Steve Braunias concludes our week-long coverage of the diaries of rich, long-suffering and loveable James Courage
The last time James Courage (1903-1963) made any kind of impression on New Zealand literature was by his absence. He was cancelled by his own family. Peter Wells and Rex Pilgrim, as co-editors of Best Mates, a 1997 anthology of New Zealand gay writing, wanted to include some of Courage's fiction. Of course they did: Courage was the first New Zealand novelist to deal with a same-sex love affair, in A Way of Love (1959), as well as the first short story writer to do likewise in "Guest at the Wedding", published by Charles Brasch in Landfall in 1953. Neither were erotic. A Way of Love has been nicely described as "discreet to a fault". Hamish, the gay blade (he wears "a Stetson hat, tight flannel trousers, a school blazer and yellow brogue shoes") in the Landfall short story, is unrequited in his confused feelings for a groom who wrestles nude with him on a beach on Stewart Island. "Guest at the Wedding" and A Way of Love were guilty sexless romps but at least Courage dared to speak the name of an outlawed love. It made him ripe and obvious for inclusion in Best Mates. The anthology was the first to collect writings by gay New Zealand authors. But nothing appeared. Wells and Pilgrim were refused permission by Patricia Fanshaw, Courage's sister and literary executor. She told the editors that her brother had not publicly identified himself as gay. Wells later wrote, "We returned the compliment by showing a blank page with the author’s name at the top. It said a lot." It was a witty, combative response - classic Wells, whose death in 2019 robbed New Zealand writing of his lambent prose and provocative mind – and it left Courage stranded, an outcast, blank.
Chris Brickell, a professor at Otago University, has taken on Courage as a rescue project. In 2015, he published a selection of seven stories and other writings by Courage. No one noticed and it didn't exactly set New Zealand literature on fire. Brickell's latest rehab is the James Courage Diaries. It presents selections from the personal diaries Courage kept from 1920, when he was about to leave New Zealand, to 1963, shortly before his death in London. "The moment is right," declares University of Canterbury's Paul Millar in his Preface, "for him to be fully inducted into the literary mainstream".
But that's only the sort of thing academics say to each other. The full induction isn't going to happen. As a white male so stale that he has in fact been dead for nearly 60 years, Courage doesn't come with the right credentials. Roger Hickin tried the same kind of revival this year when he published a selection of writing by Auckland short story writer Roderick Finlayson (1904-1992) in A Roderick Finlayson Reader (Cold Hub Press). Finlayson was among the first writers to make a conscious effort to introduce Māori characters in his work. It was far-sighted then but they can read like caricatures now. As with the Courage diaries, I devoted a week to the Finlayson book at ReadingRoom; it included a devastating assessment by Anahera Gildea: "That Finlayson’s work was a product of his time is undeniable, but there has to be a certain amount of tone deafness at play in order to continue to circulate these stories without significant criticism."
Courage, too, is unwelcome in 2021. It's nothing personal; things have moved on, New Zealand writing has changed, changed utterly since Finlayson and Courage were working hard at finding imaginative ways to record the New Zealand experience. The way Finlayson presumed to occupy Māori thinking and speaking in his stories is no longer permissible. Likewise, Courage presented gay love and sex as something shameful, aberrant, wrong; that's not really the best way to approach the subject anymore.
In any case, Courage's novels are dated and talky melodramas, and although the best of the short stories retain their power and precision (Courage adored the modernist stories of Katherine Mansfield, and Chekhov), there were too few to be regarded as a major contribution. Charles Brasch published 15 of them in Such Separate Creatures, in 1973, in posthumous tribute to his old friend. They include a series of brooding psychological studies clearly based on his childhood – the stern family, the timid boy. "The Day in Bed" (1959), which I ran in ReadingRoom last month, is a creepy story of child abuse. Courage mentions almost in passing in his diaries that he was "seduced" by an uncle when he was a boy.
CK Stead reviewed James Courage Diaries in ReadingRoom yesterday. It would not count as a slander to suggest he did not much like the book. His critique of Courage's many and various confessions, sharings and TMIs was measured in just two words, the worst two words you can level at any author: "Who cares?"
An answer, however, is at hand: I do. Yes, yes, Courage reveals himself as a silly old fusspot, a life of privilege woefully wasted in exchange for long years on the psychiatrist's couch moaning about his parents; he's a Wooster without jokes, a very poor specimen of the idle rich, barely aware of the crisis in Europe until war was declared. I accept all this. But I felt for Courage, cheered him on, and I loved the book. In an annus mirabilis of New Zealand non-fiction – 2021 is a golden year for memoir (The Mirror Book by Charlotte Grimshaw, You Have a Lot to Lose by CK Stead), essays (Tranquility & Ruin by Danyl McLachlan, The Commercial Hotel by John Summers), biography (Helen Kelly by Rebecca Macfie), and crime writing (may I nominate with all due vanity my own book, Missing Persons) – James Courage Diaries is among the very best, a long, slow, immersion into the life and mind of a New Zealand writer who felt New Zealand as a deep presence even though he took the first opportunity to get the hell away from it and spent most of his life in preferred exile.
As a body of work, the diaries succeed as an honest and intimate self-portrait. Brickell and his assistant Natasha Smillie, who transcribed the diaries, have chosen only a small selection of Courage's journals. They weren't written or conceived as a book. But it has a defined shape to it, telling Courage's life in its various stages as he grows older, more successful, and more or less just as deeply unhappy as he was ever since his childhood in Amberley, North Canterbury, born into a family of considerable wealth. The point of the journals was to maintain writing as a daily exercise, a kind of limbering-up (there are beautifully observed scenes that only a fiction writer could achieve), to record his daily life, and to explore it for meaning. It reads as memoir. Towards the end of the book, it reads as a harrowing attempt to bare his tormented soul and all its miseries. This is what makes the book such a thrilling read and such a quality addition to the rich harvest of New Zealand non-fiction in 2021.
It can't credibly be described as a narrative arc. Life is for living, the quotidian duty of dragging your feet across the floor day after day, eating, sleeping, fucking, and the diaries are a reminder that our personal stories are like Toynbee's famous description of history: "One damned thing after another." There is Courage on September 5, 1927, entranced by the sight of a good-looking guy on the street: "My heart quivered like a hot light … I felt lusty but intensely embarrassed." The following month, he records, "My grand piano has arrived but it was found that the stairs were too narrow to allow it to be taken upstairs." You don’t say. But as the years roll on in James Courage Diaries, we get a sense of his triumphs and disappointments, and a complex picture emerges of someone vain and wry, unhappy and ambitious, horny and lonely. It's exciting to witness his literary career take off. His reporting of the London Blitz is rich in atmosphere and detail. There is a brief return to New Zealand, but Courage is light on detail about that; his niece Virginia Clegg did a better job, when she shared her memories of him with Christchurch City Libraries in 2008: "He came home to New Zealand only once. During this visit he ‘came out’ telling his mother of his gender preference. And when his father discovered all hell broke loose and he never set foot in this country again – very sad."
"A new lover; and such a gentle, beautiful creature!", Courage writes on January 16, 1930. This is Frank Fleet. Two months later: "I love this man unreservedly. I cannot imagine life without him." Two days later: "Paco [his pet name for Frank] left. I love him." Fleet left England for Argentina. They remained close for the next 30 years. He writes on July 25, 1953: "One should be able to write of one's sexual predilections as naturally as one's taste in foods. Remembered today something I’d said to F. [Frank] last summer as we lay on the bed together. I said 'You know, you’re one of the few men I’d like to have had a child by.'… His arm around me tightened a little. 'Yes,' he said slowly, 'I'd have liked that too.'" He was clearly the love of Courage's life but he confides in his diary that although he has been in love two or three times, he can't honestly think of anyone who was in love with him.
A memoir is an honesty project. That smirking literary movement of the unreliable narrator undermined its function, and presented remembering as misremembering, fiction, exaggeration, and all sorts of other kinds of entertaining and sometimes artful pretence. The real deal is a harder task. "I have entered upon a performance which is without example, whose accomplishment will have no imitator", Rousseau begins his Confessions. "I mean to present my fellow-mortals with a man in all the integrity of nature; and this man shall be myself." His 1782 classic remains the greatest work of self-examination, the noblest attempt to lay a life bare. That old wind-bag Frank Harris took the form in another direction with his My Life & Loves volumes (1922-27). Without shame, he writes, "I love this book in spite of all its shortcomings and all its faults. It is the first book ever written to glorify the body and its passionate desires." Fair call, and his descriptions of sex, particularly eating pussy, are a really determined attempt to record every sensation. James Courage Diaries, too, works towards the same idea of writing it all down, sharing all the details in a sexually explicit manner – although really only in his last few years.
"Boring," CK Stead writes of the many pages at the end of the book, when Courage sets out exactly what was said in his sessions with Dr Edward Larkin, a psychiatrist at the St Marylebone Hospital. I couldn’t get enough of these pages. They’re exhilarating, a rare chance to eavesdrop on everything that gets said by someone trying to get to the bottom of their deepest fears and secrets to a shrink. It's gossip at the very least and gossip that good is priceless. Above all, it's a literary project. You can sense Courage's excitement, as a writer: he set himself the task of coming back from the sessions and relaying them on the page in fantastically remembered dialogue, as a kind of transcript. Two people in a room, talking, talking, talking, challenging each other, laughing with and at each other, but always serious in their intent to get to the truth of the matter.
And yet so much of what Courage and Larkin talked about back then reads now as such appalling bullshit. In Courage's entry for October 17, 1960, he tells Larkin, "When I'm in bed with another man it's always his cock I find the greatest comfort but somehow it is not his cock I seek and worship, it's my own, transferred." Larkin replies, "Unconsciously it is your own. That's just it. The homosexuality is a narcissism, erotically transferred to another man's body."
Oh for God's sakes. Poor old Courage, at the mercy of a quack who never seems to entertain the thought of homosexuality providing lasting happiness and fulfilment. But then Courage didn't either, or for very long, anyway; the dark Canterbury shadows of his disapproving father, and cold mother, falls over the Freudian landscape of his life and loves. What a misery guts! "Courage took many lovers home over the years," writes Brickell in his Introduction, "and mentioned them in his diaries: Chris, Ivan, Dick, Ernest, Frank, Harry, Graham, Edward, Nigel, Stuart…" He had a private income, thanks to his father ("a hard, selfish, condemning swine"); he was a successful novelist, published in England, with sales (as he reports of one book) of 60,000; he had a nice apartment, which he filled with a grand piano and young men (June 11, 1944: "The extraordinary experience of being made passionate love to by a boy young enough to be your own son.")
But he was damaged. There were mental collapses, years of depression. The final section in the book is sub-titled, "Diary of a neurotic." A neurotic who had the skill and sense of purpose to open up, and record what was said and done, in a book that will likely fail to bring Courage back into whatever literary establishment fold – you don’t come back from the dead when you’re that dead, and that white – but succeeds as a moving, elegantly composed portrait of the suffering artist.
This concludes 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, on Tuesday the diary's editor Chris Brickell provided a portrait of the author, and yesterday CK Stead more or less ripped the book into tiny pieces. James Courage Diaries edited by Chris Brickell (Otago University Press, $45), is available when lockdown level 3 allows online orders through bookstores.
