Lucy1958

House of All Nations

Author	Christina Stead
Language	English
Genre	Satire, Political fiction, Novel
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication date	1938
Publication place	Australia
Media type	Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages	127 pp
ISBN	978-0-684-80122-3
OCLC	33134129
Dewey Decimal	813/.52 20
LC Class	PS3515.E37 O4 1995
Preceded by	Seven Poor Men of Sydney
Followed by	The Man Who Loved Children

House of All Nations is a 1938 novel by Christina Stead, set in the world of finance, in the uneasy period between the wars. The plot concerns intrigue at a merchant bank, a bank ‘made of air’, which, in the end, collapses. In Stead’s obituary in The Times the novel was described as

a massive and superbly constructed story of greed and money, supported by impressive documentation about the financial world … and with two memorable portraits in depth. Here Christina Stead made fruitful use of her reading of Zola, and produced a novel worthy of him. Yet at the time it went entirely unrecognised as a masterpiece.

While perhaps not labelled a masterpiece, it was the only one Stead’s books that, at least in the United States, was both a critical success and a reasonably big seller on first release, and it is now ranked as one of her best works, although modern readership is probably small.

Characteristics of the book

The novel uses a vast ensemble of characters. The story moves in a series of ‘scenes’ rather than chapters. The narrative style is said to mimic financial communiques. Financial transactions are the fabric of the novel. The novel has a very long and apparently static structure transformed by the final drama whereby one apparently insignificant subplot, introduced early, and visible all the way through, ultimately brings about the bank’s downfall. As in the Mask of Dimitrios the cunning Bertillon is defeated not by brilliance but by stupidity.

The characters are placed centrally in the world of finance and politics rather than in private or home life: hence it is a novel focusing on men. European characters, Jewish and Gentile, predominate, and their conversation is rendered in an invented Gallic and Teutonic English.

The handful of leading characters are an array of interesting types. Henri Leon, the first main character introducted in the book, an excitable client always looking for a new woman and a new angle, whose speech is a fascinating spew of association and tangents. Jules Bertillon, the bank's owner, is mercurial, lives for the challenge of the game. Alphenderry, Jules' economic advisor and friend, thinks he wants to devote himself to the communist cause just as soon as he can help the bank over the next hurdle. His time is divided between clandestine political meetings and clandestine bank business. Jaques Carriere.......

While House of All Nations has been described as a novel with 'capitalist villains, and a socialist hero', it is more complex than that..........

Critical reception in 1938

Simon & Schuster heavily promoted this book and it received major, appreciative reviews in the United States, but not in England.

• The New Yorker
• Saturday Review of Books
• Time included a long review, together with a profile of the author and the book was later included in Time’s books of the year.The Time review cited Stead as a novelist who had been a critics favourite, but a popular failure, and commented that ‘if readers ignore her latest novel, they will have to do so in the pedestrian ignores a landslide – by walking around it.’
• The New York Times review was a full page, and commented on the excellent qualities of the book, but at the same time expressed reservations about the lack of a traditional structure.
• The Chicago Daily Tribune review was positive and it also listed House of All Nations among the books of the year
• The Los Angeles Times was very positive

It is a brilliant, often uproarious tale, filled with biting irony, never losing the undertones of bitter tragedy, even when comedy is the surface note.

In England the book did not get anything like the same coverage and was not treated as a major work.

• The Manchester Guardian reviewed it as one of group of three. The reviewer praised the writing (‘the writing is often brilliant, with wit and a nice adaptation of French idiom’) but criticised the main characters as unconvincing (‘Jules remains a vaguely dancing imp and a theory of a mercurial financier rather than a man’) and the story of the chancy merchant bank as unrepresentative of finance as a whole.
• The Times reviewer x said , consistent with his negative reviews of other books by Stead.

Selected later opinions

• When the novel was published in an Australian edition in 1974, novelist Kylie Tennant wrote a sensitive review for the Sydney Morning Herald.

• Saul Bellow chose ‘’The House of All Nations’’ as his contribution to ‘Writer’s Choice: a Library of Rediscoveries’’ (1983) – a book compiled from writers’ nominations. (Lillian Hellman chose ‘’The Man Who Loved Children’’).

• Novelist and critic Michael Upchurch has written an appreciation of the novel

Drawing on Stead’s life

In later life Stead admitted that the character of Alphenderry was based on her husband William Blake, ‘Jules Bertillon’ was based on his boss Peter Niedecker, ‘Henri Leon’ on Alfred Hurst and the ‘Banque Mercure’ on the Traveller’s Bank where they all worked.

References

Box quote Jules Bertillon always insisted that no great fortunes were ever made out of commodities; they were financial, came out of the air..from LA Times review

Critical reception

…We are fortunate that [Geering] was able to pick up the pieces…setting the mosaic in all its splendid, uneven glory.

I’m Dying Laughing, because of its intense theme and style, harks back to Stead’s best work ‘’The Man Who Loved Children’’. Emily, the loquacious, uncontrollably energetic and self-destructive heroine, also resembles Sam Pollit in that novel. Some sections are agreed to be brilliant: in particular, the consecutive scenes ‘The Dinner Party’ and ‘The Straightening Out’. In these scenes, the Howards, keen to break into the inner circle of Hollywood communists, are invited to a dinner party, and find themselves on trial for their sins against the party line and also, that their ‘friends’ are considering giving evidence against them in a custody case.

The main problems for reviewers are the novels length, loose structure and degree of detail. These were the problems that reviewers had with Stead's other novels, but apparently the problems are deeper in 'I'm Dying Laughing'. Some thought Geering should have edited it more freely:

The overall shape of the book wanders, lumps, builds too unevenly and explodes too early. Major characters are introduced only to fade away or disappear entirely.

There are traces, and more than traces, of the novel's original chaotic condition in this version which Geering has pieced together and brought out.......He has my sympathy. It couldn't have been an easy job, and yet he didn't go far enough with it. At two-thirds its length - say, about 300 pages - it might have worked. In any case it would have worked better.

One reviewer thinks the problem is that Stead attempt unsuccessfully to make characters personify concepts alas, Stead was more adept at conceptualising people than personifying concepts and this didactic novel seems queerly cadaverous after the almost ungovernable autonomy of life that veins the leaves of The Man Who Loved Children

Vivienne Gornick comments that in I'm Dying Laughing Emily's amazing talk goes on and on without resolution (in contrast to Sam's in The Man Who Loved Children). Goes on and on without resolution

By turns fascinating and irritating, the novel is one of those loose and baggy monsters that can try one’s patience even as it impresses itself in memory