From literature to lovers, Charles Brasch's diary entries offer deeply personal insights into a man who influenced many, writes Shane Gilchrist.
The journals of Charles Brasch occupy a lofty position.
Not only do they take up some 28 linear metres of shelving at the Hocken Library, they (along with assorted papers, correspondence and Landfall materials) were accorded international heritage status by Unesco in 2013, joining the likes of the Treaty of Waitangi and the 1893 Women's Suffrage Petition.
Given he knew they would be read by others eventually, Brasch stipulated his journals were only to be opened 30 years after his death in 1973. Yet it has taken even longer for his detailed, highly personal musings on literature, lovers, art, culture, friends and family (and other subjects) to surface to a wider audience.
In 2013, Otago University Press published the first of a three-volume series, the last of which is scheduled for next year. At 646 pages, the initial compilation spanned eight (1938-1945) of the 40 years' worth of handwritten journals, all of which were transcribed by Brasch's friend, Margaret Scott, who died in 2014.
Now, a second volume has been published. Charles Brasch Journals 1945-1957 covers the years when the poet and editor was aged 36 to 48 and begins with his return to New Zealand after World War 2 to establish a literary quarterly, Landfall.
The first decade or so of his distinguished editorship brought Brasch into contact with New Zealand's leading artists and intelligentsia, including Frank Sargeson, Keith Sinclair, Alistair Campbell, Bill Oliver, Toss and Edith Woollaston, Denis Glover, Allen Curnow, Leo Bensemann, Lawrence Baigent, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, James K. Baxter, Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas and others.
Given many of these luminaries are the subject of diary entries, editor Peter Simpson is hardly guilty of exaggeration in describing Brasch's journals as ''a priceless record'' of a generation.
''He was writing these journals three times week. It was a routine of his to record his thoughts and meetings he had. And he was well-placed in regards what was happening in an intellectual and cultural sense.''
Sent to Oxford University as a 17-year-old, Brasch stayed in England and Europe for 20 years, apart from returning to New Zealand briefly in 1931 and 1938.''He had a very highly developed sense of standards, which he had formed while in England,'' Simpson explains.
''He was the opposite of the `that'll do' approach. It was almost like a religion with him, that New Zealand arts had to be measured against the best in the world.''
His ability as a poet notwithstanding, Brasch's rigorous maintenance of those standards was at the heart of Landfall, and so significantly contributed to a burgeoning post-war literary culture.
''To him, making judgements was the essence of being an editor, as well as having the capacity to recognise new work when it turned up. There wasn't much he missed in the 20 years he was editor,'' Simpson says.
Award-winning Dunedin author Philip Temple, who was associate editor of Landfall from 1972 to 1975, points out that although Brasch may not have been conscious of it, he established Landfall the same year (1947) as a permanent national orchestra was formed, as was the State Literary Fund to support writers.
''Here were the foundations to becoming ourselves, culturally,'' Temple says.
''Small magazines to publish new work came and went but Brasch's Landfall was intended to last at least 10-15 years - on a regular quarterly basis - and with very high standards in quality of work accepted, editing and production that all allowed it to become measured equally with peer magazines overseas.
''For a very long time it was the New Zealand literary journal that was on permanent order by overseas libraries and universities,'' Temple notes.
''It was valued not only for its strictly literary content but also its cultural commentaries and reviews. The quality of that material was high and Brasch relied a good deal on academic contacts for those.''
Yet, the latest volume of Brasch journals is about so much more than literature. It's also a highly personal insight into his passions, friendships, family, love of the outdoors and travel.
A writer, editor and curator who was a head of English at the University of Auckland before retiring in 2013, Simpson says his job was made so much easier because of the painstaking work of Margaret Scott.
''Margaret was a scholar who was best known for her volumes of Katherine Mansfield letters and editions of Mansfield journals. Having completed that work, she moved on to Brasch, who had been a very close friend.''
After the death of Margaret's husband Harry Scott in a fall on Mt Cook in 1960, Charles was a great comfort to Margaret. They had a brief intimate relationship; it didn't last long, yet they remained lifelong friends.
''She planned to edit Charles' journals, which had been deposited in the Hocken Library since his death in 1973 and on which there was a 30-year embargo. In 2003, the journals became available to view.''
However, Margaret became ill before she could complete such a task. She'd gone as far as transcribing all his journals, but she died in 2014.
Having written previously about Brasch, Simpson was invited by Otago University Press to continue the job Scott had started.
He points out the journals are not printed in their entirety; they are a selection, comprising about 60% of what Brasch wrote.
''One of my main jobs as editor was deciding what to leave out.
''For example, when his maternal grandfather got ill, Charles rushed back to Dunedin but it was three months before his grandfather died. Charles sat by his bed and wrote an entry in his journal almost every day for three months. If I had put all that in, I would have lost readers pretty early on.''
Among the various subjects covered, one conclusion becomes clear: Brasch was rarely comfortable in his own skin.
''Being Jewish, and being rich, he was an outsider in some ways. The fact he was gay ... His emotional life was a rollercoaster. He had a great propensity to fall in love, with both men and women. Sometimes he seemed like a teenager in the intensity of his involvement with people.''
Conservative in appearance, reserved and exacting in his professional, literary dealings, drawn to those who spoke and acted in the custom of the upper classes, Brasch was highly sensitive, too.
''He'd beat himself up if he upset somebody because of a harsh judgement on a contribution to Landfall. It didn't sit easily with him. He hated upsetting people but, on the other hand, he wasn't soft,'' Simpson explains.
''He fought depression, but I think there were a number of factors to his character,'' Simpson says, pointing to the death of Brasch's German-born mother, Helene Mary Fels, in 1914. Brasch described the event as ending his ''childhood proper'', aged 4.
Raised in Dunedin by his father, Hyam Brasch, along with aunts and various housekeepers, Brasch spent much time with his grandfather, Willi Fels, who helped foster his interest in European culture.
Hyam, however, would have preferred his son to pursue business interests. A lawyer of Jewish origin who, sensitive to prejudice, later changed his name to Henry Brash, he had little time for Charles' cultural inclinations.
''His relationship with his father was difficult,'' Simpson says.
''His father was a go-getting, upwardly mobile business type who had married into the Fels family, one of the richest in New Zealand. His biggest wish for Charles was that he would become a businessman like himself.
''But very early on, Charles refused. He wanted to be a poet and was very sceptical of his father's business values. When his father died, he remarked that it was perhaps the most important relationship of his life. It was a complex relationship.''
Charles Brasch Journals 1945-1957 also reads as something of a travelogue and, certainly, a celebration of New Zealand's wild spaces. As editor of Landfall, Brasch would regularly visit contributors (some of whom became friends) throughout New Zealand. And he long held a powerful attachment to Queenstown, where his great-grandfather Bendix Hallenstein started business in the 19th-century goldfields.
''The family had always retained summer houses and cottages and so forth in the area and Charles eventually acquired one of his own,'' Simpson says.
''He went there often and loved the lakes and tracks, including the Routeburn and the Milford as well as walking on the Otago Peninsula. The outdoors was an important part of his life and an antidote to the rather bookish existence he led as editor of Landfall.''
Given Brasch's great facility with language, his love of the outdoors is pronounced with a vigorous, tumbling outpouring of words that matches his subject matter: ''Why do I like the mountains?'' he wrote in February 1949 while confined in Aspiring Hut, in the Matukituki Valley, for several days as a storm raged.
''Because I am haunted by heights and spaces. Because among them, visibly, audibly, the heights and spaces. Because among them, visibly, audibly, the earth is still being made ...''
This balance of celebrating worlds both cerebral and physical provides a sense of narrative arc to the latest volume of journals.
Having arrived in New Zealand early in 1946, Brasch headed back to Europe for six months in 1957. On returning from his sojourn, which included England, Italy and France, he seemed to have formed a fresh view of his place of birth, too.
Two days before 1958 dawned, he wrote: ''A road has been run round the foot of Peninsula Hill from the Kawarau almost to the neck and the land on either side of it is to be sold in sections for cottages. It was a shock to learn this; I think of all this country as inviolable, sacred in its original state or as I first knew it and to see it changed seems to threaten all I know.''
And yet now I see New Zealand differently myself ... it has shrunk in my eyes. Yet it is richly various, with much packed into little, with grandeur and great distances, more than enough to enjoy for a life time ..."
In ruminating on a place bigger and full of possibilities yet also small and precious, Brasch again reveals his eye for both detail and larger themes.
''I thought it was a nice point at which to end the first volume,'' Simpson says, matter of factly, as if his transparent yet deft decision-making has been of little consequence.
Like good writing, understatement is a valid tool. In the right hands, of course.
Charles Brasch: Factfile
• Born at 26 Tweed St, Littlebourne, on July 27, 1909; died (aged 63) on May 20, 1973.
• Educated at Waitaki Boys High School and St John's College, Oxford, England.
• He lived abroad for many years, working as a teacher in England, an archaeologist in Egypt and as a civil servant in wartime London.
• He returned to New Zealand in 1946 and founded the influential literary quarterly Landfall in 1947 with friend and fellow poet Denis Glover.
• Like his great-grandfather Bendix Hallenstein, and grandfather Willi Fels, Brasch was a generous benefactor, contributing to Otago Museum, the Hocken Collections, the University of Otago Library and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
• He was involved in the establishment of the University of Otago Robert Burns, Frances Hodgkins and Mozart fellowships.
• The University of Otago recognised Brasch's contribution as an editor, poet and patron of New Zealand culture by awarding him an honorary doctorate in 1963.
The collections
• Brasch's collection of 7500 books takes up 156 linear metres of shelf space at the University of Otago Library (special collections), which named the Charles Brasch Room after its benefactor.
• The Hocken Library is also home to Brasch's New Zealand art collection of 461 works, including works by many of the artists he championed: Toss Woollaston, Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, Ralph Hotere and dozens of others.
• Elsewhere, an array of Egyptian artefacts Brasch collected from Tel El-Amarna is housed at Otago Museum.
• Charles Brasch Journals 1945-1957 is published by Otago University Press.
