The year that I first became ill, when my physical condition first developed, was the first year that I studied Australian Literature. I was in my second year of university, and was actually studying a lot of literature, as a kind of salve to the media subjects that I’d enrolled in, thinking at the time that I might like to be a journalist. (I now think of this as a bullet dodged.) One of my literature subjects was a course on nineteenth-century German prose, riddled with novels about hysterical women, sanatoria and destructive unconsciousnesses. Yet it wasn’t here but in my Australian Literature lectures that I learnt about the shock of recognition; the German lecturers were more concerned with accusative declension and pluperfect tense.
The year that I first became ill, when I started vomiting without volition, no one could figure out what was happening to my body. I had gastroscopies, barium swallows, I kept food diaries. I threw up a pH monitor that had been inserted into my stomach through my nose with my first post-procedural meal and then spent several hours in Emergency, waiting for a nurse to remove it, coiled up in the back of my mouth. I lost count of the number of times doctors asked if I might be pregnant, or how I felt about my body. A specialist asked my mother, while I was present in the room, if she knew ‘why I was doing this’. But the ground hadn’t shifted then, at least as far as I can tell.
In the year that I first became ill I remember climbing the concrete stairs at Mortdale station and concentrating on each protesting muscle, feeling as though my legs were moving by telekinesis alone; and the almost physical longing I felt on the way through Redfern when I saw a sign on the gate of a sharehouse: If you lived here, you’d be home by now, and then in smaller letters Housemate wanted.
That year I read, for the first time, Christina Stead’s For Love Alone. I was nineteen, and it was a set text. I remember that I disliked the male protagonist Jonathan Crowe for his selfobsession and coldness, a coldness that I thought extended to the book as a whole. I found the novel old-fashioned and too rigidly structured, the dialogue too ornate and stagey to feel poignant, to feel real. But even then, there was one section that stopped me dead, and that remained for years as my overriding memory of the book. Teresa, the intelligent and passionate heroine – she who suffers for love alone – is working in a factory in Redfern and relentlessly saving all of her money in order to buy a passage to London. Rather than pay for trams between the ferry terminal and the factory, Teresa walks. From Circular Quay to Redfern, and back, every day. She saves money; she goes hungry rather than pay for lunch, and she walks, both ways, each day. Stead’s description of Teresa’s physical exhaustion, of the ravages of hunger on her body, cut me to my ever-more prominent bones.
Early on, when Teresa begins to feel ‘the resistance of the body’ that she’s pushing to its limits, just as I was mine, she divides her route into defined stretches. From the ferry to the Law School to the courts to a primary school to Hyde Park, to Tooth’s Brewery, Mark Foy’s, a barber, a park, a station, a street in Surry Hills, a war museum, another park, a chapel, a bridge. This is something I too had been doing, on those late and suddenly biting-cold autumn afternoons, when the walk from the lecture hall in the university’s Woolley Building to the steep concrete steps at Redfern station, where an upswept draught was always and inexplicably howling, seemed unimaginably long, the idea of it alone exhausting. I found I could will myself through small stages, landmark to landmark, until I reached the dirty peach tiles of the station and sat down, propped against a pillar.
So too did the progression of Teresa’s disintegration resonate with me. Teresa spends more than three years walking, being spare with her energy and money, hungering for the start of her new life. These three years are all but elided in the book, as if no real living, no real memory-making occurs within in them. All there is, is Teresa’s walking, Teresa’s hunger:
When she had less than a year to go, she became very weak…She became indifferent to everyone…She was beginning to notice the noise in the streets, which increased her fatigue; the smell of brewing was getting stronger and sickened her. She avoided food shops and lemonade stands. She had found the kind of step that cost her the least fatigue, a firm lope, though it might not have looked as easy as a drag and slouch…and even when she was half-fainting, she never forgot to walk with this peculiar, life-saving step which cost the least energy…She dreamed; she saw fewer people on the crowded streets but she bumped into no one…She recognised no faces and never in all these years, though she had been bred and brought up in the city, saw a person she knew on the street. She recognised noises and smells, however, things that guided her when her eyes became milky or dark as they did occasionally…She developed the acuity of a savage, in sound and in smell.
These things I remember from that period: constantly arguing with my sister in our shared car about the volume of her music, which made my brain feel foggy but which she insisted she could barely hear. Introducing myself to people who I’d already met, often several times, at picnics or parties, but was unable to recognise because I’d been almost half-conscious, ghosted by hunger when we’d conversed; on the other hand, even now, being able to recall in detail exactly which foods were served at particular gatherings: the three different cheeses and cherry tomatoes at last year’s Christmas picnic, the chicken wings, potato bake and four varieties of salad at my niece’s christening, the veal and pumpkin stir-fry my mother made on my twenty-first birthday. How awful I found the smell of bacon, how I’d phase in and out of conversations held around me, unable to concentrate on anything more than the bare bones of a story. I feel, sometimes, that my higher functioning has been milky and dark for years; that hunger has made me savage, as it savaged me, instead.
Teresa begins to look compulsively in shop windows selling jams, cakes, juices, fruits. This I did too. I shopped every day, I stole food. I watched other people eat almost mesmerically. I would hang around in the kitchen whenever my housemates cooked. Teresa’s hunger, Stead writes, constantly ‘blow[s] through her like a draught.’ Mine did too.
In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa’s hunger, but only this aspect of her story, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest of For Love Alone didn’t stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to understand it fully. But in recent years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead. Several of her books, and her biography, were reissued with new introductions by writers as unlikely as Jonathan Franzen, or as important to me as Drusilla Modjeska. Stead died in the year that I was born. I discovered that we went to the same high school.
I re-read For Love Alone a few years ago, just weeks after I’d started negotiating with the hospital to permit me a second admission, and days after the National Young Writers’ Festival, a four-day weekend during which I’d eaten just two meals, tearing around Newcastle full of coffee, vodka and sugar-free gum. I was still ill, very much so, but at least I knew by then the shape and face of my disease. And this time, as I read the novel, I was stunned.
Teresa, I realised this time, has all of the character traits, from the very beginning of the book, that are said to make a person vulnerable to disordered eating. She is passionate, but stymied by her domineering family; intelligent, but always striving for something more: for honour, for meaning, for love. She is austere because she holds herself accountable, she demands standards and sacrifices of herself, she thinks and feels too deeply, and far too much. She sees herself as separate somehow from, and frustrated by, the life and the society that she must move through: ‘She smelled, heard, saw, guessed faster, longer more than others, it seemed to her. She listened…with a galling politeness, because what she had to say was not to tell them.’
Teresa’s nineteen-year-old angst at the opening of the book (‘You offend my honour! I would kill anyone who offends my honour…Honour is more sacred than life,’ she exclaims in the earliest scene) I first read as out-moded and overblown; almost a decade later, I recognised this sense of grasping, this need for something more, as the pulsing bass-line to so much of my life, even if the language has been different. And it’s so simple for eating, the most basic, daily ritual, to become entangled in that striving, that separation. Early in the novel, Teresa refuses wine at her cousin’s wedding, and her denial immediately sets her apart. Her denial makes her powerful, and it makes her strangely sensual: ‘Teresa looked at them proudly; she felt immortal. The world was like a giant egg of golden glass, she could crush it. She floated; she looked at them, gleaming.’
Teresa’s hunger, and her striving are always this sensual, and always linked to love – this is hunger as a yearning, as desire made physically manifest. ‘Shall I die hungry?’ she asks, thinking about the passion that the cold and distant Jonathan cannot show her. But more than this yearning, more than these horribly familiar character traits, what I recognised in my second reading of the book was how Teresa’s walking, to and from work, shifts, in those perilously small increments, from something primarily practical – a frugality with money – to something mostly about achievement, striving, a frugality of the body. More and more, Teresa’s walking becomes a way to prove that she is strong, that she is worthy of the love she craves, that she is earning her right to make choices, her right to exist, step by step, even as she physically shrinks away. It is as if she walks her way to England, and this is proof of her selflessness, because it is, at its core, a kind of self-annihilation. Very quickly, she stops walking for love alone, for the burning hope that she might be loved. ‘She was not now walking only to save money.’ Stead writes. ‘She was outstripping illness and failure.’
That’s what hunger does for people like Teresa, and for people like me. It outstrips failure, or at the very least, it makes failure something that is contingent, beyond our control: if we fail when we are hungry, we only fail because we are ill, not because of something that is lacking in ourselves. It’s a strange kind of power hunger gives us – beyond that physical drivenness, hunger allows us to hold our potential as potential. Hunger keeps our potential untested – and limitless – because we can never access it entirely.
But more importantly, in another of those strange inversions that eating disorders offer, Teresa’s hunger is a kind of sacrifice of the physical to bring her closer to a metaphysical ideal. Hunger is a measurable achievement when achievement is usually something far more abstract and ill-defined; hunger is a constant where Teresa can only be uncertain, of her purpose, her place, of Jonathan’s love. Hunger is a constant reminder of what she wants, or what she’s waiting for and working towards. It is grounding, it is stable, and it can be held onto, relied upon, like nothing else that Teresa has ever known.
It’s important, too, that Teresa is not the only character in For Love Alone to equate – or at least align – hunger with love. Soon after Teresa’s arrival in London, she and Jonathan go the theatre together, and return to his bed-sit. After chastising Teresa for ‘doing nothing with herself’ in the years she had been saving, Jonathan begins to talk about his university life and work:
Someone…says the relation between the sexes is based on food. Savages only have their women once or twice a year. Their food is poor. All that about love-life of the savages is balderdash for mammy-pappy consumption in the suburbs. Love is an illusion, love is food. Savages don’t love. It’s due to an overplus of calories, we eat more than we need…Some of the superfluidity goes to the brains, the nerves, and we get love, sighs, groans. Primitive love – raw fish, Cockney love – fish and chips, middle-class love – cottage pudding, the grand passion – roast duckling and port wine.
For Jonathan, love is a kind of hunger, its satiation something he imagines only in terms of food. For so many of the years I was unwell, I was too savage to love, and kept all of my appetites unsatiated.
Similarly, Teresa’s family consider her sick body as both caused by, and the cause of, the fact that she ‘hasn’t got a man’. In the final year of her walking, she withdraws further from her family, eating most of her meals in seclusion (a classic eating disorder symptom), or else watching on silently as they argue over the meal table:
‘Terry’s going mad,’ said the brother…The way she’s going on, she must be going mad.’
‘Women go mad if they don’t get married,’ said the father. ‘It isn’t their fault. If Terry would get herself up a bit, make herself more attractive, she’d probably get a nibble, but she can’t expect men to go after a bag of bones. Now Terry was quite beefy when she was sixteen, she was quite an eyeful.
‘The brother’, as he is called most often, takes this even further:
Yes, it’s your fault because you’re so ugly, mangy, thin as a skeleton…It’s your fault. Look at your hair and the hollows in your cheeks, you can almost see your teeth through your cheeks. I’ve seen you bathing, you can almost count every rib you’ve got, your arms are like sticks, your legs are like broomsticks, it’s your own fault no man will have you.
Teresa’s family sees her thinness not as a misplaced act of striving, but as something hysterical, her shrivelled body as directly linked with her stymied sexuality. They are, perhaps, partially correct – but only in that Teresa’s hunger is a wanting, a long desire. Although the body does become the most obvious expression of these illnesses, it is also, in a way, the least important. Hunger is, I think, always an attempt to transcend the body, to become something other, something more.
Metaphors of eating are prevalent throughout For Love Alone. A description of Teresa’s adolescent love of reading (which is, incidentally, held partly to blame for her high ideals) refers to her as having ‘eaten into her few years’; an early family reprimand is ‘Eat your soup and don’t be a fool.’ One of Teresa’s most vivid childhood memories is of barges in the harbour, glimpsed on her way to school, dumping excess fruit into the water, to ‘fall among the fishes,’ a waste that’s particularly resonant given what lies ahead for her body.
On Jonathan’s part, his descriptions of and railings against his poverty are constantly figured around food – he tells Teresa early on that he always eats at home because it’s all he can afford, he conflates his lack of property, and subsequent need to work, with a need to eat: ‘If I had property, I wouldn’t have to use my brains…I’d just enjoy. But I can’t eat and so I think.’ (This sentence also startled me when I re-read the book: one of the hardest things for me to deal with, as I’ve moved away from my hunger, is how I still find it so difficult to think, to write, to work, after I eat; how my thinking feels so much sharper, more vivid, when I’m hungry. I know I’ve said this to my doctors: I can’t eat or I won’t be able to think.) It is Jonathan, after all, who introduces Teresa to the idea of frugality, before he leaves for London, concerned as he is with always showing the world the bootstraps by which he has pulled himself up.
Most important of all, however, is Stead’s presentation of eating as an erosion, a wearing away, not only of the body, but also of will, hope, and finally, recuperatively, of despair. When, in England, Teresa and Jonathan become lost on a weekend hike (mostly due to Jonathan’s self-righteousness) and are forced to spend an evening sleeping through a storm in an abandoned mill, Teresa finally sees him for the callous person that he is. She ‘release[s] him from her will’ and ‘the harness of years drop[s] off, eaten through.’ It’s a remarkable choice of words, ‘eaten through’, and one that seems, suddenly and subtley, to close the cycle of hunger and destruction that has been plaguing Teresa for so many years.
In fact, Teresa has been physically recovering since her arrival in London, again in those perilously small increments, helped along by her new freedoms and independence, the kindnesses and attentions of colleagues, a new lover, a release from poverty and its attendant need for parsimoniousness. These are all slow and slight changes in and of themselves, yet they somehow accrue to give her the clarity to be able to cast Jonathan off (and reading this, the second time, gave me a thrill of hope). On its own, hunger does not lend itself towards epiphanies, even though it promises to do so. The metaphysical is impossible without the physical, though hunger desperately tries to convince us otherwise.
What I admire most about Stead’s portrayal of Teresa is how her illness is never made unambiguous, indeed, it is never named. In all of her years of walking, Teresa does not recognise that anything has shifted – although she knows that her body has been devastated, she never thinks that she is doing anything other that what she has to do to get through. Teresa’s hunger is deceptive, and her denial is complete – and this is not despite, but all the more so because she is so fierce and wilful a woman. It was deceptive for me too: I was managing the physical cause of my vomiting by cutting out the foods that triggered it, preventing it from happening by barely eating at all. I couldn’t see, for years, that there was anything wrong with this, that it was any different from someone allergic to nuts avoiding eating pecan pie.
More than this, because of the way I’d thought about my hunger, my denial of my denial, the way the shifts were always so small that I didn’t see them happening, I never recognised that there might be a way to write about falling under its spell, without pinning some clear progression or false awareness to the process. But Stead manages this, for Teresa, by keeping her largely unaware of the process – although the trade off for this lack of acknowledgment may well be that Teresa’s hunger, or more precisely, her anorexia, is easy to miss in any reading of the book. By my second reading of For Love Alone, I was simply more attuned to it.
For people like Teresa it takes so long to realise that hunger is no longer an act of will, even though it is, perhaps, that willing for something else. Teresa’s willing is a want to live for love, and by love alone; it is a willing to live by word and thought and not by bread and body.