now lives in England. Her husband is William Blake, the author of several novels and of the best and most entertaining textbook of Marxian economics that I know. In 1934 Christina Stead published The Salzburg Tales ; in 1935, Seven Poor Men of Sydney ; in 1936, The Beauties and the Furies ; in 1938, House of All Nations ; in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children; in 1944, For Love Alone ; in 1946, Letty Fox, Her Luck ; in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat ; in 1952, The People with the Dogs.
    Her books have had varying receptions. House of All Nations was a critical success and a best-seller; The Man Who Loved Children was a failure both with critics and with the public. It has been out of print for many years, and Christina Stead herself is remembered by only a few readers. When the world rejects, and then forgets, a writer’s most profound and imaginative book, he may unconsciously work in a more limited way in the books that follow it; this has happened, I believe, to Christina Stead. The world’s incomprehension has robbed it, for twenty-five years, of The Man Who Loved Children; has robbed it, forever, of what could have come after The Man Who Loved Children.
IX
    When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby Dick was a good book—why, how could anyone help knowing?
    But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?
    But if I were asked something easier—to name a good book that we don’t read and that the people of the future will read—
    I’d be less at a loss. In 1941 I bought two copies of The Man Who Loved Children, one to read and the other to lend. In the long run a borrower of one died and a borrower of the other went abroad, so that I have nothing left but a copy from the library. Lending a favorite book has its risks; the borrower may not like it. I don’t know a better novel than Crime and Punishment —still, every fourth or fifth borrower returns it unfinished: it depressed him; besides that, he didn’t believe it. More borrowers than this return the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past unfinished: they were bored. There is no book you can lend people that all of them will like.
    But The Man Who Loved Children has been a queer exception. I have lent it to many writers and more readers, and all of them thought it good and original, a book different from any other. They could see that there were things wrong with it—a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it—but they felt that, somehow, the things didn’t matter.
    To have this happen with a book that was a failure to begin with, and that after twenty-five years is unknown, is strange. Having it happen has helped me to believe that it is one of those books that their own age neither reads nor praises, but that the next age thinks a masterpiece.
    But I suppose I’d believe this even if every borrower had told me it was bad. As Wordsworth and Proust say, a good enough book in the long run makes its own readers, people who believe in it because they can’t help themselves. Where The Man Who Loved Children is concerned, I can’t help myself; it seems to me as plainly good as War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and Remembrance of Things Past are plainly great. A few of its