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Hazel Rowley’s biography of Australian ex-pat novelist Christina Stead paints a portrait of a woman possessed by demons, however melodramatic this sounds, but also herself possessing literary genius. So as readers, we can, at a remove, feel the grip of these demons (and they are many and varied), that harried this unhappy self-crossed individual.

A miserable childhood is often prerequisite for a successful artist, rage and guilt great goads. So it is here. Stead escaped from parochial isolated 1920s Sydney, and her family, chasing love mostly but also experience in the wider world and found both, but not in the ways she expected. Fortunately, for her and us, she was blessed early on to find a partner, American Bill Blake, faithful (unlike Stead) and loving, who quickly recognised her talent and encouraged and supported her throughout their shared life. When he died she could no longer write.

They led a peripatetic existence, shifting from Europe to America and back as fortune, or lack of it, dictated. Which means, while relating this, Rowley shows how the couple were enmeshed in major historical movements and events, Communism, the Spanish Civil War, World War Two, the Cold War, giving a fascinating keyhole perspective of much of the twentieth century. Which is reflected in Stead’s writing.

While back in Sydney, her great counterpart, Patrick White, having decisively left Europe and its high culture, was also turning out a succession of masterpieces. His fiction, like most writers, tends to revisit a confined number of concerns, and certainly stylistically, is always recognisably his. Stead’s prose (I think) displays a wider range, fitted to wider purpose, always accomplished, whether expressionistic, lyrical, satirical or dramatic.

But Rowley demonstrates convincingly that it was the above-mentioned demons that inspired her greatest work. So, in ‘The Man who Loved Children’, her most acclaimed book, Stead turbo-charges the family dysfunctions of her childhood and adolescence to create an intense Dostoevsky-meets-the-Greeks psychodrama that could not credibly have been her actual day-to-day lived experience, but the reader is swept away anyway, although I must admit I was happy enough to finish it, almost as emotionally exhausted and wasted as the characters.

Anger, never an attractive emotion, is Stead’s major spur in many of her novels, and while personal anger obviously distorts narrative balance and psychology, it definitely gives a black power to the writing. It also lost Stead a lot of friends, particularly women, upon seeing themselves caricatured one after another (Stead bizarrely refused to change even minor biographical details) as greedy jealous over-sexed harpies. The men fared better, but not always.

Rowley does not disguise her distaste for Stead’s bad behaviour on and off the page, but at least aims to contextualise if not excuse it. A bit of overreach in Freudian interpretation, although the temptation here is certainly strong. At its heart is Stead’s vexed relationship with her father, noted naturalist David Stead, glamourous and polarising, who, like Stead, made difficulties for himself and others through an often pig-headed intransigence.

After early successes, Stead fell off the radar, partly due to McCarthyism, but nevertheless continued to write while she and Blake wandered perilously penurious through post-war Europe. Then unexpected re-discovery with the 1965 reprint of ‘The Man…’ Another short season in the sun before further personal difficulties and Bill’s declining health shadowed things again.

The final years in Australia, despite some belated acclaim, were on the whole pretty pathetic. Although growing old is no joke, entertaining crazy self-delusions and drinking like a fish never help matters. In an age of increasing self-promotion this is one writer that did not aid her cause. Which considering the outstanding quality of the work, is a pity.

Hazel Rowley has seized a good opportunity, to write the first comprehensive biography of a significant literary powerhouse, still largely neglected. Like Stead, she spoke German and French and lived in most of the countries Stead lived in. As well, Stead’s life is a fascinating story, both in itself, and also in the many things it touches.

Thoroughly researched, cleanly written, well indexed etc. I cannot imagine this bio being eclipsed any time soon, if ever. A fine book on a great writer.

Happy New Year everybody. One of my New Year resolutions is to re-start posting short book reviews on this website blog and my professional Facebook page. I intend to post a review on the first of each month, with the occasional theatrical interview interspersed. My choice of books is pretty random, whatever I ‘ve read recently that I felt like writing about. First up, an American 20th Century classic, a fulsome Folio Society volume of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories. Feel free to disagree with me or comment as you wish.

Flannery O’Connor has a particular take on a particular place, which is both the strength and limitation of her writing. Reading through these black and brilliant tales I was remind of a child who looks at a picture identifying only those objects that they know, or wish to note. Another way of saying this is that O’Connor approaches her world with a fixed view, which basically is that it is damned. She then selects her characters and shapes their stories to demonstrate this. Why this world, and presumably ours by extension, is damned is not clear; what is clear is the primary sin: Pride, the Satan original (particularly for those tainted by east-coast liberalism).

Although I have never visited the American South, and despite historical knowledge of the provincialism and racism that pervaded so much of the area in O’Connor’s time, I do not believe for an instant that her litany of misfits and maniacs and their attendant violence is anything like a true portrait of the time and place. Given the power of the writing, does this matter? Well it depends what you’re looking for.

O’Connor’s main literary vehicle is character. Focusing mostly on externals, which is why much of what she presents is so vivid, almost like a play, she carves out each of her figures in sharp relief by detailed physical description, subtle and often ironic dialogue, and conversational conflict. All up, they are not an attractive bunch, and collectively they come to no good end.

If you’re living in a fallen world, the only possible proof of God’s existence is personal redemption. And many of O’Connor’s characters do achieve redemption, but they achieve it only by having her smash them open, through them ignorantly or accidentally destroying the thing of most value to them, usually a loved one. She imposes on our fallen world a sort of infernal moral arithmetic. To save one soul others must necessarily be sacrificed, usually physically. I’m sure even Jesus, maybe especially Jesus, would have found this bizarre, perhaps pathological.

So, in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, the grandmother gains self-knowledge just as she’s being blasted away and maybe the blaster gains it too, but at what cost? The murder of an entire family, including an innocent infant (or simply by being born has it forgone innocence?). This is the most extreme example but the template repeats over. In ‘A View of the Woods’, an arrogant old man ends up killing his beloved granddaughter and having a coronary to boot. In ‘The Comforts of Home’ a pride-stricken intellectual unintentionally shoots his mother. On and on it goes, drowned kiddies, avoidable suicides, fired properties, I know that the God of the Old Testament is a jealous God but whatever happened to lovingkindness? Wrong question.

So, despite one’s admiration for the craft, relish of the dark humour, cutting observations, sustained Gothic tone etc. after a while all the cumulative relentless misanthropy might make a normally constituted reader relieved to turn that final page. I know I was. Great writing, sure, but this is one skewed vision of humanity, do with it what you will.

Christina Stead’s third novel, ‘House of All Nations’ reads like Balzac on steroids. When Stead, a big fan of the French super-realist, left Australia to work in trade and banking houses in London and Paris in the early 1930s, she found that all the characters she had to deal and socialise with could have stepped straight from the pages of ‘La Comédie humaine’. Apparently bankers and businessmen and their various vacuous hangers-on were just as ruthless, amoral, grasping, delusional, energetic, greedy, avaricious, and toadying social climbers in the 1930s as in the 1830s. Well, well. Suffice it to say that these characters also seem surprisingly recognisable to contemporary readers; with minimum tweaking, this novel could be set in the 1987, 2008, pick your period of financial rapacity and instability: ‘plus ça change’ as Balzac might have remarked.

So Stead was inspired to write this far too long but still compulsively readable picaresque describing the rise and fall of the boutique bank, ‘Bertillon Frères’, commandeered and powered by the mercurial charismatic Jules Bertillon. The House of All Nations, referred to only a couple of times in the novel, is a Parisian brothel, so you can see where Stead is coming from with this. However, here is one of those unusual examples in literature where a mismatch between intention and achievement actually results in a better work. Stead was a communist and what is obviously meant to be a savage takedown of capitalism’s immoral gaudy excesses, and she does make her points, winds up being a thoroughly entertaining comedic romp.

In these pages Stead is ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’ as Blake said of Milton’s depiction of Satan in ‘Paradise Lost’, or maybe she does know it, anyway, whether or not, Jules, the in-house devil here, drives the whole show with his charisma and energy, the typical speculator’s eternal optimism. He is cast as the negative principle, the rotten core of a rotten system, but we’re charmed and fascinated by him as is everyone else in the novel, and so very clearly is Stead. Blake thought Milton wrote ‘in fetters’ but all chains are burst here as Jules, our animating spirit, effortlessly bends the whirling world of pre-war plutocratic Paris to his various extravagant whims.

Although a long book, 800 odd pages, the texture is curiously light, insubstantial, like its leading man; Jules is a will-of-the-wisp and despite the occasional anti-capitalist diatribe (not his), he stops the show from getting too stodgy. His Sancho Panza, Michel Alphendéry, who basically runs the bank for him, efficient servant of his desires and excesses, is based on Stead’s lover-soon-to-be-husband, another William Blake (anglicised from Wilhelm Blech) and is also a communist. A Marxist banker, how about that? Almost all the characters are men, and there are a lot of them, although there is no problem following it all. None of them have much depth, but each rings true, you know them, you’ve met them, like in any successful picaresque.

Another factor that keeps things skipping along, aside from Jules, is that it is largely a book of conversations. Talk, talk, talk, that’s all these bankers ever seem to do, and so we have the same frenetic energy that you find in Dickens or Dostoevsky where various obsessives grab you by your lapel and hold their faces that bit too close but still you’re mesmerised and even convinced by their schemes until they finally release you and you realise what madmen they really are.

Yes, Jules fiddles while Europe burns, well not quite yet, but although above I mention the ‘timelessness’ of the cast, one of the fascinations of this novel is Stead’s perceptive rendering of the contemporary political and social scene. We know what’s going to happen, she doesn’t, but the coming cataclysm is well and truly foreshadowed, all the instability, shifting allegiances, anti-Semitism. Jules knows he is dancing on the edge of a volcano, although it’s not capitalism that’s going to suck everything into a black hole, but forces far more sinister. Hitler often crops up in conversations―no-one seems to quite know what he is about―as does the nascent (doomed) Spanish republic and all the various communist and workers’ insurgences, England dropping the gold standard, Mussolini in Africa, the Depression in America etc. A real snapshot.

Can I recommend this? Well you need to have time on your hands, but with the present pandemic lockdown (I’ve lost my job), it could be the go: not too heavy, not too light. Possibly best read with one of those low-alcohol beverages of the period, a long Pimm’s say, with mint and chopped fruit. Although Stead would go on to write a truly great novel after this, her wild and furious ‘The Man who loved Children’, still there are plenty of brilliant literary flashes here. So, I’ve given you my snapshot, and I’ll leave it to you.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ is his second most famous and acclaimed novel. The first is, of course, ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, which, when I travelled throughout India and Europe in the eighties, it seemed every backpacker was reading. For that reason I read it too, and despite all the florid invention and clever political take-down, I was surprised to find myself pushing to reach the end. The same effort a few years later with ‘Love’. Again, wonderfully colourful and imaginative but finally facile and even dull. I dared not admit it to myself at the time, these famous books, sensational magical realism. What was I not seeing, not feeling?

Coming back to ‘Love’ some decades later, my answer is: not very much. Although Marquez has written fine shorter works and tales, the stand-out being ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, I feel the various story-telling techniques he employs cannot be so well sustained for the longer efforts. Through too much indulgence in his box-of-tricks or hall-of-mirrors, or however you like to describe it, we end up with a sacrifice of psychological depth and development for endless imaginative spin.

These days, magic realism is out of favour for political reasons, seen as offering a falsely hyped-up version of a marginal culture to slake an urbane reader’s thirst for exoticism, just another version of Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’. This is as silly a reason for not liking the ‘technique’ as the previous wild enthusiasm for its apparent innovations. Your standard reader loves a story, that’s why they pick up a book―entertainment, escapism―but story or no story, it is characters that really drive a novel, human engagement, and unless the plot takes over, ingenious in its own right, the longer the novel extends, the greater complexity those characters need to have.

In one explanation or defence of his approach, Marquez has claimed that the supernatural is in fact the ‘natural’ way the people he writes about see their world. The magic is ‘real’, the world wider and stranger and more various than we cosmopolitan rationalists suppose. Maybe so, on the other hand this sounds to me like a disingenuous agenda for working both sides of the street. Either the world of a novel is consistently fantastic and credible within itself, or it is not. It may be my blinkered vision, but I have difficulty seeing how something can be both magical and real, satire notwithstanding, and this has always been a problem for me with this kind of literature (Salman Rushdie in ‘The Satanic Verses’ actually exploits this by presenting dual opposed existing worlds).

Marquez’ invention is prodigious, he is like a brilliant composer who given a nursery theme, can extrapolate endlessly upon it. But after a while, the brilliance is not enough, because the theme is, after all, the same set progression of aural experiences, there is no sustained development. The composer needs to know at what point the audience will have had enough, and stop well before. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’, a straightforward story of the wooing of a widow by her former rejected lover, partly based on Marquez’s parents’ and his own ‘courtship’ histories, could have efficiently been told in forty pages as opposed to four hundred. The back of my Penguin edition compares ‘Love’ to Proust’s ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ but Proust’s profound explication of the psychology of his actors, not to mention the many superbly dramatic scenarios he presents are a world away from Marquez’ one-note protagonists and their simple tale.

There is not so much ‘magic’ in this book as in many others of Marquez and I could readily take it on board if not for the major problem described above. A few other problems should also be noted, particularly some forms of ‘love’ described rather breathlessly which have not dated well; if ‘love’ is another feverish illness, varieties here are overdue for inoculation. There is a rape, a number of near-rapes, later in the novel our hero Florentino grooms and seduces an adolescent, all this cast in a positive light, and also it’s difficult to credit Florentino holding a candle for Fermina throughout such a long life of non-stop frantic sexual activity. This might be just a ‘Latin’ thing, but still. In this light the mitigating ‘excuse’ is, I suppose, the excess of passion which infects Florentino as opposed to Fermina’s husband, Urbino, a moderate rational man of science and eradicator of disease (passion?), but morally this all just doesn’t hold up, whatever the culture.

One aspect I did enjoy was the very complete picture Marquez paints of early twentieth century coastal Colombia, both the landscape and the society. He really brings that lost world fully to life, all the differing occupations and activities, the politics and class structure. Perhaps not so removed from the Cartagena/Barranquilla of his youth; here he is returning to his homeland in 1982 after an extended exile abroad to conjure up this nostalgic literary extravagance, while increasingly around him is a mire of drugs, violence, terrorism and corruption.

Nevertheless, a brilliant setting on its own is never enough. Finally, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ is a novel of seemingly endless dead ends and elaborate diversions attempting to maintain our interest in two flat characters performing a repetitive dance we soon grow tired of watching.