A Little Tea, a Little Chat Read online

  CHRISTINA ELLEN STEAD was born in 1902 in Sydney’s south. After graduating from high school in 1919, she attended Sydney Teachers’ College on a scholarship. She subsequently held a series of teaching and secretarial positions before leaving for London in 1928.

  There she met and fell in love with Wilhelm Blech (later William Blake), a married American broker at the financial organisation where she was working. They moved to the Paris branch of the same firm in 1929, eventually marrying in 1952 after many years travelling and writing in Europe and the United States.

  Stead’s debut novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, and a short-story collection, The Salzburg Tales, were published in 1934 to positive reviews in England and America. They were followed by novels drawing on Stead’s time in Paris, The Beauties and Furies and House of All Nations, and in the 1940s a succession of major works, among them A Little Tea, a Little Chat and Letty Fox: Her Luck.

  By the early 1950s Stead’s sales, and her finances, had deteriorated. ‘Her refusal to write for popular taste, her mobility and her left-wing politics,’ Margaret Harris writes, ‘all impeded her efforts to be published in the postwar environment.’

  The republication in the mid-1960s of the autobiographical novels The Man Who Loved Children and For Love Alone renewed interest in Stead’s writing; the former has in recent years been called a masterpiece by Jonathan Franzen, among others. Over the next ten years Stead published four new works of fiction, including The Puzzleheaded Girl and The Little Hotel.

  Stead returned to Australia for a university fellowship in 1969, following William Blake’s death. In 1974 she resettled permanently in Sydney and was the first recipient of the Patrick White Award.

  Christina Stead died in 1983. She is widely considered to be one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century.

  DAVID MALOUF was born in 1934 and brought up in Brisbane. He is the internationally acclaimed author of such novels as The Great World (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger), Remembering Babylon (winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and, most recently, Ransom. The Complete Stories won the 2008 Australia-Asia Literary Award.

  ALSO BY CHRISTINA STEAD

  The Salzburg Tales

  Seven Poor Men of Sydney

  The Beauties and Furies

  House of All Nations

  The Man Who Loved Children

  For Love Alone

  Letty Fox: Her Luck

  The People with the Dogs

  Cotters’ England (US title: Dark Places of the Heart)

  The Puzzleheaded Girl

  The Little Hotel

  Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife)

  Ocean of Story: The Uncollected Stories of Christina Stead (ed. R. G. Geering)

  I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Australia

  Copyright © Christina Stead 1948

  Introduction copyright © David Malouf 2016

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. New York 1948

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2016

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary Print ISBN: 9781925355727

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925410150

  Creator: Stead, Christina, 1902–1983, author.

  Title: A little tea, a little chat / by Christina Stead ; introduced by David Malouf.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Great Cream Pot of War

  by David Malouf

  A Little Tea, a Little Chat

  The Great Cream Pot of War

  by David Malouf

  A LITTLE TEA, a Little Chat, first published in 1948, is the cruellest and most blackly comic of Christina Stead’s masterpieces. The opening sets the tone and suggests something of its cold, clear, ‘objective’ view of things:

  Peter Hoag, a Wall Street man, aged fifty-six in March, 1941, led a simple Manhattan life and had regular habits. He lived in a furnished apartment at $110 monthly, on the eighteenth floor of a residential hotel in the lower East Sixties…The people below looked so small they seemed like two-legged fleas, and the cars so small they were like potato bugs that could be scooped up by the hatful.

  A latter-day version of the seventeenth-century City Comedies of Jonson, Middleton and Massinger, full of double-dealing and coney-catching devices of the most resourceful and up-to-date sort, and overreachers of all kinds and both sexes, A Little Tea is set in New York in the early 1940s and has at its centre a comic character of Volpone-like proportions.

  Robert Grant is devoted to the twin arts of seduction and swindling; for him women and commodities are indistinguishable. ‘Property is a woman,’ he tells his son, Gilbert, in an extraordinary eight-page lecture on the morality of money-making, and the two become one in Stead’s description of his sexual gambits:

  He did not care for the pursuit nor for adventure. Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance: ‘I got no time for futures in women.’

  Grant’s world is a world of deals both big and small, of exploitation and dog-eat-dog betrayals, of snooping, spying, anonymous letters of denunciation, saleable secrets and afternoons of serial seduction. He cannot sit still, never has his hand out of someone’s pocket and cannot stop talking. Deals and women, money and ‘honey’, and the link between them, sweet-talk. Stead marvellously catches the style in which Grant gives himself away in a ‘guileless’ monologue that is intended to confuse as well as fascinate:

  He dropped clues, lifted masks, showed his tracks, all through his discourse, and then seeing what he had done, doubled back on himself, made false scents, artfully mixed in incompatibles, but not with any true idea of dodging them, but of keeping their minds intent on himself and his romantic situation. He did not care what they saw as long as they kept looking and wondering at him. He felt all kinds of rich emotions, a sentimental innocence in the pleasure of showing himself to them as a creature they had never dreamed of—more sorrowful, wickeder, gayer, more romantic, more lecherous, more bewildered.

  Grant’s twists and turns, his rapid shifts of pace, focus, object, are like Stead’s own; the book lives off Grant’s energy, which is a law unto itself, a force of nature. Garrulous, mean, obsessive, self-parodying, devious, open, generous, Grant also has charm, and in the end—this is one of the novel’s major achievements—real pathos. He is a comic monster who out-natures nature and breaks free of any attempt that we or his creator might make to place him.

>   He longs to have his life turned into a bestselling novel that is to be called All I Want Is a Woman, then a Broadway musical, The Subway Princess, and his attempt to achieve the latter—in partnership with a crazy playwright of ‘European reputation’—is one of the most comic things in the book; but, like Volpone, or Brecht’s Pierpont Mauler, he is too big for the drama he is in already. His energy cannot contain itself or be contained. He cheats without discrimination because it is his ‘nature’. He takes his profit everywhere. When a friend gives him an apartment to hide in, ‘he began peering into the cupboards…he found salt, coffee and canned milk in the kitchen—a profit. In one of the drawers was a small enamelled pillcase about one inch square. He liked this and pocketed it.’

  Grant’s passion for boxes of all sorts, but especially a yellow hatbox that contains all his ‘secrets’, and for keys to open or lock them, is a fetish, one of the man’s unexplained ‘humours’ that provides some of the book’s zaniest conversations and scenes. His own explanation is always that he is a creature of the society that produced him: the poverty of his childhood; capitalism; a world where ‘Money talks…I can do it without money; but why should I? Money talks faster than I do.’

  If I’d been born in a land where they wouldn’t let me put my hand in your pocket—not yours, Edda—I’d be a good commissar. But I’m corrupted. I’m a profiteer. Will I stand by and let others take the pickings? It’s asking too much.

  ‘My dear boy,’ Grant tells his friend David Flack, ‘when the golden harvest has begun, take a scythe in your hand.’ The golden harvest is the war. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Grant considers forming a shipping company in Valparaiso to send contraband to Japan. ‘We got a blood transfusion,’ he declares, ‘they gave us a blood transfusion.’

  His friend March, an isolationist and crypto-fascist, takes a different line:

  The whole world’s going to hell without our aid…We got a big enough country. All we’ve got to do is sit on it. No good ever came out of meddling in other people’s affairs. It don’t matter who’s right, it don’t matter who’s wrong, you get the rainbow in your eye and you pay the damages.

  March’s friends are

  organising all the time behind the scenes to take over…They had their men, they had the money, they had the key positions, and they had an army which they would use at home, not abroad. The USA would be turned into a magnificent producing machine, producing for March and his friends.

  Another friend tells Grant’s son, Gilbert, a young lieutenant at home on leave, ‘When Europe’s ruined after the war and the kids are starving and the old people dropping dead like flies, everybody sick, and without any hats or shoes, you’ll see: we’ll make a fortune.’

  Robert Grant’s war turns out to be on the homefront. His undoing is the great Blonde Network, the blondine, Barbara Kent, in her various guises: as she goes back and forth, financed by Grant, between New York and Reno, on the ‘alimony trail’; as Mrs Kent, then Mrs Adams, at last as Mrs Downs. She ‘sinks’ him, unlike his many other victims, because she is a creature of his own kind. (‘I go into the daily battle with men,’ she tells Gilbert, ‘I meet them on their own terms…I do exactly what your father does.’)

  But Grant is also the victim of his own neediness:

  I should not say this, but perhaps I was not always as I should have been, but without any thought of harm, I swear, I was carried away. I saw her, by lamplight, on the fresh linen, with her blonde hair uncoiled and a white cat there, a picture of innocence, asleep, with a rosy cheek and hardly breathing, like that princess, the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, I kissed her forehead and up there woke a rascal and a criminal.

  After many sidesteps and minuets, many ‘frenzied monologues’ and red herrings (the wild goose chase of Mrs Adams’ career as the pay-mistress of an international spy-ring), and ‘front lines and back lines and strategic retreats and lines of communications and hidden depots’, our last view of the terrible pair is utterly banal, a parody Darby and Joan: she with her knitting, he in his shirt-sleeves and slippers with the evening papers; dependent, suspicious, resentful of one another, still dashing off the occasional poison-pen letter. Abruptly the Brechtian farce, the exemplary anti-capitalist comedy, opens up to let in a figure from quite another world, the world of folk-tale or nightmare: Grant’s version of the Exterminating Angel, Azrael, the mysterious Hilbertson (‘Gilbert’, the maid calls him, in some obscure but disturbing confusion with Grant’s son), who steps out of Grant’s ‘Louisiana past’, or out of his shadow, in the shape of an old, white-haired caller—Death as Grant had already imagined him—to strike the man down.

  It’s a splendid and terrifying conclusion that the blondine takes in her stride. Mere farce in the end, mere satire or morality play, could not contain Grant or properly finish him off. His end belongs to some darker genre. He is a creation of the highest imaginative order, all energy without object, replacing nature with talk, with deals, with breathless activity, but at the centre empty; when the bubble bursts there is nothing there. It is, fully dramatised and without comment, a fierce critique both of the ‘creature’ and of the society that made him.

  A Little Tea, a Little Chat

  To my friends

  AIDA AND MAX KOTLARSKY

  Chief Characters

  ROBERT OWEN GRANT—cotton speculator and dealer

  GILBERT GRANT—his elder son

  MRS. BARBARA KENT, then DOWNS—the blondine

  MRS. JONES—her mother

  MISS PAULA RUSSELL—her friend

  MISS LIVY WRIGHT—friend of Grant

  HUGO MARCH—Wall Street man

  ALFRED GOODWIN—Grant’s friend

  DAVID FLACK

  EDDA FLACK—his daughter

  —friends of Grant

  MISS ROBBINS—Grant’s secretary

  1

  Peter Hoag, a Wall Street man, aged fifty-six in March, 1941, led a simple Manhattan life and had regular habits. He lived alone in a furnished apartment, at $110 monthly, on the eighteenth floor of a residential hotel in the lower East Sixties. His apartment was in the corner of the building, with two sets of windows, one set overlooking Madison Avenue, and the other, the cross street. The people below looked so small that they seemed to walk like two-legged fleas, and the cars so small that they were like potato bugs that could be scooped up by the hatful. The apartment consisted of a lobby about a yard square, a living room with a divan on which Hoag slept, a bathroom, and a small service kitchen, used also as a bar. The whole was carpeted and the ceiling not too low. The walls were painted green and decorated with six pictures showing small boys and dogs urinating, and, on two small veneered tables, Hoag had albums containing pictures with similar subjects. He had on a bookcase, three bronzes: the first, two dogs round an umbrella stand with a dripping umbrella; the second, a European import, Mannekin Pis, brought by his sister for him from Antwerp; and the third a head of Abraham Lincoln, given to him by one of his best friends, Hugo March, a stock-exchange broker. In the bathroom were several notices stolen from men’s rooms, and in the kitchen a picture of bluebonnets in Texas, a state in which Elias Brown, Hoag’s partner downtown, owned some oil property. Another of Peter Hoag’s friends, now dead, had reorganized a bankrupt Southwestern railroad, and Hoag had helped in the affair. This friend, dying, had left Hoag $5,000. Hoag liked the Texas picture better than the others: the others were witty, but this gave him pleasure. He and March would look at it together, while he mixed drinks for March, after five o’clock, or cooked him some eggs and bacon; they would talk over the oil wells and Texas, and say the bluebonnets were a lovely flower. If anyone came from Texas, they would bring him up to the apartment to see the picture, which, however, had only been cut out of a National Geographic magazine. The oil properties had founded Brown’s fortune.

  Hoag had as many friends as he could count, all Wall Street men, stock-exchange and insurance brokers, bankers, men who ran bankrupt railroads, insured stockyards, were produce merchants
and shipping brokers. About five of these were now his intimates—Elias Brown and Hugo March, stock exchange; Saul Udall, railroads; Arthur Pantalona and Francis O’Sullivan, plainclothes Government agents, Fraud and Narcotics Squads. About the first three almost everything was known by the six, about the last two, very little; Peter Hoag was the only one dear to them all. He was really loved, and not only by these men but by a number of others, all men of considerable active wealth, not mere merchants, but industrious, successful, crafty men with networks of control in the United States and Canada, not commercial princes of the first order, but men of principles identical with those of the first class, each one of whom, given some sort of break, might emerge (at least so each thought) as another Du Pont, or at least marry his child to a Du Pont. These men were well aware that the age of monstrous personal achievement had passed and that dynasties were now the order of that extraordinary one-time democracy, now territory of financial oligarchs…These men loved the United States intensely, ferociously, with terror and greed.

  Peter Hoag appreciated these men; his certainty that each of them loved money and lechery, above all, that each must find a fatal woman and a fatal day, made him irresistible to them as a friend. He was a rich deposit of sex lore and table talk. Peter Hoag got liquor in prohibition days, when O’Sullivan had been a revenue agent; he got passports and passages, silk stockings and medicines, narcotics and income-tax arrangements; he knew abortionists, skin-disease charlatans, psychoanalysts and face lifters, lobbyists and lawyers, restaurants and bordels. He was in on arranged marriages and divorces, seductions and criminal discoveries; he knew and did everything that was necessary to his friends, and was easy of approach, candid, honest, and tender. It was said no woman could, or at least would resist him, though he was a short, plump, carelessly dressed personage, with an ordinary pear-shaped face. It was not only as a fixer but as a friend that he was known to strangers, too.