The Salzburg Tales (2 page)
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Authors: Christina Stead
To honour her contract Stead turned to short stories. A volume of tales assembled before she left Australia, submitted to the Sydney publisher Angus & Robertson by her father on her behalf, had been rejected. The typescript went astray in Paris, though some stories were retrieved or recreated in
The Salzburg Tales
. Stead was to say
that only âMorpeth Tower' and âOn the Road' were salvaged, though âThe Triskelion', âDay of Wrath' and âSilk-shirt' also have Australian settings and may bear some relation to the lost tales. Yet each of these stories diverges dramatically from the naturalistic tradition of the Australian short story associated with
The Bulletin
and epitomised by Henry Lawson. Rather, Stead drew on many authors and traditions: the Russian and French masters Chekhov and Gogol, Balzac and Maupassant, the German Hoffmann and Americans such as Poe and Hawthorne; classical myth and legend, fairy story, fable, and more.
The distance Stead had taken from her home town is clear from her reference in âDay of Wrath' to Sydney as the âhonest city, where the “Decameron” is forbidden'. Though
The Salzburg Tales
has evident resemblances to other classic collections of stories within a narrative frame, such as Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales
and the
Arabian Nights
, Boccaccio's fourteenth-century work
The Decameron
provides a closer parallel. For a start, Stead's strength, like Boccaccio's, is best seen in episodes. However, the strongest affinity between the two works is that neither has recourse to divine intervention as sanction or resolution, though there is plenty of the uncanny and the supernatural. Both are distinguished by awareness of political and economic considerations, topical reference, occasional licentiousness, and pre-eminently, by prodigious inventiveness, whether reworking familiar tales or presenting new ones. Further, while
The Salzburg Tales
does not display the overall symmetry and control of
The Decameron
, it is less innocent of design and has more internal coherence than might at first appear.
Contemporary events permeate
The Salzburg Tales
. Stead was stimulated by her attendance at the Salzburg Festival, interpreting the location, the birthplace of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as a site of pilgrimage. The personages are united in their
dedication to (Western European) culture, variously manifested, that has brought them to Salzburg, though the mission of the Festival was broader still.
The annual Festival had been inaugurated only in 1920, as an assertion of Austrian nationalism in the wake of the Great War and the final dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. The playwright and librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal was the prime mover in its formation, with the aim of inventing a tradition that would establish Salzburg as the cultural capital of a greater Germany, embracing Berlin and Bayreuth as well as Vienna. A number of oppositions were in play: Hoffmannsthal espoused nationalism (versus cosmopolitanism), Austrian identity (versus German), conservatism (versus modernism), and an insistence on Catholicity coupled with resistance to Jewishness. While Stead does not buy into these debates, in the volatility of
The Salzburg Tales
there are subliminal traces of the inherent tensions.
The tradition of opening the Salzburg Festival with a performance of
Jedermann
in the Cathedral Square dates from 1920. In Hoffmannsthal's version of the fifteenth-century English morality play
Everyman
, Everyman tries to persuade other allegorically named characters to join him on a pilgrimage designed to accrue greater credit with God, who appears with a ledger in which to record individuals' balances of good and evil deeds. The âEveryman' story, stripped of Christian morality, accords with the sympathy for ordinary people apparent in
The Salzburg Tales
, and central to
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
. From this angle, the complementarity of the volume of stories and the novel (delivered in June 1934, published in October) is plain, though in other respects they differ substantially.
The Salzburg Tales
implies that unity of the disparate personages through culture is momentarily achieved at the Festival, but when the book was published at the beginning of 1934, Hitler had begun his rise to power and the
Anschluss
of 1938, in which Germany annexed Austria, was only a few years off. The harmony the volume projects was already precarious.
The Salzburg Tales
, then and now
On publication
The Salzburg Tales
was received with considerable enthusiasm and some dissentâreactions which have persisted. The august London
Times
hailed it as âa collection of tales of delightful character and variety' (30 January 1934). The
Times Literary Supplement
followed suit: âa pleasure to salute ⦠a story-teller of profuse imagination with a gift of ingenious and rollicking fantasy and a turn of language to match' (15 February 1934).
The Sydney Morning Herald
described it as âa unique performance' (4 May 1934), though unfortunately used the spelling âSaltzburg' throughout its review of the book by âMiss Stead, daughter of Mr David G. Stead, of Sydney'. There was also disparagement of the book's artificiality, with the New York
Saturday Review of Literature
sneeringly calling it a âcollection of inconsequentialities' (15 December 1934).
Subsequent readings, while admiring its stylistic exhibitionism, have often treated
The Salzburg Tales
cursorily, pointing to ways in which it is premonitory of Stead's later work, in terms of big themes such as the place of women, the critique of capitalism, and the role of the artist in society, which are explored in greater depth for instance in her most famous novel,
The Man Who Loved Children
. It is also taken to be an exploration of ways not taken, a splendid sport, a one-off.
It is possible to dip into
The Salzburg Tales
at random, relishing its heterogeneity: stories that are uncanny, fantastic, morbid, ghostly, lighthearted; tales from various traditions, others that are startlingly original; some neatly resolved narratives, others enigmatic. Its full achievement comes clear when read from beginning to end, for it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the pleasures of individual tales, as day follows day incremental detail registers in the developing interactions among the tales and tellers. At eighty years old,
The Salzburg Tales
continues to excite and amaze.
Quotations from Christina Stead's essays âOcean of Story' and âA Writer's Friends' are taken from
Ocean of Story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead
,
edited by RG Geering (Viking/Penguin, Ringwood, 1985). Hazel Rowley's
Christina Stead: A Biography
(William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1993) continues to be an invaluable resource. Michael P Steinberg's
The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology
(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1990) informs part of my discussion. I have also drawn on
Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake
, edited by Margaret Harris (The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005), and Christina Stead's
A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters (1928
â
1973)
, edited by RG Geering (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992).
The Prologue
S
ALZBURG
, old princely and archiepiscopal city, and its fortress Hohen-Salzburg, lie among the mountains of the Tyrol, in Salzburg Province, in Austria. The river Salzach, swift and yellow from the glaciers and streaming mountain valleys, flows between baroque pleasure-castles standing in glassy lakes, and peasant villages pricked in their vineyards, and winds about to reflect the citadel rising in its forests, single eminence in the plain. The river divides the city, leaving a wooded mound on either hand, rushes noisily under the bridges between Italian domes and boulevarded banks, and rolls out, placid, fast and deep, towards the Bavarian plain and the rainburdened evening sky.
Yesterday morning, the city flashed like an outcrop of rock-crystals in its cliffs by the river: in the evening, rain-clouds sat on the Kapuzinerberg and the Mönchsberg and squirted their black waters on the town and beat down the mild leafage of the woods. This morning the clouds rolled away with troutside gleams under a fresh wind, and the river, risen a foot in the night, and roaring like the wind, is again calm and yellow. And now, on this last day of July, the townspeople look at the red walls of the naked Tyrol far off and at the giant peak of the Untersberg, like a hatchet in the air, and all their conversation is that they hope it will be fine for the first day of the August festival, the great event of Salzburg men.
Now the streets are full: bands of German students in blue linen coats with rucksacks and staves lope through the town at a round pace, counting the monuments and ignoring the tourists; foreign women in summer dresses peer in jewellers' windows full of Swiss clocks and edelweiss pressed under glass, foreign gentlemen buy tufts of reindeer hair to put in their hats, and trout-flies; the milk-wagons are busy, the elegants sit in the cafés and drink coffee with cream, and the men going home from work on their bicycles glance thirstily in the low leaded panes of beer-cellars on the Linzergasse, and see severe Berlin merchants and tall blond American college boys drinking good Salzburg beer. A stage has been put up in the Cathedral Place for the Miracle Play of “Jedermann”, German bands are playing Mozart and Wagner in all the cafés, the Residenz Platz is packed with visitors waiting to hear the Glockenspiel at six o'clock ring out its antique elfin tunes, tourists pop in and out of the house at number nine, Getreide-gasse, where Mozart was born, musicians and actors are walking and talking under the thick trees on the river-bank, and even the poor people in the new pink and blue stucco houses, built in a marsh on the Josef-Mayburger Kai, look at the red sunset and count busily for the hundredth time the little profit they will make on the Viennese lady who has rented a room from them for the duration of the Festival.
Opposite the fortress, across the river, is the yellow-walled Capuchin convent in its tall wood. One has to pay a few groschen each day at the Convent Gate to enter the wood. Within the gate, transported there from Vienna, stands the little wooden hut in which Mozart wrote “The Magic Flute”. Higher up the hill is a fine outlook towards Bavaria, and on the crest of the hill in the grounds of an ancient house built of beams and hung with vines, in which the monks formerly dwelt, is a vantage-point commanding the city and its environs.
In this wood the visitors to the August Festival walk often, and often sit long, in groups, listening to the innumerable bells of the town ringing through the wood, and talking, in the fresh mornings.
The wood is tranquil in its brown hollows and full of sandalled Capuchin monks drawing wagons of wood, and woodcutters who have to take their carts and horses down the steep Calvary Way beyond the convent gate to reach the streets of the town. Sometimes by the covered well in the tall-wooded hollow are heard foreign voices relating sonorously the marvellous and dark and bloody annals of the town, or some long-spun story brought in their packs with them from overseas, while the soft Austrian breeze entreats the leaves in the tops of the trees, squirrels scrabble in the roots and wild violets and sun-coloured fungi fill the hollows. So passionate a love awakes in the stranger's breast as he scarcely feels for his native land, for the incomparable beauty of these wild peaks, these rose walls two thousand feet in air and this mediaeval fortress hanging footless on an adamantine rock against the unweathered cliffs of the Untersberg: and as he walks, meditative, along some lowland or upland path, listening to the distant voices, the bells and the diminutive rustlings, he passes an old inhabitant with large brown eyes, sitting immobile on a log, who says politely in his sweet dialect, “Good-day,” as he would to a son of the city come from a foreign shore.