UnSteady: The story of the Great Australian Novel that never was
Christina Stead, novelist, Marxist, and Sydneysider, has been allowed to fade into partial canonical obscurity, in part due to failures to Americanise her unequivocally Australian work.
Image: Christina Stead, National Library of Australia
In June 2021, I read a book about a young woman living in Sydney. Moreton Bay figs blanketed the streets and bougainvillaea danced in harbourside gardens over swimmers below. The mandarin sky at sunset matched the colour of the train station plaques and heat sunk into the brick of crumbling Redfern terraces. You couldn’t misplace it, you couldn’t mistake it: there was no place else in the world that book could have been about — right?
The Sydney Madeleine Watts depicts in The Inland Sea is so accurate, the pages of the book may as well have been a mirror. When I wrote to congratulate Watts on the book (it was in the running for the Miles Franklin Award at the time), she urged me to read the writer that had inspired her own work.
The Sydney that this writer, another woman, had imagined — fecund, dark, complex, and sublime — has and should set the bar for bildungsroman writing set in Australia’s most famous city. Yet I had barely recognised her name. This is no accident — she is not, as far as I know, taught in any Australian curriculum, nor are her works required reading in gender studies or sociology courses despite the efforts of many well-regarded critics to make it so. Christina Stead, novelist, Marxist, and Sydneysider, has been allowed to fade into partial canonical obscurity, in part due to failures to Americanise her unequivocally Australian work.
Stead was born in 1902 in Rockdale, though the family soon relocated to Watson’s Bay. She was the only child of her father David’s first marriage, and gained five half-siblings from his second (his third marriage was to a woman Christina’s age). Leaving Sydney in 1928, Stead first went to Europe, where she met Marxist political economist William Blake. Marrying in 1952, the two lived together in the US and Europe before Blake’s death in 1968, upon which Stead returned to Australia. She died in Balmain in 1983.
Perhaps the obscurity of her work 40 years on is limited to Australian audiences, and young ones at that. In 2005, Stead was entered into Time Magazine’s Greatest 100 Novels of the 20th Century, and praise flowed from American literary giants ranging from Jonathan Franzen to poet laureate Randall Jarrell.
Stead’s relative anonymity amongst readers my age is astonishing in light of this success, particularly given the topicality of her Sydney-based bildungsromans. Her debut novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), follows the lives of its characters, many of them radicals, around a fictionalised Watson’s Bay. Often delving deep into its characters’ religious, political and social musings, Stead masterfully interlinks the interior lives of her characters with a city that shimmers even for its most impoverished residents.
Ten years later, Stead produced an even more acclaimed work: For Love Alone (1944) — my introduction to Stead — revolves around Sydney debutante Teresa Hawkins’s quest for love. The novel’s introspection perfectly imitates the coming-of-age brooding of its young protagonist, as writers today do, and is studded with scenes of night walks around the harbour and sweaty Sydney summer afternoons. The love Hawkins dreams of is inextricable from the city she imagines it in.
She had a vague picture of her future in her mind. Along the cliffs on a starlit night, very dark, strolled two figures enlaced, the girl’s hair, curled as snail-shells, falling back over the man’s shoulders, but alive of itself, as she leaned against him walking and all was alive, the revolute leaves, the binding roots. This she conceived happened in passion, a strange walking in harmony, blood in the trees. (p. 83)
While some might conceive of the above prose as juvenile, it superbly evokes the yearning for the love one has yet to experience. Teresa’s only reference point for desire is the small slice of physical world she understands, a place of both affinity and allure: the qualities she expects love to offer her. It is this near-perfect rendering of Australian girlhood that should make Stead so readable for me and countless other young women nearly 80 years on.
For all its merits, For Love Alone is likely edged out as Stead’s magnum opus by The Man Who Loved Children (1940), a family saga that follows eldest daughter Louisa’s struggle to resist the familial dysfunction wrought by a narcissistic father, Sam, and vengeful stepmother, Henny.
It’s a painfully accurate portrait of Stead’s own childhood and father. The “tree-clouded” family home, Tohoga House, rises above sweltering streets and Sam admonishes his wife as a “vixen possum.” Praised for the detail and complexity in which Stead renders her characters, Randall Jarrell went as far as to compare Stead to Tolstoy in his review of the book.
Its glowing praise is out of step with the middling success Stead has enjoyed. It’s likely her reach was hindered because she was a woman, particularly when contrasted with the greater success of Patrick White. This was not helped by Stead’s lifelong rejection of feminism, but it doesn’t explain the dissonance between Stead’s international acclaim and domestic success.
Unlike Stead’s childhood home, the inspiration for the novel, Tohoga House is not situated upon the dramatic cliffs of Watson’s Bay, nor buried in a row of Surry Hills terraces. It is quite literally a world removed from the family home that inspired it. Though originally set in Sydney, Stead was forced to change the setting of the book to Washington, D.C. on the urging of her American publisher, Simon and Schuster.
One might ask why Stead’s Australian publisher failed to offer at least a limp objection to this: they indeed might’ve, had they existed. The literary and economic power of Northern Hemisphere publishing houses was not overwhelming but absolute. Shockingly, Stead’s novels were not published in Australia until the 1960s, by which time the damage to The Man Who Loved Children was done.
It’s not that writing about the Northern Hemisphere was uncharted territory for Stead. She had lived there for much of her adult life. Works like House of All Nations, set in 1930s Paris, and I’m Dying Laughing, following the marriage of two Americans, showcased her talent in writing these places, just not when it's the product of forced relocation: Stead’s prose in The Man Who Loved Children is scarred in the shape of the Sydney Harbour. She transplants vivid descriptions of Sydney’s topography into the work, like in a passage describing Sam’s dominance over the family home.
He could often be seen spying out of the attic windows, up and down the streets, for some toddler from the neighbours’ houses, who might be making for the Garden of Eden, Tohoga House, its clifflike walls and the immense trees, full of birds and birds’ nests, and at the man-high hedges and who might grin in a watery way or even wave its sea-anemone hand when it saw Sam’s sunflower coloured head away up there amongst the birds and the leaves (p. 45).
This change in setting, whatever the short-term commercial benefits, has created a bigger problem for a work that struggles to find its deserved place in the canon. The linguistic and geographic idiosyncrasies mean it cannot be regarded as a great American novel, while the shoddy attempt to make it so precludes it from being one about Sydney. Indeed, Stead was deemed ineligible to be rewarded the Britannica-Australia prize in recognition of her literary achievements on the grounds that she had “ceased to be Australian”.
The tragedy of this is not just individual, but endemic. Big Little Lies, the blockbuster American drama series set in California, was based on the 2014 Liane Moriaty novel set in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Of course, both Stead and Moriaty are both Anglo-Saxon white women, whose narratives are deemed more universal and marketable to American audiences once the setting has been changed to somewhere more familiar. The challenge multiplies for First Nations and other non-white writers: it is only this year, for the first time in its history, that the Miles Franklin shortlist has been dominated by people of colour.
“We weren’t being read 10 years ago. Maybe one of us was being read per year,” said Tara June Winch, a Wiradjuri woman and author of the Miles-Franklin-winning The Yield, in a 2019 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. This exemplifies the difficulty First Nations authors face in breaking into the domestic — let alone global — book industry, a difficulty compounded by the financial precarity of life as an author.
“One year ago, I was as broke as I had ever been,” remarked Bundjalung poet Evelyn Araulen in her acceptance speech for this year’s Stella Prize, Australia’s most prestigious women’s literary award. “Artists in this country are used to living one paycheck away from poverty.” While exact data on the pay gap between white and non-white authors is limited, a 2020 New York Times analysis of tweets under the hashtag #PublishingPaidMe, which attempted to shed light on the issue, reveals that of 122 authors who reported earning over $100 000 USD for their work, 78 were white, seven were black and two were Hispanic.
“It’s the kind of book that, if it is for you, is really for you,” wrote Jonathan Franzen in his 2010 introduction to The Man Who Loved Children. Franzen here, is undoubtedly talking about Stead’s perceptive and unrelentingly honest treatment of her character’s struggles, ranging from family dysfunction to poverty to eating disorders to idealism. These are all excellent reasons to read Stead, but for Australian readers, the brilliance of her work is often obscured by its unwanted Americanisation. Franzen writes: “I’m convinced that there are tens of thousands of people who would bless the day the book was published, if only they could be exposed to it.”