Displaced Persons

Abstract

Christina Stead’s exorbitant imagination makes demands we have not yet come to terms with. Her idiom seems often as alien as it is impressive — a tribute to her originality and power as a writer, doubtless, but a back-handed one. It’s partly because her work was so neglected, so unassimilated, that she is hard, still, to take. With a less ambitious writer this would matter less, but in reading her now it’s an abiding irony. Her passionate crafsmanship should have been part of the diet post-war readers and writers grew up on. Major writers need re-readers, a chorus of commentary, argument and exegesis, if they are to occupy their proper space in the canon. Stead is difficult in more senses than one. She herself seems to have spent her last grouchy ten years or so (she died in 1983), back in her native Australia, covering her tracks, refusing to stand for any of the things hopeful interviewers and researchers wanted her to represent: feminism, literary experiment, the old Left…. ‘The “Reds” have done me a disservice by claiming me as one of their woolly sheep,’ she complained in 1973, ‘when in reality I am a goat.’¹ Chris Williams’s pioneering biography (A Life of Letters) portrays a woman who was stubborn, unpredictable, and mean. As her long, wandering life curved back on itself — London (1928), Paris, the United States (1938–46), England again, then ‘home’ — she was consumed with scorn and loneliness.

The people I loved were Shelley and Shakespeare. Finished. The person who is genuinely original — and I am, in the sense that I was cut off from literature, and I was even cut off from family life in that I was an orphan from my first family — is not looking for patterns.

(Christina Stead in a (Sydney) National Times interview, 1981)