Meet Chris Brickell, editor of James Courage Diaries and professor of Gender Studies at the University of Otago
Date:
14 June 2021
To celebrate Pride Month, we spoke to Chris Brickell about editing James Courage Diaries, publishing next month. He discusses what he learnt while working on the diaries of the writer of New Zealand’s first gay novel.
Why did you want to edit James Courage’s diaries – was there a specific inspiration?
I first worked with James Courage’s diaries when I was researching Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand. Courage’s sister had placed an embargo on public access to his personal papers, and I didn’t waste any time in checking them out once this expired in 2005. Courage grew up near Amberley in North Canterbury, and one of the things that struck me about these diaries was how open he was about his homosexuality as a young man during the 1920s.
There is a real immediacy to his writing too: he was sharp, sometimes acidic, and a brilliant observer of places and people.
A contemporary of the authors Frank Sargeson, Charles Brasch and Eric McCormick, he eventually became an accomplished writer of novels, but his diaries are much more intimate and candid.
What was the easiest/best thing about collating these entries? Alternatively, what was the most challenging?
The diaries are extensive – two of them consist of tiny writing on each side of a whole ream of A4 paper: 2000 pages between them. The diaries of Courage’s later years deal with the state of his mental health, and his psychotherapy, in painstaking and repetitive detail. I had a wonderful research assistant, Natasha Smillie, who helped enormously with the selection process.
The most intricate part of the project was putting together my introductory essay. I wanted to contextualise the diary entries by outlining the key moments in Courage’s life: his school years, the time he spent at university in Oxford, his relationships with other men – some of them transitory and others passionate and deeply memorable. Courage’s platonic friendship with Charles Brasch was also important.
The diaries do not represent the totality of Courage’s life writing: he also wrote two autobiographical manuscripts, both of them unpublished, which are equally sharp-witted. There is also a series of letters that Courage received from his parents during the 1950s which contextualise his psychotherapy. Writing about Courage’s life involved piecing together small details as well as painting in broad strokes.
What did you learn in the course of working on this book – and was there anything that really surprised you?
James Courage was a versatile writer. He is most well-known for his novels – the most commercially successful was The Young Have Secrets (1954), set in the Christchurch suburb of Sumner, and he wrote A Way of Love (1959), the first gay novel by a New Zealand author – but he also worked in other mediums. He became interested in poetry at primary school, and he later composed verse; he also wrote plays.
Private History (1938), which is about love between boys in an English secondary school, was very well received in bohemian London at the time – much to Courage’s surprise.
He fashioned another play from his experience of a Norwich sanitorium while recovering from tuberculosis – a stay also recorded in the diaries.
It turns out Courage was also a compelling travel writer. He relayed his voyages across the world by sea and around Europe by rail. Whether he was preparing to dress as a Roman for a shipboard dance while off the coast of Africa, or gossiping with a French aristocrat as his train passed through the countryside between Athens and Calais, Courage wrote keenly about the sensations and social aspects of travel. His descriptions of landscapes are precise and often beautiful, but he could be rude about the travelling companions he didn’t like!
How do you think working on James Courage Diaries may alter the way you look at the world, and what do you hope readers will take away from the book?
Courage’s diaries offer a holistic picture of a person, his life and times. He was a complicated character, and his writing constantly reminded me not to oversimplify human experience. For someone who seemed to write so effortlessly and incisively in his diaries, Courage really struggled with writing his novels, and he described his troubles with words – and the depths of despair to which they drove him. Writing can be hard graft, and it was refreshing to see someone so accomplished describe the difficulties. Sometimes he spent hours writing a single sentence in the manuscript of a novel.
There were other complexities too. Courage avidly and persuasively defended his sexuality. His literary work in this area was absolutely pioneering, and it inspired many people.
At the same time, he was often defensive about being homosexual, and felt sure his therapists would want to change him: surely they must want to try? Courage seemed to be proud and ashamed at the same time. He really was a multi-layered man, and he taught me to sit with the contradictions. When it comes to aspects of identity, Courage’s life and his writing urge all of us to think about the messy shades of grey.
Pre-order James Courage Diaries publishing in July 2021 from Otago University Press