A Web of Friendship

Selected Letters (1928-1973)

Christina Stead

• Publisher: Miegunyah Press Digital
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780522871388
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

'I am not a born writer, but I must say that when I have actually launched myself I get the profoundest and most passionate satisfaction from writing.'—Christina Stead

A Web of Friendship is a collection of Christina Stead's intimate correspondence with influential literary figures such as Stanley Burnshaw, Ettore Rella, Nettie Palmer, Clem Christesen, Elizabeth Harrower and A.D. Hope.

These letters span the life of one of Australia's most illustrious writers, offering a rare insight into the relationships that influenced and sustained her work. They reveal Stead's reflections on the art of literature, the development of her political thought, and the significance of a handful of friendships that would endure throughout her life and career.

The letters cover Stead's arrival in England in 1928, as well as her time abroad in Europe and the United States. They also detail her marriage to William Blake, their life in England where they settled in 1953, as well as her brief return to Australia and her final years in England following Blake's death.

To Florence Walker-Smith¹

The Club House,
33 Cartwright Gardens,
London. WC1
17th June, 1928

Dear Auntie Florrie,

Writing you from my solitary chamber on the borders of the Euston wilds at the end of a somewhat cold Sunday afternoon, I am wishing I could see you to have a chat, without the trouble (of course, no trouble, I assure you!) of going 12,200 (or whatever it be) miles. I have a sinister feeling that Time is stealing you all, so that when I do see you again, there will be a sort of gap in you all which I can’t fill in—of course, I have given up hope of ever seeing my family as I left it, but I am beginning to feel as if even you others will all be different people. Well, I’ll tell you what I don’t like most of all—that is, not being able to run round and see you on your birthdays and enjoy our usual little celebrations, etc., and when I think of all the birthdays approaching—Gwen’s and the rest—I begin to realise how foolish I was to go gadding off to Albion perfide and the Continong. Now pray don’t accept that as a sign of repentance! I am, despite what I say, glad that I am away and out—I wish I’d stop talking about it, though! The reason I talk about it so much, is that my daily life is not intensely exciting and although all the fire engines in the district rush past my window nearly every night and last night there were six gunshots just along the road, and I make horribly and unmentionably scandalous faux pas in my French class and I am touching the night spots in the way of fashionable restaurants and picture-shows at 7/9 a time (but mind you, that is not what I pay, that is what the elite pay—when I go, I pay the paltry, proletarian, plebeian price of 2/4, which is enough to make gold-braid commissionaire and velvet-coated ushers and silk-laced ladies-in-waiting and plush tam-o’-shantered seat-finders and all the rest of the princely riff-raff who are absolutely essential to one’s finding one’s seat—enough to make them sniff with their princely noses and snap with their princely thumbs, I say)—well, I say, despite all this, life is somewhat dull, unless you are thrilled by the fact that this afternoon I found my way through the Metropolis’ subterranean tubes, corridors, lanes, subways, arteries and cetera and went to the National Art Gallery and spent three hours solid staring at Correggio, Rubens, Raphael, Tintoretto, Michaelangelo, Constable, Canaletto, Tiepolo, van Dyck, and Rembrandt out of countenance, and trying to look interested in the thousands of wooden madonnas and imbecile ‘Childs’ and anaemic Christs, and came out with a head full of Venuses of dubious virtue and painfully and obscenely interested young men and inspected the Nelson Column! …

Peg²

1. Christina’s father’s younger sister. First part of letter only.

2. Christina was usually Peg to the family. See letter of 29 August 1982 (Talking into the Typewriter, Selected Letters 1973–1983).

To Gwen Walker-Smith¹

The Club House
11th July, 1928

My Dearest Gwen,

Thank you for your letter which I was very pleased indeed to receive. I often wish you were here with me when we could fill in the long weekends seeing all that there is to be seen: I saw a young girl like you in the Underground the other day which made me stand still for a moment and there is a girl who has lunch in the place where I lunch who looks something like you but that she is less lively, and she has a pack of wolf-cubs, I notice and is always learning tales to teach them and moral histories and the like. She also takes them out for afternoon outings—I hear her tell this, I don’t know her.

I hope you enjoyed your birthday and Greenie² came to the front with a bouquet for the star performer, as usual. I hope you are getting some assistance in all that work which is now on your hands and are not working too long and late. When is your holiday? I haven’t heard from Nellie,³ except once on the way over, so if you see her one of these days you had better ask her to write me when she has time. Has she yielded at last to impulse and left the old firm and gone to fresh fields and pastures new? I don’t suppose so, but I used to smile to see the seeds of unrest germinating in her mind.

I have nothing much to report at the moment: went to the Russian Ballet—perhaps you have heard about that escapade. Last Sunday I spent the day exploring London on my own—rather an exciting, rather a frightening process. At one moment you feel grand to be there on your own and seeing the sights and treading historic grounds and smelling historic smells and the next you feel like some small sort of insect crawling about miserably waving its antennae and only just out of its chrysalis and a long way from anywhere—which is, I suppose, exactly what insects feel like when they come out. The Tower of London is a curious sight—all built of small stones, with a wide moat and four central towers which are very poor style and toy-like from our modern point of view. The modern style is represented all over the city by huge erections, built up pile upon pile, recessed and ‘stepped’ (as in New York), with pillars and statues, or else some great pseudo-monolithic place looking like Ancient Egypt. The Tower is positively trumpery—except when you first come on it, and then a thrilling feeling runs through your marrow—no doubt it is your marrow—or it may be your less polite innards. The windows whence looked the aristocratic martyrs now have (fairly) modern catches and curtains, so that it looks quite friendly. The gentlemen at the gates and the sentries wear sensational uniforms of red, black and gold—the porters are dressed in a kind of beef-eater costume which is fascinating until you get close and see a raffish, commonplace mug under the velvet hat and gold braid and hear a scolding, rough voice threatening the small boys issuing therefrom.

The first time I saw one of these scarlet and gold gentlemen on the railway station, I thought he was one of the chorus of the Russian Ballet, which I had just been to see—it took me ten minutes to realise that he was just as and where he should be and that I was the only person surprised. The porters and janitors and the like of the Bank of England, too, have very gay costumes which I will now harrow you by describing. Red, weskits, long-tailed bangers of a pucy-pink which doesn’t quite know its own mind, black understandings, top hats. The functionaries in chief, such as Head Janitor and Assistant Head Doorkeeper wear also a long red gown after the style of doctors of medicine, with bits of dog’s fur or rabbit-fur in rows, in the most regal style, and a cocked hat exactly like our hero Mr Bumble. It’s really queer to keep running up against these old customs in the very centre of a modern city—or what passes for a modern city—I begin to have doubts about it all.

We have had a couple of weeks of sunshine and the last few days have touched 84 degrees—everyone is groaning about the heat, but our building is cool in summer (and freezing in winter), so that I only just begin to feel like natural when I have spent half my lunch-hour promenading on the sunny side of all the streets near. Keith⁴ is tutoring at Oxford and having a gloriously lazy time in dazzling sun, he says—which makes me painfully envious: I just yearn to be out in the country somewhere—I have seen just a glimpse of the countryside, out by Oxshott, where I went driving with the Unwins (Marie Byles’s relatives). London would be unbearable, were it not for the wonderful little providential squares which crop up every two or three hundred yards and are as green as anyone could imagine in Summer, with millions of light fluttering leaves—limes, plane-trees and beeches.

Let me know how you are and what you are doing when you have time.

Much love, as ever,

Peg

1. Christina and Gwen (Florence’s daughter) were brought up together in their early years. See ‘A Waker and Dreamer’ in Ocean of Story.

2. Walter Greenbaum, businessman, Gwen’s first employer.

3. Nellie Molyneux, girlhood friend at Watsons Bay. See letters 1 March and 2 April 1929.

4. W. G. K. Duncan, BA Sydney 1924, MA Sydney 1926. Awarded the James King of Irrawang Travelling Scholarship to study in England. In 1932 he became assistant lecturer of philosophy at the University of Sydney and in 1954 Professor of Politics at the University of Adelaide.

To Gwen Walker-Smith¹

The Club House
12th September, 1928

Dearest Gwen,

I was delighted to get your ten-page letter and to hear all that you have been doing (although I don’t suppose it was half of what you manage to crowd into your busy life) and of the operas you and Auntie Florrie had managed to see. I am glad to hear that Mr Greenbaum now comes in every second day, if that lightens your burdens a bit. As for that Fox,² I don’t like him so much and have nothing to say about him. I can’t remember what I said about the National Gallery: I’ll bet it was all wrong. I went there again recently with Francette (Mlle Hubert) and we saw some beautiful things, especially the Madonna dei Ansidei of the Italian schools and some Dutchies. She can’t bear the Flemish school and isn’t even very keen on Rembrandt, but she admits the finish of Van Dyck. Rubens by the way, that florid, fleshy, sensualist, neither of us can bear. Her criticisms are as frank as they are original. She has had the advantage of Paris and Odessa and all the places intervening. In Paris each year there are many salons, including salons of caricaturist, futurist and satiric art, so that she can view all that we have from all those windows of experience. For example, she considers that Epstein’s grotesque Madonna, which is a statue of an ill-looking, obviously enceinte peasant woman, and ugly, is a Jew’s satire on the Christian Madonna. For my own part, I thought it was his attempt at realism and no satire: it is impossible to say: his work is thoroughly ‘realistic’ by which I mean it shows the bones, the pockmarks and the receding chins of various unsavoury specimens of mankind. It has a scorn of artistic affectation, I consider and is worth preserving.

There was much excitement in Paris during the signing of the Pact. Phrases flowed free, but the French are militarists at heart and Germany is an obsession with them. Mlle Hubert is absolutely hopeless on the subject of Germany and Mr Blech³ seems to feel that France is still afraid. I understand she has done us the honour to shift her aeroplane base up this way: she has no love for us, but unfortunately we have America with us. I understand it is said in diplomatic circles in France that if America were not there, she would pick a quarrel with us tomorrow. She is bitterly opposed to any Anschluss idea and is very much afraid of it. Things aren’t at all jolly in Europe: the same jealousies looking sideways, when they are endeavouring to meet each other’s eyes foursquare. I don’t know that there is a great deal in the Anschluss idea. Germany ardently desires it, but they say the duality of government would be impossible and so it seems to me. It isn’t well received in Vienna. Vienna has been socialist these seven years and the bourgeoisie are in a hopeless position. The Riviera is full of longfaced Viennese bourgeois who cannot endure their taxes (as of the English aristocrats who live abroad to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Preface
• Introduction
• Contents
• A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters (1928–1973)