Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  I can think of no author for whom milieu is more important than for Christina Stead, no author who works harder to create the social settings of her novels and to convey the sense that character and background are inseparable. She appreciates the irony that although the individual struggles above all for himself, and although his primary experience is that of being alone, nevertheless he does not create or even possess that self, but is very largely a product of his own milieu.

  No doubt this knowledge came from being so frequently forced to change milieu herself Having met Blech in London, so soon after arrival from Sydney, she at once agreed to his moving her nearer to his wife and daughter in Paris. She loved it. In Paris, well dressed, speaking French, she decided she was not so plain after all. Place changes you. Over the next few years she lived in London again, then New York, Spain, Belgium, London and - at last a few years of stability - New York.

  She made copious notes on every community she came in contact with. She changed languages, accents. She wrote books set in Australia, England, France, the USA, set in the lower class, the middle class, among expatriates. Each work was testimony to her own determination to adapt and survive, to fit in; or perhaps one should rather say, to shine whatever the milieu, whatever society she chose to write about or style she chose to use. Her first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, rediscovers and reproduces the Australia of her youth. Moving back and forth from London to Paris, her second, The Beauties and Furies, shows an intimate awareness of the Englishman and his relationship with France, but also a readiness to measure herself with Lawrence, Joyce and the most innovative fiction of the century. The House of All Nations is entirely at home in the international banking community of northern Europe, while The Man who Loved Children and Letty Fox are both written in a determinedly American idiom. Later in life, after a spell in Newcastle, Stead would produce a completely convincing novel of the English working classes: published in 1966, Cotters England, was a feat far beyond mere mimicry and suggests an extraordinary facility for penetrating an alien group psychology.

  But in the decade that led up to the writing of Letty Fox, Stead was above all determined to fit in with Bill Blech’s family, with the German mother, the expensively educated American daughter, the wife whom she must never meet, and, in short, with the whole Jewish American community and its cosmopolitan traditions. It was here that her penetrative eye must go deepest. How else could she hope to win through, to arrive, if not at the altar, then at least the registry office?

  Letty Fox: Her Luek was the fruit of those long years of adaptation, an exuberant muddling of Stead’s own girlhood memories, with her meticulous observations of Blech’s now adult daughter, Ruth, who was a frequent visitor at the Stead/Blech ménage in New York. Ruth becomes the model, or one of the models, for Letty. She is given all the contradictions that formed the core of Stead’s experience: the erotic charge, the romantic longings, the left-wing politics, the desire to be both beautiful and brilliant, to be admired and feared, to love with feminine faithfulness and submission and with masculine presumption and promiscuity. It’s an explosive cocktail.

  The relationships around Letty are likewise a retangling of those Stead knew best. So the heroine is given a father who, like Bill Blech, is a businessman radical, still married yet living with a mistress, who thus becomes, at least potentially, a portrait of Stead herself. Then Bill Blech, of course, was not unlike Christina’s father, David Stead, another radical who left his wife for a mistress. The book is a hall of mirrors as far as possible identifications are concerned. Certainly when it was published all of Blech’s extended family would see themselves in it. The only character who was unrecognisable was Letty’s father’s mistress: cool, level-headed, beautiful and practical, Persia was as different from Christina as her exotic name suggests.

  Wasn’t this blatant mixture of fiction and reality a risk for Christina? Couldn’t it perhaps lead to a break-up with Bill, to whom she still wasn’t married, particularly if his daughter was to be presented as wild and promiscuous and Bill as an ineffectual father who kept wife and mistress happy by lying to them both? Reading Rowley’s biography one becomes aware of an unspoken pact between Stead and Blech. She would never disagree with him politically and he would never take an offence at what she wrote in a novel. It is to Blech’s immense credit, after all, that he was the first to appreciate Stead’s talent. Discovering his secretary’s ambitions, he had asked to see a manuscript and, an able writer himself, recognised at once that it was remarkable. Her genius, perhaps, would excuse his betrayal of his family. It must be given full reign. ‘Dear Bill said once to me,’ Stead recounted, ‘that he would like to be to me what G.H. Lewes was to George Eliot … I was not very pleased, because G.E. was not a pretty girl.’

  Stead would also one day remark that she only felt truly ‘moral’ when writing, and again that she had only ‘felt herself when writing. Perhaps what she meant was that in this supposedly fictional space she was free not to adhere to certain ideals, not to be coherent, to tell a truth or two. ‘Radicalism is the opium of the middle class,’ announces an incensed Letty. Stead is enjoying herself. What luck to be able to say such things! And if this was the only space where she could be herself, where she could say she loved a man but found him unforgivable, or alternately that she loved a man but yearned for other men, or again that she was deeply attracted to women, but found lesbianism abhorrent, then little wonder she made the books long, and furious. The novels would express all the wild life no orthodoxy could embrace. ‘He had some wonderful vision of the future, Letty remarks of a black man who falls in love with her, ‘where no hate would exist, only love between peoples and races, this was fine enough, but I live too much in the here and now; this is my great weakness.’ It was Stead’s strength as a novelist.

  The here and now of Letty Fox is overwhelmingly New York. Stead is determined to demonstrate that she has gained full command of Bill’s world. It opens thus:

  One hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarrelled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad.

  Letty is always flinging out of rooms, rushing across streets. She is always full of energy and always on the edge of depression. Above all, she always needs money. The long first paragraph finishes:

  Beyond such petty expenses, I needed at least two hundred and fifty dollars for a new coat. My fur coat, got from my mother, and my dinner dress, got from my grandmother, were things of the past and things with a past, mere rags and too well known to all my friends. There was no end to what I needed.

  Immediately, we have the picture of Stead’s America, a place where love and money cannot be separated, where relationships are talked about in terms of investments and cutting losses, where people enjoy the illusion that the marriage game can be managed, and evaded, like an income tax return. It’s savvy, cynical, full of corrupt life. But no sooner has Stead seduced us with the bubbly frankness of Letty’s voice than we are to be repulsed by the brutal consequences.

  Acting on the principle that the greatest asset a girl has is her availability (for men), Letty decides she must have an apartment of her own. On 11th Street she sees the signs of a family moving out. However, a haggard woman informs her that she has already taken the place, she needs it desperately for herself, her husband and three children. “I went down half a block,’ says Letty, ‘saw the woman had left the railings and was rounding the other corner. I, at once, went back, had an interview with the superintendent’s wife, promised her thirty dollars (the old woman had promised twenty dollars) to hold the place for me, agreed to paint the place myself, exterminate vermin, and to move in in less than a week, and so forth. It was discussed and concluded within the hour.’

  The needy woman with first claim on the apartment is never again mentioned. No compass
ion is shown her. Needless to say, Letty is a left-wing radical. America, as Stead sees it, is that place where the struggle of everyone against everyone else is most visible and the rhetoric of concern at its absolute thinnest. Yet it is impossible not to appreciate the gusto with which Letty enters the fray. Wondering whether she should accept a job offer in return for sex, Letty tells us: “I do not even see a scandal in this, for wide-awake women. In other times, society regarded us as cattle or handsome house slaves, the ability to sell ourselves in any way we like is a step towards freedom.’ Later in the book the terms are reversed, but the principle the same: ‘I had the feeling that he could have been bought,’ Letty remarks of one reluctant lover, “if I had had a little more money.’

  Having given us just a dozen sparkling pages on the twenty-three-year-old Letty’s life in wartime Manhattan, Stead then goes back to reconstruct her narrator’s childhood. It is here that the reader will first boggle at what Angela Carter referred to as Stead’s ‘almost megalomaniac ambition’. The ‘almost’ was unnecessary. It is the sheer scope of the enterprise that is so extraordinary. Stead, an Australian, goes right back to the beginning of the century to reconstruct the rich New England family of Letty’s maternal grandmother, the notorious Cissy Morgan, then the German Jewish family of her paternal grandmother. Uncles, aunts and cousins, marry, divorce and remarry. We have their foibles, ambitions, views on education and endless improprieties. None of these are mere vignettes or anecdotes, but highly developed studies integrated in a tangled series of interlocking stories that could well fill a book of their own. What they establish beyond all dispute is that Letty, like so many modern children, knows far too much far too young.

  The satire is vast, fed constantly by the ancient struggle between the sexes and the modern American woman’s discovery of alimony. At great length we learn of the unhappily complex relationship between Letty’s father Solander and her mother Mathilde, then his passion for the younger woman who becomes his mistress. Eagle-eyed, always excited, Letty wants to know what all this means. By the time her father leaves home, she and her younger sister Jacky have already learnt how to present themselves as victims and make the most of it. They know that compassion is a harbinger of gifts, hopefully cash.

  The daughters are moved in with relatives, they are taken to England, to Paris, they write extremely long, witty, passionate letters in highly individual voices, seeking to impress their father, or calm their mother. Slowly and with complete conviction, Stead shows the two sisters becoming distinct as they react first to the overall situation and then to each other’s response to it, seeking individuality through complementary or competitive behaviour. We see character in the making.

  Meanwhile, stories you thought must have ended, start again. An uncle you imagined married and forgotten reappears with debts and a mistress. He tries to seduce a niece. A cousin is becoming a whore, or a saint. An aunt turns up with a child, but without a husband. The book smoulders, flaring up where you thought it extinguished, smoking where you had seen no fire.

  But where is the whole thing going? If every form of narrative representation is essentially a convention, a pact between writer and reader as to how experience can be talked about, then it is only natural that the finest authors should be uneasy with some aspect of that convention, eager to bend it closer to the grain of their own lives. What Stead most resisted in traditional narrative was any easy formulation of shape and direction, any neatness, “the neatly groomed little boy in sailor collar’, she called it, speaking disparagingly of the fiction the publishers liked most. In contrast, the exuberance and manic extension of the world she depicts in Letty Fox denies any possibility of order. The work is rich and capricious, its descriptions dense, vital and highly particularised; its only overall drift is that of Letty’s growing up.

  Not surprisingly then, it is with the depiction of Letty’s adolescence and young womanhood that Stead achieves her most impressive effect in this book. For perhaps three hundred pages we have been given a dazzling social satire, a tragicomic picture of a modern society where, with all traditional hierarchy broken down, the only possible relationship between people, above all between men and women, is competition and conflict; it is the mirror image at a social level of the political war that is raging in Europe as Stead writes her story. Yet up to this point, the reader feels, the whole book, bar the opening dozen pages, might well have been written in third person; for Letty is retailing stories she has heard, or overheard, stories she understands only in the most superficial fashion. She feels superior to these people with their incomprehensibly muddled lives. There is a consequent narrative distance. And, as with most satires, the reader too feels a certain smug, if uneasy, detachment. There is something slightly grotesque about all these Morgans and Foxes with their interminable passions. Letty feels sure she will do better.

  But the moment Letty too becomes subject to sexual desire, everything changes. It is as if a sane psychiatrist, chuckling over the antics of his lunatic patients, had himself gone mad. Suddenly it is no laughing matter. Or it is, fpr there is still plenty of comedy, but the nature of the laughter has changed. It is full of pathos, where before it was constantly on the edge of caricature. What had appeared to be an essentially political book is overtaken by existential concerns: the compassion Stead arouses now is not for the victims of poverty - the usual objects of public piety - but for those of desire.

  Moods of blackness and suffering passed through me, of fierce, fierce intercourse such as no flesh could bear. I got up and the fever that raged through my body was intolerable. Yes, this is the love that nymphs knew on afternoons when Pan chased them, I thought, this is the meaning of all those stories. I thought I was passionate; now, I know what growing up is. I thought, if it is going to be like this, this suffering and madness, I will kill myself now, for in the difficulty of getting married nowadays and of getting a child, that cooling cold stone of a child which stands in the hot belly and makes a woman heavy and tired, forgetting all her cruel fervours, that thing that drags her to the doors of the death-house and away from the intolerable ardours of the sun, in this slow world for women, I cannot live, I will kill myself.

  Letty does not kill herself. She goes out and finds another lover. And another. Sexual conquest brings with it a gust of energy. Letty studies hard, works hard, she goes to meetings to discuss socialism and reform, achieving the ‘cheerful feeling that a lot is wrong with the universe; and it’s marvellous to be able to discuss it all over a Martini. Political militancy thus emerges as no more than a by-product of sexual happiness. Or as a way out of distress: (‘Everyone forgot… my troubles and we all began to discuss … the African problem.’) In one of the most powerful scenes in the book, Letty seduces her father’s radical and philandering friend, Luke Adams, while the older man is selfishly trying to get her to take in a Hispanic orphan boy whom he himself, in a moment of weakness, had agreed to look after. Letty remarks: ‘One not only felt that, in love, this dangerous man consulted his own pleasure and had no morals, but with him, all altruism vanished like smoke.’

  As fully drawn as any character in literature, Stead’s Letty is marvellously talented, bursting with energy and youthful optimism. What is to become of such vitality, the book wonders? And so does Letty. How is it not to be spilled? In her biography, Hazel Rowley feels that this is a question Stead could not answer. The blurb to the Virago edition of 1982 shows all the feminist publisher’s uneasiness with the answer that, on the contrary, the novel very frankly offers, marriage: Letty is a “powerful portrayal”,’ the blurb writer says, ‘of a woman who might have been independent, but chose otherwise.’

  But could she really have been independent? What Letty most profoundly learns from her promiscuity, from her growing fear of herself and of her appetite, is that marriage is not, as her profligate family had led her to believe, merely the legally regulated collision of sex and economics. Something else is going on in the long-term union of man and woman, something to
which she is inexorably drawn.

  I sometimes wondered at the infinite distance between the state of not being married … and the state of being married … I couldn’t figure it out; perhaps I was too young, anyway; but it savoured to me of magic, and I felt very miserable that in this modern world something so primary, this first of all things to a woman, smacked so strongly of the tribal priest, the smoky cult, the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the hidden mystery. It didn’t seem fair. We should have abolished all that with enlightenment.

  It is in the novel’s savouring, over so many pages, of Letty’s growing belief, or obsession, right or wrong, that her energies must be ‘husbanded’, that Letty Fox becomes more than a brilliant satire. Watching a poor working girl give birth to her illegitimate child, she muses: T wish I were a mother too. Cornells and all the men I had played round with seemed far away. This was the reality, and this was, truth to tell, what I, in my blind ignorant way, was fighting for, trying to make shift with one and all of them. But what chance has a smart, forward girl to be innocent or maternal? That’s a dream.’

  How are we to take this? No doubt Letty is in earnest, but then she is perfectly capable of earnestly maintaining the opposite point of view on the next page. All the same, as the chapters accumulate and with them Letty’s frustrations, we sense the growing seduction of that traditional dream, the pull of the marriage bond and maternity. Sooner or later Letty will succumb. In her case, it does not seem to be a question of choice.