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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Niggle at Catholic Verse

A Niggle at Catholic Verse

I know very little about poetry because I write poems, and so have not had the leisure or inclination to read new, badly-written biographies of poets, or theories of composition which earned lectureships at American universities – Blake’s Prose and the Land of Enclosures by Talullah Hornbuckle – much as I admire the donnish authors, who can live happily for weeks on a page of Donne and the smell of a worn typewriter ribbon.

I do not want to see them exterminated, not even the venomous ones. Like the Abominable Snowman they add something to life; I see them now clearly, clinging to their Tibetan ledges. They know all the things about poetry that I have never had time to learn; they have named it and counted its teeth and tracked it down. They even invented prosody, God bless them! In America where they breed and swarm they make blueprints for poems, and the poets write obediently according to the blueprint. Did ever Catholic obedience stretch so far? But a fatal, tireless, persistent dryness in the throat grips me whenever I pick up one of their volumes – so earnest, so tedious, so trivial, so true. Whereas poems are born, like Eve from Adam’s side, incalculable, as primitive as a spoon.

The sad thing about Catholic poems is that they are rarely incalculable. Take Chesterton, for example. Earnest, hopefully, even prayerfully, he drums up a theme. The cardboard knights go through their capers, the wooden swords whistle, the world hangs from a thread of tarnished gold – and the moral comes pat, that it is far better to be a chaste, good-living Catholic ironmonger than a cold-hearted, immoral, free-thinking coffin-maker. Which we know already.

I’ll grant you that Chesterton wrote often for the press – he had to make his point for someone reading on the evening train. There is always genuine feeling in his poems, but the form is often mechanical and stereotyped.

When he writes of something he really loves, like good wine, the punch is there all right, smoking in the bowl; when his deep love for Our Lady, in ‘Regina Angelorum’, blows like a gale through his heart, then the poem itself lives and moves with the power and balance of a breaking wave. But far too often he substitutes the machinery of thought (‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ one hears him ask belligerently) for the incalculable sources in life itself which a poet, Catholic or Protestant or pagan, must learn to rely on.

Take our good father and mentor, Gerard Manley Hopkins – why didpage 378 he spend so long elaborating those arabesques of critical theory, which bear the same relation to his work that a Baedeker guide does to a medieval cathedral? To please Bridges, one suspects, his Abominable Snowman friend. Even Hopkins, though not so regularly as Chesterton, is prepared to write well below his own intellectual watershed. The ‘May Magnificat’ is a striking example, a girlish production as if for a pious magazine – though his genius does flare out in a few hieroglyphic paintings of the natural world.

Our Catholic poets, since the Reformation, have been cursed with an audience who ‘love’ them only too well. If a poem celebrates Our Lord or Our Lady, then it will go over in a big way, even though it may be as weightless as a child’s balloon. The poet is presanctified; he has (we take it) been through at least the fringes of the Dark Night of the Soul, when the editors grew choosy and his creditors began to hammer on the door. He is, above all, safe.

I do not feel that this rarefied atmosphere helps a Catholic poet; it may lead him to the dangerous eminence of a self-made rebuker of the modern world. The audience is confused. They know that the intention is good, and confuse intention with performance.

There is a powerful temptation to a Catholic poet to deal in short measure – ‘I am writing for the little sheep,’ he tells himself, ‘for a family audience. This work is apostolic, beyond the measurement of ordinary criticism.’ And so, to a barrel-organ metre, he trundles out the story of the Pilgrim and the Pope in the hundred tired couplets; whereas the best and most heartfelt reference to that miraculous incident occurs probably in Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, when he writes of the conjectural redemption of the hanged guardsman:

Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his mouth a white!
For who can say by what strange way
Christ brings His will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore,
Bloomed in the great Pope’s sight . . .

I grant that it is difficult, anyway, for anyone to write a really good poem; but the difficulty is increased for a Catholic poet if his audience is too readily content. Should we write like Caedmon? Like Mistral, perhaps? Or like Lorca?

First, I think, we should write like grown men and women, living in this grim century (‘a century of ruins and excavations’, Claudel called it) and the Catholicism in our bones will find its way into our verses. The Church indeed has the answers to the problems of the modern world, but one would [not] gain that impression from the diet displayed in the average Catholic’s library. Who reads Leon Bloy in New Zealand? I had to come to India to find him.

page 379

There is another subtler temptation for a Catholic writer. It sits grinning at my elbow as I write. I think I know how the Devil would present it to me. First he would persuade me that most priests are to be revered on account of the Sacrament of Holy Orders, but otherwise hardly fit intellectual company for a giant like myself. Next he would try to tell me that the Holy Father, infallible, of course, when he speaks ex cathedra, is at all other times an ignoramus.

Then someday, as I am leaving the confession-box, after a heavy session with a strict confessor, more conscious of new wounds inflicted on the ego than of the effect of Divine ointment, he would spring the thousand-dollar question – ‘Do you really always have to obey?’ Then, if I answer that question the way he would most like, he will lead me gently but surely into the desert, under the banner of a crusade for the working-classes, Jimmy Baxter, the martyr of the century, exponent of the only true, aesthetic, modern, trigger- happy Catholicism.

But would Our Lady let it happen? I rather doubt it.

1959 (185)