Poetry and Other Marvels: D'arcy Cresswell on His Own Terms (Essay‪)‬

1. Introduction: The Gay Twenties For any New Zealand writer in the decades after the First World War, but especially for the many gay writers who made the voyage, the pilgrimage to England was a venture doubly freighted with possibilities. It promised not just a passage to the cultural centre, but respite from the claustrophobic puritanism of the provinces; or as D'Arcy Cresswell put it, in a paragraph which he ghost-wrote for Anthony Alpers, a freedom not just of 'intellectual,' but also of 'moral' choice--'that room to embrace a choice, that right to mix with others in like case.' (1) If Frank Sargeson represents the classic example of the writer who comes to terms with his sexuality in Britain, for figures as diverse as Hugh Walpole, Hector Bolitho, James Courage, Eric McCormick, Charles Brasch and Bill Pearson, the relationship between their writing and their sexuality is inextricably mediated by this colonial rite of passage.