Letty Fox Read Free

began to fill me. It started like a pin point and spread; it ran through my veins.” 15 “I could … bathe my skin abd even lacerate it, tear it so that the boiling blood would rush out. Nothing could satisfy me …” 16
    More than this, there is a sexual frankness remarkable even today. No wonder it was banned in Australia as obscene (no other country banned it, nor was any other work of Stead’s so treated). Letty’s observation: “Sue said he disappointed her at night, but I am putting mildly what she told in detail” could not have pleased the Australian Department of Trade and Customs and the Literary Censorship Board, which sent
Letty Fox: Her Luck
into Australian oblivion in 1947. 17 “At once he brought me back to bed and, taking my hand, showed me where to put it” could not have pleased them either. 18
    In
Letty Fox: Her Luck
we also have Christina Stead’s celebration of heterosexual love. Man is an animal, made to mate.
    â€œBut once the look is given, the first hint of the immortal embrace, the only immortality, when this took place, the jealous, flushed apes came round, getting between us— with—suitability, morality, marriage, lechery—tearing us apart, inventing, until the whole thing was a mere shallow, sordid disgrace … Not one of us alive but has suffered this affront, this insult and injury—and why, because we offer life, body, heat, pleasure, all in one hour, to someone. It’s not a mean act; besides death for a cause and life-giving, it’s the only decent thing we ever do!” 19
    The adjectives used to describe Christina Stead’s extraordinary body of work use every superlative in the English language. One of the irritations which she must have felt sorely might well have been the constant comparisons to which she was subject. She was Balzac, she was DH Lawrence, she was Dickens, she was Stendhal. In fact Christina Stead is both incomparable and uncategorizable, and her greatness rests on her infinite variety.
    Her novels are naturalistic, but she can fly off into fantasy or fairy tale. She is a classically detached and incisive social commentator but at the same time can tell you, often more than once, a hundred or more minute pieces of information that have nothing whatever to do with narrative pace or interest of the novel in question. The force and gusto of her prose do not prevent her from writing descriptive passages of exquisite beauty. She can be at once excessive, rambling and vengeful, compassionate, witty and sardonic. She is one of the grand novelists of the human comedy: who could ask for anything more?
    Carmen Callil, London, March 2007

1
    O ne hot night last spring, after waiting fruitlessly for a call from my then lover, with whom I had quarreled the same afternoon, and finding one of my black moods on me, I flung out of my lonely room on the ninth floor (unlucky number) in a hotel in lower Fifth Avenue and rushed into the streets of the Village, feeling bad. My first thought was, at any cost, to get company for the evening. In general, things were bad with me; I was in low water financially and had nothing but married men as companions. My debts were nearly six hundred dollars, not counting my taxes in arrears. I had already visited the tax inspector twice and promised to pay in installments when I had money in the bank. I had told him that I was earning my own living, with no resources, separated from my family, and that though my weekly pay was good, that is sixty-five dollars, I needed that and more to live. All this was true. I now had, by good fortune, about seventy dollars in the bank, but this was only because a certain man had given me a handsome present (the only handsome present I ever got, in fact); and this money I badly needed for clothes, for moving, and for petty cash. During the war, I had got used to taking a taxi to work. Being out always late at night, I was sluggish in the morning;