The Man Who Loved Children Read Online Free PDF

familiar as he is, partly child-like as he is, to the children he is monstrous—not the singular monster that he is to us, but the ordinary monster that any grown-up is to you if you weigh thirty or forty pounds and have your eyes two feet from the floor. Again and again the reader is conscious of Christina Stead’s gift for showing how different anything is when looked at from a really different point of view. Little Evie, “fidgeting with her aunt’s great arm around her, seemed to be looking up trustfully with her brown eyes, but those deceptive eyes were full of revolt, mistrust, and dislike”; she averts her gaze from her aunt’s “slab cheeks, peccary skin … the long, plump, inhuman thigh, the glossy, sufficient skirt, from everything powerful, coarse, and proud about this great unmated mare … “Oh,’ thought Evie to herself, ‘when I am a lady with a baby, I won’t have all those bumps, I won’t be so big and fat, I will be a little woman, thin like I am now and not fat in front or in the skirt.’ ”
    One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups, to a child, is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child. The child has not yet had the chance to know what it is like to be a grown-up; he believes, even, that being a grown-up is a mistake he will never make—when he grows up he will keep on being a child, a big child with power. So the child and grown-up live in mutual love, misunderstanding, and distaste. Children shout and play and cry and want candy; grown-ups say Ssh! and work and scold and want steak. There is no disputing tastes as contradictory as these. It is not just Mowgli who was raised by a couple of wolves; any child is raised by a couple of grown-ups. Father and Mother may be nearer and dearer than anyone will ever be again—still, they are members of a different species. God is, I suppose, what our parents were; certainly the giant or ogre of the stories is so huge, so powerful, and so stupid because that is the way a grown-up looks to a child.
    Grown-ups forget or cannot believe that they seem even more unreasonable to children than children seem to them. Henny’s oldest boy Ernie (to whom money is the primary means of understanding and changing the world; he is a born economic determinist, someone with absolute pitch where money is concerned) is one of Christina Stead’s main ways of making us remember how mistaken and hypocritical grown-ups seem to children. Ernie feels that he sees the world as it is, but that grown-ups are no longer able to do this: their rationalization of their own actions, the infinitely complicated lie they have agreed to tell about the world, conceals the world from them. The child sees the truth, but is helpless to do anything about it.
    The Pollit children are used to the terrible helplessness of a child watching its parents war. There over their heads the Sun and the Moon, God the Father and the Holy Virgin, are shouting at each other, striking each other—the children contract all their muscles, try not to hear, and hear. Sometimes, waked in darkness by the familiar sounds, they lie sleepily listening to their parents; hear, during some lull in the quarrel, a tree-frog or the sound of the rain.
    Ernie feels the same helpless despair at the poverty of the family; thinking of how many children there already are, he implores, “Mothering, don’t have another baby!” (Henny replies, “You can bet your bottom dollar on that, old sweetness.”) But he does not really understand what he is saying: later on, he and the other children look uncomprehendingly at Henny, “who had again queerly become a large woman, though her hands, feet, and face remained small and narrow.” One night they are made to sleep downstairs, and hear Henny screaming hour after hour upstairs; finally, at morning, she is silent. “They had understood nothing at all, except that mother had been angry and miserable and now she was still; this was a blessed relief.” Their