In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Christina Stead and the Matter of America by Fiona Morrison
  • Michael Ackland
CHRISTINA STEAD AND THE MATTER OF AMERICA, by Fiona Morrison. Sydney Studies in Australian Literature. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2019. 196 pp. $45.00 paperback.

Christina Stead (1902–1983), although Australian born and much drawn to England and France, was well qualified to write about the United States. Her partner for four decades, William James Blake (né Wilhelm Blech), whom she met in London, was an American businessman, a Marxist theoretician, and a popular novelist, whose published non-fiction included Understanding the Americans (1954)—a subject on which he was regarded as an authority. Stead readily confessed to having profited greatly from Blake's learning and opinions, and he undoubtedly did the most to shape her views of America before they arrived there from Paris in July 1935. After less than a year they returned to the Continent, then mid-way through 1937 moved to Manhattan in time to watch the American economy slide into recession. They stayed in the United States, living on both the east and west coasts, until December 1946. Stead observed firsthand the New Deal, America's version of the Second World War, and the opening moves of what would become the Cold War. This was a crucial decade in American history and in Stead's life. Understandably, [End Page 174] then, Fiona Morrison's Christina Stead and the Matter of America is hailed on the back cover as "the first critical study of Stead's time in America" and foregrounded for its exploration of "Stead's profound engagement with American politics and culture," "gender," and "modernity" that mark her as "the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century."

Inevitably Stead drew on her knowledge and experience of the United States in her writing. American settings and citizens feature prominently in five of her novels (one of them incomplete), which are the main focus of Morrison's study. Stead also wrote short stories, articles, and numerous letters about the United States and left manuscripts that dealt with diverse aspects of her experience there. Given her subject, Morrison's omission of much of this material is hard to justify and can lead to dubious claims. In addition, the critic's historical grasp of the period seems, at best, general and on crucial issues far from reliable, as when the America examined here is described stunningly as being in "transition from a buoyant and financially viable 1930s into a world of ever-increasing political and commercial difficulty" (p. 136). A deeper knowledge of the 1930s and 1940s would, in turn, have helped considerably to illuminate "Stead's profound engagement[s]" during these decades.

What is at stake here can be well illustrated by one of Stead's essays on the United States that is discussed frequently and at length: "It Is All a Scramble for Boodle: Christina Stead Sums Up America." Published posthumously in the Australian Book Review in 1992, it is a fairly predictable account of the American obsession with wealth above all else: "Here, where the love of money is brutally outspoken and crassly advertised, no illusions are offered to the workers … it is all a scramble for boodle and nothing else" (p. 16). Stead is taken aback by the pervasiveness of money: "Everything is expressed in terms of money; [I am] shocked by women's pages where the money value of divorce … where the money value of children is discussed" (p. 85). These conditions, of course, are dramatized in Stead's novels such as Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) and A Little Tea, A Little Chat (1948) and duly elaborated on by Morrison. However, what is passed over in silence is that this essay exists in two versions, the second being longer, thematically more diverse, and held among the Stead papers at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Especially striking in this manuscript version is Stead's response to broader social problems than the national obsession with "boodle." One of her major themes is an America of glaring social disparities, including destitute African Americans "buying tainted meat secretly at dusk from unpainted wagon" and images of human misery...

pdf