The Reviewer Problem
MK Joseph’s Landfall review of James Courage’s groundbreaking book, A Way of Love, was a shocker, even for 1959. Joseph hated the first gay novel written by a New Zealander. He especially loathed its topic. ‘The first difficulty is to persuade most of [Courage’s] readers to accept homosexual relations as being on the same plane, or even of the same kind, as heterosexual ones: they may be serious, destructive or pathetic: but any attempt to make them the subject of exalted lyricism must almost inevitably collapse into disgust or derision or (even worse) banality’, he snarled. ‘A Way of Love is a quietly ruthless exposure of the pretentions of homosexuality, and a sad book, despite its appearance of an urbane and sensual exterior’.
Joseph also offered up a barely disguised loathing of femininity in general:
Some attempt is made to distinguish the serious characters who live in chic little flats and know about cooking from the ones who give tarty parties; but all alike have the same tone – the coy, flirtatious talk of affaires and housekeeping and well-preserved waistlines is the chatter of ageing and sentimental cocottes.
MK Joseph and his bookcases.
After reading Joseph’s hatchet job, Bill Pearson, a closeted homosexual man and Joseph’s academic colleague in the English Department at Auckland University, decided never to reveal anything about his own personal life while at work.
Paul Millar, Pearson’s biographer, blames Joseph’s conservative Catholicism for the tone of his review. But Joseph was not the only one who regarded homosexual men as, in his words, ‘inherently tragic’ – or femininity, whether enacted by men or women, as a threat to masculine hegemony. ‘The Woman Problem’, a 1947 essay by poet and satirist ARD Fairburn, was a case in point. It suggested that women’s main business is ‘the perpetuation of the species’, and that their minds ‘are not designed for the purpose of making judgements on matters that call for objective consideration’. Fairburn, far from 'objective' himself, ranted about women ‘infected by feminist propaganda’ who set themselves up in a ‘revolt against child-bearing’ and obtained their ‘emotional support from the cinema’. Joseph’s basic philosophy was much the same as Fairburn’s: ‘The relation between man and woman is profoundly complementary … it is “natural” … whether one regards Nature as the manifestation of a controlling intelligence or as the working of blind evolutionary forces’.
Fairburn (right) during the early 1930s.
Conversely, for Joseph, ‘the homosexual relationship is outside any possible society, in a world of illusion and sentimental make-believe’. Fairburn had more to say here too. As ‘foxes without tails’, homosexual men were, ‘in a deep and tragic sense, isolated from the full human context’. Their creative abilities could never extend beyond the sentimental and superficial, and Fairburn hated that – in his mind – ‘coteries of homosexuals’ should disseminate ‘homosexual propaganda’ and exert ‘such a strong influence on the arts’.
Such proclamations came at a cost. Millar believes Joseph’s denunciation of A Way of Love helped to get the novel banned in 1961, and Courage never returned from his exile in England. In 1980, Bobby Pickering wrote a piece in the English magazine Gay News, ‘The Conspiracy Against James Courage’, which New Zealand’s Pink Triangle quickly picked up. Pickering noted that Courage’s literary work (including The Fifth Child and Fires in the Distance) portrayed women, queer people and children sympathetically during the ‘machoification’ of New Zealand literature. As an author ‘who concentrated his attention on the characters of sheilas, kids and queers’, Courage ‘was obviously a bloody thorn in the side’. It does seem ironic that writers like Joseph and Fairburn, hardly the most conventional of kiwi jokers by occupation, would sign up to a eugenicist heterosexuality with its roots in the early twentieth century and echoes in mid-century fascism. And not all New Zealanders shared this view: more and more married women joined the labour market, teenagers challenged structures of authority, and queer cultures grew rapidly. The Dorian Society was established in Wellington in 1962, and its legal subcommittee took the first tentative steps towards law reform.
Bobby Pickering, 1983. Copyright Derek Cohen.
Pickering’s article described Joseph’s review as ‘blind bigotry’ and ‘a piece of pious prejudice’. More recently, he wondered why Charles Brasch, the Landfall editor whom Courage regarded as a close personal friend, published it in the first place:
When you read the original review you realise how it fails utterly as literary criticism. It is not talking about how the author’s imagination takes you to new places, new insights about the human condition; it is not about the style of the author’s writing or their particular linguistic techniques; it is not about how writing the book exposes the author’s vulnerabilities or places them in danger. I wonder why the Landfall editor did not reject the review on the grounds that it wasn’t about the book, but a diatribe on the subject matter. He could have asked MKJ to go back to it and review the words that were there. Imagine how Joseph could have approached it without having to make a big “Homos are Horrible” statement.
While Brasch had believed Joseph to be a ‘cool, judicious man’, the review was anything but cool – and Brasch admitted he was taken aback by it. ‘I’m sorry to have to warn you that [the] review was not at all sympathetic, to my dismay’, he wrote to Courage.
There was a twist, though, as there usually is. In an increasingly liberal society, the intemperate words of Joseph – like those of Fairburn – did their writer’s posthumous reputation no good at all.
*This is an expanded version of some comments that first appeared in Steve Braunias’ piece ‘The Curious Case of the Catholic Bigot’ on Newsroom, augmented by an email conversation with Bobby Pickering.
Sources
Brickell, C. ‘Moral Panic or Critical Mass?’, in H. Bauer and M. Cook (eds), Queer 1950s.
Brickell, C. (ed) James Courage Diaries.
Fairburn, A.R.D. The Woman Problem and Other Essays, pp.18; 23; 24.
Joseph, M.K. ‘A Way of Love’, Landfall, June 1959, pp.178-179.
Millar, P. No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson, p.223.
Pickering, B. ‘The Conspiracy Against James Courage’, Pink Triangle, December 1980.
Pickering, B. Email correspondence with Chris Brickell, 2025.