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Charles Orwell Brasch
(1909 - 1973) New Zealand

Charles Brasch

Poet, editor

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Charles Brasch was born in Dunedin of a large and well-known family. His great-grandfather, Bendix Hallenstein, founded the drapery company of that name, as well as the Drapery Importing Company. His grandfather, Willi Fels, was the greatest influence in his life, his mother having died when he was five.

His literary executor has refused to allow any of his work to be included in a recent anthology of gay writing, because he did not come out in his lifetime.

As its name Indirections implies ('By indirections find directions out' - Hamlet), his memoir tells us little about his sexuality. However, in it, he writes lyrically about his schoolmates' nudity:

"We were sun-worshippers... the sun was never too much with us. We loved baring our bodies to it and to each other... naked, we were fully clothed in nakedness, which was perfectly natural to us.

"We knew one another's bodies from summer hours of swimming and lying in the sun by the baths, where we wore nothing, better than we knew one another's minds.... For years after I left school it seemed to me that I did not know my friends properly until I knew their bodies too, from swimming and sunbathing with them."

He is vague about his special friendships, such as with George Menlove (!) -

"... richly brown-skinned, soft-featured... strong and fearless... his red cheeks under the permanent tan and warm smiling mouth... a lover of the sun; we spent long hours lying together beside the swimming pool and basking in hollows among the gorse on the foreshore."

He had some kind of romantic infatuation with Winsome Milner, daughter of Waitaki Boys' High School's Rector Frank Milner - but then, so it seems did every other boy at the school.

He studied at Oxford (passing through London at the same time in 1927 as Frank Davey, later Frank Sargeson) with Senior Scholar Colin Roberts "deeply loved and looked up to."

After Oxford he worked as an archaeologist with Roberts in Egypt, taught at an A.S.Neill-style school in England, and during the war worked in the Italian section at Bletchley Park. If he knew Alan Turing (who was breaking the Enigma code there), he does not mention him.

As well as his own poetry, he will be remembered as a founder in 1946 with Denis Glover, of the literary quarterly Landfall, and its first editor.

His life-long special friends were James Bertram and Rodney Kennedy, and he knew Toss (later Sir Tosswill) Woollaston, Mary Ursula Bethell, James Courage and D'arcy Cresswell. He never married.

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Quotes from Brasch's memoir, Indirections, edited by James Bertram.
© 1995-2002 Queer History New Zealand

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