The Man Who Loved Children Read Free

itself could not worm its way by any means into his heart. Such a thing would have made him ill or mad, and he was all for health, sanity, success, and human love.”
    Sam’s vanity is ultimate: the occasional objectivity or common decency that makes us take someone else’s part, not our own, is impossible for Sam, who is right because he is Sam. It is becoming for Sam to love children so (Henny says in mockery, “The man who loves children!” and gives the book its title), since he himself is partly an adult and partly a spoiled child in his late thirties; even his playing with words, the grotesque self-satisfying language he makes for himself, is the work of a great child, and exactly right for children. After he has had to live among adults for eight months, he seems sobered and commonplace; but at home among the children, he soon is Sam again. At home “the children listened to every word he said, having been trained to him from the cradle.” He addresses them “in that low, humming, cello voice and with that tender, loving face he had when beginning one of his paeans or dirges”; his speech has “a low insinuating humming that enchanted the sulky ear-guards and got straight to their softened brains.” The children listen open-mouthed; but Sam’s mouth is open wider still, as he wonders at himself. “Were not his own children happy, healthy, and growing like weeds, merely through having him to look up to and through knowing that he was always righteous, faithful, and understanding?” It is wonderful to him that he originates independently the discoveries of the great: “The theory of the expanding universe … it came to me by myself. … And very often I have an idea and then find months, years later, that a man like our very great Woodrow Wilson or Lloyd George or Einstein has had it too.”
    Kim was the Little Friend of all the World; Sam is its Little Father. He wishes that he “had a black baby too. A tan or Chinese one—every kind of baby. I am sorry that the kind of father I can be is limited.” A relative objects, to his not sending the children to Sunday school, “When they grow up they will have nothing to believe in.” Sam replies: “Now they believe in their poor little Dad: and when they grow up they’ll believe in Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, and Einstein.” Their poor little Dad is for the Pollit children a jealous God, one who interferes with everything they do and still is not satisfied, but imports children from outside the family so that he can interfere with them. He makes each of the children tell him what the others are doing “in the secrecy of their rooms or the nooks they had made their own. With what surprise and joy he would seize on all this information of his loving spies, showing them traits of character, drawing a moral conclusion from everything!” Sam loves and enjoys the children, the children admire and enjoy Sam; and yet there is nothing too awful for him to do to them and feel that he is right to do to them—the worst things are so mean and petty, are full of such selfishness and hypocrisy, are so impossible, that even as you believe you cry, “It’s unbelievable!”
    We can bear to read about Sam, a finally exasperating man, only because he is absolutely funny and absolutely true. He is so entirely real that it surprises the reader when an occasional speech of his—for instance, some of his Brave New World talk about the future—is not convincing. Perhaps different parts of his speech have different proportions of imagination and fancy and memory: it doesn’t seem that the same process (in Christina Stead, that is) has produced everything. But Sam is an Anglo-Saxon buffoon, hypocrite, quite as extraordinary as the most famous of Dostoevsky’s or Saltykov-Schedrin’s Slavic ones. Sam asks for everything and with the same breath asks to be admired for never having asked for anything; his complete selfishness sees itself as a complete selflessness. When he has