In the early 1970s, when Les Murray wrotePoems Against Economics, it was axiomatic that he was writing them against leftist economics.1To be economic then was to speak of the left. The right was irrelevant, so much so that inThe 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 writingPoems 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 lan-guage, 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 imag-inative “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.3Despite his identification with the political right (he has served as poetry editor ofQuadrant), 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 ori-gins have seemed to some critics quaint or embarrassing.
1 Les Murray,Poems Against Economics(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974).
2 Lionel Trilling,The Liberal Imagination(New York: New York Review Books, 2008), xv.
3 Les Murray, “Poemes and the Mystery of Embodiment”,Meanjin47, no. 3 (1988): 519–33; and “First Essay on Interest”,Collected Poems(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006), 166.
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”.4Rebecca Walkowitz has argued that modernism incarnated a “cosmopolitan style” that was suspicious of “epis-temological 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 chauvin-ism prevented recognition of “Muslim modernities”.6A more minor and less premeditated prejudice prevented the recognition of an Australian modernity by the world. The success of Eleanor Dark’sTimeless Land(1941) in America, and the concomitant American neglect of her more modernist novels such asPrelude to Christopher(1934) andReturn to Coolami (1936), suggest that the gatekeepers of modernity – particularly the book critics and acad-emics 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”.7Esther Gabara speaks of “peripheral modernisms”, which are often seen as “rejecting modernity”. Yet, as Gabara notes, the reality is more compli-cated.8Stead 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
4 Simon During,Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory, and Post-Secular Modernity(London:
Routledge, 2009), 57.
5 Rebecca Walkowitz,Cosmopolitan Style: Writing Beyond the Nation(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2.
6 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Unthinking Manifest Destiny: Muslim Modernities on Three Continents”, inShades of the Planet, eds. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 62.
7 Ian Watt,The Rise of the Novel(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 117.
8 Esther Gabara,Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 17.
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 identi-fying 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.9Cather 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.10But 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, metaphor-ically 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 Capricor-niamuch as one must know the Caucasus to read Lermontov’sA 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 enjoyVanity Fairwithout 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 Jar-rell, whose 1965 preface to the Holt, Rinehart & Winston reissue ofThe Man Who Loved Childrendeclared it a canonical world novel. In explaining Stead’s novel, Jarrell was more
9 Jonathan Franzen, “RereadingThe Man Who Loved Children”,New York Times Book Review, 6 June 2010. In fact, according to Stead’s biographer, Hazel Rowley, Stead left Australia at twenty-six. Hazel Rowley, interview with Leonard Lopate, WNYC radio, 22 August 2005.
10 Hazel Rowley, “The Mocking Country”,Weekend Australian, 25–26 August 2007, 8–9.
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.11So, although the Australia Stead left had produced John Shaw Neilson, Miles Franklin, Christopher Bren-nan, 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 appear-ance 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 byUlysses(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 withThe Salzburg Tales, her best received book internationally, more thanThe Man Who Loved Children.13Dixon 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.15Rowley notes that Stead “wrote beauti-fully” about “being a woman”.16Franzen has expressed surprise thatThe Man Who Loved Childrenis 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 ev-ident 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
11 Like Jarrell, Franzen was also writing an introduction to a reissue of the book, but, given its shorter length and Franzen’s greater fame, it unsurprisingly found publication in theNew York Times Book Reviewas well.
12 Robert Dixon, “Australian Fiction and the World Republic of Letters, 1890–1950”, inThe Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 223.
13 Hazel Rowley, interview with Leonard Lopate, WNYC radio, 22 August 2005.
14 Dixon, “Australian Fiction”, 248.
15 Hannah Arendt,The Human Condition(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 9.
16 Hazel Rowley, interview with Leonard Lopate, WNYC radio, 22 August 2005.
17 In the weeks after Franzen’s article appeared, several feminist academics wrote responses pointing out that they did teach the book in their courses.
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 liter-ary mainstream was often misogynistic.18In 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 com-parison with Stead”), Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood.19As Simon During points out, for Stead “romantic heterosexuality was a source of empowerment and pleasure for women as well as exploitation”.20Like 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 ori-gins 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.21Indeed, the Australian aca-demic 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 un-tethered 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 Childrenhas always been subject to a debate about whether the trans-position 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 18 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,No Man’s Land: The War of the Words(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
19 During,Exit Capitalism,79.
20 During,Exit Capitalism, 73.
21 Margaret Harris, ed.,The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead(St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000); Susan Sheridan,Christina Stead(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988); Judith Kegan Gardiner,Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of Empathy(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Louise Yelin,From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Michael Ackland, “Hedging on Destiny: History and Its Marxist Dimension in the Early Fiction of Christina Stead”,Ariel: A Review of International English Literature41, no. 1 (2010): 91–109; Anne Pender,Christina Stead, Satirist(Altona: Common Ground Publishing, 2002); During,Exit Capitalism.
22 R. G. Geering, “The Achievement of Christina Stead”,Southerly22, no. 4 (1962): 193–212.
scope. Louise Yelin asserts that The Man Who Loved Children “bears the marks of its origins”.23Although 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 theNew 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
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