letters

Alan Roddick

James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris Brickell (Otago University Press, 2021), 416pp, $45

James Courage’s name may be little known to younger generations today, but in 1955 he was hailed as ‘the best living New Zealand novelist’. Seven years later, the importation of his novel about a homosexual love affair, A Way of Love, was notoriously banned by New Zealand Customs.

Courage kept a diary for some forty-three years, starting in 1920 when he was sixteen, and in this book, editor Chris Brickell reproduces almost a quarter of his diaries’ estimated 400,000 words. In his very useful Introduction, Brickell states that he has excluded ‘some long transcriptions of other authors’ writing—pieces of novels and poetry—which Courage often copied into his own diaries’. [Read more…]

Robert McLean

Letters of Denis Glover, selected and edited by Sarah Shieff(Otago University Press, 2020), 800pp, $79.95

Letters are perhaps the least likely genre to produce good enduring writing. Unlike writers’ diaries, that most self-conscious genre so memorably manipulated by a Pepys or a Woolf, letters, especially those written in long-hand, are transactional, at once spontaneous and habitual, and seldom submitted to revision. They are the medium most likely to induce regret in the writer and discomfort in the reader given that they often seem to induce writers to show off and parade themselves at their unbuttoned worst, such as the epistolary bawdiness, hokum and spleen of T.S. Eliot or Phillip Larkin addressing their pet-named pals. But for readers who manage to find writers’ lives interesting, collections of letters are frequently read as a substitute for an unwritten autobiography, albeit one that is even less reliable than the latter’s self-curated disclosures, given the myriad manners literary letterists assume for their various recipients. [Read more…]

Telling His Story

A Beautiful World Has Gone