Angus John Mackintosh Stewart

Angus John Mackintosh Stewart (22 November 1936 - 14 July 1998) was a British writer, best known for his novel Sandel.

Biography

Stewart was the third child of the novelist and Oxford academic J. I. M. Stewart (1906-1994) and Margaret Hardwick (1905-1979). Shortly after their marriage in 1932, the Stewarts moved to Australia where, from 1935 to 1945, J. I. M. Stewart was Jury Professor of English at the University of Adelaide. Their son Angus was born in Adelaide in 1936. The family returned to England in 1949 when Stewart's father became a Student (Fellow) of Christ Church, Oxford, and Angus was educated at Bryanston School and at his father's college.

Angus Stewart's first published work was ‘The Stile’, which appeared in the 1964 Faber & Faber anthology Stories by New Writers. He won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1965. His breakthrough to public and critical attention came in 1968 with his first novel, Sandel. Set in the pseudonymous St Cecilia’s College, Oxford, the book revolves around the unorthodox love between a 19-year-old undergraduate, David Rogers, and a 13-year-old chorister, Antony Sandel. The novel appears to have been based on real events, recounted by Stewart in an article under the pseudonym 'John Davis' in the 1961 anthology Underdogs, edited for Weidenfeld and Nicolson by Philip Toynbee. The story is treated with delicacy and sensitivity, and has a place in English literature comparable in importance to Roger Peyrefitte’s treatment of the same subject in his 1943 novel Les amitiés particulières. Over the past forty years Sandel has become a cult gay novel. A stage adaptation by the Scottish writer Glenn Chandler was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2013.^[1] After forty years out of print, (and fetching astronomical prices on the second hand market), Sandel was republished in August 2013 to coincide with the Edinburgh production.

After Sandel Stewart moved to Tangier in Morocco, partly as a project in self-discovery and partly to enjoy drugs in a sympathetic environment. His Moroccan experiences resulted in two further books, a novel entitled Snow in Harvest (1969) and a travel diary entitled Tangier: A Writer’s Notebook (1977). Apparently, a third, unpublished novel, The Wind Cries All Ways, included a "startling description of a man's incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum". (So claims the publisher of the Sandel rerelease in the notes on the author.^[2])

He also wrote poetry, some of which was published as Sense and Inconsequence (1972), with an introduction by his father’s longstanding friend W. H. Auden.

After his mother’s death in 1979 Stewart returned to England, living for the final twenty years of his life in an annex to his father’s home at Fawler outside Oxford. He was an accomplished portrait photographer. For much of his life he suffered from clinical depression.

Works

• Sandel, Hutchinson, 1968. Reissued by Pilot Productions Ltd, 2013.
• Snow in Harvest, Hutchinson, 1969
• Sense and Inconsequence: Satirical Verses, Michael de Hartington, 1972
• Tangier: A Writer’s Notebook, Hutchinson, 1977

References

Further reading

• Stephen Fry, Moab is My Washpot, Hutchinson, 1997, p. 237
• Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature, Yale University Press, 1998, p. 416