Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Beginnings

Beginnings

The beginnings are tied up in a bundle somewhere near the beginning of the track itself – like the dead cat in a bag floating and tugged at by eels on the surface of the black bottomless river hole two hundred yards down from the house where I lived till I was eight. The poem-writing habit began when I was seven. All mental reconstructions of those early events seem likely to be false – not deliberate lies, but an improvised and artificial childhood tidied up for others to look at. I am one of those people who can’t give a clear account of what happened the day before yesterday – it might as well be the day before Noah’s Flood, as far as I’m concerned – and while this is usually a great blessing, it cramps my style in autobiography. Objectively I remember my childhood as a happy time. My health was good. There were plenty of things to do. My parents, my schoolteachers and my companions treated me well enough. Yet a sense of grief has attached itself to my early life, like a tapeworm in the stomach of a polar bear. I would not like to turn it into a sense of grievance – that interminable groaning noise which a man may make to a well-paid psychiatrist or a cobber in the pub – ‘They never treated me right, and that’s why I feel crook.’ Yet the sense of having been pounded all over with a club by invisible adversaries is generally with me, and has been with me as long as I can remember. It is probably the universal confession of the human race; and it has little bearing on the poem-making habit, exceptpage 724 that it may determine the rather gloomy tone of my verse.

A sense of grief – even at times a sense of grievance – helped me to write poems. In a way the poems sprang out of a quarrel with the status quo. It could be that the root of it all was no more than an early perception of the state that theologians call Original Sin. An alcoholic grave-robbing friend said to me the other day, as we sat and watched the milkbar cowboys come and go – ‘I took the wrong turn round the cabbage tree, Jim, a long time ago; and since then I’ve not been able to change it.’ He was mythologising his life; and that’s what a writer does. The trouble is, I can’t demythologise it. What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology. Even the moment of my own birth:

Not too far from the Leith water
My mother saw the mandrake grow
And pulled it. A professor’s daughter,
She told me some time after how
She had been frightened by a cow
So that the birth-sac broke too soon
And on the twenty-ninth of June
Prematurely I looked at the walls
And yelled. The Plunket nurse ran in
To scissor off my valued foreskin,
But one thing staggered that grimalkin:
Poets are born with three balls . . . (‘Letter to Robert Burns’, CP 289)

That is the exact mythological record of my birth. My mother had a Newnham M.A. degree in Old French; and my father was a self-educated Otago farmer who recited Burns and Shelley and Byron and Blake and Tom Hood and Henry Lawson when the mood took him. Somewhere back in the Freudian fog belt these two strong influences began to work on me. With the same place – the bare coast between Dunedin and Taieri Mouth – and the same people, someone else might have become a prominent Social Creditor and a collector of gold-bearing rocks. But instead I broke out in words.

How did it come about? Well – as in all good mythologies – first there was the gap, the void. After reading The Heroes of Asgard, I described it in a very early piece of verse:

Long, long ago, ere e’en the world was made,
Was naught but chaos, the abyss of space,
The deep Ginungagap – on one side lay
Cold Niflheim, home of frosts and gloomy mists,
And in it was the cauldron Hvergelmir,
The source of twelve great rivers of strange waves
page 725 That flowed into the space and chaos far
To freeze therein; while to the south there was
The red abode of Muspellheim,
The glowing home of the eternal fires . . .

I think that various factors combined early to give me a sense of difference, of a gap – not of superiority, nor of inferiority, though at times it must have felt like that, but simply of difference – between myself and other people. There was a great difference between the big house on the Cashmere Hills where my grandfather, Professor John Macmillan Brown, lived, and the closely-knit Otago tribes of my father’s family – the difference sank into my bones early and became part of me – and there was the greater difference between my own socialist-pacifist family and the semi-militarist activities of the people round about as the country moved towards war. The Pacifist Church had its confessors and martyrs – my father had been one of the greatest, and suffered almost to the point of death as a conscientious objector in France in the First World War. It also had its Scriptures – Tolstoy and Gandhi and the New Testament suitably interpreted. And it had its persecutors – the police and one’s excessively patriotic neighbours. I remember how in my teens, we could not put on the light in the upper room at night, because such neighbours would imagine we were signalling to Japanese submarines. I remember the long discussion of moral theology – whether or not a conscientious objector should obey the military order to report for medical inspection – and I remember the time when a crowd of boys of my own age surrounded me in a shelter shed at school, shouting abuse and inflicting a certain amount of physical violence. These experiences were in the long run very valuable, for they taught me to distrust mass opinion and sort out my own ideas; but at the time they were distinctly painful. I could compare them perhaps with the experiences of a Jewish boy growing up in an anti-Semitic neighbourhood. They created a gap in which the poems were able to grow.

The first poem I wrote was, no doubt, significant, if not in its form or content, at least in the way I approached the writing of it. I climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea, and there fell into the attitude of listening out of which poems may rise – not to the sound of the sea, but to the unheard sound of which poems are translations – it was then that I first endured that intense effort of listening, like a man chained to the ground trying to stand upright and walk – and from this intensity of listening the words emerged:

O Ocean, in thy rocky bed
The starry fishes swim about –
There coral rocks are strewn around
Like some great temple on the ground . . .

page 726

I don’t think my methods of composition have changed much since that time. The daimon has always to be invoked; and there is no certainty that he will answer the invitation.

I think the sense of a gap between myself and other people was increased considerably by the fact that I was born in New Zealand, and grew up there till I was nine, and then attended an English boarding school for a couple of years, and came back to New Zealand at thirteen, in the first flush of puberty, quite out of touch with my childhood companions and uncertain whether I was an Englishman or a New Zealander. This experience too, though very painful, was beneficial; for I fell into the habit of poem-writing with a vengeance and counted it a poor week when I had not written four or five pieces of verse.

At puberty the door had opened into some kind of cellar of the subconscious mind. A number of sensational ghost stories which I read at this time helped to give shape and body to the subconscious terrors. The one which impressed me most was about a lad who dabbled in black magic, or something of the sort. At the end of the story the moralistic narrator observes him at dusk running and crouching among the long grass of the churchyard, and finally scrabbling vainly at the heavy closed door of the church while large black supernatural dogs drag him down. I think it stirred up in my mind the Calvinist image of reprobation. I had only to substitute auto-erotic practices for black magic, and there I was in the centre of the tale.

The earliest poems, written from seven to fifteen, were undoubtedly imitative – I had absorbed the Romantic poets from my father – and their subject matter had little to do with my own life. They were curiously insubstantial. Thus I wrote, at thirteen, a poem called ‘The Atheist’, pointing out the pains of those who lose their faith – thinking that I myself had a faith, though in fact I believed in little except some obscure Cosmic Principle who did not particularly like me:

I spurned the ancient creed
And found no new,
Naught but a wilderness of weed
That I must wander through –

A wilderness of thorns
That tower on high,
That raise their dim misshapen forms
Towards an alien sky . . .

Probably the spiritual fact that lay behind the poem was the authentic and terrible grey rock desert of adolescence; but I didn’t exactly face up to it, I preferred to look at it sideways, feeling perhaps that I shouldn’t be there at all.

page 727

I would show my father nearly all the poems I wrote – partly for his approval, and partly because I knew they would give him genuine pleasure – yet I felt that he, and my mother too, if they had known the territory where the poems were born – that foggy Belsen of the imagination – would have been less happy about them.

All the pressures were on me at this time to accept the Calvinist ethos which underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot – work is good; sex is evil; do what you’re told and you’ll be all right; don’t dig too deep into yourself. I could not fight these chiefly inward pressures. I lacked the experience to contradict them and forge against them. All I could do was wait and sit it out. The image of Prometheus recurred in my poems:

I, Prometheus, under a sky of stone
Bare brain and entrails to the objective sand blast.
Eyes fettered, seeing sky and rock only,
Here wait, endure, sans even the hate
Of enemy or love of lover,
The legions of the stone futurity,
The crowding of the birds of memory . . .

The words are well put together, no doubt; but after all, there was very little to write about. I had no tools to deal with the central anguish of a child hurled into the adolescent abyss, at the mercy of his imagination and the impulses of his body; for our civilisation has no such tools to give. It was some time before I could forge them for myself.

In a rather Robert Lowell-ish poem I set down recently a sketch of my adolescent home environment, seen more objectively than I could see it at the time:

A Family Photograph 1939

Waves bluster up the bay and through the throat
Of the one-span bridge. My brother shoots
The gap alone
Like Charon sculling in his boat
Above the squids and flounders. With the jawbone
Of a sperm whale he fights the town,
Dances on Friday to the cello
With black-haired sluts. My father in his gumboots
Is up a ladder plucking down
The mottled autumn-yellow
Dangling torpedo clusters
page 728 Of passion fruit for home made wine.
My mother in the kitchen sunshine
Tightens her dressing gown,
Chops up carrots, onions, leeks,
For thick hot winter soup. No broom or duster
Will shift the English papers piled on chairs
And left for weeks.
I, in my fuggy room at the top of the stairs,
A thirteen-year-old schizophrene,
Write poems, wish to die,
And watch the long neat mason-fly
Malignantly serene
Arrive with spiders dopier than my mind
And build his clay dungeons inside the roller blind. (CP 237)

The tightly bundled energy of a New Zealand home was all there – at the time I couldn’t use it, but later on I learnt to. The danger was that I might sentimentalise, or make one or other of the compromises by which our culture mutilates itself. In the long run it is an intellectual problem.

There were three books which helped me. The first was John Lehmann’s Penguin survey, New Writing in Europe. Re-reading it now, I can’t quite see the cause of my enthusiasm, for the Leftist ethos has long since been blunted and fragmented by politicians and other dreary men; but at that time it burst in the middle of my desert like a nuclear device. I imagined a secret tribe of friends and lovers who waited, guns and poems and contraceptives in their hands, to welcome my coming of age. The experience had some of the force of a religious conversion; and more important, I had the sense of a possible audience for my own verse, and began to discard the dismal models I had been snared by – C.A. Marris’s anthologies and the more sluggish English pastoral poets. The second book was a sloppily written anarchist tract by Ethel Mannin, called Bread and Roses – it emphasised, very justly, the importance of free will, and made me realise that I could in fact determine in some degree what course my life should take. I decided, with no hesitation at all, that it would flow like a river into the gulf of Bohemia. And the third book was Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul. It offered the possibility that my subconscious mind might contain sources of peace and wisdom as well as ghosts, werewolves, hags, demons, and the various zoo of the living dead who crowded round my bed at night. These three books were each helpful to me in quite different ways.

I like to think of God and some hard-bitten angel discussing the just distribution of afflictions to the human race – ‘We’ll give this one a cold heart and a money-grubbing tendency; and this one a job in UNESCO; and this one a really painful marriage; and this one a homosexual temperamentpage 729 and a long spell in Mount Eden jail . . . And what about Jimmy Baxter? Turn the bag upside down, mate, there’s something stuck in the bottom. Schizophrenia? Tuberculosis? No; it’s only alcoholism and poem-making. Well, that’s not a bad combination . . .’.

It seems to me, looking back, that the negative aspects of my growth were in the long run of most help to me as a writer. They tempered the axe of intellect, as it were. A writer cannot avoid the task of exploring and understanding the private hell which lies just below the threshold of his own mind. I doubt if he can begin to understand the threefold aspect of the modern world – monotony, atrocity, anarchy – if he has not first done this. But while this growth was going on, I was of course a very quiet New Zealand lad doing this and that in a quiet New Zealand town.

1965 (352)