We continue our week-long coverage of personal diaries by James Courage with a review by CK Stead
In the 1950s and early ‘60s I heard of James Courage from time to time, usually from Frank Sargeson, at first with enthusiasm because Courage was another gay writer – not that Sargeson used, or even liked the word gay to mean homosexual. He considered it a misappropriation of a useful word. Nor on the other hand did Courage much like the word homosexual; he preferred "invert". But whatever the word, he was one of those, and not inclined to conceal it in his writing, though there was no completely overt homosexual (overt invert) novel until his A Way of Love which must have been a first, certainly for New Zealand. Sargeson continued to write fiction which offered oblique signals for gay readers and for the sophisticated straight. He was not in favour of "coming out", and was largely out of sympathy with Gay Liberation: too flamboyant and showy for this man who still carried so much of unforgiving Hamilton afflicting his soul.
I read only one of Courage’s novels, The Young Have Secrets, but I scouted his shorter fiction and chose one for inclusion in my Oxford New Zealand Short Stories (No. 2) which remained in print for many years. Sargeson’s view of Courage’s writing, that can be traced in his letters, was at first enthusiastic ("effortless technical mastery" – October ’52), then less so ("has its points"… "not too satisfying as a work of art" – December ’54), and then carefully qualified ("I have always envied a certain magazine quality" - July ’73). I remember that Sargeson wrote to me that a newly published novel of Courage’s (probably the clearly declarative A Way of Love) deserved "heavily scented brickbats", which from a fellow gay writer sounds pretty much like the ultimate dismissal.
Courage came from a wealthy Canterbury family and was sent straight from school to Oxford where his father gave him the (for the time) extraordinary allowance of £800 a year. (That was in 1923 and I remember that more than 30 years later a scholarship of £450 p.a. was enough for a couple to live on comfortably.) He aspired to be a writer, continued as a much better than average pianist, and while still a student bought himself a grand piano to be installed in his College rooms. From that time on until near to the outbreak of World War II he lived the life of what John Carey calls "the dandified and over-privileged", recording conscientiously the "tortures" of his "sensual libido", his passionate affairs with men, and small significant things like his purchase of "a pair of bath-slippers of soft scarlet leather lined with wool": "Congenial surroundings are absolutely necessary to a refined spirit. Not only clean bed-linen, but a polished fork to eat from, sweet pictures to look at, elegant clothes to wear, good music and talk to hear. Without these [he might as well be] a ploughman or a deep-sea fisherman."
At the same time he worries about severing the connections with New Zealand and what loss this may mean to his writing. Unexpected scents sometimes remind him acutely of home: in Cavendish Square "a smell of rich rotten wood […] took me back in a flash to a bush stream in the mountains of New Zealand". And again: "The first cherries […] Remember the apricot tree that used to grow on the hot dry bank above the calf pen." At other times he strains to find words for them: "If I could only recapture in words the smell of that old haystack that used to be behind the cowshed at home! A scent of dusty clover gone a little mouldy. The hot sun on the white side of the shed."
Another recurring anxiety has to do with the conflict between his "sensual nature" and his "acute fastidiousness". When he reads Wyndham Lewis’s dissection of homosexuality he feels himself to be "an utter worm". Courage never entirely rids himself of this element of self-disgust ("Love is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice" – Oct 1928) and he likes to quote Shakespeare’s "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action"; but he also records that all his life he will "fight against the unwritten, senseless, cruel law that brands sexual inverts as degenerates and beasts" (April 1929). So his gay life continues, with many different men, some friends and frequent lovers, others one-nighters; and though he is "in love" often, with detailed accounts of agonies and disappointments suffered, none seems to involve any thought of permanence until January 1930 when he meets the man, "a gentle, beautiful, affectionate creature" "Frank" (sometimes "Paco"), from Argentina, who "has changed my life. For the first time I am ready to surrender my reserve to another." […] "I love this man unreservedly. I cannot imagine life without him."
When Frank/Paco returns home Courage makes plans and follows him. The diaries record a lot about the travel but very little about the love, though there are photographs of them together in Argentina, one on the beach, another dressed for a formal occasion. Two years later looking back, Courage says that the two months they lived together there were "the happiest of my life". But many years later again he acknowledges that though probably his "most passionate love affair, the whole thing collapsed when I went out to S. America to join him". We hear of this lover at intervals thereafter, and there is one further meeting in London; but Frank/Paco is soon married in Argentina and a father.
All this time Courage has been having intermittent episodes of TB which, though not life-threatening, put him in and out of an expensive sanatorium in Norfolk. He is also going on writing, conscientiously and with all the usual pains and difficulties duly recorded. Writing is his raison d’être; but he doesn’t show any sign of readiness to approach a publisher until he has completed an autobiographical book he calls The Promising Years. This (which he describes as "the special history of a special soul") is offered unsuccessfully to Cape, and then to Faber which brings a detailed response from T.S. Eliot. Courage has a lunch with Eliot and Richard de la Mare (another Faber director) and they agree it would be best if he offered a novel first, after which there would be more interest in the autobiography.
In February 1932 on his 29th birthday he has the "sobering reflection" that he has "spent so much of the last nine years in the company of fools, vagabonds, sex maniacs and literary people generally" but that at least he has "escaped syphilis". "My great regret is that I have not written, as yet, a really good book." In the same month comes the "crushing blow": a letter from Eliot declining both the novel he had offered them, and also the autobiography originally welcomed. No explanation given. "It is really as much as I can do to prevent myself committing suicide. I walk about in a sort of dream but a dream that aches. I feel that I have to start again right at the beginning of everything." But in the same year Gollancz accept a novel, One House (almost certainly the one Eliot had declined).
All through these years of l’entre deux guerres as Eliot calls them, which include his one brief and on the whole unmemorable revisit to New Zealand, I am reading these diaries and wondering "Where is the world?" These were the years when Mussolini declared himself dictator of Italy (1925), Hitler came to power (1933), the years of the stock market crash (1929) and the Great Depression (1929-39), and of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). There is just one mention while he is in Argentina of the "slump" (Sargeson also used that word to signify the depression) having affected coffee prices and so the general well-being of that country; otherwise all these world events pass unnoticed, or anyway unrecorded. These were the decades when writers like Orwell and poets like the Auden group were acutely aware and politically active; so was Sargeson. But it seems Courage was locked inside his comfort-enclosure of gay sensibility, sexual risk-taking, aesthetic angst, and social snobbery ("I’ve found the house I want if I can get a suitable servant"), suffering of course, but there is in me as his reader a bad inclination to ask "Who cares?"
In 1937 however there are the beginnings of a change. He starts to have some success writing for the theatre. The Gate Theatre Studio’s production of his somewhat (i.e. ambiguously) gay play Private History is, he records, "a smash hit". But it is right at this promising (in the literary sense) time for him that consciousness of the larger world injects itself into the diaries. He notices that Chamberlain has become British PM, and asks someone, "in view of the appalling situation in Central Europe […] what would happen to the London theatres if war came". He records Chamberlain’s visit to meet Hitler, and the (as it happened false) relief that followed. When war is declared the dire reality hits home: "Millions of young men will be killed, the arts will suffer almost total eclipse, and hatred and brutality will reign everywhere." Air raids are threatened and gas masks issued.
Courage reads a book about Nazism, goes to the NZ High Commission and offers his services "in my clerical capacity – for the duration", and makes enquiries in Hampstead about taking a course in first aid. When Germany invades Denmark and Norway he waits up until midnight to hear the latest news. He decides he must give up "living in this expensive flat with a cherry tree under my window". He is pleased when Chamberlain is replaced by Churchill as PM, and even remarks "this is certainly a step in the right direction, though a Socialist P.M. would be even better and must come eventually".
In beautiful spring weather he has a rush of British patriotism that reminds me acutely of the tone of those times in my childhood: "I find people are beginning to ask themselves ‘Can we lose this war?’ Myself this afternoon cogitated ‘Can an England of such beauty ever cease to inspire people to love her and fight for her?’ The may-blossom seemed to answer, firmly enough with a thousand banners, ‘Never!’"
It’s the tone of movies like Mrs Miniver and the voice of Vera Lynn singing "There’ll be blue birds over/ the White Cliffs of Dover". In this spirit he records that his "entire social and political outlook has lately profoundly changed". The prospect of war has led him "for the first serious time in thirty-seven years, god help me" to question the basis of society: "...it is my own class and the conditions of monopoly capitalism under which I have unthinkingly lived that has undoubtedly led us straight to where we are now. I fully admit that as a rentier, living almost wholly on unearned income, I am a sinner. Worse than that – a traitor in my way to human society."
A gift of £100 from his father is "a reminder of the inescapable fact that I am a parasite – and have been one all my life". He resolves not only to give up his flat, but that as a writer "(not without humour, I hope) to work towards a more equitable and fairer human society". Now he must suffer the discomforts of British boarding-house living. Soon he is writing "God in heaven how I really loathe it! The smells of evening cooking […] Pfui! Am I alive or dead?" But he has his first lesson in fire-fighting and asks "Is this to be the first crack in the ivory tower?" For the first time in his life he takes a job, working part time at a bookshop for £2.10.0 per week, and "enjoying it enormously". His entry for Christmas Day 1941 is simply "Alone".
What the journal offers now is a vivid account of London under the blitz; but at the same time he is continuing to write, aware that there are two inescapables that must find their way into his work: his New Zealand background which from the point of view of publishers is a handicap, and, the other limiting factor, that he is "profoundly homosexual in temperament". Eric McCormick’s Letters & Art in New Zealand makes him feel that he has "lost the lyrical feeling of those years when I might have written something memorable and something purely of my beloved New Zealand." (His italic.) And when Charles Brasch brings him a copy of Sargeson’s A Man and his Wife he is "very considerably impressed. Here is the real voice of N.Z. at last – twang and all."
The war continues. France falls ("I shall remember this day all my life for the sad news it brought"); the Germans take Greece and Crete, and control pretty much all of Western Europe. Two of Courage’s lovers die, one a sailor torpedoed in the Mediterranean, the other by suicide. The bombing which at first seemed more than the Brits (or anyone) could bear becomes an extraordinary normal, lived through, stalwartly endured. Gradually the war turns against Germany as America enters and Hitler’s armies stall in Russia. Now the night-time noise keeping London awake is not the Germans coming in but the American and RAF bombers going out. Knowing what it is like to be on the receiving end Courage feels uneasiness and shame. Then in the latter part of the war comes the new bombardment: Hitler’s secret weapon the flying bomb, the V1 and then worse, the V2. It seemed there was very little protection against these. You heard one coming and waited, hoping it would fly on and fall somewhere else. Even after the D-Day landings and the liberation of Paris, and after the American forces have crossed into Germany, the V2s keep coming. As the end of the war approaches Courage feels apprehension. I remember feeling the same even as a child so far away in New Zealand. The war (‘the duration’) had been our lives for so long. What were we going to do (or be) without it?
In September 1944 Courage records the publication of a British Government White Paper on Social Insurance: "A great event truly, in this old Tory country. New Zealand has formerly led the world in these social schemes: now England, at a bound, has caught her up." It seems unlikely that the Conservatives under Churchill would in fact have implemented these Welfare State proposals in full; but a few months later there is an election, and Courage records "Was amazed and delighted with the huge Labour majority. […] Well now for a new era of British politics" – as indeed it was: the establishment of the Welfare State, and especially of the National Health Service which the Brits of every political stamp still regard as a National Treasure. Our own of course has been seriously wounded by the Douglas-Gibbs reforms.
It is after the war is over that Courage begins to really succeed as a published writer in London. The Fifth Child appeared in 1948, followed by Desire without Content in 1950, and The Young Have Secrets in 1954. In 1959 came A Way of Love the first explicitly (male) homosexual novel by a New Zealander (it was banned here) and possibly also the first in the UK. But it was during these years of public success that Courage suffered repeated collapses into mental instability of one kind or another – deep depression, anxiety, paranoia, homosexual guilt. He was in and out of sanatoriums, and sessions with psychotherapists until bad luck (it seems to me) put him into the care of a Dr Larkin. Courage had previously written fondly of his mother, but Larkin had soon persuaded him that she had "castrated" him, and that his father had been a bully who despised him for his sensitivity and his wish to be a writer rather than a farmer. Larkin was not the usual psychotherapist who sits back and waits for the truth to emerge as the patient ransacks his memory. Larkin (according to Courage’s account in the diaries) pushed his views on to his cringing and often protesting patient, demanding that he shout and scream his outrage at what his parents had done to him. Courage tried, found screaming almost impossibly difficult, but accepted that this inhibition was itself another illustration of the damage done to him in childhood.
These detailed accounts of the psychotherapy make up a large part of the final pages of the book. They are boring, repetitive, self-enclosed, self-pitying and for the reader not just unrewarding but painful. Anyone who has read Oliver Kamm’s book Mending the Mind will have read this part of the diaries yearning for Courage to escape from post-Freudian psychotherapy into cognitive behaviour therapy, which might have taught him practical ways of dealing with his troubles rather than looking for someone or something to blame for them. Courage died of a heart attack in mid-1963, and there the book abruptly ends, with Courage, like Hamlet’s father, "unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled".
CK Stead's review marks the third story in our week-long coverage of James Courage. On Monday, an entry from Courage's diary shared his agonising sessions with his psychiatrist talking about his father's cock, and yesterday the diary's editor Chris Brickell provided a portrait of the author. James Courage Diaries edited by Chris Brickell (Otago University Press, $45), is available when lockdown level 3 allows online orders through bookstores. Tomorrow: Steve Braunias on why he loves the book.
