The Man Who Loved Children Read Free Page B

there is no reality—except Henny—stubborn enough to force Sam to recognize its existence if its existence would disturb his complacency. We feel for Sam the wondering pity we feel for a man who has put out his own eyes and gets on better without them. To Sam everything else in the world is a means to an end, and the end is Sam. He is insensate. So, naturally, he comes out ahead of misunderstanding, poverty, Henny, anything. Life itself, in Johnson’s phrase, dismisses him to happiness: “ ‘All things work together for the good of him that loves the Truth,’ said the train to Sam as it rattled down towards the Severn, ‘all things—work—together—for the good—of him—that loves—the TRUTH!’ ”
    Sam is one of those providential larger-than-life-size creations, like Falstaff, whom we wonder and laugh at and can’t get enough of; like Queen Elizabeth wanting to see Falstaff in love, we want to see Sam in books called Sam at School, Sam in the Arctic, Grandfather Sam. About him there is the grandeur of completeness: beyond Sam we cannot go. Christina Stead’s understanding of him is without hatred; her descriptions of his vilest actions never forget how much fun it is to be Sam, and she can describe Sam’s evening walk with his child in sentences that are purely and absolutely beautiful: “Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father’s head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the day-shine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him.”
IV
    A description of Louie ought to begin with Louie knew she was the ugly duckling. It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling!—it is almost as if the grown, successful swan had repressed most of the memories of the duckling’s miserable, embarrassing, magical beginnings. (These memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he once was more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is.) Stumbling through creation in awful misery, in oblivious ecstasy, the fat, clumsy, twelve- or thirteen-year-old Louie is, as her teacher tells her, one of those who “will certainly be famous.” We believe this because the book is full of the evidence for it: the poems and plays Louie writes, the stories she tells, the lines she quotes, the things she says. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces. We do not have to take on trust Louie’s work, and she is real to us as an artist.
    Someone in a story says that when you can’t think of anything else to say you say, “Ah, youth, youth!” But sometimes as you read about Louie there is nothing else to say: your heart goes out in homesick joy to the marvellous inconsequential improbable reaching-out-to-everything of the duckling’s mind, so different from the old swan’s mind, that has learned what its interests are and is deaf and blind to the rest of reality. Louie says, “I wish I had a Welsh grammar.” Sam says, “Don’t be an idiot! What for?” Louie answers: “I’d like to learn Welsh or Egyptian grammar; I could read the poetry Borrow talks about and I could read The Book of the Dead .”
    She starts to learn Paradise Lost by heart (“Why? She did not know really”); stuffs the little children full of La Rochefoucauld; in joyful amazement discovers that The Cenci is about her father and herself; recites,
A yellow plum was given me and in return a topaz fair I gave,
    No