by David Malouf
For Love Alone was not written early and it was not written here. It shows the effect of distance. The narrative is crowded, precise and sensuous, but the writer is not mesmerised by her earlier self or by the place where she began. She is not limited by being either a woman or an Australian.
Stead has a woman’s wry and sometimes angry knowledge of the sex-war – which doesn’t look like a war – but she expresses it like a writer. Her most destructive male characters are full of weakness and charm (Tom Cotter) as well as selfish chauvinism (Sam Pollit, Robert Grant), and some of her subtlest monsters are women. She takes it for granted that a woman may be an active agency, just like a man. We must be grateful to the feminists for having quite properly taken her up, but we do not need to think of her as a feminist writer, or worse, a woman writer. She has the kind of toughness, intelligence, interest in how things work (no-one understands better the world of banking, investment, shabby back-street dealing) of the born novelist – a category in which sex is important but gender is not.
Nor does she belong, essentially, to Australian literature. The four books at the centre of her achievement deal with ‘the matter of America’. They are a passionate critique of its failed idealisms (The People with the Dogs), and of the various forms of cannibalism (A Little Tea, A Little Chat) of its capitalist mode. The streets of New York, the Washington area of The Man Who Loved Children, the Catskills, Virginia in full summer, all these are created with the same density and precise feeling for place and creature as the harbourside of For Love Alone. And when Stead shifts to England, she creates in Cotter’s England a sombre, coal-black account of one ‘dark place of the heart’, of the miseries of poverty, of helpless or crazy old age, of youth betrayed and betraying, that seems at this distance unequalled among the English novels of its decade for the acuteness of its home truths.
She writes about where she is. She belongs wherever she puts down her intelligence and allows it to take root.
Her forte is the making of monsters. They are monsters of egotism whose energy is terrible; they never stop talking, they never sit still. Brilliant, self-deceiving, wheedling, sentimental, funny talk comes tumbling out of their mouths; it is a web to catch others with its charm; it smothers and consumes them. It is a form of power.
The power-game begins at home. Brothers and sisters, parents and children, tear one another apart; they love, feed, tyrannise over one another; they eat each other up.
The alternative to the actual family is the made one – those households that proliferate in these books as havens for the odd and disorderly, like Edward’s house off 14th Street, or the one at Scratch Park in The People with the Dogs, or Nellie’s refuge for women in Cotter’s England. Even here, the exploitation, the slaughter, goes on. It is Stead’s political vision that allows her to move with such authority between worlds, from private to public, from one part of the system to another; to Europe (House of All Nations), to England, to America, then back again. The political vision is also the moral one. ‘Satan,’ as Oneida Massine ironically puts it in The People with the Dogs, ‘finds work for busy hands.’
As so often in the blacker comedies, the villains have all the energy and charm. Evil knows what it wants, and goes on, out of sheer animal vitality as well as lust or greed, to get it. The spectacle is both horrible and marvellous.
It is Stead’s image of America – American idealism, American capitalism as the poles of the system – that stands at the centre of her work. The view is dark. Only the ‘fiftieth state’, the Massine enclave at Whitehouse, offers any hope, and Edward, the hero of The People with the Dogs, has to escape it to find a life of his own. Still, he recognises the achievement:
With a little goodwill and mutual aid and sensible nonchalance, with live and let live, we can take vacations from the epoch of wars and revolutions.
Vacations. The Massines’ is a holiday world of ‘creative sloth’. It doesn’t keep the farm going, but it is there. Even the crazy airman Bart has to salute the ‘comedians on the hill’. ‘You might,’ he tells them, ‘be the last people alive. You would not be a bad crowd to start the human race again.’
Angry, passionate, loving, tolerant, fascinated by the richness of things natural, things made, by talk, jokes, deals of every sort, and the energy of even the most vicious creatures in her aquarium, Christina Stead has the scope, the imagination, the objectivity of the greatest novelists.
With characteristic generosity Patrick White recognised this when he chose her for the first of his Nobel Prize awards. She is his great contemporary. They are an awesome pair. We are lucky, we readers, to have both of them.
Sydney Morning Herald,
Saturday 17 July 1982
SCINTILLATING STEAD
THERE IS A MOMENT towards the end of The People with the Dogs, the last of Christina Stead’s American novels, when we are offered the nearest thing we get in her world to a moment of achieved harmony. The scene is a wedding feast:
At that moment the family, not specially arranged, but in a natural order, stood about at the door, in the lobby, and on the two flights of stairs, as well as in the room, and round the table, waiting for the toasts. There was no silence or constraint, no impatience and no flurry. In this moment, as in all others, their long habit and innocent, unquestioning and strong, binding family love, the rule of their family, made all things natural and sociable with them.
The Massines here are the ideal community. Families in these novels, those earliest models of the sociable, are not always so innocent, their rule is seldom so easy and without constraint; and those two terms, ‘natural’ and ‘sociable’, that seem here like two aspects of the same achievement, are more often in a warring relationship on opposite sides.
From the beginning Christina Stead has been a novelist of communal and sociable man, of action and the crowded life of cities. Her first work, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, is already a city novel, dealing with intellectuals, radicals, people of mind and soul trying to make their way under the pressure of hard economic conditions, aspiring to life and love in ‘modern times’. With no other novelist I know (except Balzac) are we so aware always of where work and money belong in the characters’ lives. And yet they are not simply the product of their environment. Letty Fox is an absolutely modern woman, a New Yorker to her fingertips. ‘To be plain,’ she tells us, ‘I despised the country and only used it to grow up in. Like plants and sheep.’ She is at home only in the fast-moving eat-or-be-eaten world of the city; she is utterly socialised. Yet she recognises the force that has her cousin Cecily in its grip as something anterior to society and its rules, as something primeval and darkly mysterious:
She loved the night. She slept out on the grass. One summer night we saw her walking naked between the garage and the house. The sky was bright with stars. This seemed awful to us, and Cecily was clothed for us in mystery and danger from that night on.
Cecily is a key figure in Letty Fox, Her Luck. Responsive to nature and its forces, and endowed with a rich and precocious sexuality, she wants, at twelve, to be married to her boy Carl, but is mocked and frustrated by those for whom sexuality belongs not to ‘nature’ but to the rules and regulations made by men. She is driven to suicide. Another cousin, Elvira, equally precocious, has her photograph taken in the nude and distributed to admirers. Sex for her is already something that belongs in the world of advertising, to commerce. She follows the rules.
There is a sense in which, if we are to see our lives as having some other shape than a string of random events, we must read them as ‘stories’, using, as dreams do, the oldest and most primitive forms we know, the folk-tale and fairy story.
Christina Stead is a born teller of tales as well as a sharp and scientific observer of creatures in an environment. Even the most modern of her novels, the most firmly rooted in economic reality, have the shape of fairy stories and are in touch with the world from which they derive. This, in the end, is what seems rarest and most original in her. Her characters belong
to society and are determined by it, but they also see themselves as belonging to a world in which what is being acted out are fables older than society and more deeply connected to what is human. Even that hard-headed modern miss, Letty Marmalade (always in a jam), has to go twice into the house of the witch, Lucy Headlong, to ‘the sacred mount, the haunted grove’ and suffer fierce ordeals of body and spirit (‘I thought of things in legend, the shirt burning like fire, the potions, the brews, the love-draughts’) before she is ready to meet her Prince Charming, a real millionaire no less; though it is in the nature of Letty’s luck, and of this modern fairytale, that he should by the time she marries him be a millionaire only in name. Characters here suddenly act in ways that take them right out of modern times, and the satirical mode, into something more like the world of the Brothers Grimm; as when Percy Hogg, of Letty Fox, meets the boys who have escaped from the prison farm and steals their stolen meat:
Hogg, to conceal his wild exultation at having eaten the stolen meat, stopped to gather a mandrake he saw. He carefully loosened the soil and brought up the strange plant …
However accurately placed and defined by the society they find themselves in, these characters do not have their whole being there; neither do the books. It is what makes the tone of Christina Stead’s writing so complex and ambiguous and the works so difficult to categorise. They escape – they marvellously escape – all the usual modes.
Letty Fox, as its narrator tells us, is ‘a book of a girl’s life. Men don’t like to think that we are just as they are; but we are …’. She means by this that a woman can be an active agency with her own fate and her own object in life. Letty’s object may seem to be that of any romantic heroine: ‘My supreme idea was always to get married and join organised society … I like to be decent; and in the table of decency a husband comes before anything else’; but her situation is not at all that of the romantic heroine.
‘In other times,’ she tells us, ‘society regarded us as cattle or handsome house slaves; the ability to sell ourselves in any way we like is a step towards freedom.’ The wry irony of that ‘freedom’ is at the heart of the book and of Letty’s hard-headed acceptance of limitations.
This is the book of Letty Fox’s ‘Education Sentimentale’, at the hands of many men – most of them weak, self-regarding, sentimental, hypocritical exploiters of women in Stead’s most assured manner – and a whole tribe of women: her timid mother, Mathilde (awful example of the downtrodden and rejected wife), Granny Fox, Granny Morgan, the terrible Dora Morgan, and various girlfriends: Hilda, Pauline, and that expert on the subject, the maverick Australian Amy, whose findings are presented in the form of a jokey (but deadly serious) catechism:
Q.: I love my fiancé, but I love another man, too – what shall I do?
A.: Throw up a nickel. If it comes down heads, stick to your fiancé; if it comes down tails, stick to your fiancé.
Q.: What about a girl most attracts a man?
A.: Other men.
Q.: But how can you hold a man?
A.: If there were any known way we wouldn’t have marriage laws.
Q.: I’m taller than he is; I’m embarrassed when we’re walking down the street. What can I do?
A.: Walk in the gutter while he walks on the kerb; or let him take you about in a wheelchair.
Q.: He doesn’t respect me now that we’ve slept together.
A.: Then it’s a good thing you didn’t marry him.
Q.: I love him but he doesn’t make enough to live on.
A.: Marry someone else.
Amy’s wickedly accurate analysis of the relations between the sexes is dramatised in the book’s wide range of encounters and confrontations.
Money is of the essence. It frequently replaces some other factor in a well-known formula. ‘He held my knee and showed me his wallet,’ Letty’s silly mother says of Mr Montrose; and another family friend, Mr McLaren, gives Letty’s father some early advice on child-raising:
A child starts off with the right idea of society if she has a little of her own, and I’m sorry you have let the first two years pass without her owning something. Thus, two years have passed during which she belonged to the underdogs, and I’m sorry to observe that this has a bad effect on the character and temper in our class of society … Let me have a child during the first seven dollars and I can guarantee its success afterwards.
When Letty does have a little of her own, Granny Fox’s $2500, its gradual whittling away provides one of the book’s chief plot interests. Men are deeply attracted by it. ‘I attracted men enough,’ Letty tells us, ‘but I could not,’ she adds, with wry ambiguity, ‘keep them.’ Her sister Jacky fares even worse. ‘Oh, I have boyfriends,’ she tells Letty. ‘One of them wanted to marry me. He wrote mother a letter. He asked her in the same letter if the $2500 would be paid at once and if mother’s piano would go along with me.’
Such is the world Letty works and uses her freedom in, the world in which she has to save her life, find a man – ‘a man, not half a human couple’ – and have her children.
The crown of all this is the ‘alimony game’, that specifically American addition to the war between the sexes; especially in the new and improved form in which it is practised by the second Mrs Bosper. The French Canadian Pauline, brought up on European manners, offers the sharpest view of it:
What luck you have, you American women! Men who pay for everything and don’t ask for accounts. Yes, it’s Protestantism. The men believe they’ve done their women an insult and injury by sleeping with them. They must pay for ever … Oh Golconda of women! And then, one’s not obliged to stay with one man. Not at all. A woman can try one man after another and each one’s obliged to pay for the privilege of sleeping with her, but only, of course, when he has stopped sleeping with her; it’s sleep with, or go to jail for alimony.
Percy Hogg and Philip Morgan, Letty’s uncles, both go to jail for alimony, and Philip, another tragic victim like Cecily, who cannot reconcile sexuality to the laws of the land, hangs himself outside Letty’s bathroom window.
The system is monstrously unnatural and cruel to both sexes. To survive and stay human, as Letty does, and to have a real life, is no easy matter. Letty does it by being ‘wide-awake’ and on all occasions honest with herself; by knowing the rules of the game and playing them to the letter and beyond, but without cruelty or vindictiveness; by having, as she puts it, ‘principles, even in a really evil setting’; and by having luck.
Two more of Amy’s questions and answers need quoting:
Q.: But do you think I’ll get a man if I stick to all this?
A.: You’ll get one anyway.
Q.: Isn’t this mere intrigue, trickery, unsuitable for a decent girl?
A.: Success is crime.
Letty is simply as kind, good, honest, natural and free as her world allows her to be.
‘Success is crime’ might have done very well as the epigraph of A Little Tea, A Little Chat. It is the most blackly comic of Christina Stead’s masterpieces. The opening sets the tone and suggests something of its cold, clear, objective view of things:
Peter Hoag, a Wall Street man, aged 56 in March, 1941, led a simple Manhattan life and had regular habits. He lived alone in a furnished apartment at $110 monthly, on the 18th floor of a residential hotel in the lower East Sixties … The people below looked so small that they seemed like two-legged fleas, and the cars so small that they were like potato-bugs that could be scooped up by the hatful.
A latter-day City Comedy, full of coney-catching devices of the most resourceful and up-to-date sort, and over-reachers of all kinds and both sexes, A Little Tea has at its centre a comic character of Volpone-like dimensions.
Robert Grant is devoted to the double art of seduction and swindling; for him woman and commodities are indistinguishable. ‘Property is a woman,’ he tells his son, Gilbert, in an extraordinary eight-page lecture on the morality of money; and the two become one in Stead’s definition of sexual gambits:
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bsp; He did not care for the pursuit, nor for adventure. Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance: ‘I got no time for futures in women.’
Grant’s world is a world of deals both big and small, of exploitation, dog-eat-dog betrayals, of snooping, spying, anonymous letters and saleable secrets. Grant cannot stop talking, cannot sit still, and never has his hand out of someone’s pocket. Stead marvellously catches the style in which he ‘gives himself away’, a style that is meant to confuse as well as fascinate:
He dropped clues, lifted masks, showed his tracks, all through his discourse, and then seeing what he had done, doubled back on himself, made false scents, artfully mixed in incompatibles, but not with any true idea of dodging them, but of keeping their minds intent on himself and his romantic situation. He did not care what they saw as long as they kept looking and wondering at him. He felt all kinds of rich emotions, a sentimental innocence in the pleasure of showing himself to them as a creature they had never dreamed of – more sorrowful, wickeder, gayer, more romantic, more lecherous, more bewildered.
Grant’s twists and turns, his rapid shifts of pace, focus, object are like Stead’s own; the book lives off Grant’s energy which is a law unto itself, a force of nature. Garrulous, mean, obsessive, self-parodying, Grant also has great charm and in the end – and this is one of the book’s major achievements – real pathos. He is a comic monster who out-natures nature and breaks free of any attempt his creator might make to place him morally. He longs to have his life turned into a Broadway hit, and his attempt to achieve this in partnership with a crazy dramatist ‘of European reputation’ is one of the most comic things in the book; but like Volpone, or Brecht’s Pierpont Mauler, he is too big for the drama he is in already; his energy cannot contain itself or be contained. He cheats without discrimination because it is his ‘nature’. He takes his profit everywhere. When he is given an apartment to hide in, which he soon sublets, ‘he began peering into cupboards. He found salt, coffee and canned milk in the kitchen – a profit. In one of the drawers was a small enamelled pill-case about one inch square. He liked this and pocketed it.’ His passion for boxes of all sorts, and for keys to open and close them, is fetishistic, an unexplained ‘humor’ that produces some of the book’s zaniest conversations and scenes. His excuse always is that he is a creature of the society that produced him:
