Randolph Stow’s Text Classics: five reprints of his novels

Randolph Stow was both a literary visionary and a destroyer of his own art.

Supplied Editorial The Australian ONLY

Five years after his death and 50 since his abandonment of Australia, ­Randolph Stow remains the mesmerising absence in the literary landscape. The prodigy of youth, the elusive genius, the writer of the inland, the high priest of demanding modernism — he is all these things, but above all else he is virtually unread, a legend, a shadow, a mirage on the past horizon, a void around which stories multiply and grow.

What will happen when he is read once more, when his works, now so obscure and unfindable, are brought before a new generation and subjected to a new critical assessment, as they surely will be, given his standing among literary academics, the ongoing centrality and topical urgency of his themes and preoccupations and the publicity surrounding the republication this month of five of his out-of-print novels in the popular Text Classics series?

The long-preserved veil of privacy cast over Stow’s personal life will also soon breached. Two biographers are in the field: much that remains enigmatic or hidden in the folds of his narratives will be exposed to the light of scrutiny. There will be at least the impression of knowing the writer more across the gulf of decades than was ever possible when Stow offered up his own reminiscences in interviews.

The moment has come, then, for a reappraisal: how to place him in time, and in the flow of history? How to read him — as symbolist, regionalist, politically engaged rebel, anatomist of the postcolonial world?

Given the extent to which Stow went looking for experience when young, and wrote from his experiences, the life’s course is critical. His ascent was swift. He was born in 1935 in Geraldton, into a long-established settler ­family. In his undergraduate years at the University of Western Australia he published his first novel, A Haunted Land. A second, The ­Bystander, followed in 1957, as did a book of verse, Act One, which won the gold medal of the Australian Literature Society. In May that same year he travelled to the north Kimberley to take up a post as a storeman at the Forrest River Aboriginal mission, where he stayed for a little more than three months.

This became the setting for his next novel, completed just after his 22nd birthday, To the Islands, an assured and poised work that repays prolonged attention and still speaks with great immediacy. Its structure is simple: it recounts a crisis in the life of an ageing, disenchanted missionary superintendent, Heriot. The narrative is staccato. Its climax comes when Heriot casts a stone at an Aboriginal man in his care whom he fiercely dislikes. Heriot believes he has killed his victim, and flees north on a death journey that doubles as a quest for insight.

Stow had spent time with senior Aboriginal men at the mission, chief among them Daniel Evans, who was said to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead. From such men he heard firsthand accounts of the Forrest River massacre of 1926, which he embedded in his narrative. “Our crimes are like a stone,” says Heriot, “a stone again, thrown into a pool, and the ripples go on washing out, until, a long time after we’re gone, the whole world’s rocked with them.” Stow succeeded in portraying his Aboriginal characters in spare and unaffected style. He caught the way they spoke; he caught the ancient deep red cliffs and ranges; he caught the sun and heat and shimmer of the far north. The novel was something new in Australian literature, both in its setting and its treatment of the frontier. It was much admired on publication and won the Miles Franklin Award. Stow wrote a revealing preface for a new edition in 1982, explaining his wish to present the mission in a positive light and agonising over reports that had come his way of troubles at Forrest River: how sad he would be now, given the collapse of the community into a crisis of sexual abuse and its dissolution about four years ago by order of the state government.

To the Islands is the great forerunner that sets out Stow’s preoccupations in writing. His characteristic style — clipped, austere, symbol-laden — is already fixed. His fondness for literary allusion is blowing strong. Heriot is intensely well-read: he quotes from or alludes to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, King Lear, Doctor ­Faustus, Shelley’s Ozymandias, Pascal’s Pensees, Xenophon’s Anabasis, Dante’s Inferno, Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal, The Waste Land, the poetry of Francois Villon — and these references tend merely to garnish, rather than illuminate, the text. But they serve to situate the book in the ­European literary tradition of spiritual quest, and thus announce Stow’s path.

When To the Islands appeared, its author was back in academe, studying anthropology at the University of Sydney. He could not settle; he took up a post as cadet patrol officer and assistant to the government anthropologist in the Trobriand Islands. This was a striking choice of destination: the Trobriands, in the east of the Papua New Guinea archipelago, had been made famous by Bronislaw Malinowski, the father of the functionalist school in anthropology, who had lived there for several years and dedicated a trio of famous books to the beliefs and customs of the islanders. Stow’s own stay was short: five months. He contracted cerebral malaria and suffered a near-suicidal psychological breakdown that reverberated all through the remaining years of his life. He was sent back to Australia, and recuperated on a farm belonging to his cousins, outside Geraldton.

In 1960 he made his first trip to England, by boat, and began sketching out his next novel, Tourmaline. It is the summit of his art and also his most mystifying, most schematic and most keenly interpreted work. Here is the 1985 ­Oxford Companion to Australian Literature setting the scene, and arguing for the book as a philosophical novel based on the opposing ideas of Taoism and Christianity: “Tourmaline is an isolated WA mining town, a place of heat and dust, but so cut off from outer society that it is an allegorical rather than a realistic entity.”

In fact the fictive Tourmaline is a close ­cousin of the ghost towns of the Murchison of half a century ago. Readers who remember Cue, on the Great Northern Highway, as it was in the early 1960s find an uncanny resemblance between the atmospherics of the book and the old, quiet, half-deserted home town of their childhood. The plot, again, is simple, but Stow, for the only time in his novels, allows himself the satisfactions of a linear, unfragmented narrative.

The story is narrated by Tourmaline’s oldest white resident, The Law, the lone policeman in the settlement, a long-timer who remembers the gold rush decades “in the days of hope, in the days of tree-lined streets, the days when the verandas of the hotel were shaded with vines”. Now there is a drought; the town lacks water, it is dying. The characters are sharply drawn: a bush singer, a sinister publican, his half-caste companion, the shopkeeper and his wife. A camp of Aboriginal locals is nearby on the fringe of town.

Into this tableau comes Michael Random, a water diviner, rescued from near-death in the surrounding desert. “He had been far, so far, in country never mapped.” What mysteries does he know? There is a striking recent parallel with Stow’s story, but it is not a literary one: the ambiguous hero seeking revelation in the desert brings to mind the most enigmatic figure in the modern history of the northwest, the Alaskan Robert Bogucki, who walked out from Sandfire roadhouse into the desert on a private quest journey in 1999: what he found there, in the dunefields, he never told.

Random, in the pages of the novel, believes God has spoken to him: he reveals to the township’s residents his plan to refound Tourmaline and revive its church. The diviner finds gold, but not water. His cult spirals out of control. All is low-key, yet intense in the extreme. The tale is drenched in symbolism, so much so that interpretations fall naturally out of its words.

Alone among Stow’s books, Tourmaline gained a certain reputation with the European intelligentsia: its author was briefly seen as a pioneer of modern storytelling, alongside figures such as Lawrence Durrell and John Fowles. It depicted the same Australia that was becoming known from the paintings of Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale: a visual, sensory space. Here is The Law, near his story’s end, describing the country: “I wandered to the edge of the hill that looks over Tourmaline. The eastern sky was like a ripening orange. The houses below were blue and metallic; the land sombre, shapeless. Then suddenly the sun was over the horizon, and the world took fire.”

Stow was aiming, through this novel, to anatomise the Australia he knew: he felt himself complicit in the tale. The climactic scene occurs on a strangely distorted version of Anzac Day. The Law gives a speech at the town’s memorial:

We come in humility, and in guilt, knowing that in some way we are all murderers, we are all cannibals, and the dead have been our victims. We come to acknowledge our guilt to the dead, because we have eaten their flesh and drunk their blood, and because their curse is on us, and the seed is dead in the ground and in the bodies of men and women, because of them. And in remembering them we remember also God, who lives and reigns in the galaxies outside us, and in the galaxies within us …

The narrative succumbs to Stow’s fondness for disaster by its end: the diviner goes his way, a sandstorm comes sweeping through. The book’s opening words find echo in its closing lines of verse. The cycle is complete; the circle is drawn tight.

After he had completed Tourmaline, Stow washed up in the US and took refuge in Aztec, New Mexico, where he wrote his simplest and most accessible book, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, a coming-of-age novel set in Geraldton and its back country during World War II. It is still widely read, and it feels like an affectionate memory of the writer’s childhood, despite its sombre underside: there are accounts of the sufferings of Australian prisoners of war in Japanese camps, and glancing cameos that illustrate the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of the hinterland.

After this, for more than a decade, silence. Stow did publish a children’s book, and poems, and wrote an opera libretto, but his extraordinary run of novels seemed to have come to an end. He left Australia for England and settled in Suffolk, in the region where his ancestors had lived. In 1974 he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Grant and made a brief trip back to the country of his childhood and youth, visiting Adelaide, Sydney and the west — but he decided to return the grant rather than remain for any length of time. And that was it for Australia.

Only in 1979 was the book Stow had been agonising over for years completed. It looked back in time. Visitants is his Trobriands work, a cross-cultural exploration: it is the postcolonial frontier, encapsulated in fragments, in a broken skein of prose. The set-up is straightforward. A patrol officer, a man with strong ­literary leanings, appropriately enough named Cawdor, has died, apparently by his own hand. An inquiry is held: the book’s voices are those of witnesses testifying. The local scene is fraught: a succession struggle is under way among the islanders and a strange object has been seen in the sky, a sparkling object, “very, very bright”. Stow took this episode from a press report of a famous UFO sighting on the Papuan mainland. It is woven into the narrative to highlight the distance between the colonial administrators and the locals whose domain they oversee.

But there is no controlling perspective. The views of the islanders and planters and patrol officers are presented side by side. It is possible to grasp the depths of the novel only by reading each strand of intersecting testimony on its own terms.

For novelist Drusilla Modjeska, who contributes the introduction to the Text Classics reprint and is herself a writer drawn to the islands, this is the “radical achievement” of Visitants, a complex work that takes as its key subject not the Conradian dissolution of its absent central character but the interplay of assumptions and strategies deployed by both the locals and the incomers to their world.

Admirers of Stow’s fiction tend to single out this novel as his most intricately realised achievement, the monument of his maturity — and it is plainly a book in which ideas, literary allusions and the clash and mesh of two distinct thought realms run elegantly through the text. On its last page the government interpreter Osana asks himself a syllogistic set of questions that sheet home the responsibility for the turmoil on the island to the man he knew only by formal style of address, “Mr Cawdor” himself, the dead patrol officer.

At last Osana asks the ultimate question: “What caused Mister Cawdor?” The dilemma of anthropology, and the colonial enterprise, laid bare. Visitants, read today, brings other books insistently to mind: Malinowski’s A Diary in a Strict Sense of the Term, for one, a work of introspection that was written in the Trobriands long before Stow’s dark experiences there, and published after his visit but before he completed his own account.

The Diary touches on many of Stow’s themes, and tears into the heart of the rationalist project of the human sciences with a kind of wild fury that scarcely surfaces in Stow’s more reticent construct. A rather different ­vision of the cross-cultural frontier is on view in the best-known modern novel set in the New Guinea islands, Mister Pip, by the New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones, a story that finds room for communication and loving acts of kindness between cultures. Stow’s world, by contrast, is one where contact between distinct cultures and even between individuals often seems shattered and near-impossible.

His road to writing Visitants was arduous: the path became clear at last when he found a separate rich vein of enthusiasm and poured out in four weeks his next work, The Girl Green as Elderflower, an East Anglian tale: domestic drama fuses with old folk story in a dreamy, soft-focus narrative. The main character, Crispin Clare, named in a nod to the great fenlands poet, is an anthropologist in recuperation from disease and breakdown suffered on a tropical island. The task for him is to put the broken pieces of the world he sees together. Close to the tale’s end comes a critical, load-bearing passage that looks back to one of Stow’s talismanic texts, The Tempest: “Truly there is in the world nothing so strange, so fathomless as love. Our home is not here, it is in Heaven; our time is not now, it is eternity; we are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly.”

Stow’s last published novel, The Suburbs of Hell, a murder mystery, appeared in 1984. Its setting is a lightly disguised version of Harwich, the Essex coastal town where he lived out the final three decades of his life, but the inspiration for the plot stemmed from a series of killings in Nedlands in 1963. The book closes in fragments and a set of newspaper headlines describing atrocities from round the world: then there is an image of a tarot card — the death card, with this little legend: “All too late, all too late, when the bier is at the gate.”

Stow died at 74, after long literary silence, in May 2010 and was buried, as he had wished, in his new country, which he liked to conceive of as a refuge of return more than a place of exile. He lies in a cardboard coffin, interred under a tree. This life in letters tells its own story: prodigy, collapse, a muteness at the end — and there are strong reasons for compassion in appraising it. Stow’s circumstances were unusual. He was precocious and incisive in intellect; he saw his own society and its fault lines with clear eyes; he was a poet who longed to place himself within a tradition; he was homosexual at a time when Australia had no place for that identity. He rejected the establishment he was born into; his views on politics were radical. In a “note” at the end of Visitants he acknowledges a grant from the Literature Board received “during the heady early days of the Whitlam Government”. As the West Australian academic Andrew Lynch has found from the manuscript, the sentence initially ran on: “ ... before the lumpenbourgeoise re-established its Nixonian dictatorship. This book is pour prendre conge (to take leave) of my native land.”

How does Stow stand in today’s Australian tradition? Among a small band of cognoscenti, his reputation is high. Scholars study him, writers admire him: the scene-setting introductions to the five new Text Classics editions of his novels, all by established literary figures, are uniformly reverential in tone. Genealogists of influence might well argue that his example and his decision to write in great depth about the landscapes of the western inland helped pave the way for a generation of successors — authors such as Tim Winton and John ­Kinsella, career regionalists who have ascended to a plateau of much greater fame.

But there is an issue to confront: Stow’s self-exiling. The current high priest of Australian letters, the novelist and anthologist Nicholas Jose, himself a figure of establishment background with a strong penchant for exotic locales and cultures, has set out the case for Stow in one of the most important critical essays yet devoted to his work. For Jose, the great book is Visitants, an “end time novel”, a work of “singular intensity”, an attempt to escape from the colonial perspective, and an attempt that merely confirms the impossibility of the task.

But Stow’s relationship to the country of his birth, the “primary location of his enduring literary presence”, became, inevitably, a relationship to a receding place. In his later years, Australia, which he never revisited after his departure in 1974, had turned into “a continuing imaginative source, a site of intimate memory and human relationship”. And a logical enough reason for the exile can be traced out, in line with Stow’s keen awareness of the frontier and his own ancestral burden and the overhanging shadow of the past.

“One might read his move to ancestral Stow territory in Essex as a rigorous personal act of undoing colonisation,” says Jose. “Of returning things to how they might have been. It was a healing return. He was content to stay where he was after that, from where he communicated reticently and honourably.”

There is surely some degree of truth in this — but it is far from the entire picture. Australia was Stow’s canvas, his necessary subject. The western outback was his backdrop, it was natural to him, it was his element; he knew it, his words were fitted to it. He was the first writer to find a way into the inland and capture it, and sense its rhythms on his skin. When he removed himself from it he destroyed his art, and all that remained was echoes and reverberations. Tourmaline, his song of love and hate for Australia, ends with a clear-eyed, near-prophetic stanza that can serve as a capstone to its author’s fearful fate: “Beware of my testament! / (Ah, my New Holland; my gold, my darling.) / I say we have a bitter heritage. / That is not to run it down.”

Nicolas Rothwell is a senior writer on The Australian. His latest novel is Belomor.

Five Text Classics editions of novels by Randolph Stow, each $12.95

To The Islands

224pp, introduction by Bernadette Brennan

Tourmaline

252pp, introduction by Gabrielle Carey

The Girl Green as Elderflower

184pp, introduction by Kerryn Goldsworthy

Visitants

267pp, introduction by Drusilla Modjeska

The Suburbs of Hell

213pp, afterword by Michelle de Kretser