Monday 19 October 2009

Christina Stead - Handle With Care

If I haven't posted much about my reading lately, it's because I have been immersed - I use the word advisedly - in an extraordinary (and very long) novel, Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children. This is a book that swallows you whole, and demands in turn that you swallow it whole. The world it throws you into is so entire, and so utterly extraordinary, that there are no half measures, no easy accommodations to be made (in this - and to some extent in subject matter - it resembles the work of Ivy Compton Burnett). Published in 1940 and set in Washington and Indianopolis in the 1930s, it is in fact (in shocking fact) closely based on Stead's own Australian childhood in the 1910s. It is, in a sentence, the portait of an unhappy marriage - unhappy on an epic, a monstrous scale - and of the ways in which the two parties to that disastrous mismatch use, abuse and oppress their children in their own cause. Henny, the wife, has become a raging, ranting harridan, still loved by her young children, capable of tenderness, but capable too of turning on them in her rage, a rage so intense and violent that she frequently passes out from the sheer force of it. Why is she like this? The reason is soon apparent, in the shape of her husband Sam, an overgrown child with no understanding of life but with an absolute, unshakable conviction of his own goodness and the rightness of his ideals (which include more than a dash of eugenics). His goodness is him - and so, tragically, are his children. They are his project, and he sees no boundaries between him and them - a fact which is at its most terrible in his relations with his eldest daughter, Louise, the child of his late first wife. He sees himself as telepathically linked to Louise, who can have no life independent of him, no secrets, and who will be mercilessly, shockingly mocked and humiliated if he discovers signs of independent life - all, of course, for her own good, as Sam can only be good. While relations between husband and wife have broken down, to the point where they communicate only in terse messages passed on by the children or in appalling, epic rows (the word is too weak), Sam - 'the man who loves children' - cultivates his relations with the children with ferocious, unceasing energy, constantly engaging them in merry, loud and messy busyness about the house and in the grounds, even enlisting nieghbourhood children into his loving circle. All are chivvied along in a joshing, wheedling invented language of sickly diminutives and babytalk - used liberally even with the adolescent 'Looloo' (one of half a dozen silly names for her, while Sam is, according to mood, 'Sam-the-great' or 'po' little Sam'). While Sam and his tribe of child helpers crash around, Henny skulks and rages, hurling the vilest insults both at Sam and at the unprepossessing, but smart and perceptive, Louise. So far, so nightmarish. The only glimpses of something like normality come when one or other of the principals is briefly at large in the world outside the family home - most notably when Sam is away in Singapore for eight months. On his return, it seems briefly as if he is not going to slip back into the Sam of old - but alas, he does, and events progress towards the inevitable terrible climax (but one which, mercifully, leaves more than a glimmer of hope for poor Louise).
Outlined like this, The Man Who Loved Children sounds like some exercise in Gothic excess or grand guignol - but it reads like the purest naturalism, however jaw-droppingly appalling the action that is being described (and at times it can even be construed as horribly comic). Stead's touch is so sure, her conviction so absolute, her writing so charged with fierce energy, that this wild, implausible world seems only too plausibly real. Randall Jarrell puts it brilliantly in his prefatory essay, which I am only reading now that I've finished the book. The real life of families, correctly remembered, is implausible: 'There in that warm, dark second womb, the bosom of the family, everything is carried far past plausibility; a family's private life is as immoderate and insensate, compared to its public life, as our thoughts are, compared to our speech.' Quite so - and family life doesn't come much more immoderate and insensate than it is in The Man Who Loved Children. I think this is a very great book - I'm amazed it isn't better known - but it is one of the most emotionally lacerating, at times very nearly unbearable, reading experiences I have had. Like Flannery O'Connor, Stead gives no quarter, she flays the emotions, she appalls. I am still dazed and reeling, and no doubt will be for some time. I recommend it then, wholeheartedly - but not lightly. It is a book to be handled with care.

14 comments:

  1. A brilliant review of what I'm sure is a very accomplished book.

    But what I struggle to understand is why one would want go through an experience that is 'emotionally lacerating, at times very nearly unbearable'. Hasn't life got enough potential for this sort of thing without going out of your way to find it? Personally, I think fiction should provide diversion, consolation or education. But not laceration.

    I genuinely struggle to understand why people read books like this (an upmarket version of the 'misery memoir'?) and would be grateful to hear a rationale.

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  2. Sounds as if I should shelve it with Hardy, on the "to be read after I've finished the Russkies" shelf.

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  3. Behind the Ruskies, but in front of Proust, I reckon.

    To be read in the event of broken limb. And broken telly.

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  4. Well Gaw diversion comes in many forms - as do consolation and education. I think you're confusing subject matter - in this case it is indeed that of a misery memoir - and the art made from it, which transforms that material into something else altogether. Reading this book was diverting - not in the sense of amusing, though there certainly is a kind of black comedy in it (I may have undeplayed that) - but in terms of diverting me from my normal life into another world. These characters may be monstrous but they are hugely compelling - esp Sam - in an awful way, you just can't get enough of him. It was educational about the human soul, and indeed about how not to bring up children, or conduct a marriage. And it was consoling in the way that all real art ultimately is - and all bad or phoney art absolutely isn't. There - it passes your test - read it!

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  5. If someone recommends a book by saying "You'll find this harrowing" one tends to baulk a bit. Do I really want to be harrowed?

    But when one has actually read a good book, and it was harrowing, you're glad you did. Only connect and all that.

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  6. I have just ordered it and was gratified to see it is well over 500 pages. If I'm going to be swallowed whole by a harrowing novel, I like to get maximum value per page. But I can't shake this worry that it will all seem strangely familiar and I won't be harrowed at all. If Sam truly was an overgrown child with no understanding of life but with an absolute, unshakable conviction of his own goodness and the rightness of his ideals, wasn't he just a typical blogger ahead of his time?

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  7. Thanks Nige. You're convincing but I remain unconvinced. I guess it's all down to the transformative power of art. But I note the book still seems to retain the element of laceration, which I for one wouldn't mind avoiding.

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  8. It's good to see someone else admiring Stead. At the moment I'm re-reading A Little Tea, A Little Chat, a book that came some while after The Man Who Loved Children, and her style in the intervening years has grown harsher, harder -- there's no equivalent, in this book, of the softening and complicating element that the children bring in, and no ugly-duckling Louie. The passages of scenery have been cut away and we're left with the bare-bones sight of the main character, self-deceiving, self-pitying as Sam, delivering speeches that go on for a page at a time. All of the characters are adults and they're gouging into one another quite fiercely. Her House of All Nations is a great book as well, and I have a soft spot for The People with The Dogs. Dogs is an uneven piece of work, but the family she writes about in the middle section (it's arranged like a sandwich: city, country, city) has the hermetic itself-ness of the Pollits.

    The Journal of the Association for the study of Australian Literature ran a Stead centenary issue in 2003: http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/issue/view/8

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  9. Thanks very much for that, Anonymous - I'm certainly intending to explore Stead further. And I think, in my original post, I did underplay the softening elements in The Man Who Loved Children - perhaps because I was still reeling from the ending...

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  10. A great review, Nige - sounds intriguing, though hopefully it doesn't teeter over into Richard Yates-level depressingness. And thanks for the Flannery O'Connor recommendation all those moons ago - she is a new favourite.

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  11. No Kate you'd be all right with Stead. I cld happily read it again - and surely no one can say that of any Richard Yates. Glad you liked Flannery - Wise Blood next perhaps?

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  12. Re. And I think, in my original post, I did underplay the softening elements ...

    Fair enough too, I think. They're only softening when you compare Man to the rest of her oeuvre, eg, "The presence of children and the lack of wailing and deluded teenagers having illegitimate babies makes The Man Who Loved Children a more palatable book than Letty Fox: Her Luck," or "The presence of children and the fact that the book is not eight hundred pages long, virtually plotless, and set in a French banking institution circa 1932, makes The Man Who Loved Children a much pleasanter thing to read than House of All Nations." On the other hand the ending of House is fairly chirpy.

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  13. Oh Mr Nige, I am so glad that a friend of mine had bookmarked your review of TMWLC - because it didn't show up in any of my Google searches. Mind you, even when she sent me your URL I couldn't find it till she sent the bookmark: could you please add a Search Box to your otherwise admirable blog?
    Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers (Melbourne, Australia)
    PS I'll add a link to your review on my blog post, now that I know where it is...

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