John Stewart (8) (1919–)

There was a day once, in a POW camp in Burma, when John Stewart asked the commandant for better rice, and it sent the man into a state of rage the Japanese called mu sekinin, “loss of responsibility.” He ordered the prisoners to kneel with their necks stretched out, and unsheathed his sword, swinging it low over the bared skin. Stewart, understanding that he had only seconds left to live, reached for some noble idea to carry in his head when he went into death. He could find nothing. show more “I found myself in a great void, conscious of being nothing but a receptacle for ready-made beliefs, mouthing words of no significance. I’d been granted two decades of life, a life of mimicry, and I was about to disappear. Despair, incommensurable despair, was all I felt.”

But he did not die. And he did not, ever, forget what he calls his “moment of lucidity.” We sleepwalk through life, Stewart writes, but “I was awake when the sword whistled over my head.”

Stewart’s seemingly random collection of essays, Flotsam: Adventures of a Footloose Photographer, is something like a double fistful of moments in his life he remembers being “awake,” grasped tight so they don’t slip away, and strung into a narrative in the vain hope that some commonality, some message or purpose to his life will appear.

John Stewart has had what people would call “an interesting life.” And if his spare, understated writing style serves to emphasize just how interesting, it also underscores how much is left out: “Sonkrai [work camp], where I spent the longest period, had the worst reputation and suffered the most casualties. Cholera, dysentery, beriberi, and malaria were fast depleting the original contingent of 1,800 prisoners. By the war’s end, only 182 were still alive.” Flotsam is not a memoir, but a series of snap shots, placed not quite in order on the album pages, and, one feels, with some of the captions missing: “I look a leopard in the eye and we both know the inevitability of death.” “I catch up with the Korean who tortured us in the camps and decide not to shoot him.” “I meet the Amdo beggar woman and we seem to recognize each other.” It is as though Stewart lives his life eternally in the immediate present. Which I suppose is to be expected in a photographer. . . read full review show less