Kunapipi Volume 4 Issue 2 Article 12 1982 An unsentimental romance: Christina Stead's for love alone Jennifer Strauss Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons Recommended Citation Strauss, Jennifer, An unsentimental romance: Christina Stead's for love alone, Kunapipi, 4(2), 1982. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol4/iss2/12 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] An unsentimental romance: Christina Stead's for love alone Abstract It is an odd aspect of Australian literature that the poets have been - at least until fairly recently - a rather sober lot stylistically. It is in the work of novelists like Patrick White and Christina Stead that we find Gothic extravagances of associative language and imagination, visions of the external world as charged, if not necessarily with the grandeur of God, at least with something more than mild pathetic fallacy. At the same time, both are uncomfortable writers, less because their intensity sometimes topples over into verbosity and portentousness than because the heat of their intensity co-exists with a chill generated by a strong distaste for, and often remarkably acute observation of, the flaws and the moral bankruptcies of human beings. This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol4/iss2/12 JENNIFER STRAUSS An Unsentimental Romance: Christina Stead's For Love Alone I It is an odd aspect of Australian literature that the poets have been - at least until fairly recently - a rather sober lot stylistically. It is in the work of novelists like Patrick White and Christina Stead that we find Gothic extravagances of associative language and imagination, visions of the external world as charged, if not necessarily with the grandeur of God, at least with something more than mild pathetic fallacy. At the same time, both are uncomfortable writers, less because their intensity sometimes 82 topples over into verbosity and portentousness than because the heat of their intensity co-exists with a chill generated by a strong distaste for, and often remarkably acute observation of, the flaws and the moral bank­ ruptcies of human beings. It is an unsentimental writer who sets out to explore the theme of love in the romantically titled For Love Alone.' Published in 1945, it was her sixth major publication,' a point which needs to be stressed because the critical memory has a treacherous tendency to slide this novel into an earlier position, directly after Seven Poor Men of Sydney. There are reasons of both style and content. Stylistically, For Love Alone has a less ambitious structural organization than House of All Nations, while it is less richly textured in its symbolism and has less sense of a world fully inhabited by characters than The Man Who Loved Children. Characters of considerable initial interest - Teresa's emotionally tyrannical father, depressed sister and disturbed brothers, the ebullient Aunt Bea, frus­ trated Anne and flirtatious Clara - rapidly fade from the scene. There is, however, a logic in this: thematically, the isolation of Jonathan and Teresa from other people is the cumulative result of his pathological selfishness and her obsessed absorption into her unsatisfactory relation­ ship with him. The structural pattem, a classic Romantic one, also militates against full development of secondary characters: the protag­ onist, estranged from context by visionary demands, must voyage out on a solitary quest to a final single-handed fight for more than life with a formidable adversary. In this case, Stead gives a nov~) twist to the pattem by having the protagonist discover that the object of her quest is in fact the adversary to be overcome. From the material of the novel, a relatively early date might be assumed because of the Australian setting and the apparently directly autobiographical nature of some of the material, notably that depicting Teresa's rejection of a 'career' as a teacher, her determination to leave Australia, and the body-destroying penury she endures while struggling, as an office-worker, to save up the money for her fare to England. As far as the Australian setting is concemed, it is offered for the most part unselfconsciously. On the one hand Stead apparently did not feel in this case the extra-artistic pressure that moved her to transfer the action of The Man Who Loved Children to America lest her own family be too easily recognizable in that of the novel. 4 On the other hand, Stead in absentia seems never to have felt obliged to take up the kind of task that White, coming uneasily home, set himself in The Tree of Man, i.e. the Joycean (or Dedelean) artistic burden of articulating the unforged con­ science of the native land. Rather, she presents the Australian setting 83 quite simply as the historically 'natural' habitat of the characters she is interested in. It is a city setting, Stead being essentially an urban novelist. 5 But where the social-realist Australian novels such as Kylie Tennant's Fouveaux produce a photographed city (even if tinted by both affection and outrage), Stead, stimulated like Dickens by the rich particularity-cum-generality of a large city, produces an imagined one. Indeed in Seven Poor Men of Sydney that city, in the exuberance of its physical presence, often overshadows its inhabitants. In For Love Alone, with the focus narrowed from her earlier sweeping celebrations of the unmanageable energies of the phenomenal world, the lyrically effusive treatment has been disciplined. Although the essential method remains an elaboration of detail bonded by a dominant (or shifting) mood, that mood is here more clearly narratively involved with the experience and preoccupations of the characters. Probably the best instance of such writing is the extended passage at the beginning of Chapter 5 presenting Teresa's night walk back home after Malfi's wedding, of which this must serve as a representative sample: In this hot night, not only the rocks above her, half-naked among twisted, tooth­ leaved trees and spiney bushes, but the little open park she was now approaching, the grass above the dripping rocks of the military reserve, and the tram-shelters, were full of semitones and broken whispers. The roots, the trees, the timbers of the houses, stained by storms, the back yards full of plasterers' rubbish, the niches in the stony undercliff were refuges of love. She came out from the lane, crossed the road and skirted the park. Near the seesaw, on the short grass, lay a black sharpe, unmoving. When she passed it, she saw it was a man over a woman, the woman's white gloves and bag lay on the grass beside them. They caught pickpockets in the Bay. Near the Old Hotel two mere, the woman on her back and the man on his elbow, lay looking into each other's eyeballs, reflecting the moon. There were none of them on the beach tonight, drowned under the high tide; none in the boats drawn up across the footpath. people sat in their moist warm gardens, talking and hitting out at the mosquitoes: the smell of eucalyp­ tus oil and pipe-smoke reached out. Across the harbour. on the oyster-coloured water, a large Manly ferry full of lights moved southwards toward the city. She felt the swarm of lovers thick as locusts behind her when she turned into the beach path. Tied up to the fourth pile of the wharf was a rowing boat covered with a tarpaulin. Under the tarpaulin was a woman's body: she had been fished out of the sea just outside of the cliffs that afternoon; it did not cause much comment. They lived there, among the gardens of the sea, and knew their fruits: fish, storms, corpses. moontides, miracles. (pp.63-4). The initial Australian setting does, however, lend a particular authen­ ticity to the central element of the novel's very simple narrative line, the voyage away. This must not be confused with the voyage 'home' charac­ teristic of novels concerned, like those of Martin Boyd, with an earlier 84 generation. By the time of which Stead writes, the intercontinental magnet drawing Australians was, as with the American earlier, a cultural one. Their sense of provincialism could not be assuaged by mere transition from Milwaukee to New York or Dim boola to Melbourne. It is this which is distinctive about Jonathan and Teresa. Apart from this the problems of poor, intellectually ambitious youth in an urban society where social and sexual restrictions are intensified by economic de· pression are not very specific to Australia as distinct from England or America. There is, unfortunately, one. grating moment of self-consciousness about the Australian setting: the Prologue, an awkward hybrid between ingratiating apology to the superior 'reality' of the Old World and an ill­ judged, pared-down version of the prize-essay extravaganza on Australia delivered late in Seven Poor Men of Sydney by Kol Blount. Even in a novel in which one had become acclimatized to verbal explosions being more or less loosely tied to the personages, that one seemed expendable. Its echo here seems inadequately justified by a possible function of intro­ ducing the voyager symbolism, foreshadowing, in its closing reference, the later characterization by Teresa of her own voyage as 'the rigmarole of a buffoon Odyssey' (p.348). Within an established context, this expresses with both pathos and sharpness Teresa's realization that her passion for Jonathan, and the consequent arduous journey towards a lover whom she has envisaged, not without encouragement, as faithfully awaiting her - that all this has been largely the result of her imperfect grasp of reality, her appetite for living mythologically, for being 'noble, loved, glorious'.