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very unpleasant." From
1947
to
1953,
when she settled in England,
Christina Stead lived in Antwerp, Montreux, Bologna, Basle, Brussels,
Lausanne, London, Paris, and The Hague. And, except for three
translations of French novels published in
'55
and
'56,
she seemed
headed for literary oblivion. Elizabeth Hardwick did attempt a resur–
rection of "The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead" in the pages of
the
New Republic
in
1955,
but little else was heard until in
1965
The
Man Who Loved Children
was republished with Randall Jarrell's
extraordinary introduction. Then
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
and
For
Love A lone
were republished in Australia. And in
1966
Christina Stead
published her first new novel in fourteen years,
Cotter's England,
badly
retitled for American readers
Dark Places of the Heart.
The novel
prompted some reevaluations, including this encomium by Jose
Yglesias:
Impervious
to
literary fashions, she is now in serene possession of a
fiction technique that is a perfect crossing ... of the Dreiser and
James legacies.... She deals with common, accessible experience
and immerses the reader so thoroughly in the scene that the reading
becomes a life experience, not an entrance into that enclosed other
world of the novelist's about which it has become a cliche
to
speak....
Dark Places
of
the Heart
is a great novel and . . . in the
wings stand eight out-of-print novels which can tell us, as Balzac did
for the same period a century ago, how the world has chosen us
to
live....
(The
Nation,
Oct. 24, 1966)
In
1967
Stead was nominated for the Britannica Australia Award
of $10,000, but the award council declared her ineligible for the award
because, though still a citizen, she'd lived abroad since
1928.
At this
time her husband died. And her novel about Hollywood and Mc–
Carthyism,
I'm Dying Laughing,
was criticized by her publisher for
not presenting sufficient political history to a public which had
forgotten McCarthy. She amassed "all the documentation in the
world" but decided "I can't write it up-it's not my line you know"
and "dropped it." This mammoth novel which defines "Miss Amer–
ica" just as
The Man Who Loved Children
defined "Mr. America"
will, it is rumored, appear soon. Meanwhile, we have whatever falls
from Ms Stead's pen, or is found wherever she has left it, plus
Miss
Herbert.
The latter is as characteristically unique as anything in
Stead's work.
It
is a novel within a narrow genre of unrelenting satire
of its central character. Eleanor passes through the fringes of feminist,
bohemian, demimonde, cultist and literary London. The satire is not
only of Eleanor, but of a society where her cliches of life are, for the
