Letty Fox (2 page)

But all this, though very much the warp and weft of
Letty Fox: Her Luck
, is also beside the point, because the place it holds in the Stead canon is unique: the novel is her satirical masterpiece, and, full of jokes and tragicomedies, her comic masterpiece too. Of course
Letty Fox: Her Luck
has other outstanding qualities. It packs a mighty political punch. With
The Man Who Loved Children
,
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
, and
The People With the Dogs
,
Letty
forms the kingpin of a quartet of novels in which Christina Stead takes a scathing swipe at American society, a satire all too relevant today.

That said, like everything else Christina Stead wrote,
Letty Fox
has no simple theme. Marxists, socialists, business men and women, money men and women, and both sexes as lovers, parents, partners, citizens and children parade here: few of them escape
Letty Fox: Her Luck
with much skin on their backs.

But most of all, this novel is about women, it is they who are the centre of this universe: no wonder we, young feminists in the 1970s, pounced upon the book and adored it.
Letty Fox: Her Luck
presents a female
Canterbury Tales
of women wailing, women crowing, women pursuing, woman as slobs with unwashed hair, women as peacocks displaying their finery; women as mothers and grandmothers, sisters and cousins, wives and spinsters, friends and enemies, and all through it is woven money. Men, who have the power, are there to be manipulated: this is the price they must pay to parade as cocks of the walk on our mortal soil.

Christina Stead tells the story of Letty in the first person, from her birth circa 1921 to her marriage in 1945. Letty (Letty-Marmalade, always in a jam) is born “full of the devil”, “a frisky filly” and her vivacious voice is full of rattling vim.
⁸
Street savvy and hilariously loquacious, she is a New Yorker, on her mother's side a member of a large family, the Morgans, a “noisy, greedy, money-loving” clan of women and attendant men, through whose matrimonial antics Christina Stead gives us a dazzling portrait of sexual activity and marital skull duggery in the modern world.
⁹

Letty's father is the socialist Solander Fox. (More slices of Stead life: how many American socialists knew in 1946, when this novel was first published, that Daniel Solander sailed with Captain Cook and that Cape Solander, at the head of Botany Bay, is named after him? Christina Stead could see Cape Solander from her childhood Sydney home. And then, how many Australians of the time knew of Ralph Fox, the English communist whom Christina Stead loved, killed fighting against Franco in the Spanish Civil War?)

“Some people, I know,” says Letty, “say I have bounce, I am preposterous, I elbow people out of my way and am out for myself. I am … but at least it doesn't impose on anyone; I am what I am, and I make my way in the world … I've got to make the right start in life … I'm absolutely determined, when I find the right man, to be the perfect wife … I've got to be selfish now in order to be a good wife and mother later on.”
¹⁰

Even as a child Letty would kneel down and pray, “Oh, God, make me worthy this day to get a rich man when I marry.”
¹¹

Be prepared for much more than this, for Letty is surrounded by a maelstrom of persons, a scrambling world of activity, as Christina Stead leads us into the byways of a hundred or so other loves and lives in this rich novel. There are many diversions, many tales, many digressions, many non sequiturs.

The characters you will meet pop up and down like Punch and Judy, each of them decorating Letty's life on the prowl like the branches of a vast tree of life. With her extraordinary ear for the villainies of the human race, the marriage marketplace which Christina Stead dissects is lined with paternity suits, “the profit of alimony,” abortions, divorce, divorcees, children pushed around from pillar to post, pregnancies, babies, deceit and betrayal.

It is inevitable that biographers and critics should connect Christina Stead the human being with the use she makes of her own life in her fiction. Her often noted dislike for her own sex, however, is much more easily understood by grasping the fact that great men and women can also be obtuse and unpleasant, and lack self-knowledge, than by any questionable extrapolation towards suppressed sexual inclinations. Nevertheless, like
The Man Who Loved Children
, which began her semi-autobiographical account of her childhood, and
For Love Alone
,
Letty Fox: Her Luck
in a sense is part of a trilogy rich with details of Stead's own early life.

Christina Stead left Australia in 1928, in unreciprocated love with a Sydney academic who was to reject her. On arrival in London in 1928, she found an entirely different kind of sexual fulfillment with the charming and cosmopolitan New Yorker William Blech. (He later changed his name to Blake.) William Blake was already married, with a daughter, Ruth, when Christina met him. Until his death in 1968, they lived together in Europe and the USA, only marrying in February 1952 when he finally got his divorce.

Thus,
Letty Fox: Her Luck
is also a revenge novel, as Christina lets off steam, sometimes talking through the mouth of Letty, but more often through Persia, the woman for whom Solander has rejected Letty's querulous mother. Persia/Christina, a “young dark serious girl, with large eyes”
¹²
who had a fondness for men is always above the fray, casting a wry eye on the maddening women who fight so bitterly in the marriage market:

“What luck you have, you American women! Men who pay for everything and don't ask for accounts … The men believe they've done their wives insult and injury by sleeping with them. They must pay for ever! They must pay their mothers because their mothers suffered to have them. And as for the women … they behave as if they are disabled for life as soon as they're married … Every man, legally related to them, must pay through the nose …”
¹³

But above all
Letty Fox: Her Luck
is a novel “alive and burning with sex.”
¹⁴

With Christina Stead's transformation of her own vigorous sexual desire into something so universally magnificent, all limp autobiographical connections fade into insignificance. Letty is tormented from the age of sixteen: “… I was the victim of some physical irritation, and the desire for love, without the dream of any masculine body, began to fill me. It started like a pin point and spread; it ran through my veins.”
¹⁵
“I could … bathe my skin abd even lacerate it, tear it so that the boiling blood would rush out. Nothing could satisfy me …”
¹⁶

More than this, there is a sexual frankness remarkable even today. No wonder it was banned in Australia as obscene (no other country banned it, nor was any other work of Stead's so treated). Letty's observation: “Sue said he disappointed her at night, but I am putting mildly what she told in detail” could not have pleased the Australian Department of Trade and Customs and the Literary Censorship Board, which sent
Letty Fox: Her Luck
into Australian oblivion in 1947.
¹⁷
“At once he brought me back to bed and, taking my hand, showed me where to put it” could not have pleased them either.
¹⁸

In
Letty Fox: Her Luck
we also have Christina Stead's celebration of heterosexual love. Man is an animal, made to mate.

“But once the look is given, the first hint of the immortal embrace, the only immortality, when this took place, the jealous, flushed apes came round, getting between us— with—suitability, morality, marriage, lechery—tearing us apart, inventing, until the whole thing was a mere shallow, sordid disgrace … Not one of us alive but has suffered this affront, this insult and injury—and why, because we offer life, body, heat, pleasure, all in one hour, to someone. It's not a mean act; besides death for a cause and life-giving, it's the only decent thing we ever do!”
¹⁹

The adjectives used to describe Christina Stead's extraordinary body of work use every superlative in the English language. One of the irritations which she must have felt sorely might well have been the constant comparisons to which she was subject. She was Balzac, she was DH Lawrence, she was Dickens, she was Stendhal. In fact Christina Stead is both incomparable and uncategorizable, and her greatness rests on her infinite variety.

Her novels are naturalistic, but she can fly off into fantasy or fairy tale. She is a classically detached and incisive social commentator but at the same time can tell you, often more than once, a hundred or more minute pieces of information that have nothing whatever to do with narrative pace or interest of the novel in question. The force and gusto of her prose do not prevent her from writing descriptive passages of exquisite beauty. She can be at once excessive, rambling and vengeful, compassionate, witty and sardonic. She is one of the grand novelists of the human comedy: who could ask for anything more?

Carmen Callil, London, March 2007

1
. Brooke Allen, ‘A Real Inferno: The Life of Christina Stead',
New Criterion
, October 1994.

2
. Angela Carter, ‘Unhappy Families: Angela Carter on the Scope of Christina Stead's Achievement',
London Review of Books
, 16 September–6 October, 1982.

3
. Lorna Sage, ‘Nothing Exceeds Like Excess',
Observer
, 25 July 1982.

4
. Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Radio Drama and Features: Christina Stead talks to Rodney Weatherell, transcript of recording, Melbourne, September 1979, p. 5.

5
. Dr GA Guiffré, ‘An interview with Christina Stead',
Stand
, September 1982.

6
. Allen; Guiffré.

7
. Weatherall, p. 29. See also Barry Hill interview with Christina Stead,
Age
, 17 July 1980: “I have written my biography in all my books. And this is true.”; Guiffré.

8
. Christina Stead,
Letty Fox: Her Luck
, Virago Modern Classics, London, 1978, p. 62 and p. 236.

9
. ibid p. 25.

10
. ibid p. 13.

11
. ibid p. 44.

12
. ibid p. 49.

13
. ibid p. 133.

14
. ibid p. 26.

15
. ibid p. 328.

16
. ibid p. 331.

17
. ibid p. 348.

18
. ibid p. 271

19
. ibid p. 381

O
ne hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. My first thought was, at any cost, to get company for the evening. In general, things were bad with me; I was in low water financially and had nothing but married men as companions. My debts were nearly six hundred dollars, not counting my taxes in arrears. I had already visited the tax inspector twice and promised to pay in installments when I had money in the bank. I had told him that I was earning my own living, with no resources, separated from my family, and that though my weekly pay was good, that is sixty-five dollars, I needed that and more to live. All this was true. I now had, by good fortune, about seventy dollars in the bank, but this was only because a certain man had given me a handsome present (the only handsome present I ever got, in fact); and this money I badly needed for clothes, for moving, and for petty cash. During the war, I had got used to taking a taxi to work. Being out always late at night, I was sluggish in the morning; and being a great worker at the office, I was behindhand for my evening dates. Beyond such petty expenses, I needed at least two hundred and fifty dollars for a new coat. My fur coat, got from my mother, and my dinner dress, got from my grandmother, were things of the past and things with a past, mere rags and too well known to all my friends. There was no end to what I needed. My twenty-fourth birthday was just gone, and I had spent two hours this same evening ruminating upon all my love affairs which had sunk ingloriously into the past, along with my shrunken and worn outfits. Most of these affairs had been promising enough. Why had they failed? (Or I failed?) Partly, because my men, at least during the war years, had been flighty, spoiled officers in the armed services, in and out of town, looking for a good-timer by the night, the week, or the month; and if not these young officers, then my escorts were floaters of another sort, middle-aged, married civilians, journalists, economic advisers, representatives of foreign governments or my own bosses, office managers, chiefs, owners. But my failure was, too, because I had no apartment to which to take them. How easy for them to find it inconvenient to visit me at my hotel, or for me to visit them at theirs when they were dubious or cool. It seemed to me that night that a room of my own was what I principally lacked.

I had to leave the hotel for another reason. One of my lovers had lived there for some time, had gone away on a trip, was now coming back, and, of course, was glad of the room they had promised to keep for him in the same hotel. We had been about together a great deal, our liaison and its nature was flagrant, and I had been only too happy to make it known. Now, his farewell had been too casual and while away, he had sent another man to me, without a letter of introduction, but merely with my address on a scrap of paper and the assurance that “Letty knows the ropes.” I had therefore resolved to have nothing to do with this absentee, Cornelis de Groot, unless he installed me somewhere and set up householding with me, openly. Meanwhile, I had become intimate with his friend, a very sensible, moderate man. Cornelis was too cunning and too ambitious; this is what made him dangerous for me. When with him, I behaved stupidly, incautiously, with passion, with ill temper; I was too dependent. I did whatever he wished and found him full of
sang-froid
. Both these men, Cornelis and his stand-in, were of about the same age, that is, about forty-two, too old, of course; yet with the absence of young men I could ask no questions, and in a way I learned much from these old men. I learned their weary, sentimental cunning, their husbandly manners; I found out that they were more generous than the young ones. But I was never fond of money, except to spend, and never went with a man for his money. My supreme idea was always to get married and join organized society. I had, always, a shrinking from what was beyond the pale.