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PARTISAN REVIEW
for example, is the extravagant and outgoing language of a wheeling–
dealing businessman: " Every crisis is a storm of gold: most people run
under an awning to get away from it. Do you know how to make
money, Leon?
If
you do, spill it. Here we are silting in a shower of gold
and nothing to hold up but a pitchfork!" In her next novel,
The Man
Who Loved Children,
she astonishingly captures the game-playing
language of children and their parents. This great novel is the story of
Christina Stead's childhood, of how Louie Pollit, while growing up
from her twelfth to fifteenth years, manages to attain the detachment of
an artist in a society in which the family has gone mad. Its setting is
transposed from Sydney to Washington, D.C. (where Stead had moved
in 1937) "for a simple reason-to shield the family. " Stead's remarks on
this are wonderfully blunt:
Q. It is certainly the most powerful evocation of what it's like to live in a
family that I've ever read.
A. That's a terrible criticism, isn't it?
Q.
Terrible criticism?
A. Of family life.
Stead presents a portrait of the artist as a young woman
in a
family.
More than this, she gives a revelation of the unconscious life of
a family. What Joyce in stream-of-consciousness revealed in the mind,
Stead in her intimate and outspoken group portrait reveals in the
family, as Randall Jarrell points out: "A family's private life is as
immoderate and insensate, compared to its public life, as our thoughts
are, compared to our speech . ... Christina Stead combines with such
extremes an immediately plausible naturalism.... We do remember;
and remembering, we are willing to admit the normality of the
abnormal." And beyond her portraits of artist and of family, Stead
gives us a picture of the war between the sexes which is effortlessly
expanded into a picture of a war between technical and sensual
humankind within a polarized modern culture.
The father of the family, Sam Pollit, is one of the great nightmare
characters of modern literature. He is a liberal, a scientist, and a
successful civil servant, who has never grown up and suffers from a sad
case of euphoria. Sam is almost serious when he tells his children that
in the future there will be "projection by dematerialization." When the
children object that the passengers will be smashed to pieces and no
one will travel, Sam responds, "That's what they said when the
locomotive came in." He explains, "Each one has a formula and is
reassembled according to that minutely correct formula. We haven't
the freaks and neuroses of the Dark Ages. We were born according to
