The text comprises eight years of the 40-year span of Charles Brasch's handwritten personal journals lodged in the Hocken Library (all of which Margaret Scott has transcribed), supported by a full panoply of editorial apparatus: Rachel Barrowman's fine biographical introduction; Andrew Parsloe's full explanatory footnotes, his chronology of Brasch's life from 1909 to 1945, and his useful ''Dramatis Personae'' appendix, providing information on 289 of the people referred to in the text; a diagram of the relevant sections of the Hallenstein family tree; and a ''Selective Bibliography'' of Brasch's works and the archives, reference works and other sources used for the text and notes.
This edition will be indispensable to future biographers and literary, cultural and family historians, but it also offers to the general reader a true treasure -
what Scott in her Acknowledgements calls Brasch's ''intimate conversation'' with himself. Sharon Dell, the Hocken librarian, in her ''Foreword'' quotes an entry in Brasch's yet unpublished 1961 journal in which he says ''the thread that unites my various selves is the observing, remembering, recording self''.
In the journals that self converses with the Brasch of that day, observing and remembering people, places, times, experiences, feelings, and thoughts encountered in some crucially formative years, and recording them in a prose marked by clarity, grace and precision. The editorial apparatus operates like the signs in a museum exhibition, giving the reader relevant information to more fully understand and appreciate the treasures on display.
The observing self of the poet is evident in the many immediate descriptions of time and place which often open a day's entry, as in the description of an afternoon walk through Ken Wood with James Courage the day after a night air-raid in April 1941, in which Brasch had found a terrible poetry of gun-flashes, smoke, the glow of the fires below making the barrage balloons above appear ''like fragments of some palely incandescent material'': now, in a peaceful spring afternoon he observed ''Water-lily leaves opening on the lake; & the big magnolia on the steep grass slope in front of the house is covered with pure wax-white buds, pointed, flame-shaped, growing upwards from the twigs as though the tree were lifting them, like an offering, first faultless offering out of its bare branches''.
The remembering self is evident in entries such as the one from July 1940, in which he looks back at his unrequited passion 10 years before for the unnamed, masculine ''E'' when he realised ''the utter finality of one's aloneness - a new & terrible insight for me then'', or the recurrent entries when he remembers remorsefully his own behaviour in his sister Lesley's last days in January 1939, as she died a painful and lingering death at 27.
The war in Europe is a constant presence through most of the journal, as Brasch attempted to come to terms with it and with his place in it. Only a day-by-day journal could reveal so vividly the process of his working through the question of whether he could remain a pacifist in the face of the Nazi threat to all that he found meaningful. In May 1940: ''The terrible humiliation of realising that though one may repudiate war one is dependent on the issue of it, utterly dependent - at least as a Jew I am.''
He finally decided he could no longer be a pacifist, but throughout the war he was conscious of the ''intolerable'' human cost, including the German death toll: ''Often by night now the heavy sinister drone of bombers passing rapidly overhead, sometimes for half an hour at at time; they are ours, but no less terrible & ominous than the German bombers used to be, although it is not us they threaten with destruction, for it is they or the power they represent that seem to dominate our world'' (August 12, 1943).
In the many responses of the observing, remembering, recording self to people, to works of art, to nature, to current events, to intellectual and spiritual experiences we can sense Brasch engaged in what he saw himself as ''constantly striving to accomplish: to discover or create a world which shall be mine while at the same time embodying aspects of the real world, a home for the spirit'' (November 16, 1944).
To make these moments of striving available to the reader is the ultimate justification of this book.
- Lawrence Jones is an emeritus professor of English.
