Seven Poor Men of Sydney 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, For Love Alone

  Christina Stead, Letty Fox

  Christina Stead, House of All Nations

  Christina Stead, Cotter’s England

  Christina Stead, The Salzburg Tales (upcoming)

  Praise for Christina Stead

  ‘Christina Stead has the scope, the imagination, the objectivity of the greatest novelists.’

  David Malouf, Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘The most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf.’

  Clifton Fadiman, New Yorker

  ‘I could die of envy of her hard eye.’

  Helen Garner, Scripsi

  ‘Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness.’

  Angela Carter, London Review of Books

  THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

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  First published in London, 1934

  This edition published 2015

  Text © Christina Stead, 1938; estate of Christina Stead, 2015

  Introduction © Delia Falconer, 2015

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

  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 TypeSkill

  Cover design and illustration by Miriam Rosenbloom

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Stead, Christina, 1902–1983, author

  Seven Poor Men of Sydney / Christina Stead

  9780522861990 (paperback)

  9780522867671 (ebook)

  Sydney (N.S.W.) – Fiction

  A823.2

  Introduction

  Delia Falconer

  Christina Stead’s first novel, published in 1934, is a dark love letter to Sydney, a portrait of madness, and the study of a lost generation. It is brimful of overlapping visions: realist, modernist, collective and Nietzschean. Its young characters are all too aware of how their lives are cramped by poverty in the lean years leading up to the Great Depression. They are part of a socialist intellectual milieu and the novel takes its form from the way their paths cross in the lending libraries, public lecture halls, and workers’ newspapers of a city in the grip of change; a late 1920s Sydney in which the half-built Harbour Bridge is covered in cranes and businesses are taking over the colonial houses with their old gardens at its centre. Full of talk, and ideas, the novel makes Sydney appear as busy and full of niches as Conrad or Woolf’s London. People were calling it “Seven Poor Men of Bloomsbury”, sniped fellow author Miles Franklin, one of the many who, from the moment the book was published, accused the author of overreaching. But the novel’s reach is its point. Seven Poor Men of Sydney is a major work; a book that “contains mountain peaks”, according to Stead’s soon-to-be life partner William Blake, when he read the manuscript, which remains to this day its best description.

  The novel’s main focus is on the half-siblings Michael and Catherine Baguenault, two intense souls who have grown up in Fisherman’s Bay: a fictionalised Watson’s Bay, beneath the scarred South Head of the harbour, where Stead spent most of her childhood. Each struggles against a smallness of spirit enforced by a lack of money and an economy geared to stifle human potential (a problem for Stead herself, who had already fled a confining life in Sydney by the time she wrote her book). Both have a singular take upon the world, especially Michael, assailed by states of “ecstasy” since his childhood. As a novel of developing sensibility, Stead’s is far more daring than her idol James Joyce’s first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). While he depicts a single consciousness, Stead sets out to plumb the inner lives, “unexpressed, incoherent, unplanned”, of a whole cohort; an ambition closer to that of Ulysses. “Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out,” the novel asks in its first pages, “when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed?”

  Catherine and Joseph’s lives intertwine with those of their younger, less ambitious cousin Joseph and his fellow employees in a small printery near the Quay—scheming Withers, philosophical Baruch, pathetic Williams; with the thwarted cripple Blount, living with his mother in the working-class inner-west; and, at the other end of the social scale, with the printery’s dissolute owner Chamberlain, and the north-shore-dwelling Folliots, wealthy benefactors of socialist causes, who Michael met in England during his service in the First World War. (Michael had an affair with Marion Folliot, while Catherine holds a torch for her husband Fulke.) Although Michael and Catherine are in their thirties, it is hard to think of a book that gives such a sense of burning youth and its hypersensitivity to ideas and conversation.

  Critic H. M. Green suggested that this is the first novel in which Sydney appears as a modern world city; and certainly, Stead’s portrait bears more resemblance to the busy, abstract visions of contemporary artists like Grace Cossington Smith than to any of its literary predecessors. Throughout its pages, ferries whistle, ocean liners bellow, cars rattle, typewriters tap and hydraulic lifts whistle in cart-docks. The novel also embodies the intense energy of this era, some of it more exalted than anything in Stead’s book; in this decade, the Lindsay brothers published the wildly Lawrentian journal Vision; Reverend Frank Cash penned his mix of swooning futurism and Biblical exegesis, Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge; anti-moralist freethinking thrived at the University; and numerous workers’ organisations, as we see in the novel, housed those on strike and out of work. In one of the five marvellous set pieces that run through the novel—the verbal equivalent of great tracking shots through the city’s different districts—Joseph goes window-shopping with Baruch, grudgingly-granted back pay jingling in their pockets. “Splendid were the silver shops,” Stead writes, “with their iron grilles half-up already. Grotesque but beautiful baskets in silver, receptacles of all sorts whose use he could not imagine, all decorated with scrolls, flourishes, chrysanthemums, cherubs, all punched out and pressed in, chased, embossed and pierced…”. Her noun-filled sentences pour forth, as if powered by the city’s own greedy momentum.

  The most striking aspect of Stead’s Sydney is its poverty. Its dull, sour weight is everywhere. It’s hard to think of anyone who writes as well about the soul-sapping work that is involved in simply existing without money, or the relentless physical intrusions of old, stale, cumbersome and dirty things: Catherine battles with a scrap-iron typewriter in the offices of a Communist newspaper; cockroache
s pour after sunset through cracks in the Fisherman’s Bay buildings; fruit buns and cups of tea barely placate stomachs weak with hunger. Chamberlain hasn’t paid his workers for two months, in thrall to the conman Montagu. A pair of swimming trunks is an unthinkable luxury for ragged Joseph. But none of this can be described as the “background” to Stead’s novel. Instead, it’s this continual struggle that defines an educated working class, trying to help the international ideals of human betterment take root in the local soil. “If bread grew on trees,” Catherine says to Fulke, “no one would recognise his brother or lover; we’d be a race of angels”.

  If Seven Poor Men of Sydney were a set of case studies only it would not have such power. But astute characterisation is one of its pleasures. Another is the sharp way these smart people have of characterising one another. Catherine is “the firebell clanging”, says an acquaintance, while Michael is its “echo in an empty house”. Certainly, at Sydney University, I knew many “Michaels”: damaged and self-destructive young men, disqualified from life, who greeted the world with preemptive anger. Michael’s snarling bond with Blount, the spiteful joy they take in seeing themselves as the hamstrung and dying young men in the painting “The Sons of Clovis”, also rings true in a city in which masculine friendship often takes an exclusive form. Michael’s slow self-destruction is the main narrative thread running through the book. His path to the Gap, Sydney’s notorious suicide spot on the scarred yellow headland where the novel begins, is inevitable. Although he is damaged by the war, and a spiritually indifferent society, Stead suggests there has also been something amiss in his makeup from an early age. Michael is a “soft forest ivy”, in the words of another character, a “clinging vine that someone has always supported”, while he himself recognises that he will “never be captain” of his own soul. The psychology of his last days feels real; after saying his melodramatic farewells at a Bohemian party, he feels at his most alive, at home and at the pub and on his final walk, even as it is clear to those around him that he will die.

  Catherine, too, is a familiar type. “Dark, furious, thin, poor by choice”, she is “a woman of revolution without a barricade… a woman who worked in holiday camps and workers’ education theatres, always passionately involved in something, always half-sick”. Though the obstacles they face are less extreme than in Stead’s day, I have also known my share of “Catherines”—ambition transformed into self-denial, too aware of the price they’ve paid for independence, who have learned to make themselves useful where they fear they can’t be brilliant. For all her labours, Catherine is not fully accepted by the men she works with: Stead is superb at showing how they constantly exclude her, even while they find her fascinating. But Catherine is tough; she will survive, even if she has to drive a knife into her flesh to prove it to herself. And this, the novel implies, is precisely because she resists Michael’s solitary impulse.

  Other characters are just as sharply struck: Baruch, with his “golden sanity”; covetous Withers, with his superior sense that he should be in charge; excitable Blount, wrapped in his own twilight, throwing off sparks of feeling as he speaks “as a cat seems to throw out sparks on a stormy evening”.

  The sparks are important. Baruch, we recall, describes conversation as “the fire of social life”. This is a novel full of talk. It licks, flares, and blazes forth in different moods and modes: complaint, explanation, sociable nonsense, and oration. It dominates, especially in the challenging late pages. Here, in a kind of Gothic eruption, Catherine delivers to Baruch and Joseph a set of nightmare stories, which were told to her by Michael, and reveals their incestuous attraction. Soon afterward, in the insane asylum at Forestville, where Catherine has come to teach the inmates while caring for herself, she, Fulke Folliot, and a passing madman launch into a delirious sequence of stories of landings on imagined worlds, including an abstracted Australia, while Blount famously delivers his damning vision of the country as unsuited to civilised life—“Nothing floats down here, this far in the south, but is worn out with wind, tempest and weather; all is flotsam and jetsam”—which many have taken as expatriate Stead’s “message”. Stead grants each of her characters his or her own high-flying, mannered language—and this is where readers of her work often come unstuck, confused by the apparent clash between these elevated, metaphysical soliloquies and its painstaking, realist observation. The incandescent talk is echoed by Stead’s descriptive prose: those direct, vigorous, extended sentences, with their more than full measure of adjectives and nouns. Much of the excitement, the brilliance, the sense of youth and life in Stead’s novel, comes from this heightened, almost febrile, language.

  It’s astonishing that Stead depended on memory alone as she wrote this book in London and Paris. In 1928, aged twenty-six, after a period of extreme scrimping detailed in her autobiographical novel For Love Alone, Stead escaped Sydney and her narcissistic father, by sailing for London. She found secretarial work with a firm of grain merchants and was soon in her first, longed-for, adult relationship with her married Jewish-American boss Wilhelm Blech (later Blake). The couple moved to Paris so he could be near his wife, daughter and mother, who had relocated there. A trained economist, Blake introduced her to cultured, intellectual Marxist circles. While dealing with his other family was fraught, this was the best time of Stead’s life. She had been planning her novel for a long time—in the early London days she was calling it Death in the Antipodes, and as a precocious schoolgirl in Australia was already talking about writing a book called The Lives of Obscure Men—but as she reworked it in Paris, these years seemed to imbue the writing with a sense of possibility, allowing, in the character of Joseph, that Australia might offer the chance of fulfillment and happiness. Blake’s presence can also be felt in Baruch, the novel’s short, kind socialist theoretician.

  London publisher Peter Davies accepted the novel. Worried about launching Stead with it, though, he asked for another; The Salzburg Tales, based on The Decameron, appeared in January 1934, Seven Poor Men of Sydney later that same year. While reviews were positive, they tended to compare Stead’s novel unfavourably to her more clearly fabulist debut. Yes, genius was evident—but perhaps too much. The UK’s Listener described the novel as a work with “brilliant faults”. In Australia, the reviewer in The Bulletin was less kind: the “dazzling book by a Sydney girl” was “diabolically clever”, but rambling. The story of Stead’s subsequent critical neglect, as she and Blake eked out a hand-to-mouth existence in America and England is too well known to repeat in detail here. After a thirteen-year period after her ninth novel, The People with the Dogs, when Stead could not find a publisher, the world would finally recognise her as a major writer after the reissue of The Man Who Loved Children, in 1965, with an introduction by critic Randall Jarrell—though the praise came too late, one feels, for Stead herself.

  One of the many ironies of Stead’s career is that we now cherish her writing for the very reasons we once excluded it from the national literature, praising its geographical reach as cosmopolitanism ahead of its time, and her interest in women’s desire. This has only thrown more shadow onto Seven Poor Men of Sydney, her only novel set entirely in this country, with its largely male cast. Added to this, once established as her “masterpiece”, The Man Who Loved Children acclimatised readers to Stead’s more brusque late style, against which the lyrical flights of her early writing were judged as self-indulgent skiting. Stead’s lifelong tendency to self-dramatise didn’t help: she wrote the novel, she said, when she had been very ill and wanted to leave some record behind her. Critics have run with this since, concluding that the book was, in the words of one, “a pent-up outpouring”. In his introduction to the 1965 Angus & Robertson edition of Seven Poor Men of Sydney (its first publication in Australia), Stead’s friend and executor Ron Geering would argue that its “reckless sincerity” outweighed the youthful excesses and “self-conscious” brilliance of an author too in love with colourful, unusual words. In her superb 1982 appraisal of Stead’s gen
ius in The London Review of Books, a classic in its own right, Angela Carter classed Seven Poor Men of Sydney as part of the “puppy fat” the author would begin to burn off in her 1938 House of All Nations, in her journey from “craftsman” to “honest worker”.

  But what if Seven Poor Men of Sydney is, as I suspect, Stead’s best book: the most free of autobiographical debt and the hardness of her later eye? What if it’s not a seriously flawed social realist novel, but the work of a writer who knew exactly what she was doing when she mixed up the material and numinous? In that case, what we have in our hands is something brilliant and heroic. Stead knew her Marxist theory, which understands social relationships as products of the conditions of production; her title shows this debt. But Socialism has rarely been sympathetic to art. Stead’s point of entry is exactly where poverty and the spirit bump together. Her poor characters are like root-bound plants in too-tight pots; at the same time they are in a continual fight to make human lives, collectively, mean something. In Stead’s novel, thinking and speaking is work in itself, a dynamic, continuous fight between order and chaos. In one of the pivotal moments in the book, Joseph attends a free physics lecture at the University. All can be seen, he thinks, at last, and feels elated; until “the bottom fell out of his jerry-built heart”. The lecture is on light, which again reinforces the connection Stead makes between the speech and thought and the luminous. Life is a struggle. This work is never done.

  By making us feel as if we are reading two books at the same time, a realist novel and its shining reflection, Seven Poor Men of Sydney sets up a sparking dance of opposites; a genuine dialectic. While none of her characters (with the exception, perhaps, of Joseph) quite settles with the world, her prose itself holds out the possibility of art as a place of heroic striving, of constant revolutionary consciousness of body and mind; it acknowledges the numbing effect of hard work while refusing to be numbed. The best comparison I can think of to Stead’s method are the coruscated reliefs in Byzantine churches, designed to be looked at by moving candle flame: the lustrous, bumpy, surfaces of an angel’s body are meant to make us feel “liveliness” over the lifelike; to not just see, but to experience, it as fire. In Stead’s secular universe, the angel is human potential. That Stead was able to bring such a vision out of the local soil was a small miracle in itself. Seven Poor Men of Sydney lacked predecessors but it would open the door to writers like Kenneth Slessor (in his later “Five Bells”), Patrick White and Elizabeth Harrower, who would also capture a Sydney of beauty and hard fact.