Moral Leper

A LITTLE TEA, A LITTLE CHAT (394 pp.) --Christina Stead--Harcourt, Brace ($3.75).

Christina Stead's prose is as hard and cold as a cake of ice. A sharp-eyed Australian now living in the U.S., Miss Stead specializes, with the murderous calm of a hangman slightly bored by his job, in dissecting egotists and connivers. One of her better novels, House of All Nations, was a long, superbly documented description of the world of high finance, which viciously satirized the European big money and led some critics to compare her, rather prematurely, to Balzac.

In her latest novel, set in wartime Wall Street, Miss Stead shows all her old talents: her sure knowledge of financial intrigue, her talent for making distasteful characters come distastefully alive, and her needling, admirably unsentimental prose. Yet A Little Tea, a Little Chat is no pleasure to read.

Block in the Dark. The main trouble is that Miss Stead has chosen to write about the most loathsome and amoral characters that can be dredged up from the cocktail bars and brokerage houses of New York. She makes her scoundrelly Wall Street speculators and their women seem so real, and lets them speak for themselves at such length, that the reader has but one desire: to get away from them. By ruthlessly eliminating any suggestion of decency or honor in her money-crazed and lecherous characters, Miss Stead deprives herself of all possibilities for moral contrasts and dramatic conflicts; the total absence of white makes it impossible to recognize the black in the dark. The novel soon assumes the quality of a very shrill feminine nightmare.

The leading character is Robert Grant, who is fiftyish, roly-poly, and "a moral leper." Grant spends his life chasing women and dollars with obsessive passion; he is not a hypocrite, since he lacks the degree of self-awareness necessary for hypocrisy; he is simply an ugly tub of flesh who snatches and grabs, whimpers and bellows, cringes and brutalizes as his pleasures demand, without ever feeling the slightest genuine regard for anyone. He invites women to his room for "a little tea, a little chat," tells them that "a woman like you could keep a man. I'm looking for an oasis in my desert, a rose on a blasted heath," and then, his conquest made, he slips them money. Ever since early manhood he "had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance: 'I got no time for futures in women.'"

Black-Market Hero. During the war Grant rides high ("I'm too old to fight, all I can do is to make a profit"). He plunges into the black market and secret deals with the Axis, is snared by an avaricious blonde whose mind is as corrupt as his, and finds in the world's agony the perfect opportunity to snatch more pleasures. At war's end, Grant, aged and decayed, passes out with fright at the unexpected appearance of an old friend whom he had cheated years back. Grant's hallucinatory harangues, much like the buzzing of a neurotic bumblebee, are recorded by Miss Stead in unsparing detail. To expect a reader to wade through several score pages of them is to ask too much.

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