Monday, 18 July 2011
Happy Birthday
Apparently today would be Christina Stead's birthday. Stead was a very great writer and her books are too little read in this country, or anywhere for that matter. For Love Alone and The Man who Loved Children are both tremendous and utterly original, even if they do have, as she says, 'what are called errors'. I don't know why my children were offered such flimsy examples of Australian literature to study in the schoolroom, when they could have been plunging into works like these.
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Ah - George will be very happy to read this (hello George) as he recommended The Man who Loved Children for our book club and David and I were the only ones who liked it. We both thought it was a hauntingly accurate depiction of a fascinatingly despicable character.
ReplyDeleteSam is despicable for his self-blindness, but then again the author takes so much pleasure in him, that thriving, vital natural force, sun-haired and glowing in the garden, that I don't think she ever despises him. She gives him his due, he is not a mean and petty man in the way that his Colonel Willetts, his superior in Malaya, is mean and petty, he supports his sister Bonnie and takes in her baby when Jo wants to throw away the sister and the baby too; and he is mortified by her cruelty. And I think the line that comes in that scene is one of the more interesting lines that Stead puts in his mouth, because the problem that he diagnoses in her the same problem that the reader might diagnose in him. "Shut up Jo: the trouble with you is that you don't understand anything and you don't try to learn." Oh Sam.
ReplyDeletePolly - that anecdote reminds me of why I don't enjoy book clubs.
ReplyDeleteUmbagollah - I never thought he was any more despicable than I am, or anyone else. He only has an exaggerated case of what we all suffer from. You can't really continue living without some self-blindness.
Hi, Polly!
ReplyDeleteIt is a wonderful book, but I'm not sure it is one for the secondary schools. Or maybe that doesn't matter--there are parts of The Great Gatsby that seemed sophisticated when I read it at 17, laughable when I read it at 35, and rather touching at 50 or so.
The American critic Marvin Mudrick writes somewhere that the conflict between intellect and vitality is the great subject of literature (and that is why Chaucer is incomparable in English). One sees, he says, what a monster the wife of Bath must be to live with, yet how fascinating she is. Sam has his share of intellect, but his critical faculties work outward only, as you say.
No you can't, but a grown man who reads an adolescent's hidden book of crush-poetry aloud to a group of children and encourages them to make fun of it has earned the right to be called at least a little bit despicable. Sam's not just very pleased with himself, and ignorant of other points of view, he's a bully who gets angry with his targets when they don't play along. '"Here," he said, throwing it to her, so that it fell on the floor, "take it away and don't write such sickening tommyrot."' He is an exaggeration, such a fruitful, massive exaggeration that he's practically an archetype, and I'm not keen on the idea of describing a book through the likability of its characters (and in the case of Man it seems particularly inadequate, like trying to exhaust Norse mythology by saying that you don't like Thor much because he shouts a lot), but I think it's right, when we see this aspect of our exaggerated selves represented so clearly, to find it shameful. "As he reads about Henny the reader feels, in awe, how terrible it must be to be Henny; as he reads about Sam he blurts, "Oh, please don't let me be like Sam!"' as Randall Jarrell says in his introduction to the book. And then the suspicion that we are like Sam, like masked Sams, not so outgoing about our Samness as the real pure Sam, the ur-Sam who is Sam.
ReplyDeleteThe main reason I have always had trouble with Patrick White and never with Christina Stead is that his work gives me the impression that he loathes humanity for its humanity - and therefore bitterly hates all his characters - whereas she doesn't. So, while I agree with you about a book's qualities having nothing to do with the likeability of its characters, I do prefer an author who doesn't dislike their own characters too much.
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