The Call Home

James Courage and Robert Lord were ‘untypical New Zealanders’, as Courage put it. Both wrote short stories and plays (Courage was best known for his novels), both were not-quite-openly gay, and both spent much of their time abroad. Courage lived from 1922 to 1963 in England and returned home only once, in 1933, while Lord, who zipped backwards and forwards between New Zealand and New York between 1975 and 1988, spent a considerable amount of time in the US.

The men were more than a generation apart – Courage was born in Canterbury in 1903 and Lord in Rotorua in 1945 – but in many ways their writing careers converged. Most of their plays and novels, though not all, were set in New Zealand. Lord began playwriting in 1971, experimental pieces whose queer themes mingled with a range of other topics: human integrity, the propensity to mislead others, the desire for social conformity, and the dysfunction of the nuclear family. Balance of Payments depicts a rent boy’s rapacious parents; the characters in Meeting Place, a psychological thriller, are profoundly alienated from themselves; and Well Hung tells of the suicide of a police officer who had committed a murder.

On stage at a dress rehersal for a 2015 Dunedin production of Balance of Payments. Photo by Finn Boyle.

In 1938, Courage wrote a play about homosexuality in boarding school [read it here], but most of his queer-themed work dates from the 1950s. The characters in Fires in the Distance, set in the Canterbury high country, include Leo, a gay teenager, and Kathy, his ‘mannish’ sister. The Visit to Penmorten, about life in Cornwall where Courage spent his holidays, has a male couple who bicker cheerfully. A Way of Love, often billed as the first gay novel by a New Zealand author, portrays a domestic relationship between architect Bruce and his younger lover Philip. The book provides a detailed study of post-war queer London.

Protagonist Geoffrey (left) and his lover Kit in Private History, Courage's 1938 play. Photo by Angus McBean.

Both writers strained against the limits of the possible. In his diaries Courage talks about the ‘timidity’ of A Way of Love, ‘a mouse of a novel’ he wished could have been braver. Bruce was sedate and rather apologetic, not the hedonistic character Courage had wanted [see here]. Although a queer flame flickers in many of Lord’s plays, including the widely-celebrated Joyful and Triumphant, Lord watered down the gay storylines of some scripts, including High as a Kite and Dead and Never Called Me Mother. Other subversive plays were performed rarely or not at all. Glitter and Spit, from 1975, deals with the language of prejudice; ‘Fairy! Ponce! Pansy! Poofter!’ A seemingly queer man goes on to have a straight relationship, and his conservative counterpart winds up wearing a tutu. The play had its debut at the Ranfurly Little Theatre in 1982, but no professional company ever picked it up.

Both Courage and Lord broke new ground amid the dearth of queer representations during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and they responded to wider social changes. Courage’s A Way of Love appeared just after the 1957 Wolfenden Report recommended legalising sex between men in the UK, a change that took ten years to implement. Lord’s Balance of Payments and Meeting Place took to the stage as Gay Liberation arrived in New Zealand [see here]. Only decades later would gay-themed plays and novels become mainstream.

A Gay Liberation meeting at Victoria University during the early 1970s.

Both men’s diaries give voice to their tentative inner lives. Courage’s friends did not always notice his shyness – fellow author Charles Brasch thought him lively, witty and ‘excellent company’ – but Courage was painfully self-aware and often found social occasions difficult. Lord tended to be sociable and gregarious, making friends with actors, artists and socialites, but his diaries reveal a hesitancy about his relationships, writing and self-worth. Being an ‘untypical New Zealander’ was not always easy. Both expatriates muddled their way between clashing worlds. In London Courage had homosexual friends as well as short-lived encounters, but he withheld the details when he returned to visit family in 1933. His mother expressed her annoyance at his reticence to tell of English life, ‘what kind of people I knew or what houses I’d lived in’. ‘I find it impossible to tell her adequately,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Facts mean nothing, without an aura of personality, atmosphere.’ Courage ‘felt angry and intensely sad’ at the resulting ‘lapse in sympathy’ with his mother.

James Courage (right) with two friends in Argentina, 1931.

Dirty, cosmopolitan, hyperstimulating New York was a place for socialising, experimentation, easy sex and new friendships during the 1970s and 80s [see here and here]. Robert Lord and his friends holidayed and partied on Fire Island, a gay enclave. There were ‘strange emotional vibrations’ as their lives intermingled. But New Zealand required him to conceal this part of himself, just as Courage had done. His traditionally-minded relatives lived here, and Lord was careful what he said. He could not tell the truth about his erotic adventures in New York’s saunas and bookstalls, and he revealed nothing about the city’s discos or his drug-taking. ‘The real me is in hiding for the duration,’ he wrote while touring the country with his mother, a housewife, and his father, a bank manager. Lord stuck to topics that reflected their interests: ‘bowls & golf & banking’.

Robert Lord in New York, with the World Trade Center in the background.

Both men bristled at New Zealand’s broadly conservative outlook. In 1962 Brasch relayed the news that Customs had banned A Way of Love. Courage asked who was responsible, and Brasch replied: ‘Oh, some nasty-minded little official. But there’ll be a row. I’ll kick up a stink. I’ll suggest they might ban Shakespeare’s Venus & Adonis also.’ Nearly twenty years later, Lord complained about ‘the brash arrogance of Muldoon’. He worried about an eventually-abandoned amendment to the Crimes Act that he feared may have imposed long prison terms on those who ‘write, record, disseminate information deemed prejudicial to the image of NZ abroad’. Lord summed up Muldoon: ‘He does give the appearance of strength but it is a sham.’

Moral campaigners railed against 'indecent literature' during the 1970s: here is Patricia Bartlett in 1971, holding a set of troublesome books.

Although New Zealand’s social climate caused both writers grief, the landscape anchored them to their homeland. Courage’s 1933 visit gave him the opportunity to write about huhu grubs, ‘Bill, the cowboy (freckled arms)’, and rain-drenched toi-toi hanging ‘like wet feathers’. Back in the UK, he reminisced in Proustian fashion about Canterbury’s summer days ‘when blue-bottles buzzed in the hot house and one could hear the mason-flies making their little clay egg-cradles in the curtains. Out of doors, a nor’wester blowing in the blue-gums and making the grass paddocks look almost colourless under the burning sky.’ Lord also loved the South Island and took his parents and overseas visitors on countless road trips. He wrote rapturously about ‘the most extraordinary assemblage of blue snow-capped mountains – a line so high and so long the breath is literally taken away. Perfection.’

Robert Lord and his vivid jersey out and about in the South Island, 1985. From a slide by Alex Ely.

Both Lord and Courage straddled hemispheres and embraced the new opportunities afforded by travel and big-city life. But neither gave up on New Zealand or severed their familial ties. The men’s novels and plays enthusiastically embraced the antipodean idiom as well as the ‘clear sharp landscape’, telling of their creators’ ongoing affinity with the land of their birth.

This piece was originally published in North and South, December 2023.