Stewart Farrar: Writer on a Broomstick, the Biography of Stewart Farrar

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Stewart Farrar: Writer on a Broomstick, the Biography of Stewart Farrar

by Elizabeth Guerra, Janet Farrar (Contribution by), R. J. Stewart (Foreword by)

4.17 · rating details · 6 ratings · 1 review

Elizabeth Guerra and Janet Farrar have collaborated to record and explore Stewart Farrar's life and career in detail. This book tracks Farrar's development from an eager and talented adolescent to a gifted journalist and television, radio and film script writer and finally to his later life as a practitioner of Wicca and author of many nonfiction books and science fiction ...more

Paperback, 232 pages

Published February 1st 2008 by R J Stewart Books

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May 30, 2010

Jon rated it

From my first eclectic days on, Stewart seemed like some relative one grows up hearing about though one has not met them, but who is clearly loved and respected and so often and so fondly talked about that you look forward to when you will inevitably meet them. That sense has only increased since.

Sometimes when people pass there is not only the obvious grief by those close to them, but it has an impact on a wider community - other people who didn't know them well or at all won't so m...moreFrom my first eclectic days on, Stewart seemed like some relative one grows up hearing about though one has not met them, but who is clearly loved and respected and so often and so fondly talked about that you look forward to when you will inevitably meet them. That sense has only increased since.

Sometimes when people pass there is not only the obvious grief by those close to them, but it has an impact on a wider community - other people who didn't know them well or at all won't so much grieve but will feel a sense of loss. Sometimes the reason for this impact will be the nature of the death - tragedies that kill whole families or fatal accidents in a local industry - and sometimes it relates more to the impact, the life, the presence of the people in question. They'd made their presence felt widely and that presence is missed when it's gone, sometimes by people only then recognising what a force that person had had.

In my short time in the Irish Pagan community I can think of three passings that had such an impact. This is subjective of course, we're too diverse a group with too many shining lights amongst us that I can only speak of those times that I saw this sense of loss and can't presume that others didn't have the same impact albeit not witnessed by me.

And when it happens there is a difficulty. How do we express this sense of loss? Can we even have the audacity to do so when those closer to the deceased are beside us grieving so much more deeply, so much more terribly?

My first glance at this book brought two memories. Stewart's passing was the first of those I mentioned above, and Rhiannon Lee-Doyle's the third. The dedication to Rhiannon immediately brought to mind her mother turning towards the funeral guests and thanking us for coming and overlaid with that was the memory of her standing, having performed Stewart's funeral rites, while Janet stood beside her and thanked us for coming to that funeral.

I was attending Stewart's funeral not in a personal capacity, but representing the eclectic group I belonged to at the time. The "inevitable" meeting with him never did take place and I'd met Janet and Gavin only briefly once before. I was there out of politeness and respect, not grief. I never knew him and yet I felt a loss of him.

And so I started reading this book with a mixture of that sense of loss and a shame at daring to feel loss for someone I never knew and someone I barely knew when their survivors were hit by grief.

Partly for this reason, therefore, I especially appreciated the remembrances section. It is nicely handled in its mixing of personal remembrances of those who would have grieved Stewart's passing with remembrances from people who did not, but who feel such a loss as I write of here, and gives each an appropriate space.

The writing is first-book writing - and the author is at a unfair disadvantage; to bring to mind such a lucid and fluid writer in a reader while they read your own writing is not an enviable prospect - but it's good first-book writing. While a few laboured moments do jar, as a whole if flows very well and I had read it from cover to cover before I'd even discarded the packaging (though the poems I left to return to as my brain was in "non-fiction" mode when I got to them and I couldn't give them the reading they deserve until later).

The technique of using quotes from Kipling poems to head each chapter was fantastic. What other poet would be so perfectly appropriate to the story of a child, an eager bright young man, a soldier, a writer, an initiate, an elder of the Craft, and finally to one who has passed from us? He was a favourite of Stewart's (it's clear from his writing that he liked Kipling, and we learn more on this in the book) and the choice seems obvious, but is the sort of obvious that all the best ideas are once somebody else has already had them. Rarely are chapter heading quotes such an enjoyable part of a book.

There is more to say on Stewart. More to be gleaned from his writings. His Craft writing alone deserves, and will hopefully some day receive, a thorough analysis of the sort that he himself conducted on the writings of Wiccans who came before him. This though is the story of who and what we in the Farrar lines, in the Craft as a whole and in the wider Pagan community lost when he died.

A difficulty the author had was with the amount of background detail needed for younger readers and those outside of Britain and Ireland at various points in the telling. It's a difficult, probably impossible, balance to get right and at first I was rather annoyed at some of it, until I reminded myself that much was from periods that I've actively sought stories about, from those who lived through them, since I was very young. Not everyone will have heard as much about the war through to Swinging London from their parents' and grandparents' generations, and increasingly it is the great- and soon even great-great-grandchildren of Stewart's generation that are taking their first steps in seeking various forms of witchcraft and pagan worship, with many of them benefiting not just from Stewart's work, but from work which in turn built on his. It is wholly appropriate that the balance lean towards serving that audience for here is a book with which the author can beat the bounds - take youngsters around and show them "this is where you come from".(less)

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