I spent some six months in 1978–79 reading Christina Stead’s mighty oeuvre. The places in which I read her seemed appropriate. Sydney; then London, in the British Museum and above a workman’s cafe in Westminster; then New York, in the Public Library and an apartment in Greenwich Village. It seemed to be proper to be reading Letty Fox while apartment-hunting in New York.

Then I was finished. I wrote my puny article on Stead (truly a louse in the locks of a mammoth of literature) and looked for lesser texts. But there have been two reprieves. A posthumous collection of her short fiction, Ocean of Story, was published last year and now, this great novel, I’m Dying Laughing, has been resuscitated. We owe R.G. Geering a great debt for making both texts available to us. (For a brief account of Stead’s inability to publish the novel during her lifetime and of Geering’s editorial labours, see my ‘On His Selection’, The National Times On Sunday, April 19. Geering plans to offer a fuller account in a future issue of Southerly.)

I’m Dying Laughing is one of Stead’s major novels, and one of this century’s major novels. It is certainly right up there with The Man Who Loved Children, House of All Nations, and Cotter’s England. Like the first two, it is long, sprawling, prodigal, passionate, loose (as an elephant’s hide is loose), argumentative, appetitive, unnaturally naturalistic.

As in those novels, Stead has created another memorable, monstrous character in Emily Wilkes. She is as imaginatively palpable a character, as egocentrically compulsive and consuming a character, as Sam Pollit, Aristide Raccamond, or Nellie Cotter. Stead subtitled the novel ‘The Humorist’, inviting us to regard her ‘characters’ as Jonsonian abstractions, as ‘Avarice’, ‘Greed’, ‘Gluttony’. For Christina Stead stylistically, as for Emily Wilkes emotionally, truly nothing succeeds like excess.

It is really very difficult to locate Stead’s characteristic mode with precision. She referred to herself again and again, in perhaps an over-protestation of filial (sic) piety, as a ‘naturalist’. But that won’t do. Nor will ‘realistic’. Somehow, she is a super-realist, as naturalism, realism, and comedy of ‘humours’ merge into a rich amalgam. But she is right to insist on the truth of her pictures:

No doubt because I was brought up by a naturalist, I have always felt an irresistible urge to paint true pictures of society as I have seen it. I often felt that quite well-known writings lacked truth, and this was particularly so of the pictures of women. I felt, not only because women took their complete part in society but were not represented as doing so, but because the long literary tradition, thousands of years old, had enabled men completely to express themselves, while women feared to do so. However, my object was by no means to write for women, or to discuss feminine problems, but to depict society as it was; indeed, I felt, I understood men better, haring been early introduced to the various colleagues, visitors, and others my father met. Naturally, I wished to understand men and women equally.

Naturally, but not naturalistically! (I am indebted for this quotation, and for Stead’s observation about ‘Mehr Licht’, to a soon-to-be-published article by Suzanne Kiernan. “‘Ugly by design”: The fiction of Christina Stead’, which will appear in Modern Fiction Studies.)

As I am as little interested in recapitulating plots as Stead is in constructing them, here is the dust-jacket’s account of I’m Dying Laughing.

Emily Wilkes, a politically naive young American journalist, travels to Europe in the thirties. On board ship she meets Stephen Howard, a rich radical. They become lovers and, inspired by his ideals, she returns to the States with him, where they marry, become active members of the Communist Party and move to Hollywood. Soon they are the darlings of the fashionable American left; she with her film-scripts and folksy novels, he with his cast-aside upper-class background and incisive critique of society and the Party line.

But Emily and Stephen fall into disfavour; neither the Party on the left nor McCarthy on the right will allow dissidents. Taking refuge again in a Paris now recovering from the War and its own private treasons, the two consume each other in hysterical bitterness, the spirits broken by loss of political faith, and are finally forced to re-examine their sense of themselves and their convictions – with tragic results.

That is hardly putting it strongly enough. Both are monsters of bad faith. Hers is a lifelong struggle between political commitment and that bourgeois individualism that must characterise the novelist who is other than ideologue or party hack; he betrays his newfound friends because he is true to his class. But the blurb is correct in characterising the novel as a ‘tragedy’, albeit a tragedy pervaded by savage farce and comical abstractions. Emily’s final isolation in the Forum Roman, distractedly destroying her manuscripts, may stand as a paradigm of the tragic condition. At one and the same time, one is reminded of Lear on the heath and of Cleopatra and Antony in their folly. Elizabeth Webby is right to point out that Emily’s last days in Paris are modelled on Marie Antoinette’s. It is Stead’s capacity to amalgamate the worlds of difference (albeit tragic difference) which characterise Lear and Antony and Cleopatra that displays the range and complexity of her imagination.

The recognisable fecundity of Stead’s style is also here. I cannot help being reminded of Saul Bellow (an author with whom she has a number of things in common: stylistic fecundity, larger-than-life characters, monstrous talkers, encyclopedic learning, moral concern) in his account of writing The Adventures of Augie March: ‘The great pleasure of the hook was that it came easily. All I had to do was be there with buckets to catch it.’

So Stead’s style is laid on with a trowel. The novel is almost all talk, talk, talk. And the dialogue, like the characters, is anything but realistic. No one human body could contain all the passions, commitments, rehearsals, slides, theories, ideas, and appetites that Emily Wilkes does. She is, to use an old and honourable expression, larger than life. What tragic heroine is not? What Stead protagonist is not?

While I am only too acutely aware of Thomas Love Peacock’s sobering advice (it should be inscribed above the desks of all thesis writers) –

All philosophers, who find

Some favourite system to their mind,

In every point to make it fit,

Will force all nature to submit.

– I take great heart from the fact that this posthumously published novel by Stead endorses my arguments (in ‘Christina Stead’s Unforgettable Dinner Parties’, published originally in Southerly and reprinted in my Hot Copy) about her ‘unforgettable dinner parties’ even more forcefully than any of the books she published while she was alive. Those good left-wingers, those sympathisers with the working class, those apostles of Marxist light, the Wilkeses, live in postwar, deprived, destitute Paris and gorge themselves again and again on black-market food. Chapter 12, ‘Landing Party’, and the dinner at the Valais’ is particularly recommended in this regard. ‘They began with asparagus soup, made with fresh, out-of-season asparagus, and with cream which could only be got on the black market …’ Let them eat cake, indeed! By the time this dinner reaches an end, one is reminded of Erasmus’s remark apropos fish: ‘My heart is Catholic, but my stomach is Lutheran.’

It is at this dinner party that no less than three stories about death are told (remember The Little Hotel). But they are told for comic effect. Stead could not have known it, but at the period at which her novel begins (her novel which has, as the epigraph to its first Part, Rabelais’ ‘I’m thirsty!’), in the very Soviet Russia which her heroine and hero admire, the Russia of the show-trials, one Mikhail Bakhtin was writing Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable, and observing in the fourth chapter:

No meal can be sad. Sadness and food are incompatible. (While death and food are perfectly compatible.) … The banquet is even more important as the occasion for wise discourse, for the gay truth.

Rabelais was convinced that free and frank talk can be said only in the atmosphere of the banquet, only in table talk. In the eyes of Rabelais seriousness ... was either the tone of receding truth and doomed authority, or the tone of feeble men intimidated and filled with terror. Bread and wine (the world defeated … through work and struggle) disperse fear and liberate the world. (Rabelais and his World)

Christina Stead would have appreciated (as would Emily Wilkes, though the rich Hollywood communists who accused her of bad faith would not) the irony of Bakhtin celebrating Rabelaisian carnival at the very time of the Stalinist terror!

So I’m Dying Laughing is a Rabelaisian tragedy (oxymoronically?) of the appetites, and it is Rabelaisian precisely because of its heroine’s appetites and its author’s unideological prodigality; while it is tragic because its heroine is unable to tum the world upside down. It oppresses her.

While the epigraph to Part One is from Rabelais, that to Part Two is from Goethe: ‘Renounce, renounce, on every side I hear.’ Like Faust’s tragedy, Emily Wilkes’s is not of the physical appetites only; the intellect is ravenous also. The young Stead dreamed of German universities ‘howling with philosophical arguments’, and wrote in the as yet uncollected ‘Admired Acquaintance’, ‘I did get to Weimar at last, and saw the small dark high room in which Goethe died. It was clear enough then that his famous words ‘Mehr Licht’ were not philosophical but were a request for more light from the window. Everything is real.’

In Christina Stead we have a novelist who can, like Mark Antony, bestride the narrow world. She can contain the diverse spirits of Rabelais and Goethe. Celebrated as she is, at home and abroad I’m not convinced that any of us (myself included) yet fully realises what a Titan we had, and still have, among us.