The Man Who Loved Children Read Online Free PDF Page B

blank misunderstanding of what is sexual is the opposite of their eager understanding of what is excremental. They thrill to the inexplicably varying permissiveness of the world: here they are being allowed to laugh at, as a joke, what is ordinarily not referred to at all, or mentioned expediently, in family euphemisms!
    The book is alive with their fights, games, cries of “You didn’t kiss me!”—”Look, Moth, Tommy kissed you in the glass!” But their great holidays so swiftly are gone: the “sun was going down, and Sunday-Funday was coming to an end. They all felt it with a kind of misery: with such a fine long day and so many things to do, how could they have let it slip past like this?” And summer vacation is the same: the indefinite, almost infinite future so soon is that small, definite, disregarded thing, the past!
    On a winter night, with nothing but the fire in the living room to warm the house, the child runs to it crying, “Oo, gee whiz, is it cold; jiminy, I’m freezing. Moth, when are we going to get the coal?” (Anyone who remembers his childhood can feel himself saving those sentences—those and so many more of the book’s sentences.) And as the child grows older, how embarrassing the parent is, in the world outside: “Louie looked stonily ahead or desperately aside.” And, home again, the parent moralizes, sermonizes—won’t he ever stop talking?—to the child doing its homework, writing, writing, until finally the parent reads over the child’s shoulder what is being written on the page of notebook paper: Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up … The book follows the children into the cold beds they warm, goes with them into their dreams: when you read about Louie’s hard-soft nightmare or the horseman she hears when she wakes in the middle of the night, you are touching childhood itself.
VI
    There is a bewitching rapidity and lack of self-consciousness about Christina Stead’s writing; she has much knowledge, extraordinary abilities, but is too engrossed in what she is doing ever to seem conscious of them, so that they do not cut her off from the world but join her to it. How literary she makes most writers seem! Her book is very human, and full of humor of an unusual kind; the spirit behind it doesn’t try to be attractive and is attractive. As you read the book’s climactic and conclusive pages you are conscious of their genius and of the Tightness of that genius: it is as though at these moments Christina Stead’s mind held in its grasp the whole action, the essential form, of The Man Who Loved Children.
    Say that you read: “As Henny sat before her teacup and the steam rose from it and the treacherous foam gathered, uncollectible round its edge, the thousand storms of her confined life would rise up before her, thinner illusions on the steam. She did not laugh at the words ‘a storm in a teacup.’ ” You feel an astonished satisfaction at the swift and fatal conclusiveness, the real poetry—the concentration of experience into a strange and accurate, resonant image—of such a passage. Doesn’t one feel the same satisfaction with, wonder at, some of the passages I have already quoted? But quotation gives no idea of what is most important in Christina Stead’s style, its simple narrative power—she tells what happens so that it happens, and to you. The direct immediate life of most of her sentences is in extraordinary contrast to the complicated uneasy life of others; as her content varies, her style varies. Ordinary styles have the rhythmical and structural monotony of a habit, of something learned and persisted in. A style like Christina Stead’s, so remarkable for its structural variety, its rhythmical spontaneity, forces you to remember that a style can be a whole way of existing, so that you exist, for the moment, in perfect sympathy with it: you don’t read it so much as listen to it as it sweeps you along—fast enough, often, to make you feel a blurred pleasure in