Cotter's England
Authors: Christina Stead
Christina Stead
Cotters' England
Introduction by Margaret Walters
This edition 1980
Copyright © Christina Stead 1966
Introduction Copyright © Margaret Walters 1980
ISBN 0 86068 128 9
For my Friends Anne and Harry Bloom
Introduction
I
N
COTTERS' ENGLAND
Christina Stead creates one of the most remarkable heroines in modern fiction. Heroine may not be the right word. Nellie Cook, born Cotter, is a monster. Stead— always an uncompromising writer—risks centering on a woman who is excessive, melodramatic, almost a comic caricature. Nellie alienates us at every turn. She is a self-proclaimed socialist whose politics are nothing but mystical waffle; noisily proclaiming her feminist loyalty, she exploits and betrays her closest women friends, even driving one to suicide. But Nellie springs off the page with a vitality that compels our attention. We respond more deeply to her, learn more through her, than a score of more conventionally sympathetic characters.
Almost forty, Nellie scrapes a living as a journalist on a left-wing London paper. Her editor is increasingly impatient with her "sobsister" prose, and her marriage to labour leader George Cook is breaking down. Anxious, lonely and ill, Nellie rushes frenetically from her job to the pub to political meetings, from her decayed Islington house to the Tyneside slum where her parents still live. She drinks, smokes, stays up all night coughing her heart out. And she talks. And talks, and talks. All Nellie's energy, all her frustrated creativity, pour into words. She never stops haranguing, arguing, wheedling, charming, complaining. She talks endlessly about the value of talk, insisting that her friends plunge with her into orgies of confession and introspection. Yet she
has
friends. For though she is absurd and pompous and pretentious, though her "perpetual outlandish chick, pet, sweetheart and her northern affectations" grate on the ear, Stead convinces us that she is indeed a spellbinder. Even her more distant acquaintances are—at moments—captured by the "inner melody of the northern voice and its unexpected cry, its eloquence".
Nellie prides herself on her realism, on a unique insight into human suffering born of her working-class origins. Anyone who views the world differently is dismissed out of hand. According to Nellie, her newspaper editor "tailors reality" to fit his socialist theory, her friend Caroline is lost in a bourgeois dream world, and her brother Tom drifts through life as a vagabond, a mountebank, a mere shadow of a man. Yet it is immediately obvious to the reader that it is Nellie who shrouds the truth in fancy words, Nellie who postures and play-acts, who glosses over anything which might puncture her sentimental rhetoric about the grand old days up north, or about her perfect marriage. Nellie knows nothing, her brother complains, about her friends or about herself. She is a hypocrite—and at the same time she is engaged in a gallant attempt to re-make herself and the world she lives in. Stead takes her contradictions seriously, and still manages to view her ironically, with a sharp sense of her comic value.
Nellie's deepest feelings are all for her brother, Tom Cotter. Neither can bear the other, nor bear to let the other go. Locked together in a narcissisitic and sterile love rooted in adolescence, they are bitterly and accurately critical of one another, and of their own reflected selves. Nellie clutches jealously at her brother, competes with him, tries to monitor his relationships and to experience them vicariously, while he clings, resentfully and tenderly, to the older sister who had seduced him into drink and drugs and politics, who had formed him in her image. Unable to give themselves, unable to rest, both seek frantically for someone, anyone, who might fill and complete them; they are always driven back on each other. They share a sadistic adolescent pleasure in provoking emotions in others which they are incapable of experiencing in themselves. Each has fantasies of being a healer, a saviour; each brings pain and despair to those who love them. The novel is littered with their victims. At the very end of the book, George Cook's first wife, Eliza, who has tried to ignore the damage done to her by both Nellie and her callous brother, has a sudden shocking memory of her first impression of the "fatal" couple. Nellie is an "imp of Satan ... a mummer, a liar", and Tom a "curious being with a floating soul, neither man nor woman, and not human; neither of them human".
And Tom's deserted wife cries out angrily against his cold self-absorption. "He's walking by the mirror and looking in to smile, and coming back to you like a man out of a mirror, and he eats your heart away." And she is even more hostile to Nellie, who came between them, who even now, under the cover of affectionate concern, is "post-morteming for all she's worth, wringing the juice out of a corpse".
In one of the most chilling scenes in the novel, Nellie and Tom try to recapture their childhood intimacy by visiting the hall of mirrors at a country fair. They dance, "so there was a string of them in the dusty narrow corridor, a ballroom of the strangest people, but always the same two". They are amused, shaken, almost disgusted when they glimpse the truth of their own distorted reflections—Nellie is a "spindling hatchet witch" and Tom a "playing-card king". Stead's prose is riddled with images from folk or fairy stories, many of them grim and bloody. Richly realistic characters suddenly, jokingly, appear in more primitive guise as witches or ghouls or harpies. Nellie jealously asserts that Tom's many women friends consume him and suck him dry. But the metaphors of cannibalism—of greed and insatiable appetite— cluster around Nellie herself: she is the vampire, a figure at once comic and terrifyingly destructive. When she claims that her brother has no heart, he turns the phrase back on her in a brutal, physically literal way : "You took it from me and lived on it and now you're scurrying around from one body to another, hungry and thirsty, and you'll do anything to still the pain."
Nellie may plead, seductively and convincingly, for greater intimacy with her friends. In fact, she is avid to possess and devour them, to incorporate their lives in hers. She flaunts her sympathy with prostitutes and deserted wives, with all the pathetic women who are wronged by men, at the same time secretly enjoying the pain inflicted on other women by her brother and her philandering husband. And in the end she does more harm than either of them. The most vulnerable of her friends is Caroline, who is deeply depressed by a broken marriage. Nellie, overwhelming her with compassionate concern, makes impossible demands on her; she belittles the girl's uncertain attempts to write and to form new relationships and gradually undermines her fragile hold on life.
At times, her brother remarks, a demon or an evil spirit seems to be speaking through Nellie; and in a scary climactic scene, she talks Caroline into a belief that suicide is the only way out of her troubles.
The episode brings out all the power and the weakness in Stead's writing. The whole novel has prepared us to recognize and understand Nellie's fascination with death. Fantasies of death excite and restore her, and the idea of suicide, of violent death of any kind, seems to heighten her sense of herself. But when an over-heated Nellie begs Caroline to offer herself as a blood sacrifice so that she, Nellie, may find renewed life, the narrative trembles on the edge of absurdity. And the lesbian bacchanalia at Nellie's weekend party, which finally unhinges Caroline, works neither as realism nor as fantasy. Stead suddenly seems nervous of her material; the relationship between Nellie and her "Bohemian" friends is never explored, and the episode disintegrates into brilliant but obscure fragments, into unsupported hints at unspeakable corruption. What Stead
does
communicate superbly is Caroline's sense that she is bewitched, trapped in some nightmarish, subhuman realm. Caroline walks the night streets to her death, exhausted, hallucinating, and "overshadowed by the lank hobbling stride of the woman who had taken her up, haunted her and ruined her. She was walking away from her, but Nellie was someone she carried with her, as you carry a bad parent always with you."
Nellie is a killer, but she is a victim as well, and demands our understanding and sympathy. Stead never allows us a cut and dried moral judgment. Nellie is presented so fully, so suggestively, that we must constantly shift and revise our attitudes to her. Stead never explains or expounds any of her characters; her talent is for giving them depth, for suggesting the kind of lives they lead off-stage, and for dramatising the multitude of ways in which the past lives on in the present. As in many of her novels, the story of one individual also involves decades of a family's history. Nellie's parents are old now, but their personalities stand out in sharper relief with the onset of death. They are viewed coldly, sardonically, at times with an almost Dickensian humour. Pop Cotter, once a professional footballer, is an unscrupulous charmer who plays to the gallery even on his death bed; his senile wife is finally and gleefully able to express her dislike of her own children; Uncle Sime, the lifelong bachelor who shares the house, skulks in the basement kitchen all day refusing to let anyone turn up the heat. All the family jealousies and fears that helped make Nellie and Tom are still startlingly alive. The pair are imprisoned by that cramped dark house as surely as is their sister Peggy who complains that she has wasted her life looking after the old people.
Through the skilful accumulation of gossip and reminiscence and casual allusion, we catch glimpses—oddly vivid and moving —-of Nellie as she once was ; a sixteen-year-old desperate to get away from home, impatient of formal schooling or the dull slogging work of orthodox socialism, driven to ever wilder and more disastrous experiments in her search for a better life. Nellie is still that adolescent. But she has the added vulnerability of middle age, of someone who must recognise that it is probably too late for radical change. Much of Nellie's near hysteria seems to be a defence against an awareness that she will never fulfil her early dreams or appease her childhood hunger. Tom, who for all his self-pitying passivity has moments of real insight, admits that they are both too marked by early privations and early choices to grow or develop much. Tom finally marries, almost at random, because he sees that he is beginning to resemble his timid old uncle. Nellie prides herself on her likeness to her glamorous father. But we gradually understand that Nellie will become—by the end of the novel is already becoming—a replica of her crafty, resentful, half-crazy old mother who can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead.
In the United States, the novel was published under the title
Dark Places of the Heart,
which stressed its psychological or even its pathological interest. But Stead's preferred title,
Cotters' England,
indicates the novel's real strength. To understand Nellie, we must understand not just her family, but the country which they inhabit and which has formed them. They are products of an England still haunted by the Thirties' depression and crippled by the aftermath of World War II. Nellie's husband George, annoyed by her blind and sentimental patriotism, describes Cotters' England as "the country of the depressed that starved you all to wraiths, gave Eliza TB, sent your sister into the Home, got your old mother into bed with malnutrition, and is trying it on with me too." Nellie is absurd and appalling partly because she is fighting for her life; she is trying to assert her
self
in an England that constrains and withers all hopes of growth. Rage and hunger and terror are constant notes beneath her endless flow of words. And these are very human responses to the physical and emotional impoverishment which the novel charts, to the lack of any real community, to the greedy egoism which George Cook embodies and which dominates all social relationships.
Beneath the psychological intricacies and the fantasy and the black comedy of
Cotters' England,
Christina Stead's political imagination is working all the time. When it first appeared the critic Jose Yglesias remarked that all the book's underlying questions are about politics. In fictional terms, Stead is asking "why the English working-class movement has not made the revolution. Though she deals only with its fringes and does not go to the centre of its trade union, Labour Party and intellectual circles, she has recreated the full ambience of its opportunism, charlatanism and demoralization." This may be overstating it. But it remains Stead's extraordinary achievement to persuade the reader to link the private and the political; to take a theme that seems eccentric, peripheral and even perverse, and turn it into a sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes comic, but always involving comment on our lives and times.