The Girl Green as Elderflower
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
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Copyright © Randolph Stow 1980
Introduction copyright © Kerryn Goldsworthy 2015
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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
Time and Time Again
by Kerryn Goldsworthy
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 call 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.