New York Picaresque: The Cosmopolitanism of Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck

Abstract

New York Picaresque:The Cosmopolitanism of Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck Jo Lennan (bio) Letty Fox: Her Luck was Christina Stead's sixth novel. It was published in October 1946, a year after the end of World War II. It is set in Manhattan and was largely written there (Rowley 246, 282). Stead had come to New York not from Sydney, her home city, but via England and continental Europe, where she had lived with her longtime partner (and later husband), William Blake. Blake was a Jewish American broker, economist, and writer, and Hitler's pursuit of Lebensraum had persuaded the couple to quit the continent for the United States. As confirmed Europhiles, they found the adjustment difficult at times. Both Stead and Blake made sporadic forays away from the city in search of work, trying their hands at screenwriting for MGM in California, for example, and writing applications for Guggenheim grants (Rowley 267). Stead also taught courses on the novel at New York University. By the time Stead began writing Letty Fox in 1941, the city—with its rhythms of speech, characters, and splashy advertising copy—had started to exert a hold on her imagination. Letty Fox presents itself as the story of a single "New York girl," the job-bing word-stringer Letty, at large in Manhattan. It is picaresque in its depiction of Letty as a roguish antiheroine who is prepared to stoop to sharp dealings to get an apartment or a man, both of these being scarce wartime commodities. It is also very much an interloper's novel of New York, in which we can see Stead writing her way into her adoptive city and country. She kept magazine cuttings and mined the lives of Blake's family (Rowley 172–73, 282). She depicts Manhattan with relish and wit, satirizing bourgeois families and the wartime marriage market. Letty Fox became the first in Stead's trio of New York novels, the others being A Little Tea, a Little Chat (1948) and The People with the Dogs (1952).1 Stead later continued this manner of writing—in what could be called her interloper mode—after her later move to the United Kingdom, with Cotter's England (1966), a novel of Labour England. As Hazel Rowley writes, "No major writer of any nationality has been more truly cosmopolitan than Christina Stead, with her genius for portraying disparate locales, voices and expressions" (xi). Among those who are familiar with Stead, this is a shared view, and yet we have so far lacked a sustained analysis of how her cosmopolitanism manifests itself in her works. In this essay, I aim to examine Letty Fox in [End Page 297] this light. Of Stead's novels, it might seem an unlikely candidate. It is not identified on its face with cosmopolitanism. Rather, in Nicholas Birns's words, it shows Stead becoming "secondarily localized" as an author, writing fiction that is "more parochially anchored in a New York familiar to her intended reader" (Contemporary 42). Not counting The Man Who Loved Children (1940), of whose imaginative relocation I will say more later, it was Stead's first American novel. As I will argue, however, Letty Fox is no less an expression of Stead's cosmopolitan. This is not only because it reflects what Michael Upchurch called "her mimic's ability to immerse herself in whatever place she happened to be" but also because of the novel's literary antecedents and, even more so, because of its challenge to the nation as a singular locus of belonging and allegiance. Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism In seeking to understand Stead's cosmopolitanism with particular reference to Letty Fox, I am bearing in mind both theoretical conceptions and more general usage in literary studies and elsewhere. In philosophy, cosmopolitanism is an ethical concept that is traced to the Cynics of the fourth century BC and particularly the oft-quoted statement of Diogenes of Sinope, who, when asked where he was from, coined the word kosmopolitês, "a citizen of the cosmos."2 As Anthony Appiah explains, "The cosmos referred to the world, not in the sense of the earth, but in the sense of...