How Real Is Sam Pollit? "Dramatic Truth" and "Proces-Verbal" in "The Man Who Loved Children"

Abstract

Man Who Loved Children is a 527-page study of an egotist, wrote the American critic Clifton Fadiman, in his 1940 review of the novel. I think Miss Stead studies him too hard and too long, but there can be no doubt that when she's through, Pollit exists, just as surely and implacably as does Balzac's Pere Goriot. repulsive, a swine, often a damned bore whose long-windedness and infinite complacency tear at your nerves till you are ready to scream at him. But that's the nub of it you're ready to scream at him as if he were not a character in a book but a man in your living room. Christina Stead would have agreed, quite literally, with the comment Sam Pollit exists. She liked to say that she invented nothing neither characters (You can't invent people or they're puppets [Lidoff interview 217]) nor plots. (Hers were real plots that occur in [Wetherell interview 444].) In interviews in later life she took this stance to its extreme. When asked, once, whether The Man Who Loved Children had any connection with her own childhood, she replied emphatically, Of course, it's exactly for word (Wetherell interview 437). About Pollit she said, less ingenuously, He's a picture of my father that's no secret (Raskin interview 74). Frequently, when she talked about her fictional characters, as she liked to do in interviews, she made no distinction between the character and the real-life model; she used the fictional name as a pseudonym. Pollit, Jonathan Crow, and the others referred to actual people.'