On a recent vacation, I did some long-overdue beach reading (critics of beach reading be damned), the major upshot of which was that I read Christina Stead’s wonderful novel The Man Who Loved Children. I am grateful for the haunting power and beauty of her prose and that, by mere serendipity, I became aware of the book’s existence after seeing a reference to its author in an article I read for work-related reasons. Only later did I find out that no lesser authority than Jonathan Franzen, author of the much-hyped Freedom, recently recommended this work for summer reading. This apparently helped the relatively obscure book to gain a higher profile this year, the seventieth anniversary of its original publication in 1940. For that, Franzen is no doubt to be thanked.
Reading his article shortly after finishing The Man, however, I can’t help feeling Franzen’s take is woefully inadequate. Franzen, who recently told an interviewer that “We don’t need novelists telling us about the surfaces of being a human being” (quoted by The Rumpus), focuses almost exclusively on the interior life of the Pollit family in his piece on The Man. He can’t quite understand why Stead isn’t canonized; after all, she does interiority so well, so she is clearly “needed”—whatever that means. But there is more to the family drama presented by Stead than a brilliant rendering of the inner life of a family. There is the impecuniousness of the family’s living situation and the attendant need to pursue credit, which causes the mother, Henny, great headaches. (Her grumblings, in Franzen’s estimation, are just “operatic.”) And then there’s the anthropological expedition the father (Sam) goes on, and the imperialist notions that travel back home with him across the surface of the Pacific. Franzen’s one-sided reading, fixated on what lies below the surface, misses those important surface-level processes (operating in everyday life or through wider social relations) that play out in the lives of Stead’s characters.
In his recent book Exit Capitalism, Simon During dedicates a chapter to discuss the work of Christina Stead. He characterizes The Man as follows:
The novel presents a devastating account, largely from a daughter’s perspective, of a family dominated by a sentimental, idealist, tyrannical father, Sam Pollitt—another soft progressivist, who faintly allegorizes the United States of the New Deal itself. Despite not openly presenting itself as a political novel, it is related to the psychoanalytically orientated, anti-familial, anti-Stalinist (or “Western”) theoretical Marxism being developed on the back of Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), most notably in the Frankfurt school’s Studien über Autorität und die Familie (1936).
This insight complicates the notion of “interiority” substantially. The very boundary between the internal (the psyche) and the external world is called into question. Read with Freud at the back of one’s mind, a family drama is never merely about interiority (Freud’s term for the “family romance” in German is Familienroman, which can also translate as “family novel”). During insists that Stead is a thoroughly political writer. In fact, her communism (unmentioned by Franzen) is her œurvre’s “primary condition,” if not in a straightforward way. Stead’s (a)positionality, During argues, is “outside the outside.” As a communist, she is outside of capitalism, but she is outside of communism as well because she does not write of working-class heros in orthodox Stalinist fashion. Outside the outside is not the same as inside; to say that Stead is a writer of interiority, as Franzen does, is is to blot out the distinctiveness of her position and to reinscribe the hegemony of what During calls “democratic state capitalism.” Stead’s exclusion from canonicity, which Franzen finds inexplicable, has a rather simple reason: she’s anticapitalist, so she’s not considered relevant in our post-historical present.
“Perhaps most of all, and paradoxically, she’s a communist writer in that her narratives are presented at a radical remove from the society they describe,” During writes. Judging by the resonant passage that constitutes the denouement of The Man Who Loved Children, this strikes me as being on target. Here, Sam’s eldest daughter Louise (Henny’s stepdaughter) leaves her parents’ home, Spa House. After crossing the bridge to the main part of town and gathering the resolve to leave, she finds: “Things certainly looked different: they were no longer part of herself but objects that she could freely consider without prejudice.” Then: “Everyone looked strange. Everyone had an outline, and brilliant, solid colors. Louie was surprised and realized that when you run away, everything is at once very different.” The relation interiority/exteriority is transformed in the crucial moment of Louise’s move outside the family drama. The book ends with the sentence: “Spa House was on the other side of the bridge.” Louise emerges from the suffocating interiority of family life and rises to a new surface on which she can stand with her own two legs. This move is what is “revolutionary” about Stead’s writing.
I don’t know when I’ll next have time to sit on a beach and read a novel. Maybe I’ll grab Freedom to see what Franzen’s rendering of interiority/exteriority is. To be perfectly honest, I probably won’t. More likely, I’ll pick up House of All Nations, Letty Fox, The People With the Dogs, The Little Hotel or A Little Tea, A Little Chat—to name just a few titles from Stead’s impressive literary output.
