In the early 1970s, when Les Murray wrote Poems Against Economics, it was axiomatic that he was writing them against leftist economics.1 To be economic then was to speak of the left. The right was irrelevant, so much so that in The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling could write that the “sole intellectual tradition” of the United States was of the left.2 A generation later, any Australian poet writing Poems Against Economics would have been assumed to be opposing neoliberalism and by extension the right. Murray’s positioning of poetry against economics was part of his early aesthetics, which privileged literary language, but in a way that left room for other forms. Murray’s willingness to accept “poemes” (by which he means “fusions of thought and dream” that may find expression in poetry but also through analogous forms, including in politics and religion) and his idea of imaginative “interest” not entirely divorced from the economic meaning of the term, implied a juxtaposition of art and economics, even if, in the case of art, an unremunerated one lacking ulterior motives.3 Despite his identification with the political right (he has served as poetry editor of Quadrant), Murray’s aesthetic does not isolate art from economics. It posits that the differences that exist between art and economics reveal the important links between the two.

Occupying a very different part of the political spectrum and a generation older than Murray, Christina Stead (1902–1983) had a keen sense of both art and economics at a time when the left reigned among intellectuals. Unlike more impressionistic twentieth-century Marxists, she had, through her own work and that of her husband, the economist and radical thinker William Blake, a real knowledge of how modern economies worked. As opposed to other twentieth-century writers who worked in or had some affiliation with business – such as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot – she was committed to an ideology that could not see art and economics as two separate spheres. The ambition of Stead’s novels is so massive and her achievement so nearly matches her ambition, that her Australian origins have seemed to some critics quaint or embarrassing.

In this chapter I will argue that Stead’s perception of the world she encountered was more astute because she was an Australian. She was at once an insider and an outsider on the American and British literary scenes, and her political affiliation brought together, in Simon During’s phrase, “Stalinism, world literature and the nation”.4 Rebecca Walkowitz has argued that modernism incarnated a “cosmopolitan style” that was suspicious of “epistemological privilege”.5 Stead’s work embodies this cosmopolitanism: it was equally at home in Australia, the USA and the UK and even in Germany and France; stylistically, it was influenced by the Russian novel as much as by anything else; and it was attuned to the transnational rhythms of financial and intellectual capital. But its critical reception necessarily followed more parochial channels, namely those of the London and New York press. Susan Stanford Friedman has argued that for many years, Western cultural chauvinism prevented recognition of “Muslim modernities”.6 A more minor and less premeditated prejudice prevented the recognition of an Australian modernity by the world. The success of Eleanor Dark’s Timeless Land (1941) in America, and the concomitant American neglect of her more modernist novels such as Prelude to Christopher (1934) and Return to Coolami (1936), suggest that the gatekeepers of modernity – particularly the book critics and academics of New York – were not able to recognise Australia as modern.

This book locates modernity in the early to mid-twentieth century, bounded more or less by the two world wars. In the UK, the modern period was preceded by the Victorian and romantic periods; in Australia by the colonial and federation periods. In a larger sense, however, as Greenblatt and other scholars have argued, modernity stretches back to the renaissance, to the era of Gutenberg, Columbus and Shakespeare. There is an important distinction to be drawn between modernity – a state of being in the modern world, which any person or text in the twentieth century exemplifies – and modernism, an aesthetic, avant-garde mode that was often critical of the technological and political priorities of modernity even as it rebelled against the modern representational preference for what Ian Watt termed “formal realism”.7 Esther Gabara speaks of “peripheral modernisms”, which are often seen as “rejecting modernity”. Yet, as Gabara notes, the reality is more complicated.8 Stead takes the modern world as her subject but offers a lacerating critique of it. Her settings are modern and, despite her realistic frames, she has often been accepted by critics as being in some way modernist.

Stead is often described as an expatriate writer. This is so, in that the prime of her life was spent in Europe, the USA and the UK. Critical discussions of Stead’s relationship with Australia, however, are unusual when compared with the treatment of other expatriate or displaced writers. Willa Cather, for example, is seen as a quintessentially Nebraskan writer, although not more than half of her fiction is set there and she lived there for a relatively small portion of her life. She arrived in Nebraska at age eight and left permanently after age twenty-three; although she returned for extended visits, she never again lived there in the sense in which the word is usually used. Yet Cather’s admirers do not shrink from identifying her with Nebraska, even though she moved permanently away. In the second major attempt to revive Christina Stead’s reputation in the United States, by contrast, Jonathan Franzen said that Stead “fled the country decisively” at age twenty-five.9 Cather is never said to have “fled” Nebraska, and the contrast is striking, especially in light of the fact that Stead returned to Australia in 1968 and lived there for the last fifteen years of her life, while Cather died in New York City. Or one could compare Stead to James Joyce, certainly an expatriate but one enthusiastically claimed by Ireland and the Irish tourist industry. Joyce left Ireland at twenty-three and returned only for occasional visits, eventually dying in Zurich, but is he ever said to have “fled” Ireland “decisively”? Hazel Rowley makes the parallel with Joyce in her 2007 article on Stead.10 But she blames Australians’ indifference towards Australian authors more than the world’s. Franzen’s comment suggests that the latter might also have something to do with it. The implication in Franzen’s remark is that Australia is parochial and that staying there or being interested in it is only for parochial people. If this were Franzen’s informed opinion – if he had made an extensive study of the Australia of the 1920s and decided that it were so – no one could object. The problem is, he clearly did not.

This is not Franzen’s fault. To be an adept of Australian literature you must learn a whole literary history, including catchphrases such as “cultural cringe”, “pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge”, “dun-coloured journalistic realism”, “Jindyworobak” and “Ern Malley”. To understand Australian literature one has to learn a new geography, metaphorically but also literally. One has to, in a general sort of way, know how far Sydney is from Melbourne, just as one has to know how far Moscow is from St Petersburg to understand Russian fiction. One must know the Northern Territory to read Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia much as one must know the Caucasus to read Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. In both cases, what Murray might call the “poemes” of the novels’ material origins are important backgrounds to understanding the novels artistically. Of course, a reader can enjoy Vanity Fair without understanding the precise cultural topography of early nineteenth-century London. But paying attention to this topography does not provincialise the book; it does not make one’s perspective hopelessly Londonish, or stop one from seeing the book on a universal scale. Stead’s Australian origins, by contrast, are not seen as important. This is not because there was anything unique about Stead’s relationship to Australia. She left her home country, as did Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence and Robert Graves, in an age when literature was often associated with expatriation, exile and internationalism.

As an individual, Franzen may well be willing and able to consider the cultural context of Stead’s novels. Franzen’s oeuvre as a novelist, after all, shows a consummate craft and an ability to work up large subjects. In writing about Stead for the general American public, however, he does not expect his readers to do so. In this, Franzen follows Randall Jarrell, whose 1965 preface to the Holt, Rinehart & Winston reissue of The Man Who Loved Children declared it a canonical world novel. In explaining Stead’s novel, Jarrell was more comfortable using Russian references than Australian ones. This reflected the fact that Russian fiction was familiar to American readers, whereas Australian fiction was not – but it was also, for all Jarrell’s downplaying of the political aspects of Stead’s work, a Cold War gesture: Russia, unlike Australia, was in 1965 important in world affairs.11 So, although the Australia Stead left had produced John Shaw Neilson, Miles Franklin, Christopher Brennan, Henry Handel Richardson, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Mary Gilmore, Vance and Nettie Palmer and, in the rising generation, Kenneth Slessor, Eleanor Dark and Xavier Herbert – among them symbolists, modernists, feminists and socialists – it is dismissed as parochial, and the international reader is presumed to be so incurious as to accept that proposition.

Stead herself, as Robert Dixon demonstrates, distanced herself from Australian nationalist critics, even accomplished ones such as Nettie Palmer, whose physical appearance and intellectual perspicuity Stead mocked.12 Stead did not wish to be bound by Australia. But she is Australian, and knowing something about Australia helps us to read her. Stead’s first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1935), was a great work of Australian social realism, written in Paris and influenced by Ulysses (as any portrait of a modern city written after Joyce was likely to be). The fact that it was social-realist did not mean that it was not also modernist. As Hazel Rowley pointed out in a 2005 radio interview with Leonard Lopate, Seven Poor Men of Sydney, the only book of Stead’s set totally in Australia, was, along with The Salzburg Tales, her best received book internationally, more than The Man Who Loved Children.13 Dixon notes that these books were published internationally in the USA and UK in the 1930s, but not in Australia until the mid-1960s, after Australian academics had begun to notice Stead.14

Franzen also downplays the importance of Stead’s gender and the pertinence of feminist criticism to her work. Franzen calls Stead’s allegiance to feminism “dubious” and quotes her as saying that she wished to “write ‘like a man’”, although he then says that she was not enough of a “man” to do so successfully. Yet being a woman was Christina Stead’s “other country”, even if she did not see herself as a feminist or as an advocate for the collective experience of women: it is an aspect of what Hannah Arendt called “natality”, “the most general condition” of her existence.15 Rowley notes that Stead “wrote beautifully” about “being a woman”.16 Franzen has expressed surprise that The Man Who Loved Children is not a “core text” in “women’s studies courses”. If its feminist interpretability is repeatedly played down, however, such will be the case.17

Probably too much has been made of Stead’s anti-feminism – which was notably evident in interviews she gave in the early 1970s – just as too much has been made of her expatriation. She was an Australian woman writer, and even when she did not write explicitly about those identities, her take on global twentieth-century history derived from them. But Stead wrote in an era when – unlike both the late twentieth century and the late nineteenth century – female voices and feminist perspectives were not in favour. War and economic catastrophe had foregrounded more “masculine” concerns and the literary mainstream was often misogynistic.18 In addition, Stead happened to have a satisfying marriage to a man she loved and respected. In this she was like other Australian women writers of the era, including Eleanor Dark (called by During “the best stay-at-home comparison with Stead”), Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood.19 As Simon During points out, for Stead “romantic heterosexuality was a source of empowerment and pleasure for women as well as exploitation”.20 Like Wright, Stead tended to see feminism as anti-male, a stance neither woman wished to endorse in part because of the roles their husbands played in their lives.

Interpreting Stead’s work in light of her life experiences is not to contort her words, but to recognise the wider horizon that acknowledging her gender and her Australian origins can afford. But the tradition in which Franzen writes is as uninterested in gender as it is in nation; it registers no impact from the critical work of feminist academics, whether Australian or North American, such as Diana Brydon, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Margaret Harris, Joan Lidoff, Susan Sheridan and Louise Yelin. The Jarrell-led revival, in contrast, had been inflected and given a more political slant by critics such as Michael Ackland, Jonathan Arac, Ann Blake, Simon During and Anne Pender.21 Indeed, the Australian academic revival of Stead began before Jarrell’s 1965 preface was published, as instanced in R. G. Geering’s 1962 Southerly article, “The Achievement of Christina Stead”, although Jarrell’s piece registered no awareness of this.22

The tendency, fostered by Jarrell, to see Stead as a neglected modernist, has led critics to downplay other aspects of her identity, suggesting a cosmopolitanism far more untethered than she actually practised. By not rushing to distance Stead from her natal contexts, I will instead locate her in a modernity whose failures help to explain the rise of neoliberalism. This entails a revaluation of Stead as a writer.

The Limits of Revival

The Man Who Loved Children has always been subject to a debate about whether the transposition of its setting from Sydney Harbour to the Chesapeake denudes it of its local pertinence, or makes it meaningful to the lives of millions by giving it a transnational scope. Louise Yelin asserts that The Man Who Loved Children “bears the marks of its origins”.23 Although Stead may have tried to jettison any Australian trappings at the behest of her publisher (as Hazel Rowley puts it, Simon & Schuster insisted Stead do it for “marketing reasons”)24, the novel’s first reviewers registered its background nonetheless. Charles Poore, in the New York Times, captured two aspects of the book that Franzen and Jarrell both miss: its Australian qualities and its severe critique of traditional family power structures. Poore wrote in his review of “overtones of other places” and “undivulged roots”; he knew, biographically, that Stead was from Australia, but he was also observing that the book itself feels spliced and splayed, and that Australia is its absent centre, its displaced subconscious.25 This is a richer reading than either lamenting the book’s displacement from Australia or hailing its transnationalism; Poore understands that the displacement, the half-exposed roots, are part of the book’s complex literary value. Necessarily, all of Stead’s possible settings are transnational. Had she been allowed by her publishers to set the book in Sydney, she would inevitably have been influenced by fictional portrayals of European cities; even a novel by a lifelong Sydneysider would thus contain transnational elements.

The headline of Poore’s review, “A Bureaucrat at the Breakfast Table”, brilliantly plays on the title of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1858 essay collection, Autocrat at the Breakfast Table, to insinuate how Sam Pollit’s domestic tyranny is also inflected by the bureaucratic practices of twentieth-century totalitarianism, later to be anatomised by Arendt. Poore, a workmanlike daily journalist, writing in the darkest days of World War II, saw Stead’s deep, disturbing critique of traditional institutions, amid the pessimism of a world that seemed to have lost its moorings, something later critics, writing in more sedate times, have missed.

Fiona Morrison, in much more detail, follows up Franzen’s important point that Jarrell’s revival of Stead failed. Stead, argues Morrison, has not been successfully revived in that people with literary tastes generally do not read Stead; she is not widely taught in university English classes; she is not an author firmly ensconced in the global literary tradition.26 The more recent Stead revival, in focusing so squarely on The Man Who Loved Children, and in insisting that this book must be seen first as a novel about the vagaries of family life, rather than about social and political injustice, suggests a wish to revive Stead in a manner that has already failed. The very fact that she still needs reviving is proof of the failure of this approach. When in 2005 Hazel Rowley discussed Stead on New York Public Radio, for example, she failed to cause a sensation, although she spoke intelligently (and with more acknowledgement of Stead’s Australian aspects than either Jarrell or Franzen).27 This does not mean that The Man Who Loved Children has not reached many individual scholars and readers. But as Morrison states, the book is still not in the canon and During forecasts that the most the novel will attain is a “quasi-canonical” status.28 Perhaps the enthusiasm for The Man Who Loved Children is simply overdone. It may be a fine, original book, but one whose advocates have overstated their case. Alternatively, perhaps they have gone about making their case the wrong way.

Psychic Bloodlands

Both Jarrell and Franzen see Stead’s main subject as the family and applaud her for, in a Tolstoyan way, writing about this fertile ground for character, motive and emotion. (Not withstanding that Anna Karenina is not so much about family as it is about marriage; it is not a book about “parenting” the way The Man Who Loves Children is.) Yet the behaviour of Sam Pollit in the novel leads to the question: can and should the family continue as an institution? Can the family survive after we have seen it enabling such sadism and narcissism? Is the story of the Pollit family a harrowing exposé, or simply a comic mock-epic about a quirky family and a gruff, eccentric father who is at once impossible and endearing? The latter is hardly how Sam Pollit is portrayed by the book or perceived by most critics. Louise Yelin has spoken helpfully of Stead’s novel as a “national family romance” that emphasises the affinity between family and nation, and thus by implication – although Yelin does not stress this – the homology between Sam as patriarch of the family and the modern idea of the national, ideological autocrat.29 Paul Giles describes Sam as “quite literally, the voice of the nation” as he contemplates a career in radio.30 But this is not how Franzen and Jarrell describe the book. Although Franzen aptly identifies the novel’s “private language” and “psychological violence”, in his reading the book is mainly about a “patriarch” who is a “crackpot”. The Man Who Loved Children, however, goes much further, questioning the viability of one of the central institutions of human society in a way no other novel has done. In this sense The Man Who Loved Children could be, to the modern family, what Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was to the modern state, representing the height of the minatory aspects of modernity.

Terry Eagleton has argued that praising psychological depth assumes that well-drawn characters are essentially more good than bad.31 This assumption can act as a straitjacket, favouring as it does multi-dimensional, quirky characters in whom the good ultimately balances or outweighs the bad. To interpret Sam Pollit this way would be to misread him. Stead endows him with an aspect of the buffoon, which makes his aspirations for dominance seem ludicrous. But comic touches have often been used in portrayals of Hitler, from Charlie Chaplin onward; the susceptibility to comic portrayal does not make the underlying subject any less menacing.

Stead was a political writer.32 Michael Wilding has, as Margaret Harris puts it, “argued for the coherence of Stead’s leftist vision” and has criticised what he termed the “depoliticisation” of Stead’s vision in Hazel Rowley’s biography. Brigid Rooney has linked Stead’s early novels to the Popular Front atmosphere of 1930s Paris.33 Giles says aptly that Franzen did Stead a “profound disservice” by his determination to “privatise … the novel’s sphere of activity”.34 Indeed, Stead’s leftist politics may be said to be her third country, after Australia and her gender.35 Jarrell could revive her no earlier than 1965 because previously, McCarthyism had stanched the reputation of writers known to be on the left; Jarrell’s focus, in his introduction to The Man Who Loved Children, on its treatment of the intimate and domestic might reflect not only his own well-known preoccupations, but also the need to dampen Stead’s politics in order to rescue her for an aesthetic, rather than social, agenda. Indeed, Jarrell was needed to lead Stead’s revival because Stead’s long-time advocate, Stanley Burnshaw, a man perfectly well equipped in critical terms to do the job himself, was known for being on the left (he had been a political antagonist of Wallace Stevens in the 1930s). Jarrell, in During’s phrase, was “the mainstream charismatic ex-leftist”, widely seen as a middle-of-the-road aesthete, whose endorsement might recover Stead’s reputation.36

As During points out, Stead was on the far left, a weird kind of “committed, if heretical, Stalinist”.37 If her portrait of Sam is meant to be a send-up of New Deal liberalism or of the Australian Labor enthusiasm of her father, it takes aim at its targets, at least nominally, from the left. Yet, although Stead persistently displayed what Michael Ackland calls “a lifelong interest in the socialist movement”, she remains politically difficult to define.38 Stead was politically aware, and displayed a concrete engagement with Northern Hemisphere geostrategic stakes that writers who set their novels in Australia, such as Dark and Prichard, did not possess, although their political views were similar to Stead’s. As Rowley notes, The Man Who Loved Children was not only transposed geographically, but also temporally: it was originally set during the Edwardian years before World War I.39 Had it kept this setting, Sam Pollit might have seemed a wayward Victorian paterfamilias, a variation on Edmund Gosse’s description of his father in Father and Son (a portrait Peter Carey would later draw on in Oscar and Lucinda). Instead, because Sam is thrust forward into the mid-twentieth century, we read his attitudes in the light of twentieth-century dictatorships and mass social control. Stead’s Marxism assisted her understanding of the family as not a natural but a contingent unit. In Stead’s sense of it, the family is a society in which power, if exploited by the wrong people, is arbitrary, unmotivated by any sense of the plural good. This has been concealed by Jarrell’s and Franzen’s readings, which, as Ackland puts it, concentrate on the novel only as “an unforgettable, rarely equalled portrayal of family life” but miss the political dimensions of her work.40

The historian Timothy Snyder has eloquently spoken of the “bloodlands” of Central Europe during World War II and the Cold War, the interstitial plains where the contest between the two great totalitarian European powers played out.41 The Man Who Loved Children may be said to depict the psychic bloodlands of the twentieth century, the places where a person like Sam, with a modern sense of autonomy unaccompanied by a modern sense of democracy, could put out the autonomous aspirations of those near and allegedly dear to him. The feeling that orthodox family structures are a trap is seen in many twentieth-century Australian novels: David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, Kate Grenville’s Lilian’s Story, much of Patrick White’s work. There must be more here than an allegorical rejection of Mother (or Father) England. Stead wrote about marriage, relationships and family in ways that appear to be more literal than they are, yet are not purely allegorical, either.

Stead wrote in a modern global context, in which Australia was beginning to have diplomatic, economic and cultural relationships with countries other than Britain, but before the hegemony of the United States and its representational practices (as anatomised by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire). Her greatest novels were written before the Cold War bipolar consensus had hardened, when it appeared, at various junctures, that Germany, Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union would all be major world powers. Stead’s books of the 1940s were written in a post-imperial yet unstable and multipolar world. In the world in the background of Stead’s fiction, the minor regime can speak to the major; the domestic martinet can exemplify the national or transnational hegemon. It is significant that Sam is at once Australian – a scientist like Stead’s own Australian father – and American, both in his name, which evokes Uncle Sam and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain (Sam was also the name of Stead’s own grandfather) and in his aggressive, colloquial vulgarity, suffused with an American sense that authority need not be dressed up in a polite accent.

Stead refuses to “other” totalitarianism entirely, or to pretend that it cannot exist in the English-speaking world. Indeed, an alternative title for the book could be, to borrow the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 alternative history, It Can’t Happen Here. Stead shows us that, within the Pollit family, it can, whether the “here” is on Sydney Harbour or Chesapeake Bay. Graham Huggan has suggested that Stead’s novel is more about “the brutal logic of eugenics” than about patriarchy.42 This is concomitant with the possibility, far more evident in the twenty-first century than in Stead’s day, of seeing Australian and American practices of “colonial governmentality” as differing more in degree than in kind from those of totalitarianism.43 This is a point made by Doris Pilkington Garimara in Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996), with its clear analogy between the eugenic and assimilationist practices of A. O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, and the way similar bureaucracies operated in Europe and Asia to assist authoritarian governance.44 The Australian government policy of severing Aboriginal parents from their children is emblematic of this. Another instance is seen in certain novels of Carmel Bird, particularly The White Garden (1995), in which religious and moral institutions betray the trust of those they are supposed to ward, much as occurred in Europe. In these examples, as in Stead’s novel, the protection of children’s welfare becomes an excuse for the wielding of fearsome and unwelcome force. In the world of The Man Who Loved Children, democratic polities do not represent the antithesis of totalitarianism but a palliated version of it; this totalitarianism may be confined to the family, but it is nonetheless latent in society.

As Louise Yelin points out, even Sam Pollit’s Labor-supporting “public spiritedness” has an “Australian provenance in the values of the new middle-class”.45 In mid-century modernity, all ideologies, even reformist liberalism, are contaminated by the presence of totalitarian regimes. This is not to say that Stead was being relativistic, but to say that even the most benign society at the time was inflected by the dangers of authoritarianism, even if these dangers became acute only in certain contexts. Stead might possibly have admired social-democratic Sweden as much as she would any democratic polity, yet, as Alberto Spektorowski and Elisabet Mizrachi have argued, the Swedish welfare state practised eugenics as part of its efforts to mould a just society, and saw no contradiction in this.46 Roberto Bolaño playfully speculated about fictional American fascist writers in Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), and the Pollits could well be included in a dictionary of Nazi Families of the Americas (or of the Antipodes). The Australian latencies in Stead’s fiction have as much to do with totalitarianism as they do with colonialism.

Little-Womey

Most critics of The Man Who Loved Children have concentrated on Sam’s relationship with his wife, Henny, whom he dominates until she unexpectedly gets her own back, or with Louie, the bright, proactive daughter who brilliantly withstands her father’s denigration and bullying, a figure modelled on Stead herself. Louie leaves the family home – or family prison – and, despite her ungainliness and low self-esteem, confidently enters the world. Meanwhile Ernie, the eldest son, finds his precious moneybox has been stolen by his mother, desperate for funds, and realises that the self-proclaimed omnipotent Sam is in fact incompetent and impecunious. Ernie hangs himself in effigy as a mode of protest, a gesture that puts him well on the way to self-determination. A younger son, “Little Sam”, along with Saul, one of the twins, surprises his father by refusing to clean up a mess, thus protesting in a larger sense against the mess his father has made of all of their lives.

I wish, however, to consider Sam’s relationship with his second daughter, Evie, whom he nicknames “Little-Womey”, or little woman, in an act of gender derogation and infantilisation. Little-Womey might seem pathetic, or just unlucky, like the victims of totalitarian regimes who simply did not get out in time. What the novel shows, however, is Evie’s resistance. When Louie stands up to Sam by denying his claim that he makes it rain, Evie is “puzzled”. Prompted by Sam to back him up, she says uncertainly, “I dunno.”47 This may mark her as a compliant guinea-pig for Sam’s preposterous claim that, in effect, he is God. Sam sees himself not just as a paterfamilias but also as a deity, a creator of meaning and sustenance. This is far more than the overweening behaviour of a bossy or paternalistic father; it is psychosis and augurs, on the personal level, the claims that totalitarian states made in the twentieth century: that their ideological leaders were in effect God-kings. Sam is effectively founding a “political religion” (as the historian Michael Burleigh has used the term) with himself as a godhead, using the family as a cult.48

But even if she lacks her older sister’s gumption and intelligence, Little-Womey is not as compliant as she appears. As her father continues robustly to press his grandiose claim, she looks scared, “thinking about her own incredulity” (294). She is potentially taken in, but she is aware of her potential to be taken in – and to be conscious of one’s own incredulity is the first step from gullibility to scepticism. If Louie is the dissident who leaves the totalitarian society early, Little-Womey is the beguiled dupe in the deluded crowd, as portrayed in Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician, Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé and Czeslaw Milosz’s The Captive Mind. The beguiled dupe may be manipulated or gratified or subjugated at first. But her eventual disaffection is undeniable proof of the failure of the system.

Jarrell and Franzen miss this about Evie’s slow but palpable disaffection because they see Sam’s extreme behaviour as just a piquant example of how quirky and captivating family life can be. Yet Sam’s behaviour is so outlandish, so extreme, it is hard to think of the family as an institution surviving it, much as a previously stable mode of rule often cannot survive a particularly brutal despot. To measure the full impact of Sam’s behaviour, it is deleterious to focus exclusively on Louie, whose individual aptitude will get her, as it might a Dickens hero, out of the prison cell and towards outward progress or self-fulfilment. A reading that focuses solely on Louie might conclude that exceptional ability is the only brake on systemic brutality, or the only mode of escape from it. But it is Little-Womey (who, unlike Louie, has an archetypally feminine name in Evie), whose resistance, when it slowly comes, will break all the malevolent hopes of perpetual domination for which Sam stands. In a way later to be made familiar by Michel Foucault, her resistance stands within the system that it challenges. Note this exchange from the book, as quoted and critiqued by Franzen:

What Franzen misses is that while Louie may be the one who challenges Sam, it is Evie who at first joins in her elder sister’s derision of their father, then retreats once she realises that the centre of authority does not think it funny. When the favoured part of a subject people begins to dissent, the regime knows its goose is cooked. Here Evie resembles the awakening populace of an authoritarian regime: she may be cowed, but she is not quelled or stilled.

Franzen makes the debatable contention that “abuse” is a “natural” or “potentially comic” feature of the family landscape. This is to read the book as the product of a less politically correct time when people were more relaxed about parental prerogative – less concerned, as the young Hillary Rodham Clinton put it in her pioneering work on children’s rights, that “children should have the right to be permitted to decide their own future if they are competent”.50 But the language of “incredulity” that Stead uses in Little-Womey’s slow, hesitant but nonetheless steady resistance to her father shows that she was writing a parable of unwarranted authority within the family, or, more aptly, saying that unwarranted authority had become so widespread in the 1940s as to infect even the allegedly private reserve of the family.

Louie is the leader of the resistance in her family, but she does not have to do it alone; she is not the only person who can envision a world not yet dead under Sam’s hegemonic sway. Stead’s portrayal of Little-Womey reveals both the breadth of Sam’s ambition and the hidden reserves of obdurate yet insensate resistance, a resistance that makes possible Sam’s undoing, even if Louie and Henny are the most visible agents of that undoing. If Evie did not resist, the book would celebrate only the exceptional resisters, not the ordinary ones: it would introduce a dichotomy of winners and losers even in the depths of the totalitarian cauldron.

Weird Public-Mindedness: For Love Alone

There is a danger, for the critic, of inadvertently dividing Stead’s canon into winners and losers: of giving so much attention to The Man Who Loved Children that the other novels suffer from neglect. Rowley and another American novelist who has championed Stead, Jonathan Lethem, have however extolled Stead’s entire oeuvre. Lethem has said that Stead’s I’m Dying Laughing (published posthumously in 1986) influenced his own portrayal of the fraught emotional lives of communists in Dissident Gardens (2013).51 In this spirit, I will briefly discuss Stead’s two other mid-career novels, For Love Alone (1944) and Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946).

For Love Alone is a female Bildungsroman that charts the progress of its heroine, Teresa Hawkins, from a stunningly evoked Sydney Harbour to London, where she follows her former teacher, Jonathan Crow, a man with “modern” intellectual aspirations whom Teresa eventually sees through. In his combination of insecurity and arrogance, Crow could be a younger version of Sam Pollit. Instead, Teresa turns to an American businessman, James Quick – a clear analogue to Stead’s husband, Blake – but not before a fleeting “jump to the third” with a man named Harry Girton (which unsettles any complacency the reader might feel about drawing parallels with Stead’s own life). Crow’s addled utopian-reformism gives way to Quick’s more savvy critique of the market from within.

Throughout the book – and here the title of Les Murray’s Poems Against Economics is once again pertinent – modernity is defined in terms of socialist economics, not symbolist aesthetics or stream-of-consciousness narration. The London depicted in the book’s second half is the Bloomsbury of John Maynard Keynes, not that of Virginia Woolf. It is very different from our era of what Yann Moulier Boutang has called “cognitive capitalism”, a renascent, contemporary capitalism based on the harvesting of mobile and digitally manifested knowledge.52

Simon During has said that Stead was so far left that she was off the map politically in a way that liberated her, and that her literary power was indeed occasioned by a hatred of capitalism. Free from a “soft-progressivist” New Deal desire to humanise capitalism or to make it more equitable, she could rove outside the capitalist paradigm entirely.53 This raises the question of Stead’s attitude to the social-welfare state. With its avoidance of dogmatic socialist realism on the one hand – despite Stead having praised just that in her essays – and its flagrant experimentation on the other, Stead’s distinctive style could be said to fit into Michael Szalay’s category of New Deal modernism, which in the work of James Agee, for example, harnessed literary craft with social concern.54 But not only did Stead apparently not pay close attention to the Roosevelt administration in any respect other than its posture towards the Soviet Union, but her villains, including Sam Pollit and Jonathan Crow, could well (as Arac has pointed out) be seen as representatives of the New Deal: technocrats, improvers, modernising engineers.55

In turn, Stead’s most famous American admirers, Jarrell and Franzen, seem to be drawn to her work partially by its criticism of twentieth-century statism. The Jarrell who wrote, “From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, / And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze”, and the Franzen whose engaging first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988), can be read as an allegory of excessive governmental power, may have found succour in Stead’s guying of people who, in their private lives, want to maintain regimes that put weaker people in a state of dependence, often via the rhetoric of solidarity and democracy.56 In the early twenty-first century, the only people with any voice in the public sphere who were critiquing moderate-left statism were from the right. With her critique of Sam Pollit, Stead offered a critique of statism from the radical left.

Susan Sheridan speaks of a sense of “material or spiritual impoverishment” in Stead’s fiction.57 Sheridan further asserts that most of Stead’s characters are petit bourgeois: they may be getting by economically, but they are hardly in a position to influence society. The pretensions of Sam Pollit and Jonathan Crow reveal their powerlessness. Jonathan travels to London, where his ideology is exposed as not up to the rigour of the modern world. Sam, for all his egoism, is a worker for the government, a cog in the system. Even as he tries to mime governmental authority within the family, he knows that, career-wise, he is but a mid-level civil servant.

Yet for all her mockery of Sam Pollit’s enthusiasm for Roosevelt’s New Deal and its petty-bureaucratic reform, Stead had her own New Deal moments. In 1942 she proposed a project for a Guggenheim Fellowship, a book described by Rowley as an anthology of “legends and contemporary lore from diverse regions in the United States”.58 The proposal could not have been more New Deal: it closely resembled the Workers’ Progress Administration guides to individual states that proliferated in the 1930s, overseen by the government’s Federal Writers’ Project. Stead’s Guggenheim project does indicate a certain mid-centuriness, not, incidentally, just in the populist interest in folklore but in the idea of the anthology itself, with its incorporation of multiple modes, seen again in the picaresque frame with which Stead so often surrounds her accounts of modern experience. If, as Claire Seiler argues, a predominant trope of the mid-century was “suspension”, a sense of equipoise, deadlock and stilled transition, the picaresque can be seen as the form of extended narrative that can most readily accommodate suspension, in a way that brings the representational novel as a form into the twentieth century.59 This perhaps is what leads During, after stressing Stead’s uncompromising hatred of capitalism, to call her nonetheless a “soft progressivist”.60

Within this soft-progressivist suspension, we may see that Teresa’s love for Crow, as disconnected from reality as it might be, has positive consequences. It enables her to find a community of shared interests and concerns, not just of geographical proximity. Knowledge does not so much pierce the naivete of love as allow love to flow outward, ramified and reticulated. Jarrell said in his introduction to The Man Who Loved Children that a novel is a prose fiction of some length with something wrong with it: it lacks the perfection, and the desire for perfection, that is found in the lyric poem or the short story. The asymmetrical and uneasy imbalance of love and knowledge is the aspect of Stead’s novel that feels “wrong” – awkward, unbalanced, distracting – and that therefore makes the novel as a whole a success.

The melange of passion and worldliness of For Love Alone creates an alternative public space. This is something Stuart Sayers discerned when reviewing For Love Alone for the Age on its Australian reissue in 1969. Sayers wrote that “an entire universe coalesces about the chief character”.61 Teresa never rejects a vision of a modern community, even after she realises Crow’s vision is fatuous. Like Stead herself, Teresa arrives at her public-mindedness by a weird route (Crow’s faux-progressivism, Blake’s outlandish Stalinism), but her trajectory is applicable to many other people of her time. In her sense of social panorama and of complex interpersonal relationships, Stead proposes a public-mindedness different from one premeditated by a conscious progressive ideology.

In her one sustained piece of literary theory, Stead spoke of herself as writing the “many-charactered novel” and also the “novel of strife”.62 The greatest strength of the community of For Love Alone is, paradoxically, that it is so adversarial. The failed relationship of Teresa and Crow limns an antipathy that yet implies a world of dependency, vulnerability and mutual caring. Teresa’s acceptance of a complex world, a world she once thought was animated by love alone, is informed by her romantic disillusionment, but this does not represent an utter disappointment. The modernity described by the novel is multi-layered and multipolar, and although its heroine struggles with gender hierarchies and ideologies, she still manages to navigate forward within its systems. The sense of individual agency brings us forward from modernity to late modernity, and heralds Stead’s next heroine, who finds herself even less comfortable amid modern systems than does Teresa.

 

Letty Fox : Australian Unconscious in Late Modernity

Letty Fox, like its two predecessors, is a long novel composed in the United States featuring a young female protagonist who grows out into the world during the novel’s course. Letty, however, is the most adult and self-assured of the three protagonists, and she is most symptomatic of trends that would continue later in the twentieth century. Stead’s first novel was composed after the end of World War II, and its action extends into 1946. It synthesises the pre-modern picaresque with the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, adding a modern sexuality so shocking that, as Nicole Moore has discussed, it was censored in Australia.63

In Letty Fox, Stead employs what seems like an amalgam of prose styles, an askance and frenetic version of T. S. Eliot’s “ideal order”, André Malraux’s musée imaginaire or Joseph Frank’s “spatial form”, all the while rendering a split portrait of a New York whose sophistication is admired – particularly when it is coupled with anti-establishment politics – yet is built on misogyny.64 Robert Genter has spoken of late modernity as featuring elaborate symbolic systems, confident in their self-constitution and thus not needing to admit history.65 Letty is embedded in these forms but she is not at home in them; she yearns for a more direct historical causation, and this both makes her relationship to her milieu less viable than Teresa’s and positions her as a forerunner of a future mentality.

It is with Letty Fox that Stead enters what this book terms late modernity. This late modernity was premised – to riff on Eliot’s cri de coeur that he was Anglo-Catholic in religion, classicist in literature and royalist in politics – on being socialist in economics, static in temporality and still patriarchal in gender politics. Late modernity is here juxtaposed against a neoliberalism that is libertarian in economics, dynamic in temporality and – it must be said in the current era’s favour – allows for a wider range of gender roles and expressions. Late modernity was recently described by Nick Pearce in the New Statesman as a time when “The huge inequalities of the belle époque gave way to a more egalitarian distribution as capital was destroyed, taxed or nationalised to pay for the war effort and the building of public services and social security”.66 Gender equity, however, was not yet a priority.

The young New York socialite Letty Fox, as Stead presents her, would be a happier character in the neoliberal era, with its frank exaltation of selfishness and personal fulfilment as defined by material gain. But she is a more interesting character when her buccaneering self-realisation faces the constraints of late modernity, and the genius of Stead is to recognise the fascination of this character within these conditions. Jill Lepore has dissected the contemporary rhetoric of disruptive innovation, the way any novelty is deemed by neoliberalism to be progress and therefore desirable for its own sake.67 It is no accident that Joseph Frank’s essay on “spatial form” was so influential on the late-modern era’s idea of what constituted literary innovation; far from the neoliberal dynamism excavated by Lepore, what was new in modernist poetics was, after its initial innovations of modernism, stasis.

Stead’s prose in Letty Fox epitomises this late-modern stasis. Yet Letty Fox is a picaresque novel, in which its title character makes a rogue’s progress through a jaded and cosmopolitan New York society. The picaresque seems inherently progressive, or at least serial, as one incident must succeed another and the hero is always trying to get somewhere, even if he or she usually fails. But on a deeper level, the picaresque is static because the landscape of the picaresque is never historically inflected. If the tableau of the picaresque were historically variable, the picaresque hero would not be able to make any sort of progress. Roguish or not, he or she would be bewildered and at a loss.

I wish to connect this to Fiona Morison’s argument that luck is a crucial structural principle in the novel. Luck, for Morrison, fills the otherwise potentially paralytic gap between individual agency and systemic coherence.68 The randomness connoted by this theme of luck, however, might lessen any sense of political pertinence. Anne Duchene’s 1978 review in the Times Literary Supplement – in an instance of Stead’s own authorial luck, the novel’s first review in that august journal – cites the references to fascism and communism as “peripheral anachronisms”.69 Although this is too harsh, their overt mention is far less tacitly integrated into the novel than is the tacit presence of totalitarianism in For Love Alone and The Man Who Loved Children. Furthermore, Letty’s fate depends on the amorality of, as the subtitle denotes, luck, and she does not even make the presumption that Bernard Williams called “moral luck”70 – that is, the belief that you are good because you are fortunate.

If Letty’s inability to change a static world is emblematic of late modernity, her habit of invoking “luck” while privately crediting her progress to her own merits is consummately neoliberal. Letty would thrive in a world where, to use Piketty’s phrase, “meritocratic extremism” means that those who strive the most are lauded because they are the only ones who seem to represent positive energy in an atmosphere dominated by the accumulated privilege of inherited wealth. Or she might have thrived in the nineteenth century, when, as Piketty remarks, novelists such as Balzac described a world in which “inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything but survival”.71

In Balzac’s world, wealth and privilege allowed for choice and aspiration, as opposed to merely getting by. In Letty’s era, with a large aspirational bourgeoisie, the circle of choice was widened. Privilege does not make her extraordinary or give her more agency than others. The notion of luck allows Letty to exploit others without assuming a malicious intent. In the egalitarian Fordism of late modernity, when even Ford’s automobile workers could and did see themselves as middle class and even well off, Letty is a fish out of water, so much so that she has to go back to a tradition even older than the bourgeois novel – the picaresque – in order to find a mode in which her adventures can at once stand out from those of others and not truly harm anyone.

Letty was born too soon for neoliberalism. She must make do with the givens of a world whose main ideological pillar, Freudianism, she finds deeply disillusioning, because it seems to dim her individual agency. She scoffs at the psychiatrist who says her problem is a fixation on her father; Letty accuses vulgar Freudianism of invoking parent-fixations as the source of every problem, even though, given Letty’s propensity for significantly older men, the psychiatrist might have a point, even if only in the same way as a stopped clock is right twice a day. The relationship between Letty’s sister Jacky with the scientist Gondych, whom at one point Letty nicknames “Father Gondych”, cries out for Freudian explication, as does Letty’s amoral and will-o’-the-wisp desire to steal Gondych from Jacky, who actually cares about the pathetic old man. If people live vulgar-Freudian lives, they will invite vulgar-Freudian analyses. Stead is not out simply to gore Freudian clichés but also to pinion the empty urbanity that gives rise to them.

The book might reject Freudianism, but it arguably has an Australian unconscious. Brigid Rooney, discussing Shirley Hazzard’s depiction of Naples in The Bay of Noon, writes of “the trace of the antipodean province”, a trace that is also present in Stead’s rendition of New York.72 The nation-state unexpectedly haunts this transnational book. Paris is a city, in Stead’s eyes, as much beyond the vulgarity of nationhood as is New York. But neither of the book’s two cities, nor the nations in which they are embedded, represents an ideal of nationhood in Letty Fox. This role is assumed, bizarrely, by Liberia, by the territory which is to become Israel, and by what will later become Indonesia. Letty speaks of herself as “taking up the question of Zion and Liberia”, likening the idea of resettling Jews in Palestine and that of the nineteenth-century resettlement of Americans in Africa as visionary movements that looked to the past for inspiration for a national future. Letty dates a young African American man, Jeff Mossop, and seems interested in Africa not as a land of racial uplift as envisioned by the Jamaican political leader Marcus Garvey, but as a new arena for industrialisation (a premonition of how, later, India and China would be seen by the West).

Zion and Liberia both turn out to be illusions for Letty, but they are more tempting sirens than either Marx or Freud, because they inspire, in her view, real passion in their adherents, unlike the affectations of Susannah Ford, the pseudo-liberated mother who insists that her son enter analysis in order to be free of all hang-ups. The national temptation is renewed when Letty meets her last serious boyfriend before her marriage, Cornelis De Groot, a middle-aged Dutchman who is in line to be the next governor of Curacao and, he hopes, “Surinam, Celebes. And, later, much later ... Java”.73 The spectre of colonial governance in South-East Asia inevitably brings to mind Australia. In Letty Fox, however, Stead alludes more overtly to the colonial world of Max Havelaar than to that of For the Term of His Natural Life.

Among Letty’s boyfriends, Cornelis is especially significant. She is with him at the beginning of the narrative, which then lopes back before skipping forward; she ultimately leaves him for Bill van Week (another Dutch name). The name “De Groot” itself has an Australian valence: Francis de Groot, an Australian right-wing paramilitary leader who could have stepped from the pages of D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, famously disrupted the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. The irony is further compounded by the fact that New York itself is a former Dutch colony.74 It is with Cornelis De Groot that the novel comes closest to naming Australia, and the Dutch connection reminds us that Stead became more of a “New York” writer than an American, Australian or transnational one. As During points out, the patronage of Stead by middlebrow American intellectuals such as Clifton Fadiman diverted her from the cosmopolitan social realism of the 1930s and led her to write books that were more parochially anchored in a New York familiar to her intended reader. In the 1940s, Stead was displaced but also secondarily localised, and at times her novels pointed back indirectly to her first locality: Australia.

Both Liberia and Zion are outward projections from the imaginations of people living elsewhere – African Americans and Jews respectively – and these are the places, rather than Paris or New York, that most tug at Letty’s heart and most tempt her to arrest her picaresque progress. Zion and Liberia are both anti-diasporic. They represent a temptation considerably deeper than Marx or Freud, as they are intimately bound up with the men Letty tries to love. And here is where Australia comes in, not just in its proximity to Celebes and Java, but in the way the Dutch colonies, along with Israel, Liberia and Australia, are all still settler colonies, at various stages of securing independence. In 1946, Liberia was an always tottering experiment that the USA worried would be annexed by Britain or France; Palestine was still under the British mandate; Indonesia was struggling to free itself from Dutch control. Israel is an especially interesting example. Paul Keating described Australia as “a multicultural nation in Asia” and Israel similarly is a multicultural yet predominantly European country in Asia. In evoking these other colonial societies, Stead gestured to an Australia to which she felt a deep, almost libidinal attachment but which, for her, was not yet manifest in history. It ironically constitutes the absent centre of Letty Fox’s surprisingly circular conception.

Australia is evoked throughout the novel by indirect references. The most compelling is the name of Letty’s father (a man long divorced from her mother), who in Letty’s mind is completely exempt from Oedipal fixation: Solander Fox. Daniel Solander was the botanist aboard Captain Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, which, in European terms, discovered Australia. Cape Solander at Botany Bay, an important place of arrival and departure, is named after him and is visible from Stead’s childhood home, Lydham Hall. (Stead’s own father, as mentioned earlier, was a biologist.) Hazel describes Solander’s lover, Persia, as “Stead’s idealised fictional self”, and this name gestures towards a country then in the thick of geopolitical competition among world powers. Interestingly, Persia was also the name of the nineteenth-century Australian poet Henry Kendall’s daughter, to whom he dedicated a poem:

Kendall’s poem “Bell-Birds” was a pedagogical staple in Australian girls’ schools in the early twentieth century, and Stead may well have encountered “Persia”, with its sense that Persia somehow mysteriously gestured to Australian landscapes.

In Letty Fox, a subterranean Australia emerges, glimpsed in the references to Solander, to other colonial settlements, and even in the expression “Such is life!” At the book’s end, Uncle Percival Hogg (another botanist, and a misogynist) charters a ship, the USS Sons of Liberty, to take men bound by alimony payments from the USA to Paraguay, “to set up his colony, Parity, Paraguay”. Uncle Perce explains, “They have the smallest ratio of women to men in the world due to Lopez, who almost extinguished their manhood in his wars; it’s impossible for women to tyrannise over men” (506). In a still-patriarchal late modernity, Perce senses an incipient decolonisation in gender terms threatening, analogous to the impending independence of Israel and Indonesia. So he runs off to Paraguay, an independent but deeply wounded nation. In the nineteenth century, Paraguay had suffered the authoritarianism of the dictator Francia (as vividly chronicled by the novelist Augusto Roa Bastos), followed by Solano Lopez’s pitiable aggression and then, in the 1930s, the Chaco War. Paraguay’s large indigenous Guarani population took it further out of the European orbit than Australia.

In Australian terms, however, Paraguay represents something more. In the 1890s it was the site of William Lane’s expedition to found a utopian “New Australia”,76 a quest that has parallels with Stead’s sense that she had to travel outside Australia in order to be Australian. Paraguayan society also contains elements – white supremacism, socialism, patriarchy – that crop up in Letty Fox, in its evocation of what is, to later eras, an odd amalgam of left and not-so-left. By mentioning a country bound up with Australian history, Stead let clued-in readers – at that point, almost exclusively Australian readers – know that, imaginatively speaking, she still in some ways called Australia home. If For Love Alone explicitly announces its Australian basis and then gravitates to the transnational centre of London, Letty Fox evokes a hidden Australian identity from within the transnational maw of New York, a city W. H. Auden called “the great Rome / to all those who lost or hated home”.77

It is a tribute to Christina Stead’s consummate ingenuity as a writer that she finds, in the synchronic vault of late-modern prose, a new Australia. Stead’s importance as a writer lies in the way she approached the challenges and calamities of the twentieth century from an acutely Australian angle. By the time she died in 1983, late modernity had run its course and society was about to turn the corner into neoliberalism. The endemic frustrations of late modernity will be the subject of the next chapter.