Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  MY DARLING SIR CLAYS,

  … We had a debate in economics on the legality and ethics of the sit-down strike, and I was on the affirmative; that is to say, they are both legal and ethical. As you predicted some time ago, oh, seer (by courtesy of Marx), the wave of strikes is hitting the United States, and the workers all over are becoming more and more labor-conscious, and realizing that they have rights too, and are setting out to get them. Labor is marching on and growing very fast, despite the opposition of the typical bourgeois “mistaken liberals” who claim that sit-downs will lead to Fascism, because the middle-class will be aroused by this “destruction of property rights” (ha, ha, ha!). This feeling is echoed by my dear Republican history teachers, who point out with sadistic pleasure the rise of a group of all of 50 vigilantes, as if every new thing in history, as if every new force of progress and democracy (yes, in our supposedly free land) had not always been attacked by the forces of reaction. Our teacher said that the vigilantes are a national institution. This must embrace a very small scope of the nation and even if it were true, who encouraged the vigilantes, dear lady! who started them? My Eco-teacher is Trotsky-ite, not mistaken, but a real one! It’s too much to always give them the break and call them Trotsky-mistakenites. She infilters the duckiest notions into the class; as the class is special, and supposedly for the bright girls, they have taken care to include very few members of the real working class in it (we have plenty here), so that the snug, comfortable brats are all too willing to receive the bad idea. The working-class girls may not have had all that leisure to read Marx (they generally have to wash the floors in between times), but oh, boy, they know what is so and what isn’t, when it comes to the wage scale, ticklish proposition, for example. I have the biggest arguments, and go up afterwards and discuss Marx (I know nothing of him, as you state, but she knows still less), and so life goes on …

  My darling Clays, I am not sighing and pining for you. This is an unusual love letter. I would, though, if I had the time, so don’t take offense. I can’t see you pining for me, either, but I hope you do. You have more experience than me in pining—I know your record—so I hope you pine somewhat from mere habit. What a shame that I can’t tell everyone! But what fun, too. I love to look at all those simpering brats and think—oh, baloney, what do you know about that thing they pronounce in the movies LERV? I’m getting sticky, my boy, and I move on.

  I am taking Art-ah-Art. We have been studying, in one week, what should take at least a year. We are now supposed to be able to identify romanesque, byzantine, babylonian, greek, gothic, renaissance, neo-classical, and such forms of architecture—the truth, we cannot. Also, now we are going to Painting. I like this better. I have to make special reports on Leonardo da Vinci and Jan van Eyck—that’s all. I know you’ll laugh at me, but “it’s the custom of the town.” I am taking J. van E. because I saw the Adoration of the Lamb myself, with mine own eyes, and she doesn’t usually have reports on him She reminds me of a person who builds a house without foundations; because he is the true founder of the Dutch school. Of course, I’m dying to take El Greco, but she said I had enough.

  I am going crazy. The Y.C.L. is being reorganized (again)—I approve of the idea that communists should be human beings; that in their relations with others they should be tolerant and broadminded; that they should do as the world does because they can thus convince more people of the efficacy of another world (not the preacher’s, the Marxist’s)—but I am sick and tired of the idea that people join the League, not to be told anything about communist theory, or to be trained in any way for the struggle later on, or to make them better Party members when they grow up. Oh, no! You must not scare them by doing anything but having meaningless discussions. You must forget that you were a communist and make the League a “mass organization” with NO PURPOSE (essential)! with little or no chance for Marxist education, and with the already established leaders remaining the already established leaders; the Leadership—God Bless ’em, over the water! Still ’n all, I am trying to educate myself—I should love, love to go to France, Spain, England—with you—learn something— how little a girl knows. When we see men conforming, how worse than bad! For we are supposed to regard men as the tigers, the outlaws, the “beloved bandits”; but, actually, are they? Very few mavericks, in my experience. But the theory still goes, among these (soon-to-be) horned heads, that the maverick, the leader is what women admire and choose, in order to carry forward the best of the species, or something of that sort; actually most of my classmates, female, have their eye out for the willingest, not the best. It’s a tattletale gray world, my masters. Well, there’ll be no sense in sexual theories until women start telling their minds; and, of course, until they have some; that’ll be when they abolish the ads, for all the kids I know get their ideas from the ads; but even at that, what they choose men for ain’t at all what the boys think. But don’t start asking me why I choose you. You know why! I couldn’t resist you. That’s terrible. I don’t want to think about it.

  I am coaxing Mother into giving me, for my birthday, the collected works of a gentleman of the Bourgeoisie known to fame as Lenin. Then, maybe I can start catching up on you. This IS a hint.)

  You will probably think I am just a loony kid gone intellectual, but I just felt like writing to you. You are the only one to whom I can tell my whole life. What a pleasure that is, what a relief! Don’t let me down. I am giving myself away. Every book on etiquette, not to mention on How to Attract Men, tells you to do the opposite. Meanwhile, I am listening to the dances from Prince Igor; my taste is crazy, but it and you make me feel freer and less nervous than I have in months and months—and years. I think I grew up fast. Jacky is still at the idolized-professor-of-English stage.His name is Peter “Varnish”! Poor kid! She thinks men are gods.

  Yours

  LETTY-SCHLAGOBERS

  (easy to whip into shape).

  Clays wrote back, among other things:

  I’ll throw you out if you say all over which is German, instead of everywhere … and a friend of mine (in the Foreign Office, so many of them are; it’s the old school tie operating) explained the Nazis to me this way: “It’s you communists that brought it on, it’s the reaction.” Don’t ask me, dear Letty, why I go to see him. Gilbert (that’s him) always knows when war is going to be declared; and it always arrives on time. I don’t even need Marxism when I know Gilbert. I don’t make any inferences.

  Lovingly, Clays.

  P.S. Why Sir Clays? Do you think that a handkerchief and a tourney were love? That was adventure! This, that we have, is LOVE.

  We spoke of our marriage, but we waited for the double divorce, which Jean, his wife, the crime writer, had not managed to get. This was not malice. We had asked ourselves if we ought to wait so long. While we were asking this, a letter came from the wife, saying that she expected us all to be free very soon, as her parents were paying for a Mexican divorce and she was even then in Mexico City. I could hardly believe it. It was like hearing that Europe was free. Do these things really happen? Underneath the excitement and joy, I had felt down in the mouth—marriage was really too hazardous these days, I sometimes thought, and I thought of poor Mother. I now wrote to Clays:

  I have had a new, different kind of feeling in the last few days, which I hope will be permanent. At last, I have lifted myself out of the tenseness, general apathy, and self-consciousness, the occasional rising into periods of hysterical work, and the general feeling of malaise, which I’ve had for months now, and is what I most have, that resembles the kind of young girls they write about. I feel like a different person. The only thing is that too many people around jar on my nerves, which is new; and that I like to be alone. However, don’t think that’s too bad, I feel a strange kind of peace; though I’m still so young, a feeling that I’m not as immature as I was, in order to convince myself that I can really accomplish something, I am making plans for a book. Don’t laugh! I know it’ll never get anywhere as a work of art, but if I can
complete it, I’ll feel that perhaps I have potentialities as an author. I mapped out a plan a few days ago, and I’ve just been working on preliminary notes, haven’t got down to work on the actual thing and won’t for some time. What is the right way to begin? It’s a story of a group I know very well; a group of girls in high school with some fancy flourishes of my own. The most I’ve done is writing a pagelong character sketch of each girl and her family, ten in all, and in working out a fantastic theory about the riddle of the universe which one of the boys is supposed to hold. I have a kind of knowledge that young men of twenty or so indulge in theories about riddles of the universe; tacked on is a conversation where he says he can’t believe in God; and he goes about telling every girl the awful news. This one’s name is Bobby—but there is more than one. I know it sounds crazy, but if I can get it done by the end of the summer—that is if we’re not married—I’ll feel happy.

  There is a strange tenseness in the air in America, it seems to me! Families parade along the streets on Sunday in their new suits; discussions go on as usual, but, maybe it’s just because I live in a big city, but everyone seems to have a feeling, conscious or otherwise, that something big is going to happen, something startling—I don’t know what. A lot of the pseudo-intellectuals, the dilettantes, have been wandering about lately in a high fervor of seething excitement, because of the profusion of lectures by Thomas Mann, Harold J. Laski, etc. There is a general meeting of each other at meetings, at the New School, at dinners, at Mecca Temple, and a cheerful feeling that a lot is wrong with the universe; and it’s marvelous to be able to discuss it all over a Martini; just as the intellectuals of fifty years ago discussed it in the Closerie des Lilas, or something, over Pernods. Life at school, as a consequence (consequent by comparison), is becoming more babyish and disgusting, as life outside of it is getting richer and more full-blooded. One gets a sense of waste, of foolish indulgence, of “why am I here,” every morning when contemplating the mature faces of eighteen-year-old cherubs who wouldn’t know a serious discussion, except on boys, if they were listening to one! And a feeling of the broadness and wealth of material in life all around, except for the class one is attending.

  And is this growing-up? Each change, I say that to myself. But it’s usually some awful symptom—but if This is It, then it isn’t so bad. If this letter, into which I have put my real thoughts, seems weak and adolescent to you still, well, tell me and I’ll weep suitably; but if it isn’t, show it to others and say, my girl,

  LETTY FOX FECIT.

  P.S.Author’s swelled-head already!

  May 8, 1937

  DEAREST CLAYS (NOT SIR),

  You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to get your letter. Though I think I am getting less sentimental and childish every day, yet I have such a longing to go back to Europe, though it is so changed now, that it is incredible. I have been living for the past two months, as if in a daze, all sorts of things happening to me, a very mouvementé period, and yet I don’t quite feel as if I were all here and (don’t snicker) as if I were going to get married. All I know is that I am dying to go back where you came from. This is not the influence of books, nor, strictly, of you. All the books, for instance, about Europe that I have read lately, except for Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, have, on the contrary, made me want to stay in America. And yet, I want to go. However, there is an obstacle and that is Mother. Not that she is opposed to the idea of my going so much, as that she wants to know many things more. First and foremost, she wants letters to her from you, not to me, telling about it, and with more details. She is hurt, really, at the idea of your having written so much to me, when she does not know your exact status (this is so ironbound but it is natural), and she would have to be consulted anyway. She wants more details and she wants to know who is to supervise me and be responsible for me, not a person always actually with me. But you travel around so much, and now you want to fight for Spain which is so splendid, but which is so much anxiety for me and her. And she wonders if I would not be better off with her. I don’t think so; I’d rather be there, even in Spain, and you know I mean that. Oh, what an end to my life if even I died in Spain! This is not all romance to me, as you cruelly put it one evening when we were walking down Eighth Street. I am a young girl, but every young person lives so much in these years of change. School doesn’t match up to life, and if your eyes are open you see it. And then, parents separate, and you aren’t nursed in those old illusions; and far from being a dreamer, it’s impossible for one to “come a cropper,” as you always put it, for one knows everything. I don’t mind dying, if I die gloriously, I mean this. “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.” And more than that, I shall have been your wife—at seventeen; and I shall have been a student at the Sorbonne (I adore this suggestion); or a worker with you at Madrid. I can hardly write, the pen is falling out of my hands as I think of it. Oh, really to do something! I have done all I could, but it has been committees, conventions, articles—I sound like, blood, fire and the sword, a fire-eater. Don’t pull your cold, superior Oxford airs on me, Clays; I am just a fiery, gallant person, given a chance, and, I suppose, the Hectors and Achilles-es, were like me, only more so. You won’t “be settled and in charge of me,” Mother says. It sounds as if I’m feebleminded; and to her I’m a child. Also, what is to become of her? She would like to go to Europe and take Jacky to give her a chance, but Andrea? My father will have to give me the $2,500 if I marry you (when, I mean), and Mother will persuade him, if she can, to give Jacky hers; or part of it, to get an European education; as for Andrea, she was posthumous maritally and financially speaking. It’s a shame to deprive her of it; but we need it too. Jacky wants a different career from me. She wants to go to art schools and wind up at the Beaux-Arts. She’s only just fifteen, not old enough to go with you and me, and she is rather young in some ways, younger than I was; and I know now, I was fairly young for fifteen at fifteen, though I didn’t think so then. If you would write to Mother quickly! She has got up all sorts of fantasies since last night when I got your letter; that (for example), when once I am over there, Jacky will want to go; and Father and Persia will want to go; and she will be left all alone with only a baby and a poker-playing and alimony-racketeering bunch to fall back on. She’s dreadfully afraid of them, and has tried all her life to be a fine, cultivated woman. So, it is, of course, rather hard on her. At the same time, I don’t intend to stay here and let you go to Spain; and I wouldn’t think of trying to persuade you against Spain. It is a wonderful opportunity for both of us. Then, stupid things. I can’t go right away. My orthodontist (brace-doctor to you, you vulgarian, and we have specialized even braces in the U.S.A. I’m just doing your sneering for you, at the glorious old stars and stripes, not stars and bars as you say, probably only to annoy, I started out to say, my orthodontist) has not yet completed his work. I can’t go with you with hoops on my kisser, and I have oodles of work to be done. But I would follow you in September. Oh, heck, you hear the voice of maternal authority. I am under-age, and all the foregoing, or most, is what Mamma says. What are we to do? Perhaps a pension; but when you could get away—and you say you could sometimes, at least to get to the French border. I’d have to travel. If I went to college there, I’d either have to be in a kind of Latin quarter which Mother is dreadfully against, or in externat surveillé—why, that’s simply impossible. And do you realize they have passports and cartes d’identité and they’d all know I was a married woman? I could pass as a young girl, so they’d expect me for decorum’s sake to live with a respectable old dragon. What am I to do? Do you really think I should like Montpellier? I do object to having my freedom curtailed. Why, this is one of Mother’s objections to marriage at my age for me—I’d have no girlhood. And it is true! Isn’t that your real objection to my studying in Paris. But, of all evils, we must choose the least. And then, perhaps I could persuade Mother to let Jacky stay with me—though since the now hush-hush episode of Aunt Phyllis, I doubt if
the Morgans will like this. And I must know more. First (you know, you have been there), what are the subjects one studies in Philosophie? Second, must one go to the Sorbonne afterwards, to study and get one’s licenciat? You know I’d like to go to a co-ed school, or I’d feel so shut away from the world. This world nowadays is really a bisexual world, both sexes are fighting, both political, both social. I’m going to become a hell of a prissy, blue-stockingish prude if I live segregated. And why? It was all very well to segregate the girls before. Now, they have all kinds of people to segregate; so I don’t want to live in an internment camp when I’m not (yet) any of the proscribed races, religions, politicals, and so on. You know I couldn’t be sex-avid now, but I still feel a kind of restraint when I’m out with men, although no one would believe it of me. And I blame this on the American system of “dates,” etc., etc., where everything is prescribed, hairdo, con versation, baby-talk from the girls, yessing the men; and second of all (as they say locally), I don’t get along with girls, so very well. I don’t gossip. Perhaps I’m a cat, as you say! But I don’t gossip and can’t bear giggling over boys, and, What did he mean when he halted at the door? And this is girl stuff. The prospect of being very respectable, in a ladies’ college with girls growing moldy and getting that iron-gray complexion that means hope is dying, while they concentrate on Greek roots, fills me with horror. So I’d like maybe, my son, to live in Paris, where there is some maturity and people can let loose via the intellect and the arts. I don’t mind La Vie de Bohème, but not local sex; for the only way they let loose here is in sex alone, and that’s what they live for; sex in every form, in stories, thought, action, innuendoes; and every darn word in the American language has come to cause a hyena laugh because of its double meaning (that is, they don’t care for the real meaning). This is a tirade and I’m being humorless. I know. But think, just the same, what it must be to be a relatively young person with everything ahead, in some place where there’s a hope in society (not just in types of automobiles) for a better kind of life all round, intellectual as well; and where people think it’s all right to be brainy; and that the brainy aren’t loony and that the brainy aren’t bad sports; and that sex isn’t some variety or other of “feelthy pictures.” I am tired of a place where instead of getting out the old family album, they now get out the old Oedipus complex that made them what they are today! It’s the same, but not in such good taste! Wow! I am not in my best parlor fit. There is something wrong, when I begin to yell, What is Truth and Up the Labor Republic, as I am now doing. So, you see, you must write to Mother and Father, and everyone else you can think of, in your most sporty style—for, let me tell you a secret, you bowl them over when you get going on all fourteen cylinders—and help me out of it … I will leave out all my usual gossip about May Day, Madison Square Garden, and other society notes. I presume by this you know what happens on May Day … I took your advice about my girl friends. My best friend at present is Isabel Cartwright; she does awfully in school, but writes real poems. She seems dull and yet you can go out with her every day and talk and talk—and I am very much tempted to tell her all. She is ugly, long horsy face—and she suffers! But she is an adult at seventeen, just like I am; and I don’t have to behave like a Mexican jumping bean or talk itsy-bitsy, to prove I’m not a pain in the neck, which is a relief.