The Girl Green as Elderflower

by Randolph Stow

  JULIAN RANDOLPH ‘MICK’ STOW was born in Geraldton, Western Australia, in 1935. He attended local schools before boarding at Guildford Grammar in Perth, where the renowned author Kenneth Mackenzie had been a student.

  While at university he sent his poems to a British publisher. The resulting collection, Act One, won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal in 1957—as did the prolific young writer’s third novel, To the Islands, the following year. To the Islands also won the 1958 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Stow reworked the novel for a second edition almost twenty-five years later, but never allowed its two predecessors to be republished.

  He worked briefly as an anthropologist’s assistant in New Guinea—an experience that subsequently informed Visitants, one of three masterful late novels—then fell seriously ill and returned to Australia. In the 1960s he lectured at universities in Australia and England, and lived in America on a Harkness fellowship. He published his second collection of verse, Outrider; the novel Tourmaline, on which critical opinion was divided; and his most popular fiction, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea and Midnite.

  For years afterwards Stow produced mainly poetry, libretti and reviews. In 1969 he settled permanently in England: first in Suffolk, then in Essex, where he moved in 1981. He received the 1979 Patrick White Award.

  Randolph Stow died in 2010, aged seventy-four. A private man, a prodigiously gifted yet intermittently silent author, he has been hailed as ‘the least visible figure of that great twentieth-century triumvirate of Australian novelists whose other members are Patrick White and Christina Stead’.

  KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY is a freelance writer and critic, and a former lecturer in Australian literature. Her most recent book is Adelaide (2011) in the Cities series. She won the 2013 Pascall Prize for criticism, and was the chair of the inaugural Stella Prize judging panel from 2013 to 2015.

  ALSO BY RANDOLPH STOW

  A Haunted Land

  The Bystander

  To the Islands

  Tourmaline

  The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea

  Midnite: The Story of a Wild Colonial Boy

  Visitants

  The Suburbs of Hell

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Copyright © Randolph Stow 1980

  Introduction copyright © Kerryn Goldsworthy 2015

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  First published by Secker and Warburg, London, 1980

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2015

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004 Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781925240283

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922253095

  Creator: Stow, Randolph, 1935–2010.

  Title: The girl green as elderflower / by Randolph Stow ; introduced by Kerryn Goldsworthy. Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Time and Time Again

  by Kerryn Goldsworthy

  The Girl Green as Elderflower

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Author's Note

  Appendix

  Text Classics

  Time and Time Again

  by Kerryn Goldsworthy

  IN 1969, a decade before The Girl Green as Elderflower was written, I discovered Randolph Stow the same way many other Australian schoolchildren did: in the classroom. Stow’s 1965 classic, The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, was a set text on my high-school syllabus. It’s an overtly Australian novel, set against a background of dazzling antipodean light and colours in Perth and Geraldton, featuring Australian characters and history, and recalling an Australian childhood. It was published when Stow was only thirty, but it was his fifth novel; by then he had also published two volumes of poetry and won two coveted national prizes, the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. For many who know him as a notable Australian writer, it might come as a surprise to learn that he lived in England for more than half his life.

  At the end of the 1950s, having studied anthropology and linguistics at the University of Sydney after taking his first degree in Perth, Stow travelled to New Guinea in 1959 as an assistant to the government anthropologist and from there, as a patrol officer, to the Trobriand Islands, where he contracted what he referred to as cerebral malaria. Seriously ill and suicidally depressed, he was shipped home to Western Australia to convalesce, a time he describes as ‘a dreadful dead period’. After that, he ‘went to England to recuperate. That was when I began to be an expatriate.’

  This experience of terrifying tropical illness and its aftermath finds its way into both The Girl Green as Elderflower (1980) and the novel he published the preceding year, Visitants; though they are quite different in other respects, the main characters of both novels have suffered an illness similar to Stow’s. Stow was working on Visitants and found himself stuck. He started and quickly finished The Girl Green as Elderflower, reworking the experience of malarial delirium once more with a happier conclusion, which seems to have freed him to write the tragic ending to Visitants. The critic Geordie Williamson calls them ‘twinned narratives…the richest and strangest books that Stow produced.’

  At a literal level, it wouldn’t seem that there is anything essentially Australian about The Girl Green as Elderflower. The narrative is woven around three mediæval tales from twelfth-century rural Suffolk, where the main story is also set. Stow’s close observations of the English countryside, from the depths of winter through to the height of summer, saturate his writing. The only connection to Australia is through the main character, Crispin Clare, an antipodean child of modernity. As he says to his aunt-by-marriage Alicia:

  I was born in South Africa, of a New Zealand mother and a father born in India. My mother and I sat out the war in New Zealand. After that, my father was in Malaya, and I went to boarding school in Australia. Then he was in Kenya, and I went to school in Devon. The end of the Empire was pretty confusing to families like mine.

  The novelist and scholar Nicholas Jose has suggested that Stow’s move to England, ‘to ancestral Stow territory in Essex’, might be read ‘as a rigorous personal act of undoing colonisation: of returning things to how they might have been’. In its preoccupation with the complex problems of an emergent postcolonial world, the English roots of first-world antipodeans, the effects of landscape and exile on character and fate, and the otherness of strangers in strange lands, The Girl Green as Elderflower is an intensely Australian book.

  At the realist level—or perhaps you could ca
ll it the outer layer—the setting of the novel is the small village of Swainstead in Suffolk, in the early 1960s, and the story is at first glance a simple one: a young man convalesces from a major illness in the regular company of some sympathetic cousins, in the six months between the deep winter of the New Year and the high, green summer of June. The focus on recovery and recuperation is hinted at in the title—elderflower is well known to herbalists as a plant with healing properties. The intention of self-healing is announced, if a little cryptically, in the novel’s opening sentence: ‘Quite how to go about doing it Clare could still not see, but the impression was strong with him that the doing would be important, might even be the rebeginning of his health.’

  Convalescence is a process that has its own narrative trajectory, but here the means of convalescence is the most important thing: Clare uses stories as a form of therapy and healing. Still beset by fever and nightmare, he writes his way back to physical and mental health, reworking three mediæval tales of the region. He explores themes of alienation, exile and loss through these stories of marvels and miracles, told as true tales by the real-life twelfth-century English monk and chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall.

  The curious reader will discover layer after layer of meaning in this book. The name Crispin reverberates in some of Shakespeare’s most famous lines, in Henry V’s speech at the Battle of Agincourt, rousing his army to a miraculous victory—a speech still used to invoke English nationalism and pride in belonging:

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

  This day shall gentle his condition:

  And gentlemen in England now a-bed

  Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

  The surname recalls John Clare, a late Romantic poet who, like Crispin (and Stow), lived and wrote in East Anglia, and was a meticulous and passionate observer of the natural world. Like Crispin, too, he feared madness, though for different reasons; unlike the poet’s, Crispin’s mental health gets better rather than worse.

  Crispin’s name is duplicated on a gravestone in an ancient churchyard on the way to Martlets, his cousins’ old house in the village, for a Crispin Clare lies buried there: ‘Some memory of that stone, accidentally prominent, must have led Major Clare to give his son the same name…and to his great-great-great grandson Swainsteadian visitors at Martlets would say “Not Crispin Clare?”’ There is something uncanny about this, as though the contemporary Clare were a ghostly revenant. And in a way, he is: like Stow himself, Clare knows that his family—on both sides—originated in these parts, and for him, as for so many other postcolonials who have made the atavistic journey to ancestral lands, this place feels paradoxically like home.

  For the reader, the gravestone detail is a portal, a miraculous entry into a different kind of time; it’s the first of many moments in the novel when time seems to have collapsed into itself, and the past comes alive in the present. The framing story of Clare and his convalescence is set within a precise period, the first six months of 1961: although Stow doesn’t spell this out as such, the time of year is identified in the novel’s first paragraph—‘the new year’s astonishing first white light’—and the specific year in a fragment of conversation between two members of the family:

  ‘Mummy, how old are you?’ Mikey wanted to know.

  ‘As old as her tongue and older than her teeth,’ Mark said.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ his little brother said squashingly. ‘How old, Mummy?’

  ‘As old as—’ said Alicia, reflecting; ‘as old as Senator Kennedy.’

  ‘President Kennedy,’ Lucy said.

  ‘No, Clever Clogs,’ Alicia said, ‘Senator. He hasn’t been inaugurated yet.’

  As well as Alicia and her three children, Clare’s intermittent companions in Swainstead include his old school friend Matt Perry and a Canadian former priest called Jacques Maunoir. Clare uses his family and these two men as models for the characters in the mediæval tales he is rewriting, with the result that the twelfth and twentieth centuries merge in a seamless and often very funny way. The first of these stories is about an invisible Latin-speaking sprite called Malkin, who appears in Ralph of Coggeshall’s original chronicles. In Clare’s version, Malkin reveals herself in the middle of a game of Monopoly being played ‘in the time of King Richard’ by the children of the manor, who are immediately recognisable as Clare’s young cousins Mark, Lucy and Mikey. Malkin intervenes by bringing the Monopoly game alive: ‘Then a tiny racing-car of lead, which was Mikey’s counter, began to tear about the London square which had been created. It changed gear rapidly, passed each corner with screeching brakes, and at last crashed into a hotel in Mayfair.’

  The ‘wild man caught in the sea’, from the second story, has some of the attributes of Clare’s friend Matt, who is clever, reckless and a little feral. The wild man, apparently a merman ‘in the times of King Henry the Second’, finds himself in the presence of a transistor radio: he ‘was enchanted, was rapt. The disc-jockey’s voice made him grin with delight. A look sentimental almost to tears was on his face as he listened to the winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.’ In the final mediæval tale, ‘Concerning a Boy and Girl Emerging From the Earth’, Jacques Maunoir appears in his priestly guise under his own name, in a scene of great beauty.

  The rewriting of these tales seems to be Clare’s way of ordering and containing the otherwise chaotic and frightening collapses of time, place and language that occur in his fever-dreams and trance-like states. In what is obviously a lingering after-effect of his illness, he can’t always control the voices he hears or the languages they speak in. Mediæval Latin and the contemporary Kiriwina language of the Trobriand Islands, Ouija-board messages and twelfth-century histories all jostle for space in his consciousness in a way that’s both exhilarating and disturbing. By far the most sinister are the voices Clare describes to doctors during his illness: ‘“In the hospital they asked whether I heard voices. I didn’t, not imaginary ones, but I did imagine—conspiracies.” He stuttered on the next word. “Calumnies. People talking too fast and too low for me to understand.”’

  The mixing-up of place and time that is a recurrent feature of this novel suggests that while such confusions in human experience might be contained and endured, no time and no place can ever be a true home. There’s evidence for this belief in Stow’s own life and his other work, and it is borne out again by the beautiful scene at the end of the third mediæval tale, in which Christian imagery and nature mysticism sit peacefully side by side when the Green Girl lies dying and the priest is summoned to her bedside. ‘Our home is not here,’ he says to her,

  it is in Heaven; our time is not now, it is eternity… Do not think to rest in your village, in your church, in your land always secure. For God is wider than middle earth, vaster than time, and as His love is infinite, so also is His strangeness…For no man is lost, no man goes astray in God’s garden; which is here, which is now, which is tomorrow, which is always, time and time again.

  The Girl Green as Elderflower

  To C. in Suffolk

  Even such midnight years

  must ebb; bequeathing this:

  a dim low English room,

  one window on the fields.

  Cloddish ancestral ghosts

  plod in a drowning mist.

  Black coral elms play host

  to hosts of shrill black fish.

  My mare turns back her ears

  and hears the land she leaves

  as grievous music.

  ‘OUTRIDER’ (1960)

  JANUARY

  Quite how to go about doing it Clare could still not see, but the impression was strong with him that the doing would be important, might even be the rebeginning of his health. That idea of health was all but
novel to him, he had sunk so deep, and it presented itself with an urgent attractiveness in the new year’s astonishing first white light.

  Through a window to his right the old unpruned apple tree which had gathered wreaths of snow in its mossy twigs was being shocked free of them by the spurts of little dun birds. The two rising fields behind, one pasture and one plough, were today unbroken by any tussock or ridge of conker-coloured earth, and lay so uniformly white and unshadowed that it seemed that they must be uniformly level. In the distance, across the river, a line of bare poplars on a ridge was caught in an odd spotlight of sun, and stood out against the heavy sky with an unEnglish sharpness, shining through air from which all moisture had frozen and fallen.

  The other window was directly before him as he lay in bed, and indeed he had aligned the bed, in the summer, so that by moonlight he could look down the clearing of the abandoned fishponds, with their nettle-choked sluices, to the Sylphides-like wood which closed the view. When he had come to the cottage it had seemed that his stay would not be long, and for furniture in that room he had brought only a bed, a table, a lamp and a painting which Alicia had done. It hung on the pale yellow wall like a third window, giving a view of what would have been seen from such a window in August, when chickens went scratching about the barley-stubble. In the snow-light so much gold and green was almost garish. His eye strayed from that down the nettle-borne humps of snow to the black and white wood, in which an occasional holm oak, holly or clump of tree-ivy was only slightly green in its darkness.

  A morning-after thirst was on him, and he slid out a hand for water. The flexible plastic beaker was rigid. What was in it was ice. He found himself laughing at this exotic turn, and sitting up in bed crushed the beaker between his hands until he had freed some water from its centre.

  His pyjama jacket was damp. It had been another fever-night. In the freezing room the jacket seemed likely to turn to ice on his back, and he tore it off and buried himself again in the warmed sheets.