Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  From the political point of view! I am nearly fourteen, am very proud, have got fat, have great hopes not well defined, how could you expect me to be a communist? Isn’t that for the depressed? I don’t understand political views except on the part of the wretched, of snobs, or of people like you, with a vague hope of success. Think it over a bit; you think it’s wonderful of you to fuss about the unfortunate, you want to give them a sovietical happiness. Put yourself in their place instead! Would you like to lead a life regulated from one end to the other, work from this hour to that on this day or that without any choice on your part? Would you be happy? Wouldn’t you go mad thinking that the entire world had a life built on your design, hour for hour, day for day? To be forced to stay where you were, never to travel, to be tied to one job, one set of meals, one type of entertainment (oh, I saw some agitprop—I won’t say a word of what I think), to belong to a political club, to be bored to death with political duties and the impertinence of one hundred thousand citi zen critics and commissars coming to tell you how to draw and write: and all your equals! I invent nothing. I met a boy whose father and mother were there. They have nothing to fear, they are rich liberals and can pay for everything; they had the best of everything; just the same, the food was terri ble, and the bedbugs (I have to write this awful word), in the hotels: and—much worse, I cannot write it. They took away their photographs for inspection! But this is not the main thing, I admit. I deny the beauty in a soviet government. Literature—art—where are they? Aren’t they life? Otherwise we are ants and bees. Read—you’ll realize—the poetry and prose are nothing. Of course, I put this old trickster Gorki on one side, he’s a dilettante, who does not believe, who goes from place to place and is feted everywhere, has no rent to pay. When they asked Baudelaire the source of his genius, he replied—leisure, liberty—where could you find piquancy, originality in your infernal Russian paradise? Genius is not an automaton which produces, salivates, and digests at regulated hours when you press a button. How could you de scribe the world if it’s unknown to you (because the world doesn’t punch the clock)? What reasonings could a writer or artist have in Russia? False, based entirely on his imagination! Our world, he doesn’t know. Their world is inhuman. And why write? All writing would be identical! What is writing? It is to see the “cases” around you and make a book about them explaining the causes of suffering and love; it is not to support political doctrines. I simply state that I don’t care for the exasperating “benefits” of communism. I prefer to suffer and beg.

  You foresaw this, and you said to me—Fascism would be equally intolerable to me. I am an American, in other words, quite incapable of putting up with any such systems. That’s true. Now, I admire Stalin as much as Mussolini, Gorki as John Dos Passos, Leonardo da Vinci as Delacroix. I am not prejudiced. A friend of these people we know— who went to Russia—have a house in 55th Street and have Delacroix, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne originals, also some El Grecos of dubious authenticity, but one certain Rembrandt—you see they have no ax to grind, they have everything—they have a friend in Paris who was a high official in the Veterans’ Croix de Feu, and who knew a commu nist who had much protection in high official circles (can you imagine it?) and he spent 150,000 francs yearly on 15 casual mistresses, one queen of the harem and one legal wife, the whole regiment lived very well—and that, Letty, is a communist! Very nice. I don’t doubt it appealed to him. But that is Mormonism! I don’t think you’d care to be even the legal wife in such a garrison of women. You must look reality in the face. And this golden calf, which you would have adored, once elected, you can imagine, how he will fill his pockets! Well, he’ll have to!

  You say you know the theory and I don’t know a word of it. Well, that’s true, but fortunately, I know the practice! If the U.S.A. or England become soviet, my child, the best I can wish an enthusiast like you, is that you will be one of the ones on top. At least better for my sister Letty, just the same, to oppress, than to suffer things like that! I am getting an autograph of James Joyce, and will give it to you for New Year’s. He is nearly blind and walks very slowly with a stick, but pretends he can see. Oh, the God of eyes, he is not a kind God. I must confess I don’t like what I said to you about this last year; I do not believe any more in the God of eyes. How childish I was. Look at the paper I am using! I got it from the Green Acres desk just now; I love the gold initial, but alas, it is not mine. I read Gorki, Gide, Merejkowski, Dostoevsky, Napoleon, Goethe, Dos Passos, Dreiser—so much. I am half mad with the excitement and joy of living. You see, I could not bear for them to take it away from me and put me in a factory. I read from morning to night—I get quite breathless and pale, but don’t stop. “Look out for your eyes! My eyes are wonderful!” I read Delacroix’s journal. Now I am sure I am an artist. I got all the books I saw mentioned in the Columbia University yearbook for the first year (I mean I am getting them one by one) and I am reading them all. Oh, the thirst for knowing things! I love it, I adore my life. When I go there, I’ll say, “Put me in Second Year!” Of course, they won’t. Imagine I am to go to Hunter and I will know so much more. I am swallowing the classics alive; Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, bad art, no art, socialist art, I should say; what a sickly creature she is, and of course she marries well—pooh! Yes, and I myself a year ago was talking about princes— according to myself then, he (V.H.) is right, young girls are sickly and I was one. Then Jack London (I like animals), Life of Talleyrand; Spinoza, I am trying to understand and think I can, but it is the beauty of man and Spinoza’s style more than his ideas, though I am now become an atheist and understand this. Then I am collecting gramophone records, Tetrazzini, Caruso, Geraldine Farrar, Nellie Melba, Emma Calve; and I have ninety-eight autographs. I write to them, as soon as I read a review or critique (good or bad, for some famous people have started out with bad reviews), but it is only if the critique, good or bad, gives me that glorious burn ing feeling of the soul that tells me, I am in the presence of genius. Oh, genius! It is my life. I am living only for it. One day I will meet a genius, or more than one, male and female. I have seen all the plays in New York this month and every new movie. (Here followed a list, with annotations upon the love relations and marriages of all the actors and actresses, as well as glowing commendations of all the roles she had seen them in.) Martha Graham, etc., etc. I am saving every penny I can to get the autographs of some of the illustrious dead, like Napoleon (that’s impossible, unless I charm some of the possessors of unique collections, like Prince Wol kowski—but he did not give me a fencing foil, after all), Duse, Oscar Wilde, Duncan—you see how ambitious I am! Life is really maddeningly delicious! All this makes me mad with enthusiasm for things as they are now. I do not find life dreary, you see, and long for some other system—and I can’t believe that you do. No need for any revolution. I read Paul and Virginia; how delicious it is, how true, this beautiful, pure, dazzling, innocent love like brother and sister—I could feel that; that is how we wish to feel. Look how Shelley suffered! Yet I suppose there is a great temptation to really physically love and the probing of a love to its depths, how ever bitter, must be unlike any other human experience. But I will be quite satisfied with a noble friendship, with some great and glorious, or noble and splendid man; I would be quite satisfied to find a man, or rather a young man, who could feel this with me, utter equality, and at the same time, rapturous love on his part, unconscious, exalted gallantry! I love, that is the secret: he loves, that must be the secret. So you see I have no time for conventions, processions, placards, meetings, reports to the secretary-general and all the dreary paper-shifting which you ignore, for you are just in flamed by your own speeches. You simply wish to feel the excitement of crowds as I wish to feel this grand, splendid, etc., etc., love; and will you ever feel like me? I do not know.

  I will visit New York from top to bottom next week, and all by myself; they have agreed I can now go about alone! I am going to all the museums and all the art shops and visit all the shops, to kn
ow what is going on and get to know everything, but do not think I am supine; I have resolved not to follow anyone; I must not even admire the old masters, nor take the classics for granted. I am myself an artist, I must accept nothing. I must get to the bottom of everything. What is the basis of criticism? I have so much to talk to you about—about life, what will happen to us in a few years. We are women! That is important in our lives. I have thought about it, things one cannot write. People read your letters to me and I must warn you certain things have come out without any fault of mine. You are so dizzy, you write about “romantic contacts, emotional experience, and a casual kiss which I can’t forget”—as if it were necessary to write this. Aren’t we much alike on this side? I’ll ask you about your work, life, friends, theater, cinemas, books, grandmas, and others but not all others, unless we are alone—and even about politics, if you must and if you don’t try to convert me; above all, we will talk of the sexual life but not in pub lic. We’ll have a long serious conversation about it—it’s necessary, for we are beyond where grandmas and mammas can help us—and of course, it’s profoundly fascinating. Don’t bring up politics at our first meeting! I only saw you once in these recent months and you brought it up. It was so strange. I had a feeling we didn’t get along. Terrible. Perhaps politics will separate us for life! If I saw any chance of that, I would pretend to be on your side; and what advantage would that be to you? I mean, I am thinking of your political honor. We are all well: we’ll soon be together again. I am looking forward to it—and afraid. Oh, I hope our separate experiences have not separated us already. I get on well everywhere; why not with you?

  YOUR JACKY.

  BOOK TWO

  On My Own

  24

  Our first few hours, at our home on Riverside Drive, flew past, and we seemed to be happy and united as before, with many new and intoxicating aspects of life coming up between us, as Jacky said. But unfortunately that very evening we had to leave for Green Acres Inn for the New Year’s party, and I did not have a word with my sister till the following day, on the train back home. I had grieved her and she herself was pale and lumpish with late hours and the unpleasant experiences at the Inn— for the party, which was nothing out of the ordinary, had seemed a debauchery to her.

  I was nearly sixteen. I knew I had never looked so pretty as I had at the traditional New Year’s party at Green Acres.

  Grandmother Fox had been alone with Lily over the holidays, in the Audubon Street flat, for Edie had gone back to England and had written us a letter to say how happy she was.

  I felt like a new girl. Is this, I thought, real girlhood? Well, though fifteen years is a long time to wait for it, it’s worth waiting for. My confidences to Jacky of the day before seemed childish.

  Mother had stayed out at Green Acres and Jacky and I had come back to be together for a day before going back to school. Jacky was very pretty by now, but not my type; and she had a curious line which was strictly not beau-catching.

  “Time,” said Jacky, “is all we are taught; get through exams; hurry up and get through; get a job, succeed; youngsters in kindergarten are catching up with you! Be in style, be à la page, go to dances at the right age, get a beau and get married, neither too soon nor too late—don’t you think so?”

  This was in the train, coming home. I yawned, “What if it is so? So what? There are times for things.”

  “Yes, but they’ve cut us up until it’s nothing but rites de passage! Play school, pre-school, school, high school, and the rest; soda-shop gang, teen-agers, subdebs, debs, brides, young mothers, is that a human life? And that not for a class, but they try to put it over on the whole one hundred and twenty-five million—It’s fantastic,” said my sister. “We’ve got no time. It’s an express train. Everything’s just speed, just getting there. That’s the only thing. They never say, ‘Throw everything away; join a lost cause!’ ”

  “So what?” said I, beginning to whistle through my teeth.

  An old lady looked at me angrily. This pleased me. It was only recently that old women had stopped patronizing me and begun to hate me. I bounced like a tennis ball. If she knew what I knew—she probably did, and she hated me for having it now when she was as good as dead. “You’re a gilt-edged pain in the neck,” I said to Jacky; “you’ve got the goofiest line I ever heard; why don’t you stop that sophomoronic philosophistry? Your head’s in the clouds with the cuckoos.”

  My sister said something. I sang to myself. I felt I had seen everything. I was sure, myself, of the only thing worth being sure of—I was a hit with the boys. I had for the first time been able to tackle them en masse, and the results were, shall we say, satisfactory. I couldn’t bear the company of my little sister. She kept talking like a Hunter College girl (which she was to be). She was stuffy, straitlaced; and not a whiff of sex-appeal about her, although later she would be all right, I thought. She wore her hair like some pictured woman she had seen, bright gold hair in a long even braid round her head. At the other end, short socks. It looked odd. No one but a future Hunter College girl would have thought it up, I told her; a combination of high-mindedness and girlishness which would tell anybody the kind of girl she was, a sonnet-writer, an artist.

  She said I thought too much about boys. I told her I was taking physics, modern history, geometry, and English and at present knew a lot about electromagnetism, but I didn’t wear a sixteenth-century hairdo and bobby socks. She became scarlet; her eyes flashed. She told me I had been drunk the whole week end. This was true, of course. I gloried in it; yet, it seemed a bit sordid to me.

  I left Jacky to poke about at home, very angry with me, and said I, at least, was going to visit dear Grandmother Jenny, who was all alone and always gave us five dollars for New Year’s. Jacky did not want to pay visits to anyone; she said she had a headache. When I passed the street window, she was already sitting in the window-seat with a book. It was snowing, clear, bright, three in the afternoon. How glad Grandma would be to see me, I thought. I bought her some flowers and a small box of chocolates and then regretted this, for I had spent all my pocket money during the holidays, and Papa kept me short. I burst in upon the old lady, who flushed with joy.

  “Oh, the lovely snow,” she cried; “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, my darling, and look, wait, wait, I have something for you!”

  I danced with impatience. It was some old trinket. I threw it on the bed without opening it, so that she had to pull at the clumsy wrapping herself; “Look in it, my darling.”

  She insisted upon enquiring after everyone; wistfully, for she had wanted an invitation to Green Acres. Because we had been there, she seemed to think it had been a children’s party, or one of those boy and girl affairs you see in children’s books—white dresses and sashes, and Eton jackets. I decided to let her see life, out of deviltry, not really out of badheartedness. She’ll be happier if she knows what it’s really like, I thought; she certainly won’t be sorry she wasn’t there. I laughed; I danced. “You should have seen me dancing, Grandma!”

  “Oh, I wish I could have been there, Tootsy.”

  “I had eleven boy friends; they all danced with me.”

  Her face brightened, then fell.

  I cried, “Oh, Grandma, I have to admit I had a good time. I shouldn’t, I suppose, but it really was, Grandma. I don’t mind admitting I got good and drunk, but that’s what New Year’s is for, after all, isn’t it? Green Acres was simply stacked. They were sleeping four in a room and they even turned the servants out of their beds, and put guests in the barn and in that old place belonging to Jape and even in the garage. Everyone was crazy to get into the place. Grandmother always gives them such a swell time. They had Tommy Goodman’s band and three other bands going all the time. Oh, I had a swell time—”

  Laughing, I was watching Grandmother’s face. It was the oddest mixture of shock and envy; she began to look crushed. I went on malevolently, “At first, I was all right, then I had four long drinks one after the other. That didn’
t seem to do me any harm. I sat down to dinner. We all sat round the long table, and half-way through dinner I just got up and went across the floor and kissed a boy I saw sitting there. I don’t know why. I just kissed him and came back to my seat. I didn’t even know him. And when I got up—oh, gee, I suddenly realized, well, I wasn’t—quite sober; I wobbled. But I got back to my seat all right … Then we danced. Errol was there. He went down with me. You know him—I told you—he begged to go down with me. And it was a good job I went down with him. No sooner did I get there than I saw Bobby Tompkins; he walked in and pretended not to see me. Well, such is life. Can you beat that? I told you all about Bobby Tompkins, the boy who was out with me when I met the cop in Washington Square, who wrote a poem and said he must have been thinking of me all the while, and Bobby—oh, I told you anyhow. But try to see it! Pretending not to see me. Presently, he began walking out again. All right, smarty, I thought; now, I won’t see you. So I averted my face, and I pretended not to see him. Well, so life goes on … He went out and he didn’t know if I’d seen him or not. I wonder what he’d think of if he’d known I did it on purpose. Well, came the dawn … I was doing the Big Apple. Errol was my partner nearly all the evening, although I danced with a couple of other boys I’d just met, and there were a couple of old guys about forty or fifty tried to make me, and I danced with a couple just to kid them, but I wasn’t really having any; no gray hairs in my beer, I said to myself, and I said it to them, too; not quite that, but pretty much that. They got it anyway; but everyone was so stewed that they’d just go and try another girl. And back comes Bobby; and out goes I! I just walked right past him, staggered would be a more appropriate word, I suppose. Errol was holding me up, I must admit. I just said, ‘What’s new, Bobby?’ He was too shikker, poor kid, to know what was what. I guess he’d been practically passing out all along and hadn’t noticed me at all. It’s just possible … Well, we went out and we walked up and down; we had to walk, the elevator was going all the time, or maybe someone was necking in it. I guess that was it; and we looked in every corner—well, frankly, for a place to neck—and we couldn’t find one place. Everywhere we went there were a couple of kids necking, and even more than necking. Gee, much more. And kids wasn’t always the appropriate word. Finally, we had to sit in a corner of a sort of storeroom right behind the kitchen, where there were already three other couples. Overcrowding—Malthus, all that.”