Letty Fox: A Divider, Not a Uniter

For the first time in I guess 110-odd books, the Mr. and Mrs.Buce readaloud club has found a book on which they emphatically disagree. Needless to say, we screen in advance, so we pick books we figure we both will like. And several times we have abandoned a book midway because neither one of us liked it. But we've finally come to a parting of the ways over Letty Fox: Her Luck.

You may remember Letty (and cf. link). She's the hopeful, hapless, inspired, energetic and often clueless heroine of the second-most-famous novel by Christina Stead--Stead who gained whatever acclaim she enjoys mostly through hereauthorship of The Man Who Loved Children. Letty is young--the story runs from her childhood through to her mid-twenties. No one can deny that she is full of life--together with an unstoppable enthusiasm for (or obsession with) men, the mere thought of whom seems to drive most any other thought out of her mind.

Channeled through her author, she carries it all off with energy, enthusiasm, and an near titanic fluency that stumbles and tumbles over pages for a single idea. Whatever you might think of her schemes and aspirations,still her stark vivacity is (I should have thought) something that you couldn't help but find engaging.

On perhaps a darker note, she is also, I think, a pretty good introduction to what life might have been like not that-all many years back when women had achieved a kind of independence but still weren't really on their own. Granted, you could hold a job, live alone, ride a bicycle, maybe even drive a car and (yes--at least in Greenwich Village) sleep with just about anybody you chose.

But the stark fact was, no matter how much you might try to wiggle out of it, your fate was always bound up with some man, if you couldn't fine one and entangle yourself with him, you were stuck with, well, with trying to find one so you could entangle himself with him. This fact goes a long way towards explaining the presence of, along with the brio, an irreducible sense of insecurity, and a kind of desperate infantilism that sullies over even the most attractive characters in the (rather large) cast.

What we have here, then, is a marriage of Saul Bellow and Jean Rhys--a bidungsroman without a lot of bildung, a tale of pathos without the pathetic. Stuff like this:

I thought with longing of an old-fashioned life. Perhaps I was tired of struggling so hard, without knowing it? I recognized how easy it would be to slip into the old way and become a squaw with a papoose. ... For the woman looking for love is like a little boat meeting waters[pout after waterspout. She is tired of steering, rowing, looking for land, hanging up old shirts for sails and the rest of it. But the pirates, they are not tired at all. They don't care if they don't make a landfall once in three years; they live off little craft. I went home, and felt depressed. ...

--Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck 451
(NYRB Paperback ed. 2001)

And so it goes, page after page and chapter after chapter. Fairness requires me to report that Mrs. Buce thought it appalling: she never came to terms with the shallowness, the self-absorption, the infantile romanticism the--as she put it, the Us Magazine atmosphere of the whole thing. She is correct on every point. But the brio, the brio.

Letty and Choice of Law

Before there were Delaware corporations and Cayman Islands hedge funds and Cook Islands asset protection trusts, there were Nevada divorces. The characters in Letty Fox: Her Luck by Christina Stead, understand this: they know that the task of a young woman in the 3os is to get married, and collect alimony. Well, yes, there is the matter of a divorce but this is a transitory instrument: a train trip to Reno, a bit of lipstick on the pig of the local residency requirements. and then home with a (sometimes fragile) triumph on a piece if paper. But Grandmother Morgan knows that you can't push it too far:

Now, if we start plundering the men, if we burden the trade with more than it can bear, it stands to reason that Congress of the Supreme Court or whoever does these things, don't you see, will start to go over the situation and we will get either no alimony at all, or else no divorce (which would be awful, girls, after all), or else a uniform law; and there are no pickings when there is a uniform law. You see what we women have now, in the U.S.A., is an arbitrage business ; we make pickings, even a fat living out of the differences between state laws, an excellent business, considering there are forty-eight states and not only a difference in the laws, but a confusion in the minds of judges, lawyers and divorcees.

--Christina Stead, Letty Fox: Her Luck (NYRB Paperback ed. )

Wiki has a splendid article about the culture of divorce at the old Riverside Hotel.

Mrs.Fox and Arina Petrovna (and Robert Frost)

Quite without intending to, I have stumbled into the literature of old age--specifically female old age. There are two instances in particular. One is Mrs. Fox, mother-in-law of Solander, mother-in-law of Mathilde, and so one of the dizzying circus of hustlers, dependents and naifs who swirl through Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck. Mrs. Fox is certainly not a naif. She she may have been a hustler, although this seems doubtful; at any rate, she is old and her powers may be seen to weaken. She is, alas, as dependent, or at least one who lives as such, not-very-effectively charming and wheedling herself to a bare sustenance day after day. She talks--my heavens, how she talks, pages at a time, with only the slenderest sense of narrative order. She's funny for he reader to listen to, but probably not so much if you are related to her. At the end of one such monologue, her daughter-in-law asks:

"Will you have some ccoffee?"
"If it is fresh."
"I don't reheat it."
"Reheat it: well, that to me is poison. I can't take it. That's another kind of thing, altogether."
"Mother, I asked you would you have some coffee!" [A pause.]
"Is it fresh? Who knows? What is she talking about?" [A pause.]"Not if it is reheated. I'm very sorry, I thank you, but I can't."
"I told you it was fresh."
"Well, if it's fresh. . . . Reheated, you say? No. All right, if it's fresh, but you say--" [A pause.]
"Here's your coffee."
"So latae in the afternoon? I don't know, my dear. I don't sleep." [No repsonse.] "Tea is better. Is it fresh, anyhow?" [Mournfully, low.] "They don't tell me. I don't know. I know nothing!"
"Drink your coffee," said Mathilde, "it's getting cold."
"Cold, hot? What does it matter? I'm dying, my dear!"
"Mother, please don't keep saying that. Every time you come--"
"My dear Mathilde, if you knew--" Grandmother let out a great cry, with a fresh voice, a wail; "I can't keep going any more; it's all over, my dear."
In fact, it is nearly over; a week later, Mrs. Fox is dead: "It was only then that Mathilde had the sense to see what had been the matter; death had been at his tricks.

Mrs. Fox was a dependent most, perhaps all, of her life.In Shchedrin's The Golovlyov Family," we are faced iwth Arina Petrovna who is quite another matter. Or was: for most of her life she bullied, sweated and otherwise dominated her family, her servants and anyone else in reach of the Golovlyov estate. But life is full of surprises; at the end of life she finds out that she too must subsist on the sufferance of others who have no instinct (but where would they have learned it?) to treat her any better than she treated others:

Day followed day with the depressing monotony so characteristic of country life, when one has neither material comfort, nor food for the intellect, nor work. Apart from the eternal causes that made personal work on the farm impossible for Arina Petrovna, she felt an inner revulsion against the petty cares that fell to her lot at the end of her life. She might perhaps have overcome her aversion had she had a purpose that would make her efforts worth-while--but that was just the point, she had no purpose. Everyone was sick and tired of her, and she was sick and tired of everyone. Drowsy idleness had taken the place of her former feverish activity and the idleness gradually demoralized her will, and developed in her inclinations she had not dreamt of a few months before. The strong and self-possessed woman whom no one v entured even to think of as an old lady had suddenly become a wreck, for whom there was neither past nor future, but only the present moment to be lived through.

On the evidence presented here, I suppose Mrs.Fox is marginally better off--at least there is someone to argue with her. But both women would have done well to harken to the advice of Robert Frost which, because it is late and because I am lazy--and because it sticks so vividly in my mind--I quote from memory:

The witch that came, the withered hag
To wipe the steps with oil and rag
Was once the beauty Abishag;
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood;

Die early, and avoid the fate,
Or, if predestined to die late,
Make certain that you die in state:
Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
So nobody can call you crone!

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all: Provide! Provide!