The Englishness of Randolph Stow (2014)

In 1962 Randolph Stow wrote from England: 'I'm pretty sure I couldn't settle in Perth-I'd dry up as a writer if I had nothing but the suburbs to write about' (Letter to mother, 29 Oct 1962). A few months earlier he had waxed lyrical about the English weather:Bulbs are coming up everywhere, so I suppose it will soon be spring. Today has been beautifully sunny and I must say it's no wonder the English go round saying: 'Lovely day' to everyone they see, because when it is fine in a month like this it does feel pretty wonderful, like a gift from heaven or something. (Letter to mother, 12 March 1962)These documents are an intimation of Stow's developing attachment to England, and eventual permanent separation from Australia, but they are not the only form of expression of such sentiments. In the same year his poem 'Outrider' gave a further clue to Stow's recent status, with its theme of exile, the hearing of the land as 'grievous music,' and its 'dim low English room, one window on the fields' (40).At the time of writing these letters Stow had already been living away from Australia for two years. Born in Geraldton in 1935, he had moved to England in 1960, and made that country his base for the next fifty years. Both sides of his family were fifth generation Australians: the Stows came from Hadleigh in Suffolk, arriving in South Australia in 1837; the Sewells on his mother's side emigrated from Essex to Western Australia in 1836. Tellingly, after brief stays in Leeds, London and Scotland, Stow moved to his ancestral places, settling first in rural Suffolk, then finally on the Essex coast. Much has been written of Stow's evocation of landscape in his Australian novels, notably in Anthony Hassall's key work, Strange Country (1986). The same receptivity to the different place in which Stow found himself can be read across his many letters back to his family in Australia which are preserved in the National Library of Australia (MS Acc10.195), eventually finding a literary outlet in his final two novels, The Girl Green as Elderflower set in Suffolk, and The Suburbs of Hell in Essex.This article focuses on the dynamic between Stow's life, family history, imagination and creative output. Using close study of his letters alongside his novels it adds a layer of understanding of this writer's engagement with 'England,' both as a concept and as reality, complementing the different angles in the 2011 writings on The Girl Green as Elderflower by Duckworth and Lynch. Stow's new-found Englishness is manifest in his choice of home in a quintessentially English terrain, as described in affectionate and poetic terms in the letters home that span a period of more than forty years. In his literary works there are more complex layers of influence; his great love of English writers such as Keats and the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists colours his own writings. In many of Stow's novels the sense of connection with his English ancestry is present, already a powerful theme in his first novel, A Haunted Land. He writes a longing for London into the final pages of The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea, and continuity and renewal lie at the heart of his final two novels.On arriving in England in 1960 Stow made his way to Hadleigh, once one of the wealthiest towns in England, dominated by the cloth trade (see Craig). It still retains a square with a parish church and a fifteenth-century guildhall. Hadleigh's ruined castle, which dates from the 1360s, is situated at a point above the Thames estuary with sweeping views that extend as far as Kent. At one time home to Anne of Cleves, the castle was destroyed in a landslide in the sixteenth century. It features in John Constable's only oil painting, a romanticised landscape of its melancholy crumbling towers completed in 1829. In a number of ways there are parallels between Constable and Stow, with their shared views of Suffolk as a place with open, sweeping skies and 'eerie illumination' (Hawes 456). …