A Buddhist Divine Comedy

Aligheri Dante & Harold Stewart

Dante Alighieri

Harold Stewart

A Buddhist Divine Comedy

La Divina Commedia & Autumn Landscape-Roll

CHRIS MOONEY-SINGH

Pure Lands Japanese Garden by Dan Morelle CC licensed

A Buddhist Divine Comedy

Some comparative highlights from
Dante's Divine Comedy with
Harold Stewart's Autumn Landscape-Roll

Chris Mooney-Singh, PhD

First published in the Southeast Asia Review of English (SARE), Vol 56 No.1 (2019)

Virgil and Dante navigating the inferno

Table of Contents

Autumn Landscape Roll . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Stewart vs 'St Ern' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Asian Muse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Traditionalists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Living in Kyoto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Pure Land Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Ōjōyōshū . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Shan-shui School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The 'Chinese Epic' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Timeline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Buddhist Literary Traditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Commedia and ALR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Buddhist Redemption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pure Land and Paradiso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Metre and Rhyme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Symbolism of Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Works Cited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Kyoto Vacation (Haibun) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Photo: Lee Riley, 2021. Harold Stewart's personal effects

Autumn Landscape Roll

Since the days of Silk Road exchanges between East and West, Asian philosophical and cultural ideas have been a magnet for rare pilgrims of the arts and lay scholars like Australian poet Harold Stewart (1917-95). In the early 1960s he settled permanently in Kyoto, a city in Japan built on a thousand years of Buddhist learning and shifted his source of inspiration exclusively to Asia in the belief that Australia’s future lay under Australasian skies.

This high degree of cultural immersion produced an exclusive oeuvre of Asian-centred writing crowned by two epic poems, a tradition unknown to classical Chinese and Japanese poetry.

His large body of writing positions him as the unacknowledged precursor to forty years of Australian poetic responses to Asia, even though his final and perhaps most challenging narrative composition Autumn Landscape Roll, with sources predating Dante by 1800 years remains unpublished.

Harold Stewart left Australia permanently for Kyōto, Japan in 1966. Immersed in Asian culture since childhood and living in Japan for the final twenty-nine years of his life, the poet wrote two verse epics that are panoramic depictions of Mahayana Buddhism. These are unprecedented in English-language poetry, alongside a volume of shorter poems as well as two collections of translated classical haiku.

The defining characteristic of his work is meaningful engagement with Asia without repeating patterns of casual acquisitiveness, post-colonial condescension, or fanciful ‘orientalism’.

Notwithstanding, Harold Stewart’s body of work has mostly been passed over by literary critics and his defining major composition remains unpublished, filed with his voluminous papers in the National Library of Australia. Autumn Landscape-Roll (ALR) can be described as a ‘Buddhist Divine Comedy’ that mirrors Dante’s monumental La Divina Commédia in scope and technical achievement.

Stewart versus 'Saint Ern'

First, let us consider some of the reasons why Harold Stewart’s 15,000 lines of poetry (Kelly 1993), along with a voluminous body of expository prose has gone largely unnoticed. Initially, his dual authorship with James McAuley of the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax of 1944, remembered as Australia’s world-famous literary hoax brought Stewart more than his share of notoriety. This incident cast a long shadow over his reputation and continued to haunt him through the 1980s until his death in 1994. By then, ‘Saint Ern’ had duly achieved literary canonisation as a modernist hero with poems that continue to be published in the current anthologies, while Stewart’s own Asian-themed work remains obscure and largely unknown. As the Malley myth grew, multimedia poet-historians like Richard Tipping visited Stewart in Kyōto to research more deeply into what he had always considered to be nothing more than a youthful prank:

It was one afternoon when James McAuley and I were bored; we were on duty and there was absolutely nothing to do…and so we amused ourselves by creating this imaginary poet and his works, which got us into terrible trouble of course, with everybody. But let’s not go into that. It’s a subject which ‘I’m heartily tired of. I’ve had it, day and night, for the last 40 years. All my serious work is completely ignored or neglected whilst everyone harps on this one string. (27)

The 1944 edition featuring The Darkening Elliptic, the Ern Malley poems by Harold Stewart and James McAuley