Oxford
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Brasch was expected to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer or enter the firm of Hallenstein Bros. The stepping-stone to these destinations was Oxford, where Brasch was expected to row (or to be sporty), and engage in studies that would lead to law or business. If all failed, it gave social standing, something that was important to his father. Brasch entered St John's College, Oxford at Michaelmas term 1927 and enrolled in Modern History. He was eighteen. In 1930, he graduated an 'ignominious Third.' |
St John's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It was founded by Thomas White in 1555 and because of endowments, it is today one of the wealthiest colleges in Oxford. Brasch joined seven other undergraduates doing Mods. His moral tutor was the medievalist Austin Lane Poole; his history tutor W. C. Costin. Extra-curricular activities included the debating club, the Hongi Club (an informal meeting of New Zealanders, including William Morrell and Ormond Wilson) and the Essay Society, which Brasch joined in June 1928. On 11 May 1930 he gave a paper to the Society entitled Poetic Heresies.
In New Zealand, just before he left for Oxford, Brasch wrote 'I had had my fill of romantic and popular novels and was ready for better ones; I was also ready to move on from Swinburne and Masefield.' On arriving in London, he purchased works by Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound, Flaubert, Christopher Marlowe, Shelley, Lawrence, Yeats, and F.S. Flint from Harold Monro's Poetry Bookshop. He also obtained a copy of Katherine Mansfield's Journal and read it in two days (on a sofa), setting the mood for the whole first term. He wrote: 'it also made me aware that writers work alone and must expect to live much alone.'
Brasch was not a collector of rare old books and deluxe editions. He preferred his books to be serviceable: well-printed, strongly bound and readable. However, while in England he must have been thrilled at the choice available in the bookshops, particular with what represented 'modern' poetry and prose. At a shilling (or 12 francs), James Joyce's Pomes penyeach was one such purchase.
When Brasch was a school-boy, one of his uncles (Dr Thomas Thompson) offered him a complete set of the Temple Shakespeare if he made it into the first fifteen. Although Brasch loved to walk, and enjoyed watching cricket, he was not sports-minded. In Oxford, in March 1929, he obtained his own copies of this well-known edition without the conditions attached. This is his Hamlet.
Brasch had a number of mentors at Oxford. The first was his cousin Esmond de Beer, the Evelyn and Locke scholar. The second was Colin Roberts, who introduced Brasch to the works of Plato. Roberts and Brasch went to poetry readings where T.S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Louis MacNeice were in attendance. Too shy to approach these figures, Brasch knew them from afar. Not Far Off was the largest single collection of verse Brasch produced. His unflattering verse sentiment about MacNeice in this work is repeated again in his Indirections.
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