The Man Who Loved Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

many places—Washington, Ann Arbor, Harper’s Ferry, Singapore—but each seems entirely different and entirely alive. As he reads about Louie’s summers the reader feels, “So this is what Harper’s Ferry looks like to an Australian!” European readers are used to being told what Europe looks like to an American or Russian of genius; we aren’t, and we enjoy it. (Occasionally Christina Stead has a kind of virtuoso passage to show that she is not merely a foreign visitor, but a real inhabitant of the United States; we enjoy, and are amused at, it.) Because The Man Who Loved Children brings to life the variety of the world outside the Pollit household, the happenings inside it—terrible as some of them are—do not seem depressing or constricted or monotonous to the reader: “within, a torment raged, day and night, week, month, year, always the same, an endless conflict, with its truces and breathing spaces; out here were a dark peace and love.” And, too, many of the happenings inside the family have so much warmth and habitual satisfaction, are so pleasant or cozy or funny, are so interesting, that the reader forgets for a moment that this wonderful playground is also a battlefield.
    Children-in-families have a life all their own, a complicated one. Christina Stead seems to have remembered it in detail from her childhood, and to have observed it in detail as an adult. Because of this knowledge she is able to imagine with complete realism the structures, textures, and atmosphere of one family’s spoken and unspoken life. She is unusually sensitive to speech-styles, to conversation-structures, to everything that makes a dialogue or monologue a sort of self-propagating entity; she knows just how family speech is different from speech outside the family, children’s speech different from adults’. She gives her children the speeches of speakers to whom a word has the reality of a thing: a thing that can be held wrong-side-up, played with like a toy, thrown at someone like a toy. Children’s speech-ways—their senseless iteration, joyous nonsense, incremental variation, entreaties and insults, family games, rhymes, rituals, proverbs with the force of law, magical mistakes, occasional uncannily penetrating descriptive phrases—are things Christina Stead knows as well as she knows the speech-ways of families, of people so used to each other that half the time they only half-say something, imply it with a family phrase, or else spell it out in words too familiar to be heard, just as the speaker’s face is too familiar to be seen. The book’s household conversations between mother and child, father and child, are both superficially and profoundly different from any conversation in the world outside; reading such conversations is as satisfying as being given some food you haven’t tasted since childhood. (After making your way through the great rain-forest of the children’s speech, you come finally to one poor broomstick of a tree, their letters: all the children—as Ernie says, laughing—”start out with ‘Dear Dad, I hope you are well, I am well, Mother is well,” and then they get stuck.”) The children inherit and employ, or recognize with passive pleasure, the cultural scraps—everything from Mozart to Hiawatha —that are a part of the sounds the grown-ups make. Father and Mother are gods but (it is strange!) gods who will sometimes perform for you on request, taking part in a ritual, repeating stories or recitations, pretending to talk like a Scot or a Jew or an Englishman—just as, earlier, they would pretend to be a bear.
    Christina Stead knows the awful eventfulness of little children’s lives. That grown-ups seldom cry, scream, fall, fight each other, or have to be sent to bed seems very strange to someone watching children: a little child pays its debt to life penny by penny. Sam is able to love a life spent with children because he himself has the insensate busy-ness of a child. Yet, wholly