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qualitatively different event that at once sums up and contradicts the earlier events, and is the beginning of a new series. And Christina Stead depends almost as much on the conflict of opposites—for instance, of Sam with Henny, the male principle with the female principle, the children with the grown-ups, the ugly duckling with the ducks. She often employs a different principle of structure, the principle that a different point of view makes everything that is seen from that point of view different. Her book continually shows the difference between children’s and adults’ points of view, between men’s and women’s, between Henny’s relatives and Sam’s relatives, between Sam’s and anybody else’s, between Louie’s and anybody else’s, between Henny’s and anybody else’s—when Henny comes home from shopping and tells what happened on the trip, the people and events of the story seem to the children part of a world entirely different from their own, even if they have been along with Henny on the trip. A somewhat similar principle of organization is the opposition between practice and theory, between concrete fact and abstract rationalization, between what people says things are and what they are. And Christina Stead, like Chekhov, is fond of having a character tell you what life is, just before events themselves show you what it is.
    The commonest and most nearly fundamental principle of organization, in serial arts like music and literature, is simply that of repetition; it organizes their notes or words very much as habit organizes our lives. Christina Stead particularly depends on repetition, and particularly understands the place of habit in our lives. If she admits that the proverb is true— Heaven gives us habits to take the place of happiness —she also admits that the habits are happiness of a sort, and that most happiness, after all, is happiness of a sort; she could say with Yeats that in Eden’s Garden “no pleasing habit ends.”
    Her book, naturally, is full of the causal structures in terms of which we explain most of life to ourselves. Very different from the book’s use of these is its use of rhythm as structure, atmosphere as structure: for instance, the series of last things that leads up to Henny’s suicide has a dark finality of rhythm and atmosphere that prepares for her death as the air before a thunderstorm prepares for the thunderstorm. Kenneth Burke calls form the satisfaction of an expectation; The Man Who Loved Children is full of such satisfactions, but it has a good deal of the deliberate disappointment of an expectation that is also form.
    A person is a process, one that leads to death: in The Man Who Loved Children the most carefully worked out, conclusive process is Henny. Even readers who remember themselves as ugly ducklings (and take a sort of credulous, incredulous delight in Louie) will still feel their main human-ness identify itself with Henny: the book’s center of gravity, of tragic weight, is Henny. She is a violent, defeated process leading to a violent end, a closed tragic process leading to a conclusion of all potentiality, just as Louie is an open process leading to a “conclusion” that is pure potentiality. As the book ends, Henny has left, Louie is leaving, Sam stays. Sam is a repetitive, comic process that merely marks time: he gets nowhere, but then he doesn’t want to get anywhere. Although there is no possibility of any real change in Sam, he never stops changing: Sam stays there inside Sam, getting less and less like the rest of mankind and more and more like Sam, Sam squared, Sam cubed, Sam to the nth. A man who repeats himself is funny; a man who repeats himself, himself, HIMSELF, is funnier. The book dignifies Henny in death, dismisses Sam with: And he lived happily ever after. The Pollits’ wild war of opposites, with Henny dead, becomes a tame peace. Even Louie, the resistance, leaves, and Sam-the-Bold, the Great I-Am, the Man Who Loved