‘Remembered to-day something I’d said to F. 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.” After all, it was nearly twenty years since F. and I first went to bed together, so my remark shouldn’t have startled him. But no, perhaps it didn’t startle him - I’m wrong. Only his arm round me tightened a little, “Yes,” he said slowly, “I’d have liked that too.” ’ This is from the recently-published diaries of a largely forgotten New Zealand gay writer, James Courage, who died 60 years ago today
Thereafter, Courage lived in London, studying the piano, and working occasionally as a journalist. He travelled in Europe and South America for a while, and lived in a fisherman’s cottage in St Ives. In 1931, he contracted tuberculosis, and was confined to a Norfolk sanatorium until 1933. During this time, though, his first novel One House was published by Victor Gollancz, though with a limited print run. On leaving the sanatorium, Courage returned to New Zealand for an extended period of convalescence, during which he made several contacts, On returning to the UK in 1936, he rented a flat in London and became involved with the Kiwi literary scene, meeting among others, Charles Brasch with whom Courage would maintain a life-long correspondence. Brasch published several of Courage’s poems in Landfall, a New Zealand literary journal he founded, and he edited a posthumous collection of Courage’s short stories.
Classified as medically unfit, Courage became a fire warden during the Second World War, and from 1940 he worked at a bookshop in Hampstead. Although regarded as excellent company, he nonetheless suffered from depression and from 1951 was nearly always under psychiatric treatment. Between 1948 and 1961, he published half a dozen novels, mostly set in New Zealand. One novel - A Way of Love - set in England focuses on a young homosexual’s relationship with an older man. Courage died in Hampstead on 5 October 1963 - see the websites of The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand and Victoria University of Wellington for further biographical information.
The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has this assessment of Courage: ‘Discreet to a fault, and even self-apologetic by modern standards, the novel [A Way of Love] was banned under the censorship provisions in place prior to the setting up of the Indecent Publications Tribunal in 1964, and was only available to few New Zealanders. In recent times some commentators have viewed it as a milestone in New Zealand writing by gay writers. Published at a time when no other New Zealand writer addressed the themes of sexual orientation and same-sex relationships, except in very indirect ways, Courage’s novel stands out as a brave exception.’
Most recently, Courage has garnered some critical attention for his diaries edited by Chris Brickell and published in 2021 by the Otago University Press. A review can be read at the New Zealand Newsroom. Here, though, is the opening paragraph of the introduction to James Courage Diaries, followed by several extracts from the diaries themselves.
‘Courage was a prolific and idiosyncratic diarist. He began making notes about his life in 1920, at the age of 16, and carried on until 1963, the year of his death. His 14 private journals have attracted less attention than his novels, short stories and plays, but they have an immediacy that is not often found in his formal writings. Courage’s ‘spasmodic’ diary entries captured the smallest details of lives and places: the fine grained aspects of his daily routine in Christchurch, and later in England after he moved there in 1922, as well as the impact of global events. He wrote about his travels by ocean liner during the 1930s, the effects of World War II on the inhabitants of inner-city London where he was a fire warden for an apartment building, and his treatment for tuberculosis. The diaries also reveal what it was like to be homosexual in a world that was not always accepting, how Freudian psychotherapy changed Courage’s view of himself and how publishers’ decisions affected his often-tenuous self-esteem.
‘This man has changed my life. For the first time I am willing to surrender my reserve to another. Even my sense of humour ‘goes under’: and my ‘second man’ (a sneaking hyper-critical fellow) disappears - which is extremely remarkable. Long may it last!’
9 February 1930
‘My twenty-seventh birthday. I turn back a year in the journal to find that last February I wrote as an aspiration: “To be famous and to be loved.” Well, I am loved. Now what about the fame?’
11 March 1930
‘I love this man unreservedly. I cannot imagine life without him.’
20 October 1931
‘Afternoon sadness. A roaring north-easterly wind tears the leaves from the trees. Bitterly cold. I sit with blue hands. Towers and scuds of white and grey cloud, with beams between. Rooks singing wildly.’
9 February 1932
‘My twenty-ninth birthday. Sobering reflection that I have spent so much of the last nine years in the company of fools, vagabonds, sex-maniacs and literary people generally. Well, if I have caught T. B. I’ve at least escaped syphilis. My great regret is that I have not written, as yet, the really good book I want to, though ‘The PY’ has excellent moments. To-day I wrote the passage about my grandmother and Mr Sherwood.’
10 July 1932
‘Pain and depression. My chest hurts: I feel stifled when I cough. A good deal of sputum. Heaven help me.’
13 July 1932
‘Appalling depression - really rock-bottom - everything in the world went black. This culminated in the evening when I burst into tears when Mrs M. came to see me, and wept for an hour and a half. I really think she saved me from suicide. I haven’t been so upset since Dec 27th, 1930, on the way to S. America. Completely and absolutely de profundis.’
16 July 1932
‘Feeling much stronger: despondency vanished. Mrs M. read One House in proof, and liked it - or rather, admired it. She envies me my “easy, flexible English”. I told her it was the result of damned hard work: and so it was.’
13 May 1937
‘I have bought this journal and make my first entry in it in Brighton (Sussex). Am staying at the Old Ship Hotel, having temporarily - and for a very good reason - shut up the flat in Hampstead. I have been here a fortnight tomorrow, staying alone. Solitude by no means as depressing as I had feared, though I miss having somebody to talk to in the evenings. That, 1 suppose, is the penalty of living out of London - at least for a soi-disant intellectual. However, for the moment it can’t be helped; and at least I’ve taken to writing letters again, a habit of which the telephone in London had almost robbed me. If I had enough gumption I’d go out and live for a bit somewhere completely away from towns - somewhere in the Weald of Sussex, for instance. But I haven’t the gumption, so that’s that. I even say to myself, cynically, that there’s nothing to do in the country except farm and/ or fornicate. However that may be, I don’t feel at the moment that I want to do either. So, at Brighton I stay (where, if the opportunity arises, I can at least fornicate urbanly and in good company - to judge by the mien of most of the couples who populate the hotels). My waiter at the hotel here said yesterday (Coronation Day): “It ought to have been Teddy (Windsor) they crowned. Then he could have had Mrs Simpson to-night and told England to go to hell!” Evidently Brighton’s philosophy is on the pagan side. It must be something to do with that amazing Royal Pavilion of George IV’s and Mrs Fitzherbert’s.’
13 February 1943
‘I shall remember this day all my life for the sad news it brought me. When I reached home at 5.30 in the evening I found an envelope from the Returned Letter Office containing two of my letters (written in Dec. last) to my much- and long-loved Christopher. On each of my envelopes was pasted a typed notice telling me that the addressee had died on active service. For about an hour I hardly felt the shock. I even played the piano and read. Then when Mrs Timmons (who remembered Chris) arrived to cook my dinner I told her the news. Directly she said “Oh, how terrible”, the tears rushed into my eyes and I wept. Later in the evening I rang up Joan V. who knew Chris well. She told me that he died of wounds “due to shell or bomb blast” on Dec. 11th last (two months ago) somewhere in the Mediterranean. The announcement had been in the papers but I had not seen it. Chris was 27. Before going to bed I wrote to his mother, though I found this difficult.’
25 July 1953
‘One should be able to write of one’s sexual predilections as naturally as one’s taste in food.
Remembered to-day something I’d said to F. 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.” After all, it was nearly twenty years since F. and I first went to bed together, so my remark shouldn’t have startled him. But no, perhaps it didn’t startle him - I’m wrong. Only his arm round me tightened a little, “Yes,” he said slowly, “I’d have liked that too.” ’
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