weird america

Sick of reading about weird children? Let’s turn to the rage in adults. I love to read about anger. A “feel bad” book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. This devastating portrait of one of the most hateful, spiteful, unhappy marriages ever imagined was originally published in 1940 with little fanfare and some backhanded good reviews (“Eventually, Christina Stead will impose herself upon the literature of English-speaking countries,” Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker. “I say ‘impose herself’ because her qualities are not apt to win her an immediate, warm acceptance”). Her fellow novelist Mary McCarthy was not kind, calling the book “an hysterical tirade” filled with “fearful, discorded vindictiveness.” It’s hardly surprising that The Man Who Loved Children quickly disappeared. But when it was rereleased in 1965, the book finally found the praise it deserved: “a long neglected masterpiece” and a “big black diamond of a book.” I became a rabid fan.
Henny Pollit, our furious heroine, is trapped in a marriage to a sanctimonious bore who keeps her pregnant. Worse, he constantly lectures her on “love and goodness.” When he begins one of his pompous sermons and sees Henny is frantically scribbling something down on paper as she listens, he thinks his wife is so inspired she’s taking notes, but when he looks over her shoulder he reads, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.” Henny hates her husband with such venom that the reader feels like visiting the emergency room of a hospital after hearing her tirades of vitriol.
“How dare you say that! How dare you—” her husband sputters, but when Henny starts, nobody can control her bitter attacks. “You took me and you maltreated me,” she rages, “and starved me half to death because you couldn’t make a living and sponged off of my father and used his affluence, hoisting yourself up on all my aches and miseries…boasting and blowing about your own success when all the time it was me, my poor body that was what you took your success out of. You were breaking my bones and spirit and forcing your beastly love on me…slobbering around me and calling it love and filling me with children month after month and year after year while I hated you and detested you and screamed in your ears to get away from me.”
Let’s form a “Hate Book Club” and read the dialogue from this amazing novel out loud. Come on, you play Henny and I’ll play the husband and we’ll shout out the malignant taunts and experience together the group horror of a failed marriage. Go on, give Henny’s furor a voice! Rant aloud what she’s had to put up with: “Your everlasting talk, talk, talk, talk, talk…boring me, filling me, filling my ears with talk, jaw, jaw, till I thought the only way was to kill myself to escape you…I’m through; you can pack your bags and get out.” Okay, build now! Start bitching about his family, “your loudmouth, dung-haired sister,” shout out, “Take your whore sister with you!” like Henny did. Now I’ll play the husband and smack you. And then just like in the book, you attack me with a knife. Maybe the neighbors downstairs will hear all the commotion coming from inside our Hate Book Club and will rush up in concern to investigate. Once we get them inside, we can force them to read The Man Who Loved Children, too, and then they can imagine the terrible calm at the end of this scene, when Henny lies defeated on the floor and I, playing the husband, whisper the most maddeningly abusive dialogue of all: “The worst part of it is, Pet, that you love me still in a way; everything you do—even this!—shows me that. I know it!

—Role Models, 2010, John Waters (via poopballs)