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"The rest flies down the wind": Complexities of Late Style in the Work of Christina Stead

Susan Carson Queensland University of Technology

HRISTINA STEAD RETURNED TO LIVE IN AUSTRALIA IN 1974 Yet many of the characteristics of late style identified by Del- at the age of 72 after a peripatetic literary life in Eng- banco and Edward Said certainly can be seen in Stead's work. C land, Europe and America. She was recognized as a We can consider productively the respective critics interest in major international writer, even if recognition was delayed in the way in which late works are produced with impatience (Del- Australia, and at this point she intended to keep writing fic- banco 242); the sense of late work being both in and apart from tion. But she found long projects difficult: she was not in good the present (Said 24); a strong sense of exile (Said 8); and the health and she did not have the emotional support of her hus- development of an adaptive energy rather than repetition in band, Bill Blake, who had died in 1968. By the time of her creative work (Delbanco 247). A similar sense of concentration death in Sydney in 1983, a combination of social, financial and is captured by David Rosand in his discussion of Barbara Her- emotional circumstances decreed that Stead's fiction written rnstein Smith's use of the term "senile sublime," which is, for in middle-age, some completed decades years before her death, Rosand, an "unembarrassed reductiveness" (92). In his review would be her "late" works. of Said's On Late Style: M usic and Literature Against the Grain, Stead's late works, for the purposes of this discussion, are John Updike quotes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writing about the those written between 1949 and the 1960s, notably the nov- senile sublime as the "various more or less intelligible perfor- els Cotters' England (1967), The Little Hotel: A Novel (1973), M iss mances by old brilliant people, whether artists, scientists, or Herbert: The Suburban Wife (1976) and I'm Dying Laughing: The intellectuals, where the bare outlines of a creative idiom seem Humourist (1986). The novels are so-grouped because, while the finally to emerge from what had been the obscuring puppy fat works continue many of the themes of Stead's earlier fiction, of personableness, timeliness, or sometimes even of coherent they develop an intensity of form and a focus on the suffering sense" (Updike). of aging women that extends previous narrative experiments. Stead was never a personable writer, but as she hones her The works were written in Stead's "middle-ness" but there is creative idiom in her late works there is a falling away of the nothing in published letters of her last years, or accounts of fragments of hopefulness in earlier novels. She focuses on in- conversations or interviews, to suggest that she would have creasingly strident versions of her female characters, her "mon- changed her combative style had she continued to write fiction. sters," the characters whom she embeds in forceful critiques of Nicholas Delbanco points out in Lastingness: The Art of Old post-war capitalism. In this context Said's understanding of the Age that there is doubt over the usefulness of a chronological theme of death in relation to Visconti and Lampedusa in On division of early, middle and late: "[t]he youthful Keats was just Late Style resonates: "[i]t is as if having achieved age, they want as clear-eyed on the themes of life and death as the octogenar- none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its ami- ian Hardy, and it may be that the age of an artist while working ability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality is finally less important than the number of years left for work" denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death (228). It is valuable, however, to consider changes of form or which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language content in an artists' late work, whenever this period occurs, and the aesthetic" (114). My discussion traces this elevation of because the variation says something about the development language and aesthetic in the late work of Stead, connecting of technique and an artist's perspective on their creative prac- certain aspects of her social and political situation to the devel- tice. What then does "late" style mean in relation to a writer opment of intensified stylistic devices. such as Christina Stead? The long gap between completion of As Updike notes, Said is interested in discovering the quali- a work and publication in the 1950s and 1960s, in addition ties of eccentricity and intransigence in late works rather than to Stead's self-described writing "block" after her return to a mellow resolution on the part of the artist. It is a useful ap- Australia, indicates the complexity of identifying "lateness" in proach for thinking about Stead's late work and the place of Stead's work. these novels in the general arc of her "rebarbative prose" ("Talks

About"). In I'm Dying Laughing, her last novel, she denies an tion to future readers: "[a]nd would you learn the spells that accommodation with the principles of both Communism and drowse my soul?" Stead could have found comfort perhaps in capitalism. There is no sense of reconciliation of past and pres- Coleridge's hopefulness, but her own hope had to be tied to ent, even as she made changes to the work as she neared 70, love. In 1976 she wrote to a friend that love might "remain a and there is no resignation and acceptance. hope and ideal for older people; until the very end of life, per- In brief, the intensity of form in the "late" group is based haps" (Talking 125). on an increasingly strident aural signature in the late works. In 1980 she was still struggling, asking Nadine Mendelson, Said argues throughout On Late Style that certain artists dem- "[b]ut why can't I work. That is the only thing that counts" onstrate a "late style" by becoming almost alienated from their (Talking 342). In these late years she mixes repeated assurances earlier body of work, developing extravagant and often con- about the importance of her relationship with Bill with com- tradictory formal qualities, and not caring that they are doing ments that it was writing that had always counted, and that Bill so. For Stead, the extravagance of the vocal theatrics delivers a often suffered for her commitment. tonal register that acts as a narrative soundtrack. This intense As noted above, the fears that Stead expresses to friends and language is used to display the savage portraits of class betrayal relatives in letters and conversations in the last years could be of Cotters' England and the disintegration of Emily Wilkes's seen in her fiction from the late 1940s. While researching Cot- world in I'm Dying Laughing. In developing this intensity, Stead ters' England in 1949, Stead wrote The Little Hotel, a novel based adapted the lives and language of old and new friends, usually on the daily activities of a small Swiss hotel at the start of the those that had begun to disappoint her. She was not apparently Cold War. The focus is on exploring "the fear of loneliness troubled by what friends or family thought of this process, as and old age, and the effect of money and class on human rela- her biographer Hazel Rowley points out on many occasions. tionships" (Rowley 387) rather than innovations of style. Hazel Indeed, Stead's friends provided an irresistible fictional Rowley argues that the "wanderers" who were once celebrated source as did Stead's own travels and her relationship with in Stead's work are now "sad" (389). We meet the vacillating Bill Blake. By the end of World War II, the couple had been Mrs. Trollope and the elderly Princess who is busy organizing involved in radical literary and political circles in Europe and a facelift in order to fly to South America and find a new hus- America for some time, socializing and working with well- band (money is always safer in a dictatorship, she explains). The known socialists, communists, actors and writers. They saw Little Hotel sold well but Stead was never to return to the humor their friends suffer from anti-Communist trials in America and of this work. Indeed it is the evacuation of humor that becomes they continued to contribute to international socialism from one of the features of the examination of aging and the rhetori- wherever they happened to be based: Stead through her fiction cal representation of that process in Stead's late style. and essays, and Blake mostly through his economic treatises, al- In the next three important novels of this period, Cotters' though he also wrote fiction. Given their irregular income, it is England , M iss Herbert (The Suburban Wife ), and I'm Dying Laugh- no surprise that fears about poverty, aging and illness haunted ing, Stead uses the struggles of the English working and lower Stead and became more important in her fiction. middle class to examine aging women under duress, whether But Stead was not to know that she would produce no new from class or sexual politics. In each novel, Stead uses a recent novels after 1973. She would not have expected a long period or long-standing female friend, or a number of friends, as a of non-publication from the mid-1950s to 1965, as she was writ- touchstone for her middle-aged woman. The character of Nel- ing continuously during this time. And she would not have lie caused Stead, and others, some disquiet given that Nellie thought that it would take Holt, Rhinehart & Winston's re- was recognizable as Anne Dooley, and the Cotter family were print of The M an Who Loved Children (1940) in 1965 to generate clearly modeled on Dooley's relatives in the north of England, renewed interest in her work. the Kelly family, whom Stead visited in 1949. Stead saw the pri- This long publishing drought, when Stead was in her 50s and vations of life in northern England and identified with penury. early 60s, was a period of great personal, financial and political She wrote to a friend about her difficulties in this period say- struggle, but at least she had Bill beside her as she was writing. ing, "we are really on the beach" (Rowley 398). She was looking In 1968, when Bill was dying, she wrote to him saying that it for any type of office or literary work and her experiences of was their relationship that had counted in her life: " [t] he rest 1953-1955, her time on "Grub Street," became the basis of flies down the wind" (Harris 530). By 1972 she was beginning M iss Herbert (The Suburban Wife ) (1976). M iss Herbert is an ac- to realize that writing without Bill was going to be difficult. The count of the publishing industry's exploitation of writers, but conflict between her personal desires and her writing self, a it also satirizes Eleanor Herbert's belief in the primacy of mar- conflict so well expressed in the tempestuous dialogue of Emily riage and children. The character of Eleanor Herbert is said to Wilkes in I'm Dying Laughing, became stronger after the death resemble Florence James, the Australian writer who was Stead's of her husband. She saw herself as useless, alone and, worst friend for many years, and Jarnes's family have taken issue with of all, not working. Living in Surbiton, England, aged 68, she the depiction of Eleanor Herbert (Pender 78). read Coleridge's "late" poem, "Work without Hope," and felt The chapter headings in this novel clearly mark out a general- him a kindred spirit. She wrote to a relative in Australia about ized aging process: "Playtime, Maytirne"; "Horne and Children"; Coleridge's sense of dejection without noting his lines in the "Break-up of the Horne"; "The Guinea Pig"; "The Woman of poem that refer to past pleasure and renewal, or the invita- Fifty." Eleanor's fortunes only begin to improve when she is

befriended by a male publisher who has an interest in perverse into a discourse of shameless self-justification. Self-interest and antiques. At the end of the novel Eleanor, a former beauty, ambition override social concern even when, as in the case of begins to notice signs of aging: "over the charming image she Nellie Cook or Emily Wilkes, the reader is presented with char- had carried with her from her girlhood of fine, smooth skins, acters who work hard for left-wing politics. In Stead's late pe- rosy cheeks and smooth, shining hair, another coarse face has riod there is no character with the intellectual gravitas or politi- grown, heavy, but strong and real: herself in the present hour" cal substance possessed by the character of Michel Alphendery, (306). She becomes ill and on her recovery she declares she the banker socialist in House of All Nations (1938), who is based is now ready to "take things easier" and consider the pension on Bill Blake. so that she can "write the story of my life" (308). Stead allows The dramatic dialogues that Stead uses in her early novels Eleanor a grudging respect for the long years of constant work are extended into longer, more strident and chaotic scenes but there is no narratorial support for the compromises that El- in her late work that become, perhaps, a version of the "new eanor finally makes when she awakes from her illness. Eleanor expressive mode" (247) that Delbanco identifies in late style. Herbert's approach to life is one of acceptance. When she is be- Stead seems intent on distilling her verbal strategies to produce set by the radical writer Cope Pigsney who spends "hours and a highly charged delivery. We can see the evolution of this ap- days on instructing her, pressing and arguing his system, his proach in her early novels. The discourse of Seven Poor M en of inventions" (244), she sets aside her own plans for his success. Sydney (1934) prefigures the political and financial dialogues in Eleanor believes that to put "politics into writing is to mix the House of All Nations (1938), which in turn anticipates the exag- eternal values with bits and pieces of topical ideas and tempo- gerated conversational ploys of A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948), rary greed" (244). So she begins to work with Cope out of erotic Stead's novel about corruption and black marketeering in New desire rather than a respect for his politics. York during World War IL Indeed, A Little Tea, A Little Chat In her next work, Stead moved away from the passivity of M iss includes an 11-page diatribe on the art of making money and Herbert to focus further on the politics of post-war England. managing property. The sleazy businessman, Robert Grant, Cotters' England is a trenchant critique of class and industrial who invokes John Stuart Mills and Albert Spencer, reminds capitalism. Many of the characters are valued for their direct his son that "[p]roperty is a woman, remember" (344). Grant's action in taking the socialist fight to their communities. Yet steamroller speech is indicative of his rushing and wayward the novel also allows key characters to unscrupulously use left- New York life. Grant is exhausting inside and outside of the wing politics for personal advantage. In the closing scene Nellie narrative: his linguistic victims beg to be allowed to sleep. The Cotter is bitter because a strike leader has attracted publicity intensity of A Little Tea, a Little Chat is relieved by a degree of at Nellie's husband's funeral. George Cook, Nellie's husband, black humor, although this comic mode was lost on some read- is described in the press after his death as "a great fighter for ers. A reviewer wrote: "[t]here are some individuals in whose the British working class." But Nellie has her heart "burned to company one can remain only to a point. Miss Stead takes the bitter water" when she sees that the newspaper had published a reader far beyond that point" (Rowley 353). One wonders what photograph of another socialist leader, Anthony Butters, rather this reviewer would have made of the volume of Nellie Cotter's than a smiling picture of herself (352). Nellie walks away from strident banter in Cotters' England. Nellie is a firebrand who car- socialism to begin a relationship with a "dull, respectable" man ries the socialist cause forward with her incessant speech. She who is interested in "in the human heart" (352). Angela Carter has much of the same approach to life and language as does comments that "Nellie ends up being a spiritualist [. . .] her Robert Grant (A Little Tea, A Little Chat), which is to tire out political commitment has been to do with her own desires" an opponent by the intensity and length of her conversation. ("Talks About"). The tension between politics and desire-for Nellie is very good at using language to sway men and women men, for women, for food, for money-characterizes the works to her cause: of this period. "What can Marxism say to a lover, or to a mother? Or Stead began I'm Dying Laughing while completing Cotters' what can Einstein? Aye, he can say more, for there's some- England . The central character is Emily Wilkes, one of Stead's thing wonderful and beautiful in the idea that we have an greatest monsters. Emily is closely based on Stead's then-friend, attic window only, open on the swamp of stars." American satirist and one-time Communist Ruth McKenney. "The way you talk is so lovely," said Eliza struck by this. Emily is the last of Stead's great talkers, an indulgent and "I believe in you Nellie" (344). greedy woman who professes the Communist cause. According to Rowley, Stead was jealous of McKenney's excesses (especially But soon the narrator says that Nellie "talked Eliza to utter in relation to food and money). Rowley says that the "Straight- weariness telling her about the great epochs of her life" (343). ening Out" scene in I'm Dying Laughing is based on McKenney's Nellie's passionate speechrnaking is balanced by the silkier tone account of that event, which appeared in her novel Love Story of her brother Torn, one of the blond, handsome and passive (1950). Indeed, a comparison of these scenes "shows the ex- male figures in Stead's late fiction. These men often function traordinary resemblance between the voices of Ruth McKenney as punctuation devices: inserting pragmatic or humorous state- and Emily Wilkes [Howard]" (Rowley 308). ments into the conversational flow of the women, who are ac- Stead is unflinching in allowing the passionate political rhet- tive, hardworking, and who consistently lose money to men. oric in Cotters' England and I'm Dying Laughing to degenerate Cotters' England was followed by M iss Herbert (The Suburban Wife) and here the tone is muted, which suits the frustrating a novel about politics and revolution rather than to continue passivity of the protagonist Eleanor Herbert. But in I'm Dying as a populist humorist has cost her dearly and speaks perhaps Laughing Stead returns to high-voltage prose as Emily Wilkes's to Stead's suspicion that her writing life might too be limited. extravagant and long conversational ploys dominate the action. One thinks of Delbanco's claim that "[t]he art of old age is Stead's aural signature is embedded in this rush of language. discourteous; it has less time to lose" (242). At this point nei- It is highly individual and often confronting. Angela Carter ther Emily nor her husband Stephen are old, and neither was speaks of Stead as issuing readers a "curt command to grapple Stead. But, to restate Said, there is a strong sense in the work with the dialectics [. . .] She is a very rebarbative writer, her of being in but apart from the present. The bewilderment of a language is full of spikes [. . .] also, she is very rude and violent" lost epoch underscores the fracturing of a world that will see ("Talks About"). The frenzied dialogues, episodes that Angela the central figure of the writer, Emily, sitting in the streets of Carter calls 'serial monologues', ("An Appreciation" 451), be- Rome, quite mad. come for Carter part of a "system of deceit" in which "style Angela Carter argues that technically Stead is "an expression- itself is a lie in action" ("An Appreciation" 450). The sabotage ist writer, in whose books mad-men scream in deserted land- of the writer's craft in the dissolution of Emily and Stead's ca- scapes." She continues: "[t]he way she finally writes is almost reers in I'm Dying Laughing indicates Stead's increasing interest as if she were showing you by demonstration that style itself is in the limits of the writing process. This process exposes her a lie in action, that language is an elaborate confidence trick willingness to push language into an uncomfortable realm and designed to lull us into acceptance of the intolerable . . ." ("An is a strategy that resonates with Said's discussion about the un- Appreciation" 450). Carter's assertion that Stead's method be- masking of the creative process in late style (xviii). comes rougher, "tachiste," in her late works of maturity is an The excessive character at the center of the narrative is Emily incisive account of Stead's dramatic sequences. But it is per- Wilkes (who marries Stephen Howard). Stead writes with lush haps Delbanco's notion of adaptive energy that accounts for detail about Emily's dress, her silks, her jewels, her high heels the almost explosive rhetorical power of I'm Dying Laughing. and her menus for dinners at home or in restaurants, and her Emily is the result of a long search for vocal complexity that is fears about aging. The greatest excess, however, is that of voice. represented in the figure of the aging, and monstrous, woman. Emily's rhetoric reaches virtuoso heights and the dialectics be- Stead's narrator calls attention to this linguistic performance. tween herself and her husband Stephen, together with their In the chapter "The Straightening Out" in which Stephen and circle of friends, gives the reader an excoriating account of Cold Emily are called to account by Hollywood's Communist Party War party politics, the sexual politics of the era, and, from a elite, the accusations are read as a report, which Emily and Ste- writer's perspective, the issue of "lastingness." phen interrupt consistently. The report, proudly presented as Early in the novel Emily says she never wants to be old. She a well-written document by its author, stands in stark contrast tells Stephen "I never want to be old, withered, hideous. There to the pragmatism of Emily and the intellectualism of Stephen is no dignity of old age or disease. I hate the stench of death, I in their respective writing. In earlier work Stead drew atten- hate death" (134). Later, at a party in their Connecticut house tion to the instability of realism. In A Little Tea, A Little Chat, at New Caanan, Emily launches into a eugenicist speech in Robert Grant describes an episode in his life thus: "[i]t was a which she says she doesn't like "misfits and sick people" (147). true story, realism [. . .]" (276), a strategy that immediately alerts When the family moves to Paris to escape denunciation as the reader to the lie of the story. In the dialectics of Emily and Communists, Emily finds it difficult to write while Stephen Stephen there is no need for narratorial flagging because the lie demands impatiently that she produce work for populist pub- is made apparent in the sudden switches of tone and pace and lication. She proposes a serial: "The Sorrows of a Really Fat the increasing volume of frenzied delivery as Stephen and Em- Person like Me, only fatter if possible. And who can't really ily become ever more unstable. In this novel Stead brilliantly weep about it, who has to laugh; and then sometimes wants to captures the visceral self-destruction of the Howard family but crawl in somewhere and hide herself. She's afraid she'll never she found she was not able to finish the book (which was pub- get married [. . .]" (301). lished posthumously). After completing the drafts she consid- As the narrative progresses, Emily celebrates her excess but ered making changes. When her publishers Secker & Warburg she also begins to feel that her writing is worthless: she "felt asked about her progress, or lack thereof, she said it was due to the humour dying out of her" (306). As her body gets larger several factors: "Oldfashioned [sic] people would say laziness, and she takes increasing amounts of Benzedrine, she presents Americans would (and do) say 'a block'-and the British say as a fading coquette and an embarrassment. Food and death 'it's the weather'-and it may be a combination of these three" are united in her choice of Marie Antoinette as a subject for (Rowley 484). her next novel, the novel which would take her away from her former writing style: "I taste death and total loss and I like the CONCLUSION taste; it is sweet to the taste" (422) she says on visiting Versailles. When Emily leaves France after her husband's suicide car- Stead hoped for both love and literary fulfillment in her last rying the drafts a novel based on the life of Marie Antoinette years, even if her life had changed forever with the death of Bill. (which she calls the "monster"), she is lost to the family that Rowley quotes an interview with Stead by Anne Chisholm in she has fought so hard to maintain. Her determination to write which Chisholm remarks: "[s]he had already told me that she

loathes the sight of any of her books in print, that she believes, WORKS CITED with Ambrose Beirce the American essayist, that "achievement Bailey, Hilary. Introduction. A Little Tea, A Little Chat, by Chris- is the end of endeavour, and the beginning of disgust"' (551). tina Stead. London: Virago, 9181. There appears to be no sense in which Stead considered her Carter, Angela. "Christina Stead, An Appreciation." Afterword. work finished and there is no attempt to back away from dearly I'm Dying Laughing The Humourist , by Christina Stead. New held ideological positions. Later in August 1982, Stead wrote to York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986. 448-52. Rosemary Dobson as follows: "Yes, I'm getting 'tributes' from --. "Angela Carter Talks about Christina Stead." Interview. A&S (all and sundry)-'before it's too late,' they probably think. ABC Radio Sunday Feature. July 7 and July 14, 1985. But contrary to their remarkable statements, I was 'recognised' Delbanco, Nicholas. Lastingness The Art of Old Age. New York: in Europe (i.e. GB, USA, and some foreign countries, 'foreign' Grand Central Publishing, 2011. like France) a long time ago [. . .] So I can't help that their trib- Didion, Joan. Blue Nights. London: Fourth Estate, 2011. utes are a bit like plaster on the icing of the cake [. . .] (Nasty Harris, Margaret, Ed. Dearest M un.x:: The Letters of Christina Stead woman )" (Rowley 391). and William ]. Blake. Carlton, Victoria: The Miegunyah Some writers, in their late style, turn their gaze back on their Press, 2005. own life, as Said writes. Joan Didion, for example, speaks of Holmes, Richard. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: Harper her recent memoir Blue Nights in the following terms: "I found Collins, 1998. my mind turning increasingly to illness, to the end of promise, Updike, John. "Late Works: Writers and artists confronting the the dwindling of the days, the inevitability of the fading, the end." The New Yorker (August 7, 2006). http://www.newy- dying of the brightness" (4). Stead expressed frustration with orker.com/ archive/2006/08/07 /060807 crat_atlarge her inability to write but she does not seem to have thought of Pender, Anne. Christina Stead , Satirist. Altona, Victoria: Com- her writing self as fading or dying. She was conscious of a grow- mon Ground, 2002. ing critical interest in her later works, written long before she Rosand, David. "Old-Age Style." Art Journal 46.2 (1987): 91-3. received literary accolades in Australia, but she was impatient Rowley, Hazel. Christina Stead A Biography. Melbourne: Wil- with most scholarly or journalistic accounts of her writing. She liam Heinemann, 1993. enjoyed recognition but she displayed no interest in looking Said, Edward. On Late Style: M usic and Literature Against the back over her work and was uncomfortable with being inter- Grain. New York: Vintage, 2007. viewed about her writing. Stead, Christina. Cotters' England. [1966 ] Sydney: Angus and A year before she died she wrote to Mary Lord that "I don't Robertson, A &R Classic Edition, 1974. really care at all about name, fame, shame, blame, or anything --. I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist. New York: Henry Holt the same-rumbling in my heart (as you know) is Mozart, and and Company, 1986. they don't even know where he is buried!" (Talking 393-4). --. The Little H otel. London: Angus and Robertson (UK), Stead's late style foretells some of her fears of her last years and 1973. she certainly found the period after Bill Blake's death very dif- --. A Little Tea, A Little Chat. London: Virago, 1981. ficult. In a letter dated 14 October 1973 to Gilbert and Betty --. Miss Herbert (The Suburban Wife ). New York: Random Stead, anticipating her return to Australia, Stead says "I haven't House, 1976. really worked since Bill died; but a natural clinging to home --. Papers of Christina Stead, 1937-1988 (Manuscript), Na- and to friends, I suppose, concealed it from me-the workless- tional Library of Australia, MS ACC 09 151. ness." Yet the intransigence and burning energy that we can --. Talking into the Typewriter Selected Letters (1973-1983 ). Ed. identify in the group of middle/late novels provides perhaps a R.G. Geering. Sydney : Angus and Robertson, 1992. different perspective on Stead and lastingness. 0 Wood, Michael. Introduction. On Late Style: M usic and Litera- ture Against the Grain. New York: Vintage, 2007. xii-xix. .