Review of Peter Kelly, Buddha in a Bookshop

Abstract

Buddha in a Bookshop straddles several genres – biography, memoir, social history, literary criticism, philosophical rumination – and this is both its charm and the source of its limitations. The book has three governing purposes: to furnish an account of the life and work of the neglected Australian poet, Harold Stewart; to trace the trajectory of a small circle of Melbourne writers and thinkers who, under Stewart’s leadership, were influenced by the Traditionalist school associated with Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon; and to provide an assessment of Traditionalism. The bare bones of Stewart’s life: born in Sydney, 1916, attended Fort Street High and, briefly, Sydney University; moved to Melbourne, worked in Army Intelligence in World War 2; developed an early interest in Oriental art and poetry, and the ideas of Carl Jung and Rene Guenon; published his first collection of poetry in 1948; moved to Japan in the early 1960s, became a Shin Buddhist in Kyoto where he lived until his death in 1995. His most durable writings were Orpheus and Other Poems (1956), A Net of Fireflies (haiku translations; 1960), By the Old Walls of Kyoto (1981), a 460-page collection incorporating a cycle of 12 narrative poems and essays on Japanese culture and the unpublished Autumn Landscape Roll, a 5,000-line verse epic which Stewart regarded as his magnum opus. With fellow antimodernist James McAuley, Stewart is best remembered as the perpetrator of the Ern Malley hoax of 1944, which created quite a brouhaha but is now consigned to a footnote in our literary history. Kelly argues the case for Stewart as a major poet, especially in his Japanese years, and an orientalist of some distinction. He also provides glimpses into the personality of Stewart with whom Kelly maintained a close friendship for half a century. But Stewart was a reclusive man, in part because of his gayness, and Kelly is able to tell us less about the person than the poet. SOPHIA (2007) 46:315–316 DOI 10.1007/s11841-007-0029-0