Harold Stewart

Fort Street was established in 1850 as an academically selective public high school reserved for intellectually gifted students.

He got to know James McAuley at Fort Street and the budding poets shared a common interest in literature which provided the foundation for the exchange of ideas and the opportunity to develop a friendship.

Harold Frederick Stewart (14 December 1916 – 7 August 1995) was an Australian poet and oriental scholar.

He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax.

Stewart's work has been associated with McAuley and A. D. Hope, belonging to a neo-classical or Augustian movement in poetry, but his choice of subject matter is different in that he concentrates on writing long metaphysical narrative poems, combining Eastern subject matter with his own metaphysical journey to shape the narrative.

He is usually described by critics as a traditionalist and conservative but described himself as a conservative anarchist.

A witty and engaging letter writer, many examples have been retained by the National Library in Canberra.

Leonie Kramer in The Oxford History of Australian Literature grades the literary quality of Ethel's (Malley's supposed elder sister) letters as equal to those of Patrick White, Peter Porter and Barry Humphries.

Stewart was raised in Drummoyne, in the western suburbs of Sydney.

He came from a comfortable middle-class background, and his father, employed as a health inspector, had a keen interest in Asia.

"... back in the later 1930's, I had met Alec Hope and he along with Jim [McAuley] and other literary friends used to meet on Saturday afternoons at Sherry's Coffee Shop in Pitt Street Sydney to discuss literary topics and improvise light verse, usually of a satirical nature".

While his former classmates engaged his intellect and wit, he had other friends entertaining more than just his mind.

He refrained from publicly disclosing his homosexuality while alive.

Stewart displayed early promise as a poet after enrolling at Fort Street High School at the age of fifteen in 1932.

Before attending Fort Street he studied the trumpet at the Sydney Conservatorium High School.

A Subtitle honouring Claude Debussy in 'Prelude: On the Quay,' written in the last year of high school, demonstrates that music was a formative poetic influence and one that provided a sense of organisation for his later poetry, which is most apparent in the fugue-like thematic structure of his spiritual autobiography By the Old Walls of Kyoto.

The reference to Debussy also points to the significant influence the French Symbolists had on shaping the affective Gothic mood of his early poetry.

McAuley won the school Poetry Prize in 1933, while Stewart achieved the same honour in the two years that followed.

In a letter to Michael Heyward, he writes: "Jim and I were not good friends at Fort Street, but rather rivals".

He had an early interest in French symbolists Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry and provided translations of their work in his first volume of poetry.

He also favoured American modernists like Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens.

Other major influences include the Romantics poets, especially William Wordsworth and John Keats.

Carl Jung was an early metaphysical influence and it was by way of Jung's commentaries on oriental texts that he discovered the 'Traditionalist' school of writers.

He also immersed himself in Chinese art and poetry, and this determined the subject matter of his first published collection, Phoenix Wings: Poems 1940-46 (1948).

In 1943, while at the Army Barracks, he collaborated with James McAuley and invented Ern Malley, which aimed to expose the excesses of literary modernism.

In The Ern Malley Affair, Michael Heyward recounts the events of the hoax when Stewart conspired with friend and fellow poet James McAuley to dupe Max Harris, the young leader of the modernist movement, and his fellow Angry Penguins, into believing that Ern's sister, Ethel, had found an unpublished manuscript while sorting through her brother's personal belongings after his premature death at the age of twenty-five from the usually non-fatal hyperthyroid condition known as Graves' disease.

The sad and unforgiving truth for Stewart is that Ern Malley not only haunted his career but also eclipsed his other poetry, though this should not be the manner in which his Buddhist poetry is remembered according to several critics.

A later volume, Orpheus and Other Poems (1956), was strongly influenced by Jungian ideas.

Stewart's enrolment in a teaching course at Sydney University was abandoned before his second year for the less certain but more enticing career of a poet.

"I found the courses ... arid and boring to distraction," he recalls.

His ambition to become a poet gathered momentum during high school and after completing his final year, and without university or full-time employment as a distraction, he embarked upon his chosen career path, spending many hours at the Sydney Public Library copying his favourite poems in long hand.

In a letter to Michael Heyward, he wrote: "The period between leaving Sydney University and joining the Army was that period during which I worked through many modern influences, getting lost in the wilderness, stuck up blind alleys, and finding my way out of them".

This period served as an apprenticeship of sorts, suiting his introspective personality, though he did not abandon his social life completely and continued to gather with university friends in coffee shops and bars around Sydney to discuss literature and listen as they read their latest works.

Despite his reserved social demeanour, and without the spur of alcohol as he rarely drank, he appeared forthcoming in conversation, though he had good reason to guard against revealing the more libertine details of his personal life.

In a letter to Michael Heyward, Stewart discussed this social life:

After his death Cassandra Pybus announced it in The Devil and James McAuley and Michael Ackland reiterated it in Damaged Men, though Sasha Soldatow was the first to publish the secret about Stewart's private life in 1996.

Most of his friends were aware that Stewart made his way to the bohemian inner suburb of Kings Cross to discuss modern art, though, at the time, many were probably unaware that he also went there to pursue sexual relations with artists William Dobell and Donald Friend.

Discretion about his sexuality was exercised after the final years of high school when accusations about his sexual orientation were made, forcing him to shelter his private life from scrutiny by developing a poetic persona as his public face.

It is within this environment of intolerance that he had to appear as if poetry, not marriage and raising a family, was his main priority.

During the Second World War, he worked in Army Intelligence (DORCA) at the St Kilda Road Barracks in Melbourne.