Moving Among Strangers (10 page)

Of course, Alex's abandonment of White Peak (and Joan) caused a bit of a sensation. The idea that an only son could walk out of a place like White Peak was incomprehensible in our district.

But Stow's natural reticence restrained him from expanding further.

I can't tell you anything more about Alex's leaving White Peak – I was just a child and got the impression that he just ran away from home, to his father's distress.

*

My grandfather was truly heartbroken. He had worked, backbreakingly, all his life, in order to establish a home and an inheritance for his only son. Perhaps this was why my father had to run away in 1949. He couldn't bear the thought of his father's disappointment, couldn't face letting him down.

‘Alex wasn't good at facing up to things,' Aunty Rachel told me more than once.

Sometimes I imagine my father packing his bags and stealing away in the middle of the night, leaving my mother some sad excuse of a letter, not unlike the letter he left when he suicided forty years later.

‘He never forgave himself for giving away White Peak.'

*

While staying with my aunt I frequently wandered into her study to examine the various studio portraits of ‘Mother'. This elegant grandmother, Erica Carey née Hester, had the calm, dignified kind of beauty that only women of that era appear to possess. As a child I had met my grandmother three or four times, but remembered her only as a crotchety old lady with a limp, the result of a horse-and-cart accident. Right up until Erica's death, my father argued with her, hoping to shift her entrenched conservative views, but it was a waste of time. My grandmother considered herself one of the elite, a member of the elect few whose job it was to demonstrate decorum and maintain the manners of polite society.

I have some sympathy, even empathy, for this woman often accused of snobbery. It is a serious charge in our emphatically egalitarian Australia and a crime that I have also been charged with. Perhaps it's genetic. Or maybe it's just a matter of taste. Like my grandmother (and Stow), I prefer leaf tea in china cups – a penchant my daughter describes as ‘old-ladyish'. Maybe my grandmother was simply of a particular temperament that is at odds with the current dominant tone of dismissive irony, a temperament that implied a particular taste that was once known as fine – a certain fineness – but is now misinterpreted as snobbery.

In any case, very few people met my grandmother's extremely high standards, and my father always felt he'd let her down. Even more sadly, he inherited her high principles and applied them to his own family, his relationships and then finally, unforgivingly, to himself. In the self-reflective notes I found in his house after his death, he wrote:

I have set standards for the world, for the university, for my friends, for my children and especially for my lovers. These are harsh standards which I apply even more strongly to myself … Unless people measured up entirely to fairly idealised and unforgiving ‘standards', I have withdrawn approval to the point of making them so unhappy as to largely destroy the relationship.

Fortunately, his mother was long dead by the time Alex decided to tie the knot around his neck. But his three sisters, as well as his three children, were devastated.

‘I remember when Joan rang me,' Aunty Rachel recounted, ‘I couldn't believe it; I just couldn't believe it. He had been in Perth only a fortnight before; he'd been fishing with Ken every morning and I had cooked for him every evening. We had such a wonderful time together! Then when I took him to the airport he gave me such a hug! “I promise I won't leave it so long next time,” he said. “I'll come back soon. I won't leave it so long.”'

One of the few intimate memories I have of my father is of watching him shave. He was careless with shaving, as he was with all manner of grooming, so important to Erica yet deemed superficial by her son. So it made me nervous to watch. He used blunt blades – because buying new ones was wasteful and materialistic – so his face was always left with tiny nicks bright with blood. Careless also with washing, white flecks of shaving foam remained on his face, often around the moustache that prickled when he came to kiss me goodnight. He always seemed to be in a rush to get away from his reflection – impatient and critical. Perhaps somewhere within him was his mother's gaze: those eyes were famously beautiful – and yet also infamously, cruelly judgemental, as though born to focus on flaws and highlight weaknesses – to notice, negatively, what most other people wouldn't.

In my father's suicide note he requested that his favourite Thomas Hardy poem ‘Afterwards' be read aloud at his funeral. (Was this the only thing my parents ever had in common, I wondered later, a love for Thomas Hardy? Had this shared passion led them to believe they could live together happily, even though Hardy had never written a happy ending?) My father's favourite Hardy poem is about a man who notices things but in a different way from the way my grandmother noticed things.

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

‘He was a man who used to notice such things'?

Now I wish that my father and I had spent more time discussing poetry and less time discussing politics. I might have quoted to him, while he was struggling with his blunt razor in front of the steamy mirror. I might have read Seamus Heaney, who had also tried to escape the trappings of his birthplace, only to realise that self-hatred is a mug's game and there is no use in trying to grind oneself
‘down to a different core'.

‘I hate how quick I was to know my place,' Heaney talks to himself in his long poem ‘Station Island'. ‘I hate where I was born, hate everything/That made me biddable and unforthcoming.'

Was this also how Randolph Stow felt?

*

What I have to tell you may not be true but it's the best I can do based on what I've heard, what I've been told, what I've observed, what I have read, and what I've imagined – acknowledging my poor eyesight, my inevitable blind spots and the failing hearing inherited from my father, and my unavoidably narcissistically subjective point of view.

Family stories are full of secrets. And the story we get to hear depends upon the teller. The big question is who gets to be the storyteller. Who gets to own the official version? Who is the trusted narrator? Up until my return visit to Perth in 2010, I had only heard one version, my sister's, which went roughly like this: Our mother was an innocent sweet country girl who was mistreated for years by our brutish, inconsiderate, selfish father. All our West Australian relatives are right-wingers not to be tolerated or spoken to. Our great-grandfather, Canon Alfred Burton, known as Bully Burton of the Swan Mission orphanage, housed stolen children, some of whom died while in his care, and one, it was rumoured, was beaten to death.

The message was simple: our ancestors were guilty; we must sever all ties with the relations that remained and spend our lives trying to expiate the sins of our forebears, ashamed of who we are and where we came from.

Now, though, I was getting a completely different story. My mother might have been an innocent vintner's daughter, but my father was no less innocent as a grazier's son. My Carey relatives were friendly, generous and hospitable and more than willing, after all these years, to welcome me back into the family fold. Canon Burton, on the Ferguson side, might have been a missionary of the worst kind but that didn't necessarily mean that all his descendants were similarly inclined or equally guilty, or that the stories shouldn't be told and our family history censored.

For years, my sister's interpretation of the world had utterly convinced me. She was so certain. And when the world is divided into the righteous and the wrong-doers, there is only one side you want to belong to. But now her vision seemed simplistic and exclusive. If we hadn't spent decades maintaining some sort of imaginary moral high ground, I might have enjoyed having aunts and uncles and dozens of cousins the way Rob does in
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea.
‘I was born an insider,' said Stow, ‘into a large country clan. Most people I knew were my cousins.'

If our family had stayed in Perth I might have had a place where I felt I really belonged, a patch of land that resonated, a family history of stories that stretched back several generations. I might have inherited a cultural context and connectedness – that elusive authentic belonging that Stow yearned for all his life.

But then again, am I romanticising? Idealising a past I'd never had? Imagining an Eden that was really just another prison? My parents' decision to escape the narrow-minded provincialism of Western Australia was utterly reasonable. As was Stow's decision to flee his fly-ridden birthplace and seek out the landscape of his forefathers.

Perhaps the truth was that, our family, whether we were in Perth, London or Sydney, had always been, and would always be, outsiders.

19

A
fter the fierce criticism of his novel
Tourmaline
, led by Professor Leonie Kramer and her objections to Stow's ‘quasi-religious ideas', Stow only ever returned to Australia once, briefly. His ambition was not foremost to forge a literary career. Rather, it seems that Stow was on a quest for meaning, belonging and authenticity, which meant he had to get away from the land of the lotus-eaters. He couldn't just kick back, eat meat pies, swat flies and write a few poems. He was in search of a home and believed that the only authentic home was that of his English ancestors. In Australia, he said, he felt like a visitor: ‘I don't feel like a visitor here,' he said of Harwich, a tiny seaside town in Essex that was once a walled city.

*

On the other hand, I felt ill at ease in England, and particularly in London. So I was curious to learn from a Randolph Stow letter that my mother's initial reaction to England was similar to mine.
‘She says she hated England at first but likes it now,'
Stow wrote to his mother in 1952, detailing the news from his friend Joan
.
Having come directly from the warm and open landscape of Western Australia, my mother probably hated the big, cold city of London, rather than the English themselves. Though he spent most of his life in England, Stow also had a measure of disdain for the people.

‘The English just don't know how to give parties,' he complained to a friend in a 1962 letter.

In fact, the English don't know anything, and that's why, although I've got a lot of friends in England only two of them are English. All the nice English people are Scots, with the exception of a few who are Irish or Welsh.'

Then, in another letter of the same year he comments:

At this time of year England doesn't seem to be so full of English people … but later on it gets grim. Why can't they all go to Majorca and leave the place to the colonials?

Still, though Stow had preferred to live in rural settings almost all his life, in 1966 he made a deliberate decision to take up residence in London just to have the experience, for once, of living in a big city.

By the summer of 2011 I was on a Stow pilgrimage. At the British Library I peered at old manuscripts of Piers Plowman and Chaucer and gazed at the beauty of the original manuscript of
Alice in Wonderland.
Maybe I could get to like London after all. Outside, a gentle sun fell over the footpath and into the many carefully sculpted green squares, tiny parks that adorned almost every corner of that part of the city, perfect for retreating from the incessant busy-ness of this finance capital. How often had Stow withdrawn into these beautiful green spaces? And was it in one of these tiny havens that my mother and father ‘met again' on that ‘park bench'?

Next I made my way to the Wallace Collection, within easy walking distance of Stow's 1960s home in Marble Arch (long since demolished). Here hung the paintings that my mother felt compelled to send prints of to her young friend Mick. Their names had come directly from Stow's letters:
La belle Grecque
by Lancet and
The Roadside Inn
by Meissner.

It took a while to find the paintings, as Stow had misspelled both artists' names – Lancret and Messonier were French painters and the young Stow's interest in French may have led my mother to these paintings.
The Roadside Inn
showed two gentlemen on horseback accepting refreshment from a stableman, or perhaps an innkeeper. The shadows are long so the visitors may have just arrived at the end of a day's travelling. The trees in the background are tall and lean; the light falling on the shutters looks just as I remembered it from my first trip to the south of France: illuminating yet gentle, so different from the severe sun of
Western Australia.

La belle Grecque
, on the other hand, was absolutely unnaturalistic. The beautiful Greek woman, dressed in a dark orange dress trimmed with black fur, appears alone like an opera singer on the stage. I could not even begin to imagine why my mother felt drawn to this painting or how she concluded that this was an image the young Stow would appreciate.

Sometimes what I was so sure were meaningful clues to an obscure puzzle turned out to be nothing more than a mirage.

The last piece this long-silent writer ever published focused on his London period. Unusually for Stow, it was a non-fiction memoir called
Remembering Mr Atkinson
. The piece had a particular fascination for me because it combined my current preoccupation, Randolph Stow, with my other, long-standing literary obsession, James Joyce.

Stow begins with a quotation from
Ulysses
, a parody that mentions a man named F. McCurdy Atkinson. As was Joyce's indiscreet habit, Atkinson was a real individual whose name the Irishman didn't even bother to disguise. Later he was also, as it turned out, Stow's ageing landlord in Bryanston Street, Marble Arch.

Stow writes that his flatmate Mike introduced him to this minor character from
Ulysses:

It was the third of the young men lampooned by Buck Mulligan on that long ago Bloomsday whom Mike Harvey took me to meet, down many scruffily carpeted stairs, after I had stowed away my gear up under the roof … The old man's main room or rooms had been, I assume, the dining-room originally, while the drawing-room was included in the flat on the next floor. Our landlord's waking hours were passed in a double apartment running from the street to the yard, well-lighted by windows at either end, and divided in the middle by folding doors, which I never in fact saw closed. Every wall was hidden behind books, the furniture was dark, and in spite of the windows it seemed gloomy.

The essay demonstrates Stow's deep knowledge, not just of this small character from
Ulysses
, but of the book and its author, making a reference to Richard Ellman's biography, and also to the diary of Joyce's brother, Stanislaus. While living in Mr Atkinson's house, Stow also ‘happened to buy a copy of
Ulysses
to re-read
.
'

Meanwhile, outside the house:

All around us, at Marble Arch in the late Sixties, so much was going on. I was in the front-line of the Battle of Grosvenor Square in 1968, and if I mistake not the lady in a straw hat who was near me when I was nearly brained by a policeman's helmet was Mary McCarthy.

Both Stow and my father – two men from Geraldton, a rural town so far from the scene of war – were engaged in moratorium marches during that year. The now infamous Grosvenor Square battle started as a peaceful anti-Vietnam war protest outside the US Embassy, after a rally in Trafalgar Square that had been addressed by Vanessa Redgrave.

*

Throughout this period in London Stow was suffering a particularly bad bout of insomnia. He dealt with his sleeplessness by going to the local pub or walking the streets.

Whenever I drank at the Duke of York, Rathbone Place (a Cypriot restaurant, last time I looked), I was frisked for drugs by the police at the exit. Harvey, who was a theatre sound-and-lighting man, had his tool-box searched by the fuzz regularly at 2 a.m. as he walked home. I, being an insomniac, was often in the 24-Hour Golden Egg, Marble Arch, or at Covent Garden, at 4 a.m., and many a time I have eavesdropped on crooked-faced off-duty cops talking of how they had slipped a joint into the breastpocket of someone they did not like the look of.

‘So silly,' said Mr Atkinson, ‘all this fuss about marijuana. When Yeats and I were young, we would go into a chemist's and buy some Tincture of Cannabis over the counter.'

But it's the final lines from this small ‘portrait of the artist as a young man' that really resound. They bid farewell to Mr Atkinson, aged ninety-one in 1968:

He had been a bookish youth, and bookish he remained to the end. I have nearly forty years to go before I reach his age, but it seems to me a life, a declining life, with some attractions. Perhaps this is why my thoughts have begun to run again on F. MacCurdy Atkinson on this twentieth anniversary of our parting.

Remembering Mr Atkinson
is a poignant memorial to a largely-forgotten literary figure. In some ways, this exquisite tribute teaches us more about Stow than anything else. His last published creative piece (not including the book reviews), is not just about remembering Mr
Atkinson; it is about Stow remembering Stow. Like Joyce's
literary circularity, the beginning expands intriguingly on the ending:

It happens that lately my own thoughts are running on him quite a bit
…
because it is precisely twenty years since I last saw him, and he would now be a hundred-and-eleven years old, and I shall never be able to ask him certain literary-historical questions which have occurred to me since we parted company.

What
were
these questions Stow wanted to ask Mr Atkinson? Did he grieve a lost opportunity as I grieve the phone number on his letter that I never rang?

Aren't we all left with numberless questions that can never be answered, and regret at what now can never be asked?