Christina Stead: A Biography
By Hazel Rowley
Minerva, 1994, 646 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Christina Stead's novels are complex and difficult; they scale and fall artistic peaks and troughs, and are marked by a striking, if disconcerting, originality. It comes as no surprise, on reading Hazel Rowley's biography of Stead, that Christina was a woman of similar characteristics.
Born in 1902 in NSW, Stead left Australia in 1928, wrote a dozen major novels in England and America (to little commercial success or critical acclaim) before returning to Australia in 1974 until her death in 1983. She is hailed by Rowley and others as "the finest woman writer Australia has produced".
Stead apparently had a difficult (though not traumatic) time as a young woman in Australia, later recalling with horror the "domestic agony" of the "poison of family life". She found solace in writing and Stead apparently had a difficult (though not traumatic) time as a young woman in Australia, later recalling with horror the "domestic agony" of the "poison of family life". She found solace in writing and sought respite in the larger world of socialist politics.
She "grew up proud of Australia's working class heritage and labour tradition". Influenced by her husband, she saw herself as a "communist sympathiser", moved amongst left-wing writers, journalists and Hollywood screenwriters, was opposed to fascism in the thirties, McCarthyism in the fifties, and Whitlam's sacking in the seventies. Although remaining a communist of the Stalinist stamp right to the end (visiting hyper-Stalinist Albania in 1971, she claimed to see "a fresh new Socialism struggling hard"), she supported civil liberties and the peace movement.
However, there was always some doubt about the depth of her left-wing views. The Australian writer, Nettie Palmer, visited Stead at the height of Stead's revolutionary commitment in 1935 when Stead was arguing that writers should give up their "liberal quietism, poetic solitudes and soft self-probings to study worldly subjects" but Palmer came away wondering "did she really care about political causes?".
Stead's left-wing beliefs were only ever an echo of her husband's, says Rowley. They were more a "matter of peer pressure" and were "never a deeply felt conviction". Her political activity, for example as a board member of the anti-fascist League of American Writers, was "without enthusiasm".
This political diffidence is evident in her novels, especially when compared with that wonderful phalanx of socialist-inspired and communist Australian women writers who were her contemporaries — Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Dymphna Cusack, Jean Devanney, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and Barnard-Eldershaw. Rowley is somewhat dismissive of this "dun-coloured", "kitchen-sink" realist tradition, contrasting it unfavourably with Stead's more poetic and subjective novels.
The realist novels did have a tighter narrative and a more definite plot, carried an obvious moral message and had positive heroes. Stead's novels, on the other hand, were strewn with "manic wind-bagging", "lack of moral colouring and lack of narrative direction", were hero-free and had a surfeit of modernistic techniques such as sudden changes in tone and style from realism to dream and fantasy.
The realist writers, however, never downgraded the novel's fundamental focus on "individual psychological portrayal" or the ambivalences and contradictions of their heroes, as some of the more vulgar proponents of "proletarian literature" would have liked to impose in the thirties. They successfully integrated individuals and their social and political context.
For Stead, the worldly context — fascism, capitalist corruption and decay, socialist alternatives — were often mere backdrop to her focus on the individual, the family and the unconscious. "Oedipal tensions", "sexual dramas", madness and suicide caught her gaze and drew her to a bleak and often darkly pessimistic view of humanity.
Stead's closest brush with politically committed literature was House Of All Nations, which was about the "sordid machinations of fraudulent capitalists", but Rowley argues it is unclear whether the novel was "a hard-hitting exposure of international stock market manipulation" or a "playful, indulgent satire". Stead's husband, after all, was a "Marxist Investments Manager", a Wall Street communist.
The three Marxist characters in the novel are all "floundering" compared to the "energetic money-makers". Steinbeck, writes Rowley, "lived amongst the Okies", Stead amongst bankers, and The Grapes of Wrath and House of All Nations reflect these different environments and degree of political commitment.
Even Letty Fox, the main character in Letty Fox an