Flight from Australia and the family
Anne Chisholm
CHRISTINA STEAD: A LIFE OF LETTERS by Chris Williams
Virago, £11.95, pp. 341
Like her writing, Christina Stead, the Australian novelist who died aged 81 in 1983, was neither easy nor agreeable; but both repay attention. Her 15 books, which include The Man Who Loved Children, perhaps the most disturbing book ever written about a family, are uneven, dense, and shapeless, but always original and with passages of exhilarating brilliance. As this first biography proves, all Stead's writing was intimately linked to her life, which doubtless explains why she was prickly and private, and especially in old age found talking about herself and her writing almost intolerable. Her life has a curious symmetry; her first and last years were spent in Australia and they were not the best. In between, she lived in London, Europe, America, and London again, and although she was al- ways intractably herself, she reflected, in her doings and her work, some of the main preoccupations of her time.
First, she made the classic and very Australian escape, at 26, from family and country. Her father was a naturalist and pioneer conservationist, a gifted, awkward character whom she acknowledged she greatly resembled; after her mother died when Stead was two, he remarried and had six more children. Hence, perhaps, as her biographer suggests, Stead's lifelong dis- taste for family life, competitiveness with women, preference for male company, and craving for love.
After starving herself to save the fare, Stead sailed for England in 1928 in pursuit of a man who did not love her (as reflected in her great novel For Love Alone). In London, she had the luck to find a job almost at once with a man who became her lover and eventually her husband, who was able for 40 years to give her what she needed: emotional and intellectual susten- ance. Bill Blake, born Wilhelm Blech, was a small, ebullient, widely-read Amer- ican Jew of Latvian extraction, who man- aged to combine being a banker and a hedonist with being a serious Marxist economist. Together they went to Paris where they worked in a bank (as in The House of All Nations) and Blake intro- duced the raw Australian girl to good food, stylish clothes and other cosmopolitan pleasures of the old world. He also led her into the political circles of the communist left, encouraged her to write (he told her her writing had 'mountain peaks'), and found her first publisher, Peter Davies, in London.
By the mid-1930s Stead was riding high; her first books were greatly praised, espe- cially in America, where the New Yorker called her the best woman writer since Virginia Woolf. She plunged into anti- fascist activity, and a love affair with a leading English communist writer, Ralph Fox; in 1935, she attended the Internation- al Congress of Writers in Paris as secretary to the English delegation, which included Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, and John Strachey. Fox was killed in Spain, and by 1938 Stead and Blake were living in New York, very much part of the left-wing intelligentsia, contributing to New Masses, the communist party journal. They spent the war writing and teaching in New York.
By the late Forties, the good times were over. To escape the persecution of the right and the feuds of the left Stead and Blake moved to London, where they were poor and obscure and dependent on liter- ary hack work. Both continued to write for the communist press; in 1959 Stead dismis- sed Pasternak's Dr Zhivago as 'an anti- Soviet sensation'. Both were kept under pointless surveillance by the FBI. By the mid-Sixties, when thanks to Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Hardwick The Man Who Loved Children (referred to by Stead, who could be mordantly funny, as 'The Strind- berg Family Robinson') was republished in America and her reputation began to revive, Blake's health was failing; he died in 1968.
In 1969, faute de mieux, Stead returned to Australia, where her politics had aroused suspicion, her books had been unavailable for years and one (Letty Fox) was banned by the customs on grounds of obscenity. The last years saw her dependent on the family she had struggled so hard to leave, feted by journalists, academics and femin- ists in a way she despised, without a real home of her own, quarrelsome, lonely and, increasingly, drunk. She kept working away at her novel of the American years, (I'm Dying Laughing, published post- humously in 1986), in the grip of what she described as 'the awful blind strength and cruelty of the creative impulse'.
Perhaps appropriately, this biography by an Australian broadcaster is unpolished and ill-edited. It is, however, disarmingly unpretentious; Williams is best when she stays close to Stead's letters home and interviews with her family and friends; her accounts of Paris in the 1930s or New York in the 1940s lack depth and confidence. But she knows the novels well and has had access to fascinating material, including Stead's notes and drafts. Stead herself once wrote, 'The essence of style in literature for me is experiment, invention, creative error'. She was not one for the elegantly finished book, or indeed life.
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