The Best Australian Essays 2015 (26 page)

Michael and Catherine are recognisable types, even today. Certainly, in my time at Sydney University, I knew many ‘Michaels': bright, damaged and self-destructive young men, who had somehow already disqualified themselves from life, greeting the world with pre-emptive anger. Michael has a snarling bond with Blount; they take a spiteful joy in seeing themselves as the hamstrung and dying young men in Évariste Luminais' painting ‘The Sons of Clovis'. This also has a ring of truth in a city in which masculine friendship often takes an exclusive form (and Stead is always a sharp observer of misogyny;
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
is a forensic study of women's place within a homosocial order, which Stead is always putting before us, in its many different forms). Although Michael has been damaged by the war, and a spiritually indifferent society, Stead suggests there is something amiss in his makeup from an early age. The psychology of his last days is convincing; drifting from Bohemian party to pub, Michael feels he is at his most alive, while it's clear to those around him that he will die.

Catherine, too, is a familiar type. ‘Dark, furious, thin, poor by choice', she is ‘a woman of revolution without a barricade … a woman who worked in holiday camps and workers' education theatres, always passionately involved in something, always half-sick'. Though the obstacles they face are by no means as extreme as in Stead's day, I have also known my share of ‘Catherines' – women in whom ambition has transformed into self-denial, all too aware of the price extracted for independence, who have learned to make themselves useful where they fear they can't be brilliant. For all her work, Catherine is not fully accepted by the men she works with: Stead is superb at showing how they constantly exclude her, even while they find her fascinating; and Stead's study of misogyny is the sharper, I think, for simply showing its repetitive patterns without ever giving us a lecture. But Catherine is tough; she will survive, even if she has to drive a knife into her flesh to prove it to herself. And this, the novel implies, is precisely because she resists Michael's solitary impulse. Other characters are just as sharply defined: pudgy, angelic, philosophical Baruch, with his ‘golden sanity'; the excitable, stunted Kol Blount, wrapped in his own twilight, throwing off sparks of feeling as he speaks ‘as a cat seems to throw out sparks on a stormy evening'.

The sparks are important. Baruch, too, will describe conversation as ‘the fire of social life'. For all my descriptions of its prose, the strange, overwhelming brilliance of this novel is found in speech, which has a kind of force that we can almost see glowing upon the page.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
is a novel full of talk. It pours, flares and blazes forth in different moods and modes: in complaint, anecdote, exegesis, sociable nonsense and oration. Talk dominates, especially in the novel's challenging late pages, in kind of Gothic eruption. Towards the end of the novel, Catherine delivers a set of nightmare stories told to her by Michael to Fulke Folliot in a section that bears its own heading, ‘Catherine's Narrative', and ends by revealing the half-siblings' incestuous attraction. Subsequently, in the Forestville Asylum, where Catherine has come to teach the inmates and care for herself, she, Fulke, a passing madman and Kol Blount launch into a sequence of delirious stories of landings on imagined worlds, including an abstracted Australia, while Blount famously delivers his damning vision of the country as a pale imitation of Europe and unsuited to life (‘Nothing floats down here, this far in the south, but is worn out with wind, tempest and weather; all is flotsam and jetsam'); many readers have taken this as the expatriate Stead's ‘message'. Stead grants each of her characters his or her own soliloquy, which takes us into their internal worlds, and this is where readers of Stead's work often come unstuck, because of the clash between this high-flying, mannered talk and her painstaking, realist observation. The incandescence of all this talk is echoed by Stead's descriptive prose: those direct, vigorous, extended sentences, with their more than full measure of adjectives and nouns. Yet much of the excitement, the intensity, the sense of youth and
life
in Stead's novel comes from this heightened, almost febrile, language.

This interiority is balanced by the extraordinary beauty of the city's natural setting; in Fisherman's Bay, still a small village, a small clear wave runs up the beach at low tide, ‘playfully ringing its air-bells'. The novel is filled with a sense of wonder at this not-entirely-tamed city, where the workers at the communist newspaper hear the palms in the gardens of the old colonial houses thrashing in the wind. Another reason I love Stead's book is that it gives a rare glimpse of one of Sydney's many evanescent layers (here an odd mix of Victorian, early colonial and jarring modern) which have vanished so thoroughly that they might not ever have existed.

It's astonishing that Stead was able to depend entirely on memory as she wrote
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
in London and Paris. In 1928, aged twenty-six, after a period of extreme scrimping detailed in her autobiographical novel
For Love Alone
, Stead escaped Sydney and her narcissistic, overpowering father by sailing for England. In London she found secretarial work with a firm of grain merchants and was soon in her first, longed-for, adult relationship with her married Russian-Jewish American boss, Wilhelm Blech (later to change his name to William Blake). Later, the couple moved to Paris so he could be near his wife, daughter and mother, who had relocated there. A trained economist, Blake shared Stead's interest in socialism, but moved in cultured, intellectual Marxist circles. While dealing with his other family was fraught, this was the best time of Stead's life. She had been planning her novel for a long time – in London she was calling it
Death in the Antipodes
, and as a precocious schoolgirl in Australia she had already spoken about writing a book called
The Lives of Obscure Men
– but as she reworked it in Paris, these years with Blake seemed to imbue the writing with a sense of possibility. While her later novel
For Love Alone
would not,
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
allows that Australia might offer some paths to fulfilment and happiness. Blake's presence can also be felt in Baruch Mendelssohn, the novel's short, pale and loquacious Marxist theoretician.

London publisher Peter Davies accepted the novel; worried about launching Stead with this book, however, he asked for another.
The Salzburg Tales
, stories based on
The Decameron
, appeared in January 1934, and
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
later the same year. While reviews were positive, they tended to compare Stead's novel unfavourably to her more clearly fabulist debut. Yes, genius was evident, they conceded – but perhaps too much. The United Kingdom's
Listener
described the novel as a work with ‘brilliant faults'. In Australia, the reviewer in
The Bulletin
was less kind: the ‘dazzling book by a Sydney girl' was ‘diabolically clever', but rambling. The story of Stead's subsequent critical neglect, as she and Blake eked out a hand-to-mouth existence in America and England, is too well known to need repeating in detail here. After a thirteen-year period following her ninth novel,
The People with the Dogs
, when Stead could not find a publisher, the world would finally recognise Stead as a major writer after the reissue of
The Man Who Loved Children
, in 1965, with an introduction by esteemed critic Randall Jarrell – though the praise came too late, one suspects, for Stead herself.

But this still did little to help
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
. One of the many ironies of Stead's career is that we now cherish her writing for the very reasons we once excluded her from the national literature, praising its geographical reach as a cosmopolitanism ahead of its time, and her interest in women's desire. Yet it seems this has only cast her one novel set entirely in Australia into further shadow. Once it was established as her ‘masterpiece',
The Man Who Loved Children
acclimatised readers to Stead's more brusque late style, against which the lyrical flights of her early writing were judged as self-indulgent verbal skiting. Stead's lifelong tendency to self-dramatise didn't help: she wrote the novel, she said, when she had been very ill and wanted to leave some record behind her. Critics have run with this, concluding that the book was, in the words of critic Michael Ackland, ‘a pent-up outpouring'. In his introduction to the 1965 Angus & Robertson edition of
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
– its first publication in Australia – Stead's friend and executor Ron Geering argued that its ‘reckless sincerity' outweighed the youthful excesses and ‘self-conscious' brilliance of an author too in love with colourful, unusual words. In her superb 1982 appraisal of Stead's genius in
The London Review of Books
, a classic in its own right, even Angela Carter classed
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
as part of the ‘puppy fat' the author would begin to burn off in her 1938
House of All Nations
, in her journey from ‘craftsman' to ‘honest worker'.

Here Stead also falls on the wrong side of a very long-lasting prejudice in modern literature against voiced or lyrical writing. Since Flaubert's
Madame Bovary
, and his insistence on the artist as God in the universe, present everywhere but visible nowhere, naturalism has dominated the upper flights of the literary landscape; we value most writing as a transparent window through which we see the world. Writers who denaturalise language, who bring it to the forefront, like Jeanette Winterson, or John Banville, tend to be seen often as lesser writers. (The great exceptions being James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett). Stead has a flawless ability to observe with great accuracy, but she eschews the comforts of naturalism. Hers is writing in which we're aware of the words, of the material, as it renders the world, rather like looking through alabaster or porphyry rather than through glass.

But what if
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
is, as I suspect, Stead's best book: the freest of autobiographical debt and the judgemental hardness of her later eye? What if she knew exactly what she was doing when she mixed the material and numinous? In that case, what we have in our hands is something brilliant and heroic. Stead knew her Marxist materialism, which understood social relationships as products of the conditions of production; her title shows her debt. But Marxist theory has rarely been sympathetic to the artistic or the literary. Yet here is Stead insisting on a point of entry where poverty and the spirit bump together. Certainly, materialist analysis is everywhere: in Baruch's speeches, but especially in Stead's insistence on showing how poverty cramps her characters like root-bound plants in too-tight pots; and yet they are in a continual struggle to find meaning.

In Stead's novel, thinking, speaking, trying to find a position is work in itself, a dynamic, continuous, shifting fight between order and chaos. To this Stead adds another level: language. She beats, blows and burnishes it so that it seems also to be forged into a kind of material thing itself, a form of conspicuous
labour
(it's not always easy to read either). In this singular, brave novel she is, in a sense, doing the materialist hard yards, while offering an extra level of critique of women's status within the socialist scene; added to which, she insists on her right as a novelist to situate art, thematically and formally, as beautiful effort.

If we return to that window-shopping scene, as Joseph and Baruch walk through the city, there's another wonderful moment where Joseph is contemplating buying some toothpaste: ‘Weighing what he needed and did not need, he felt how round and complex was his personality. He almost felt the ebb and flow in the markets, the jostling in the streets, the polishing of counters by elbows.' Stead shows us her debt to Marxist theory, that she knows its social milieu exactly and has the ability to draw such a breathtakingly rich portrait; but at the same time, here she is, making a bold, iconoclastic statement for the debt this world owes to art. You can't have revolutionary thought without art, or – I think Stead is quietly insisting, through hardworking Catherine – without women.

In one of the pivotal moments in the book, mild cousin Joseph attends a free physics lecture at the university. All can be seen, he thinks, and feels elated; then darkly, painfully, ‘the bottom fell out of his jerry-built heart'. The lecture is on light, which again reinforces the connection Stead makes between the luminous and thought. Stead's writing itself seems charged and luminous. It is never quite satisfied with the distance of realism. Because we are never allowed to escape an awareness that the characters and the novelist are actively making sense of the world, it can feel quite overwhelming. This sense of urgency, activity and plenitude is far from the cold inevitability of Flaubert. Life is a struggle, the book insists; the work of trying to live better, to see the world more clearly, is never done.

When I read
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
I feel as if I'm reading two books at the same time, a realist one and its own glistering reflection. This, I believe, is deliberate.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
sets up a sparking dance of opposites – a genuine dialectic. While none of her characters (with the exception, perhaps, of Joseph) quite settles with the world, her prose itself holds out the possibility of art as a place of heroic striving, of constant revolutionary consciousness of body and mind; it acknowledges the numbing effect of hard work while refusing to be numbed. The best comparison I can think of to Stead's method are the coruscated reliefs in Byzantine churches, designed to be looked at by moving candle flame: the lustrous, bumpy, surfaces of an angel's body were created to make us feel ‘liveliness' over the lifelike; not just to see but also to
experience
it as fire. In Stead's secular universe, the angel is human potential. That Stead was able to bring such a vision out of the local soil was a small miracle in itself.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
lacked predecessors but would open the door to writers like Kenneth Slessor (in his later poem ‘Five Bells'), Patrick White and Elizabeth Harrower, who would also capture a Sydney of beauty and hard fact.