The Salzburg Tales

 

 

The Miegunyah Press

The general series of the
Miegunyah Volumes
was made possible by the
Miegunyah Fund
established by bequests
under the wills of
Sir Russell and Lady Grimwade.

‘Miegunyah' was the home of
Mab and Russell Grimwade
from 1911 to 1955.

 

 

Christina Stead,
The Man Who Loved Children

Christina Stead,
For Love Alone

Christina Stead,
Letty Fox

Christina Stead,
House of All Nations

Christina Stead,
Cotters' England

Christina Stead,
Seven Poor Men of Sydney

 

 

‘Christina Stead has the scope, the imagination, the objectivity of the greatest novelists.'

David Malouf,
Sydney Morning Herald

‘The most extraordinary woman novelist produced by the English-speaking race since Virginia Woolf.'

Clifton Fadiman,
New Yorker

‘I could die of envy of her hard eye.'

Helen Garner,
Scripsi

‘Stead is of that category of fiction writer who restores to us the entire world, in its infinite complexity and inexorable bitterness.'

Angela Carter,
London Review of Books

 

THE MIEGUNYAH PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[email protected]

www.mup.com.au

First published 1934

This edition published 2016

Text © Christina Stead, 1934; estate of Christina Stead, 2016

Introduction © Margaret Harris, 2016

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the
Copyright Act 1968
and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design by Peter Long

Typeset by TypeSkill

Cover design and illustration by Miriam Rosenbloom

Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Stead, Christina, 1902–1983, author.

The Salzburg tales/Christina Stead.

9780522862010 (paperback)

9780522869552 (ebook)

Miegunyah modern library.

Fiction—Collections.

A823.2

 

‘My life was filled with story from the first days.'

Christina Stead, ‘A Waker and Dreamer', 1972

C
HRISTINA
Stead thought of herself as a storyteller above all else. In
The Salzburg Tales
, her first published work of fiction, she gives a spectacular demonstration of her storytelling virtuosity, across an array of narrative genres that includes, according to her, ‘the sketch, anecdote, jokes cunning, philosophical, and biting, legends and fragments'. She attributed great power to story, maintaining that it ‘is magical … It is the hope of recognising and having explained our own experience … what is best about the short story [is] it is real life for everyone; and everyone can tell one.'

This insistence that the short story is a democratic mode— ‘everyone can tell one'—with roots in oral traditions like folklore, is apparent from the beginning of
The Salzburg Tales
. The lengthy opening chapter, ‘The Personages', is a
tour de force
introducing the thirty-one characters who tell over forty tales in a week. By choosing to call her narrators ‘personages', rather than ‘characters', Stead confers importance on them. They are a diverse group, designated by occupation (most are in business, the learned professions, and the arts), and range in age from a Schoolgirl and a Schoolboy to an Old Lady and an Old Man, and are predominantly male. Nearly all are
European, with a few Americans, an Australian, and ‘a Chinaman, the F
OREIGN
C
ORRESPONDENT
of a French newspaper', who is, however, thoroughly westernised.

Each vignette in ‘The Personages' implies a backstory: some, like the sketch of the Police Commissioner, are even narratives in miniature. His story, ‘The Deacon of Rottenhill', humorously aligns with his experience, making fun of police incompetence. A more complex instance of fit between tale and teller is provided by the Public Stenographer's ‘Overcote', placed immediately before the Centenarist's final recital. It is autobiographical, and pathetically shows how limited is the Stenographer's stoic understanding of the pathology of her family, at the same time as demonstrating her achievement in developing a successful niche business, in one of the instances throughout the volume that accord women unexpected worldly agency. Initially the Public Stenographer is sketched at greater length than any of her companions in a way that anticipates Stead's claim that ‘everyone can tell one'. We learn that despite her seeming ordinariness and the greyness of her daily life, she can enthral hearers with a repertoire of sensational stories arising from an occluded genealogy: ‘Behind her lay the ghostly tradition of English literature, the genius of the Brontës, the popularity of Scott and the mad gifts of Protestantism, but she did not know it'.

In other cases, like ‘Don Juan in the Arena', the tale is curiously at odds with the profile of its teller, the American Broker, for all the description of him as being full of contradictions. Some tales are told in response to a previous story. Thus in ‘The Sparrow in Love', the German Student talks back to the Mathematician's supernatural ‘The Mirror', both variants of the Narcissus legend. In addition, ‘The Mirror' is a riposte to the heated discussion about artistic inspiration between the Mathematician and the Centenarist in the immediately preceding ‘Interlude'. A different kind of narrative texture is developed in the Doctress's ‘clinical romance', ‘The Triskelion', famously described by Ian Reid as Australia's best horror story. It incorporates an inset narrative related by a barrister friend,
and moreover elicits a sequel from the Balkan Lawyer that prompts the Doctress to conclude that the ‘three-legged history … will never stop'. This comment on the power of story is underlined at the end, where story is accorded the elemental power of a force of nature as the Centenarist and the Viennese Conductor, ‘the great tale-teller and the master of tongues sang on through the quiet night. There was no indication that they would ever stop … for the earth breeds tales and songs quicker even than weeds'. Frequently anthologised, ‘The Triskelion' is one of the tales that provides fertile ground for critics who argue that
The Salzburg Tales
can be read as a manifesto about the nature of narrative, through analysis of Stead's fascination with ways of telling, and her ability both to exploit and subvert the traditions with which she engages.

Stead was given to making narratives of her own life as well as inventing original stories and revising traditional ones. After the republication of
The Man Who Loved Children
in 1965 revived her reputation, she looked back over the trajectory of her career, claiming that ‘my first novel, was an essay, at the age of ten, on the life-cycle of the frog. I was content with it, it could not have been better: the style was good'. Here she is writing about her start as a published author under the auspices of ‘Peter Davies (a famous man, godson of Sir James Barrie and the original Peter Pan)':

Of course it didn't happen just like that. Stead's account of the spontaneous, rhythmic emergence of
The Salzburg Tales
is belied by the factual record. As his condition for agreeing to take her novel
Seven Poor Men of Sydney
, in April 1931 Davies contracted for a more conventional book to be delivered first. Yet it was almost three years before
The Salzburg Tales
was published in January 1934, having been delivered in August 1933—hardly consistent with Stead's boast that she produced a story every couple of days.

The volume of short stories was in fact her second attempt to fulfil her contractual undertaking. Initially she worked on
The Wraith and the Wanderer
, advertised by Davies in hyperbolic terms as ‘a highly original and extremely modern story', scheduled for publication in November 1931. She had had this project in mind for some time, but though it was never completed, elements of it were to emerge in
The Beauties and Furies
(1936) and
For Love Alone
(1944), particularly in the narcissistic characters of the scholars Oliver Fenton and Jonathan Crow. The emotional dynamics presumably involved elements of Stead's current personal situation, especially given she was deeply involved in what was to become a lifelong relationship with Wilhelm Blech, an American of German-Jewish ancestry. By the mid-1930s Blech had anglicised his name to William (Bill) Blake, and definitively separated from his wife Mollie. Their divorce was finalised only in 1952, whereupon Blake and Stead promptly married. But in 1929 when Stead joined him in Paris from London, Blake was living neither with Mollie and his eight-year-old daughter Ruth, nor with Christina. Indeed, it was partly because of an impending visit to Paris by Mollie's American family that Blake encouraged Stead to attend the Salzburg Festival for six weeks from mid-July to late August 1930.

She relished the experience. A characteristically exuberant letter from Salzburg to her cousin Gwen Walker-Smith in Sydney relates her
schedule of concerts, opera (a devotee of Mozart, she went twice to
Don Juan)
, and theatre, including marionette shows, as well as the pageant play
Jedermann
(
Everyman
). Anxieties and misgivings, explicitly about her health, implicitly about their anomalous relationship, emerge from Blake's letters to Stead during their separation (she kept his letters though hers to him do not survive). His concern for her is apparent in letters that are always lively and occasionally ribald: ‘Save no money, eat cream, drink beer and get fat', he orders in one of them, signed ‘With reasonable genital affection Wilhelm'.

Stead's horizons had expanded hugely since her departure from Australia in March 1928, and
The Salzburg Tales
is suffused by her immersion in European culture in many forms. Beyond this, some of the stories are perverse versions of her personal circumstances: there are many stories, including ‘Overcote' and ‘The Triskelion', about dysfunctional families, or about thwarted love and infidelity, such as the Translator's Tale, ‘A Colin, A Chloë', set in contemporary London, and the Frenchwoman's Tale, ‘Gaspard', set in pre-Revolutionary France. In a different vein, the Jewishness of tales like ‘The Amenities', told by the Solicitor, and some of the Centenarist's, notably those told on the first and last days, can be attributed at least in part to Blake's influence. Certainly ‘the six wealthy men that the other guests in derision called the
Gold Trust'
, and the stories dealing with or alluding in passing to mercantile machinations, derive from her experience in the Travelers' Bank. But the achievement of
The Salzburg Tales
is far from straightforward sublimation or culture shock.