James Munro Bertram - Support For New Zealand Literature

Support For New Zealand Literature

Bertram was a strong supporter of New Zealand literature. He helped Charles Brasch to found the Landfall journal, and wrote many literary reviews, especially for the New Zealand Listener. He specialised in the lives and work of nineteenth century British poets A. H. Clough, Matthew and his younger brother Thomas Arnold the Younger who arrived in New Zealand in 1848. Bertram sorted and edited a collection of letters by Thomas Arnold from 1847 to 1851. "I felt I might begin with a critical study of Clough's poetry, then switch to the impulsive Tom Arnold, whose abrupt changes of political and religious faith covered in one lifetime the whole gamut of Victorian disbelief and belief. I could not help feeling that this inner circle of Dr Arnold's favourite pupils ...had some resemblance to our own little Waitaki group, Frank Milner's cognoscenti, just as painfully caught between Nietzche, Freud, and Marx, between C.S. Lewis and Teilhard de Chardin."

He was awarded the title of Emeritus Professor of English in 1971. After his retirement in 1975 he was general editor of the New Zealand Writers and their Work series, wrote on Charles Brasch and Dan Davin, and edited Brasch's memoir, Indirections. In 1981 he received an honorary LittD. In 1985 he published some of his reflections on New Zealand writers in Flight of the Phoenix.