Letty Fox: Her Luck

It happened that I went out once or twice in the following week to studio parties, and fat-chewing political groups where I exhibited a foul bad temper, and hardly recognised myself; I really seemed to have Luke's spirit in me. I said what I thought he would say when tired or bored. I would come out into the streets, into the new June night, still floating with bud scales, once more bitterly unhappy, my anger raging like a fire. Is not his seed like a fire? All about him, his word, his smile, his hypocrisy, his darkness, was like a fire, and I burned because I could not tell people, I have Luke. I came home once in the morning and saw two street lovers getting together on the steps of a church; the little cigarette ends jigged in the dark and described, in arcs, their weavings and embraces. Another time, a man groaned in an areaway. I did not care. I could have passed murderers, not only men with the blue devils. I was possessed with this man. One night, about two, I walked over to the slum he lived in and, taking a hand mirror out of my purse, threw it into the window of their room on the second floor. The window was open; they were in bed inside; I heard it tinkle on the floor. There were voices. I looked up. He came to the window and looked down. He saw a woman. But what woman? He had so many women. He only knew it was one of his women because of the smashed mirror from a lady's handbag, and so did she, of course. I went back home and cried in fresh agony, thinking of the scene, the conjugal bed, the open window on the summer night, the jag of glass flying through the air, smashing on the floor, the delicate tinkle, and him leaping from bed. If only it could have planted itself in her eye, her cheek, her breast! But it just sang a little note like a mosquito and lay there on the floor of their room.

Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946)




While reading Letty Fox for the first time recently (and I have still not finished it), I keep wondering what I'd have thought of this novel when I was 24, the same age Letty is when she narrates her story. And I do wish I had read it then. It was certainly (just) available, having been reissued in 1974 by Angus and Robertson in their Australian Classics, with an introduction by Meaghan Morris. I was certainly aware that it was available - but what was I doing? Huddling in a shabby room in Sydney's Glebe reading Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing and Shulamith Firestone, attempting a few scribbles of my own and finding them sadly lacking, and avoiding reading all the (patriarchal, to my mind) set texts for university.

In her introduction, Morris says:

'Letty Fox had offended because it presented a woman's account of her sexual and emotional life without following the prescribed formula for females of modesty, passivity, and simple contentment. It described the way women do live, not the way they are supposed to live. It is likely to be equally disturbing now when Letty's notions of self-respect in marriage are being discarded by more and more women.'


Yes! That's what I love about Letty Fox now. It is so frank and real. I recognise myself, and women I know, in her. Yet at the age of 24, I fear I may have dismissed her because, while she had many sexual adventures (and she is very much an adventurer), she believed in love and longed to be married. It might have done me good to see that the free and easy ways of libertarian young women in the 1970s (I'm sure most of us thought we were different from women in the past) had already been charted by women in the 1930s, as this book portrays (and no doubt before then, too!)

Stead herself (born 1902) was scared of being 'left on the shelf', and to her delight wasn't, because soon after she arrived in England from Australia in her 20s, met William Blech (he later became Bill Blake), a communist businessman who had been born in America.  They lived together a long time but weren't to marry till Christina was in her 50s, because his wife wouldn't give him a divorce (and I don't think he pressed her too much for one). It was complicated.  Letty's father, Solander Fox, was based on Blake, and his partner, Persia, on Stead herself.

A review of Letty Fox in the New York Times was to bring Christina to the attention of the FBI because it 'indicated the author had an extensive knowledge of Communist matters'.

Stead, who lived almost all her life away from Australia, much of it America, was also not awarded an Australian literary grant in the 50s because of her communist connections. She and Bill were both Stalinists. (Even the intelligent were obviously deluded, even though Emma Goldman tried to tell communists what Russia was like after she'd been there soon after the Revolution.)

As well as wishing I'd read this in my 20s, I wish that newly adult women would read it now. Is Letty Fox a Young Adult Novel?

Certainly, it could be. If publishers today were brave and bold enough.

But there is certainly nothing there that would shock many young women from their late teens on, and much in it to delight them, from the frank portrayal of sex and love, to the stunningly brilliant writing.  

Readingalia

- what's that? asked Underground Man, as he came across the dead, spiky banksia leaf in our bed (our bed in a rented holiday cottage in Blackheath, which turned out not to be as good as the reviews on the cottages' own website (well, der!) made out. For a start, the unappealing-looking kitchen smelt odd, and its only window opened onto a very dodgy 'sunroom' extension at the back, so no fresh air. At the back of the kitchen a door led to a decrepit, mouldy laundry. To be fair, the washer and dryer looked decent enough, from my fleeting glimpse of them, but who would dare enter?

- It's my bookmark, I said, retrieving the banksia leaf. I had jauntily thrown Stevie Smith's novel The Holiday into the top of my basket as I went away on holiday, and began reading it the first afternoon, lying on a tarpaulin on the ground at Mayall Lakes, where we camped the first night. Hence the banksia leaf bookmark, which I'll keep as a memento. It will forever belong to Stevie Smith.

And then when we arrived home, UG man was thinking of reading Kangaroo, by DHL, and flicking through found an old bookmark (see above, next to the iconically Australian banksia leaf). This one opens up to reveal that it is from a book chain called Van Gelderen, in Amsterdam, Holland, and I'd guess that it's at least 30 years old, if not more.

He didn't read Kangaroo, choosing instead to read An Autobiographical Novel, by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth, and the bookmark ended up marking his place in that.  This is a book I'd just  brought home from Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, from a rather wonderful second-hand bookshop. (We stayed at another cottage there first, which was indeed all it was cracked up to be, a lovely clean, sunny, well-furnished late 1950s place with a beautiful garden. Crabapple Cottage. Do go there, and it's 'dog-friendly'. We stayed with our son and his partner and their two large dogs.)

And so bookmarks move from book to book. I especially like bookmarks that were never intended for that use. I have variously used bus tickets, airline boarding passes, the little brown pleated paper cups from chocolates, flattened out (and you can smell the chocolate on them for a long time afterwards), the paper strips surrounding a certain type of soap I buy from our heath-food shop (ditto for the smell), post-it notes, corners torn from newspapers, and the wrappers from 'feminine hygiene' products.

In used books I have bought, I've found among other things a Tokyo subway ticket (fittingly in a book by Haruki Murakami, in English but priced in yen), a business card for a Paris atelier, and what was once a perfume-sample impregnated piece of card, now with only a musty smell, in an ancient, falling-apart copy of Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.  I don't know where any of these have ended up - in one of our books, somewhere, or lost. Bookmarks are ephemera, to be used, discarded or left behind, or kept for their associations and memories.  They remind me of the vast networks of readers, sharing books, recommending them (or not), discarding them, handing them on.

They remind me that reading a book is more than about just the book. They are about where you read them, what you were doing, and how you were feeling. And so books enter your life and become part of it.

Shabby old Viragos...

... and David Herbert

From the Lifeline op shop in South Lismore (an excellent source of books, housed in a charming little former church) :  Four old Viragos and a bloke.

From the Macquarie Dictionary:

virago  [I'll leave out the pronunciation] n., pl. -goes, gos.  1. a turbulent, violent, or ill-tempered scolding woman; a shrew. 2. a woman of masculine strength or spirit. [ME and OE, from L: manlike woman]

So now tell me feminists have no sense of humour. Good name for a publisher of (mostly) neglected classics by women.

They are:

1. Tell me a Riddle, by Tillie Olsen

A new writer for me. Short stories (the title one, published in 1961, being 'one of the most famous stories in modern American fiction.)

2. Stevie Smith, The Holiday, first published 1949

Love her Novel on Yellow Paper.

Random quotation from new book:

So with these happy thoughts in my mind, I go down to our butcher, with whom my aunt has dealt for forty years, and Mr. Montgomery the butcher gives me six ounces more than the ration books says. He is a tall thin man, looking like Charles II, he smiles as he wraps the parcel. There you are, my dear. How's mother? (for he is convinced that my aunt is my mother).

My mother died when I was a child, my aunt has always lived with us, she has never wished to marry, she has 'no patience' with men (she also has 'no patience' with Hitler).  She thinks men are soppy, she says: He is a very soppy man, a most soppy individual.

Stevie Smith, The Holiday

3. Emma Goldman, An Intimate Life, by Alice Wexler

Late last year I re-read Goldman's excellent 2 volume autobiography, Living My Life (which should be brought into the attic at some stage - I've had it over 30 years, a wonderful strong old Dover publication), so I think I should let the effect of that settle before I read this. But why not have it there, just waiting to be read?

4. Such Devoted Sisters: An anthology of Stories, edited by Shena MacKay (1993)

How to resist this subject matter? One I've mined many times in my own novels.

And the bloke, not a Virago of course, but one of those lovely old orange Penguins, is Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence.

I hated him when I was a student - all that overblown stuff about men and women. But he lived in Australia for a time, in a cottage called 'Wywork' (a delightfully Australian sentiment) on the South Coast of NSW. Thirroul, if I'm not mistaken.

So here is is writing about Oz. Has to be worth a read.

Shelfie

Yes, there are spaces on some of my shelves (but only  this one) ... I regularly hand books on, in order to have room for more. Of course, I keep all the old, best-loved ones.

The attic has rules. Yes!

These be the rules: No post shall be without a quotation from a book. Or a song. This time (sigh) I think the quotation has to be be from a book by moi.

Now she reads (the luxury of it!) till the small hours of the morning. Books fill the shelves that line the walls of her room; she has so many they spill over into piles on the floor and over the coffee table; they are stacked up beside the sofa, so she only has to reach out her hand and it touches a book.

The books are many and various. There are new books, with clean, shiny covers and crisp pages, and there are old books, rare books, with beautiful dustjackets and intriguing inscriptions inside. Their pages are beautiful in a different way from the clean, sweet-smelling white pages of the new books - these old books have thick, cream-coloured paper, browned on the edges, some as crisp as a perfectly fried egg. They all smell different - of rich, old spices, or deep green forests, earthy and damp. They evoke long-forgotten rooms and other lives.

Joanne Horniman, Secret Scribbled Notebooks (2004)


And so we enter the season of intense reading, where it is too hot to do anything else here in Northern NSW. Wherever you are, I wish you a festive end-of-year full of books, and a new one of happy reading.

Of attics and apples

Do  the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

With Flaubert, the apocrypha cast a second shadow. If the sweetest moment in life is a visit to a brothel that doesn't come off, perhaps the sweetest moment of writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never  needs be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

Julian Barnes: 'Flaubert's Parrot' (1984)

The cow at the creek

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained;

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition.

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;

Not one is dissatisfied - not one is demented with the mania of owning things;

Not one kneels to another, nor his kind that lived thousands of years ago;

Not one is responsible or industrious over the whole earth.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass




Until a day or two ago it had not rained for months. There is so little feed around that the cattle belonging to a farm up the creek are getting through fences and wandering over neighbouring properties, including ours.

Today when I went down to the creek to feed the ducks, there was a large old black cow, with huge horns. As I approached, she did not run away as they always do, but looked at me wearily.

I stopped. Leisurely, she put her mouth to the water and drank and drank. It was then that I noticed she was heavily pregnant. Slowly and laboriously, she climbed the steep bank opposite and went on her way.

I liked her, so dignified and long-suffering. She wasn't young.

The people who own these cattle over-stock them.  A neighbour reckons they are animal hoarders, hoarding also dogs and cats in their dozens.

People do sicken me at times, but never animals.  There's a bit in a Alice Munro story where a woman has on her tombstone, 'She was kind to her chickens.'

I can't think of a better epitaph for me.

SHE WAS KIND TO HER CHICKENS

At Kylie's

Diamond Head has its own special illusion. Anyone who comes there is filled with a wild resolution to stay for ever. No man but is possessed  with the urge to bend Diamond Head to his secret longings, to make it his own. Diamond Head deals with them. It outlasts. Its great lump of basalt was doing just this a few hundred years ago when captain Cook and his crew of constipated heros swept past, claiming the continent in a distant and gentlemanly manner. They heard the roar of the cliffs as so many cheers for their passing, a bombardment of welcome salutes. And Diamond Head will give a belch and a roar for the passing of all who come after him.

Kylie Tennant, The Man on the Headland (1971)


We came to Diamond Head (Dimandead) in the late afternoon of a hot, dry and windy day a couple of weeks ago, having left Canberra about 8 am. We did not know it, but the state was burning to the south in our beloved Blue Mountains.


It was a day of complete fire ban; we knew that, so cold baked beans for dinner. We called in at Diamond Head camp ground to register and pay our camp fees. The ranger was away till a quarter to 5, so we waited, wandering down to the beach. A storm was brewing.

Back at the Ranger's office, it began to rain, fat drops making us take shelter under the overhang of the roof. Nearby kangaroos, used to people, hopped over at once to also take shelter under the roof, though around the corner of the building from where we were.

The Diamond Head camp ground is the most popular, full of motor homes and caravans. Simple campers, we prefer the seclusion and privacy of the Kylie's Hut area, a kilometre or two away, at Indian Head.

In the 1940s, the writer Kylie Tennant moved to nearby Laurieton where her husband got a job as school principal.  They stayed many years; both their children were born there.

And it was there that Kylie met Ernie Metcalfe, the 'mad hermit' of Diamond Head, whose family had a farm there (very little farming seemed to be actually done). Later, in 1971, she published a memoir of their time there, naming it The Man on the Headland as a tribute to Ernie, whose story this also is.

Ernie was neither mad nor a hermit; Kylie described him as the 'most sociable of men'. He loved beer, but because he couldn't afford to shout (buy a round of drinks for others), he did not go to the pub.  He was the archetypal bushman, happy to rough it as long as he had his freedom.

Kylie and her husband Roddy befriended him. He'd come around and play chess with Roddy, and borrow books. He read all Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac, as well as stories of Polar and African explorers.

And Kylie would go to stay out at Ernie's because she loved the bush; it gave her time to think and write, and was a good place to take her first baby, Benison, to give her plenty of sun and air.  She wanted to build a hut to stay in and insisted on paying a fair price for the land Ernie wanted to give her. He was astounded that it was worth sixty five pounds.


In 1976, she gave the land and hut to the National Parks, and the whole headland is now national park.

We first went there over 30 years ago, and then not till earlier this year. The hut has been moved, and fixed up somewhat, so it's not quite as it was described in the book, or what it was like when we first went there.

There are now large swathes of grassed area (there are about 80 camp sites, though both times we've been there this year there were only three lots of campers. From the hut, which may be used in an emergency to sleep in, it is only a short walk down to the beach.

In her book, Kylie talks of the rutile sand miners coming in next door. (Sand mining disrupted the dunes and bush all the way along the coast and left the curse of the weed bitou bush, which they used to revegetate.  She hated having them there, for the the damage they did to the beach and bush, and the noise of the machinery, but Ernie was phlegmatic. 'You'll never know in fifty years,' he said.

Bitou bush is a noxious weed, but the bush has fairly well recovered, sixty years later. maybe Ernie was right.


I met Kylie Tennant in the early 1970s. She came in to the magazine where I was an editorial assistant to see the two women I worked with, notable children's writers both. I had tea with her a few times, and found her warm, generous, and good-humoured.

As are all her books, and especially The Man on the Headland. It has the kind of humour that speaks of a particular brand of Australian resilience.

When I camp at Kylie's I feel that she and Ernie are there with me, that I am entirely welcome. It's a good feeling, rather like coming home.


Tennant and her family later moved away to Sydney, but they kept the hut, and went to visit. Ernie also visited them in Sydney.

After he died:

A year later, my son coming back from Dimandead said, "You were right about Ernie. He's still there." Somehow the memory of his old army hat has left him. He is always bareheaded in the sunlight. If I did not turn round Ernie could be heard talking of the weather and the birds. Dimandead shines now with more splendid light. It is not every day that a headland takes to itself the soul of a man.

The Man on the Headland