CHRISTINA ELLEN STEAD was born in 1902 in Sydney’s south. After graduating from high school in 1919, she attended Sydney Teachers’ College on a scholarship. She subsequently held a series of teaching and secretarial positions before leaving for London in 1928.
There she met and fell in love with Wilhelm Blech (later William Blake), a married American broker at the financial organisation where she was working. They moved to the Paris branch of the same firm in 1929, eventually marrying in 1952 after many years travelling and writing in Europe and the United States.
Stead’s debut novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and a short-story collection, The Salzburg Tales, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and America. They were followed by novels drawing on Stead’s time in Paris, The Beauties and Furies and House of All Nations, and in the 1940s a succession of major works, among them A Little Tea, a Little Chat and Letty Fox: Her Luck.
By the early 1950s Stead’s sales, and her finances, had deteriorated. ‘Her refusal to write for popular taste, her mobility and her left-wing politics,’ Margaret Harris writes, ‘all impeded her efforts to be published in the postwar environment.’
The republication in the mid-1960s of the autobiographical novels The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone renewed interest in Stead’s writing; the former has in recent years been called a masterpiece by Jonathan Franzen, among others. Over the next ten years Stead published four new works of fiction, including The Puzzleheaded Girl and The Little Hotel.
Stead returned to Australia for a university fellowship in 1969, following William Blake’s death. In 1974 she resettled permanently in Sydney and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award.
Christina Stead died in 1983. She is widely considered to be one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century.
MARGARET HARRIS is Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita of The University of Sydney, and literary executor for Christina Stead. Her publications include Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead and, most recently, George Eliot in Context.
ALSO BY CHRISTINA STEAD
The Salzburg Tales
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
House of All Nations
The Man Who Loved Children
For Love Alone
Letty Fox: Her Luck
A Little Tea, a Little Chat
The People with the Dogs
Cotters’ England (US title: Dark Places of the Heart)
The Puzzleheaded Girl
The Little Hotel
Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)
Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead (ed. R. G. Geering)
I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist
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Copyright © Christina Stead 1936
Introduction copyright © Margaret Harris 2016
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First published by Peter Davies Ltd 1936
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2016
Cover design by WH Chong
Page design by Text
Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer
Primary Print ISBN: 9781925355703
Ebook ISBN: 9781925410136
Creator: Stead, Christina, 1902–1983, author.
Title: The beauties and furies / by Christina Stead ; introduced by Margaret Harris.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.2
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
City of Night
by Margaret Harris
The Beauties and Furies
City of Night
by Margaret Harris
FROM THE BEGINNING Christina Stead’s fiction divided critical opinion, and reactions to The Beauties and Furies, her second novel, were no exception. Where some saw ‘garrulous pretentiousness’, Clifton Fadiman in the New Yorker found ‘such streaming imagination, such tireless wit, such intellectual virtuosity’ that Stead must be recognised as ‘the most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf’.
What Fadiman discerned is the extraordinary originality of Stead’s modernist experiment, ranking her achievement with that of James Joyce. Ulysses, published in 1922, was no longer banned for obscenity in the United States by 1936, when The Beauties and Furies was published. Of the major novels published in that year, only William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood rival The Beauties and Furies in its contempt for prevailing realist-narrative expectations. (The big commercial success of 1936 was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, much to Stead’s chagrin.)
Once I would have thought Fadiman’s claim excessive. My introduction to Christina Stead was through the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children (1940) in 1965, which astounded me. I was already reading her in earnest in the late 1970s when the Virago republications began, including The Beauties and Furies in 1982. I found it baffling, overshadowed by its predecessor, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1935), and its successor, House of All Nations (1938)—the latter is Stead’s other Paris novel, based on her experience of working in the private bank where her partner, William Blake, was a financial adviser.
I wasn’t alone. The Beauties and Furies has never been taken up as The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone (1944) have been. Only in recent years, as I have thought more about Stead’s early writings, has it been borne in on me that it is arguably her most experimental work, disconcerting and disturbing, a searching, sometimes ironic, depiction of a decadent society. It is a quintessential modernist text that heeds Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’.
Its affinity with Ulysses is marked. In letters back to Sydney after her arrival in London in 1928, Stead called Joyce ‘the modern Shakespeare, superior to Shakespeare in command of language, equal in music’, acknowledging that Ulysses is ‘hard work’ because it ‘has to be read with a rhyming dictionary, an encyclopaedia, the grammars of ten languages, and an annotated “crib”’.
Joyce was far from being her only discovery in those heady years. Stead’s fiction from the start displayed the interest in dreams and the unconscious flaunted in The Beauties and Furies, everywhere mixing fantasy and reality in extravagant swoops of tone and register. The influence of surrealism is pervasive, reaching greatest intensity near the end, in the spectacular sequence in the Somnambulists’ Club.
Yet a plot summary could represent the novel as no more than a variant of 1930s lending-library romances: a bored London housewife, Elvira Western, leaves her solid doctor husband, Paul, for a younger lover, Oliver Fenton, a student in Paris. At every turn, though, the narrative undermines romantic expectations. There is an underto
w of incestuous and same-sex attractions among the various heterosexual liaisons, along with daring depiction of casual couplings, and references to prostitutes, venereal disease and abortion. This is not the Paris of romantic love: dreams are nightmarish in a city of night rather than light.
The action takes place in a specific timeframe in 1934, in a moment of political instability due to an economic downturn and the menace of fascism. It begins in March, with Paris still unsettled following an outbreak of violence in February, and ends in the winter of 1934–35. Throughout there are references to contemporary events, including the workers’ rallies in May attended by Oliver.
There is much political rhetoric. Characters’ analyses of such issues as the operation of capital are largely Marxist-Leninist, and to a significant extent are attributable to the input of William Blake. But they are the views of the characters, frequently belied by their actions, and not endorsed by Stead.
The weight of this depiction of bad faith rests on Oliver. Although he supports the workers by attending rallies, he harbours a desire for a career in business rather than academia. His commitment to the labour cause is expedient. The topic of his thesis, on which he works fitfully, is ‘The French Workers’ Movement from the Commune to the Amsterdam Congress of 1904’, chosen for easy archival access and exotic appeal to his English university. However, his cynicism rarely finds such epigrammatic expression as in his observation that ‘All middle-class novels are about the trials of three, all upper-class novels about mass fornication, all revolutionary novels about a bad man turned good by a tractor.’
According to this mocking definition, The Beauties and Furies is very much a middle-class novel, though bourgeois values and behaviour are among its targets. In the rich opening chapter, the first of a sequence of triangles is set up, involving the ‘runaway wife’ (as Elvira is described in the List of Characters), her husband and ‘her lover, a student’. The similarity of the names Elvira and Oliver is curious, and they are sometimes described as twins: Elvira’s brother Adam Cinips also enters the emotional equations. Oliver’s affairs with the actress Blanche and the lace artist Coromandel set up further triangles.
The idea of Paris as an underworld is spelled out by Annibale Marpurgo, ‘a lace-buyer’, a manipulative self-made cosmopolitan. His declaration that ‘Paris is Klingsor’s garden, to me’ is typical of the range of allusion that Stead deploys, here bringing into play Wagner’s opera based on the medieval Grail quest epic Parzival.
An ‘annotated “crib”’ would tell us that in Wagner’s version, Parsifal, Klingsor—who has been denied entry to the Temple of the Holy Grail, despite having attempted to do away with his impure thoughts by self-castration—constructs a garden into which questing knights are seduced. The sexual connotations are especially relevant. Similar intertextual references proliferate in the novel, including an explicit invocation of Ulysses when Oliver reads to Elvira as she is lying ill (an episode that tells us a lot about Oliver).
From the first chapter, where Marpurgo trades radical credentials with Oliver, political affiliation is a persistent topic in The Beauties and Furies. Marpurgo declares that they are ‘Brother marxists…and brother fantasts’, tossing in mention of the Arabian Nights and Hegel. Elvira refers to the economic determinism of capitalism, using imagery from lace manufacture to enunciate a tension between romantic dreams and fate: ‘Life’s a pattern, and we’re just shuttles rushing in and out thinking we are making jerks up and down freely.’ The image is potent, playing into the role of the lace industry in the novel as well as signalling that these characters lack agency.
Although the characters articulate insights both about others and themselves, these rarely translate into action, any more than do such histrionic processes of irresolution as this:
Elvira sat at home and ate olives and chocolates alternately. She also wound herself, slow, cold, beautifully-diamonded, as a snake, round the problem, and colder and more forbidding grew her brow. She began to smoke, and was presently smoking the chamber full of her resentment, desolation and increasing resolution.
‘What a damned traitor!’ she cried, beside herself with impatience. Her smoke-trails, as she paced about, were like wraiths waiting about the ceiling to topple on Oliver’s much-cursed and oft-coddled black topknot.
Stead took pains to study the practical aspects of lace-making. The industry provides an economic case study of a venerable craft being overtaken by mechanisation. The novel focuses on the businessmen who manage the trade, the Fuseaux brothers (‘lace-jobbers’) and their employee Marpurgo: the operatives are not seen. Paradoxically, these economic issues are explored in some of Stead’s most fantastical writing, particularly in the presentation of the Paindebled family, whose members literally live off the past. Both the Paindebled house and shop are repositories of lace as a work of art, exemplified by the prized umbrella cover, a beautiful decorative object entirely lacking utility.
The Paindebled daughter, Coromandel, despite her family context has more agency than any other character in the novel—as demonstrated in a seduction scene that enacts a metaphysical poem like Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ (‘This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere’). Later she carries Oliver off on a crazy drive into the countryside. She can operate in the bucolic environment of the farm in Burgundy, beyond the house and shop. Along with Blanche, the characters in the lace storyline are the only Parisians among the dramatis personae: the others are transients.
Stead reaches beyond the immediate setting in the allusion of the title to the Furies of Greek mythology, goddesses of vengeance who brought pestilence and misfortune. Marpurgo says that Paris ‘has many beauties—and furies’, and the three central beauties, Elvira, Blanche and Coromandel, all become destructive furies. ‘Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone send me for you,’ says the Machiavellian Marpurgo to Oliver—who he is about to lead into a hypnotic drunken revel. In a welter of allusion, Marpurgo casts himself as Laius, father of Oedipus, and addresses Oliver as Orestes, who was pursued by the Furies for killing his mother.
The classical references reinforce Stead’s alignment with Joyce, which is evident also in the wordplay of Oliver’s poems. Like Ulysses, The Beauties and Furies is concentrated in a particular city at a particular historical juncture, though its action extends beyond a single day to run across a full year. The novel is shaped by the cycle of the seasons, within which is conducted the minuet of characters meeting and parting, mainly in interiors or nocturnal scenes from which the natural world is largely excluded. The seasonal round offers no promise of anything other than a different version of the same kinds of romantic illusion and delusion that have been delineated with such exhilarating energy over some 350 pages.
The Beauties and Furies is a challenging novel of breathtaking ambition. Surrender to it, and marvel.
The Beauties and Furies
LIST OF CHARACTERS
ELVIRA WESTERN, a runaway wife.
PAUL WESTERN, M.D., her husband.
OLIVER FENTON, her lover, a student.
ADAM CINIPS, her brother, a dyer.
SARA STEELE, a distant cousin of Paul.
COROMANDEL, a young Frenchwoman.
M. PAINDEBLED, her father, an antiquary.
AMELIE, her insane mother.
ANNIBALE MARPURGO, a lace-buyer.
ANTOINE and GEORGES FUSEAUX, brothers, lace-jobbers.
BLANCHE D’ANIZY, a French actress.
SEPTENNAT, political columnist, her lover.
MAURICE BLANE, journalist, her lover.
ANDREW FULTON, café loafer.
And others.
CHAPTER I
The express flew towards Paris over the flooded March swamps. In a parlour-car, the melancholy dark young woman looked out persistently at the sand-dunes, cement-mills, pines, the war-cemetery with stone banners like folded umbrellas, the fields under water, the bristling ponds with deserted boats and the little naked trees which marked the horizon-searching roads. Her lips moved a
lmost imperceptibly. The sky was clearing after weeks of rain. Opposite to her sat a man she judged to be an Italian; the initials on his tobacco-pouch were A. M. in gilt script, he wore a diamond tiepin and he was about forty. Across the aisle a rouged blonde with a cigarette-holder ordered Evian water and drawled about a hunt ball and ‘Esmé, a perfect darling, terrific at charades.’ The small dark woman was slipping her new shoe off her swollen right foot when she saw the Italian looking at her sociably. She drew a letter out of her bag and tried to pretend that she had just got it, hurriedly, in the morning’s mail, as she left for the train. The address, in a student’s script, said ‘Mrs. Paul Western, Mecklenburgh Square, London,’ and had a French stamp. Mrs. Western rather slowly took out the letter and read it from the beginning, although these were the very words that she had been repeating by heart during the journey. It said:
ELVIRA, MY DEAR,—Paris is bitter cold, with slate-blue skies, and yet I am already looking forward to the spring, but all you can look forward to in your blue-nose London is arthritis-March, neuralgia-April, coldsore-May, sniffle-June, macadamsick-July, cheappetrol-August, fireless-September, influenza-October, and four coffin-months to follow. I don’t say, How can any woman resist my entreaties, but just, How can any young woman resist Paris in the spring? How can you resist me in the spring? It’s against nature and all the authorities! On moonlight nights, when everyone walks with his shade, I pretend we are here together. You are the moon of beauty and I a moonstruck poet. My little glass of water on the bedroom table, when the moon sails high above the narrow street, shines with one eye, a little moon, and I go out. The skies are starling-dark—your hair; the town and its towers discoloured—your breast; the river, curdled, bubbling—your voice; the glistening brown buds of the first-sprouters—your eyes. I lie awake at night, my body sinks like a crust shillyshallying to the silt of a dull canal, my brain floats. I begin to see all that tame, familiar country between Paris and the Channel, the Channel and London. I see you at home, grumping over a meal with Paul, or by yourself by the fire, contented in habitual melancholy. I feel the stuff of your diffident dresses, hear your cool voice dropping disconsolate words like water from a tap: you odd creature! I’m afraid to do it often, because I lie awake a long time afterwards, open to sights, scents, sounds. Asleep, I know you are not with me, and I devise all sorts of ways of getting to you. I am up home in Northampton saving up to come to London, working in my father’s bakery, the Polack beside me singing unintelligible songs, covered with sweat from the heat, sweeping, scraping and saving and learning under an oil-lamp. Or I am sitting for examinations in a row and cannot see you till I pass them all. Or I am in Paris for seven years, confined in the Archives, and all sorts of worries begin: Will she be dead in seven years? Will I? Will she have a child and forget me? I sob in these dreams and wake up in the morning crying. The next day I can’t work at all, but nod over my desk at the Archives. Only once or twice I dreamed we were going to be married: I made all preparations for the wedding: we went to the registrar; coming out of the registry office, men working on the road took off their hats and sang the Wedding March. That was the happiest moment of the whole year when I dreamed that!…
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