The curious case of the Catholic bigot

Newsroom

30-04-2025

Dear old Landfall, New Zealand's most distinguished literary periodical founded in 1947, reaches a significant milestone later this year when it publishes its 250th issue. The occasion merits a fond retrospective of the journal which has published everybody who is anybody in New Zealand letters, and held fast to a model of good taste, intellectual rigour and liberal ideology. But its back pages also include one particular review of such extraordinary awfulness that it continues to draw attention like a fire in the night – and serves as a warning that others, one day when you least expect it, will let rip and do unto you.
The review was by Auckland novelist Michael Joseph. He went by the pen-name of MK Joseph. It appears in the June 1959 issue of Landfall. It's a good issue. There are two poems from promising young turk CK Stead (27), and that dark classic by Maurice Gee, 'The Losers', a short story about horse racing, with its cruel and violent denouement: 'He went down on his knees and looked underneath the float; and stood up immediately, leaving the torch on the ground. He moved to the roadside and sat down in the grass with his feet in a gutter. Soon he began to retch. He didn't notice that another car had stopped and other people were climbing into the float, but he heard the horse scream…' MK Joseph's review of A Way of Life by James Courage releases its scream on page 178.
The reviewer and the reviewed led lives in opposite directions. Joseph was born in Essex and emigrated to New Zealand with his parents, while Courage grew up on a sheep station in Canterbury and got the hell out of New Zealand as soon as he could. Joseph grew up in Bethlehem, attended school in Te Puke and boarded at Sacred Heart in Auckland, studied at Auckland University and later at Merton College in Oxford, from 1936-9. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Artillery and fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He returned to New Zealand after the war, joined the English department at the University of Auckland as full professor, married, and had five children. He was the author of six novels. Courage lived the rest of his life in London, and was the author of eight novels. His most famous book, A Way of Life, was New Zealand's first openly same-sex novel. There wasn't actually any sex in it; the author took many lovers home to his apartment, but was too timid to go into any erotic detail in fiction. In 1953, he wrote New Zealand's first openly gay short story, 'Guest at the Wedding', published in Landfall in 1953. The hottest it gets is when Hamish, who wears 'a Stetson hat, tight flannel trousers, a school blazer and yellow brogue shoes', wrestles nude with a groom on a beach on Stewart Island.
A Way of Life was published in London and New York. Two years later in New Zealand, a committee made up of representatives from the Justice Department and Crown Law advised the Customs Department that the book was 'unacceptable'. It was withdrawn from libraries and bookstores. By then, several reviews had already appeared; the worst was by MK Joseph.
Charles Brasch, editor and founder of Landfall, took the delicate operation of commissioning reviews with seriousness and sensitivity. He wanted to do right by Courage. He was a good and loyal friend, and like Courage, stayed close to the closet (he was attracted to men and women; his friend Margaret Scott told the Otago Daily Times, 'Charles and I slept together off and on for some years. He thought if he found the right woman then he could settle down and have a family'). Brasch put his trust in Joseph. He wrote to Courage ('Dear Jim') in February 1959, 'I shall probably ask MK Joseph to review it; he's a cool, judicious man who doesn't make rash judgments; and I should expect him to be reasonably sympathetic although he's a Catholic; there's hardly anyone else I'd care to ask.'
Later in the year, he wrote to Courage again. 'I'm sorry to have to warn you that LF's review was not at all sympathetic, to my dismay.'
New York edition of A Way of Love by James Courage.
The review was hateful, patronising, repulsed, the ravings of a Catholic bigot. Little of it was about the book. Joseph writes, 'It is inevitable that the serious writer should wish to write of homosexual love. But once he tries to present it on the lines of a grand passion, he is immediately up against … insuperable difficulties.
'The first difficulty is to persuade most of his readers to accept homosexual relations as being on the same plane as heterosexual ones: they may be serious, destructive or pathetic: but any attempt to make them the subject of exalted lyricism must almost inevitably collapse into disgust or derision.
'The relation of man and woman is profoundly complementary, and not simply on the physical level. It is 'natural', in either sense of the word, whether one regards nature as the manifestation of a controlling intelligence or as the working of blind evolutionary forces.
'And it is not only a social function – it is the basic function without which no society exists; whereas homosexual relationship is outside any possible society, in a world of illusion and sentimental make-believe. That is why any homosexual love-story must almost automatically come out on the same level as the unreal and sentimental heterosexual love-story.
'Even if the writer can persuade us to accept his story on the same level as a tale of normal love, there is the difficulty of writing, truthfully but unselfconsciously, about the act of sex itself, at once the most natural and kindly of human acts.'
Courage, then, was not only a degenerate but a fool. Joseph holds his nose and says of A Way of Love from a great height: 'Its attempts to persuade us of the reality of this passion have a desperate ring.'
I sought comment from Chris Brickell, an Otago University academic and editor of James Courage Diaries (2020). He replied, 'MK Joseph's review of A Way of Love was a shocker, even for 1959. After reading it, Bill Pearson, a closeted homosexual man and Joseph's colleague in the English Department at Auckland University, decided not to reveal anything about his personal life to the other academics. At the same time, however, the queer community was becoming increasingly visible in the bigger cities. There was some coverage in the newspapers, not all of it as condemnatory as Joseph's piece. The Dorian Society was established in Wellington just three years later, and in 1963 its legal subcommittee took the first tentative steps towards law reform.
'Paul Millar, Pearson's biographer, blames Joseph's conservative Catholicism for the tone of his review. But Joseph was not the only one who regarded homosexual men as, in his words, 'inherently tragic'. 'The Woman Problem', an essay by poet and satirist ARD Fairburn, was a case in point. Fairburn railed against the 'dominating position' of homosexual writers in New Zealand culture. As 'foxes without tails', they were, 'in a deep and tragic sense, isolated from the full human context'.
'There was a twist, as there usually is. In an increasingly liberal society, the intemperate words of Joseph and Fairburn did their posthumous reputations no good at all.'
But Joseph didn't have to wait to die before he was trashed. Allen Curnow got to him in his last years. It was time to reach out to likely the last man standing who moved with MK Joseph, with Bill Pearson, with Allen Curnow, who lived across the road from him in Parnell: CK Stead (92).
*
What did MK Joseph look like?
He had a drooping moustache and he looked like an old English gentleman really. And he was very polite and very unaggressive. I'm sure he was astonished to find that he offended anyone. Mike was very tranquil and when we went to dinner at his place in Remuera, he always showed us his latest developments in his train set.
A train set?
Yes. He had a train set all set up. You know, the way people sometimes do with stations and everything.
When did you first meet him?
I was his MA student. I had him as a supervisor. So I got to know him very well because I met him once a week. He was very gentle and kind. But he had a very soothing voice. So if you'd had a hard night before, it was easy to go to sleep in his lectures. Not that they weren't good lectures. They were actually very substantial.
MK Joseph at his home in Remuera.
What sort of rooster was he?
He was a nice old rooster to deal with. But he was a very devout Catholic, and produced a number of children. And so he wrote that review of the James Courage novel in which he said it wasn't possible to have a civilised society based on homosexuality, and that really deeply offended our other colleague, Bill Pearson, who was secretly gay. Bill was always ashamed of himself for not having come out because he made his character in his novel Coal Flat heterosexual. It was really Bill himself.
So Bill was so offended by that review of James Courage's novel that when he reviewed one of Mike's novels, in the Listener, he kind of savaged him in revenge. And then he thought Mike had taken a slight revenge on him by representing him in his novel A Pound of Saffron as a drunk who danced wildly at a party and was sort of embarrassing everybody.
Was this a tableau that Mike had possibly witnessed?
I think so because Bill liked to get pissed. He drank a lot in those days. He eased off in his later life. He only drank beer, but he drank a hell of a lot of it. And he always had a very strange walk with his arms wide, rather wide on either side of him, as though he was trying to look like a tough guy. Bob Chapman also described Bill Pearson's dancing at parties, he wrote somewhere that it was wild and uncoordinated, like he shouldn't have tried because he was such an awful dancer.
And anyway, Mike put it into his novel and Bill saw it as a revenge for his unkind review of Mike's novel.
Did you read A Pound of Saffron and did you recognise yourself in it?
I read it at the time and I remember we all read it trying to pick who was who. But Mike had done a fairly good job of concealing who the people were, but everyone knew it was Bill's character. He's described as tall, which Bill certainly wasn't, and Mike probably thought, 'If I make him tall, no one can say I'm writing about Bill.' But it was obvious. We all knew.
*
I took out A Pound of Saffron (1962) from the library, and enjoyed it immensely. This is the thing about MK Joseph: he was, sometimes, a wonderful writer and a significant author, and unusual, too, daring to range well beyond any expectations of conforming to the New Zealand literary realism tradition. In 2020, Atuanui Press posthumously issued his speculative novel Tomorrow the World, which imagined Hitler having won the war. His 1967 novel The Hole in the Zero is credited with inventing the word 'hoverboard'. He won the New Zealand national fiction prize with his time-travel novel The Time of Archamuth (1977).
He was in possession, then, of a fine and lively mind. A Pound of Saffron operates as a satire, a bonfire of vanities at the English department, and it's often very funny; Joseph is also very skilled at setting, with descriptions of Albert Park in spring, an academic's converted boat shed on the North Shore ('His wife found it useful for adultery'), and walking from Queen St to the ferry terminal: 'When he reached the last intersection, the air changed sweetly. He emerged from the hot concrete canyon, lined with banks and espresso bars, big stores and novelty shops, movie-houses, insurance-offices, windows full of lingerie, motormowers and LP records; a perfume of salt, smoke and tar cleaned the air; cranes swayed and a bass hooter drummed; the gulls screamed, delighting in scraps. And here were the ships – the ferries plying their harbour shuttle, white sails and moored launches, the grey warships across the water, tankers, coasters, tramps out of Hong Kong or Surabaya.' Fantastic; and contemporary, too, because Joseph's sensory perceptions are as accurate now as they were then – in that last intersection of Queen St to Customs St, the air (and the light) really does change, sweetly.
The book loathes racists: 'I won't have my son getting mixed up with a Maori tart,' says an awful old bag. It hates rock'n'roll, too. Here is the party where Bill Pearson is about to make his entrance: 'By 9 o'clock, the cool jazz discs had been put away, and from the record-player came a sound of idiots mumbling over untuned guitars.' (But Joseph was hip to the fact that some of these idiots were New Zealanders: in another scene, one of his characters sits on his floor, plays an LP by the contemporary Kiwi pop star Johnny Devlin, and enthuses to a visitor, 'It's Johnny, man!')
''It's Johnny, man!': Johnny Devlin LP, 1959, courtesy of his nephew, broadcaster Martin Devlin.
And so to the scene with poor Bill Pearson, that 'awful dancer'.
The party gets loud. Everyone is drinking. 'The unpublished novelist, a tall loose-limbed man, was being the life of the party by doing improvised dances in the middle of the floor with one of the arty girls. The students politely ignored him.'
That's not too bad, but it gets worse. The party gets louder. Everyone is drunk. 'The novelist led a crowd down to the beach for what he called an open-air demonstration of free dance. He had soon fallen off a rock into a shallow pool: he was carried back, dried, and soothed with brandy.'
The 'soothed' is very good. Poor, humiliated Pearson, knowing everyone knew the character was based on him, seething in the staff room at Auckland University, staring daggers at Michael Kennedy Joseph, that tranquil Catholic with his train set and his moustache; at least Pearson could claim he was, in fact, a published novelist, a year later, when Coal Flat appeared. But there was someone else in the staff room, his lips clenched around his pipe, also looking at Joseph and coveting ideas of retribution, in this golden age of an all but abandoned pastime in New Zealand letters – the literary feud.
*
MK Joseph's best-known novel was A Soldier's Tale (1977). It was made into a film, shot in France with Gabriel Byrne, later to star in The Usual Suspects, and French actress Marianne Basler. The book was reissued in 2010 by HarperCollins.
Film poster for A Soldier's Tale, starring Gabrielle Byrne and Marianne Basler.
Its synopsis: 'Normandy, 1944. In a small village near Bayeux, a young soldier comes across an isolated farmhouse, where a woman waits alone. As they talk, three grim-faced Frenchmen arrive to take her away for 'questioning', telling him she betrayed their Resistance colleagues to the Gestapo, through her SS lover. The soldier is armed, and forces them to leave her – but they all know he will eventually have to move on, and the woman will be theirs …'
It ends like no other novel has ever ended. The woman makes the soldier a bowl of soup with meatloaf. She runs a bath. He sits by the fire. 'She led him towards the bedroom … Afterwards she rested on her back … Perhaps we shall have a baby, she said.'
Perhaps not.
The French Resistance are waiting to get to her, torture her, rape her, kill her.
In the morning, the soldier puts a towel around his waist, strips her naked, and kisses her.
She likes that.
'With my right hand I loosened the towel and reached for the long knife which I'd strapped to my thigh, under the towel … Then I went down and in with the long knife behind the collarbone.'
She doesn't like that.
'She groaned and fell onto the flagged floor and began to kick and scrabble like an old dog dying in the road, but I knew that it was as good as over.'
Then he goes into great, loving detail about laying her body on the bed and arranging a crucifix and two lit candles beside her.
The narrator of A Soldier's Tale concludes his story: 'Sometimes it appals me, and sometimes I think it's the finest love story I know. Cruelty and mercy share the same human heart.'
Jesus Christ. Au revoir, 'old dog'; such is love among the ruins.
Back to my interview with CK Stead.
*
So you were a friend of Mike Joseph.
Yes. He was an all right guy really. And I did feel sorry for him when Curnow wrote a vicious but brilliant poem about Mike's novel A Soldier's Tale. At the same time I could only concede it's absolutely brilliant. Do you know Allen's poem?
No.
Oh God, it's so savage and so brilliant.
Was there some personal animus behind it?
Well, Allen didn't like Joseph's view of homosexuality. Allen deeply disapproved of that. At one point there was a famous case involving a guy who was a producer of plays, and he produced Curnow's play Moon Season, which really rather bombed out and was unsuccessful. His name was Ronnie Barker. He wasn't the famous Ronnie Barker. He was the unfamous Ronnie Barker, and he was caught sucking someone off in central Auckland by a cop who was just there to entrap gays.
Mike and Bill Pearson were in the university common room together. And Bill said, 'That was terrible. That was just an entrapment.'
And Mike said, 'Well, we've got to protect our children.'
And of course Bill was furious. He knew it was a nonsense that gay people were hellbent on corrupting children, but it was a popular thought back then. I mean, [Frank] Sargeson had that problem too. People thought he had to be kept away from their children in case he seduced them.
What happened to poor old Ronnie Barker?
He didn't get imprisoned. They tried to make out it was a medical problem. I ran into him on Princes Street and he was showing us how he had to take the green pills and the blue pills and the red pills. Ronnie was very theatrical. He put on this very funny skit about being absolutely engulfed in these pills.
Was the medication supposed to suppress his gay cravings or some bullshit like that?
I think that was the theory. It might have been something his defence lawyer made up to keep him out of jail. His lawyer was John Haigh, the great liberal lawyer of the times.
The father of John Haigh, later one of the great criminal lawyers at the Auckland High Court.
Yes. And so Allen was very, very, very fond of Ronnie. Ronnie had a wife and two children but clearly Ronnie was bisexual and active on both fronts, so to speak. So Mike said this thing and of course it got back to Allen, who held it against Mike. Allen and Bill both sort of hated Mike as a Catholic bigot and he probably was a Catholic bigot.
Tell me about this poem that Allen wrote.
It's dripping with heavy irony. What happens in the novel is that in order to save a French woman from the terrible things that the Resistance would do to her, because she was an informer, he has sex with her and then he murders her. And then he lays her out beautifully on a table with a crucifix.
Kay [Stead's wife] was so revolted by it and felt she could never speak to Mike again. She was so disgusted by the whole idea that he's saving her by killing her, by cutting her throat. Really, it's so outrageous. It made you wonder about Mike sitting up late at night writing these things, these sorts of dirty thoughts. He looked such a saintly person and behaved in such a saintly way, and yet there was this turmoil of dirty thoughts going on in his mind that he could concoct this scenario and then write about it so lovingly. She was quite revolted by it.
*
The poem by Allen Curnow was titled 'Dichtung und Warhreit', taken from Goethe; translated, it means poetry and truth. It first appeared in Curnow's collection An Incorrigible Music (1979). It came too late for James Courage to read and perhaps exact some kind of satisfaction; he died in 1963. But Bill Pearson would have read it and so, too, would MK Joseph, that 'cool, judicious man', who looked on 'the act of sex itself, [as] at once the most natural and kindly of human acts'. He died in 1981.
The poem begins,
A man I know wrote a book about a man he knew
and this man, or so he the man I know said, fucked
and murdered a girl to save her from the others
who would have fucked and murdered the girl
much more painfully and without finer feelings,
for letting the Resistance down and herself be fucked
by officers of the arm of occupation……
What a fucking shame, this man the one the man
I know knew decided, if you want a job done well
do it yourself, and he did and he left her in a bath
of blood from the hole in her neck which he carved
in soldierly fashion, a way we have in the commandos,
after the fuck he knew she didn't of course
was her last, and a far better thing, wasn't it?
than the bloody fuckup it would have been if he'd left her
to be unzippered and jack-the-rippered by a bunch
of scabby patriots with no regimental pride.
And he had this idea, and he mopped up the mess
and he laid her out naked on a bed with a crucifix
round her neck for those bastards the others
the sods to find, furious it must have made them…
'And,' the poem concludes, 'he wrote this book.'