In Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) she extends this form of the dramatic monologue to the length of an entire novel. It is an elaborate imitation autobiography almost in the manner of Defoe, a completely successful impersonation of an American woman, in which we are invited to extract bare facts from Letty’s account of her own life – the life of a ‘generous fool’ who has no luck with men because of the careless magnificence with which she throws herself away on them – and construct from the bare facts the real life of Letty Fox. Letty, it turns out, is joylessly promiscuous, hysterically demanding, a self-righteous bitch, and a heartless betrayer. But Letty does not know any of these things about herself and when, as from time to time happens, her friends tax her with them, she hotly denies them. The disjuncture between what she is and what she thinks she is is wonderfully comic. It is, curiously, not comic at Letty’s expense. Letty finally does no harm to anyone but herself, and Stead graciously allots her the best one-liner in her entire oeuvre: ‘Radicalism is the opium of the middle-classes.’ Letty is as full of bad faith as Nellie Cotter but is saved by her unpretentiousness and by what Stead calls somewhere the ‘inherent outlawry’ in women. Letty is not named after the predatory and raffish fox for nothing and if her only ambition is to marry, which defines her limited aspirations, it takes two to tie the knot. Letty longs for children and is only truly happy when pregnant, but any social worker would recommend a termination when, at the novel’s end, we leave her pregnant, in a cheap hotel, with a penniless playboy husband – all she has finally managed to ensnare. The final joke is that this greedy vixen of an amateur prostitute will, as a wife, be the perfect poacher turned gamekeeper: all her life she has been a matriarch manquée – hence her ill-success as a free woman – and now the matriarch has found herself and can begin. The amoral predator will become the solid citizen. Why rob banks when you can run them, to paraphrase one of the maxims in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, and Letty is too dishonest to live for long outside the law.
Others in Stead’s gallery of monsters of existential bad faith – Sam Pollitt, Nellie Cotter, Robert Grant in A Little Tea, A Little Chat – are not treated so genially. They are killers. They precipitate suicide and madness in those who come close to them. Letty uses bad faith to bolster her faltering self-respect: these pernicious beings base their entire self-respect on bad faith. The mouths of these grotesque, nodding carnival heads are moving all the time as they rage, bluster, cajole, manipulate, provoke, enlightening us as to what bad faith does.
Stead’s fictional method obviously presupposes a confidence in the importance of fiction as the exposition of the real structures on which our lives are based. It follows that she has gained a reputation as a writer of naturalism, so much so that, in her Introduction to the Virago edition of The Beauties and Furies, Hilary Bailey seems disconcerted that ‘this great writer of naturalism’ should have produced a novel so resistant to a naturalist reading. (Any novel in which a prostitute advertises her wares by reciting the poetry of Baudelaire is scarcely in the tradition of George Gissing.) Stead is certainly not a writer of naturalism nor of social realism, and if her novels are read as novels about our lives, rather than about the circumstances that shape our lives, they are bound to disappoint, because the naturalist or high-bourgeois mode works within the convention that there exists such a thing as ‘private life’. In these private lives, actions are informed by certain innate inner freedoms and, however stringent the pressures upon the individual, there is always a little margin of autonomy which could be called ‘the self’. For Stead, however, ‘private life’ is itself a socially determined fiction, the ‘self’ is a mere foetus of autonomy which may or may not prove viable, and ‘inner freedom’, far from being an innate quality, is a precariously held intellectual position that may be achieved only at the cost of enormous struggle, often against the very grain of what we take to be human feeling.
Teresa Hawkins achieves selfhood only through a fanatical, half-crazed ordeal of self-imposed poverty and an act of willed alienation which takes her across half the world, from Australia to England. But this ordeal does not prepare Teresa for any reconciliation with the world: it only toughens her up for what is going to happen next. Louie, in The Man Who Loved Children, plots her parents’ murder and succeeds in abetting her stepmother’s death to a point beyond complicity. Then she runs away, leaving a houseful of small children to the tender mercies of Sam Pollitt. That is what Louie must do, in order to enter the fragile state of freedom-in-potential which is all Stead will offer in the way of hope. (She sometimes reminds me of what Kafka said to Max Brod: ‘There is hope – but not for us.’) But many, in fact most, of Stead’s characters remain trapped in the circumstances which have produced them. These include Sam Pollitt, Letty Fox, Nellie Cooke and her brother, Robert Grant and his blonde, fatal mistress – and the eponymous ‘Miss Herbert, the Suburban Wife’. (Miss Herbert is one of the oddest novels and, after much thought, I take it to be a reversion to certain allegorical elements present in her earliest writing and always latent in it: to be nothing more nor less than a representation of the home life of Britannia from the Twenties until almost the present day.) The lovers in The Beauties and Furies are incapable of responding to the challenge of their romantic attachment: they drift, vacillate, betray one another and all in a kind of lapse of consciousness – like the sleepwalkers their friend Marpurgo says they all are. ‘I prefer to be a somnambulist. I walk on the edge of precipices safely. Awake, I tremble’. Earlier, Elvira has said: ‘I am a dead soul; life is too heavy for me to lift.’ Happily for them, they never wake; happily for her, she never gets sufficient grip on life to give it a good shove.
The hard edges and sharp spikes of Stead’s work are rarely, if ever, softened by the notion that things might be, generally, other than they are. It is tempting to conclude that she does not think much of the human race, but it is rather that she is appalled by the human condition. It is illuminating that Teresa, in For Love Alone, says to herself, near the end of the novel: ‘I only have to do what is supposed to be wrong and I have a happiness that is barely credible.’ Teresa has freely chosen to be unfaithful to her beloved lover, to follow her own desire. To become free, she has exercised her will; to remain free, she follows her desires. Stead rarely states her subversive intent as explicitly as this, nor often suggests that the mind-forged manacles of the human condition are to be so easily confounded. But when Teresa meditates, ‘It was easy to see how upsetting it would be if women began to love freely’, she is raising the question of female desire, of women’s sexuality as action and as choice, of the assertion of sexuality as a right, and this question, to which she returns again and again in various ways, is at the core of Stead’s work. The latter part of For Love Alone, the section in London where Teresa learns to love freedom, is rendered as a mass of dense argument within Teresa herself, unlike the discussion of women and marriage that occupies most of the earlier, Australian section of the book, where it is dramatised through the experiences of women in Teresa’s circle. As a result, the triumph of desire simply does not strike the reader as vividly as the early grisly tableaux vivants of repression, such as Malfi’s wedding. Perhaps Stead found this subject of the triumph of desire almost too important to be rendered as pure fiction; it is the exultant end of Teresa’s ordeal.
For Love Alone is an account of a woman’s fight for the right to love in freedom, which the anarchist Emma Goldman claimed as ‘the most vital right’. (All Teresa’s meditations on free union recall Goldman.) This is a fight we see one woman, Teresa herself, win: Teresa, who has the name of a saint, and also – Hawkins – kinship with a bird of prey noted for its clear vision. Stead then published Letty Fox: Her Luck, a crazy comedy about a girl who fights, and fights dirty, to get a ring on her finger. It is as if Stead were saying: ‘There is Teresa, yes: but there is also Letty.’ (‘Letty Marmalade’, as she signs herself, ‘Always-in-a-Jam’.) It is as if the successive novels were parts of one long argument.
S
tead’s work always has this movement, always contains a movement forward, and then a withdrawal to a different position. A Little Tea, A Little Chat, her New York novel of 1948, presents us with another kind of woman: the thoroughly venal Barbara Kent, who is depicted almost exclusively from the outside. She is a mystery, with a complicated but largely concealed past, and she does not say much. She is like a secret agent from the outlawry of women, on a mission to destroy – but that is not her conscious intention. She and the shark-like war-profiteer, Robert Grant, form a union of true minds. They are both entrepreneurs, although Barbara Kent’s only capital is her erotic allure. However, she is able to, as they say, screw him. Grant, for himself, screws everything that moves. The novel makes a seamless equation between sexual exploitation and economic exploitation. It thoroughly trashes all the social and economic relations of the USA. It etches in acid an impressive picture of New York as the city of the damned. It is also, as is all Stead, rich in humour of the blackest kind. It occurs to me that Stead has a good deal in common with Luis Buñuel, if it is possible to imagine a Buñuel within a lapsed Protestant tradition. A Calvinist Buñuel, whose belief in grace has survived belief in God.
However, this definitive account of a New York fit to be destroyed by fire from heaven is followed, in 1952, by The People with the Dogs, a description of a charming clan of New York intelligentsia who are modestly and unself-consciously virtuous and, although bonded by blood, are each other’s best friends. Why is Stead playing happy families, all of a sudden? What, one wonders, is she trying to prove? Perhaps, that amongst the infinite contradictions of the USA, where anything is possible, even Utopia might be possible. In the USA, Utopias have certainly been attempted. The generously loving Oneida Massine, not matriarch – that would be too much – but principal aunt of this extended family, is named after one of the Utopian experimental communities of nineteenth-century America. And, like perfect communards, the Massines exist in harmony and tolerance with one another in a New York which has transformed itself from the City of Dreadful Night into the shabby, seedy, comfortable kind of place where birds of passage, Stead’s habitual displaced dramatis personae, can all roost happily together – a city of strangers, which is to say a city with infinite possibilities. Tiring of the city, the Massines can enjoy pastoral retreats in an idyllic country house left them by a wise father who has had the decency to die long before the action begins. Stead seems to be saying that, given a small private income, beautiful people can lead beautiful lives, although the very circumstances which nourish their human kindness are those which succour the morally deformed profiteers and whores of A Little Tea, A Little Chat.
But there is something odd about The People with the Dogs, as if the dynamo of her energy, ill-supplied with the fuel of distaste, were flagging. She permits the Massines to be charming and even writes about them in a charming way, as if she herself has been moved by the beautiful promise of the Statue of Liberty, which always touches the heart no matter how often it is betrayed. There is nothing fraudulent about this novel, although, perhaps reyealingly, it is exceedingly carelessly written. It would be interesting to know whether an unpublished novel, I’m Dying Laughing, set during the period of the HUAC investigations, was written before or after The People with the Dogs. According to a recent Australian newspaper article, this novel remained unpublished because of subsequent tragedies in the lives of the people involved. Certainly The People with the Dogs may be softening up the reader for a blow which, in the end, was never delivered.
An internal logic of dialectical sequels connects all Stead’s work in a single massive argument on the themes of sexual relations, economic relations, and politics. There has been scarcely any large-scale critical appraisal in the UK, to my knowledge, though at the moment more of her fiction is in print, here, than at any single time before. If I were to choose an introductory motto for the collected works of Christina Stead, it would be, again, from Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It would be: ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.’ One might take this as a point to begin the exploration of this most undervalued of our contemporaries.
(1982)
Christina Stead completed the original manuscript of I’m Dying Laughing in 1966 and was urged to revise it, to clarify its background of politics in the US in the Forties. For the next ten years, she worried away at the novel until at last she bequeathed a mass of confused material to her literary trustee, R. G. Geering, with instructions to publish it after her death.
The Stead connoisseur will note that Mr Geering’s editorial hand is evident in an internal consistency far from characteristic of the novelist in her later years. I’m Dying Laughing is a mess, but a tidy mess. Characters do not change their names and appearances from page to page; events do not occur in an entirely arbitrary manner. All the same, it has that chaotic sense of flux that makes reading Stead somehow unlike reading fiction, that makes reading her seem like plunging into the mess of life itself, learning things, crashing against the desperate strategies of survival.
Thematically, it belongs with the group of political novels she completed much earlier, in the Forties – Letty Fox, Her Luck, A Little Tea, A Little Chat, The People with the Dogs, novels about the life and times of the American Left. I’m Dying Laughing concludes this sequence; it is a kind of obituary.
I’m Dying Laughing begins at a time that now seems scarcely credible, those far-off days when the Left was in fashion in the US. In those days, careerists joined the Party and the Party itself was a career. In 1935, Emily Wilkes and Stephen Howard meet, fall in love, and marry, to the strains of the Internationale.
They are superficially an odd couple. She, a big, gaudy, loquacious mid-Westerner with huge appetites and mighty laughter. He is the scion of an upper-crust East Coast family. He has abandoned his patrimony for the Party. The Howards’ greatest bond is the struggle. They love passionately, with a quality of amour fou that already suggests a tragic outcome.
Emily is a writer, and Stead makes us believe this comic, greedy, self-deceiving, self-dramatising woman might possess some kind of genius, although her husband spends a good deal of time attempting to convince her she has only the profitable fluency of a hack. This does not make the portrait of their marriage any less gripping; it is one of the happiest if most tempestuous marriages in literature, and destructive precisely to the degree of their mutual passion.
Stephen, however, is more an all-purpose Marxist intellectual. Emily ritually defers to Stephen’s superiority in dialectics but it is she who rakes in the money. The Roosevelt years are ripe for her home-spun tales of small-town life.
By the end of the war, they are in Hollywood, hobnobbing with a Communist élite of script-writers and living high on the hog’s back. They are already very partial to a place on the hog’s back.
In his Preface, R. G. Geering observes that I’m Dying Laughing is ‘not a political novel in the manner of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four’. Quite so. It is certainly not a novel about the bankruptcy of an ideology. Stead takes the validity of the ideology for granted. The world of her fiction is analysed as consistently from the left as Evelyn Waugh’s world is described from the right. She gives her own characteristically bleak and sardonic account of the novel’s protagonists: ‘At the same time they wanted to be on the side of the angels, good Communists, good people, and also to be very rich. Well, of course . . . they came to a bad end.’
But the side of the angels has its drawbacks. The first full-scale set piece in the novel is a trial – an informal one, conducted after a good dinner in a spirit of the most sanctimonious self-righteousness, by a cabal of Hollywood Communists. The Howards, it seems, have been judged deviationist. Especially roaring, ranting Emily, who is ‘making deviationist speeches every time she opens her mouth. It’s a very serious thing’.
Their crimes are individualism. Bohemianism. The
y won’t accept Party discipline. They are unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists and the ‘good party Communists’ don’t see why such disordered creatures should be permitted to take care of Stephen’s daughter by his first wife. Indeed, they are prepared to go to court to help contest his custody of the girl.
It is an extraordinary scene, a ‘trial without jury, entirely in the spirit of the mid-century and their society’. The Howards are subjected to what is virtually a moral crucifixion – ‘It was thought necessary by us all to get you here and be frank and clear,’ they are told.
At this point, the Hollywood Communists have a great deal of power and do not even realise when they are abusing it. With hindsight, one knows all those gathered in the room will shortly face real trials of their own; it is one of Stead’s singular achievements to make us understand fully some of the powerful bitternesses that came to flower in the days of HUAC.
But the Howards remain proudly unreconstructed. ‘Still on the train that started from the Finland Station,’ as Stephen says, he is determined to stay on it until the end. They compile a litany of the sins of the Soviet Union, the 1923 Party purge, the expulsion of Trotsky, the labour camps. ‘And to think we’re losing our shirts and our faces, standing up for such a nation, such betrayers of all that’s dear to the romantic hearts of the parlour pinks,’ says Emily. Then she damns herself: ‘Heigh-ho! History doesn’t bear scrutiny.’
The Howards flee, not the Party but their country. Like the representatives of the Lost Generation immediately preceding them, they go to Paris. They set up a vast entourage of children, nannies, maids, cooks, governesses, and proceed to live the life of Riley although, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the necessities of life are scarce and luxuries virtually unobtainable. But the Howards live happily, lavishly, off the Black Market, financed by Emily’s earnings. Slowly, the contradictions of their situation destroy them.
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