Goodbye Randolph Stow
(This post added to May 6th 2010)

The Western Australian-born novelist Randolph Stow died in Britain recently. He is being described by newspapers as reclusive, solitary and eccentric. He wrote about the sense of space and the solitude that can be found in the Australian bush (I can tell you this is true). His literary career started early and was prolific and successful, but tapered off into silence. Randolph Stow lived alone for most of his life. He never married, which possibly shouldn’t be surprising as he was apparently gay, but in the recent press articles that I have read issues of sexuality have not been cited as an explanation for Stow’s lack of social involvement. Stow “remained outside all Australian literary networks” and reportedly also had little involvement in the social world of literature in the UK where he had lived since the 1960s. One could speculate about a possible place on the autistic spectrum for this influential figure in Australian literature, but I think what really matters is that here we have one more example of a confirmed loner who has achieved some kind of greatness, which just goes to prove that all of those people who like to say that sociability is an essential requisite to being any kind of success, or any kind of human, are full of it.

P. S. I've found a couple of interesting details about Randolph Stow in an old book Randolph Stow by Ray Willbanks, published in 1978. Willbanks quoted from Geoffrey Dutton when he wrote that Stow came from "an old station-owning family of style, education, and eccentricity ..." Willbanks added that Stow's mother's family claimed Thomas Jefferson as a relation. Why is this interesting? I have found no less than seven publications by seven different authors, three of them regarded as having expertise in the area of autism/Asperger syndrome, two of them professors, who all assert that President Jefferson was or could have been autistic. Norm Ledgin has even written a whole book arguing that Jefferson had Asperger syndrome, a condition that runs in families and is genetic. If you'd like to see the list of publications that mention Jefferson in regard to the autstic spectrum, see a more recent post in my blog.