Stow’s satire on the Head is one of his earliest published compositions. In it Guildford Grammar is renamed ‘Guilgrasgolia’ and the House Master has the suitably violent-sounding name of Mr Battersby, while the Head is ‘Prince Trite’. Mr Battersby, we are told in the first paragraph of Stow’s story in the banned school magazine, was ‘very elegant and very gentlemanly, and had blue hair and long tapering fingers of which he was very proud. He was fond of flipping them at people, so that they drew back suddenly, in fear of being impaled.’ The story was signed with the penname ‘Albion’. Clearly, Stow identified with being British from a very young age.
The model for Mr Battersby was the Deputy Head who was allegedly unpopular with both staff and students and had a habit of hanging around corridors in an attempt to overhear possibly incriminating student conversations. Thence the title of the story: ‘He Snooped to Conquer’.
Some four years after he graduated from Guildford Grammar, Stow posted his recently published novel, A Haunted Land, to his former headmaster. The response from Mr Thwaites, dated 30 October 1956, was as follows:
Dear Mr Stow,
Thank you very much for the copy of your novel for the School. I read it during the week-end and would like to offer you my congratulations. I think it is extremely well-written and creates a very clear atmosphere, though my own personal taste for novels involves the situations of more normal everyday life without quite so many abnormal characters. I have some doubts as to whether it is, as you say, suitable for the School Library, but will hand it on to the master in charge for his opinion. Anyway, it is a remarkable effort and I wish you all success with your future literary ventures,
Best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
[Mr Thwaites]
It is a pity that Mr Thwaites was incapable of recognising that the earlier story, of Mr Battersby, was also ‘extremely well-written and created a very clear atmosphere’. As for his complaint about abnormal characters, one can only assume that Wuthering Heights, to which A Haunted Land has been compared, was on the shelves of the Guildford Grammar library and that Mr Thwaites had never realised just how many abnormal characters also inhabited that and other books. In any case, the correspondence between the two men, spanning from apologetic student to successful young novelist is a telling one.
Why, I can’t help wondering, did Stow feel he needed recognition from such a man? It is not unusual for writers and poets to be dismissed by officious school masters, but how many of those who go on to succeed in their ‘literary ventures’ – if success is the word – then return to those corridors in the hope that the tone-deaf teacher has suddenly acquired perfect pitch? Or that the headmaster might come to see, at last, that their former student was indeed a ‘special case’?
On the application form for admission to Guildford Grammar School, dated 1949, in answer to the question, ‘What is his Probable Destination in Life? Agricultural, Professional, Commercial, etc.’, Stow’s mother wrote, ‘Professional’. This was because her only son was expected to follow his father into the profession of law. And at the end of his secondary school year, Stow wrote to Joan:
I’m starting a Law course at the Uni next year, God and the Public Examinations Board being willing. I’m booked in at both the Hostel and St. George’s College and probably won’t get into either. You have to have a reference from your headmaster.
In February 1953, Stow began his studies in first-year law at the University of Western Australia and resided in St George’s College, the on-campus student accommodation.
The last evidence I have of his correspondence with my mother is a torn letter from 1955 telling Joan of his intention to go to Paris and study for his MA at the Sorbonne.
It all depends on my financial situation. I would have to augment my income somehow or other. Of course, I hope before then to have written a best-selling novel or play, and I suppose I’ll continue to rest in that faith until the time comes.
And then he signs off:
Your letters always make me very eager to see England.
Yours, Mick.
13
In March 1953, my older sister was born in an understaffed London hospital.
‘No one came near me,’ my mother told me once in a rare candid moment, but still in her understated, stoic manner. ‘The nurses were just too busy.’
My mother didn’t exaggerate. If she said no one came near her, that meant she gave birth alone. So there weren’t enough nurses on night duty then. But where was my father? Presumably fathers were not allowed in to maternity wards in those days; I doubt that he was pacing up and down in the waiting room. He wasn’t that kind of father. In June 1953, when the baby was three months old, Stow wrote from St George’s College to his mother in Geraldton:
I found a letter from Joan waiting here when I got back. She is leaving in September, unless someone leaves them a fortune, in which case she will stay. Alec has nearly finished I think, but she didn’t say if he was coming too.
My father had almost completed his degree in psychology at the University of London. With the baby, my mother could no longer work, so surviving in London was clearly difficult.
In July 1953, Stow wrote again to his mother:
Joan came home today. I rang her up, and she sounded very tired, said she had had a terrible trip, and had been waiting around the Customs for four hours. She said she wasn’t too keen to come home, but now she is here she is quite happy. The baby is called Catherine Michelle, all of it. While she was on the boat, she had a cable that Alec was following her in about three weeks. She thought he was going to Canada or somewhere. I suppose he will turn up in the Psych. department here. I hope he can coach me on statistics.
Joan was met on her arrival by my aunt and her husband.
‘She’d had a dreadful trip!’ Rachel recounted later. ‘She looked terrible. There had been an awful heatwave and of course she was only in steerage so she had to find a way of getting up on deck so she could keep the baby cool. And then there was a storm and almost everyone on board got sick so Joan – when she wasn’t attending to Catherine – was nursing everyone else.’
My older sister Catherine was named after the heroine in Wuthering Heights. I sometimes wonder about choosing such a namesake, but my mother had always been fond of tragic nineteenth-century heroines, her favourite book being Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Having their first child clearly didn’t bring the closeness my parents might have hoped for. They separated again several times after Cathy’s birth. Indeed, the voyage back to Australia might well have been another separation. I can only wonder what the cable my mother received on the boat really implied. Had she left London with her newborn thinking her marriage was over? Had my father decided to pursue career opportunities in Canada? Had he then repented and decided to come back to his wife and family? Did the cable come as a complete surprise to my mother? ‘She thought he was going to Canada or somewhere.’ Is this Stow’s expression – meaning he wasn’t sure where Alex was headed – or my mother’s words to Stow when he rang her? Were my parents so estranged that she was even vague about which country he might be setting off to? Was my father’s life so utterly dominated by indecision?
No one can tell me. Everyone involved – my grandparents, my mother, my father, my sister, Stow – are all dead and silent. So I am compelled, as Atwood says, to attempt that risky trip to the Underworld in an effort to bring something or someone back. The only way down is via imagination.
When my mother came back to Western Australia with her firstborn, her mother, Mary, must have been delighted to see her, although perhaps not so delighted by the husband who had allowed her to return unaccompanied. I imagine my mother staying at Oakover on the Swan Valley vineyard, and I imagine it might have been slightly scandalous, a married woman returning from England on her own with a baby. I imagine Donald Ferguson, her father, shaking his head, becaus
e he rarely spoke, and wishing his eldest daughter had had enough sense, like her younger sister, to marry a proper farming man and not this upstart of a grazier’s son who was convinced he had some other, higher, kind of destiny.
In one of Joan’s rare moments of confession, extracted while we sat together in a waiting room, I had heard about how her own mother, Mary, had suffered a serious depressive episode.
‘They called it a breakdown,’ my mother said. ‘She felt so terrible but she couldn’t help it. She just couldn’t get out of bed.’
Joan was only fifteen at the time and as the eldest was compelled to leave school to housekeep and care for the family.
Stow helped to explain a little more:
I think your grandmother’s ‘breakdown’ in the ’30s, which ended Joan’s schooldays, may have been caused not just by depression, but also the Depression. It was a grim time, and a lot of people simply walked off their farms and stations, leaving them to the banks. I should think the Fergusons would have been vulnerable. My father, as a recently married, young country-town lawyer, once had to accept payment for his services in bananas, from a client at Carnarvon. After those years of poverty came wartime austerity, with rationing that went on into the ’50s. We boarders at Guildford took our ration-books with us.
My aunt’s version of Joan’s arrival back to Perth is that the marriage was definitely over but it was only a matter of weeks before my father followed my mother back to Australia. It may have been then that my grandfather made the offer. With four daughters and no son, Donald Ferguson had no heir to inherit the vineyard or his vintner’s business. So he asked my father if he would take on the Oakover property of three hundred acres. My father said no. He didn’t want a life on the land, he said. He wanted a life of the mind. It was that decision that led to the loss of our heritage, our inheritance, the vast family network of cousins and all knowledge of ancestral lineage.
And the life of the mind, as we know, can be just as dangerous as a life on the land. ‘Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education,’ said David Foster Wallace, ‘is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff … instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.’ Then he refers to the ‘old cliché’ about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
Some time in 1954 my father went back to England, in pursuit of the life of the mind, taking my mother with him. But they were not destined to stay together and I will never know what exactly pushed them apart yet again. Family stories are always full of holes, blank bits, missing pages and paragraphs that have been scribbled on or deleted. The story we get to hear depends entirely on the storyteller. Cathy claimed that she was left behind in Western Australia, abandoned to our grandmother, while Joan and Alex returned to England together. She claimed that she spent her first birthday like an orphan, without parents. A letter from Stow to his grandmother seems to confirm this: ‘Joan has gone away and left the baby with Mrs Ferguson.’ But my aunt Rachel, my father’s sister, disputes this. She says Joan would never have left her firstborn behind. And how could Cathy remember her first birthday anyway?
All that’s certain is that, in 1958, my parents returned again from England to settle in Australia permanently, after my father was offered a position in the psychology department of the University of New South Wales. During this time, while Stow was at the University of Sydney studying anthropology, he went to visit my parents.
I too have a memory of another little girl: your sister Catherine, when she was whatever age she was in 1958. I was studying anthropology and living at St Paul’s College in Newtown, and Joan and Alex invited me to where they were based then, somewhere Botany Bay way … What I remember is Catherine repeatedly jumping off the sofa for Alex to catch her, until at last he dropped her. Then she said, in effect: ‘Why can’t I depend on you, Daddy, why do you always let me down?’ I thought this was a striking example of psychological warfare being used against a psychologist. Alex looked considerably chastened for a moment.
*
After all these years, one might wonder why it is so important to know when exactly my father came and went between Australia and England. Why is it relevant to me, at this age, to know whether he was at the birth of his firstborn or not? Or whether he was a reluctant father? Or if he had contemplated abandoning his wife and newborn child? Or where Cathy spent her first birthday?
It’s important because later on, as a grown-up, my sister continued to accuse my father of never being there for her. It’s important because she gradually came to resent and then hate him. It’s important because, for a long time, she was the family storyteller and we, my brother and I, believed everything she said. It’s also important because she was the one, many years later, who knocked on our father’s door and, getting no answer, climbed through his window and found him hanging.
*
Back in Sydney, I discovered that my sister’s health had deteriorated. Since her first emergency surgery for endometrial cancer, I had accompanied her to rounds of radiation and a schedule of acupuncture appointments. But while I’d been away she’d received more bad news: diabetes type 1.
The handsome oncologist told us, as gently as possible, that although he might be able to keep my sister alive for a few years – perhaps five – the cancer would, in the end, kill her. He wasn’t direct but his meaning was clear. As I drove my sister home we didn’t discuss his prognosis and I couldn’t ask Cathy whether she had interpreted it in the same way as I had. Silence seemed to be the only possible way to respond. In the end, his prediction was extremely accurate.
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 ap
proval 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.’
Moving Among Strangers Page 6