Moving Among Strangers (7 page)

14

Writers are such melancholy creatures; they are not generally the kind of people who know how to party. They simply take themselves too seriously. For that reason, I spent way too much time preparing my contribution to the 2011 Perth Writers Festival panel on Stow. I am not a natural public speaker, despite decades of practice, and I was conscious that the audience would be full of people who knew way more about the writer than I.

Writers' festivals are also odd occasions. People who spend most of their lives in self-imposed solitary confinement are suddenly thrown into luxurious hotel rooms – or at least luxurious compared to the garret-like study cells they are used to – and exposed to days of public attention. The result isn't always what you'd imagine. You would imagine, for example, that after a day of publicity, writers would gather in the evening for intellectual love-ins, if not wild, overnight affairs. The very least you'd expect is a dinner table of literary types drinking far too much wine and arguing into the early hours over who should or shouldn't have been short-listed for the latest prize. But in my experience, this is rarely the reality. Instead, you meet The Famous Playwright at the breakfast bar and discuss whether to try the Danish or the fruit toast. Or you find yourself in the hotel bar in the evening with no one you recognise at all. Until you see another person sitting forlornly in the corner; he is vastly overweight, unkempt and alone. He is also Australia's Most Feted Poet.

The 2011 Stow panel was held outdoors in the exquisite leafy grounds of the University of Western Australia. Novelist Gail Jones spoke eloquently and insightfully without the help of a single note, then I read from my much-drafted paper.

Afterwards Gail turned to me and gestured towards a tree at the edge of the audience: ‘Who are they?'

I looked around. A group of people standing under the tree smiled widely and waved with excitement. Carey, Andrea, Peter and Tina – my four cousins. I hadn't seen them earlier and certainly wasn't expecting them.

‘They're my family!' I said.

‘They've been beaming the whole time,' Gail told me. ‘They look so proud of you.'

I smiled back and went to them through the crowd. We all hugged and kissed, and they enthused about the talk. Once again, it was just the kind of familial approval that I'd always longed for. I wondered now whether Randolph Stow had felt that his parents were proud of him, especially his silent, withdrawn father who had expected his only son to follow in the family profession of law. And his cousins, of whom he had so many – did they congratulate him like this? Buy his books? Surround him on his brief return to Western Australia, smiling proudly? Or did he feel that his gifts were unappreciated?

As editor of
Australian Poetry 1964
, Stow chose his poem ‘Ishmael' to conclude the volume
.
The final lines hint at a feeling of genius unrecognised:

‘–– and what have I to leave, but this encumbering

tenderness, like gear forever unclaimed.'

Australia rejected Stow – at times brutally – when he offered up his most precious gifts: his poetry and novels. His first poems, submitted to journals when he was still an undergraduate, were more warmly received overseas than at home. In a letter to my mother written during his last year at the University of Western Australia, Stow compares the positive response he gets from English publishers and critics, including people like Stephen Spender, to the lukewarm reception at home. ‘They certainly show up the Australians,' says Stow. ‘If the
Bulletin
doesn't like a poem they sneer at it; if they do, no comment. The editors of
Southerly
and
Meanjin
will maybe write a line of vague encouragement on the back of a rejection slip, but never any criticism worth having.'

I suspect that Stow had a deeply personal relationship with Australia – for him nation and the idea of Australianness wasn't an abstract notion – it was almost personified. And it was a person with whom he had a tumultuous, love–hate affair. Like a lover he had tried to please, or a parent from whom he sought approval, or a headmaster he wanted to impress, Australia couldn't return his affections, couldn't match his emotional pitch, couldn't embrace his artistic intensity, and therefore, was compelled to look away, like someone looking away from unwanted lost luggage.

*

It was one of those shiny, hot days when the sun bounces off the footpath. A typical blazing Perth day, the kind Stow must have endured for so many summers. The light is different in Perth. I wondered how Stow had adjusted from this brightness to the long dark days in England. He had majored in French at university and been hugely influenced by French writers and poets – why not go and live in the south of France where the light is so perfect? I thought of Stella Bowen's reflection on her life in Provence with Ford Madox Ford: ‘It has something to do with the light, I suppose, and the airiness and bareness and frugality of life … which induces a simplicity of thought … and you are released from the necessity of owning things.'

And then I thought of Stow and his tiny terrace in England, the long winters and his frugal lifestyle. The poet Fay Zwicky had witnessed Stow's ascetic way of life when she visited him in East Bergholt – ‘It was mid-winter. He had no food, not even a fire in the grate.'

Now I sat in Fay's house, watching her strong, fearless face as she spoke. A brilliant poet, critic and academic, Fay was one of the very few people who'd written at length on Stow's poetry. More than that, she had also talked and walked with him!

Like Stow, Fay has always considered herself an outsider in Australia. In fact, she has almost completely withdrawn from the literary world and has a reputation for being fierce. More than a few people I knew were positively frightened of her. So I felt nervous when we first met, but also honoured.

We'd already talked about Stow, Joyce, Faulkner, Australia, asylum seekers, universities and writers. Now she said that despite spending so many years in academia, she had since decided that writers shouldn't really be associated with institutions; they should be independent. Which had, of course, been Stow's decision from very early on in his career. With such a brilliant mind, his facility for languages, his broad interests in history and anthropology and literature, he could easily have followed a promising academic career. But by 1962, at the age of twenty-seven, he had written to a friend announcing that he was ‘retiring from academic life
'
. By the age of just thirty, he had already ‘envisaged' the rest of his life, and his vision was that he ‘should go back to Suffolk and rusticate
'
. Which was exactly what he did, living a truly monastic existence, surviving on baked beans on toast, working as a barman in the local pubs in Suffolk, barely able to heat his home.

Over the years, I had pondered, on and off, about Stow's material wellbeing. I knew from experience how hard it was to survive as a freelance writer. I had even once mentioned my concern to my sister.

‘Oh, he would have family money,' she assured me airily. ‘Landed gentry.'

I didn't think to question her. She was my reliable narrator; she was older, had been to Western Australia more often, and, well, she just knew
more
. And I trusted her judgement implicitly, when perhaps I should have trusted my imagination and posted Stow a food parcel.

Fay and I now talked at length about why Stow felt he had to go into self-exile. ‘The trouble with Australia,' said Fay, ‘is that you have to explain yourself.'

I didn't really know what she meant, and I didn't dare ask her to explain! Later, as I absorbed our afternoon together, it dawned on me that at least two or three of my own books were exactly that: efforts to explain myself. And I remembered Hazel Rowley writing of Rick's outburst in
The Merry-Go-Round
in the Sea
in defence of his decision to leave Australia. This was really Stow's voice, said Rowley, trying to explain himself. Then, after the release of
Tourmaline
,
Stow again attempted to explain himself to the perplexed and unsympathetic Australian critics, in a poem called ‘
From
the Testament of Tourmaline'. Even the word ‘testament' is curious, as though he were a defence witness giving testimony in some mysterious literary trial. He had been judged, harshly, and he was appealing the sentence.

Is there something specifically Australian, I wonder, about always being on the defensive, as though we all still have a prison sentence to be carried out and a terrible sin that, for some unexplained reason, can never be redeemed? In
Tourmaline
, the narrator, Law, says, ‘we come in humility, and in guilt, knowing that in some way we are all murderers … and the dead have been our victims … And we ask him [God] in his good time, to revise our sentence.'

15

In the month of March the heat in Perth can still be intense so when the festival was over I was pleased to see my cousin Carey arrive at the hotel in a Mercedes – a car with air-conditioning and leather seats.

Carey and I had agreed over the lunch in Cottesloe to make a pilgrimage together, to the old family homestead outside Geraldton. We were both curious about where his mother and my father had grown up. It was also an opportunity to become reacquainted after many lost years, each of us filling in parts of family history the other knew nothing about.

Before we'd even left the Perth suburbs, Carey and I had bonded like, well, like long-lost cousins. Like Andrea, Carey had known my father as Uncle Alec, the slightly whacky odd one out in the family, in contrast to his father, Stuart McDowell – a quiet, conservative Trans-Australian Airlines pilot. Strangely, both men had ended their lives in the same way.

‘How did he do it?' I asked now, tentatively.

‘Hanged himself.'

Perhaps this was part of the bond I had instinctively felt the first time we'd met. The children of suicide carry a very particular kind of burden.

*

The drive to what poet John Kinsella describes as Stow-country was long and hot, the landscape scrubby and monotonous and the road noisy with gigantic trucks going back and forth to the mines. I recalled that, after moving to England, Stow never owned a car again; he cycled or walked everywhere.

When we finally came into the outskirts of Geraldton
, there was a place I wanted to see first. Ellendale pool is the setting for the most disturbing scene in
A Haunted Land
, Stow's first novel, written when he was nineteen during his summer holidays. It also features in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
and the poem ‘For One Dying'
.
Nowadays it is a popular local swimming spot and a tourist stop-off, and yet for all its beauty there remains something undeniably eerie about the opaque water and the strange, overhanging cliffs of red sandstone. Ellendale pool was said to be bottomless.

We drove into the car park and walked around the water's edge. Somewhere in the surrounding cliffs on the other side of the pool, there was a cave where Stow, as a child, had seen the imprint of a small indigenous hand that had sent his imagination wondering.

He felt the cold rock under his hand, where a dead boy's hand had once rested. Time and change had removed this child from his country, and his world was not one world, but had in it camps of the dispossessed. Above the one monument of the dead black people, the she oaks sounded cold, sounded colder than rock.

As a teenager on these banks of Ellendale pool, Stow had imagined Anne Maguire making love with Charlie, the Aboriginal help in the novel. In these same waters, he had imagined Rick and Rob swimming naked. The place was inhabited with stories and spirits, ancient and modern, layered like the coloured streaks in the sandstone rocks.

For the next hour we drove the back roads searching next for the ‘Ellendale' homestead, which was the basis for ‘Malin', the home of the Maguire family in
A Haunted Land.
A number of critics noted that
A Haunted Land
was reminiscent of
Wuthering Heights
, with its demonic passions and wild landscape. The most Gothic of Stow's novels would prove to be, at least in part, based on real places and real people.

Stow's original claim in the Author's Note that ‘no character in this novel has, or has ever had, any existence outside the author's imagination' is contradicted by Mary Durack in her book about pioneer Eliza Shaw,
To Be Heirs Forever
. Durack claims that ‘many of the people' referred to in letters written by Eliza in the period between 1866 and 1877 ‘were in future years to haunt the imagination of the Geraldton-born writer Randolph Stow, inspiring his earliest novels'. In a 1976 interview Stow admitted that the idea for his first novel came ‘from stories around the pastoral district near Geraldton. Parallels to the incidents in the book had all happened. The book is a sort of conflation of a number of stories.' Doug Sturkey, a student colleague of Stow's from the University of
Western Australia, also tells how the young writer took him to see Ellendale ‘where events in the book were described as having taken place'.

*

Although Stow's novels are undoubtedly works of great imagination, the parallels to reality are always present too, each story rooted in and growing out of real experience. Even the most fanciful details in his most famous book,
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
, appear to have a connection to historical detail. When Rob refers to Lord Byron dying in his great-great-grandfather's bed, this actually turns out to be Stow-family fact. Fantastically, Marshall McDermott, whose daughter Fanny married Randolph Isham Stow, was a captain in the British army in Missolonghi, Greece, where Byron, as a private citizen, had taken up the cause of Greek liberation and spent time in the officers' mess. McDermott had a folding travelling bed that was apparently rather ornate and handsome; it was admired by the aristocratic poet who asked to purchase it from Marshall. Soon after, Byron died in that very bed. McDermott, allegedly, then carried part of the manuscript of ‘Don Juan' back to England.

In the
Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
the young Rob thinks to himself:

It was a pity that Byron died on his great-great-grandfather's bed because otherwise he could have come with his great-great-grandfather to Australia and died in the desert instead.

All Stow's books contain reflections of real people and places, and the writer described himself as ‘a fanatical realist'. So perhaps the model for Andrew Maguire – the ferociously destructive central character of
A Haunted Land
– had once lived and gone on to haunt the hinterland of Geraldton. But what family could possibly be the model for the tragic Maguires? And where did the author imagine these frightening events as taking place? In the old Ellendale homestead?

The West Australian landscape around Geraldton was like nothing I'd ever seen, vast and desolate in its sense of isolation. We came across several abandoned properties before finally identifying Ellendale – built in about 1860 for a man called Major Logue, who had evidently emigrated from a miserable village in Northern Ireland. Though in ruins, the two-storey stone building with sagging verandahs looked to have been grand. According to local history, the bedrooms housed four-poster beds with canopies and ‘one room had a haunted cupboard whose doors opened mysteriously to warn of impending tragedy'. In the drawing room was a piano, that symbol of European civilisation. The difficulties of transporting the instrument from overseas and then overland, not to mention maintaining it in the stresses of a West Australian summer, were put aside, I can only imagine, in the conviction that on a remote farm a piano was as necessary as a plough.

I looked at this old ruin that had once been filled with a large family and was possibly the setting for the events in
A Haunted Land.
It was easy to imagine that horrors might erupt in a place so isolated. There are no neighbours to hear the shouts and screams or the shotgun blasts. There would be no hope of rescue from these bare hills and the wide, endless sky. Cries for help would be like crying in outer space. There seemed to be no edges to this sweeping landscape. The immense openness threatened by its very emptiness. And now, after all those years and all that labour, the country was taking back this homestead, already advanced in decay. In another decade or so, only wind and white flood-gums will remain.

This is the landscape and these are the places that shaped Randolph Stow's imagination. To one side of him he had the untamed immensity of the Geraldton hinterland and on the other the foreverness of the Indian Ocean. From the land he heard stories of isolated farmers and from the sea he heard stories of shipwrecks and massacres on the Abrolhos Islands. Surrounded by the haunted, as a young writer he made that dangerous trip to the Underworld in search of something or someone to bring back from the dead.

*

We went round the block a couple of times before we came to Shenton Street, mainly due to my uselessness as a navigator.

‘Right here,' I told my cousin.

‘Is that it?' he asked.

I couldn't pretend not to be disappointed. Randolph Stow's childhood home was the most ordinary house on a most ordinary block and
par exemplar
of the Australian rural poor, barely worth taking a photo. But we parked anyway. By now the heat was beating down.

I introduced myself to the woman who emerged from the front door. The interior looked just as uninspiring as the exterior. But behind the house I could see that the spare block was still there; the block they nicknamed the ‘goanna paddock', through which Stow used to walk to his grandmother's house in Gregory Street. This was where my mother often visited Stow's Granny Sewell and Aunt Ap during her time as a newly graduated nurse at Geraldton Hospital.

We drove around to the Gregory Street property, which is now a B&B named ‘Weelaway', ‘a luxurious heritage home with en suite bathrooms, antique furnishings, luxury linens and air-conditioning. The Randolph Stow Suite features a king-size-bed and a private verandah through French doors.'

I knocked on the door but no one was home. I looked down the side of the house and noticed several fig trees, then tiptoed round to the back garden. I thought of how Stow felt about figs, and how my mother felt the same way. They both grew up with that earthy fragrance of fig leaves, the abundance of fruit in summer, the sensuality of the split flesh, opening mauve, pink, green, spilling seeds and sweetness.

The fruit on the tree was ripe and I couldn't resist. I plucked three and ate one, warm and juicy, remembering Rob's words from
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea.

Even when he had first started going to Sunday school he had been able to feel no warmth for Jesus, and when they told the kids how Jesus had cursed the fig tree he had given up Jesus as hopeless. Heck, he'd like to hear what his grandmother would say if someone cursed one of her fig trees.

*

Our next stop in Geraldton was the foreshore, where the famous merry-go-round had been officially brought to a standstill the day before Stow died.
The
Geraldton Guardian
headlined at the time: ‘Era ends for iconic swing' and then reported that, ‘No one could remember anyone being hurt in the last forty years but nevertheless, Mayor Carpenter was acting on a public safety report.'

This merry-go-round was just one of many versions of the seaside roundabout that featured so prominently in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
, and there was debate about which was the ‘real' one. The first merry-go-round, called ‘Ocean Wave Swings', was erected in 1921. The second merry-go-round was constructed in 1929 but removed that same year when, according to the
Guardian & Express
, ‘the centre pole of a merry-go-round snapped …' and ‘four or five children were injured, one seriously'.

The third merry-go-round, erected around 1930, was the one that Stow and my father played on – the same merry-go-round described on the first page of Stow's most popular novel. The proximity of the Geraldton Library, which was housed in the Mechanics Institute, was just a short walk away and must have given the area a special significance to the young Stow.

This third merry-go-round was removed in the 1950s and not replaced until 1988. The fourth claimed to be a ‘replica of the original' and was unveiled by the writer's mother, Mrs Mary Stow. Randolph Stow sent a poem to be read at the opening, written in the style of Donne's ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning', closing with the couplet:

The gulls stoop down, the big toy jerks and flies;

And time is tethered where its centre lies.

The ultimate merry-go-round is the most real and enduring, the one that will keep moving after all the others have been demolished or demobilised: the mysterious, sunken merry-go-round of Stow's imagination – the merry-go-round in the sea.

The last time Stow had been in Geraldton was 1974. He had returned in response to an offer of a Commonwealth Writers Fellowship. Mysteriously, his stay was brief and he returned the money rather than feel obliged to stay. According to Stow's life-long friend and fellow poet, Bill Grono, Stow gave up the Whitlam fellowship because he believed Australia was uncivilised and unsympathetic towards, almost willfully ignorant of, the world's problems, and that he considered Australian culture ‘a celebration of yobbishness'
. Like Rick in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
, Stow believed Australians were still ‘smug, bigoted and way too pleased with themselves'. To remain living here would, therefore, be the equivalent to a death sentence.

The next stop on our Stow pilgrimage was ‘Sand Springs', the model for Sandalwood, in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea.
A vast property, Sand Springs still belongs to the Sewell family, and, as with any farming family, making a living from such drought-ridden acres has never been easy.

John Sewell, son of Eric Sewell, who was thought to be the model for Rick in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea
, is one of those hard-working, dusty, ‘tight-lipped countrymen' that Stow wrote about so accurately. John remembered Mick as very quiet and often wandering around this property alone. ‘Of course, we never knew what was going through his mind,' he said.

Sand Springs is now dilapidated, the orchard and gardens no longer tended, the house uninhabited. In the old stone walls we could still see the arrow slits that were used to aim rifles through, in defence of the property from the local indigenous population. When I asked to look inside the homestead John Sewell clearly felt uncomfortable; with thirty thousand acres and his job on the local council, he hasn't got time to be restoring a heritage property. However, he kindly relented for long enough for me to imagine the young Mick in those high-ceilinged, once-grand rooms, now abandoned. As we left I fantasised about developing Sand Springs into a Writers' Retreat and a Randolph Stow museum. Other countries seem to be able to preserve significant writers' houses – why are there so few in Australia?