‘Nervous, self-doubting, fearlessly brave’
I discovered James Courage when I read Peter Wells and Rex Pilgrim’s Best Mates, a landmark book on New Zealand gay writers. Courage seemed like someone I’d want to know about: creative, eloquent, serious – and his writing had even been censored. A Way of Love, the first gay novel by a New Zealander, was banned in 1961 by a bossy group of government bureaucrats.
Courage was a contemporary of Frank Sargeson and Charles Brasch, but he is much less known than them. This is a shame – he is an engaging and sometimes provocative writer. There are eight novels, several plays, numerous short stories and quite a few poems. But Courage, who grew up in Canterbury and lived most of his life in London, seems to be only half-remembered in New Zealand.
The embargo on his fourteen personal diaries expired in 2005, and I rushed into Dunedin’s Hocken Library to prise open the small leather notebooks and the loose-leaf pages tied up with ribbon. There is a pencil sketch in the second diary, with a long thin face and studious spectacles. This is how I pictured Courage as I read through the diaries that span the years between 1920, when he was a schoolboy of 16, and 1963, the year he died. He was a reserved and complex man. I learned about his personal relationships, especially his many male lovers; his experience of the Blitz, when he cowered with the neighbours in a cupboard under the stairs ("dreadful nights … made hideous with bombs and fires"); and the Freudian psychotherapy he undertook for depression near the end of his life.