Damaged Men: The Precarious Lives of James McAuley and Harold Stewart.(Review)

Damaged Men: The Precarious Lives of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, by Michael Ackland; Allen & Unwin, 2001, $45.

IT WAS A VERY odd way to launch a scholarly book. Before this new study of the Ern Malley hoaxers had even been released, author Michael Ackland was already qualifying its conclusions. After sketching James McAuley as a mentally-troubled, strident, adulterous hypocrite, Ackland defended his "intellectual breadth, courage, creativity and enduring readability" in the March issue of Quadrant.

True, Ackland was indignantly rebutting an even darker portrait by Tasmanian writer Cassandra Pybus. But in so doing, he certainly muddied the waters. So, after two heavily-footnoted biographies in three years, we are no closer to a satisfying understanding of this complex poet, critic and public intellectual.

However, Ackland can fairly claim to have uncovered new material about McAuley in Damaged Men and to have written the first helpful account of the strange life of Harold Stewart. His is also the first book to bring to light the peculiar influence of latter-day gnosticism on both men. The contrast between their ideas, commitments and careers makes a fascinating story.

Stewart, who died in 1995, nineteen years after McAuley, is a more eccentric but less problematic character. A schoolmate of McAuley's at Fort Street Boys' High School in Sydney, a companion at the University of Sydney and in the army during the Second World War, he showed great promise, but published little in his early years. His first book appeared four years after the Ern Malley hoax and its glittering, elegant Orientalism was largely ignored. An eternal outsider, Stewart never got a degree, never held down a "respectable" job, and never felt comfortable in suburban Australia. In 1966 he moved to Kyoto and never returned. There he lived a frugal life as a poet and Buddhist sage, supporting himself with odd jobs and grants from admiring friends and the Australia Council.

Ackland argues that the basic cause of Stewart's alienation was his homosexuality "in an aggressively heterosexual society". In Melbourne, where he worked as a bookseller, Stewart was part of the gay scene, and in Japan he had a succession of gay lovers.

Stewart took art seriously and devoted his years in Japan to writing two long, long poems, By the Old Walls of Kyoto and Autumn Landscape Roll. The first was published in 1981-138 pages of rhyming pentameter and 325 pages of prose commentary. It was praised by his good friend, the late A.D. Hope, says Ackland, as the greatest poem in English in the twentieth century (but by no one else). Stewart finished the second poem a fortnight before his death and the manuscript is gathering dust in the National Library. Perhaps one happy consequence of Ackland's biography will be its publication.