There's No Place Like Home

THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN by Christina Stead. 527 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $5.95.

At the time it seemed like too much of a bad thing. Back in 1940, when Australia's Christina Stead (House of All Nations) first published The Man Who Loved Children, a world at war was in no mood to consider the perennial war between men and women. The book sold badly and was soon forgotten. But a slowly enlarging circle of literati insisted that a magnum opus had been overlooked, and the publisher at last consented to a second edition that proves the literati right. The Man Who Loved Children is one of the most truthful and terrifying horror stories ever written about family life.

Charming Croc. Sam, the central figure of the tale, is "a tall, yellow-haired, red-faced man with sparkling, self-satisfied eyes and a kind of religious mouth." Born poor, he has risen to some modest eminence in the U.S. Department of the Interior. Sam the Bold he calls himself, but in fact he is pitifully afraid of life. He hates his wife because she will not be his mother, fears the world because it does not accord him the homage he feels he deserves. To compensate for these afflictions, Sam shamelessly uses his six children. He says he loves them "as no man ever loved his children before"; in fact, he battens on his babies like a charming crocodile.

To win their confidence he shamelessly acts their age. Every night after work and all day Sunday ("Funday"), Sam spouts Sam-made nursery rhymes ("Old Mother Bannister sat on her canister"), talks baby talk ("Dot a nedache. Dot pagans in my stumjack") and justifies his egotism by spieling off a sermon on world federation or the evils of drink or his own "beautiful soul and sympathetic life story." His object, he piously proclaims, is to create "splendid men and women to work for progress." But when his eldest daughter shows signs of becoming a splendid woman, Sam savagely attempts to destroy her--jeers at her poetry, sneers at her diary and, when all else fails, comes flat out with the awful truth: "You will never leave me! I'll break that miserable dogged spirit of yours!"

Living Poor. His wife Henny is a ravaged beauty when the book begins. Bred to wealth, she despises Sam for making her live poor and for playing the "little tin Jesus." She spends her life cursing him, beating her babies, kissing them better, robbing their piggy banks, fighting off loan sharks, sneaking off to see a stupid lover and viciously cheating at solitaire. She ages disastrously. Halfway through the book she is "a black-eyed, feverishly rouged hag with blazing yellow skin" and a mind that is slowly coming apart.

The tragedy of Sam and Henny is no grand Sophoclean descent into doom. They live like a couple of roaches battling over garbage, and fate simply sluices them down the drain. But every page is written with battering intensity. The Man Who Loved Children is a big black diamond of a book, an exotic and virulent attar of hatred.

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