The Man Who Loved Children Read Free Page A

been out of work for many months, it doesn’t bother him: “About their money, as about everything, he was vague and sentimental. But in a few months he would be earning, and in the meantime, he said, ‘It was only right that the mother too should fend for her offspring.’ ” One morning there are no bananas. “Sam flushed with anger. ‘Why aren’t there any bananas? I don’t ask for much. I work to make the Home Beautiful for one and all, and I don’t even get bananas. Everyone knows I like bananas. If your mother won’t get them, why don’t some of you? Why doesn’t anyone think of poor little Dad?’ He continued, looking in a most pathetic way round the table, at the abashed children, ‘It isn’t much. I give you kids a house and a wonderful playground of nature and fish and marlin and everything, and I can’t even get a little banana.’ ” Sam moralizes, rationalizes, anything whatsoever: the children feel that they have to obey, ought to obey, his least whim. There is an abject reality about the woman Henny, an abject ideality about the man Sam; he is so idealistically, hypocritically, transcendentally masculine that a male reader worries, “Ought I to be a man?”
    Every family has words and phrases of its own; that ultimate family, the Pollits, has what amounts to a whole language of its own. Only Sam can speak it, really, but the children understand it and mix phrases from it into their ordinary speech. (If anyone feels that it is unlikely for a big grown man to have a little language of his own, let me remind him of that great grown man Swift.) Children’s natural distortions of words and the distortions of Artemus Ward and Uncle Remus are the main sources of this little language of Sam’s. As we listen to Sam talking in it, we exclaim in astonished veneration, “It’s so!” Many of the words and phrases of this language are so natural that we admire Christina Stead for having invented them at the same instant at which we are thinking, “No, nobody, not even Christina Stead, could have made that up!”—they have the uncreated reality of any perfect creation. I quote none of the language: a few sentences could show neither how marvellous it is nor how marvellously it expresses Sam’s nature, satisfies his every instinct. When he puts his interminable objections and suggestions and commands into the joke-terms of this unctuous, wheedling, insinuating language—what a tease the wretch is!—it is as if to make the least disagreement on the part of the children a moral impossibility.
    His friend Saul says to Sam: “Sam, when you talk, you know you create a world.” It is true; and the world he creates is a world of wishes or wish-fantasies. What Freud calls the primary principle, the pleasure principle, is always at work in that world—the claims of the reality principle, of the later ego, have been abrogated. It is a world of free fantasy: “Sam began to wonder at himself: why did he feel free? He had always been free, a free man, a free mind, a freethinker.”
    Bismarck said: “You can do anything with children if you will only play with them.” All Bismarck’s experience of mankind has been concentrated into knowledge, and the knowledge has been concentrated into a single dispassionate sentence. Sam has, so to speak, based his life on this sentence; but he has taken literally the children and play that are figurative in Bismarck’s saying. Children are damp clay which Sam can freely and playfully manipulate. Yet even there he prefers “the very small boys” and “the baby girls”; the larger boys, the girls of school age, somehow cramp his style. (His embryonic love affair is an affair not with a grown-up but with the child-woman Gillian.) He reasons and moralizes mainly to force others to accept his fantasy, but the reasoning and moralizing have become fantastic in the process.
    In psychoanalytical textbooks we read of the mechanism of denial. Surely Sam was its discoverer: