GABRIELLE CAREY Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family. Reviewed by Lou Murphy
Gabrielle Carey searches for clues to the life of Randolph Stow in this treasure hunt of family memoir and literary history.
In her determination to ‘know’ Julian Randolph Stow – ‘Mick’ to his family and friends – Carey journeys through both the literary and geographic terrain of her subject. She tries to be as accurate as possible, aware of the difficulty of the task she has undertaken:
… I could be wrong. Being wrong, I’ve realised, is how I’ve spent most of my life: misinterpreting, misunderstanding, misjudging, miscommunicating. Words slip and slide, as T S Eliot said, or as Stow put it, ‘words can’t cope’. And yet that’s all we have. It is all that histories and stories are made of.
Drawing on anecdotal evidence and letters written from Stow to her mother, and to his own mother, Carey takes us on a pilgrimage to uncover the mystery of Stow’s persona as well as the secrets of her own family. She shares the impact of her mother’s fragility as she ages; the burden of palliative care on the family; the rift it causes between Carey and her sister. The death of her mother precedes the disclosure of her sister’s own battle with a terminal illness. In retrospect her sister’s fight with mortality makes sense of some of the decisions made during the course of her mother’s care, decisions fraught with arguments between the sisters.
Family plays a big role in the narrative. Reunion with ‘lost’ family members proves fruitful for Carey, as she is welcomed warmly back into the fold. From cousins, aunts and uncles in Western Australia she gleans further details to help her solve the jigsaw puzzle of her parents’ relationship, and her father’s eventual suicide. Although the content is often heavy, Carey’s voice is full of light, embracing Stow’s spirit of magical wonder. Her intimate voice tells the story simply and directly.
As puzzling as her own parents’ relationship was that of her mother and Stow. Aside from the letters they exchanged and the memories of those who knew them in their youth, Carey discovers that when she was in London, her mother had sent Stow a print of French artist Nicolas Lancret’s painting, La Belle Grecque. This ‘clue’ provides more bafflement than insight into the mystery of their liaison:
… La Belle Grecque … 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 …
Carey also scrutinises the stifling effect of Australian cultural stereotypes on Stow. The national glorification of sport and material success, often at the expense of literary and spiritual pursuits, contributed to Stow’s self-imposed exile from the continent. Before his return to and final settlement in the United Kingdom, Stow was preoccupied with the idea of Australians as being rather like ‘shipwrecked mariners’. The relationships of these stranded seafarers are explored extensively in his work:
The word ‘shipwreck’ often appears in Stow’s poetry and prose. In one of his most quoted passages, he writes of human existence as a kind of shipwreck: ‘We are here as shipwrecked mariners on an island, moving among strangers, darkly.’
There is a sense that in thinking about Stow’s work Carey sees her own father as one of Stow’s ‘shipwrecked mariners’. Using the connection between Stow and her own family to draw on this analogy is an ambitious thing: to combine a personal family story with the story of a public figure. According to Carey it was Stow’s own sensitivity, his fragile artistic nature, that marked him forever as a shipwrecked cultural creature on the Australian shores, but, while focusing on the lack of public recognition for one of our nation’s greatest writers she neglects to mention that he won the Miles Franklin award in 1958 for his novel To The Islands, and also that he received the Patrick White Award in 1979.
Though an illuminating and heartfelt personal memoir, Moving Among Strangers raises more questions than answers about the mystery of Stow. In so doing the book will perhaps serve as a catalyst for renewed interest in one of our nation’s greatest writers.
Gabrielle Carey Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family UQP 2013 PB 240pp $29.99
Lou Murphy is the author of the crime novel, Squealer, and has worked a mix of jobs including on the Sydney dockyards, in crime reporting and in hospitality: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/LouMurphy
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Another one for my enormous TBR pile! Thank you so much for the review and it does sound like Carey took a lot on. Randolph Stow is definitely a neglected writer and it was one of the reasons I chose his book To the Islands as one of the 52 books featured in my novel Crossing Paths. He should be known and read more widely!