The Man Who Loved Children

CHRISTINA STEAD
1940

INTRODUCTION

Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children received little critical consideration when it was first published in 1940, and would probably have been forgotten by the literary world if not for the attention brought to it by the poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote a highly laudatory introduction for the twenty-five-year anniversary edition. Since then, the book has been considered a modern masterpiece.

The novel offers a harrowing look at a dysfunctional family, and is patterned on the household in which Stead grew up. Like the oldest daughter, Louisa, Stead was raised by her stepmother after her birth mother died when she was two; her parents went on to have six more children, even though they fought constantly. Stead's eye for detail makes these characters easily relatable to readers, and their hatred and self-destructive tendencies make them characters that are difficult to forget. Perhaps this is why the book has remained in print for so long, with a new edition published by Picador in 2001.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Christina Stead was born in Australia, in the town of Rockdale in New South Wales, on July 17, 1902. Her father was a marine biologist and an active socialist. When she was two years old, her mother died. Three years later, her father

remarried Ada Gibbons, with whom Stead did not get along. Her parents went on to have six more children, mirroring the family structure in The Man Who Loved Children.

Stead was educated in nearby Sydney, earning her degree from New South Wales Teachers' College in 1922. She found that teaching was not the right job for her, and in 1925 started working as a secretary. She moved to London in 1928, to follow a man with whom she had fallen in love, and when he rejected her, she took a job as an office clerk. At that job, she met Wilhelm Blech, who was to become her lifelong companion. With his influence, she became a Marxist. The two lived in Paris, then in Spain until the Civil War began in 1936. Then they moved to the United States.

Stead's first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, was published in 1934, followed by The Beauties and Furies in 1936, and House of All Nations in 1938. The novels did not sell well, and were not even published in her native Australia. To support herself, Stead worked on a variety of writing jobs, including some scriptwriting for MGM. The publication of The Man Who Loved Children in 1940 did little to raise her from literary obscurity; and the novel only started to gain widespread critical praise when it was reissued in 1965.

Stead and Blech, who had changed his name to William Blake, returned to Europe after World War II, finding it difficult to obtain writing jobs in the anti-Communist climate of the 1940s and 1950s. They were married in 1952. After the poet Randall Jarrell renewed interest in Stead's writing with his forward for the 1965 edition of The Man Who Loved Children, the couple found more financial stability. In 1968, though, Blake died of stomach cancer. In 1969, Stead returned to Australia as a visiting writer when she was given a Creative Arts Fellowship to the Australian National University. Stead, now recognized in Europe, America, and Australia as a major literary talent, kept writing, though she published few books in her later years. Also in 1969, Stead was passed over for the Britannica-Australia prize on the grounds that she had not lived in Australia for decades and was, thus, no longer Australian. She received the first Patrick White prize for fiction in 1974, and was nominated several times for a Nobel Prize in literature. Stead returned to live in Sydney in 1974 and lived there until her death on March 31, 1983.

PLOT SUMMARY

Chapter One

The first chapter of The Man Who Loved Children introduces readers to life at Tohoga House, the large Washington estate occupied by the Pollit family. Henrietta (Henny), the mother, comes home, and her children swarm around her, curious about where she has been and what she has brought. Instead of basking in their attention, though, she snaps at them in a manner that seems ferocious, but that they are obviously accustomed to, since they accept her anger with good nature. They fetch tea for her and kiss her as they watch her play solitaire.

Sam Pollit, the father, returns home from a party at work, with the happy news that he has just been appointed to the Anthropological Mission to the Pacific, a position that he has been seeking. He notices the neighbor's young daughter, Gillian Roebuck, and makes up a short poem about her that he recites to himself. Once in Tahoga House, he talks with his eleven-year-old daughter Louisa, whose mother was his first wife (she died when Louisa was two). His other five children are not around.

On Sunday, Sam wakes up the children. His other daughter, Evie, is called into his bedroom to massage his head as soon as she wakes up. After breakfast, Sam and the boys—Ernie, the twins Sam Jr. and Saul, and Tommy, the toddler—go out to paint the house.

Chapter Two

The house painting progresses slowly, as Sam spends his time entertaining his sons and the children from the neighborhood with his plans, theories, and ideas. He talks to them in comic accents, and makes up funny, slanderous stories about people in the neighborhood.

Chapter Three

Louie goes to the house of an elderly couple in the neighborhood, the Kydds. Mrs. Kydd is kind to her and speaks lovingly of her husband, though the gossip around the neighborhood is that John Kydd abuses her. While Sam mocks Louie's sullenness to his boys, Mrs. Kydd invites the girl in and explains to her that they have a new cat, but that they cannot afford to feed it and she herself is too weak to kill it. Louisa drowns the cat for her.

Sam, sitting on the lawn with the boys, outlines his ideas for a utopian future society. When he assigns Ernest to be his lieutenant while he is away, his son Sam Jr. objects, and the other twin, Saul, stands up for little Sam. Sam encourages Saul and Ernest to settle their disagreement by fighting; he taunts Saul throughout. Meanwhile, Henny goes downtown and meets with Bert Anderson, a bachelor, at a restaurant, pleased because he lavishes attention and money on her.

Chapter Four

Sam's unmarried older sister, Jo, comes to him to tell him some scandalous gossip she has heard about their younger sister Bonnie, an aspiring actress. When Jo confronts Bonnie, she says that she has heard that the man Bonnie is involved with, Holloway, will not leave his wife, dashing Bonnie's hopes. After going to her room for a while, Bonnie eventually rejoins her siblings to sing and joke.

When Henny comes home after her assignation with Anderson, Jo tells her about Bonnie's affair, but Henny is not interested. She waits until Sam's sisters leave, then argues with him about money. Sam takes a walk with Louisa, and on their return Henny is still quarrelsome. During their fight Sam hits her, but then as they calm down, he suggests that they should have another child together. Henny agrees, thinking as she does so that she will have her revenge on him.

Chapter Five

Louie goes to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, to spend the summer with her mother's family, the Bakens. The assorted people at her grandfather's house are poor, and they resent the fact that the Pollits, who they think are rich, do not send any money to care for Louie: still, they provide her with a happier family life than she finds at home. After her return, Henny and her daughters visit Monocacy, the opulent home of her wealthy father, David Collyer. Henny discusses methods of suicide with her mother, Ellen, a woman whom her brother Barry impregnated; they discuss the methods they would or would not try.

While Henny, her sister and her mother discuss the difficulties of their lives in the living room, the maid, Nellie, talks to Louie in the kitchen. She mocks Louie, calling her an orphan because her mother is dead and Henny is not her real mother. Louie later tells the adults about the way the maid treated her, and Nellie is fired.

Back home, Louie befriends a girl named Olive who is just a little older than her. Their friendship is short-lived, however—Olive, who is fourteen, announces that she is sick of her home and is running away to Baltimore.

Chapter Six

With Sam in Malaya, Tohoga House is unheated, because Henny spends all of the money he sends her to pay back loans. The children all write letters to Sam, and Louie puts them to bed at night with made-up stories about the interesting characters that their father has befriended in Asia.

In Malay, Sam walks through the streets of Singapore with his Indian secretary, Nadan, discussing religion and culture. Nadan sees Sam as naïve about the danger to a white man walking alone, and Sam thinks Nadan is too cynical. Nadan takes Sam to his home to meet his wife and child, expressing his honor at such a visit. Sam returns to his office and hears from Lai Wan Hoe, who runs the office for him, that his supervisor, Colonel Willets, is angry with him. Sam opens his letters, including one from Gillian Roebuck, a neighborhood child from home, with whom he has been corresponding. He writes back to Louisa and to Gillian.

When he finds out that Lai Wan Hoe has fled the city to escape creditors, Sam realizes that he knows too little about what he is supposed to be doing to continue with the expedition. He considers an offer to teach ichthyology at Hangkow University, but decides to return to Washington, to be with his family.

Chapter Seven

Sam's family—including his parents, brothers and sisters—gathers at Tohoga House (now called Tohoga Place, at Sam's will) to celebrate his arrival home from Asia. While his father, Charles, leads them in song and in his recitations of dramatic scenes, His brother Lenny mixes a punch with alcohol in it. Sam is infuriated because he does not allow alcohol in his house, and a fight breaks out between him and Henny, during which they insult each other viciously in front of all of the guests.

When Henny goes up to her room, a letter comes for her, saying that her father, David Collyer, has died. Sam decides to not tell her. Soon after, though, Henny goes into labor and the doctor is called. Sam stays up all night, and in the morning wakes all of the children to see the new baby, a boy whom they name Charles, because Sam's father asked that the baby be named after him.

When Old David Collyer's estate is settled, it is found that he has spent his family's fortune. There will be no inheritance, which Henny was waiting for to pay off her debts. Tohoga Place must be sold to pay off Collyer's own debts, and the family is forced to move.

Without the protection of his rich father-in-law, the people in his department who never liked Sam are able to start rumors about him: about his ineptitude and possible affairs. Colonel Willets testifies to the bad work he did in Singapore. Sam knows that there are rumors about him going around, but he refuses to answer them, feeling that he is above them.

Chapter Eight

The family moves to Spa House, in a poor section of Annapolis, Virginia. Sam is on unpaid leave from his job, and is not sure if he would go back to it if asked. He uses his time off to repair the decrepit house he could afford, claiming that he and his sons can do all necessary construction. When his official suspension comes, he welcomes the chance to spend more time with the children.

At school, Louisa finds she has a talent for writing poetry and plays. She makes friends with Clare Meredith, who is an artist like herself, and together she and Clare bond over their love for their teacher, Miss Aiden. One day, when walking with Louisa, Sam steers her over to Clare's house and has her ask Clare out with them for some ice cream. Though Louisa dreads how Clare will react when she hears the pet names Sam uses for her and his general air of superiority, Clare says nothing about it.

Later, when Sam is talking with the children, Ernie tells him that Louie has a diary hidden in his room. Sam brings it out to read to the whole family, but it is in code. Louie comes home and he makes her translate it to them, humiliating her. After that, when he tries to lecture her about what she can expect from the world, she can only laugh at his own ignorance and, like Henny, is openly spiteful toward Sam.

Chapter Nine

Henny spends time away from home, often visiting her sister, Hassie. Sam stays around his children, nominally supervising their work but more often distracting them with stories about the neighbors and his old work companions. When he discovers that Ernie, who has always been conscious about money, has been hoarding lumps of lead under his bed to sell later, Sam has the other children take it out, and he publicly makes fun of Ernie for his miserliness.

Ernie notices all of the luxury items that are missing from the house. He asks his mother where they all went: at first, she says that she stored them with relatives, but he eventually finds out that she has sold them. He also finds out that she has raided his money box, taken his life savings of five dollars, and replaced his money with worthless foreign money.

On Sam's birthday, Louisa has Ernie and Evie perform a play that she has written called "Tragedy: The Snake-Man." It is a one-act play about an overbearing, clueless father and his daughter, who has isolated herself from the world. When Sam is outraged by it, Louie is perplexed.

Louie's teacher Miss Aiden comes to dinner on Sam's fortieth birthday. She struggles to remain polite, but she is aghast to see the condition that the Pollits live in: they have only one glass for the whole family and the rough construction work that Sam has done with his sons looks shabby to her outsider's eyes.

After she leaves, Sam feels inspired to make a new bookcase in Louisa's room. Taking down the old bookcase, he finds a book of poetry that Louie has written to Miss Aiden, titled "The Aiden Cycle." He reads the poems aloud to the children, mocking Louie's deeply-held sentiments as he reads, until she shouts at him to give her her book back.

A letter that was delivered earlier but dropped on the lawn is given to Sam. It is an anonymous note telling him that his wife was having an affair while he was in Asia, and that his youngest son, Chappy, is another man's child. Louie distracts the other children with a story while Sam and Henny argue about the letter. Another letter that was dropped on the lawn is given to Louie: it is from her friend Clare, written that afternoon, commiserating with her sorrows and offering her support.

The following morning, Henny is distraught, screaming at Sam and the children, threatening to kill herself or kill all of them. She meets with Bert Anderson the following day. Bert has been avoiding her since the death of her politically powerful father, and he is shocked to see how haggard Henny has become. He has to get back to work, but agrees to meet her again later. Henny waits for him in a bar, but, when he doesn't come, she goes to her sister Hassie's home, where she stays a few days.

Chapter Ten

When Henny returns home, the family is in more disarray than usual. The children have been eating things like raw bacon and almonds for dinner, and the baby, left in the yard, is eating his own feces, which Sam thinks is normal and healthy.

Jo Pollit comes and tells Sam that their sister Bonnie has come to her home and given birth. Jo arranged for the baby to be taken away to an orphanage, but she wants Bonnie, who is too sick to move, out of her apartment before the neighbors start to talk.

Sam has been given a huge fish, a marlin, that his friend Saul caught. He has a scientific theory about the many uses of fish oil, and so he decides to boil the fish and bottle the oil that comes out of it. The only thing big enough for it is Henny's large washtub. He starts it boiling at night, giving the children different shifts throughout the night to watch the fire under the tub. During his shift in the night, Sam wakes Louie to talk. He tells her about a young woman he has been seeing, who he would marry if not for Henny. She tells him of her desperate desire to get away, of her plan to leave with Clare and travel the country.

In the morning, when the fish oil is bottled, Sam has all of the children take the boiled-down shreds of the marlin out to the garbage heap. The smell of it is so bad that Little-Sam vomits. Sam mocks him for being weak, and, when he says he cannot carry these awful fish remains any more, he pours the stuff all over Little-Sam and gives him the job of cleaning out the washtub.

Louie cannot think of any way free of Sam and Henny and their constant arguing except to kill them both. She plans to put cyanide in their morning tea. In the morning, however, Henny comes in as she is preparing the tea, and suspects that something is up. When Sam comes in, Henny rages at him, tells him to not blame Louie, grabs the poisoned cup and drinks it down, falling dead almost immediately. They try to revive her, but are unsuccessful. Louie then finds that Ernie has hung a mannequin of himself in his bed with a rope around his neck, which she later deduces was a practice attempt at hanging himself.

After Henny's death, the family finds out that she was deeply in debt ever since Ernie was born, twelve years ago. People start treating Sam more sympathetically, though he insists on being responsible for what Henny owed. He secures a job that he thinks will be good for him—he will be the host of a radio program for children, telling them patriotic stories—and he runs across his estranged sister Bonnie, whom he convinces to move back into the house and help him with the children. After a talk in which she explains to Sam her plans to kill him and Henny, Louie leaves home with no definite plan for where she will go.

CHARACTERS

Miss Rosalind Aiden

Miss Aiden is the teacher that Louisa has a crush on. Sam, having read some of the poetry that Louie has written in Miss Aiden's praise, tells her to invite her teacher to dinner on the night of his birthday. When Miss Aiden comes, she is shocked to find the poverty in which the Pollits live.

Bert Anderson

Bert is a government employee with whom Henny is having an affair. When her father dies and her family is forced to leave their house, he avoids her phone calls. When Henny is fed up with life with Sam, she goes to Bert; he arranges to meet her in the evening at a bar, but he never shows up.

Chappy

See Charles Franklin Pollit

David Collyer

"Old David," Henrietta's father, is a rich man who has raised her to expect a life of luxury. She goes to him to borrow money when she can, and the family rents Tohoga House from him for a nominal rent. After his death, it is discovered that he has spent his entire fortune taking care of his children. Henny does not receive the inheritance she had been counting on, and Tohoga House has to be sold, forcing the Pollits to move.

Ernie

See Ernest Pollit

Evie

See Evelyn Pollit

Aunt Hassie

See Aunt Eleanor Lessinum

Henny

See Henrietta Pollit

Aunt Jo

See Josephine Pollit

Aunt Eleanor Lessinum

Henrietta's sister and her confidante, Hassie, whose real name is Eleanor, is as sarcastic about her marriage as Henny is, but her husband Archie is weak-willed, which has allowed her to stay closer to her family than Henny can be.

Little-Sam

See Samuel Pollit

Little-Womey

See Evelyn Pollit

Louie

See Louisa Pollit

Megalops

See Charles Franklin Pollit

Clare Meredith

Clare is Louisa's friend when she transfers to school in Annapolis. They are both intellectuals and share an infatuation with Miss Aiden. Clare thinks of herself as a Socialist and reads intellectual works about class struggle. She understands Louie's home situation and sympathizes with her. When Sam insists on taking Clare out for ice cream, Louie is embarrassed by his attempts to be charming, but Clare says nothing about it to Louie. They make plans to run away together, to walk across the country, but, when Louisa comes to Clare as she is leaving town at the end of the book, Clare says that she has a responsibility to her little sister.

Hazel Moore

Hazel is the housekeeper from Henny's childhood. She was with the Pollits in the beginning of their marriage, but Sam fires her because she abused his reading materials, which offended her religious sensibilities. When Sam goes to Malay, Henny has Hazel move back into the house, but eventually they cannot afford her. In the end she marries her long-time beau, Mr. Gray, to whom she was engaged for more than fifteen years.

Nadan

Nadan is Sam's secretary in Malay, a Madrasi Kerani. He sees Sam as being a bit naïve, telling him to not roam the streets at night, that he might not be safe. Nadan takes Sam to see his wife and newborn child, feeling that his connection with this westerner makes him important.

Old David

See David Collyer

Saul Pilgrim

Sam's friend from the Conservation Bureau, Saul has published his own newspaper with an ongoing story. When Sam is the subject of a smear campaign, Saul stands by him.

Bonnie Pollit

Bonnie is Sam's younger sister, who lives in Tohoga House with them and does all of the work of a maid, without pay. Henny does not approve of her, and, when Sam goes to Asia, Henny has Bonnie moved out of the house, to bring in her old maid, whom Sam cannot stand.

For a while, the family loses track of Bonnie. She shows up at her sister Jo's place about to have a baby, and, while she is sick from childbirth, the baby is given away. Bonnie disappears again, but later, after Henny's death, Sam runs into her on a Washington street with a child that she is fairly sure is the one that Hassie forced her to give away, and Sam asks her to move in with him and his children again.

Charles Franklin Pollit

Charles is the baby of the family, born on the night of Sam's return from Malay. Rumors circulate that Henny became pregnant with this son while her husband was away. These rumors are unlikely, as Henny later thinks of him as being, just like the rest of the children, a Pollit. He is sometimes called by the nickname "Megalops," and, more often, "Chappy."

Ernest Pollit

The first born child of Henrietta and Sam, Ernest (Ernie) is ten years old at the start of the book. He is Henrietta's favorite. Ernie is obsessed with money: he hoards the coins relatives give him for birthdays and special occasions and frantically calculates what money is coming into the house and what is going out. He lends Henny money out of his cash box, at interest.

When Sam loses his job and the family, impoverished, has to move to the poor section of Annapolis, Ernie hoards lumps of lead. He refuses to sell them, or to even let others touch them. His insecurity about finances is magnified when he notices that his mother has sold all of the family's valuable possessions. Even worse, however, is when he finds out that Henny has found his cash box, hidden under a loose board in the floor, and stolen all of his money, replacing it with useless foreign money. As desperate as that act was for Henny, it is a catastrophe for Ernie to lose his life's savings, five dollars and eighty-nine cents. On the morning that Henny dies, Ernie has attached a dummy with a rope around its neck to his bed, and Louie speculates that Ernie is planning to hang himself.

Evelyn Pollit

Evelyn (Evie) is eight years old at the start of the book, and is her father's favorite. His nickname for her is "Little-Womey," for "little woman." His relationship with her is physically close: every morning he calls her, against her objections, to come to him in his bed and massage his head.

Unlike her older sister Louisa, Evie is a pretty girl. Because Louie is an intellectual, and is increasingly wandering off to think and to write, the household chores that their father determines should be handled by girls often fall to Evie. The boys go outside to paint or to build things, but Evie is left to wash dishes and change beds. She never objects to the tasks assigned to her, making her the model of the young compliant "woman" that her father admires.

Henrietta Pollit

Henrietta (Henny) Pollit is the mother of the family portrayed in the novel. Having grown up in a wealthy family, she finds her current situation, as the wife of a man with limited means and a mother to a large family, to be woefully disappointing. Henny has never learned to budget, and so lives beyond her means, spending money too freely while constantly worrying about paying back the money she has borrowed. After her death, it is discovered that Henny's debts went back years, to the birth of her first child, Ernest, ten years before the novel's beginning.

Although Henny is verbally abusive toward her children, she is also loved by them. They dote on her and ask her to sing favorite songs and recite poems, even when she asks them brusquely to go away and leave her alone. She forms a particular bond with Louisa, who is her husband's daughter by his previous marriage. Though Henny is vicious about Louisa's looks, her behavior, and even her hygiene, Henny still feels some empathy for the girl, and Louisa feels that she has more understanding for her stepmother than she does for her father.

To help accept the disappointments of her unhappy marriage, Henny sits in her room and plays solitaire, distancing herself from the rest of the family. She seldom goes out, though she does seek solace in an affair with Bert Anderson, who, like Sam Pollit, is a government bureaucrat. In the end of the book, Henny finally wins at solitaire without cheating and she finds herself abandoned by Bert, who promises to meet her at a bar but never shows up. Henny thus has little to look forward to in life, and this drives her to suicide.

Josephine Pollit

Josephine (Jo) Pollit is Sam Pollit's sister, older than him by about a decade. She is not married and rents out apartments in two buildings she owns for a living. Aunt Jo, as she is called, babies her younger brother by bringing him chocolate when she visits. She is a prude, complaining about their sister Bonnie's potentially scandalous behavior when she lives with Sam's family. Later, when Bonnie nearly dies at Jo's apartment during childbirth, Jo does what she can to have Bonnie moved to Sam's house before her neighbors can find out about the out-of-wedlock birth.

Louisa Pollit

Louisa (Louie) is eleven and a half years old at the beginning of the book. She is Sam's daughter by his first wife, Rachel. Because she is the oldest and not Henny's own child, Henny is particularly harsh toward Louie, picking at her every fault; still, there is a bond between Louie and her stepmother, so that she tends to sympathize with Henny when her parents argue. Often, when her parents are not talking, it falls to Louie to act as a parent to the younger children.

Louie is a big, lumbering child. She is not a pretty girl. She is, however, very intelligent, writing plays and verse in Latin. She is well-read, and fills her writings with literary allusions that her parents do not understand.

Because she can see Sam's hypocrisy, Louie has little use for men. She forms a few close friendships with girls her own age, but the greatest love of her life is her teacher, Miss Aiden, for whom she composes an entire volume of poems. Although Louie is generally embarrassed about her parents, she does not realize how pitiable Miss Aiden finds her home situation when she comes to visit.

Although Louie plans to end the family turmoil by killing Sam and Henny, she is saved the trouble when Henny, realizing the poison Louie has put in her tea, commits suicide by drinking it willingly. Still, Louie is honest enough to tell Sam of her intention, and just barely strong-willed enough to leave home on her own at age fourteen.

Rebecca Baken Pollit

Rebecca was Sam Pollit's first wife and is Louisa's mother. She died when Louie was a baby. Though she never appears in the story, Sam often refers to her in glowing terms.

Sam Pollit

Sam is thirty-eight when the novel begins. He comes from humble roots—his father was a bricklayer—but he has worked himself up in the Conservation Bureau in large part because of the political influence of his wealthy father-in-law, David Collyer. After Old David's death, rumors spread around the office, and Sam loses his job.

Throughout the novel, Sam forms relationships with women outside of his marriage. Whether these relationships ever blossom into sexual affairs is never made clear: he thinks about his desires for Madeline Vines, his secretary, and his correspondences with Gillian Roebuck, who he later thinks he could marry if Henny were not his wife. He is flirtatious with women while stationed in Malay, with Louie's teacher, and with her friend, Clare.

Despite his self-image as a kind and loving father, Sam is cruel whenever he senses that his children are thinking independently. He forces Saul and Ernest to fight, even though the younger boy is hopelessly outmatched; he reads Louie's poetry aloud to the family, mocking it; he pours fish offal all over Little-Sam's head when the smell of it has already made the boy sick. Sam pretends that his cruel behavior is in their best interest, to make them stronger.

Sam's ego blinds him to the results of his theories about child rearing and family. He looks at his marriage to Henny as a mistake, but one that he has been bound by honor to follow through, despite the misery that it inflicts on everyone around them. He refuses to see the suffering of his children, living in poverty and surrounded by hatred, and even blocks out the terrible truth when Louie tells him that she tried to poison both parents and that Ernie was probably planning suicide.

After Henny's death, things work out well for Sam. People look at him sympathetically, blaming her for the troubles of the Pollit household. He starts a new job with a radio program, where, presumably, he will be able to expand upon his own delusions and self-justification.

Samuel Pollit

The blonde seven-year-old twin son, Little-Sam, is one of the most sensitive of the Pollit children. When Sam forces the children to boil down a fish for the oil and help him dispose of the remains, the stench of the fish pieces that they are throwing out make Little-Sam vomit. Instead of showing sympathy, Sam pours the disgusting fish liquid all over Little-Sam's head and refuses to let him shower it off.

Saul Pollit

The technically older of the seven-year-old twins, Saul is considered the hothead of the family. He is ready to enter into a fight without thinking, a "manly" trait of which his father approves.

Tommy Pollit

At the beginning of the book Tommy is the four-year-old baby of the family. By the end he is old enough to have befriended a girl in the neighborhood. His mother and father look at him as a young womanizer.

Gillian Roebuck

Gillian is a child at the beginning of the novel, when Sam Pollit notices her on the street and makes up a poem about her. Later, when he is away from home, he writes letters to her. When life between Sam and Henny is at its worst, Sam implies that Gillian is in love with him and he with her, and that they would be married if he were single.

Lai Wan Hoe

A Chinese citizen born in Singapore, Wan Hoe is Sam's office secretary in Malay. Because Sam is almost crippled by the heat of southeast Asia, Wan Hoe does all of the work that his office generates. He has to borrow money to take care of his family, however, and he ends up running away, leaving Sam with no one to do his work for him.

Colonel Willard Willets

Colonel Willets is Sam's superior at his Malay job. He resents Sam, and feels he does not respect his authority. Later, when Sam's career at the Conservation Bureau is in jeopardy, Colonel Willets writes letters to do anything he can to get Sam fired, out of spite.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• Research the cost of household goods during the Depression and make out a budget for a family of eight living in an urban area. Include costs for utilities (telephone, electricity, heat, etc.).
• Near the end of the novel, young Charles Pollit develops coprophagia, eating his own excrement. Research the symptoms of this condition, and, using the descriptions of his family background, write a diagnosis for him just as a psychologist would write it.
• Some critics have categorized The Man Who Loved Children as a "feminist" novel, while others have said that it is not one. Make a list of eight to ten characteristics that you think a feminist novel should have, and then chart how each item is or is not found in the work. Write an essay discussing your findings.
• At the end of the novel, Sam Pollit is about to host a radio program that will allow him to broadcast his theories about children across the country. Write a script of a radio show that Sam Pollit would likely broadcast. Perform your script for the class.
• The short play that Louisa writes for her father's birthday gift horrifies and enrages him. Write a one-act play that mirrors the kind of relationship that you have with someone that you admire.

THEMES

Family

The central theme of The Man Who Loved Children is the way that the Pollit family sticks together despite the fierce animosity between the two parents who run the household. From the start, Stead establishes Henrietta Pollit's lack of respect for her husband, whom she usually communicates with through the children. Regarding Henny, Sam seems more frustrated than angry: he showers the children with attention, telling them stories and keeping them occupied with chores around the house. Henny's inability to keep the house, cope with the children or remain within her budget causes him concern.

It is only as the novel progresses that it becomes clear that the problem with the Pollit family structure is not simply a matter of Henny's bad attitude, but is solidly established in the family's roots. Although she is sarcastic and sharp-tongued, Henny can actually be a caring person at heart: her stepdaughter, Louisa, senses this, and dotes on Henny in spite of the verbal abuse she receives from her. And Sam's culpability for the unhealthy family structure is revealed as readers become more able to see through his cheerfulness—which is often masked by his unique, exuberant way of talking—to see what a cold and demanding man he really is. The early episode in which he sets Saul and Ernest against each other in a fight, for instance, seems to be misguided but at least grounded in his moral principles, as Sam tells them that brothers should always clear the air with fighting and then make up. Later episodes, however, in which he leads the family in mocking Ernest for collecting lead or in mocking Louie's love poetry, show Sam to be nothing more than mean-spirited. Although Stead presents Henny's hostility from the start, it is when Sam's suppressed hostility gradually develops that readers can see that the Pollit family is not just a family where something has gone wrong, but that it is a family built around anger, and that the cheerful and well-behaved personalities of the children are a response to the insecurity and hostility they have known all their lives.

Narcissism

Narcissism is a psychological condition in which a person views the world only in terms of how much they see themselves reflected in it. Although this novel's title character, Sam Pollit, seems to sincerely enjoy the company of his own children and welcomes other children from around the neighborhood to join his family, Stead makes it clear that he is fooling himself as well as others about his apparent love. He says that his family is the most important thing in his life, that he would like to have children from all nations and races, and that he welcomes his suspension from work as an opportunity to spend more time with his children, but there are clear indicators that this talk is only there to hide his real interest in drawing attention to himself. For one thing, the specific language that he uses with the children is not as whimsical as it might at first seem: though it might seem a fun way to amuse his children, Sam uses this way of talking all of the time, in effect alienating the family from the outside world with it and forcing the children to focus on him. When he works on projects with the children, he seems to mix fun with work (as indicated in the title "Sunday a Funday," used for two chapters at opposite ends of the book); in actuality, however, Sam does little work and more talking, designating himself as a project supervisor. Not being a role model, he still requires the attention of the children, doubling their burden as they are expected to work and listen to Sam weave his amusing tales.

Sam's narcissism becomes most apparent as his oldest daughter, Louie, begins to develop her own personality. When she makes a friend outside of the home, Clare Meredith, he tries to bring her into his circle of influence, taking Clare out for ice cream and trying to charm her. He does the same thing with Miss Aiden, Louie's teacher, although it is clear that Sam's wordplay and boyishness have minimal success with adults. One of the most telling aspects of his narcissism is the way that he proves to be so upset over Louie's love poetry for Miss Aiden: in mocking it, even though he clearly does not understand whether it is good poetry or not, Sam is showing his fear that his oldest daughter has reached an age at which she can become emotionally attached to someone other than himself.

Art

Throughout the novel, Louisa receives little encouragement from any members of her family. She is not pretty, as she is told often. She is not accommodating, as her younger sister Evie is. She is an outcast at Tahoga House, where her family lives; at Monocacy, where her stepmother Henny's family lives; or at Harpers Ferry, where she spends her summers with her real mother's family. As she matures, though, Louie realizes that she has a gift for art. Instead of channeling her frustrations with the world into anger, as Henny does, or into seeking the attention of children, as her father does, she learns to express herself through writing. She writes clever poems that her friend Clare appreciates. She channels her admiration for her teacher into an extended cycle of poetry, expanding her basic talent by linking it to increasingly complex forms. She reads extensively, quoting freely from Herman Melville, La Rochefoucauld, and the letters of the Russian ballet genius Njinsky. Perhaps the most sure sign that art has become Louie's identity as she has outgrown her family is the fact that she writes a play for her father's birthday, oblivious to the fact that he will not be able to appreciate it for its artistic merits and can only see the ways in which it makes him look bad. Understanding art but not her father, Louie seems sincerely surprised by the offense that Sam takes at her play.

STYLE

Stylized Language

Throughout The Man Who Loved Children the members of the Pollit family speak in a particularly stylized language invented by the father, Sam Pollit. This language is a mix of baby talk, ethnic dialect, and some sort of stylized version of the homey rural colloquialisms used by the 19th century American humorist Artemus Ward. At times, Stead's use of this strange Pollit language is so far removed from standard English that she needs to provide readers with a translation in parentheses, knowing that they will never be able to sound out the meaning of what Sam or the children are saying to each other from the words on the page. Their use of the specialized language with each other makes the Pollits initially seem to be a close-knit group, but Stead shows by the end of the book, when Miss Aiden comes to visit, that their closeness has made them unable to recognize how odd they are to outsiders.

Foreshadowing

Even from the start of this long novel, Stead foreshadows the events that are eventually going to take place in the final chapter. Foreshadowing is a device that authors use to prepare readers for what is to come. Usually, it is difficult to identify foreshadowing in advance, and it is only after reading to the end of a work that readers can look back and see how earlier events predicted later ones. In The Man Who Loved Children for instance, Henny seems to be on the verge of violence from the novel's opening pages. There are numerous times when Henny threatens to kill herself, as she actually does in the end. There are, however, also many times when she threatens to kill Sam, or the children, so readers would be in their rights to expect either of those events to occur as well. Even so, once they move to Spa House, a death by the end of the book is almost certain, not only because of Henny's spiraling depression, but also because of the presence of a coffin maker across the street.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Great Depression

The Man Who Loved Children was written in the late 1930s, which is when the action takes place. Although it is not a fact that is dwelt upon in the book, this time frame marked the depth of the Great Depression in America. The poverty that seems to creep up on the characters in the book is, in fact, the natural result of years of economic stagnation throughout the country.

While economic shifts usually occur gradually, most historians identify the start of the Great Depression as October 24, 1929, when the U.S. stock market faced a massive sell-off. On that one day, U.S. stocks lost a total of 12.8 percent. The panic that ensued as people tried to take their money out of stocks created an even worse crisis, so that by November it was down 40 percent from where it had been in September. Personal fortunes and businesses were wiped out, and the lack of money caused a chain reaction, bankrupting other businesses and putting people out of jobs, which glutted the employment market with skilled workers. The Depression grew in the United States and spread to markets overseas, to become a worldwide phenomenon. It lingered on until the United States entered World War II in 1941.

Economic conditions declined over the first few years, hitting their low point in March of 1933. That month, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term. Roosevelt came into office enacting economic changes to ease the Depression's effects. His New Deal program created new government agencies, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, which gave unemployed men outdoor work on construction projects. Many other New Deal agencies focused government resources on the environment.

Because Sam Pollit draws his salary from the government, which was in no danger of going out of business, it makes sense that he would be able to hold onto his job throughout the 1930s. Still, the glut of able workers would have made his job increasingly vulnerable, just as the shortage of investment money would have dried up a fortune like the one held by his father-in-law, David Collyer. The fact that the Pollits, and many of the Collyers, end up in poverty at the end of the novel, or that a child from a poor family like Louisa would have left home to aimlessly travel the world, would not have seemed that unusual during the Great Depression.

Malay

Sam travels to Malay (the term that was once used to describe the Malay Peninsula). Starting in the early 1920s, most of the peninsula was under the political influence of Great Britain. That changed, however, with World War II, when Japan spread its control over the entire region. After the war, there was a brief-lived Malayan Union under British control from 1946 to 1948, but the indigenous people of the area objected to the way that power in this federation had been ceded to Britain without their consent. In 1948, the Federation of Malaya replaced it, recognizing the sovereignty of the Malaysian people. In 1963, a new federation formed under the name Malaysia.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1930s: Singapore is a colony under British control. Its economic output is the property of the United Kingdom.

  Today: Singapore is an independent country and one if the economic centers of Asia, with one of the continent's highest standards of living.

• 1930s: An out-of-wedlock birth, like that experienced by Bonnie Pollit, can create such a scandal that family members, like her sister Jo, would feel compelled to throw the single mother out of their household to avoid shame being attached to them.

  Today: The social stigma surrounding unmarried parenting is almost entirely diminished, with nearly 40 percent of all births in the United States occurring out of wedlock.

• 1930s: At the height of the Depression, families are evicted from their homes and broken up as each family member, including children and teens, set out to seek work. A fourteen-year-old girl traveling on her own (like Louie prepares to do at the end of the novel), would be viewed and treated almost as any other adult would.

  Today: Economic prosperity in America has resulted in extended childhoods, and minors are no longer required to support themselves or their family. Children rarely leave home before the age of eighteen, and a fourteen-year-old girl would not be able to travel far on her own before being victimized or reported to police as a runaway.

• 1930s: Many Americans, like Henny Pollit, suffer for years as they try without hope to pay back debts that have accrued interest.

  Today: More Americans are in debt than ever before. However, agencies that provide services to restructure debts (so that they can be managed and eventually paid off) have proliferated.

Today, the Malay Peninsula is comprised by the southwest portion of Burma, now called Myanmar; the southern reaches of Thailand; and part of the country of Malaysia (referred to as West Malaysia or Peninsular Malaysia). Singapore, where Sam Pollit served on his economic mission in the novel, is a series of islands off of the tip of the Malay Peninsula: it had been considered a part of Malaya at the time of the novel, but it is not currently joined to Malaysia.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

The story of how The Man Who Loved Children emerged from obscurity twenty-five years after its initial publication is one of the great stories of the power of literary criticism. When the book was published in 1940, it received tepid reviews, its sales were poor, and it was soon forgotten. Stead went on to write four more novels in the 1940s and 1950s, but none gained widespread popularity. Then, in 1965, Rinehart & Winston re-released The Man Who Loved Children with an introduction by the poet Randall Jarrell. Suddenly, the literary world accepted the case that Jarrell made for the book's excellence. Indeed, a contributor to Time magazine explains in a 1965 review that the book's newfound attention: "a slowly enlarging circle of literati insisted that a magnum opus had been overlooked, and the publisher at last consented to a second edition that proves the literati right." The same article also reports: "The Man Who Loved Children is one of the most truthful and terrifying horror stories ever written about family life."

The book has been in print continuously since 1965, and, since that reissue, Christina Stead has been acknowledged as one of the great Australian novelists. In the ensuing years, as the book has become an accepted part of the literary canon, there has been a tendency to categorize it as one type of writing or another. Most often, it has been used as a text in Women's Studies curricula. As Susan Sheridan, a Lecturer in Women's Studies at the Flinders University of South Australia, points out in her 1988 study titled Christina Stead, "many of Stead's stories of women's lives seem at first to invite the attention of feminist critics seeking in women's writing testimony to the common feature of female experience which are not represented in patriarchal discourses." As recently as 2001, in discussing the book in a review for Slate, Katha Pollitt comments that Lillian Hellman, the famed playwright, once referred to Stead as "the best woman writer alive," but Pollit dismissed that praise as a patronizing "kiss of death," noting that "nobody ever calls a man ‘the best male writer alive.’" Pollitt settles the matter by stating: "Christina Stead is a great writer, period."

CRITICISM

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature. In the following essay, he examines the careful balance between the essential personalities of Sam and Henny Pollit, and how that balance crumbles over the course of the novel.

One of the finer achievements of Christina Stead's 1940 masterpiece The Man Who Loved Children is the presentation of a dysfunctional household as if it is suspended in a state of absolute balance. The parents, Sam and Henny Pollit, are so perfectly unlike one another in their worldviews that it is easy to accept that they have, up to the time of the novel, canceled each other out. Henny, who comes from an old, staid, moneyed family, has a sharp tongue with her children (when she interacts with them at all), though she is more often crippled by her inability to handle money to the point where it consumes her every thought. Sam, who was the baby of a boisterous family of singers, actors, and general attention seekers, makes up for Henny's absence in his children's lives by lavishing attention on them, talking to them in a silly, fanciful language. As the novel progresses, the psychoses of these two individuals become increasingly clear. What also becomes clearer is that their personalities represent natural forces: Henny provides permanence (in that she does not change), while Sam provides the opposite, moving forward with one eye to the future. Unfortunately for the Pollits, this culminates in disaster. Henny is a case study in inertia, and Sam is pitifully out of touch with the world he lives in.

Henrietta Pollit is not an easy character to like. Her first line in the novel is "I come home and find you tearing about the streets like mad things!" This sets the pace for the bitter, sarcastic tone that she takes toward her children throughout the entire book. Readers soon come to recognize that her way of speaking does not bother the children in the least: they still kiss her and dote on her as much as they would a mother who doled out constant praise to them. Toward the five children to whom she has given birth, and especially toward her favorite, Ernie, Henny can be gentle and sympathetic at times. Toward Louie, Sam's daughter from his previous marriage, though, Henny has nothing but vicious words: it is only in her thoughts or in Henny's conversations with her sister that readers learn that Henny pities the child.

Henny does not seek out occasions to persecute her family; in fact, she tries consistently to isolate herself from them. She locks herself in her room playing patience, a kind of solitaire, and takes off, in the middle of what Sam and the children call "Sunday-Funday," to meet her lover Bert. She yearns for freedom from her husband and her children.

In her anger and isolation, Henny exhibits all the symptoms of chronic depression, but Stead offers an explanation for her behavior that does not require readers to go beyond the pages of the novel. In the end, after she has committed suicide, it is discovered that her financial troubles have been longer held and much deeper than anyone could have guessed, going back twelve years, and coinciding with the birth of her first child. Though readers have known throughout the book that Henny was concerned with money, this revelation at the end changes her behavior so that it is viewed as a constant, enduring state of panic. It defines her personality, reversing the psychology that has been intact up to that point: Henny is not just a depressed person who cannot cope with her debts any more than she can cope with the other aspects of her life, such as her marriage and her children. She is a woman mired in the past, frozen in place by twelve-year-old loans with accruing interest which increase her financial burden with every passing day. The future represents nothing to Henny but a worsening of her situation.

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• Studs Turkel's book Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression is a collection of interviews with people from all walks of life remembering what everyday living was like for them during those years. First published in 1970, it has stayed in print and is considered an invaluable tool for historians interested in the period. It is currently available from W. W. Norton, reprinted in 2000.
• After The Man Who Loved Children, critics consider Stead's novel Letty Fox: Her Luck to be her most successful work. Published in 1946, it is a vast, sprawling work about a young woman living in New York during World War II and dealing with her eccentric extended family.
• Sam Pollit acknowledges that the language that he uses with his children is based, at least in part, on the writings of American humorist Artemus Ward. Ward's essay "The Shakers," about a religious sect popular in his time, is included in The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, published in paperback in 2005 by Kessinger Publishing.
• The introduction that Randall Jarrell wrote for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Man Who Loved Children was instrumental in reviving critical interest in the book, and it also revived Christina Stead's literary career. The introduction, titled "An Unread Book," is included in Jarrell's No Other Book: Selected Essays (2000).
• Marilynne Robinson's 1980 novel Housekeeping is about two sisters raised in Fingerbone, Idaho, by their grandmother and various aunts in circumstances that are as unconventional and dysfunctional as those in Stead's novel.
• The personal correspondence of Christina Stead and her husband can be found in Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake (2005). Unlike the many good biographies written about Stead, this volume gives readers insight into her life in her own words.

In contrast, her husband, Sam, spends every day looking to the future. In one early segment, he spins tales for his children about what he thinks the world could be like in the future, if he had control of it. His trip to Malay, during which he seems incapable of doing any of his assigned work, is, in Sam's mind, a chance to get to know his fellow man, to make the world a better place. Sam's noble sentiments, however, skip over the complexities of the present; he blithely ignores the details, as he does the financial quagmire that Henny has gotten herself into. While he dreams of the future, the world around him collapses: by the end, the home of this "man who loved children" is a place where there is only one water glass for nine people; where the baby is left to eat his own feces; where one child thinks of suicide while another plots the murder of her parents. Readers can easily see this situation developing. Sam doesn't see it for what it is.

Sam's love for children and his hopes for the future are tied together, only not in the way that he thinks. He is an idealist, but his ideals never really connect with actual people. He imagines himself having a hundred children, building a new society with them, yet he is woefully unaware of what is happening to the children he already has. When he goes to Singapore to study Asian culture, he ends up blocking out almost everything he experienced there, retaining only the fact that, during a discussion about different theological understandings, his secretary Naden told him: "Sah, you are as the gods."

Sam's interest in children is, in fact, no more deeply-held than his interest in the servants that he rules over within the colonial system. His is an imperial ego supported by feeble competence: children and servants are the only ones who are forced to look up to him. Stead's ironic fate for Sam at the end of the book is consigning him to the bliss of broadcasting his half-baked ideas over the radio to an audience of children, and to people with childish dispositions who would be willing to listen to someone like him.

There are occasionally circumstances that drive Sam Pollit to panic and to drop his veil of benevolence toward children. His true nature appears when his children show any sense of independence. This, of course, is most evident with his daughter Louie. Not only is Louie the oldest child, and therefore the first to mature and realize that Sam is not the wise and "bold" character he claims to be, she also is the only one of the children who has other relatives to learn from. Her summers at Harpers Ferry with her mother's family give Louie a different perspective on how the world operates outside of the insular walls of Tohoga House or Spa House.

Not only do Sam and Henny fear her physical maturity—both make constant remarks about her size, dreading the approaching day when she will be an adult—but they know that if she reaches emotional maturity, Louie will see their personality defects for what they are. Henny's only response is to criticize the child more and more, but Sam takes steps to impede her development. When she forms friendships outside of his sphere of influence, he tries to charm her new friends. When he is not successful, his cruelty comes out: his mocking of Louie's poetry is transparent jealousy for her reverence toward her new parent figure, Miss Aiden; when he reads her diary and finds that it is written in code, he demands that she have no secret thoughts from him. He is too egocentric and naïve to see that his battle against Louie's emerging adolescence is a battle he is bound to lose.

Stead offers other examples of his true nature, such as when he sets two sons fighting against each other or when he tortures Little-Sam, who is sickened by the smell of boiled-down fish, by pouring the very thing that makes the child vomit all over his head. In each case, Sam defends his actions with some weak justification based in ill-considered child-rearing techniques, but it does not take much to see that the real motive behind his actions is simple, childish bullying. Clearly, he has little love for children, but he does need them around. He simply wants to be a child. At age forty, the best that he can do is pose as a man who spends his time with children because he enjoys their company.

Sam Pollit's view of the world is that of a child; he feels that life has yet to arrive. Henny Pollit's view is that of a hopeless debtor, whose burden increases every day; she feels that life can only get worse. At the time of the novel's start, they are in an unpleasant situation, but they are also in stasis, a place of balance, of equilibrium. Throughout the course of The Man Who Loved Children, each parent's basic nature grinds the household down. Henny's debt and Sam's neglect force them to move to poorer circumstances, while Henny's isolation and Sam's desperation for the reverence of his and others' children drive the family toward increasingly antisocial behaviors. At the end of the novel, even with the good fortune befalling Sam Pollit at that point of his life, it is quite unlikely that he will be able to survive for long without his opposite, Henny, to provide a counterbalance to his personality.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Man Who Loved Children, in Novels for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2008.

Michael Ackland

In the following excerpt, Ackland compares The Man Who Loved Children to the writings of William Blake. While doing so, Ackland also attempts to ascertain Stead's familiarity with Blake's philosophies by identifying the possible influences his writing may have had on Stead's novel.

… Stead's knowledge of Blake has long been assumed but rarely pinned down. That she was thoroughly acquainted with at least his more accessible works can hardly be doubted. Blake's writing had begun to emerge from obscurity with the influential commentaries and editions of E.J. Ellis and W.B. Yeats in 1893 and 1907, and the foundation for future Blake scholarship had been laid with S. Foster Damon's William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924). Henceforth readers, undaunted by Blake's unorthodox art and poetry, could grasp in detail his radical critique of everyday life. Attacking the restrictive nature of empirical and scientific thinking, the Romantic posited the existence of an eternal realm, portions of which appear to our fallen senses as solid and real. These, according to Blake, are illusory perceptions, destined to be expunged when humanity rediscovers its full spiritual potential. Organized religion, government, social hierarchies and inherited beliefs need to be overthrown. These tenets could be readily assimilated by convinced Marxists like Stead and her life-companion Wilhelm Blech—although Stead, true to her own convictions, consistently located her visions of individual regeneration in the physical here-and-now, not in Blake's otherworldly "Eternal Life" (146). One measure of the poet's new fame and notoriety as a revolutionary thinker was the decision of Blech, in 1936, to change his name to William Blake in a profound acknowledgment of intellectual kinship and respect, and two years later the narrator of Stead's House of All Nations confirmed the essential promise of Adam, a young socialist employed in a dubious financial institution, by likening him to "the frail earthly first man hearing the strains of sun music in one of William Blake's dawn pictures." Other "sporadic affinities" between Blake and Stead have been noted (Green 69), and Angela Carter has credibly asserted that the most fitting motto for Stead's entire oeuvre would be: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence" (262). And like most of her works, The Man Who Loved Children abounds in contraries. Most obviously, the lifestyles of Sam and Henny afford a series of binary oppositions. Sam is identified with scientific treatment of the natural world, a drive to order, name and create pedagogically rewarding exhibitions, with rule and the tables of the law, and linked with either Darwin or despotic czarism. Henny is aligned with great, mysterious forces, an esoteric personal space that affords joyous refuge or "a cave of Aladdin," with primal instinct and natural law; she is diversely cast as anarchist, perennial adversary, and hyena. Their clash, Carter suggests, may be read as an illustration of Blake's adage.

But what was Stead's attitude to this doctrine of contraries, and is it, of all Blake's tenets, the most important to an understanding of The Man Who Loved Children? The Marriage of Heaven and Hell asserts unambiguously that contraries are necessary to life itself. On plate 16 this article of faith is reiterated in terms relevant to Stead's novel:

Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.

But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved [sic] the excess of his delights.

These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence. (Blake 40)

Translated into breathing human situations, the unceasing enmity projected by Blake had little appeal to Stead. In For Love Alone, for instance, the narrator utters a damning cri de coeur about "the naked domestic drama and hate of parent and child" and its bleak consequences (463), while the last line of the novel resonates with Teresa's despair at the possible recurrence of a pair of contraries in herself and Jonathan: "‘It's dreadful to think that it will go on being repeated for ever, he—and me! What's there to stop it?’" (502). Similarly, neither Stead nor Louie locates much that is positive in the war of attrition waged between Sam and Henny. In fact, it degenerates into bloodshed, saps their moral stature, and seems destructive of worthwhile human existence. Moreover, given Stead's need to portray this couple's fluctuating state of turmoil, she would presumably have been drawn to Blake's many depictions of the "various arts of Love & Hate" played out between the sexes. But less expected, and as elusive as Louie's "hard-soft" nightmare, is her interest in the Romantic's notion of the dialectics of vision, or the ability of a strong ideology or mindset to alter radically the reality perceived by others.

The Man Who Loved Children contains a brief, well-disguised allusion to a key scene in Blake's writing that deals with this issue. Again it appears in the course of an enigmatic, longer dream:

As they stood in front of the snake cage, he said anxiously, "Kids, last night I was dozing on Bonniferous's [his sister's] bed … and I had my snake dream. Great snakes alive were crawling around da kitch [the kitchen] and out of one of my boxes jumped two beautiful young spotted cats, ocelots, Felis pardalis, which relieved me considduble, because they began to fight the naiks [snakes], and then an ocelot with a snake curled round him and hissing at me tried to break through the netted back door here at me and I pushed with all my strength against them, crying out, but they gradually opened it, when I saw the door opened right on the city of Washington! There it was, with all its marbles like bones gleaming under me, and I hung on the edge of a precipice—it was the snake, or the bone yard!"

Visually compelling and personalized by Sam's idiolect, the dream nonetheless has complex literary antecedents. The novel's debt to Twain has been demonstrated (Arac 175-89), and the initial comic register and mayhem of the dream reveal a distant kinship with a scene of slapstick comedy in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where another Sam (Samuel Clemens) depicts snakes, so laboriously collected by Huck and Tom Sawyer, escaping to run amok in Aunt Sally's home, which inspires Huck's laconic remark: "No, there warn't no real scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerble spell" (338-39). Embedded still deeper, a Blakean reference reverberates in the one incongruous line in the passage: "And I hung on the edge of a precipice"—an allusion clinched by the dominance of serpents in the scene and by the alternating visions of Washington.

The allusion, together with Blake's hallmark statement of the doctrine of contraries, is drawn from the longest "Memorable Fancy" of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It consists of two scenes of hellish menace, linked by an authorially endorsed explanation. In the first a self-assured Angel offers to show the young male speaker the perdition, or "hot burning dungeon," awaiting him for all eternity. A long descent through a cavern brings them to "a void boundless as a nether sky"—Stead's "precipice"—at whose edge they rest "suspended in … [oak roots and] fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep." Beneath them in "the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city," unfolds a series of terrifying scenes: "vast spiders, crawling after their prey," "animals sprung from corruption," and "a cataract of blood mixed with fire." When asked where the narrator's "eternal lot" lies, the Angel responds: "between the black & white spiders." All these, however, are eclipsed by a climactic image of infernal threat and retribution as Leviathan appears "a monstrous serpent … advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence" (41). The Angel, his intuitions of everlasting damnation confirmed, flees, leaving the narrator to make sense of a sudden visual reversal:

I remain'd alone, & then this appearance was no more, but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moon light hearing a harper, who sung to the harp. & his theme was, The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.

… I found my Angel, who surprised asked me, how I escaped?

I answerd. All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics: for when you ran away, I found myself on a bank by moonlight hearing a harper, But now we have seen my eternal lot, shall I shew you yours? (41-42)

Then follows a satiric scene of apes cannibalizing each other, rounded off by a final antagonistic exchange: "So the Angel said: thy phantasy has imposed upon me & thou oughtest to be ashamed. / I answerd: we impose on one another" (42).

The effect of mental impositions is Blake's primary concern. The central encounter involves three participants: the speaker, the Angel, and what they see before them in "the infinite Abyss." Blake registers two changes to this configuration. First, the Angel leaves (he "climb'd up from his station into the mill" [of analytical reason]); next, whatever is in front of the speaker undergoes a radical change of form: from Leviathan to harper. Nowhere, however, is there any indication that the principal constituent of the abyss has moved away. What alters are the audience's perceptions of it. Remove the Angel and what had assumed the shape of Leviathan metamorphoses into something far less threatening and more productive: a harper who advocates the need to alter individual opinions or mindsets. Blake's message, in a work that celebrates the redemptive uses of energy, is clear. To orthodoxy, unchained energy is unambiguously dangerous and infernal. To a viewer not subjected to the "mind-forg'd manacles" of institutional belief (27), the same energy is creative; and the theme of the harper, a figure akin to Blake's beloved poets and prophets, suggests that the preceding vision of Leviathan was a "reptile of the mind." …

Source: Michael Ackland, "Breeding ‘Reptiles of the Mind’: Blake's Dialectics of Vision and Stead's Critique of Pollitry in The Man Who Loved Children," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 2006, pp. 234-49.

Brooke Allen

In the following excerpt, Allen discusses aspects of Stead's life and how they correlate to events in The Man Who Loved Children.

… The Australian-born novelist Christina Stead is an author whose reputation perpetually hovers somewhere between apotheosis and oblivion. As a novelist, she was one of those unfortunates whom critics admire in the abstract but often find distasteful or harsh in reality. She never achieved a popular or even a real critical success; during her lifetime she complained, with justification, that each new novel was greeted with cries of disappointment by reviewers, who accused it of not measuring up to her earlier books—books that themselves had all too often met with indifference, incomprehension, or hostility.

One of her publishers said that "Christina Stead is a writer who makes absolutely no concessions to the reader." This is true, and the result was that at no time during her life or beyond it could Stead be even remotely considered a popular writer. But her talent, raw and undisciplined as it undoubtedly was, has proved impossible to dismiss. Beginning in 1955 with Randall Jarrell's famous essay on The Man Who Loved Children in The New York Times, a handful of influential writers have urged the public to take notice of this largely ignored artist. While most of her books are out of print at any given time, publishers, ever hopeful, continue to put out new editions of the better-known and less "difficult" ones: this year Henry Holt is republishing The Man Who Loved Children, I'm Dying Laughing, and The Little Hotel. Holt is also bringing out a comprehensive biography by Hazel Rowley, the first that has been written.

But the ranks of Stead fans are unlikely to swell greatly, however hard her admirers try to share their enthusiasm. As many have pointed out, her prose is inaccessible to the casual reader—repetitive, verbose, often precious. At the same time Stead is insufficiently pretentious to appeal to the intellectual snob. She rejected the more self-conscious tricks of the second-string modernist, and while she was plainly influenced by Lawrence, Joyce, and Stein, the nineteenth-century masters—Balzac, Stendhal, Dickens, Thackeray, Goethe, Nietzsche, Strindberg, and many others—were really more important to her aesthetic. Clifton Fadiman, Stead's onetime editor and a lifelong admirer, knew that most readers would never swallow Stead whole. "Her humor is savage, her learning hard to cope with, her fancies too furious. Like Emily Brontë, she has none of the proper bearing, the reassuring domestic countenance of a ‘lady author.’"

In the American literary climate dominated for so many decades by the stylistic dogma of Hemingwayesque simplicity, Stead's all-over-the-map excess was viewed with puzzlement if not active annoyance, and Stead herself, much as she desired at least a modicum of popular recognition and the financial rewards that accompany it, never even paid lip service to middle-highbrow tastes: "That brainless pamphlet of monosyllables!" she raged when her publishers suggested that she write more in the style of Steinbeck's latest best seller. When she edited her work she might throw things away, but by throwing away she emphatically did not mean "what is called ‘paring to the bone.’" Her own style was distinctly unfashionable.

The sensuality, delicacy of literature does not exist for me [she once wrote]; only the passion, energy and struggle, the night of which no one speaks, the creative act: some people like to see the creative act banished from the book—it should be put behind one and a neatly-groomed little boy in sailor-collar introduced … But for me it is not right: I like each book to have not only the little boy, not very neat, but also the preceding creative act … Most of my friends deplore this: they are always telling me what I should leave out in order to have "success." But I know that nothing has more success in the end than an intelligent ferocity.

The execution of such a credo virtually demands an anti-naturalistic style, and while Stead's prose is not exactly what most people call "experimental," it was also not what mid-century readers, saturated in Hemingway/Steinbeck minimalism, thought of as realistic. Stead saw herself as serving psychological rather than literal truth, hence her practice of making all her characters far more articulate than their real-life models could possibly be. Marpurgo, the cosmopolitan lace-merchant in The Beauties and the Furies, speaks in a fashion which we should find hideously affected in a real person—nevertheless, he remains sympathetic to the reader: "Humidity height is bad for the lesion: I was born for the nocturnes, the chiaroscuro, but a soggy lung makes indwelling constant, for relief, sustenance, it insists on the dry fresco of midday." One could criticize this kind of stylistic liberty at length, even mock it, but Stead's own words of justification ought first to be considered:

My purpose, in making characters eloquent, is the expression of two psychological truths; first, that everyone has a wit superior to his everyday wit, when discussing his personal problems and the most depressed housewife, for example, can talk like Medea about her troubles; second, that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is a fountain of passion, which is turned by circumstances of birth or upbringing into conventional channels.

If Stead saw her characters as fountains of passion, it is because she knew herself to be one. As a plain, unloved Australian schoolgirl she saw herself as a Nietzschean heroine; as a lonely elderly woman she concocted a romantic "past" for herself and almost succeeded in making herself believe that she was an object of sexual desire to the most glamorous men of her acquaintance. Speaking of Louisa Pollit, Stead's alter-ego in The Man Who Loved Children, Randall Jarrell pointed out that "it is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art." Christina Stead was fated to become one of those big, ugly ducks. To her credit, she had the courage to acknowledge her passionate nature rather than set it into "conventional channels," though she was often humiliated and made to look ridiculous for her sexual aggression.

It is not only in her two autobiographical novels, The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944), that Christina Stead fictionalized herself and the people she knew. All of her novels were based on real people, the cruelest portraits of all, the real "monsters," on people who had had reason over the years to consider her a good friend. Her technique of turning life into fiction was startlingly rudimentary. She would reproduce her model's speech patterns, appearance, life circumstances exactly; she even transcribed their letters verbatim. Stead's novels can in effect be read as a chronicle of her life. Her lifelong tirade against the libel laws was hardly disinterested.

Though she spent her first twenty-six years in Australia (she was born in 1902), it is doubtful whether Stead in later life felt "Australian," and it is equally doubtful whether Australia liked to consider her a native daughter. Stead was too European and too intellectual. She made her home abroad, and with few exceptions she set her novels there, too. The Australian intelligentsia had always suffered from what one writer memorably termed "cultural cringe," an attitude both deferential and defensive toward European cultural products and institutions. The pull of London, Paris, and New York had stripped Australia of many of her best artists: during Stead's childhood, Miles Franklin moved to America, and Henry Handel Richardson, the most important Australian writer of the period, had been living in Europe for years. As an expatriate, Stead was resentfully branded "un-Australian," a label that was to color her reputation in her native country for the rest of her life.

Stead's childhood, described unforgettably and almost literally in The Man Who Loved Children, was a bitterly unhappy one. Her father, David Stead, was a self-educated naturalist who eventually became the General Manager of the State Trawling Industry and co-founder of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia. Stead characterized him as "Huxley-Darwin reasonable-rational nature-agnostic mother-of-all-things-fresh-air-panacea eclectic-socialist universal-peace-manhood suffrage-and-vegetarianism of the English breed, inheriting from the eighteenth century age of light and Jean-Jacques …" David was a strange combination of atheist and Puritan, allowing no tobacco or alcohol, no kissing, dancing, or embracing in the home. Christina's mother, Ellen Butters, died when her daughter was two, and David then married Ada Gibbins, a delicate girl from a faded-genteel background, totally unsuited to the life of poverty and squalor the Stead family eventually descended to. Before her marriage, she had never learned anything but "water-color-painting, embroidery, and the playing of Chopin."

My stepmother did not like me, very natural, as I was the kind of child only a mother could love and then probably with doubts: her treatment of me was dubious. Sometimes servants thought I was my father's illegitimate child, at other times, they fancied I was an orphan on my stepmother's side: friends who came to the house took me aside and told me what I owed the kind people who had taken me in.

But while Stead obviously despises the furious, impotent Henny Pollit, Ada's representative in The Man Who Loved Children, she retains, too, a certain amount of sympathy for her, trapped as she is in a hated union. It is for the father, Sam, that Stead reserves the full force of her hatred. Of all Stead's monstrous characters, Sam is the greatest monster, because he is the most supreme egotist. Other people, especially his own children, have no independent life for Sam; he sees them only as the very palest reflections of himself. He loves little children because he can be their god, and he forces his way into the very center of their small lives, tirelessly organizing games and fantasies. He speaks to them in a playful dialect, a cross between Uncle Remus and Artemus Ward—a dialect that eventually enrages the reader as Sam uses it to deflect every challenge and confrontation.

Sam is less fond of older children, children who have reached the age of dissent, and The Man Who Loved Children is in large part an account of the conflict between Sam and the adolescent Louisa. Louisa is brilliant, angry, and powerless. Her every assertion of intellectual independence is annexed by Sam into his own story, her every experience is made somehow less authentic than his own.

"You cannot appreciate what I mean and will not for years to come, perhaps never. My sorrows, while all the time I was struggling upward, were more than man should bear."

"I had sorrows too," she piped up.

"I know, Looloo, I know," he said hastily, squeezing her hand. "We are close to each other: you are nearly of an age to begin to understand me."

As Louie makes her strikes for independence, Sam becomes cruel, even sadistic, in his efforts to retain her as his satellite, prying among her things, forcing her to read her diaries aloud, ridiculing her appearance—"You'll find your place in the world, Looloo, but whatever we eventually find in that mountain of fat, it isn't going to be a Pavlova!" Louie, meanwhile, who sees herself as Beatrice in The Cenci, bides her time, plans her escape, and keeps in mind Nietzsche's exhortation to throw not away the hero in her soul—for within the unlikely person of this tubby schoolgirl is a Nietzschean heroine, as she proves at the end of the book, when her achieved act of will brings the Pollits' untenable life to a sort of resolution.

Clifton Fadiman wrote about Sam that "you're ready to scream at him as if he were not a character in a book but a man in your living room"—somewhat in the manner of the characters in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. This infuriating but powerful effect is achieved partly through force of repetition, a technique Stead always used to an unorthodox degree. In all of her novels she treads a very fine line between the power of controlled reiteration and the diffusion caused by an ill-disciplined unwillingness to edit.

What Stead achieved with Sam Pollit was a character who is at once unique and universal: however different he is from one's own parents, he still represents the abstract notion of Parent. This is because Stead penetrated the secret that egotism is an essential condition of parenthood, that all parents are wounded to the heart to think that their children have an emotional and intellectual life independent of them; some parents, like Sam, never accept the existence of that life at all. This universality is why The Man Who Loved Children has survived where another book, I'm Dying Laughing, equally interesting and well-written, is hardly known. The former is a critique of family life as memorable as The Way of All Flesh; the latter is very much of a particular historical moment, and fatally inscribed within it….

Source: Brooke Allen, "‘A Real Inferno’: The Life of Christina Stead," in New Criterion, Vol. 13, No. 2, October 1994, 16 pp.

SOURCES

Pollitt, Katha, "A Monster of Selfishness and Irresponsibility," in Slate, March 6, 2001, http://www.slate.com/id/2000238/entry/1007210/ (accessed July 27, 2007).

Sheridan, Susan, "A Challenge to Feminist Criticism," in Christina Stead, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 9.

Stead, Christina, The Man Who Loved Children, Picador Press, 2001.

"There's No Place Like Home," in Time, April 2, 1965, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941052,00.html (accessed July 27, 2007).

FURTHER READING

Blake, Ann, Christina Stead's Politics of Place, University of Western Australia Press, 1999.

This book traces Stead's travels as an expatriate throughout her adult life and the development of her political sensibilities, and charts how her political development is reflected in her fiction.

Lidoff, Joan, "Family Fictions: The Man Who Loved Children," in Christina Stead Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982, pp. 14-56.

This chapter of Lidoff's book on Stead analyzes the major characters from the novel one at a time, discussing them both independently of one another, and exploring how they work together as a family unit.

Peterson, Teresa, The Enigmatic Christina Stead: A Provocative Re-Reading, Melbourne University Press, 2001.

Rather than focusing on an analysis of The Man Who Loved Children, as so many critical studies of Stead do, Peterson works around the novel, examining Stead's other major works with a depth that they seldom receive elsewhere.

Stewart, Ken, "Heaven and Hell in The Man Who Loved Children," in The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead, edited by Margaret Harris, University of Queensland Press, 2001, pp. 133-44.

As its title indicates, Stewart's essay contrasts the elements of the divine in the novel with the hellish imagery that appears throughout the story.

West, Diana, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization, St. Martin's Press, 2007.

This recent study traces the phenomenon that Stead attributes to Sam Pollit in the novel: a fixation with the toys and games of childhood and the worldview of the child. In West's analysis, this attitude is widespread today and dangerous to society as a whole.