Letty Fox Read online

  The Miegunyah Press

  The general series of the

  Miegunyah Volumes

  was made possible by the

  Miegunyah Fund

  established by bequests

  under the wills of

  Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.

  ‘Miegunyah’ was the home of

  Mab and Russell Grimwade

  from 1911 to 1955.

  Miegunyah Modern Library

  Titles in this series

  Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

  Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck

  Christina Stead, For Love Alone (upcoming)

  THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2011

  Text © Christina Stead, 1946; estate of Christina Stead, 2011

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2011

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  Text design by Peter Long

  Typeset by Megan Ellis

  Cover design and illustration by Miriam Rosenbloom

  Printed by Griffin Press in South Australia

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  [to come]

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body.

  Introduction

  One critic has said of Christina Stead that “at no time during her life or beyond it could Stead be even remotely considered a popular writer.”1 Unfortunately for Christina Stead, this was not the case. When I founded Virago in 1972, the group of women I gradually gathered round me included many who were devoted to the works of Christina Stead, and each of us loved her work for different reasons.

  The feminism of the 1970s had many strands, and in Britain one of its strongest elements was that of socialist feminism, which carried with it a firm attachment to any woman who had suffered for the faith. For these women Christina Stead was a heroine of the left, a writer who wrote about socialists, who was said—more daring still—to be a communist, and a Stalinist to boot. In those days this was seen to be a good thing. (Christina Stead was in fact not a member of the party, and William Blake, her husband, only for a short time.)

  As for me, I came to Christina Stead’s works because I am an Australian libertarian, and my version of Stead worship was purely literary, and of course, nationalistic. Then there were others, including my great friend the novelist Angela Carter, who hailed Christina Stead as a forgotten woman writer of huge achievement, fabulous individuality and magnificent creative powers. Angela, herself a towering figure in what she called “pygmy times,” recognized with rapture a kindred spirit.2

  And so it was inevitable that once I thought to launch a series of reprints of out-of-print novels by women writers, Christina Stead should be almost the first writer we thought of. She was one of three writers whose books launched the Virago Modern Classics series in 1978. We published Letty Fox: Her Luck on 20 July of that year, and over the following decades we published nine more of her works.

  Critically, they were a success; she was “rediscovered” by Virago, so that, as English writer Lorna Sage claimed, she was “a kind of Virago mascot, a truly extraordinary writer whose rediscovery is a major event of the past decade.”3

  For us, life was not easy. Trees were felled in sorting out knotty problems between Christina Stead and her agents in New York and London. The writer we chose to introduce Letty Fox: Her Luck was a disaster. She was an American writer, Markie (Mary Kathleen) Benet, a scion of the old American left, and Christina Stead’s acid letters about it still cry to the heavens.

  Meanwhile, Christina Stead had developed a marvelous technique to deal with a recalcitrant world. She became a professional contrarian: in all her numerous interviews, in response to the most innocent question, Christina Stead would automatically answer no, the response of a person irritated beyond bearing by the banalities and stupidities of the everyday folk amongst whom she was forced to live.

  Rodney Wetherell interviewed Christina Stead for the ABC in Melbourne, in September 1979. The exchange was a classic and the gist of it is to be found in other interviews both before and after it, during which she perfected her art:

  Rodney Wetherell: There must have been a great restlessness in you, too, right from early days.

  Christina Stead: No, not at all.

  RW: Do you have a professional sort of writer’s interest in psychology?

  CS: No, I was never a professional writer, and I am not now …

  RW: I’ve always wondered where you fitted writing into your life actually, because … obviously you were working very hard in the bank …

  CS: No, I was not working hard, no, no …4

  Why did Christina Stead accept publication by a feminist publisher? She made it clear, again and again, that the success that came to her with the women’s movement was hard to bear. Another classic encounter occurred when she was interviewed in 1982 by Dr Guilia Guiffré for Stand magazine:

  Guilia Guiffré: Would you agree that some of the notions that occur in your books would support a feminist reading? Christina Stead: No. I have always found men to be wonderful friends and they’ve helped me a great deal. I love men.5

  I can only imagine that, despite her constant reiteration that she had always been published with ease by leading publishers, by 1977, when I came along, her work was usually out of print. But “I adore men” was a Stead catchphrase.6 Her fixed opinion that feminists did not inevitably led to a relationship between us which, reread thirty years later, can only make one laugh.

  How heroically she tried to be polite, not to be driven mad by what we represented. How she struggled to deal with us. She was intelligent enough—and good enough—to know that we meant well, but the Virago files bristle with her sharp stabs:

  DEAR VIRAGO,

  Thank you for your catalogue; you have many interesting titles. About my own books … details about myself. I did not “fall into disfavour under McCarthyism”—a romantic (and corny) statement … I do not care about the other romantic statements in your blurb: I am interested in fact. Sorry, I know you mean well—but the women’s movement, like any other movement, is best helped by FACT, by TRUTH.

  At the time, it was painful. How could we please this revered icon? How was I to know, when I went to meet Virago’s heroine of literature and socialism, that she thought she was encountering a radical lesbian man-hater? How was I to know that I was about to encounter a writer whose bad teeth meant she could not eat, who drank over a liter of Cinzano a day and who liked to absorb at least two strong drinks, if not more, before lunch?

  I met her in February 1980. It was hard to find an unattractive brutalist pub in Melbourne at the time, but Christina Stead managed it.

  Here is how the meeting went:

  A formidable and terrifying lady. Just as picky as one imagined. Offered me two gins and tonics, made a great fuss about getting them, and drank nauseating brown vermouth herself. Talked about her brothers and sisters and her position in the family. We talked about being the first child in the family, she said how harsh her life had been, that sh
e’d been almost an orphan. She was the only child of her father’s first marriage to a working-class girl; he married subsequently a middle-class girl and they had six children, four boys and two girls and she had to more or less bring up her step brothers and sisters. She described a very harsh childhood and then said, “Of course it did me no harm whatsoever, I was perfectly happy, it was good discipline.”

  She said meaningfully twice that she loved men and constantly referred to her close relationship with her husband. I think she meant by this that she was suspicious of my sexual proclivities. About her husband she talked a great deal … After lunch we stood outside in the blazing heat waiting for a taxi for ten minutes, we then went to a post office so she could send three valentines to men friends.

  She continues to assert in a quiet sort of way (it’s very difficult to hear what she says) that all the circumstances of her life, wherever she is, are good. A weird sort of inverted rage it seems to me—which you can see in her books. I found it hard to imagine that this prickly, rather disagreeable and unloving creature had written those novels.

  I was a terrified and crestfallen young publisher when I wrote a—much longer—account of this meeting thirty years ago. Today I see her quite differently. Even if Christina still frets in whatever Darwinian utopia to which I hope she has been transported, what she had and what she gave us was far grander and more wonderful than the stinging encounters to which she subjected us mere mortals. What she had was genius, and a troubled childhood. She was selfabsorbed and spiky, often idiotic—in other words, she was a human genius, but there are many monsters prowling the earth who have given us a great deal less than she has. Almost, though not quite, I wish I could meet her again.

  Since Christina Stead’s death in 1983—and mostly emanating from Australia—biographical accounts of her life and critical studies of her work have poured out, often interpreting the personality of this remarkable writer in ways that would have made her incandescent with rage. Did her seeming dislike of women mean she was a closet lesbian? Was she psychologically damaged by her unhappy childhood? Was she fixated on her supremely egotistical father, and thus always in pursuit of equally domineering men?

  This is not surprising, because as Stead often admitted herself, her fifteen works of fiction plundered her own life and the lives of those around her. “But I don’t invent it. I see what’s going on. That’s all.”7

  In Letty Fox: Her Luck, her sixth novel, written in 1946, Christina Stead uses such sources to place Letty’s picaresque pursuit of sex, love and marriage within a meticulous satire on marriage and the marketplace without any rival in English literature. More than that, Stead uses her own passionate nature to explore, brilliantly, sexual desire—female sexual desire in particular: what women feel about it, what they will do to satisfy it, and the arrangements society has put in place to control it.

  But all this, though very much the warp and weft of Letty Fox: Her Luck, is also beside the point, because the place it holds in the Stead canon is unique: the novel is her satirical masterpiece, and, full of jokes and tragicomedies, her comic masterpiece too. Of course Letty Fox: Her Luck has other outstanding qualities. It packs a mighty political punch. With The Man Who Loved Children, A Little Tea, A Little Chat, and The People With the Dogs, Letty forms the kingpin of a quartet of novels in which Christina Stead takes a scathing swipe at American society, a satire all too relevant today.

  That said, like everything else Christina Stead wrote, Letty Fox has no simple theme. Marxists, socialists, business men and women, money men and women, and both sexes as lovers, parents, partners, citizens and children parade here: few of them escape Letty Fox: Her Luck with much skin on their backs.

  But most of all, this novel is about women, it is they who are the centre of this universe: no wonder we, young feminists in the 1970s, pounced upon the book and adored it. Letty Fox: Her Luck presents a female Canterbury Tales of women wailing, women crowing, women pursuing, woman as slobs with unwashed hair, women as peacocks displaying their finery; women as mothers and grandmothers, sisters and cousins, wives and spinsters, friends and enemies, and all through it is woven money. Men, who have the power, are there to be manipulated: this is the price they must pay to parade as cocks of the walk on our mortal soil.

  Christina Stead tells the story of Letty in the first person, from her birth circa 1921 to her marriage in 1945. Letty (Letty-Marmalade, always in a jam) is born “full of the devil”, “a frisky filly” and her vivacious voice is full of rattling vim.8 Street savvy and hilariously loquacious, she is a New Yorker, on her mother’s side a member of a large family, the Morgans, a “noisy, greedy, money-loving” clan of women and attendant men, through whose matrimonial antics Christina Stead gives us a dazzling portrait of sexual activity and marital skull duggery in the modern world.9

  Letty’s father is the socialist Solander Fox. (More slices of Stead life: how many American socialists knew in 1946, when this novel was first published, that Daniel Solander sailed with Captain Cook and that Cape Solander, at the head of Botany Bay, is named after him? Christina Stead could see Cape Solander from her childhood Sydney home. And then, how many Australians of the time knew of Ralph Fox, the English communist whom Christina Stead loved, killed fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War?)

  “Some people, I know,” says Letty, “say I have bounce, I am preposterous, I elbow people out of my way and am out for myself. I am … but at least it doesn’t impose on anyone; I am what I am, and I make my way in the world … I’ve got to make the right start in life … I’m absolutely determined, when I find the right man, to be the perfect wife … I’ve got to be selfish now in order to be a good wife and mother later on.”10

  Even as a child Letty would kneel down and pray, “Oh, God, make me worthy this day to get a rich man when I marry.”11

  Be prepared for much more than this, for Letty is surrounded by a maelstrom of persons, a scrambling world of activity, as Christina Stead leads us into the byways of a hundred or so other loves and lives in this rich novel. There are many diversions, many tales, many digressions, many non sequiturs.

  The characters you will meet pop up and down like Punch and Judy, each of them decorating Letty’s life on the prowl like the branches of a vast tree of life. With her extraordinary ear for the villainies of the human race, the marriage marketplace which Christina Stead dissects is lined with paternity suits, “the profit of alimony,” abortions, divorce, divorcees, children pushed around from pillar to post, pregnancies, babies, deceit and betrayal.

  It is inevitable that biographers and critics should connect Christina Stead the human being with the use she makes of her own life in her fiction. Her often noted dislike for her own sex, however, is much more easily understood by grasping the fact that great men and women can also be obtuse and unpleasant, and lack self-knowledge, than by any questionable extrapolation towards suppressed sexual inclinations. Nevertheless, like The Man Who Loved Children, which began her semi-autobiographical account of her childhood, and For Love Alone, Letty Fox: Her Luck in a sense is part of a trilogy rich with details of Stead’s own early life.

  Christina Stead left Australia in 1928, in unreciprocated love with a Sydney academic who was to reject her. On arrival in London in 1928, she found an entirely different kind of sexual fulfillment with the charming and cosmopolitan New Yorker William Blech. (He later changed his name to Blake.) William Blake was already married, with a daughter, Ruth, when Christina met him. Until his death in 1968, they lived together in Europe and the USA, only marrying in February 1952 when he finally got his divorce.

  Thus, Letty Fox: Her Luck is also a revenge novel, as Christina lets off steam, sometimes talking through the mouth of Letty, but more often through Persia, the woman for whom Solander has rejected Letty’s querulous mother. Persia/Christina, a “young dark serious girl, with large eyes”12 who had a fondness for men is always above the fray, casting a wry eye on the maddening women who fight so bitterly in the marriage
market:

  “What luck you have, you American women! Men who pay for everything and don’t ask for accounts … The men believe they’ve done their wives insult and injury by sleeping with them. They must pay for ever! They must pay their mothers because their mothers suffered to have them. And as for the women … they behave as if they are disabled for life as soon as they’re married … Every man, legally related to them, must pay through the nose …”13

  But above all Letty Fox: Her Luck is a novel “alive and burning with sex.”14

  With Christina Stead’s transformation of her own vigorous sexual desire into something so universally magnificent, all limp autobiographical connections fade into insignificance. Letty is tormented from the age of sixteen: “… I was the victim of some physical irritation, and the desire for love, without the dream of any masculine body, began to fill me. It started like a pin point and spread; it ran through my veins.”15 “I could … bathe my skin abd even lacerate it, tear it so that the boiling blood would rush out. Nothing could satisfy me …”16

  More than this, there is a sexual frankness remarkable even today. No wonder it was banned in Australia as obscene (no other country banned it, nor was any other work of Stead’s so treated). Letty’s observation: “Sue said he disappointed her at night, but I am putting mildly what she told in detail” could not have pleased the Australian Department of Trade and Customs and the Literary Censorship Board, which sent Letty Fox: Her Luck into Australian oblivion in 1947.17 “At once he brought me back to bed and, taking my hand, showed me where to put it” could not have pleased them either.18

  In Letty Fox: Her Luck we also have Christina Stead’s celebration of heterosexual love. Man is an animal, made to mate.

  “But once the look is given, the first hint of the immortal embrace, the only immortality, when this took place, the jealous, flushed apes came round, getting between us— with—suitability, morality, marriage, lechery—tearing us apart, inventing, until the whole thing was a mere shallow, sordid disgrace … Not one of us alive but has suffered this affront, this insult and injury—and why, because we offer life, body, heat, pleasure, all in one hour, to someone. It’s not a mean act; besides death for a cause and life-giving, it’s the only decent thing we ever do!”19