Table of Contents
In July 1937, two Australian writers left their respective homes and steamed across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to opposite coasts of the United States. Sailing west from Europe, Christina Stead (1902–83) and her partner, Bill Blake, reached New York on the SS Aquitania, while on the Niagara, Eleanor Dark (1901–85), with husband, Eric, crossed the Pacific to the west coast and made their way east to New York. Both women were in the great metropolis, the eternal city of the New World, but they did not meet. They had, in fact, lived in adjoining suburbs on Sydney Harbour a decade earlier, and there, as in New York, their paths did not cross. For a time in the 1930s, however, they shared an imaginative space that was informed by their Sydney adolescence and stimulated by inter-war global political and social change.
In the following discussion, I examine ways in which the writers conceptualised transnational experience in their fiction and negotiated the complexities of their own relationships with ‘home’. The transnational functions as a barometer of their encounters with aspects of modernity and indicates that their lives, and those of their readers, were increasingly complicated by the transmission of new cultural, political and social convictions that swirled around the world in the 1930s. Dark and Stead represented and influenced this transnational experience (albeit in different ways) and this focus provides a way of tracing imaginative connections between major Australian writers whose work is often discussed in quite different literary contexts. My examination of Dark’s Waterway and Stead’s House of All Nations indicates that the tensions of the transnational/national are important emotional, political and thematic dimensions of their fiction and an emphasis on the transnational opens a space for making connections between seemingly diverse Australian writing.
Although the women never met, their imaginative intersections resulted in narratives that intersected on questions of race, class and gender. Later in their careers, their lives would touch—but at arm’s length: Stead was a manuscript reader in the United States for Dark’s The Timeless Land (she imagined Dark as an ‘old girl’),[1] while Dark was asked, in 1952, to supply a reference for Stead’s application for a Commonwealth Literary Fund award (which she did).[2] Points of connection, however, keep surfacing, especially in the context of the fraught geopolitics of the 1930s, when both writers understood that war might eventuate.
National Library of Australia: nla.pic-an24717059.
Max Dupain, photographer, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.
History records that in early 1937 Stead was uncertain as to her next move after nearly a decade away from Australia. She wrote from the cold of a London January that she was back in Britain and had completed a novel ‘about banking and full of crooks’.[3] She wondered just where she would live next: revolution had forced an early exit from Spain, a return to Paris was unlikely and although there was work in Moscow and Manhattan she preferred England, despite the climate. A few months later, life changed again and she moved to New York, where, in 1938, her virtuoso critique of international finance was published, the Paris-inspired House of All Nations. In Australia, Dark also had completed a novel, Waterway, a homage to Sydney, also published in 1938. Dark’s two-month visit to the United States in 1937 was to be the only time she left the Australian continent. She returned, eagerly, to Katoomba and the large mountain home that became her base for the rest of her life, with the exception of winter retreats to a farm in Montville, in south-east Queensland.
In future accounts of their lives, the women would be ascribed very different positions in Australian literary history. Stead is confirmed as the most transnational of novelists: a contender for a Nobel Prize, who roamed the northern hemisphere for most of her life. Dark was one of Drusilla Modjeska’s ‘exiles’ at home and a writer of historical fiction who focused on representations of Australian landscape and nation-building. The development of a gap between those who write ‘at home’ and ‘away’, however, tends to gloss over the ways in which the writers meet imaginatively, and travel through literature, in turn representing and influencing how Australians think about their world. In investigating the interstices of their work, I have employed Marc Augé’s discussion of the spectator–traveller to help describe the extent to which these writers appear to conceive of and write transnationally while producing a location-based narrative.
Dark and Stead were born a year apart (Dark in 1901, Stead in 1902) and they shared a beachside adolescence in wartime Sydney. Their mothers died when they were young: Stead’s mother when Christina was two and Dark’s when Eleanor was eight. They attended academically oriented high schools where their literary pursuits were encouraged. Dark published poetry and short stories in her twenties and her first novel, Slow Dawning, in 1932, and Stead’s first publication, The Salzburg Tales, appeared in 1934. By the time these works were published, the authors were living on different continents and involved in relationships with men that extended their early interest in socialism. Stead’s partner, Bill Blake, was a writer on Marxist economic theory and a sometime member of the Communist Party. Dark’s husband, Eric, was likewise interested in Marxist politics and he and Eleanor supported a range of left-wing causes. It is not surprising, then, that the novels of the late 1930s, House of All Nations and Waterway, each critique the exploitative global and local financial structures of mid twentieth-century capitalism. It is interesting to note, however, that this repudiation of capitalism reaches into the private realm via an assault on the economics of marriage.
In Waterway, Dark investigates the impact of global economic change on a settled and smug Sydney. Modern transport and communication systems meant that Sydney was a technologically advanced city at the centre of burgeoning international trade. Dark chooses, however, to depict the parochialism of the city and its somnolent ruling class as turning away from international affairs. Dark is fearful of the turmoil of Europe and she is especially nervous about fascism, but she insists that Australia must look out to the world and be part of an intellectual resistance to rampant nationalism. Her novel resonates with the tensions of this ambivalence as the class-stratified characters carefully pick their way in and across Sydney Harbour, almost in slow motion, as preparations for war intensify in Europe. Stead, alternatively, in House of All Nations, appears to embrace the growing chaos of Europe as she rushes the reader through the world of bull and bear financial markets driven by fabulous and bizarre characters who meet in Paris in the mid 1930s.
The authors therefore react to the conceptual double-act of early twentieth-century modernity, in which time and space simultaneously shrink and expand, in quite different ways. In his discussion of the relationship between place and space, Augé[4] argues that the spectator–traveller experiences disorientation when passing through a landscape. This disorientation opens a gap that prevents the spectator from perceiving what he views as a place, or from ‘being fully present in it’.[5] Stead, as a confessed wanderer—a spectator–traveller, in other words—never seems to be quite present in the European ‘place’ and this sense of dislocation is transferred to the fictional Paris of House of All Nations, where it induces a restlessness and intensity that frames the narrative action. Freed from national and regional boundaries, her narrative captures a cosmopolitan urgency that most fully articulates the transnational impulse. Like Stead, the characters are unsettled and mobile, so that national boundaries become nonsense. Such spectator–travellers inhabit a space that is a ‘rhetorical territory’,[6] to continue Augé’s line of thinking, rather than a ‘place’—that is, the cast of House of All Nations shares an imaginative transnational space that is characterised by the discourse of finance.
In Dark’s work, however, there is an allegiance to place that seemingly overrides the activities of the assembled cast. Sydney, the city, is an eloquent voice in Dark’s writing and the harbour and its environs inform every aspect of the novel. At first glance, there appears to be no dislocation at work: the lengthy descriptions of the sea and landscape and the entanglement of character and site privilege a sense of place. At the same time, however, the characters continually engage in an intellectual debate, either with themselves or with other characters, that ranges across international politics, labour conditions, class divisions and Australia’s position as a modern nation, as they travel across the water or walk the foreshores of Sydney Harbour. The space they inhabit is almost disembodied but it is through this rhetorical territory that the characters become part of an international community of ideas.
[1] Harris, Margaret (ed.) 2005, Dearest Munx: The letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake, The Miegunyah Press, Carlton, Victoria, p. 16.
[2] Rowley, Hazel 1993, Christina Stead: A biography, William Heinemann, Sydney, p. 389.
[3] Christina Stead to Gilbert Stead, quoted in Rowley, Christina Stead, p. 234.
[4] Augé, Marc 1995, Non-Places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, Translated by John Howe, Verso, London, p. 84.
[5] Ibid., p. 84.
[6] Ibid., p. 77.