James Courage's Promising Years
In 1930, New Zealand-born novelist and playwright James Courage began writing ‘a sort of fictional autobiography in the manner of Proust, of my own early childhood’. At the start of that year he met Frank Fleet on a Cornish train, the men began a passionate affair, and three months later Fleet departed for a new life in Argentina. Courage booked a trip to see him at the end of the year. The journey distilled aspects of Courage’s early life ‘stored in memory’, as he put it. He worked on his manuscript while sailing between London and Buenos Aires – and for a short time he was laid up with influenza in an Argentinian sanatorium. Of his time aboard ship, he wrote:
Am awoken at 7.30 with very strong tea. A hot morning, but a light breeze. Some stewed figs and a boiled egg for breakfast. Afterwards sit on top-deck. Am disturbed by the 7-year-old son of an Anglo-Brazilian clerk, who, after watching me write, says it looks like the weed swaying under the sea – an extraordinarily good image on which my literary mind congratulates him. I write my book for 1½ hours and get on quite well, though heat becomes stifling.
Above: An ocean liner of the time.
Courage titled his book The Promising Years. It chronicles his early life on a rural farm station near Amberley and tells of his time at Dunelm, a private boys’ primary school in Christchurch. Courage spent holidays at Mount Somers with his grandmother; she introduced him to her books, encouraged him to fish for trout in the stream, and bade him ride her black mare. ‘One of my pleasures as I cantered along was to watch the clouds, for they changed their shape with amazing quickness in this high air, whisked along by currents I did not feel on the ground,’ he wrote. The Promising Years provides a glimmer of Courage’s time at Christ’s College – ‘the tyranny of bells, of whistles, of reprimands’, algebra, ‘coarse food’ and bullying – although he hated secondary school so much he barely ever wrote about it. The book’s penultimate chapter describes Courage’s voyage to England, chaperoned by an aunt, and the last one tells of his years at St John’s College, Oxford:
Lighting a cigarette I watched from my second storey a sauntering procession at the junction of Ship St and the Turl, a crowd of leisurely young men on their way to attend lectures, to visit friends, to drink coffee, to amuse themselves. The wind at the corner blew out their gowns and ruffled their hair; they shouted and ran through the traffic; they laughed and walked arm-in-arm.
Above: Marcel Proust.
The Promising Years draws its inspiration from Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, written between 1913 and 1927 and published in English as both In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past. Proust composed ‘vivid word paintings’, and his characters’ memories are often triggered by sensory cues. ‘Full-blown flowers’ are ‘as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish leather’, and a garden hose sends up ‘from its sprinkler a vertical and prismatic fan of multicoloured droplets’. Like Proust, Courage revelled in heightened sensations and exquisite pleasures. He and his sister had a rapturous time at the beach near Amberley:
As it was already four o’clock we set about gathering driftwood and dried marram-grass to build a fire, and scooping a hollow in the shingle for a grate. And soon the acrid yellow smoke blew in the wind, then lessened, and the clear flame of the tindery sticks fluttered up the sides of the black billy, singeing our fingers as we fed the core of fire beneath. I took off my Norfolk jacket and held it to windward so as to concentrate the heat, while Ann, her plaits brushing her hot cheeks, poked bits of jetsam into the blaze. In the tending of that fire we were completely happy.
Above: A young James Courage.
James Courage’s fourteen diaries, written between 1920 and 1963, offer an extensive chronicle of his literary endeavours and influences, his sexuality, the trials of wartime, and psychiatric therapy for depression [see here] – but there is little detail of Courage’s youthful holidays, his sea voyage to England, or his time at Oxford University. The Promising Years includes that detail.
Courage desperately wanted The Promising Years to reach an audience. At first he thought his musings may turn out to have ‘no account to anybody but myself’, but he was not so sure. Publisher Jonathan Cape turned him down, worried about the book’s ‘smallness of appeal’, so Courage corresponded with the poet and playwright T.S. Eliot who worked for Faber and Faber. Having read the manuscript with much ‘interest and sympathy’, Eliot agreed to meet Courage in person:
Eliot is a tall man with a rather strained, nervous face. Regular features. Horn-rimmed glasses. Quiet manner. He said that he had been impressed by my work. He detected the Proustian influences, though he has never read any Proust.
Eliot decided to publish the memoir, but he later changed his mind. Courage was distraught:
I am simply knocked out. Why did they first decide to publish it and then let me down like this? I walk about in a sort of dream, but a dream that aches. I feel that I have to start again right at the beginning of everything.
Above: TS Eliot, poet and publisher.
Courage eventually calmed down, concluding that ‘publishers are queer cattle and no mistake’.
Ninety-one years later, The Promising Years is available as a free download from genrebooks.co.nz. The book tells of a New Zealander growing up, striking out on his own, and discovering new worlds. Courage often looked back on his homeland and, inspired by Proust’s elaborate, finely detailed prose, he documented the richness of his own experience.
* This is a shortened version of my introduction to The Promising Years. Download it here.