Harold Stewart. (Letters).

SIR: It is unfortunate that Michael Cook, in his review of Michael Ackland's Damaged Men (June 2001), should express his dissatisfaction with the portrayal of James McAuley in this book by launching an attack on Harold Stewart. While I can sympathise with his view that neither of the two recent biographies of McAuley shed much light on the poetry and that much of the evidence about his alleged misdemeanours is based on unreliable evidence, Mr Cook has no hesitation in making unfounded allegations about the character of Harold Stewart. This strikes me as being both inconsistent and uncharitable.

It is true that the portrayal of Harold Stewart by Ackland is largely benign. This is based on the evidence taken from reliable witnesses, many of whom knew the man for years. A similar portrait of Stewart is revealed in Michael Heyward's The Ern Malley Affair, so Ackland is not alone in making a favourable assessment. But Mr Cook wonders if Ackland's sympathy is misplaced; Stewart could "afford easy-going tolerance because his beliefs were fuzzy, amorphous and New Age". This charge alone is so bizarre that it calls for rebuttal.

First, Harold Stewart was anything but "fuzzy, amorphous and New Age". He abhorred everything that the New Age belief system stood for. His own beliefs were founded on those of Mahayana Buddhism, its ethical precepts and its advocacy of compassion to all living beings. He was a practising, fully-committed member of the Jodo-Shinshu sect for the last thirty years of his life. If Mr Cook had taken the time to consult the essays in By the Old Walls of Kyoto (instead of telling us how many pages were in the book) he would have realised the depth of Stewart's scholarship and his intellectual rigour. Stewart's understanding of the doctrinal foundations of Buddhism is firm and clear and his exposition is eloquent. Nothing fuzzy and amorphous here.

Second, Stewart is accused of lack of "commitment". He was "wifeless, childless, countryless". To accuse someone known to be homosexual of being "wifeless and childless" strikes me as being patently absurd. What else could he be? How could he have had any choice in the matter? The question of his being "countryless" is more complex. Stewart went to ...