Bloomsbury South by Peter Simpson

Author:Peter Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

1946–1953

Charles Brasch spent from 1927 to 1945 in England, except for two extensive trips to New Zealand in 1931–32 and 1938. Landfall was planned in England during the Second World War.

Chapter Seven

Charles Brasch and Landfall

Charles Brasch returned to New Zealand in February 1946, and rapidly became a central figure in the post-war cultural scene, especially through Landfall – the leading literary and cultural journal of the period, of which he was the foundation editor from 1947 to 1966 – but also as a poet, critic, collector, patron and close friend to many key people in the arts.

From 1927, when he was aged seventeen, Brasch lived for nearly two decades in Europe, mostly in England, but also travelled extensively on the continent and elsewhere, including Russia, the United States and Egypt. He spent time in New Zealand twice before his final return. For about a year, in 1931–32, he assisted his school friends James Bertram and Ian Milner with the first issue of Phoenix, edited by Bertram, and later by Mason, at Auckland University College. Then while in the country for six months in 1938 he became friends with Ursula Bethell, Toss Woollaston, Rodney Kennedy and Denis Glover and placed his first poetry collection, The Land and the People, with Caxton Press.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Brasch was in Hawaii en route to New Zealand after the death in London of his younger sister, Lesley, but he courageously chose to return to England rather than wait out the war safely in his homeland. Declared medically unfit for active service, he served as a fire watcher during the Blitz and worked on secret projects for the Foreign Office.

Before the war, Brasch had been much preoccupied with whether to remain in England or return to New Zealand. It was a topic frequently discussed in his journals – he was a regular and indefatigable diarist – and in letters to friends. In October 1938, recently back from New Zealand, he wrote to Bethell: ‘Shall I come back to N.Z.? (since you still suggest it). I doubt it, now; the European doom has taken hold of me too completely, & my Jewish blood makes me too heavy with guilt. The world is unreal when I am in a safe place …’1 During his time in the Royal Navy, Glover usually stayed with Brasch in London when on leave, and they often discussed Brasch’s future, as in March 1942: ‘[I] said to Denis that after the war I would have to settle down & get a job, & felt that perhaps I ought to go back to NZ. He thought too that I should; mentioned the case of abler men, Beaglehole for one, who stayed on from a sense of duty although partly wasted in NZ …’2

In May 1943, stimulated by a later visit from Glover, Brasch’s thinking about New Zealand suddenly took a more purposeful direction:

Yesterday we discussed the possibility of a review – quarterly or thereabouts – in NZ, aiming at the standards of the Dublin Review & the Criterion.

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