Second life: The Man Who Love Children by Christina Stead

JA September 15

Christina Stead in 1938.

Anyone trying to revive interest in the novel at this late date will labor under the shadow of the poet Randall Jarrell’s long and dazzling introduction to its 1965 re­issue. Not only can nobody praise the book more roundly and minutely than Jarrell already did, but if an appeal as powerful as his couldn’t turn the world on to the book, back in the day when our country still took literature halfway seriously, it seems highly unlikely that anybody else can now.

Jonathan Franzen might have to eat his words, in the best possible sense, for he’s done exactly what he predicted to be an impossible feat and given a second life to a long-forgotten literary classic.

Back in June, Franzen wrote an ode to Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children in the New York Times. Given the novelist’s huge fan base, and the warp speed of the net, it’s no surprise that the piece was widely circulated around the digital stratosphere. This is word-of-mouth, every publisher’s dream, jacked up to the millions.

Although its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes “Revolutionary Road” look like “Everybody Loves Raymond.” … “The Man Who Loved Children” is so retrograde as to accept what we would call “abuse” as a natural feature of the familial landscape, and a potentially comic feature at that, and to posit a gulf between adults and children far wider than their differing consumer tastes. The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours.

Such was the interest generated from the article that sales for Stead’s novel immediately spiked in the US. Now, MUP, through their Miegunyah imprint, are bringing out three more of Stead’s books in Australia, beginning with The Man Who Loved Children in November (complete with this lovely cover, and Frazen’s eloquent essay as an introduction) and followed by Letty Fox: Her Luck and For Love Alone.

Incidentally, 2010 also marks the 70th anniversary of the TMWLC, which was first released in 1940 to ‘negligible sales’ and lukewarm reviews. Stead wrote it in under 18 months after she moved from Australia to New York as a fictional expression of her own childhood. However her publishers, Simon & Schuster, insisted that she change the setting to Washington D.C. in order to better appeal to American readers.

Franzen himself probably sums up best the complexity, power and black humour at play here:

At its most basic level, the novel is the story of a patriarch, Sam Pollit — Samuel Clemens Pollit — who subjugates his wife, Henny, by impregnating her six times, and who seduces and beguiles his progeny with endless torrents of private language and crackpot household schemes and rituals that cumulatively serve to make him the sun (he is radiantly white, with yellow hair) around which the Pollit world revolves. By day, Sam is a striving, idealistic bureaucrat in F.D.R.’s Washington. By night and on weekends, he’s the hyperkinetic lord of the family’s run-down house in Georgetown; he’s the great I-Am (Henny’s words), the Great Mouthpiece (Henny again), Mr. Here-There and Everywhere (Henny); he’s the Sam-the-Bold (his own name for himself) who insinuates himself into every pore of his children’s beings. He lets them run naked, he spits chewed-up sandwich into their mouths (to strengthen their immune systems), he’s unfazed by the news that his youngest is eating his own excrement (because it’s “natural”). To his sister, a schoolteacher, he says, “It’s not even right they should be forced to go to school when they have a father like me.” To the children themselves he says things like “You are myself” and “When I say, ‘Sun, you can shine!’ doesn’t it shine?”

Our Friends

• Overland
• Alien Onion
• Ampersand Duck
• Andrew McDonald
• A Pair of Ragged Claws
• Arts Victoria
• Australia Council for the Arts
• Ben Eltham
• Bookshow blog
• CAL
• City of Tongues
• Crikey
• darkly wise, rudely great
• David Astle
• Elmo Keep Does Stuff
• The Ember
• Fly the Falcon blog
• Going Down Swinging
• Griffith Review
• Hackpacker
• Harvest
• HEAT
• Island
• Killings blog
• Literary Minded
• Lorraine Crescent
• Lynden Barber
• Mandy Ord
• Marcus Westbury
• Matilda
• Meanland
• Melbourne University Publishing
• Mel Campbell
• The Monthly
• Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
• Oslo Davis
• Paul Callaghan
• Read, Think, Write
• Sleepers Publishing
• Sorrow at Sills Bend
• SPLOG
• Tom Cho
• Virgule
• Wet Ink
• Wheeler Centre