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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Dante in the Antipodes

Dante in the Antipodes

‘Frankly, I think you young writers are taking yourselves too seriously. Another magazine isn’t going to change the face of the country. . . .’

‘Maybe not. But why young writers? Most of the writers in Numbers are at least thirty, with wives or husbands, and children, and their own share of trouble. If they know nothing now, they’re not likely to know more at fifty.’

‘Well, in that case, why all this noise about Dada and the wicked society we live in?’

page 207

‘Dada is just a slogan. As for the wicked society, dead was the word, I think.’

‘Dead, then. Why dead? We’ve got books, music, football, theatres, churches, people who know what they’re talking about. It’s the isolated intellectuals who imagine that everyone else is dead because they live in their own fug.’

‘Maybe you’re lucky and have no trouble keeping your mind and heart alive. But do you ever listen to the radio?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And do you find you can think at the same time?’ ‘Personally I find some of the programmes very instructive.’

‘Yes, but by supposing you were really trying to work things out the hard way, wrestling to keep that flicker of a real idea awake in your mind and set it down on paper at the same time.’

‘It all sounds too desperate to me. Couldn’t you switch the radio off?’ ‘There’s a radio going in one’s own head which it’s very difficult to switch

off. All the junk of half-baked notions and old obsessions going round and round like a gramophone disc.’

‘You can’t blame that on society.’

‘In a way. Has it ever struck you how afraid we are of silence? The headlines, the clanging trams, the talk in the pubs and shops and cafeterias. Can anyone stop to think why they were born and what they’re going to do before they die?’

‘You’re on religion now, not art.’

‘I don’t see much difference. They work at the same level.’ ‘What level?’

‘Good and evil and human pain or happiness.’

‘That’s a point I’d like to take up. Most of you younger writers take a worm’s eye view of things. Sordid. What happened to Jenny in the back parlour? Nothing about ordinary people.’

‘Perhaps people aren’t as ordinary as they look.’ ‘We’re ordinary enough.’

‘Did you ever read Dante?’

‘Yes. He put all the people he didn’t like in Hell, didn’t he? And God and Beatrice mixed up together.’

‘I’d say he wrote about spiritual states, states of being. You’ve missed out Limbo and Purgatory anyway. All the dry, canny intellectuals went to Limbo. They sat on a green lawn and discussed Philosophy. Inside Hell’s Gate. They didn’t feel any pain. But in order to get to Purgatory he went round and round the Pit, right to the bottom, and came out by a little rock stair in the antipodes. Maybe in New Zealand.’

‘I don’t see that Dante’s got much to do with New Zealand.’ ‘He was a man too. . . .’

1954 (97)