The Refuge
KENNETH IVO BROWNLEY LANGWELL ‘SEAFORTH’ MACKENZIE was born in 1913 in South Perth. His parents divorced in 1919, and he grew up with his mother and maternal grandfather on a property at Pinjarra, south of Perth. He was a sensitive child who developed an intense love of nature.
At age thirteen Mackenzie was sent to board at Guildford Grammar School in Perth. His experiences there informed his first novel,
The Young Desire It
, published under the name Seaforth Mackenzie by Jonathan Cape in 1937. The author was just twenty-three.
The novel drew praise from
The Times
,
Spectator
and
Sydney Morning Herald
; the
Liverpool Daily Post
called it ‘amazingly brilliant’. It was awarded the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal.
By this time Mackenzie had studied law, worked as a journalist and moved to Sydney. There he met the leading lights of the literary scene—among them Kenneth Slessor and Norman Lindsay—and married. He and his wife had a daughter and a son.
Mackenzie’s subsequent novels were
Chosen People
(1938),
Dead Men Rising
(1951), based partly on his experience of the Cowra prisoner breakout, and
The Refuge
(1954). He also produced two volumes of poetry.
Kenneth Mackenzie’s last years were spent mainly alone, in declining health and battling alcoholism, at Kurrajong in New South Wales. On 19 January 1955 he drowned in mysterious circumstances while swimming in Tallong Creek, near Goulburn.
NICOLAS ROTHWELL is a senior writer for the
Australian
, and the award-winning author of
Heaven and Earth
,
Wings of the Kite-Hawk
,
Another Country
,
The Red Highway
and
Journeys to the Interior
. His most recent book,
Belomor
, was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Literary Award.
ALSO BY KENNETH MACKENZIE
The Young Desire It
Chosen People
Dead Men Rising
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Copyright © the estate of Kenneth Mackenzie 1954
Introduction copyright © Nicolas Rothwell 2015
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
First published by Jonathan Cape 1954
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: 9781922182654
Ebook ISBN: 9781925095593
Author: Mackenzie, Kenneth, 1913–1955.
Title: The refuge : a confession / by Kenneth Mackenzie ; introduced by
Nicolas Rothwell.
Series: Text classics.
Dewey Number: A823.3
CONTENTS
Hunting Different Game
by Nicolas Rothwell
Hunting Different Game
by Nicolas Rothwell
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.
