Charles Brasch in perspective

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XII, Issue 1, 1 May 1979, Page 29

Charles Brasch in perspective

JAMES BERTRAM

Five years after a man’s death isn’t a bad time to attempt to adjust the record. It’s too soon for final judgements, of course: this is especially true of a writer, when substantial parts of his work remain unpublished or uncollected. But within five years, while the special tones of obituary have faded, a few tentative critical estimates may have surfaced, before the subject is handed over to the research student and the literary historian.

With Charles Brasch, that five-year sequence has run its modest course. His death was not headline news, and significantly The Times in London carried a more adequate notice than any New Zealand newspaper. At his funeral in Dunedin a group of friends gathered in the anonymous limbo of a funeral parlour to hear a fine academic tribute from Alan Horsman, readings from the Old Testament and from Plato, a few of the late poems Brasch had written in Wakari hospital, and the music of Douglas Lilburn. The one slightly picturesque incident (in which the poet’s ashes, following a direction in his will, were scattered ‘from a high and windy place’ over the South Island hills) took place very privately indeed, and was reported only obliquely in a moving poem by Ruth Dallas, ‘Last Letter to Charles’. This poem, along with other personal tributes and recollections, appeared in the fifth issue of Islands, the literary journal Brasch had helped Robin Dudding to establish after his dismissal by the Caxton Press. It is significant that no line of appreciation appeared in Landfall, the journal Brasch had founded in 1947 and so lovingly shaped over twenty years.

Two publications in 1974 added to the record. The sixth volume of poems Brasch had been preparing before his death was scrupulously edited and filled out by his literary executor, Alan Roddick, and given the title Home Ground. Then, as a useful reminder of another side of his activity, A. M. Broadbent published in New Zealand Libraries (April 1974) an excellent brief account of the books, pictures and literary papers Brasch bequeathed to the University of Otago and the Hocken Library. The fullest and most perceptive review of Brasch’s late verse came fittingly from a poet of a younger generation —lan Wedde’s ‘Captivating Invitation: A talk given on 27 July 1978 (Charles Brasch’s birthday) to the Friends of the Turnbull Library.

Getting on to Charles Brasch’s Home Ground ’, which appeared in Islands 13 (Spring 1975). In July 1976, as a spontaneous (and surely unprecedented?) tribute to a single artist and patron, Ted Middleton and John Caselberg, with the help of the University of Otago, organized in Dunedin a Charles Brasch Arts Festival. This took the form of a three-day sequence of music, painting, drama, and verse and prose readings with commentary, which traversed a good many of Brasch’s special interests; the sessions devoted to his own work clearly illustrated how much wider it was in range (especially in the fields of descriptive prose, and verse translation from German, Russian, Punjabi and Bengali) than most people had supposed. About the same time, my own critical essay on Charles Brasch appeared in the O.U.P. series, New Zealand Writers and Their Work.

In that essay, so far as I was able to sketch a biography, I tried to counter the commonly held view that just because he was financially independent, and because he never married, Brasch was somehow in a specially privileged position, both as writer and art patron, to indulge his artistic tastes. Of course it’s true that financial independence makes it easier for a man to follow up his own special interests: if he has enough determination and confidence in his judgement, he may become a serious collector or something of a scholar. One thinks here of such names as those of Sir George Grey and Dr Thomas Hocken, or of a less gifted but more single-minded figure like Alexander Turnbull. The first two of these were men with active professional careers; only the last was able to turn a private hobby into his chief interest in life. None of them, I think —not even the moody, devious, intensely ambitious Grey—would have claimed to be a creative artist, with all the agonizing private doubts and fears that so often go with this most demanding of vocations.

Within the commercially prosperous cluster of German-Jewish families already acclimatized in Australia and New Zealand to which Brasch belonged, there were two clear examples of the intelligent use of private wealth for cultural purposes. The first was his grandfather Willi Fels, for many years head of the firm of Hallenstein Bros., who was a serious collector in several fields, did much to foster anthropology and Maori studies in Dunedin, and was a generous patron of the Otago Museum. The second —their names are too little known in their native New Zealand —was that slightly older generation of cousins who left Dunedin to make their home in London while Charles was still at school —Mary, Dora and Esmond de Beer. In terms of the convenient E. M. Forster distinction between the practical managing Wilcoxes who make the

money, and the idealistic art-loving Schlegels who spend it in the cause of cultivated enlightenment, the de Beers were almost pure Schlegel—a compact family trio, a little island of Thomas Mann culture planted in the West End of London, with sturdy bodies trained on Queenstown hills and minds civilised by European travel and the London Library, quietly busy through world war and social revolution in preserving some older cultural values and making their own addition to them. Esmond de Beer, as the superlative editor of Evelyn and Locke, as an Honorary Fellow of New College and as one of that very limited list of benefactors whose names are inscribed in marble above the staircase in the Bodleian Library that leads to Duke Humphrey, is (like John Beaglehole) one of the really outstanding scholars New Zealand has helped to produce; and the

kind of scholar, like his own Evelyn, who is as much the gifted amateur as the professional researcher. Both these examples, within the family circle, show an admirable use of private resources for public benefit by men whose lives had early taken on a clear direction. Charles Brasch was different, because he was by instinct and temperament neither a businessman nor a scholar. From his schooldays he wanted to be an artist, but he deeply distrusted his own talent: for him, as for Hamlet in another intolerable dilemma, it was only by indirections that he could find

directions out. There is perhaps a superficial parallel, in social and family terms, with the Beauchamp family in Wellington a generation before. Katherine Mansfield was that unlikely product, the born artist thrown up by a hard-headed, material-minded commercial family: she too was translated from a colonial setting to enjoy a rather superior education in England; it is a further coincidence that the only Beauchamp boy, the one marked out to continue the business connexion, was like Brasch sent to be a boarder at Waitaki under Frank Milner. But there is one very significant difference: even as a schoolgirl Kassie Beauchamp showed astonishing talent, throwing off a trail of sparks that impressed even her phlegmatic father, so that with whatever misgivings he stood behind her, was flattered by her early artistic success, and never lost a warm parental relationship. We don’t know what Sir Harold Beauchamp’s attitude might have been, if it had been his only son who wanted to become a writer, live dangerously among artists in foreign parts, and reject all the opportunities for a prosperous career that lay open to him.

Indirections, the long prose memoir of his early life up to the founding of Landfall in 1947, makes very clear just how strongly family pressures worked on the young Charles Brasch—they almost tore him apart. To Willi Fels, the genial tolerant grandfather who best understood him, he was the first grandson, the first-born of a favourite daughter. Helene Fels, a sensitive romantic young woman, had married Henry (Hyam) Brasch, a handsome self-confident lawyer from Melbourne determined to get on in the legal-business world of Dunedin. It was a true love match, and the two children, Charles and his sister Lesley, might have looked forward to as happy a childhood as the Beauchamp tribe at Karori or ‘At the Bay’. But before Charles was five his mother fatally miscarried with a third child; from the conflicting details of just what had occurred the boy was left with an obscure feeling that his father was somehow to blame. Mr Brasch never remarried; he remained devoted to the memory of his dead wife, and fiercely ambitious for both his children; but something had gone wrong that was never to be fully healed between father and son. Henry

Brasch was no domestic tyrant, but through his severe demands (and perhaps some lack of imagination and trust) he increasingly lost the confidence and affection, if never the respect, of both his children. Looking back years later with a kind of sad fatalism, Charles wrote: ‘I had had no father, and he no son.’

So, though Brasch was happy as a boarder at Waitaki and made friendships that were to last for life, the atmosphere at home remained stiff and strained. Before he was seventeen his father wrote to tell him, without any further discussion or explanation, that he was to go to Oxford. In the event this proved a pleasant enough interlude, which brought new friendships and a much closer association with Esmond de Beer, then in Oxford as a research assistant to Sir Charles Firth. The de Beers lovingly and expertly introduced him to Italy; other vacations were spent in France and Germany. This was true education for which Brasch was later to be immensely grateful, but formally he left Oxford with a very indifferent degree in history, and no book to his credit: he had written a good deal of verse, but that very experienced bookman Basil Blackwell wisely persuaded him against any premature publication. He left England at the end of 1930 with a deep sense of failure, both public and private: ‘I had failed in love too, in a hopeless long-drawn-out devotion which came to nothing and left me defeated. I had longed for a complete impossible union of souls and bodies, physical and spiritual in one, a living together of perfect openness, absolute trust, total sharing and reciprocity. When it was over, I knew I should never love in that way again, and never find what I sought; that I was alone and would always be alone.’

That is the voice of a very romantic young man of twenty-one. But if you picture that same young man back in Dunedin, entering the warehouse of his grandfather’s firm with the idea ofworking his way up from the bottom, urged on by his father to further studies in law and accountancy, you can guess how he felt. ‘I was only partly back in New Zealand’, he wrote in Indirections . ‘The centre of my world now was England, Europe; there my heart remained; there my thoughts turned.’ By Easter 1931, sitting among the trees his great-grandfather Bendix Hallenstein had planted in Queenstown Park, he had already made the firm decision to renounce business and any kind of money-making; to escape back to London and somehow prove that he could be a creative writer. It meant a bitter showdown with his father, but his grandfather was prepared to make him a private allowance. After helping with the first number of a new literary journal in Auckland, The Phoenix, he sailed again for England early in 1932. He was not to return for another six years. These years were filled

with further travels in Europe and the Mediterranean, with three seasons of field work as an archaeologist in Egypt, with an attempt to edit the works of Fulke Greville (this suggestion came from Esmond de Beer, and was warmly seconded by his friend Jack Bennett), and perhaps most rewardingly with helping to teach disturbed children at an experimental school run by Mrs Lister-Kaye near Missenden Abbey. When he came back to New Zealand on a visit in 1938, he was acutely conscious that no clear pattern had yet emerged in his life: Willi Fels had respected Egyptology but didn’t care much for the disturbed children; his father remained bleakly hostile. Brasch has recorded wryly the suspicion with which he was regarded, especially by women, on his first morning walk around Dunedin: ‘I soon realized that I was the only male creature in Dunedin who was not working, who hadn’t a job—for the unemployed were clearly marked as such. And no honest respectable man goes about without a job; if for some obscure reason he hasn’t one, he does not show himself.’ At least, on this visit, he was able to leave with Denis Glover at the Caxton Press the slim volume of poems that became his first published work, The Land and the People.

The rest of Indirections covers a return to England across America, the death of his sister Lesley, and a painful meeting with his father in Hawaii in the month that war was declared. Brasch, who had intended to return to New Zealand with his father, decided he had to see the war out in Europe: ‘I had enjoyed and loved the best of England, I must not now refuse the worst.’ He became first a fire-watcher in the East End of London, then found a niche in intelligence work for the Foreign Office under his Oxford friend, Colin Roberts. The war years brought experience and responsibility; and with Denis Glover, on leave from naval service, Brasch was able to discuss the possibility of a post-war literary periodical in New Zealand, to be printed by the Caxton Press. When he did at last return in 1945 it was for good, with fresh confidence and a clear purpose. Nearly twenty years of Wanderjahre now pointed to a useful and attainable goal in his own country; and he had enough poems from the war years to make up a second volume of verse which he knew would contain some work that was really good.

In retrospect, it’s easy enough to say that the 1930 s and the war years were a disturbed and restless period in which few people were able to put down secure roots or deliberately shape their own lives: individuals were uprooted, blown about, many of them destroyed. But what I’ve tried to indicate in this brief focus on Charles Brasch, and what comes out much more clearly in the detailed narrative of his memoir, is the stubborn determination with which he held to his private resolution, from Easter 1931, to make his own life, choose

his own friends, and resist all family pressures to conform to a role which he knew would be fatal to him as a free, creative artist. It may not seem a very spectacular or heroic struggle—but the struggle was real enough. Remember that this was ajewish family: though it had given up most of the practices ofjudaism, the traditions were as strong as ever. Brasch had to defy his father, give pain to his beloved grandfather, and hold to his own line through all the long years when he had little enough to show for his chosen vocation as poet. Willi Fels died before the first number of Landfall came out; it was to be another year still before Disputed Ground was in print, and Brasch came to be recognized as a true poet of the 19305, one of the small brave company of Mason, Fairburn, Curnow and Glover. Katherine Mansfield left a unique body of original work behind her when she died in her mid-thirties; Brasch had already well passed this mark before he made any serious literary impression at all.

In the sequel, in the twenty-five years that remained to him after the publication of Disputed Ground, Brasch completed a full and honourable literary career. He became a much stronger and more assured poet, a tireless and discriminating editor, and probably did more than any single person to help consolidate new achievements in the arts in post-war New Zealand. All that is on the record, though his most considerable achievements in prose —his letters, journals, and the long prose memoir Indirections —still remain unpublished. What isn’t on the record, and probably never will be (for in such matters he liked to cover his tracks), is the extent of his private benefactions and unobtrusive aid to fellow-writers and artists, and often to mere victims of circumstance in troubled times.

An abridged version of Indirections —something like half the length of the formidable manuscript Brasch left—is due for publication in the near future, and should be welcome to all who care about letters in New Zealand. The work is a sort of antipodean Prelude, an account of‘The Growth of a Poet’s Mind’. It explores childhood and natural influences, and gives a richly detailed description of the life-style of one small but significant section of New Zealand society —the extended Jewish family, always deeply conscious of its Eastern and European origins. It makes clear, in its account of Oxford and Europe, Egypt and Palestine, just why the Old World meant so much to Brasch; but it also takes in a lively critical view of New Worlds in America and Soviet Russia. It records many close friendships with men and women in different countries, and contains some notable family portraits—above all, of his father and grandfather, the de Beers, and those aunts and other relatives who came to take the place of the mother he lost so early. In my view, after Katherine Mansfield’s Journal, and along with Sargeson and perhaps Guthrie-Smith, it is one of the very few New

Zealand autobiographies that is also a work of art. It establishes Charles Brasch firmly in his family setting, his national and international heritage, and his cherished hopes for a New Zealand that might at last learn to recognize itself in the original work of its painters, composers and writers. It is, as we might expect, a modest, careful, and truthful book, but illumined throughout by a unique sequence of landscapes and ‘epiphanies’ in which a painter’s eye, and a poet’s feeling for language, are often happily combined. In this work, the younger Brasch is as clearly and candidly exposed as he will ever be, and a whole chapter of New Zealand cultural history is definitively written.