The Salzburg Tales 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, Cotters’ England

  Christina Stead, Seven Poor Men of Sydney

  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

  11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 1934

  This edition published 2016

  Text © Christina Stead, 1934; estate of Christina Stead, 2016

  Introduction © Margaret Harris, 2016

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

  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.

  The Salzburg tales/Christina Stead.

  9780522862010 (paperback)

  9780522869552 (ebook)

  Miegunyah modern library.

  Fiction—Collections.

  A823.2

  Introduction

  Margaret Harris

  ‘My life was filled with story from the first days.’

  Christina Stead, ‘A Waker and Dreamer’, 1972

  CHRISTINA Stead thought of herself as a storyteller above all else. In The Salzburg Tales, her first published work of fiction, she gives a spectacular demonstration of her storytelling virtuosity, across an array of narrative genres that includes, according to her, ‘the sketch, anecdote, jokes cunning, philosophical, and biting, legends and fragments’. She attributed great power to story, maintaining that it ‘is magical … It is the hope of recognising and having explained our own experience … what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one.’

  This insistence that the short story is a democratic mode— ‘everyone can tell one’—with roots in oral traditions like folklore, is apparent from the beginning of The Salzburg Tales. The lengthy opening chapter, ‘The Personages’, is a tour de force introducing the thirty-one characters who tell over forty tales in a week. By choosing to call her narrators ‘personages’, rather than ‘characters’, Stead confers importance on them. They are a diverse group, designated by occupation (most are in business, the learned professions, and the arts), and range in age from a Schoolgirl and a Schoolboy to an Old Lady and an Old Man, and are predominantly male. Nearly all are European, with a few Americans, an Australian, and ‘a Chinaman, the FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT of a French newspaper’, who is, however, thoroughly westernised.

  Each vignette in ‘The Personages’ implies a backstory: some, like the sketch of the Police Commissioner, are even narratives in miniature. His story, ‘The Deacon of Rottenhill’, humorously aligns with his experience, making fun of police incompetence. A more complex instance of fit between tale and teller is provided by the Public Stenographer’s ‘Overcote’, placed immediately before the Centenarist’s final recital. It is autobiographical, and pathetically shows how limited is the Stenographer’s stoic understanding of the pathology of her family, at the same time as demonstrating her achievement in developing a successful niche business, in one of the instances throughout the volume that accord women unexpected worldly agency. Initially the Public Stenographer is sketched at greater length than any of her companions in a way that anticipates Stead’s claim that ‘everyone can tell one’. We learn that despite her seeming ordinariness and the greyness of her daily life, she can enthral hearers with a repertoire of sensational stories arising from an occluded genealogy: ‘Behind her lay the ghostly tradition of English literature, the genius of the Brontës, the popularity of Scott and the mad gifts of Protestantism, but she did not know it’.

  In other cases, like ‘Don Juan in the Arena’, the tale is curiously at odds with the profile of its teller, the American Broker, for all the description of him as being full of contradictions. Some tales are told in response to a previous story. Thus in ‘The Sparrow in Love’, the German Student talks back to the Mathematician’s supernatural ‘The Mirror’, both variants of the Narcissus legend. In addition, ‘The Mirror’ is a riposte to the heated discussion about artistic inspiration between the Mathematician and the Centenarist in the immediately preceding ‘Interlude’. A different kind of narrative texture is developed in the Doctress’s ‘clinical romance’, ‘The Triskelion’, famously described by Ian Reid as Australia’s best horror story. It incorporates an inset narrative related by a barrister friend, and moreover elicits a sequel from the Balkan Lawyer that prompts the Doctress to conclude that the ‘three-legged history … will never stop’. This comment on the power of story is underlined at the end, where story is accorded the elemental power of a force of nature as the Centenarist and the Viennese Conductor, ‘the great tale-teller and the master of tongues sang on through the quiet night. There was no indication that they would ever stop … for the earth breeds tales and songs quicker even than weeds’. Frequently anthologised, ‘The Triskelion’ is one of the tales that provides fertile ground for critics who argue that The Salzburg Tales can be read as a manifesto about the nature of narrative, through analysis of Stead’s fascination with ways of telling, and her ability both to exploit and subvert the traditions with which she engages.

  Fact and fiction

  Stead was given to making narratives of her own life as well as inventing original stories and revising traditional ones. After the republication of The Man Who Loved Children in 1965 revived her reputation, she looked back over the trajectory of her career, claiming that ‘my first novel, was an essay, at the age of ten, on the life-cycle of the frog. I was content with it, it could not have been better: the style was good’. Here she is writing about her start as a published author under the auspices of ‘Peter Davies (a famous man, godson of Sir James Barrie and the original Peter Pan)’:

&nbs
p; He said he would publish Seven Poor Men, but for me first to give him another book. I went home and began the Salzburg Tales. I had been to Salzburg in the meantime. I wrote a story every first day of a pair, finishing it and putting in the connective tissue the second day; the third day starting another story. They let me do this at the Bank [the Travelers’ Bank in Paris, where she was employed] …

  I wrote the S.T. very fast and it gave me the same satisfaction

  I had with the History of the Frog: simple, complete, no questions asked. It doesn’t often happen.

  Of course it didn’t happen just like that. Stead’s account of the spontaneous, rhythmic emergence of The Salzburg Tales is belied by the factual record. As his condition for agreeing to take her novel Seven Poor Men of Sydney, in April 1931 Davies contracted for a more conventional book to be delivered first. Yet it was almost three years before The Salzburg Tales was published in January 1934, having been delivered in August 1933—hardly consistent with Stead’s boast that she produced a story every couple of days.

  The volume of short stories was in fact her second attempt to fulfil her contractual undertaking. Initially she worked on The Wraith and the Wanderer, advertised by Davies in hyperbolic terms as ‘a highly original and extremely modern story’, scheduled for publication in November 1931. She had had this project in mind for some time, but though it was never completed, elements of it were to emerge in The Beauties and Furies (1936) and For Love Alone (1944), particularly in the narcissistic characters of the scholars Oliver Fenton and Jonathan Crow. The emotional dynamics presumably involved elements of Stead’s current personal situation, especially given she was deeply involved in what was to become a lifelong relationship with Wilhelm Blech, an American of German-Jewish ancestry. By the mid-1930s Blech had anglicised his name to William (Bill) Blake, and definitively separated from his wife Mollie. Their divorce was finalised only in 1952, whereupon Blake and Stead promptly married. But in 1929 when Stead joined him in Paris from London, Blake was living neither with Mollie and his eight-year-old daughter Ruth, nor with Christina. Indeed, it was partly because of an impending visit to Paris by Mollie’s American family that Blake encouraged Stead to attend the Salzburg Festival for six weeks from mid-July to late August 1930.

  She relished the experience. A characteristically exuberant letter from Salzburg to her cousin Gwen Walker-Smith in Sydney relates her schedule of concerts, opera (a devotee of Mozart, she went twice to Don Juan), and theatre, including marionette shows, as well as the pageant play Jedermann (Everyman). Anxieties and misgivings, explicitly about her health, implicitly about their anomalous relationship, emerge from Blake’s letters to Stead during their separation (she kept his letters though hers to him do not survive). His concern for her is apparent in letters that are always lively and occasionally ribald: ‘Save no money, eat cream, drink beer and get fat’, he orders in one of them, signed ‘With reasonable genital affection Wilhelm’.

  Stead’s horizons had expanded hugely since her departure from Australia in March 1928, and The Salzburg Tales is suffused by her immersion in European culture in many forms. Beyond this, some of the stories are perverse versions of her personal circumstances: there are many stories, including ‘Overcote’ and ‘The Triskelion’, about dysfunctional families, or about thwarted love and infidelity, such as the Translator’s Tale, ‘A Colin, A Chloë’, set in contemporary London, and the Frenchwoman’s Tale, ‘Gaspard’, set in pre-Revolutionary France. In a different vein, the Jewishness of tales like ‘The Amenities’, told by the Solicitor, and some of the Centenarist’s, notably those told on the first and last days, can be attributed at least in part to Blake’s influence. Certainly ‘the six wealthy men that the other guests in derision called the Gold Trust’, and the stories dealing with or alluding in passing to mercantile machinations, derive from her experience in the Travelers’ Bank. But the achievement of The Salzburg Tales is far from straightforward sublimation or culture shock.

  Influences and originality

  To honour her contract Stead turned to short stories. A volume of tales assembled before she left Australia, submitted to the Sydney publisher Angus & Robertson by her father on her behalf, had been rejected. The typescript went astray in Paris, though some stories were retrieved or recreated in The Salzburg Tales. Stead was to say that only ‘Morpeth Tower’ and ‘On the Road’ were salvaged, though ‘The Triskelion’, ‘Day of Wrath’ and ‘Silk-shirt’ also have Australian settings and may bear some relation to the lost tales. Yet each of these stories diverges dramatically from the naturalistic tradition of the Australian short story associated with The Bulletin and epitomised by Henry Lawson. Rather, Stead drew on many authors and traditions: the Russian and French masters Chekhov and Gogol, Balzac and Maupassant, the German Hoffmann and Americans such as Poe and Hawthorne; classical myth and legend, fairy story, fable, and more.

  The distance Stead had taken from her home town is clear from her reference in ‘Day of Wrath’ to Sydney as the ‘honest city, where the “Decameron” is forbidden’. Though The Salzburg Tales has evident resemblances to other classic collections of stories within a narrative frame, such as Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and the Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work The Decameron provides a closer parallel. For a start, Stead’s strength, like Boccaccio’s, is best seen in episodes. However, the strongest affinity between the two works is that neither has recourse to divine intervention as sanction or resolution, though there is plenty of the uncanny and the supernatural. Both are distinguished by awareness of political and economic considerations, topical reference, occasional licentiousness, and pre-eminently, by prodigious inventiveness, whether reworking familiar tales or presenting new ones. Further, while The Salzburg Tales does not display the overall symmetry and control of The Decameron, it is less innocent of design and has more internal coherence than might at first appear.

  Cultural and political context

  Contemporary events permeate The Salzburg Tales. Stead was stimulated by her attendance at the Salzburg Festival, interpreting the location, the birthplace of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as a site of pilgrimage. The personages are united in their dedication to (Western European) culture, variously manifested, that has brought them to Salzburg, though the mission of the Festival was broader still.

  The annual Festival had been inaugurated only in 1920, as an assertion of Austrian nationalism in the wake of the Great War and the final dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The playwright and librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal was the prime mover in its formation, with the aim of inventing a tradition that would establish Salzburg as the cultural capital of a greater Germany, embracing Berlin and Bayreuth as well as Vienna. A number of oppositions were in play: Hoffmannsthal espoused nationalism (versus cosmopolitanism), Austrian identity (versus German), conservatism (versus modernism), and an insistence on Catholicity coupled with resistance to Jewishness. While Stead does not buy into these debates, in the volatility of The Salzburg Tales there are subliminal traces of the inherent tensions.

  The tradition of opening the Salzburg Festival with a performance of Jedermann in the Cathedral Square dates from 1920. In Hoffmannsthal’s version of the fifteenth-century English morality play Everyman, Everyman tries to persuade other allegorically named characters to join him on a pilgrimage designed to accrue greater credit with God, who appears with a ledger in which to record individuals’ balances of good and evil deeds. The ‘Everyman’ story, stripped of Christian morality, accords with the sympathy for ordinary people apparent in The Salzburg Tales, and central to Seven Poor Men of Sydney. From this angle, the complementarity of the volume of stories and the novel (delivered in June 1934, published in October) is plain, though in other respects they differ substantially. The Salzburg Tales implies that unity of the disparate personages through culture is momentarily achieved at the Festival, but when the book was published at the beginning of 1934, Hitler had begun his rise to power and the Anschluss of 1938, in
which Germany annexed Austria, was only a few years off. The harmony the volume projects was already precarious.

  Reading The Salzburg Tales, then and now

  On publication The Salzburg Tales was received with considerable enthusiasm and some dissent—reactions which have persisted. The august London Times hailed it as ‘a collection of tales of delightful character and variety’ (30 January 1934). The Times Literary Supplement followed suit: ‘a pleasure to salute … a story-teller of profuse imagination with a gift of ingenious and rollicking fantasy and a turn of language to match’ (15 February 1934). The Sydney Morning Herald described it as ‘a unique performance’ (4 May 1934), though unfortunately used the spelling ‘Saltzburg’ throughout its review of the book by ‘Miss Stead, daughter of Mr David G. Stead, of Sydney’. There was also disparagement of the book’s artificiality, with the New York Saturday Review of Literature sneeringly calling it a ‘collection of inconsequentialities’ (15 December 1934).

  Subsequent readings, while admiring its stylistic exhibitionism, have often treated The Salzburg Tales cursorily, pointing to ways in which it is premonitory of Stead’s later work, in terms of big themes such as the place of women, the critique of capitalism, and the role of the artist in society, which are explored in greater depth for instance in her most famous novel, The Man Who Loved Children. It is also taken to be an exploration of ways not taken, a splendid sport, a one-off.

  It is possible to dip into The Salzburg Tales at random, relishing its heterogeneity: stories that are uncanny, fantastic, morbid, ghostly, lighthearted; tales from various traditions, others that are startlingly original; some neatly resolved narratives, others enigmatic. Its full achievement comes clear when read from beginning to end, for it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the pleasures of individual tales, as day follows day incremental detail registers in the developing interactions among the tales and tellers. At eighty years old, The Salzburg Tales continues to excite and amaze.