CRESSWELL (Walter D'Arcy).
Lyttelton Harbour. A Poem.
Inscribed “For Eddie Marsh very gratefully & fondly from D’Arcy Cresswell. Auckland 1936”. With a copy of the prospectus, also inscribed, and an 8 page ALS written on the backs of composition typescripts. The letter gives a detailed picture of his life in Auckland, where he was living rather primitively in a “bach” in the garden of Jane Stronach on the outskirts of Auckland. [For non-Kiwi readers, this word “bach” is pronounced ‘batch’ and is a small light building - more than a shed, less than a house - that would often serve as a holiday cabin: an English usage might be ‘chalet’.] He complains of the “ignorant and stupid piece of suppression” that stopped the publication of his Poet’s Progress in New Zealand (in an odd echo of the English actor Wilfrid Brambell he was apparently rather disrespectful about the city of Christchurch). At first he thought “that the blame might be partly mine; but now I wonder how they could have been so unjust and silly. I don’t think I’m a bit too harsh in the poem I send you with this, nor do I exaggerate the revulsion I feel for my country: I mean for its social & civic life, while for its natural life I feel a compensating reverence & awe.” He lists the people he is chasing for patronage “I am dreadfully in debt for it, & dreadfully in debt everywhere. I just don’t how I shall get thro’ this year.”
Cresswell was a problematic character, famous for his part in a gay blackmail scandal when the Mayor of Whanganui attempted to murder him.
