CAN a work of genius, a masterwork—a classic—be imperfect, flawed in its essence? Can a great book be made from unbalanced or ill-fitting parts, and can those flaws and quirks actually be the crux of its strength, in much the same way the crystal imperfections of an Argyle diamond cause its prized pale-pink sheen? On first encounter, Kenneth Mackenzie’s The Refuge certainly seems a strange beast of a novel: it is not a tale told, but an act remembered. It doesn’t really have subsidiary characters, so much as walk-on cardboard cut-out figures. The first-person narrative strains credulity until you surrender yourself to its flow. It is by turns wordy and rapid to a fault; its focus jumps here and there; it is distinctly dreamlike, if not nightmarish—yet life, at least the life we expect to see reflected in a mid-twentieth-century realist Australian novel set in a busy media landscape, does not generally have the texture of a dream. We are caught up in a most unconventional kind of classic, then.
Securely designated classics are often venerable treasures, famous for being famous, so well known we cannot really read them: grand human tapestries in prose, depicting with assured simplicity all the breadth of a particular society’s jostling, intermingling life. In the Australian context, the term has been eagerly affixed to well-loved novels, to period pieces with a certain enduring verve, to essay-tracts that traffic in grand ideas and national themes. Sunshine, more than shadows and the night. Critics want the books they call classics to have a consistent confidence and energy about them, and to radiate enlightened social attitudes. Works of Australian literature judged worthy of canonical status are thus often those that portray man’s nature as fundamentally benign, or within the province of possible redemption. A sense of progress in the narrative, a journey towards resolution and greater understanding—such features are desirable as well.
None of these are obvious attributes of the best-known work of Kenneth Mackenzie, and they are wholly lacking in The Refuge, the last book he published in his lifetime. How to frame and approach this novel, without doubt one of the most peculiar and least known of the texts included in the eclectic Text Classics series to date? The Young Desire It, Mackenzie’s early masterwork, was revived by Text in 2013, a full three-quarter century after its first appearance, and was well received by respectable authorities. The case for it was clear enough: it is a vivid tale of youth, and coming of age, written in lyrical prose, its themes in fine balance, its exploration of the tensions between master and pupil in a sylvan West Australian setting exquisitely done.
The Refuge, first published seventeen years after that novel, in 1954, is something else: a murder mystery that is no mystery at all, a seeming thriller set against the backdrop of wartime Sydney with an introspective crime reporter as its controlling, narrating central presence. As is clear from the outset, he is himself the killer in the case—the author and the reporter of the crime. After this initial set-up, the story is inevitably a retracing: the plot is preordained, it has a fated quality about it; we see the characters move in uncomprehending lock-step towards the narrative’s final point. But this crime business is not the key to the work, or even its matter, so much as its pretext. The Mackenzie of The Refuge is hunting different game.
The novel’s opening scene is set in a magnificently tangy Sydney newspaper general reporting room—‘in the corner annexe the overseas teletype machine kept up a continuous solid rattle and ring, working away on its own inside its heavy metal case.’ Foreign influences are flooding in—we will not stay long in familiar, parochial territory. Our reporter, the van Dyck-bearded, grandly named Lloyd Fitzherbert, sets down his tale in poised, self-conscious fashion: he is mazy, he is artful; he meanders into questions of psychology and family dynamics, pedagogy and inheritance, ideology and world politics, the nature and reproducibility of female beauty, the light and look of Sydney Harbour, and the landscape of the Blue Mountains and the surrounding Australian bush.
Indeed, Sydney is a principal presence in his narrative: one could almost say, as with the works of Elizabeth Harrower, that the city has a speaking part. ‘There would be dawn,’ Fitzherbert muses early on,
turning the harbour slowly from light-pricked nothingness to an unfolding mystery of black and silver; aslant the twin bluffs of the Heads, day would break in melancholy tones of yellow and grey and the scraping cries of seagulls above the leaden water would herald the winter sunrise.
So what genre are we dealing with: a philosophical novel? A self-examination? No: another kind of classic. The Refuge is in fact a tragedy, a very precise one, conforming in its own fashion to the tragic unities of time and place. The tell-tale signs are there in the early pages: the initial unfurling image sequences; the central character’s propensity for clear-eyed, paradox-courting psychological explorations; the long soliloquies, the sudden shafts of rather Shakespearean prose—the harbour in the early morning is like music, ‘there is a cool, voluptuous quality in the light of air and water.’
It is impossible that the hyper-literary Mackenzie was unaware, as he wrote, of the genre that lay concealed inside his narrative, or of the specific precursor from which, somehow, he derived his initial premise—a play first performed in 428 BC, the gruesome, distinctly perverse Hippolytus of Euripides. In it a kingly, potent father with a handsome young son on the brink of manhood decides to remarry; this father who loves youth takes as his new bride a much younger woman than himself, a creature from the depths of Europe, beautiful, exotic. Trouble ensues.
Those who seek the humdrum in a novel may well struggle with The Refuge, for all the beauty of its language, the force of intellect present in its architecture and the terrifying logic of its progression from first page to end. But the open reader will be caught at once by Mackenzie’s overwhelming ability to convey the texture of subjective experience: his hero, or anti-hero, is not relating or describing the events of his life; he is living them afresh in the manner he first grasped them, through the medium of words. We are in his head, we see into his poor heart: we have his perspective only. And so we cannot help but be with him, as we are with a great tragic hero whose thought and fate dominates and shapes all the dramatic landscape.
Mackenzie achieves this by a simple procedure. The narrator controls all: the novel is not just his confession, his manifesto. It is his vision. This is a filmic book, and the cinematic genre it borrows from on almost every page is film noir. Odd angles, sharp cuts, extreme close-ups, schlock movie-script coincidences—Hitchcock and Fritz Lang stand like plot consultants at Mackenzie’s shoulder. The twists begin with the early pages, and build to the bleak disclosures of the last.
Police reporter Fitzherbert of the Gazette places his regular late-night call to the CIB in the full knowledge that he will be told of a mysterious drowning in the harbour. What he does not know is that his close friend the duty sergeant will kindly invite him to take a ride to view the corpse—the body of the woman he loved too much to forgive. And so, with this Grand Guignol gauntlet thrown down, the narrator at once in supreme control and off balance, his tragedy in flashback begins.
The cast of characters we meet is limited: Fitzherbert himself; his love object, the impossibly glamorous mid-European refugee Irma, trailing a concealed Communist Party back story in her wake; his teenage son, Alan; and his female confidante, Barbara, who plays the dialogue-sustaining role assigned in Greek tragedy to the nurse or family retainer, conversing, disclosing, moving the drama’s action relentlessly on.
None of this would be sufficient to lift The Refuge beyond the realm of quirky thrillerdom: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, done with a garnishing of literary style. But Mackenzie has a further aim, intriguingly realised in the sweep and atmospherics of his book. Wartime Sydney and the Australia of the setting constitute the ‘refuge’ of the title. Irma is fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe, but she is also bringing the sophistication and the complexity and the paranoia of Europe in her wake. She is a character from the fictive world of Victor Serge or the real world of the exiled Trotsky. Murky agents are on her trail; she must seek shelter, she must hide her unforgettable face away.
Lloyd Fitzherbert, a distinctly provincial, establishment Australian with pedigree and fine principles, finds himself swept up in this net. His investigations and questionings quickly bring him into contact with sinister-seeming party apparatchiks. One foreign pursuer pays a call on Fitzherbert in his newsroom:
He was one of those Europeans who seem to have been born to shrug, roll their guilelessly watchful eyes, and to do things with their mouths and hands in a fashion so hypnotic that, without remembering a word they ever say, one has a lasting recollection of them always doing those things, like images on a motion-picture screen not wired for sound.
With great indignation, Fitzherbert winds himself up to resist this sinuous intruder and all the machinations and conspiracies he represents:
‘Look here…you have come to the wrong man. In fact, I suggest you have come to the wrong country. Wherever your sort go, they expect to inspire fear, or to arouse a fear already dormant. In Australia we have never had to live in that sort of individual fear as yet. I doubt if we ever shall.’
And Fitzherbert sends him packing. But the worm is already deep in the virginal Australian rose. Foreign spirits, sultry and intoxicating, have drifted in upon the tide, and they are spreading through the old, staid country, hinting at elusive, hidden knowledge, sowing temptation and confusion as they go. Lovely Irma has seized on Fitzherbert as her refuge, just as he believes he has found refuge from the drab succession of his life in her. In the Indian summer of their romance it is clear to him: refuge is what people give each other. She is the bird in flight, and she has come to ‘her final refuge within the cave of my mind, the walls of my arms’.
But those walls do not remain a solid place of safety, given Fitzherbert’s slow realisation, in his repeated dealings with his new love and her milieu, that all emotions are ambiguous, that there is no rational or appointed order in the flux and flow of the wide world: ‘It is not hard,’ he concludes, ‘to love that which will destroy the lover, and earthly love and fear are in essence equally strong, equally self-destructive.’ A few pages later, Irma is dead by his hand, her body is adrift in the harbour, and the seagulls are once more on the wing against cloud cover the colour of themselves. The refuge has failed. Australia has lost its simplicity; the equations have come out to their inevitable solution: the tale is at its term.
Much has been at stake; much has been resolved. This is a novel of lingering looks and breaths on the skin, of imagined closeness and wide distances between characters. From its opening pages on, it is also a duel: between eye and object. Our reporter first meets the woman he will love and kill on a passenger ship in the harbour. She is in his mind from that day on. Time drags: eventually, she comes to him, in appeal. He rescues her: he abstracts her to his retreat in the Blue Mountains, another space of shrouds and life-threatening edges. There, she is safe, away from the world. They talk through the night, and the book’s central scene unfolds—a scene that really must be read through without pause, both attentively and with tenderness. It has few parallels in modern writing: it is mature and sophisticated, and naïve and adolescent. It is a description of intimacy and intimacy’s limits; of longing, gazing, and the way the self can lose its boundaries and become unmoored. Such conversations are only possible by night, and are probably best confined to fiction. Another such is the endless-seeming talk between the heroine and the doctor in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, a strange jewel of the 1930s that The Refuge resembles in its baroque linguistic glow.
Irma confesses herself to Fitzherbert, she tells him all her secrets, she offers her body up to him. ‘I knew that such a moment could never again in my life come upon me with this fierce, unpardonable surprise.’ His choice is abstention, and honour: it is also possession in words, and obsession. Better to write than to live; better to know one’s thoughts and feelings with analytic precision than to be caught up wildly in the flow of love. This is the choice that is no choice. The memory of it tempts him until he betrays it. His depth of feeling compels his surrender. Like all tragedies, The Refuge is the tale of a hero who is trapped. His gifts and the strengths in his character are what destroy him.
Books can reach out beyond their frame, and dictate, in some sense, the lives their authors lead. By the time he had reached his fortieth birthday, Kenneth Mackenzie was living at Kurrajong, beside the flank of the Blue Mountains. He was drinking; his world was in disarray. He was the author of majestic books that were received with puzzlement; he was a Bohemian in an austere new post-war realm. The Australian Dictionary of Biography entry devoted to him signs off in sombre tones: ‘His financial situation and personal life were fast deteriorating.’
In January 1955, Mackenzie made a visit to a friend in nearby Goulburn, and was arrested for drunkenness. That same night he was, though a strong swimmer, ‘accidentally drowned’ while bathing in Tallong Creek, a fast-flowing watercourse that few would choose for an early evening dip. Death by water—refuge, release, a literary end.