Back in Sydney, I was asked by the ABC to review the American selection A Christina Stead Reader, for Books and Writing. I thought it would be valuable to combine such an occasion with an interview, and through the kind offices of Professor G.A. Wilkes I was invited to lunch on 18 July 1979 at the home of Ron and Dorothy Geering, Christina’s friends. Christina Stead had been politely firm in a telephone conversation that I was not to bring a tape recorder. That she did later give in to Rodney Wetherell’s blandishments and record an interview for the ABC (printed in Australian Literary Studies, vol. 9. no. 4. Oct. 1980) we may all be grateful.

Christina Stead was very courteous, sympathetic, and generous of her time, as were Ron and Dorothy Geering of their hospitality. Leafy Gordon seemed a long way from Manhattan. Before and over lunch we chatted, and, when I returned to the university, I typed up some notes of our ‘interview’. As this was not what the ABC had in mind, my program never eventuated. While some of the things Christina Stead spoke of to me overlap with what she recorded for Rodney, they are by no means identical, and I would like to place them on record.

Imagine an elderly, very tall lady not in the best of health who speaks with a firmness and sympathy, an intellectual strength and wide-ranging erudition that utterly belie her apparent frailty. Asked how she regards her fiction, she replies, with singular firmness, ‘I am a naturalist’. Nature for her is not moral. She sees her characters, be they villains, gangsters, or virtuous, as people; she does not adopt a moral attitude toward them.

She feels that she may have inherited the naturalist’s instinct from her father, who was a marine biologist. He, however, was fiercely moralistic about alcohol, about literature, about sex. Thus, referring to one of the characters in House of All Nations, she can delight in Jules Bertillon. Sure, merchant bankers are interested in making money. But, if you know them, as she did, they are also people. Aristide Raccamond, from the same novel, however, is a monster. Christina Stead says, ‘I don’t like parasites’. Which does seem to be a shortcoming in a naturalist, but perhaps an unavoidable one in an ethical novelist.

She spoke, unprompted by me, of biographical connexions, in her work. She knew ‘Nellie Cotter’. She knew the French financiers through her husband, William Blake. The dramatically great, physically revolting, emotionally harrowing (my expressions) boiling-down of the marlin in The Man Who Loved Children actually happened, though it happened in Sydney, and it was a shark that was boiled. (This, I take it, was one of many changes that had to be made to transform the manuscript for an American publisher.)

As Christina Stead had raised the topic of her best-known novel, I asked her whether she regretted The Man Who Loved Children in the way Khachaturian is rumoured to have wished he had never written the ‘Sabre Dance’, as nobody ever knew anything else about him. Did she regret the way in which it overshadowed her other books? No, she replied, when a book is written, she doesn’t think about it anymore. She doesn’t read the finished, printed product, and doesn’t read reviews.

Formal questions over, Christina Stead talked of other things, and, in a casual aside, revealed herself to be the humane, inquisitive adventurous woman we know from her fiction. In Melbourne, recently, she had learned modern Greek in order to converse with her Greek shopkeepers who would then speak only English in her presence. When living in the United States, she learned to speak Yiddish, and told me a Yiddish joke, which she kindly translated for me, in her slightly upper-class East’ Coast United States accent. The lunch and the interview over, I returned to the university, and typed up the notes on which the preceding, I trust accurate, account is based. I confess, with all sincerity and no sentimentality, that I returned feeling humbled.

Returning to her work as it is represented in this Reader, I find it distinguished by the qualities that I sensed in Christina Stead herself. There is dignity; there is a wide-ranging sympathy; there is generosity of spirit; there is a width of experiential reference; there is an at times harrowing dramatisation of the dark places of the heart; there is the recurring depiction of the ardent, caged soul of woman; and there are those egotistical, all-consuming men with their endless talk, talk, talk; and, finally, it must not be forgotten, in a period of revisionist feminist criticism, there are some wonderful character creations of very silly women, self-destructive women, self-deluding women.

I don’t wish to engage in any conventional ‘review’ of this volume. Jean B. Read was unable to include extracts from The Man Who Loved Children or The Little Hotel, and that does seem rather like starting behind the eight ball. Again, to represent Christina Stead in extract seems to be a mistaken notion as so much of her characters’ as of her readers’ sense of being emotionally overwhelmed in and by her fiction comes through the accretion of plot. But if a selection introduces Christina Stead to one more reader, it will have done a valuable service of publicity if that reader goes beyond and reads the whole thing. And if it introduces such lesser-known and wrongly lesser-valued ‘American’ novels as A Little Tea, A Little Chat and The People with the Dogs (now both available from Virago), to people who know the more ‘mainstream’ Stead, then it will have done another valuable service.

To end this personal tribute with a personal connection. I would like to thank Jean B. Read for including extracts that highlight a particular excellence in Christina Stead’s writings, a strength which he who many would regard as ‘a much finer writer’ confessed to lamentably lacking.

The question was to have appeared, however, and the question was to remain, this interrogated mystery of what American town-life had left to entertain the observer withal/ when nineteen twentieths of it, or in other words the huge organised mystery of the consummately, the supremely applied money-passion, were inexorably closed to him ... To ride the nouvelle down-town, to prance and curvet and caracole with it there that would have been the true ecstasy. But a single ‘spill’ such as I so easily might have had in Wall Street or wherever would have forbidden me, for very shame, in the eyes of the expert and the knowing, ever to mount again; so that in short it wasn’t to be risked on any terms.

It never occurred to Henry James to walk down-town. Christina Stead, like Teresa Hawkins, has walked, and walked, and walked. As House of All Nations and A Little Tea, A Little Chat so consummately, so supremely attest, Christina Stead fully understands the money-passion, and is expert and knowing not only in her dramatisation of it, but in her rendering of its relations with other human passions. Christina Stead may not prance and curvet and caracole, but she walks, and she dines, and she barters in ways that were not open to the Master. ‘Fineness’ may be one thing, but, when it excludes finance, it may know its own limitations. Balzac, Bellow, and Christina Stead there are three novelists who know how money talks, while the flesh pants, and the heart and mind yearn.