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''The Rest Flies Down the Wind'': Complexities of Late Style in The This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Carson, Susan (2012) ”The rest flies down the wind”: Complexities of late style in the work of Christina Stead. Antipodes: a global journal of Australian/New Zealand literature, 26(2), pp. 253-257. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/50235/ c Susan Carson This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// digitalcommons.wayne.edu/ antipodes/ vol26/ iss2/ 30/ "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).
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