by Anne Fadiman
Because most documents were fine-tuned overnight for filing with the SEC the next morning, I worked crazy hours—usually 4:00 p.m. to midnight. Even on day shift, there was a chance that I’d be asked to come in early—hence the 3:00 a.m. phone calls.
I saw lots of documents. I was required to sign oaths promising that I would not take advantage of my insider’s access to do any insider trading. I signed—and despaired. The idea of my doing insider trading was laughable. Apart from the obvious death-throe symptoms of People Express, nothing registered. I began to grow quite fond of certain typefaces and I liked doing layout for cover pages, but the content of what I was typing was mind-numbing.
Nevertheless, some Stead-like local color came with the job. During another one of my “3:00 a.m. specials” (as I began to think of them), the car-service driver voiced his worries to me, saying he knew full well he was shipping drugs along with documents to legal types up and down the town, but he didn’t know whether to believe his bosses when they told him he was in no danger of being arrested if caught. (Arrangements had been made, they said.) And once, during a lull in office activity, a colleague and I had fun trading information on who in the office did cocaine (“But he’s a health nut!”) and who was gay (“But he’s a nice Italian boy!”).
So far, so good. There was rumored drug use in House of All Nations—and at least one homosexual.
On another night, an envelope addressed to a customer service representative turned out to be full of white powder. A receptionist, thinking the package contained page proofs, had opened it. The addressee was fired, and we worried terribly over how he would pay for his new house and new baby.
No problem: he was hired by a competitor the very next week. The utter lack of consequences was in perfect keeping with Stead.
None of this helped me with my central problem, however—that I was simply too stupid to discern the action cloaked in the language of the blue-sky memorandums and prospectuses that passed through my hands.
In the end, I thoroughly messed up my finance-novel research by quitting my job a full year before the 1987 Black Monday crash. Stead, perhaps jealously guarding her turf from beyond the grave, took some of the blame here, for while visiting Seattle in 1985, I had come across a copy of her posthumous collection, Ocean of Story, at the Elliott Bay Book Company. The book was nowhere to be found in any of the cramped New York bookstores I frequented—and so, partly on the strength of this, I moved out West in 1986.
I had all Stead’s published books in my library by then, but had begun to realize I could never meaningfully emulate her. In fact, I had given up trying to understand even my own paltry finances. At tax time, I turned everything over to an accountant.
I review books on a weekly basis, so the ultimate luxury—one I am unable to indulge in very often—is to reread: to revisit a book to see how time has treated it, how memory has distorted it, or how my own passing years have cast a new light on it.
It was an odd sensation, more than two decades after first encountering House of All Nations, to look again at a book that had shaped me in such serious and absurd ways, for it unerringly revealed how much one can’t know, or can’t remember, about one’s own reading and writing.
There were minor things, such as the carnival festivity of Stead’s vocabulary: words like “canoodle” and “tatterdemalion.” Could I first have come across them here? I’ve certainly used them since, in ways that begin to feel uncomfortably derivative. Or punctuation: I thought I got my exclamation points from Paul Theroux! But, no, they’re here too—so perhaps Stead’s punctuation whetted an appetite that Theroux merely continued to satisfy.
On a deeper level, Stead’s work has an appealingly amoral aesthetic that I now see must have been a revelation to me when I first read it. Henry James may have paved the way here, for I remember my relief when I read him at nineteen and realized how little use he had for “lessons,” how purely he focused on the dynamics of the psyche and of social situations. But James is a meticulous analyst, while Stead presents her characters almost without comment. Instead, she simply lets them announce themselves, reveal themselves, and, as often as not, sink themselves. In a 1982 interview, she explained:
I’m interested in people here and now. I have not even any moral views. Maybe, within myself I think “You shouldn’t do that,” but I would never write such a thing, or express it openly, because I was brought up by a naturalist [her father, David Stead], and you don’t say to a snail, “You bad snail, you mustn’t cross my garden path” or anything, do you? A snail crosses your garden path and he leaves a little silver trail, which is very nice of him, and it’s very pretty and that’s all. A sea-anemone puts out its beautiful little tentacles making it look like a flower and it catches things out of the water and eats them. You don’t say, “You bad sea-anemone, you shouldn’t eat those live things,” do you? They do eat them and otherwise they wouldn’t be alive and be like a lovely little flower.
In House of All Nations, it is this very lack of judgment that, in collusion with her giddy, caustic humor, allows Stead to probe so deeply. The book may feel like an indictment, but it’s not an indictment of particular characters—it’s an indictment of a society in economic anarchy that is heading inexorably toward war. Her characters, as they see it, are just making the best of a bad hand.
The sheer number of those characters—the 1938 edition supplies a cast list of more than 130—is crucial to the novel’s method and moral outlook. Hazel Rowley, in her admirable Christina Stead: A Biography, cites a lecture that Stead gave on “the many-charactered novel” in June 1939, one year after House of All Nations was published. Rowley writes:
Stead suggested that this was the ideal form of novel for a world in chaos in which the individual felt small. No writer could take sides when dealing with such a large array of characters: the writer “is in the position of an impartial, disabused and merry god” and the reader has to “draw his own conclusions from the diverse material, as from life itself.”
It is this sense of having to draw your own conclusions that, to my mind, makes House of All Nations more satisfying than The Man Who Loved Children, where you know exactly whom you’re rooting for: the put-upon housewife, the gifted but dowdy adolescent daughter.
There is also this difference between The Man Who Loved Children and House of All Nations: the former explores subject matter that was foisted on Stead by her own troubled girlhood, while the latter explores subject matter that, in a bid for freedom, she sought out.
In March of 1928, Christina Stead, twenty-five years old and filled with writerly aspirations, left her native Australia for England. Two months later, she walked into the London offices of Strauss & Co., a grain exchange business, and was hired as a secretary by its investment manager, William Blech, an American of German Jewish origin—and a Marxist to boot. By February of 1929, the two had become lovers. (Blech, married, would take twenty-three years to obtain a divorce from his first wife before marrying Stead in 1952.) That same month the couple moved to Paris, where both worked for a private American firm known as the Travelers’ Bank, the creation of a charismatic American Army Air Service veteran, Bertrand Coles Neidecker. By 1931, Stead was making business trips to London for Neidecker and had her own “plushly furnished” office in the bank. Her job duties were vaguely defined and left plenty of time for fiction writing. She was also in an ideal position for a novelist: that of a fly on the wall.
That year, of course, was not a good one for banking. But Neidecker, with his charm, and Blech, with his hard work, managed to keep the bank afloat in perilous circumstances for another four years. In July of 1935, Neidecker skedaddled to New York, where he was arrested for fraud, and the bank was closed. Blech, who had resigned in May, was nevertheless implicated in the affair and also ended up in New York—with Stead and his mother in tow. Neidecker was subsequently freed on bail until the trial. Stead met with him in October and asked permission to write a novel about the Travelers’ Bank. He
gave her his blessing to write “everything she knew,” Rowley tells us. “He probably never imagined that she knew as much as she did.”
Stead proceeded with relish. In June of 1936 a business venture of Blech’s took the couple to Spain, where she commenced writing. In mid-July, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and Stead and Blech were on the run: first to Antwerp, then to London. By October, Stead had submitted a draft to her publisher, and by the summer of 1937 she had completed her revisions. In the meantime, she and Blech had left London for southern France, before giving up on Europe altogether and heading back to New York.
Appalling conditions under which to write a novel—or were they? The tinderbox existence Stead and Blech were leading, with its multiple threats of lawsuits and war, seems only to have heightened the blend of bedlam and tension that crackles on the pages of House of All Nations.
In the novel, the Travelers’ Bank becomes the Banque Mercure; Bertrand Coles Neidecker becomes Jules Simla Bertillon, a “hummingbird of rumor, fancy, and adventures”; and William Blech becomes Michel Alphendéry, Jules’s right-hand man, an Alsatian Jew with a gift for moneymaking and a yearning to commit all his energies to the Communist Party as soon as he has steered Jules into calmer financial waters.
A host of characters swarms around this central pair, the most memorable of them being Henri Léon, a Romanian-born grain merchant. Jewish, promiscuous, and wildly inarticulate (one of his fractured monologues is described as an “elliptic hurricane”), Léon turns out to have a heart almost as big as Alphendéry’s. His outline of his brilliantly profitable and strangely altruistic “wheat schematism”—which will give Yankee capitalism a much-needed shot in the arm and help Soviet Russia carry out its latest five-year plan—is one of the book’s high points.
Undoubtedly it was the exuberant cynicism of this and other set pieces that appealed to me when I first read the novel. But there’s more here than easy skepticism to appeal to a young reader—for a shimmering veil of myth plays over the nitty-gritty of greed and blackmail, especially in the depiction of Jules and the bank. Jules is, variously, superstitious and hardheaded, debonair and tantrum-prone. He is “slender, arch, and very beautiful,” in the eyes of one bank employee. “’Tis pity he’s a banker,” says another. “He’s only made to be a flier, a dancer—a messenger of the gods.” Jules’s own estimate of himself: “I’m just a gilded pickpocket and, believe me, a pickpocket has to have twinkling ankles.”
In other words, he’s an incarnation of wing-footed Mercury, the god who lends the bank its name. There seem to be no limits to the facets of his character, from the quibbling wisecracker (“What’s the use of being rich if you can’t be crazy?”) to the driven directeur on the verge of a nervous breakdown (“I want highflying cash, beautiful cash, in platoons, in platoons, zooming; I want it big, rich, and plentiful, and all mine”). This, with more than four hundred pages still to go!
Jules, while vivid, isn’t solid: “He took out his hat and coat and wrapped himself elegantly in them. He always had the curious appearance of being less material than the rest of mankind, part of him seemed always to belong to the chiaroscuro of a room, to the dark substance of lampposts in a street. When he moved amongst the pillars downstairs it was almost impossible to see him clearly.” The bank is no less spectral. It’s a “confidence trick,” Jules frankly admits. Alphendéry puts it more poetically, seeing it as a “phantom bank” and, later, as a “strange palace of illusion, temptation, and beauty.”
The periodic threats posed to Jules and Alphendéry by stock-market fluctuations, parisitical “friends” of the bank, and Jules’s own erratic behavior sustain the tension over a remarkably prolonged narrative. Rowley tells us that Stead’s editor wanted trims in the novel, and in certain scenes one can see his point. An early chapter on Alphendéry’s Communist circle reads opaquely, even though its rhetoric is undercut by Alphendéry’s own wryly voiced deprecation of spouted dogma. (By contrast, a later scene set in the same milieu, in which Alphendéry teaches a night class on economics to exhausted and Depression-bewildered factory workers, is deeply moving.)
Elsewhere, two paragraphs of untranslated French and German ring alarm bells, since these characters have been doing quite well, thank you, speaking an English that sounds Latinate or Teutonic, as required. But if 30 or 40 pages out of 787 don’t work, who can complain? Jules’s tirades may seem repetitious, but their cumulative impact is needed to give a full picture of him as he is in turn humored, chided, lambasted, and, by the end of the book, fondly remembered.
A second reading confirms how well assembled the book is, how deftly Stead juggles her vast cast and her many narrative strands, and how clearly she keeps a subplot’s pivotal details before the reader over a stretch of five hundred pages or more. A second reading also reveals a vein of the book that somehow escaped my notice the first time around, or else had faded from memory: the finely shaded and loving tribute it pays to European and Levantine Jewry. Stead was a third-generation atheist of Protestant extraction, but her devotion to Blech was instrumental here. As Rowley puts it, “Blech was proud of his Jewishness; so was Stead.” More than half the main characters in House are Jewish, and they compose a rich mosaic of personalities and types—some rascally, some generous, some observers of their faith, others ebulliently cynical.
Everywhere there is a sense that an intrinsic part of European character is being squeezed into an impossible corner. Stead had no way of imagining the particulars of the death-camp horrors in store. Yet she, like her characters, sensed something awful, just over the horizon, with a conviction approaching clairvoyance.
Mixed in with this salute to a roaming, cosmopolitan Jewish culture is Stead’s palpable love for Michel Alphendéry—a reflection, no doubt, of her love for William Blech. Alphendéry lends the book a warmth that spills over into many of its characters, despite their shenanigans. Only one other portrait in Stead’s fiction is so affectionate: that of Edward Massine in The People with the Dogs, another man-about-town deeply divided in nature—not between political credo and personal loyalty, but between general love of his fellow creatures and fear of a particular romantic commitment. (It may be worth noting here that the distinguishing characteristic of Stead villains and villainesses is not their evil intentions but their utterly undivided natures—a delusional certainty of self that prevents them from questioning their actions, no matter how transparently destructive those actions might be.)
A last, minor point: How, the first time around, could I have missed the distinctly homoerotic terms in which these wheelers and dealers’ scheming and subterfuges are described? If ever a writer pinpointed the way a businessman of a certain type sees women as merely decorative and discardable, while male colleagues embody the central passion of his life, it is Stead. True, this can be seen as standard business-world misogyny, but there’s something else going on here. Midway through the book, for instance, a millionaire’s henchman named Davigdor Schicklgrüber—a self-proclaimed idiot who is cannier than he admits about the money he handles—traipses through Paris banking circles, and the author has maximum fun with him: “No athletic beauty married to an invalid, no youth of sixteen, no debonair valetudinarian in a low vaudeville show, no dowager in pink organdie at Nice, ever felt the desires that rich men felt when Davigdor passed their way.”
This lust for Davigdor, admittedly, approaches burlesque. But the wayward beauty of Jules repeatedly enchants the book’s male characters as often as the female, and works on the reader too as one of the key lures of the novel.
One benefit of learning your own limits as a writer is reaching the point where, in reading a book, you recognize straight off that you can’t make use of it——so you simply sit back and savor an author who, like an acrobat or a silversmith or a high-C soprano, does things you will never, with all the training and practice in the world, be able to do.
Clearly, House of All Nations does plenty of things I’ll never be able to do. For a start, it catches me up p
assionately in a subject matter that, on the surface, I have no interest in as a reader and no talent for as a writer. (Surely this is one definition of a great book.) It shows me that in the right hands, even the most unpromising topics—wheat shipments, letters of credit—can give rise to fictional wizardry.
For the longest time, I have to admit, the book misled me. It was a holy grail, a talisman, a reference point, and I embraced it the same way I’ve stepped aboard the wrong train, eager to begin my journey but headed in the wrong direction. I remain in awe of House of All Nations, knowing I’m not likely to pull off anything like it.
But after all, there’s no need; it’s already been done.
ALLEGRA GOODMAN
Pemberley Previsited
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The first time I read Pride and Prejudice I was nine. I was a pert, excitable, giggly reader. My school librarian couldn’t stand me. She had already spoken to me about saving books for when you were older, and suggested ominously that the novel would be ruined for me later on. “Someday,” she predicted, “you’re going to get too big for your britches.”
I’m sure she wouldn’t have let me take the novel out of her library, but of course it didn’t come from her shelves. I’d found it at the University of Hawaii. My mother was the chair of women’s studies there, and my sister and I spent hours after school in the small program library with the books by women authors, the anthropological studies, and, particularly, the variorum edition of Wonder Woman. I knew my mother loved Jane Austen, so when I came upon Pride and Prejudice, I curled up on a couple of floor cushions in the lounge and began to read.