The Puzzleheaded Girl 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.

  FIONA WRIGHT is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays, Small Acts of Disappearance, won the 2016 Kibble Award, and her poetry collection, Knuckled, won the Dame Mary Gilmore 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

  A Little Tea, a Little Chat

  The People with the Dogs

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

  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

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  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © Christina Stead 1967

  Introduction copyright © Fiona Wright 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 Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1967

  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: 9781925355710

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925410143

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

  Title: The puzzleheaded girl / by Christina Stead ; introduced by Fiona Wright.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Pieces of the Puzzle

  by Fiona Wright

  The Puzzleheaded Girl

  Pieces of the Puzzle

  by Fiona Wright

  THE FOUR NOVELLAS that make up The Puzzleheaded Girl, first published in 1967, are all portraits of women—although they’re referred to, by the characters that surround them, as girls. The distinction is important, and it’s made most explicitly by two of Stead’s male characters, Martin and George, both American expats living in Paris. They’re talking about Linda, the beautiful, kleptomaniac daughter of one of Martin’s friends, whom George desperately wants to marry, in what would be his fourth such partnership. Martin begins:

  ‘A woman can’t be, until a girl dies. I don’t mean it indecently. I mean the sprites girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in.’

  ‘Women!’ said George stormily. ‘No, there is not a dead girl in them. They are just clay. When a girl dies there is nothing. Just an army of aunts and mothers, midwives and charwomen…I see girls without sentiment, but I see how beautiful they are. I cannot marry a woman who is a dead girl. I must marry a living beautiful wonderful girl.’

  Yet the drama in this story—the last in the collection, ‘Girl from the Beach’—occurs precisely because Linda refuses the definition that these men seek to impose on her, refuses their expectations, too. She is flighty and impulsive, embarking on spontaneous trips to Spain, to Strasburg, to the French countryside, with other young expats she meets in cafes and bars; she shares a hotel room with a young gay man, pretending they are an engaged couple, to save her money and his reputation simultaneously.

  At one point in the novella, Barby, one of George’s ex-wives, asks Linda if she intends to follow through with her engagement, and she answers, ‘I don’t know…I think everybody wants to get rid of the problem. I’m a problem.’ But Barby, older, brasher and clearer-eyed than Linda, responds by pointing out that George is the problem, that ‘he’s got a complex’ and hates American girls, but doesn’t know it. ‘He keeps marrying them to make them into his own little girl,’ she states.

  Linda is a problem because she won’t settle down, because she doesn’t know exactly what she wants, but won’t accept anything that she doesn’t. She has her secrets, and her own pain, but she is also having a riotous time, indifferent to—although not unconscious of—the demands and desires that men like George project onto her.

  And project Stead’s men do, across each of these novellas. In ‘The Dianas’, Lydia, another American living and working in Paris, spends her time meeting and dining with men, all of whom feel some claim on her and try to pin her down. ‘The Puzzleheaded Girl’ is named for the descriptor Debrett, a city businessman, uses for the enigmatic Honor Lawrence, an oddly beautiful and socially inept young woman who drifts in and out of his life across many years. And in ‘The Rightangled Creek’, Sam Parsons, a male writer, goes on retreat in a country farmhouse, and dreams up a ghost based on a local story about the young woman who once inhabited the house. In each of these stories, Stead is making a forceful and sometimes brutal point, about the claims and the kinds of knowledge, patronising and paternalist, that these men assume they have over women—and girls.

  I’ve been this girl
, I can’t help but think. This kind of girl somehow misapprehended by the world, or at least by the people around me, who’ve seen something in me or about me that I wasn’t sure was really there. And because we are all constituted in part by the selves we see reflected back at us in our interactions, or because I think I somehow trusted other peoples’ apprehensions more than my own, I couldn’t help but play along. It’s taken me years to recognise the damage this misrecognition can do, even longer to try to undo it. So it’s remarkable to me that Stead is so uncompromising, so clear-eyed in examining this strange projection.

  It’s remarkable today, but all the more startling when you consider that the first novella in this book was originally published in 1965. In 1965, Robert Menzies was still prime minister of Australia. Bookshops were still being raided and publishers prosecuted for obscenity. The first Australian troops were sent to Vietnam. In the United States, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published only two years before, and it was still illegal for married couples to use contraception.

  At this time, Christina Stead had been living away from Australia for thirty-seven years, and was residing on the suburban outskirts of London. Her novel The Man Who Loved Children, originally published in 1940, was reissued in the United States, and finally started finding its audience and acclaim. The world was changing, and so was Stead’s position within it; so too, more slowly, were the lives of many women and girls. Against this backdrop, Stead’s portraits are subversive and defiantly political. They are drawn from many angles at once, much like Cubist paintings, and are never stable, never definitive, but riddled with uncertainties, half-truths and secrets that conventional knowledge cannot capture or contain.

  Honor Lawrence, the titular ‘puzzleheaded girl’, first appears at the offices of the newly formed Farmers’ Utilities Corporation in New York City, carrying a book on French symbolism and claiming to be eighteen. The first description of her is entirely from the perspective of Guy Debrett, one of the partners in this firm, who is immediately intrigued by her: ‘He saw a diffident girl in a plain tan blouse, a tight, navy-blue skirt, very short at the time when skirts were not short, round knees, worn walking shoes; she wore no overcoat.’ In this passage, Debrett literally looks Honor up and down, and we see only what he sees.

  Honor joins Debrett’s office as a filing clerk, and is disliked by her women colleagues, but is strangely fascinating to the men. She is ‘polite yet odd’, an unsettling and intense presence, always reading her art books as she works. After some months, she is offered a promotion, but stormily declines, stating ‘I have to earn my living in an office, but I won’t mix in business…it is the enemy of art.’ When pressed, she explains, ‘I want to live with artists and live like them. I don’t want to be like those earthy girls there…I prefer to die of hunger. Or go away.’

  There are echoes here of Stead’s other heroines—the principled, ambitious and hungry Teresa from For Love Alone, the rebellious and creative Louisa from The Man Who Loved Children. Honor’s striving and desire lead her, later, to abandon the firm without warning, to almost travel to Europe as the companion of an older lesbian, to marry bigamously and float around the world, always unanchored, always unsatisfied and always barely avoiding destitution.

  But the more that Honor passes in and out of Debrett’s life, the greater his romanticisation of her becomes. She is an innocent and ‘a rare human being’, and then ‘a repressed girl who is hunted by lechers, criminals and hags’, ‘a weak shade of lunatic’, and finally one who ‘partakes of a sacred character, those the gods love, or hate’. Other characters, caught in her thrall, begin to describe her as a person ‘with great gifts who want[s] to create, but [is] not self-centred enough’, ‘a spirit in a dress of rags’, and even ‘the ragged, wayward heart of a woman that doesn’t want to be caught and hasn’t been caught’. To the men who perceive her, Honor is all of these things—but what she is to herself neither they nor we are ever allowed to know. All we see are pieces of the puzzle, never the image that Honor might carry in her own head.

  And this is Honor’s tragedy, just as it is the tragedy of Linda, traipsing around Europe with George hopelessly in tow, and the tragedy of Lydia, trying to make a life for herself and by herself, as her suitors scramble madly and often cruelly to pin her down. ‘You’re surely not going to refuse?’ one of these men asks when he tries to take her to bed. Linda answers, ‘We’re travelling together, my dear Russell, but we’re not intimate. We’re comrades, remember; we scarcely know each other’—which doesn’t prevent him from trying again, and again.

  All four of the women at the heart of these novellas are, in their own way, trampled or tormented by the expectations or projections that are pressed upon them, but they are also defiant. They are distinctly modern women, waiting for the world to catch up. And this is precisely why The Puzzle-headed Girl is such a fascinating book—it is so thoroughly of its changing and confusing time. Stead is masterly in capturing the contradictions and complications of this era, and the effects, both devastating and decidedly mundane, that they had—and perhaps still have—on the lives of women and girls.

  The Puzzleheaded Girl

  To my friends

  JESSIE AND ETTORE RELLA

  CHAPTER 1

  Debrett liked his job in the old-style German Bank in Broad Street, but he soon saw that the partners’ sons were coming into the firm and he could not rise far; so he joined three friends of his, Arthur Good, Tom Zero and Saul Scott, who had just formed the Farmers’ Utilities Corporation. They were all in their early twenties.

  It was a new office building, scarcely completed, built like a factory; everything was in contrast with the German Bank’s offices smelling of old wood, the ink and grease of ledgers, hair oil and dust, crumbling bindings. Here the elevator opened into carpeted offices. There was a waiting room with soft leather seats, photographs of farms, farmers and machinery, a doorman, a pretty girl receptionist, an outer office with busy clerks. The uniformed doorman, Fisher, was a retired policeman, who looked like a fine old small-town banker; and could be useful as a bouncer. The head clerk was Saul Scott’s secretary, Vera Day, who was studying law; and the head typist was Maria Magna, business-like, impatient.

  One November Saturday afternoon, working overtime, they sent out for lunch; the paper cups were still on the desks when doorman Fisher told Debrett that a girl was waiting for an interview. They still needed a filing clerk. One of the typists, a boyish girl named Charlotte and called Sharlie, went out to look her over. A young seventeen, perhaps, dressed like a poor schoolgirl, she sat reading a small book, her light brown hair over her plain grave face. She looked up, a sweet and wistful expression appeared. Sharlie withdrew, and reported: “She’s just a high-school kid reading art to impress the customers, an innocent—doesn’t know she’s alive yet.”

  Augustus Debrett, a stubby dark man with large hazel eyes, a round head, with pale face turned blue with the winter light, sat between two large windows, behind a big polished desk on which was nothing but a blotter and an inkstand.

  She stood for a moment in the doorway looking at the room; the light fell on her. He saw a diffident girl in a plain tan blouse, a tight navy-blue skirt, very short at a time when skirts were not short, round knees, worn walking shoes; she wore no overcoat. “Miss Lawrence, come in.”

  She had a chin dimple and a dimple in her left cheek, a flittering smile; and when the smile went, her face returned to its gravity, its almost sadness. She had a full, youthful figure. She said she was eighteen. She sat down, keeping her knees together and holding her skirt on her knees with her brown purse. The little book she placed on the desk in front of her. It was a book in English on French symbolism. He looked at her face a moment before he began to question her. “Surely Honor Lawrence is a New England name? It sounds like Beacon Hill,” and he laughed kindly in case it was not Beacon Hill. No answer. She said she had experience and wanted a good wage, and then she named a low wage and said she had no
references: “Only my schoolteacher.” “Where was your last job?” After a pause, she said, “I could start now if you liked.” Debrett engaged her. “Come on Monday. If you’ve been out of a job for some time, you may be short of money. Do you need money now? I can give you an advance.” “Oh, no, I have money.” She got up and went to the door. There she turned and said quietly, “Thank you.” As she was going out, Tom Zero, the young lawyer, one of the partners, entered. He was short, slender, debonair and so swarthy that he was looked at curiously in restaurants in the South, handsome and dark-eyed from two olive-skinned parents from southern Europe, fastidious but with a faint sweet personal odour, like grass and olives; ambitious, bright and selfish.

  “I’ve engaged Miss Lawrence as filing clerk: she’s coming on Monday,” said Debrett. Zero looked sharply. “Have you looked at her references? Can she type?” “Yes,” said Debrett. The girl looked straight into Zero’s eyes and moved away. Later, Debrett thought about her, her poverty and her book.

  He had a socialist meeting that night and got home late. No food was laid out for him. His wife, who was up early and in the middle of the night with her newborn son, was asleep now. He got himself some bread and cheese and a cup of coffee and began to walk about the living room making calculations, repeating his speech at the meeting, the objections and the answers. He baffled professional hecklers by treating them as sincerely puzzled people; and he answered them in good faith. They would sit down, turn away, sincerely puzzled. He wanted to tell his wife what had happened; and he even thought of mentioning the girl to her. Miss Lawrence’s address was on the fourth floor of a house in a tenement district far uptown. “A poor, prudish New England family—well educated, spoke a choice English—New Englanders are poor too—” Such a girl might preserve a girl’s primness for years, might be really innocent. “What does a man really know about girls? A man feels he has to be a wise guy and he can misjudge.”