Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  While those suffering from phobias face a double bind that makes self-esteem and long-term attachment mutually exclusive, the obsessive-compulsive, in Ugazio’s model, has the more profound problem of being obliged to choose between opposite and equally unacceptable visions of self. Here the patient’s family constructs its conversation around the opposites sacrificial renunciation/selfish indulgence. The sufferer is a child adopting a median position, not unlike the position Bateson occupied between his father and brother. A huge appetite for life, stimulated by those in the family occupying the selfish side of the polarity, makes a path of self-renunciation unbearable to contemplate. But the label of selfishness placed on almost any engagement with pleasure destroys self-esteem, which, for reasons of early attachment, largely depends on the judgement of someone occupying the renunciatory side of the polarity.

  The classic symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive are of two kinds: compulsively repeated actions like washing hands or checking that a door has been locked (Ugazio recounts the case of a man who stopped his car every few hundred yards to see if he had run over a child or an animal). These may be seen as the neurotic reactions of one for whom every adventure into life generates guilt. The obsessions, on the other hand, take the form of the invasion of highly erotic or violent images over which the mind has no control. These can be seen as the repressed yearnings of one who is determinedly seeking self-esteem in renunciation and repression.

  Again Ugazio offers examples suggesting how the condition can arise in particular family scenarios and the strategies developed to deal with it. Particularly intriguing is her account of the tendency to cultivate a hierarchical vision of ‘evil’ which allows a ‘selfish’ self to flourish just so long as it remains under the control of a superior ‘sacrificial’ self The case history of a hard-working priest living with his mother but allowing himself homosexual adventures in third world countries is instructive here. At the age of thirty, the priest had been hospitalised for two months with an acute obsessive-compulsive disorder. After decades of relative health his symptoms recur when he is fifty-nine. Usually on return from his ‘holidays’, his mother (decidedly on the renunciatory side of the critical polarity), though not privy to his secret, had been extremely severe, giving a welcome sense of punishment and facilitating his renewed acceptance of his ‘higher’ self. But after the most recent trip the elderly lady was indulgent and spoke of her ‘not always being there to look after him’. Suddenly the priest feels that the guarantee that his homosexuality will remain strictly circumscribed is gone. The conflict between selfishness and renunciation is renewed with obsessive erotic images, insomnia and extreme anxiety as the result.

  Ugazio makes it clear that her book is to be seen more as an analysis of the causes of the disorders she discusses than a manual of therapeutic approaches. There are no prescriptions, no large claims. On the contrary, she recognises that by linking these disorders to the very process by which the patient’s character has been formed, her model demands that successful therapy achieve nothing less than a reconstruction of the patient’s deepest epistemology. All the same, and despite these sensible caveats, it seems only legitimate that the reader ask what hope her new systemic model offers for the sufferers she describes.

  The issue of therapy is finally, if rather unsatisfactorily, addressed in the book’s last chapter. Ugazio clearly does not favour the dramatic forms of intervention proposed by Haley and Selvini. But nor does she take Bateson’s pessimistic line that such matters are too delicate to be interfered with at all. Rather she suggests that, having established the critical semantic polarity which dominates the patient’s life and within which he is unable to find a satisfactory position, the therapist can begin to look for other polarities around which the family of origin composed itself, since, as she insists, no family, however fierce the schismogenetic process, will be limited to just one polarity. In so far, she claims, as she has alleviated and in many instances eliminated the symptoms of the patients described in the book, this has been achieved by gradually playing down the importance of the critical polarity and building on any others available in the patient’s experience to generate self-esteem in different ways and lead him or her to contemplate an entirely different life story. In this process, the original double bind does not so much disappear - after all, most of us are aware of, for example, a certain incompatibility between complete independence and close attachments - as become less urgent and all-determining.

  In line with this approach, Ugazio concludes by remarking that one of the great dangers of therapy arises when therapist and patient concede the same importance to the same semantic polarity. Obsessive-compulsives, she claims, will tend to go to traditional Freudian analysts, because Freud himself saw the world in terms of indulgence and repression. This explains why, while offering such brilliant accounts of the disorder, Freud himself lamented his limited success in curing it. He could not move patients away from a vision he shared. Any inflexible approach to mental disturbance thus runs the risk of becoming, as Blake put it, another of ‘man’s mind forg’d manacles’, and may lead to situations where the therapist is actually exacerbating the patient’s difficulties. It is with this caveat that Ugazio bows out by suggesting that With respect to this [her own] as to other models of mental disturbance I believe the therapist must maintain a wise irreverence.’

  The modesty here is admittedly exemplary, yet after the brilliance of her analysis of how double binds and illnesses can occur, one cannot help wishing that Ugazio had spent longer describing the process by which they may be eroded. And since various asides in Storie permesse indicate that she has worked with schizophrenics for many years, one likewise wishes that she had thrown caution to the winds and told us straight whether or not she believes her model is applicable to that most intractable of disorders. But perhaps these are to be the subjects of other books.

  Christina Stead: Our Luck

  [Christina Stead]

  Aside from all the betrayals and broken friendships, the abortions and depressions, and, in old age, two decades of inertia and alcoholism, the real scandal of Christina Stead’s life, one feels on reading Hazel Rowley’s fine biography of the Australian novelist, is that right up to her death in 1983 she remained not only a hard-line communist but a declared Stalinist. In the teeth of the evidence, this brilliant and supremely gifted woman, who spent much of her life toing and froing between Europe and the United States, neither relented nor retracted.

  The great scandal of Stead’s novels, on the other hand, at least as seen by those who shared her political views, was that they could not have been more damaging to the cause of communism, or indeed any reformist position. Invariably and with lavish ferocity these works attack the prophets and spokesmen of the political ideals Stead claimed to hold dear. Such people are greedy, self-serving and sexually dishonest. The very notion that society might be organised on behalf of the masses and the weak is blown away by the fury and rapture of individual appetite. Yet outside the novels Stead remained a loyal Soviet Marxist and was outraged by all defections. What is going on?

  'I don’t know what imagination is,’ says Letty Fox in the eponymous novel, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.’ Though the claim comes early on in this long book, and is made what’s more by one of the flightiest narrators fiction has ever produced, nevertheless the reader will immediately take it as confirmation of what he has already suspected: flagrantly unpruned and tangled beyond any unravelling, the six hundred-plus pages of Letty Fox: Her Luck are the seductive and savage reworking of an apparently inexhaustible memory, its author’s as much as its narrator’s.

  Christina Stead certainly had much to remember by the time she came to this, her sixth novel. Born in a southern suburb of Sydney in 1902, her literary ambitions, radical politics and difficult love life brought her first to London, then Paris, then New York. She had known success and failure, romance and rejection; she had worked for the Communist Party and collaborated, simultaneously
, with corrupt financiers. But however complex and contradictory her career and relationships may have become, Stead’s memories still tended to organise themselves around the two great stories that had shaped her life: the story of the bizarre Australian family she grew up in, and the story of the Jewish American community she ultimately became part of. The first was a horror story with comic interludes, the second a romance with recurrent nightmares. The five novels before Letty Fox, all equally extravagant and daring, had kept the two stages of her life apart; they dealt with either the one story or the other. Published in 1946, after she had been resident in New York for nine years and when her literary reputation at last seemed established, Letty Fox: Her Luck contrives to tangle them both.

  Stead’s early unhappiness is easily understood. The plain, big-boned daughter of a pretty mother who died when she was two, Christina soon found herself an unwanted extra in her father’s second family. ‘My stepmother was kind to me,’ she later conceded of Ada Stead, ‘until her first child was born.’ Five more children would follow. From the beginning, Stead’s writing would always convey a sense of life’s exhausting excess. ‘Living is too much for me,’ says Letty Fox, who is herself more than a handful for those around her. It is as if Stead were telling us that her own explosive vitality was no more than a necessary defence against the world’s threatening profusion.

  Self-taught biologist and pioneering socialist, a man of immense energy and greater vanity, Stead’s handsome father contrived to complicate his adolescent daughter’s isolation by making Christina his confidante in what had now become the epic struggle between himself and his wife. David Stead had made this second marriage at least partly for money. The couple had moved into an extravagant mansion immediately after the wedding. But when Ada’s father died, her family was found to be as deeply in debt as it had previously appeared to be swimming in wealth. Reduced to poverty, obliged to make do with ramshackle accommodation, Ada sulked. The charismatic David found her plain and dull. Christina, on the other hand, was intelligent beyond her years. How sad, however, as he never tired of reminding her, that she was also a fat lazy lump’.

  On research trips to Malaysia and Paris, David Stead, a staunch supporter of women’s rights and a great believer in eugenics, wrote his daughter long letters sharing his enthusiasm for the superior and slender beauty of the women of those countries. Bulky Christina yearned to travel. When she was seventeen her father fell in love with a sixteen-year-old girl, Thisde Harris, and would eventually run off with this pretty junior. Again he made the ugly duckling of his brood his confidante. Twenty years later, from the distant fortress of Manhattan, his daughter took her revenge. I know of no account of father and family more generously observed or more irremediably cruel than the autobiographical novel The Man Who Loved Children. Published in 1940, it remains Stead’s most frightening and ruthless work. At the height of her powers, she was thus able to begin Letty Fox with the worst of that old bitterness exorcised. She was ready to have fun.

  The passage from family of origin to partner of election is the story at the core of Letty Fox. In that sense, albeit with a completely different milieu and a whole new gallery of characters, the novel takes over where The Man Who Loved Children left off.

  In the earlier work the heroine leaves home only on the final pages, here instead she is decidedly out of the fold and on the make. For Stead herself, as one learns from Hazel Rowley’s biography, this period of young adulthood was marked by the most intense yearning and frustration. It was also the period in which the contradiction that shaped her novels, or rather that extended them beyond any immediately perceptible shape, first becomes apparent.

  Stead’s final school exams won her a scholarship to university, but she was ineligible for an arts degree because she hadn’t studied Latin. The daughter of a biologist and man of action isn’t encouraged to grapple with fossil languages. She could have chosen a science course and had her higher education financed by the state, but decided against it, apparently because she had come to associate women in science with dowdy and frustrated spinsters. The Darwinist determinism she had learnt from her biologist father had apparently convinced Stead that in the struggle for survival, which was always a struggle to win the right mate, a science degree would not be a winning card, for a woman. The more biology a girl knew, it seemed, the more she appreciated that it was not biology a girl needed to know.

  This disturbing lesson was reinforced, in Stead’s case, by the fiercest erotic longings, desires which, if only because they couldn’t be talked about in the puritan society she grew up in, she often feared would drive her mad. Would a plain girl find a lover and husband? ‘Hunger of the stomach can be confessed,’ she later wrote in a note for the novel For Love Alone, ‘but not sexual hunger.’ In Letty Fox, Christina Stead would make it her business to be alarmingly frank about that hunger. From earliest adolescence, Letty lusts. ‘This fox was tearing at my vitals,’ she tells us. Hazel Rowley remarks that ‘Stead liked the hint of bawdiness’ in the title’s combination of the words ‘fox’ and ‘luck’.

  Unable to study the arts and unwilling to take up science, the nineteen-year-old Stead settled on teaching, making the long journey back and forth to training college in Sydney every day. Rising at dawn, she wrote down stories of great fantasy that nevertheless show an acute awareness of what was the most urgent reality of her life: she was a highly sexed young woman after her man, a caricature almost of the traditional gal.

  But she was also a socialist and a radical. Here come the complications. At Sydney Girls High School, Christina had been enthusiastic when a teacher told them about the Communist revolution in Russia. Throughout the First World War she was staunchly pacifist. These controversial positions were again things she had taken from her atheist but far from clear-headed father. As he saw it, you discovered the hard facts of the biological struggle, facts that in Europe were preparing the way for a book like Mein Kampf, but then paradoxically, idealistically, you used that knowledge, or said you were using it, not for your own personal fight, or even for that of your race, but to further the cause of mankind in a spirit of solidarity. David Stead, for example, had established which fish off the Australian coast were fit for human consumption, where and how they could be caught. It was an important contribution. It also made him, if only briefly, an important man, the sort of man a bright young girl might run away with.

  There was an irony to this of course: the altruism of the common cause had proved an efficient way for the individual male of the species to get what he wanted: a young woman. But would the same be true for the female? Attending a politicised evening course at Sydney University, a course whose object, according to one student, was nothing less than ‘the reform of the Universe’, Christina Stead fell determinedly in love with the left-wing lecturer Keith Duncan. Alas, she was not in a position to offer him either what her father could offer Thistle Harris, or what Thistle could offer her father. Perhaps it was at this point that Stead began to appreciate the hypocrisy and contradiction in her father’s position. Certainly the comedy that everywhere galvanises Letty Fox is the mismatch between the idealistic rhetoric of radicalism and the biologically driven power game between men and women. Both Stead and Letty dream of the grand individual career, the generous altruistic gesture and traditional romantic love. Since such romance notoriously involves feminine submission, the combination proves arduous. What was required, it seemed, was an improbable stroke of luck.

  Stead failed to become a teacher. In the classroom she lost her voice, arriving at the school gates she panicked. Again the problem was the fear of a virginity prolonged into old age. School was a place where “a woman was not a woman’. Bound over to teaching for five years to pay for her training, she had to struggle hard to escape without a heavy fine. She was lonely now. Keith Duncan and other radical friends had left for England and the wider world. They had travel scholarships. But for Stead there were no such handouts. She worked for two years as a secretary to
save the money to follow Duncan. He wrote to encourage her, then to put her off. Would they ever become lovers? Every day she walked miles to save tram fares. A special kind of feminism was developing in Stead. She wasn’t interested in rights and equality as ends in themselves, but in relation to the struggle to marry one’s man.

  Then, at last in England, aged twenty-five, Christina Stead did get what she would always consider her one great piece of luck in life: she met the man with whom she could combine both career and romance. It wasn’t Keith Duncan. Duncan had led her on, but wouldn’t commit himself. He wouldn’t even take her to bed. It was Christina’s new employer, ten years older than herself, who finally relieved his young secretary of her virginity. In a letter home announcing imminent marriage, Stead described him thus: William James Blech is a German Jew of American upbringing, small, very loquacious, very astute in business and literary affairs and art, highly educated and original.’ Some years later, as a precautionary measure against arrest for fraudulent bankruptcy, William Blech changed his name to William Blake. It was a gesture typical of his innocent charm and considerable presumption.

  In fact Blech, like Stead’s father, was entirely self-taught. Like her father he was a radical, indeed a communist, though he worked for a decidedly shady banking company. Like her father, he had boundless energy and optimism. And like her father, alas, he was married. He had a wife and daughter. Wedding bells were far from imminent. Once again, Stead was an anomalous creature on the edge of a family that didn’t quite know what to do with her. The second story of her life, the second great struggle had begun. Having gratefully given herself to this man, she must now persuade him to persuade his wife to agree to a divorce. Stead’s staunch communism, her unquestioning support for Bill’s unceasing political endeavours, would be a crucial part of that struggle.