Christina Stead, Australian writer, born 1902, died 1983. Best known for her novels, The Man Who Loved Children (1940), Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946) and her collection of stories, The Salzburg Tales (1934). Stead seems to me the kind of writer who lived story, who had, so to speak, story in the blood. A writer’s writer, you might say, who, though apparently a committed Marxist, didn’t let her political beliefs turn her fiction into ideological proselytising. Stead wasn’t interested in being a popular novelist, or a bestselling author, what she was, to her core, was an individual artist, a writer. As she wrote of her childhood, “I was born into the ocean of story, or on its shores.”
Christina Stead — Quotes:
“I love Ocean of Story, the name of an Indian treasury of story; that is the way I think of the short story and what is part of it, the sketch, anecdote, jokes, cunning, philosophical and biting, legends and fragments. Where do they come from? Who invents them? Everyone perhaps. Who remembers them so that they pass endlessly across city life? I know some of those marvellous rememberers who pass on their daily earnings in story; and then they are forgotten to become fragments, mysterious indications. Any treasury of story is a residue of the past and a record of the day; as in Grimm, we have ancient folklore and church-inspired moralities and some tales to shiver at which are quite clearly frightening local events.” (from, Ocean of Story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead, 1985, edited by R. G. Geering)
“The short story can’t wither and, living, can’t be tied to a plan. It is only when the short story is written to a rigid plan, or done as an imitation, that it dies. It dies where it is pinned down, but not elsewhere. It is the million drops of water that are the looking-glass of all our lives.” (from, Ocean of Story)
“My purpose, in making characters somewhat eloquent, is the expression of two psychological truths: first, that everyone has a wit superior to their everyday wit, when discussing their personal problems, and the most depressed housewife, for example, can talk like Medea about her troubles; second, that everyone, to a greater or lesser extent, is a fountain of passion, which is turned by circumstances of birth or upbringing into conventional channels — as, ambition, love, money-grubbing, politics, but which could be as well applied to other objects and with less waste of energy. There are some whom this personal sentiment makes wanderers and some who stew all their lives in their own juice and ferment. I confess that the study of personality is a private passion, with me.” (Christina Stead, interviewed in 1935)
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