While Sam and Henny’s war takes up the novel’s foreground, its less and less secret arc is Sam’s deteriorating relationship with his eldest child, Louie. Many good novelists produce entire good oeuvres without leaving us one indelible, archetypal character. Christina Stead, in one book, gives us three, of which Louie is the most endearing and miraculous. She is a big, fat, clumsy girl who believes herself to be a genius; “I’m the ugly duckling, you’ll see,” she shouts at her father when he’s tormenting her. As Randall Jarrell noted, while many if not most writers were ugly ducklings as children, few if any have ever conveyed as honestly and completely as Stead does the pain of the experience of being one. Louie is forever covered with cuts and bruises from her bumblings, her clothes forever stained and shredded from her accidents. She’s befriended only by the queerest of neighbors (for one of whom, old Mrs. Kydd, in one of the novel’s hundred spectacular little scenes, she consents to drown an unwanted cat in the bathtub). Louie is constantly reviled by both parents for her slovenliness: that she isn’t pretty is a terrible blow to Sam’s narcissism, while, to Henny, her oblivious self-regard is an intolerable seconding of Sam’s own (“She crawls, I can hardly touch her, she reeks with her slime and filth—she doesn’t notice!”). Louie keeps trying to resist being drawn into her father’s insane-making games, but because she’s still a child, and because she loves him, and because he really is irresistible, she keeps humiliating herself by surrendering.
More and more clearly, though, Louie emerges as Sam’s true nemesis. She begins by challenging him on the field of spoken language, as in the scene in which he’s expatiating on the harmonious oneness of future mankind:
“My system,” Sam continued, “which I invented myself, might be called Monoman or Manunity!”
Evie [Sam’s younger, favored daughter] laughed timidly, not knowing whether it was right or not. Louisa said, “You mean Monomania.”
Evie giggled and then lost all her color, became a stainless olive, appalled at her mistake.
Sam said coolly, “You look like a gutter rat, Looloo, with that expression. Monoman would only be the condition of the world after we had weeded out the misfits and degenerates.” There was a threat in the way he said it.
Later, as she enters adolescence, Louie begins to keep a diary and fills it not with scientific observations (as Sam has suggested) but with veiled accusations of her father, elaborately enciphered. When she falls in love with one of her high school teachers, Miss Aiden, she embarks on composing what she calls the Aiden Cycle, consisting of poems to Miss Aiden in “every conceivable form and also every conceivable meter in the English language.” As a present for her father on his fortieth birthday, she writes a one-act tragedy, Herpes Rom, in which a young woman is strangled by her father, who seems to be part snake; since Louie doesn’t know a foreign language yet, she uses a language of her own invention.
While the novel is building to various cataclysms at the plot level (Henny is finally losing her long war), its inner story consists of Sam’s efforts to hold on to Louie and crush her separate language. He keeps vowing to break her spirit, claiming to have direct telepathic access to her thoughts, insisting that she’ll become a scientist and support him in his altruistic mission, and calling her his “foolish, poor little Looloo.” In front of the assembled children, he forces her to decipher her diary, so that she can be laughed at. He recites poems from the Aiden Cycle and laughs at these, too, and when Miss Aiden comes to dinner with the Pollits he takes her away from Louie and talks to her nonstop. After Herpes Rom has been performed, ridiculously, incomprehensibly, and Louie has presented Sam with the English translation, he pronounces his judgment: “Damn my eyes if I’ve ever seen anything so stupid and silly.”
In a lesser work, this might all read like a grim, abstract feminist parable, but Stead has already devoted most of the book to making the Pollits specific and real and funny, and to establishing them as capable of saying and doing just about anything, and she has particularly established what a problem love is for Louie (how much, in spite of everything, she yearns for her father’s adoration), and so the abstraction becomes inescapably concrete, the warring archetypes are given sympathetic flesh: you can’t help being dragged along through Louisa’s bloody soul-struggle to become her own person, and you can’t help cheering for her triumph. As the narrator remarks, matter-of-factly, “That was family life.” And telling the story of this inner life is what novels, and only novels, are for.
Or used to be, at least. Because haven’t we left this stuff behind us? High-mindedly domineering males? Children as accessories to their parents’ narcissism? The nuclear family as a free-for-all of psychic abuse? We’re tired of the war between the sexes and the war between the generations, because these wars are so ugly, and who wants to look into the mirror of a novel and see such ugliness? How much better about ourselves we’ll feel when we stop speaking our embarrassing private family languages! The absence of literary swans seems like a small price to pay for a world in which ugly ducklings grow up to be big ugly ducks whom we can then agree to call beautiful.
And yet the culture isn’t monolithic. Although The Man Who Loved Children is probably too difficult (difficult to stomach, difficult to allow into your heart) to gain a mass following, it’s certainly less difficult than other novels common to college syllabuses, and it’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you. I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people in this country who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it. I might never have found my way to it myself had my wife not discovered it in the public library in Somerville, Mass., in 1983, and pronounced it the truest book she’d ever read. Every time I’ve been away from it for some years and am thinking of reading it again, I worry that I must have been wrong about it, since the literary and academic and book-club worlds make so little of it. (For example, as I’m writing this, there are 177 Amazon customer reviews of To the Lighthouse, 312 for Gravity’s Rainbow, and 409 for Ulysses; for The Man Who Loved Children, a much more accessible book, there are 14.) I open the book with trepidation, and then I read five pages and am right back into it and realize that I wasn’t wrong at all. I feel as if I’ve come home again.
I suspect that one reason The Man Who Loved Children remains exiled from the canon is that Christina Stead’s ambition was to write not “like a woman” but “like a man”: her allegiances are too dubious for the feminists, and she’s not enough like a man for everybody else. The novel’s precursor, House of All Nations, more resembles a Gaddis novel, even a Pynchon novel, than it does any novel by a twentieth-century woman. Stead wasn’t content to make a separate peace for herself, in a room of her own. She was competitive like a son, not a daughter, and she needed to go back, in her best novel, to her life’s primal scenes and beat her eloquent father at his own game. And this, too, is an embarrassment, since, however central competition may be to the free-enterprise system we live in, to cop to it personally and speak of it nakedly is very unflattering (athletic competition being the exception that proves the rule).
Stead, in the interviews she gave, was sometimes frank about how directly and completely autobiographical her novel was. Basically, Sam Pollit is her father, David Stead. Sam’s ideas and voice and domestic arrangements are all David’s, transposed from Australia to America. And where Sam is infatuated with an innocent girl-woman, Gillian, the daughter of a colleague, the real-life David fell for a pretty girl the same age as Christina, Thistle Harris, with whom he briefly had an affair, later lived with, and eventually, after many years, married. Thistle was the beautiful acolyte and flattering mirror who Christina herself could never be for David, if only because, although she wasn’t fat like Louie, she also wasn’t remotely good-looking. (Rowley’s biography has pictures to prove it.)
In the novel, Louie’s lack of good looks is a blow to her own narcissism. Her fatness and plainness are, arguably, what rescue her from her father’s delusions, impel her toward honesty, and save her. But the pain that Louie experiences in not being pleasing to anybody’s eyes,