Books
This uneducated land
by David Eggleton
Frozen for 30 years after his death, the papers of Landfall founder Charles Brasch are now open for inspection in Dunedin. What do they reveal about New Zealand’s chief literary architect, with his Anglophilia and his skittish sexuality?
HARMONISING MY STARTING PLACE: Charles Brasch, patron poet and collector, de Beer Gallery, University of Otago Central Library (till October 31).
Dunedin’s Landfall was the little magazine that could – and did. "No literate New Zealander has any excuse for not reading Landfall," said its founder Charles Brasch in 1971, repeating with approval the verdict delivered by a reviewer of the very first issue, which appeared in 1947.
In truth, though, it was always touch and go. The high standards, small circulation and shaky finances of the journal were coaxed along by Brasch’s single-minded devotion. His editorial assistant Ruth Dallas later recalled his dedication to excellence: "I read aloud the whole of Landfall, including stops, commas, italics, while Charles’s thin, fine-boned hand moved steadily down the galleys with ruler and pen, occasionally pausing to make exact corrections in the margin."
For Brasch, Landfall was a vocation, a cause, a crusade – and a rallying standard against the besieging Philistine hordes. Through Landfall Brasch knew everyone who was anyone in the literary community, seemingly keeping up a correspondence with each bit-part player in the nation’s cultural narrative during the 50s and 60s, while also preaching sermons to the converted on the values of civilisation from the pulpit of Landfall’s Editorial Notes. But who was Charles Brasch and what drove him?
In May 2003 the Charles Brasch papers, frozen for 30 years after the writer’s death and stored at the Hocken Library, were released, warmly heralded by two exhibitions of archival material – one at the Hocken Library, the other at the University of Otago Library. And in June Sarah Quigley arrived in town to work on Brasch’s biography as the Robert Burns Fellow. (She holds the Fellowship this year in tandem with poet Nick Ascroft.)
It will take ages to unpack all the nuances of the 23 linear metres of correspondence, journals, diaries, photographs, postcards, family documents and other items. The displays feature examples of personal books, paintings and drawings as well as selected correspondence. And there’s the original of the letter in Landfall 100, in which New Zealand artistic luminary after New Zealand artistic luminary adds his or her signature congratulating Brasch on the centenary. Dallas has recorded that Brasch was a letter-writer on an epic scale. Can it be long before someone fossicking among the fodder assembles a collection of letters that lights up all the links?
BRASCH, ALONG WITH Allen Curnow and Denis Glover, was essentially one of a small group of mid-20th century innovators in New Zealand who consciously set out to invent a local version of the modernist tradition. Brasch, the great-grandson of pioneering merchant Bendix Hallenstein, was an importer and marketeer of European vintage values, and therefore zealous in his pursuit of the Eurocentric approach summed up in the ambiguous promise of his most famous phrase: "distance looks our way". The modernists believed that New Zealand was "an empty land crying out for meaning" and they set out to provide one. (Landfall takes its name from Curnow’s poem "Landfall in Unknown Seas".)
While some prominent intellectuals exiled themselves overseas, Brasch was one determined not to become a footloose expatriate. He returned in order to make a difference. His notions of duty and responsibility, his sense of mission, were bred into him early. He found his own sense of identity by meditating on that great abstraction: New Zealand’s identity.
Brasch’s family background was German-Jewish and on his mother’s side very interested in the arts. Willi Fels, his maternal grandfather, had been inspired by the Hellenic ideals that were so central to German-Jewish high culture in the 19th century, and in turn he inspired Charles. Charles’s father, however, preferred business and sports and regretted that his son had turned out an aesthete and a poet. He sent Charles to Waitaki Boys High School – training ground for farmers and rugby players – where the lad was indoctrinated into a regime of cold showers, relentless physical exercise and conformist behaviour and thinking.
More education in England at Oxford University followed before the unwilling poet returned to work in the family business.
Within a year he had taken off back to Britain and Europe, where he worked by turns as an archaeologist, a teacher of problem children and, during World War II, for British Intelligence. Brasch tells the story of this part of his life in his autobiography Indirections, which, with its sensitive account of the growth of a poet’s mind, is among the best books of memoirs ever produced in this country. It endures as a model of clear, chiselled prose.
But coming back to New Zealand after the war was over and nearly 20 years away, Brasch had to struggle with unease, alienation and anxiety – the sense of having arrived at the back of beyond: "this uneducated land", he called it, "with its barbarously ugly towns". Brasch’s distaste for what he saw as smug complacency and "mindlessness" was worked out through his poetry.
Page 1 2 
