264
PARTISAN REVIEW
and offered it to a well known publishing house in Sydney, which in
the spirit of colonial enterprise said they would take some if a British
firm did it first.
Later, four of these stories went into Stead's first book,
The
Salzburg Tales.
But now she had
to
earn her living and try to save
passage money to leave Australia. She taught in schools for circus
children, children from the outback, and feeble-minded children. She
worked as a demonstrator in a Sydney University psychology labora–
tory and studied stenography in the evenings. Finally, in 1928 she was
able to leave Sydney for London where she found a job with a firm of
grain merchants in the city. Now her first novel,
Seven Poor Men of
Sydney,
came into being: "The first winter I was there, I was very ill,
and when I came home from work. . . I started on this novel , you
see ... I didn't intend it for a literary career, I never had in mind a
literary career.
It
was ... something I had to do 'before I died,' but this
was only an instinct. I must have mentioned it
to
William
J.
Blake for
whom I was working.... He read it over a weekend and returned it,
rather surprised.
'It
has mountain peaks,' he said." By the next year
Christina Stead was married to William
J.
Blake and both were
working in a bank in Paris. Now Stead becomes the published author
not of one but of two books. Her story continues to have more the
quality of a fable than of a battle on New Grub Street, as she gets
published in a most roundabout way:
As a hobby I took up bookbinding. ... I bound the manuscript of
Seven Poor Men,
and once it was bound, William
J.
Blake LOok it,
unknown to me, LO Sylvia Beach, of Shakespeare
&
Co.... With her
commendation, we had the courage to send the MS to England... .
Peter Davies (a famous man, godson of Sir James Barrie and the
original Peter Pan), was a friend to many writers; he admired
Australian writers. He said he would publish
.Seven Poor Men,
but
for me first to give him another book. I went home and began
Salzburg Tales.
I had been to Salzburg in the meantime. I wrote a
story every first day of a pair, finishing it and pUlling in the
connective tissue the second day.... This book was well received in
London and I was out of it all in Paris, and so I have remained.
Ms Stead remained "out of it," has remained one of the "obscure
pec;>ple." Her novels continued to be published, but they fitted into no
literary movement; her personal and spontaneous style was by no
means consistent or well wrought, and confused the critics. The history
of Stead's reviews in the
Times Literary Supplement
is especially
curious. The
T.L.S.
greets her first book with " it is a pleasure to salute
