House of All Nations by Christina Stead

First published: 1938

Type of work: Intrigue

Time of work: The early 1930’s

Locale: Paris and its suburbs, London, and Amsterdam

Principal Characters:

• Jules Bertillon, a mercurial director of the private bank run by the Bertillon brothers
• William Bertillon, Jules s older brother and a lesser partner in the family bank
• Claire-Josephe, Jules s wife, a beautiful and socially cultivated heiress
• Michel Alphendery, a Communist intellectual and the bank’s exchange expert
• Aristide Raccamond, a client’s representative who attaches himself to the Bertillon brothers
• Marianne, Raccamond’s calculating and vindictive wife

The Novel

House of All Nations is a fictional tale dependent on the dramatic events of economic history to substantiate its fantastic plot. At the center of the novel is the Banque Mercure, ostensibly run by the Bertillon brothers. The brothers’ official, legal responsibility for the bank’s mysterious but apparently successful inner workings, however, exists more in the minds of the institution’s clients than it does on paper. As Jules says, “It’s easy to make money. You put up the sign BANK and someone walks in and hands you his money. The facade is everything.” The petty European aristocrats, South American plantation profiteers, and American businessman who deposit at the bank and rely on its stock-exchange services are continually buoyed by the profits they see themselves making thanks to the financial wizardry of the enigmatic but gracious Jules Bertillon. Yet, while the men who make these fortunes and the bank which helps them flourish share a penchant for the trappings of elegance, as demonstrated in the clients’ refined manners and the plush atmosphere of the bank, they also share less glamorous common attributes. The private matters of neither the institution nor those it serves can withstand close inspection.

In this realm of precarious financial stability, where a facade of substance and reliability is carefully maintained, Jules Bertillon reigns over all. Everyone in the bank—employees, clients, even his brother William—thinks that Jules is the driving imagination and creative presence maintaining the bank’s solid position during the dangerous storms of the 1930’s global financial climate. It is Michel Alphendery, however, who is the true genius: While Jules’s urbane, expansive personality draws in clients and their capital, Michel, when markets fluctuate, juggles the discrepancies between the bank’s apparent and actual position, recorded in numerous hidden account books.

As Jules, using the bank clients’ funds for capital, recklessly plays in the gold and commodities markets, Michel covers the losses “on the books.” Michel reconciles these dishonest practices with his personal politics by cynically acknowledging that the inescapable corruption of the system that his work supports will inevitably cause its own downfall.

Aristide Raccamond insinuates himself into the chaotically disorganized bank administration, hoping to recover recent personal financial losses and promote himself as a client’s representative through his association with the bank. Jules overlooks his superstitious misgivings about Aristide’s recent involvement with a failed competitor and takes Aristide into the bank, despite a premonition that the “customer’s man” brings bad luck.

Jules never takes the business of his bank too seriously. When reverses in the global financial community portend the bank’s failure, Jules, encouraged by Claire-Josephe and with Michel’s help, siphons his clients’ funds into bank accounts abroad. He thus ensures his family’s future security. Aristide, however, discovers the plan, and he and his wife try to blackmail the Bertillons. The Raccamonds fail not only because the Bertillons have prepared for every eventuality but also because the malicious and potentially damaging rumors they spread about the Banque Mercure and its directors do not convince any of its clients or employees, who have been utterly seduced into loyalty by the enigmatic and charming Jules. Their admiration for him remains intact, even after the abrupt disappearance of both the Bertillons and the bank’s entire capital. After some mourning over their lost income, the poseurs of Continental high society, along with the bank workers whom Jules exploited and the financiers he duped, transform their memories of Jules into a legend. He is remembered as the gracious charlatan who was clever enough to deceive anyone—even other professional deceivers.

The Characters

None of Stead’s characters, with the possible exception of Michel, invites the reader’s sympathy; they are not intended to do so. While Jules seems to charm everyone and even wins the grudging respect of his enemies, he manages this only by withholding a complete and genuine representation of himself from any one individual. The narrator grants a complete view of Jules’s numerous weaknesses, mistakes, and character flaws from the reader’s perspective only. The reader sees Jules, and the other characters, from a privileged position, comprehending their foolishness and errors in ways which they cannot. Hence, William’s unquestioning trust for his brother be comes a confidence based not on filial love but on his sense of inadequacy, compared with Jules’s glittering self-confidence. William not only defers to Jules’s superior business sense; he shirks his own responsibilities. Claire-Josephe’s vocal concern for her children’s future is a convenient guise for expressing a genuine fear originating in self-interest, and not the parental conscience which she employs as its vehicle. Jules’s family circle is composed of characters whose veneer is only slightly more superficial than his own. Moreover, he never claims that the bank’s practices are ethical; he simply never discourages the clients from assuming that they are. Jules deceives perfectly within his circle, exposed through the narrator’s unrelentingly critical and ironic examination.

Although the reader is encouraged to recognize the Bertillons as the highclass con artists that they are, their practices are not as unsavory as those of the Raccamonds—at least the Bertillons have style and do not concede the criminal nature of their financial ruses. They accept that dishonest business is the only sort of business and assume that their clients think as they do, unlike the physically unattractive Raccamonds, who possess neither elegance nor the means to create its semblance. The Raccamonds’ brand of criminality is more noxious than that of the Bertillons, for the Raccamonds claim to be motivated by the clients’ interests, not their own, when attempting to blackmail the bank. Their pretense to moral obligations in the world of finance is as false as Jules knows such obligations are. Stead maneuvers her characters to transgress the limits of conventional morality repeatedly as they reiterate her message: that those conventions, like other social conventions, are simply a quite useful commodity in the world of high finance.

The exchange of these commodities, however, is not easily effected. The traders must always be deeply invested in the system itself. Michel’s character is an utter contradiction—his constant generosity and good humor co-exist with an unflinchingly ruthless economic strategy. His commitment to working within the world of high finance seems opposed to his political beliefs, but his investment in the bank is marked by a sense of the futility of all capitalist endeavors. He sees the frequently brutalizing effects of capitalism on the members of its ruling class as inevitable. His cynicism is different from Jules’s in that his faith lies elsewhere— in the eventual demise of an unapologetically exploitive system. Yet Michel’s love of Jules is genuine, and unlike the others, he sees beneath Jules’s flattering mask. In a world distinguished by corruption and greed, Michel is Stead’s evidence that something in human nature is ultimately redeemable and morally worthwhile.

Critical Context

House of All Nations was the third novel in Stead’s long and prolific literary career. Inspiration and material for the novel came while Stead, an Australian, worked in a Paris bank while living with William J. Blake, the Marxist economist whom she eventually married. While the themes present in House of All Nations chronicle an important period of Stead’s growing political awareness, the novel is not as intimately autobiographical as her later work, particularly The Man Who Loved Children (1940), her fourth and most critically acclaimed novel.

House of All Nations is notable for its exquisitely complicated plot and its skillful indictment of the relationship between individual and collective greed. The later brilliance of Stead’s narrative technique is practiced and refined in this novel. After producing House of All Nations and in addition to her more autobiographical and domestic emphasis, Stead created a number of female protagonists rivaling Jacques Bertillon in their ambition and adventurousness. Later women characters, such as Teresa in For Love Alone (1944) and the title character of Letty Fox: Her Luck (1946), face uniquely female challenges and represent the author’s specifically feminist political concerns.

Stead’s political sentiments, out of favor in the McCarthy era, are partly responsible for the unavailability of some of her work in the United States during that period and some years after. Given the renewed interest in the feminist and political ideology that Stead’s work espouses, much of it was republished and made widely available in the years preceding her death in 1983.

Bibliography

Gold, Michael. Review in Daily Worker. September 8, 1938.

Lidoff, Joan. Christina Stead, 1982.

The New Yorker. Review. XIV (June 11, 1938), p. 71.

Strauss, Harold. “A Novel of Frenzied Finance,” in The New York Times. LXXXVII (June 12, 1938), p. 2.

Time. Review. XXXI (June 13,1938), p. 73.