268
PARTISAN REVIEW
Nothing in Teresa's environment furnishes her with sexual mod–
els to match her fantasies. While engaged young women her age are
stitching their trousseaux, she reads Ovid's
Art of Love
and Piere
Louys. Teresa knows what she wants: "One wants love.... I am
certain that as I lie here now, frenzied with desire and want, all women
have lain for centuries, since innocent times and never an ounce of
bravado to throw off the servitude of timidity.
If
ever I have money, I'll
build hostels where youth can go free, no watchman, no fee." Her
dreams of free love are limited by the lovers she finds. After a long false
start, she discovers enormous sexual satisfaction, but must tailor her
life to her lover's monogamous ideals: she must conform to his
stereotype of a woman's love as "passionate, ideal, romatic," rather
than communicate her full and unromantic feelings, which scare him.
Thus she "resigned herself now to playing a part with him, because she
loved him," even though she realized "that each day would be a step
farther into the labyrinth of concealment and loving mendacity." She
reflects, "I belong to the race which is not allowed to reason.
Love is
blind
is the dictum, whereas, with me at least, Love sees everything."
F
or
Love A lone
beautifull y anatomizes the distortions, false hopes,
and bad faith that characterize dealings between the sexes; but Teresa
does discover a saner and more fruitful sexual relationship than any
Louie could have observed. Christina says herself that "meeting a man
who was my equal and liked me ... was the great freedom for me. You
can't live alone. Freedom is association with other people, and espe–
cially with a sexual partner." Her husband, William Blake, was not
only a businessman, but also a novelist and a Marxist theoretician. The
character modeled after Blake in
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
says:
"Women are an oppressed class and their peculiarities are imposed
on them by society to keep them in order." This is very much the
burden of
Letty Fox: Her Luck
(1946) and
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
(1948). Stead's chronicle of the Greenwich Village love affairs of Letty
Fox was too much for Stead's native land, which banned the book.
Similarly,
A Little Tea, A Little Chat
provoked the ire of
Time,
which
declared "that Miss Stead has chosen to write about the most loathsome
and amoral characters that can be dredged up from the cocktail bars
and brokerage houses of New York." The novel "assumes the quality
of a very shrill feminine nightmare."
In the meantime Stead and her husband were going through their
own nightmare. Stead was living in Hollywood and writing for the
movies, but she had also written for the
Left Review
and
New Masses.
She reports that "I was not in the line of fire at all, but I thought that
Bill should get out and some of my friends too, ;n that time....
It
was
