Chris Brickell dives into the diaries of writer James Courage

James Courage's passport picture. Photo / Supplied

"This blacked-out, bourgeois, boarding-house life – God in Heaven, how I really loathe it!" the New Zealand author, James Courage, wrote in his diary in grim and wintry wartime Britain in January 1941. "Am I alive or dead? What I want is to get drunk, to lie in the hot and generous sun, to sleep with wild boys – yes, that is more like it."

There is something irresistible about reading another person's diaries. They hold hidden thoughts and secret opinions. It is just like having access to a friend's phone and all their passwords in the contemporary world … An archive box in a library, with a 30-year embargo upon its opening, is just as enticing.

Historian Chris Brickell, of Otago University, recently had this experience. The results are now published in James Courage Diaries. What made Brickell's discovery unique is that Courage came from a wealthy Canterbury farming family, was a well-published novelist (one of whose novels, A Way of Love, would be banned in New Zealand), and homosexual in a time and world where his sexual life was illegal.

Brickell first learned of the existence of the diaries from a bare statement in the Introduction to Best Mates: Gay writing in Aotearoa, New Zealand by the late Peter Wells and Rex Pilgrim. It mentioned their location in Dunedin's Hocken Library. They had remained unread since their deposition.

"The fact of the embargo only made me more determined to have a look when the diaries became available," Brickell remarked. "The early ones are small leatherette notebooks and the very first page of writing is inscribed 'Diary: For Myself and No Other'. This alluring opening really intensified the sense that I was about to read something very intimate, written at a time when very few homosexual New Zealanders committed anything incriminating to paper. I wasn't disappointed."

Courage was born in Christchurch. His parents owned the prosperous Seadown station, near Amberley in North Canterbury. He was a boarder at schools in Christchurch but many of his most vivid memories were associated with Seadown itself. Photographs survive of an adolescent Courage "dragged up" in wispy feminine costuming in Canterbury's Peel Forest. Eventually, he entered St John's College at the University of Oxford in England, graduating with a BA in 1928.

James Courage (left) and Frank Fleet at Mar del Plata, Argentina. Photo / Hocken Collections

When his diaries begin, he is approaching life in England without any idea of a career, with relatively little knowledge of himself and largely protected from the real world by his wealthy father's generous allowance. Using the terminology of the era, Courage referred to himself as an "invert" and always had problems with the word "queer". He describes exchanging meaningful glances with men in the street or in museums, and casual meetings on cliff-top walks. "When he wrote about his personal life," says Brickell, "he seemed both brave and a little scared – or conflicted, perhaps - at the same time."

The diaries span from 1920, when Courage was at Christ's College until 1963, the year of his death. During this time, as he became easier with himself, he recorded three major relationships.

First, there was the athletic Frank Fleet, an Argentinian, whom he thought of for years as his grand passion. "One day Courage said he 'could not live without' Frank, and the next day Frank left to return to Argentina," says Brickell. "The relationship with seaman Chris Huth lasted, off and on, over several years," continues Brickell, describing Courage's war-time sailor lover. "Tragically, Chris died overseas from injuries sustained in the war, and Courage was deeply saddened – a feeling that only intensified when Ivan, another young military lover, took his own life soon after. The other very important relationship was with Stuart Hurrell, who supported Courage both emotionally and practically at the end of Courage's life."

Brickell says Courage was a remarkable observer of human character. "His writing about World War II is really significant – and lively. You can really sense the fear, exhaustion and pathos – the entry about sheltering from bombs in a shoe cupboard under the stairs, with several other people, for instance, or his descriptions of bombed-out buildings and the panic of other Londoners as bombs fell."

In the 1950s, like many homosexual men, Courage entered psychoanalysis to discover the mystery of who he was and the nervous ailments that bedevilled him. Brickell selects entries that deal with the "talking cure" and how it leads Courage to reassess himself.

Simultaneously, Courage was working hard writing his eight novels and relishing their success. He was relatively bewildered when New Zealand chose to ban A Way of Love in 1960. It was the story of a relationship between a younger and an older man and it was published by reputable companies in Britain and the United States.

One of Brickell's hopes is that the publication of James Courage Diaries will lead to a reassessment of Courage's life and work.

"The diaries make important contributions in a range of spheres: mid-century homosexual life, being an expatriate, travelling the seas, surviving the stress of war, having psychotherapy treatment, and they are compellingly written – and very readable," Brickell says. "Their breadth and richness really underscore what an important New Zealand writer James Courage was."

James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell (Otago University Press, $45) is out now.

- By David Herkt