(The following article first appeared in Echoes: Writers in Kyoto Anthology 2017)

Three Old Men of Kyoto
by Alex Kerr

Harold Stewart
David Kidd
William Gilkey

I don’t know if young men are like this any more, but I was the sort of young man who sat at the feet of old men. I hung on their every word, even writing down scraps of conversation like Boswell did with Dr. Johnson. And fate was kind to me, because it sent me three amazing old men in Kyoto: They were David Kidd, William Gilkey, and Harold Stewart.

All three were formed by dramatic events in their youth, events which propelled them in the end to Kyoto.

Harold Stewart, The Poet
Harold Stewart (1916-1995) was one of those unusual people who have lived a previous life completely unrelated to the one they finally choose in later years. An Australian, when only 25 he became famous overnight through a hoax: Harold and a friend created an imaginary poet, named Ern Malley who wrote overblown free-verse and whose poems were supposedly found in a trunk after his death. As a spoof in protest against the “decay of meaning and craftsmanship in poetry,” they sent these poems to the editor of a literary magazine who published them to great acclaim. 

When it was revealed that there was no Ern Malley, it led to a scandal as a result of which the editor was fined, critics bitterly argued the merits of free versus rhymed verse, and Harold’s name went down in Australian literary history. He spent the rest of his life writing serious poetry — rhymed and metered, of course.

In middle life, Harold turned increasingly to Asia, beginning first with Bali, where he traveled and lived for a while as guest of painter Donald Friend. Eventually he discovered Japan in 1961, and finally moved to Kyoto in 1966. He was drawn by the beauty of Kyoto as well as the charm of Masaaki, a garden designer who later became the partner for some years of tea master John McGee. Harold was 50 years old when he made his move.

Already having experienced a full life in Australia and Bali, Harold lived in Kyoto more or less in retirement. He devoted himself to the life of a pure literary man: studying Buddhism, taking walks, and writing long poetry and prose cycles, the most important of which was By the Old Walls of Kyoto (1981).  

I doubt that there will be foreign Harold Stewarts in Kyoto in the future, as the essence of his existence lay in the way the old city, its history and arts fit in with his contemplative life style.  He used to send me manuscripts of poetry now and then, and I find that I still have pages from his epic Autumn Landscape Scroll, which he finished just before his death. I don’t know if it was ever published. As if describing his own life in Kyoto, he relates how the poet Wu Tao-tzu walked into a painted landscape:

The Emperor could not follow where he led,
But only watch his distant figure, dim
And indistinct, diminishing in scale
While passing through the morning’s golden haze
That glorified the foot-hills, veil on veil,
Until beyond their range’s farthest rim
Wu disappeared at last from mortal gaze,
And wandering on through that pictorial plane,
Lost in his work, was never seen again.

David Kidd — The Aesthete
David Kidd (1926-1996) was a colorful, outrageous personality, surrounded by an adoring court of disciples and admirers. There was also an outer ring of those who absolutely loathed him. Meeting David, attired in satin Tibetan robes, with his long golden hair, endless cigarettes, his kang (a Chinese raised platform) on which David reigned while others sat on the floor below him, and his brilliant but stinging conversation, was an experience that none forgot.

Coming from a poor family in Kentucky, David went to Beijing when he was 19 years old — and entered into a realm of fantasy. He married Aimee Yu, daughter of an old aristocratic family, and took up residence in the Yu mansion, a palace of 400 rooms dating to the Ming dynasty. He fled soon after the Communist victory in 1952, but in the meantime — as one of the very last people in history to have seen it — he had absorbed the magnificent life of Imperial China.

After a year in America, he came to Japan and stayed, living first in Kobe, then Ashiya (this time in a daimyo’s palace), and finally, after 1978, in a grand residence on a hill overlooking the Miyako Hotel. With an eye for beauty that was close to genius, David built a fabled Chinese and Japanese art collection, and it was surrounded by gold screens, Ming tables, jade, ceramics, and polished lacquer, that he held court.

David’s true art was conversation. Talk in his palaces adorned with ancient treasure took on a surreal tone. When someone commented that a gold screen looked strangely pink, David would remark “Oh, it’s just the reflection off the red silk covering the Manchu crown.” And if you looked closely, it was.

David was the ultimate aesthete. For David colors were like gems and each color had a taste, such as the peppermint clouds in Ming portrait painting which he called “ice-cream colors.” He insisted that everything should be art, even (as he glanced out the window at his partner Morimoto laboring in the garden) the art of burning weeds. He added, the great thing about burning weeds, unlike ephemeral arts such as flower arranging is, “Once burnt, always burnt.”

David’s humor was completely irreverent, and so infectious that casual visitors would open their hearts and tell him things they wouldn’t tell their closest friends. “I always think a well-chosen word is humorous,” he used to say. 

His wit could be sharp, even cruel. A Japanese boy, irritated by David’s harsh criticisms of Japan, once asked him, “There must be something good about Japan.  Otherwise, why would you live here?” “Of course there is” replied David.  “What is it?” asked the boy.  “Japan is wonderful because it preserves so many beautiful Chinese things,” David pronounced.  

Within the wit, however, was a kind of Buddhist wisdom, a sense of the mystery and evanescence of things. David saw first the life of old Beijing disappear, and then old Japan. Nothing stayed the same, and nothing was what it appeared to be. One night a group of us were gathered late at night on the moon-viewing platform in the garden of David’s palace in Ashiya shortly before it was dismantled to make way for an apartment complex. Masaaki was there and he commented on the strange blooming of cherry blossoms out of season. “Is that a cherry tree?”  asked Masaaki. “Yes,” replied David. “I can see cherry blossoms!” said Masaaki. “Well,” said David, “It’s just like Persian carpets.  You’re looking at the pattern that isn’t there. Actually you’re looking at bug-eaten leaves and the spaces look like flowers.”

William Gilkey — The Sage
Of my three old men, William Gilkey (1920-2000) was the least known to the greater world, but had a cult following which may even have rivaled David Kidd’s.  

William Gilkey hailed from Chikasha, Oklahoma. Trained at Harvard and Julliard as a concert pianist, he went first to India as a young man, and then, like David Kidd, moved to China in the 1940’s. Living first in Suzhou, and later in Beijing, he was to witness the fall of the old regime, and experience two years of house arrest and Maoist brain-washing, before being deported in 1954. When asked why he stayed on, even though most of the other foreigners fled, Gilkey replied characteristically, “This was the greatest show on earth, and I had a front row seat.  How could I leave?”

Arriving in Kobe, Gilkey became fast friends with David Kidd, and the two shared a house for some years before David found his Ashiya palace. But as the years passed, the paths of these two men diverged. In 1969, at the age of 50, Gilkey changed the course of his life. He left Japan and returned to America, where he embarked on a ten-year course of study including classes in professional writing at Oklahoma University, study of health regimens through vitamins, and research into the occult. He read everything from the Bible to Madame Blavatsky, and at one stage visited Japan where he met and interviewed Japan’s leading mystics.

By the time he returned to Japan in 1979, Gilkey had become a mystic and a sage. People called from all over the world to have their I Ching cast; others took up piano under him; and I studied occult lore from Gilkey.  Among various useful talents, he taught me how to stop the rain.  He himself, however, rarely could be bothered to stop rain — except on laundry day.

With his homey Oklahoma accent, Gilkey would explain occult truths with wit as trenchant as David Kidd’s.  Outlining the laws of karma, he would say, “When you do someone wrong, you are creating a powerful karmic link. You should ask yourself first, ‘Do I really want to walk hand in hand down eternity with this jerk?’”

With his bald head, flowing gray hair, and twinkling eyes, Gilkey looked rather like Yoda in Star Wars. He lived in a charming old Japanese house in Kameoka, just outside of Kyoto. There he taught his band of disciples, as sages have done for centuries, the hard facts of life: that all is transient, and that love, beauty, and friendship fail. Yet he remained a romantic who believed that the only correct way to play a piano phrase is to “break your heart”.

Coda
Well, why Kyoto? I doubt very much that these three men would have been attracted by the whirling activity of Tokyo, since their lives were basically quiet ones, devoted to their interests: literature, art, and philosophy. David Kidd used to say, “You need to make your living with your big toe,” meaning that paying the rent should only occupy a small part of your energy. In Kyoto, such a thing is possible.

Another aspect of each of their lives was that time had in fact passed them by.  All three dwelled in what amounted to a dreamworld. What happened in Japan was increasingly irrelevant to them, and what they did no longer mattered. And yet there was nothing sad in this. Because of it, they had the leisure to be wise and wonderful.  

One is reminded of a paragraph from an old guidebook to Peking, describing the palace eunuchs after the fall of the dynasty:

It is pleasant to look at the brocade of autumn tints from the pretty pavilions on the hillside, to linger near the pond where tame goldfish rise to the surface to be fed at the sound of a wooden rattle, to gossip with lonely old men who have cut themselves off from family life by the nature of their calling, but who served Empresses and princesses and remember many things … Alas, these Manchu grandees — so typical of the faults and virtues of the past — have nothing to offer the new world except a wonderful and unwanted elegance of living which still permits them to accept with calm dignity the fate of failures.

In the end, we’re all failures, of course. David warned, “Life is a constant battle against boredom on all fronts. You must create your own inner cinema.” This these three old men did, and I was lucky to sit at their feet and take notes.  None of it is very useful.  But it’s still nice to know how a metered couplet should really be written, and what the taste of ruby red is, and how to stop rain.

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The following photos of David Kidd’s house overlooking the Miyako Hill are taken from the lavishly illustrated Japanese Style by Suzanne Slesin, Stafford Cliff and Daniel Rozensztroch (pub. Clarkson Potter, 1988).