If Letty was invited to Christina Stead’s birthday party, preparations would be extensive. Clothing, accessories, the gift: everything would have to be “just so”. (Stead was born OTD in 1902; she died March 31, 1983.)

When Letty needs to find an apartment in New York City, however, she makes an enquiry in passing, offers a bribe at precisely the right moment, and days later she moves in.

She moves quickly and strategically—not only with real estate, but with boys/men too. But the geography of the wider world is less important than the inner landscape anyway, as Letty moves from the first part of her life “With the Others” to the next part: “On My Own”.

It’s Australian writer Christina Stead’s sixth novel, published in 1946, her second set in the United States but her first set in New York City. And Letty is in the process of becoming Letty: readers inhabit Letty’s perspective so closely that we can’t help but wriggle a little. The novel is just over five hundred pages long, and my VMC copy employs the dark-but-cramped font they use with all their longest tomes. It’s All-Letty-All-the-Time.

The story opens with a backwards glance: Letty is feeling “a general uneasiness about the kind of life [she] was leading”. She’s reading packets of love letters and thinking about what’s changed and what remains. She’s considering how what she’s observed of her mother’s relationships with men has impacted her own expectations. And she’s thinking about the gap between how she says that she wants to move through the world, and how much room the world affords her to move, which dramatically impacts her navigation.

“I’m twenty-four. That’s awful. I’ve simply got to live my own life. I know we’ve been over this before, but I simply boil over with it every night. Think how I live!”

Stead captures that twinned state of knowing-everything and knowing-nothing perfectly, by immersing us in Letty’s view. She says: “I have written everyday facts which, doubtless, have happened in the life of almost every New York middle-class girl who has gone out from high school or college to make a living in the city.” But, of course there is nothing universal about her experience, and the few hundred pages that follow prove that out.

Later she says: “I don’t know what the young want; I only know what I wanted. I wanted, in a way, to be truthful, to find the truth about myself. It’s hard indeed for youth to be truthful; revelations never seem moral. Adults lie in order to be moral.”

And as she begins to gather more personal experiences and begins to scrutinise the experiences of other women from a different perspective, everything shifts: “I had always thought of them as my father, my mother, my grandmothers, and my sister, and never thought that I was only their daughter, her sister.”

There’s not actually anything funny about these statements, but if you’re smiling tentatively, you’re not alone. Letty’s energy, her single-mindedness, her sense of entitlement, her intelligence: her observations and declarations are often quietly amusing and, sometimes, they are wickedly funny.

  “The idea of this money gnawed away at me. I needed clothes, money for parties and presents, though my theatre tickets and movies and cocktails were all paid for by others. I wanted corsages and taxi-rides and more than could be provided for by the boys I went with.
I saw what happened to the girls who looked poor, talked poor, and went poor—they went poor, semi-colon; and they got no invitations, period. They didn’t live; they dragged along like an amoeba, rather, like a slow-worm. (I don’t know if that’s really slow.)”

This passage captures Letty’s concern with her basic needs (no matter where she’s living after her parents have split, she regularly plies family members for cash, for such… essentials) and the value she places on presentation (a vital component of securing… economic security: ultimately via a relationship with a man, which she expects to be a grand love affair as well as an income).

But it also captures Letty’s humour: I really love the little punctuation giggles here. (Maybe you missed them the first time: I did too. Stead’s prose is packed with little gems like this. More on the worms, later.)

I first read this novel twenty years ago, very quickly (taking not one note): that struck me as odd, but rereading, almost immediately, I was caught up in the rush and had to force myself to backtrack and flag passages. Letty’s voice seems to drown out everything else. Which is ironic because, with Letty, I think she’s straining hard to hear herself think, to figure out where she belongs and what she believes.

There are layers to all of this, for the curious reader to plumb. The value of truth reverberates through an examination of class (particularly through experiences with grandmothers on each side of her family), misalignment between how events unfold and how they are reported (for instance, in letters exchanged between characters), the importance of creative work (writing, for Letty: she’s always on the verge of being published in The New Yorker), and politics (“It was a blow over the heart to everyone radical in New York when Madrid, and with it, Spain, fell”).

Sometimes Stead presents rich and varied scenes (a note at the beginning credits unnamed people in Manhattan, whose banter and jokes fill a few pages mid-way) which invite discussion about behaviour and norms, expectations and betrayals; sometimes we simply absorb the significance of a visit Letty remembers taking to someone’s house, which informs what she sees as her choices, while the contents of a bookshelf are enumerated to condense the inhabitants’ values and worldview for us (without comment).

No question, Letty is A Lot. She takes herself very seriously. But she’s also willing to call herself an amoeba and to joke about slow worms. (In fact, they aren’t slow, and Letty hints it’s more complicated than that in her parenthetical quip: they’re lizards without legs, which look like—but aren’t—snakes, or worms.)

And Stead’s novel raises all sorts of broader questions about life beyond the page too: what happens when the way we’ve always defined things—and ourselves—is understood to be fundamentally limiting? What if the thing we’ve always pursued is the last thing we want? Is it easier to change the course of pursuit, or to change the wanting?

Thanks to Bron and Bill (I’ll add links to their specific CS posts here and here, later), who also have read and reread Letty this June and July. It’s always fun reading with you two!