Book Review : Author With Affinity for Lives You Love to Hate

Ocean of Story by Christina Stead, the uncollected stories, edited and with an afterword by R. G. Geering (Viking: $19.95)

What a crank Christina must have been! Ms. Hard-to-Get-Along-With; Ms. Snip! To read these stories--which cover a lifetime of prolific writing--is like standing in a wind machine or swimming in one of those nifty new pools where you swim and swim and get nowhere. (And yet, of course, people buy those pools, and swear by them.)

Christina Stead was born in Australia in 1902, daughter of a distinguished (and, she suggests, naively self-righteous) naturalist. Her mother died when Christina was 2; her father remarried. By her early 20s, she was working in an office “practicing severe economies in order to save her fare to Europe.” She practiced them so hard that when she was 26 and had finally disembarked in England, she almost died. Here was a lady so disinclined to return home that she didn’t see Australia again for more than 40 years.

Christina married a Marxist-economist-banker-editor-novelist. They lived in shabby pensiones all over Europe until 1937 (not in places like Paris or Rome, but places like Brussels and Antwerp and Basel, spent the war years in New York, returned immediately after the war to Europe. It was more than a decade before they (tentatively) settled in England.

A Preference for ‘Real’ People

All this is only to ask--what kind of writer was Christina Stead? Not until the last 10 years of her life did Australians begin to think of her as “Australian,” and she didn’t belong to those other countries either. She began to publish early, but refused to promote herself or her books, or to hang around with writers. She preferred bankers and “real” people, she writes here, loftily, and yet she spits on money: Her books include “Seven Poor Men of Sydney,” and she very disdainfully remarks in a later essay that some people in Australia have “stopped believing in poverty.” (And yet, the most compelling stories here are about dead-enders living on nothing, in miserable conditions, in grindingly shabby rooms, and her exasperation with her characters is so thick you could spread it on toast.)

What a game-player! I’ll do nothing but write, she implies, and I’ll insist that it’s no accomplishment at all: “That is what’s best about the short story; it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one.” And I’ll write and write until I get old and die, and then you figure out what to do with all this work. I won’t lift a finger!

Well, she won her game. More and more of her books are in print. These stories--some very rough, never published--provide a fascinating sample of her work. They’re hard to write about, however, because Stead disdains literary tradition the way she shrugged off houses or children or families or countries: She writes of adults, of the bourgeoisie , of people who repeat themselves endlessly, of self-deceiving loonies who live on the psychic edge. . . .

The Real Horror

In “My Friend, Lafe Tilly,” Lafe exists only to tell a story about a womanizing, vain and very handsome man who marries an unattractive woman he doesn’t love, on the condition that she’ll do his bookkeeping and that he can have as many girlfriends as he likes. The new wife willingly agrees. Soon the husband develops a scratch on his face that doesn’t heal, and soon after that about three-fourths of his face falls off. The real horror, however, is the satisfaction of the wife, who joyfully “translates” his words to his friends, since he doesn’t have any lips. . . .

Or, in “A Household,” we are introduced to a group of Alsatians who live in the town of Mulhouse, outside the city of Basel. Since the war is barely over, these Alsatians must travel weekly to the Swiss city to lay up rations of groceries--a tolerance. For the first 10 pages or so the reader is lulled into thinking this is another simple tale of the bourgeosie; there’s a Mrs. Poupon and a Mr. and Mrs. Legland and a Mrs. Levasseur. Mrs. Legland does tend to drone on about the beauty of Mrs. Poupon’s furniture and lace, and Mr. Legland does tend to eat and drink too much. By the end of the story it’s abundantly clear that Mrs. Legland is cramming her husband to the brim with absinthe and hard-boiled eggs, so that he’ll have a stroke and she can move across the hall with Mrs. Poupon and have access to all that furniture. . . .

Terrible Eloquence

A recurring theme here is the enslavement of one person by another: The invalid enslaves the nurse, the husband enslaves the wife (often, in these stories, putting her to work as a landlady while he pockets all the money). But, just as often, the wife bamboozles the husband. In “A Routine,” an English lower-class amateur prostitute, married to a fish expert 20 years older than she, speaks at length and with a terrible eloquence about how boring her husband is--even as she dishes up liver and onions, and watches her dad die, cracking stupid jokes.

The only false notes here are the “normal” ones. It’s as though Stead had heard about happy people but never seen any close up. Lifelong exasperation and alienation are what these stories seem to be about. I liked them a lot, and if you ever get into fits of wanting to kick everything and everyone you know--not for long, necessarily, just for the length of a short story--you may like them too.