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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Draft of ‘Shots around the Target’ (2)

Draft of ‘Shots around the Target’ (2)

I am glad to have been asked to speak at this Festival – but it’s by no means an easy job, Without falling into the trap of regarding myself as a minor prophet, simply because I’ve written verse and managed to survive to the age of forty, I feel the occasion demands an extra truthfulness – more than a few slipshod aphorisms and anecdotes stitched together to . . . catch the mind. And there is of course the problem of age itself. One of the characters in Graham Greene’s last book has this to say of the matter – ‘For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience; the rest is observation – but I think it is equally true of all of us . . .’.

This statement seems plausible to me; though for the sake of delivering a single heavy punch Greene may have suggested a real enough limitation. I think that deep experiences, character-changing or character-forming, happen much more rarely after, say, the age of twenty. The self tends to form a tough protective shell. For personal, domestic, financial, even religious reasons, one finds oneself involved in a number of compromises. The better compromises are made on account of love – being alongside the people, one has to share their crouch, their twist, their particular spiritual limitations as well as one’s own – the best comparisons are made, I think on account of fear – to avoid this or that pain or injury or loss of serenity or difficult encounter. These merely deafen the mind and destroy one’s quota of human honesty and courage. The negative compromises are, I think, the more common. To this extent the comment of Greene’s persona is accurate. Deep experiences can occur in later life; but they occur far less frequently. But if this is so, then you who are still young, would be right to feel that you have to act, understand, find out who you are – not in some distant future, but now, right now. On this page 17 account I have a grudge against education: it tricks the young into supposing that their knowledge of themselves and others can wait till they have learnt certain skills and certain formulae; whereas if the old were thoroughly honest, they would admit that the years spent in the classroom and lecture rooms were lost years, years of experience neglected, and they have never been able to grow up well because of that early pedagogical mistake.

Not long ago I met a young man who was writing some good poems. His own history had been stormy enough, including a rejection of the Catholicism in which he had been raised and some time spent in a mental hospital. But when I saw him he seemed to have sorted something out. He was talking about starting a literary magazine, and he said – ‘Of course I’ll get the best work from the varsity chuck-outs’ – meaning those people who clashed with the varsity world, who often failed to get units, who acquired from the varsity environment the beginning of an intelligent sharpness, but insisted on trying to lead a life of their own. My own experience led me to agree with him. As Robert Burns Fellow for 1966, down at Otago University, with a study supplied so that I can do my own work, I look at that pseudo-Gothic building that I hung around in my late ’teens, and recognise that nothing ever happened inside those walls to help me to grow in the way I needed to grow. Whatever experiences did affect me – good or bad – happened outside the academic suites. So I see the New Zealand Universities’ Arts Festival as either a non-academic happening within the academic region or else as something useless to me and to people of my kind.

I say – ‘knowledge of themselves and others’ – or – ‘to lead a life of their own’ – and those phrases carry an obvious ambiguity. They could be taken as the sayings of a Bohemian . . . People have sometimes taken me to task for, allegedly, telling the young who wish to be artists that they need a diet of debunking. One would never have to gain this grotesque impression if the alternatives offering were in fact either a fruitful, active, harmonious life, or some kind of delinquency. But as they present themselves – as they presented themselves to me in my early ’teens and twenties – the alternatives are either an unacknowledged but deeply brutalising sterility and boredom, or else a series of explosive statements and actions designed, as it were, to get things moving. I was like a paralytic who had to learn to walk, even if he knocked the furniture over in the process of learning. The pedagogues would have wanted me to remain contented with my paralysis. . . . I meet someone like my friend who wanted to start a literary magazine, and feel, ‘Man, you may be a bit disorganised, but you’re trying to put the pieces together’ – or I may meet some member of an Adult Education group, a successful librarian, let us say, and feel – ‘God help us, I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes. You’ve kept the peace; you’ve never broken anything; and the world is a birdcage with you inside it.’ Between a false good and a false evil the scores are probably about equal.

page 18

Still, the Bohemian ethic is the more real answer; because the necessity of art is not experience for the sake of experience, but something more difficult – you could perhaps call it emotional integration. . . .

In a talk like this, one should say something about sex. Now, I’ve never yet met a person who thought straight about sex; those who claim to are generally the screwiest. I don’t claim to myself. But the reason I mention sex in a talk that ought to be about art, is because human beings are sexual idealists – women sometimes say than most men are not, but all this means is that they have different and often conflicting ideals. And of course that’s where the unending sexual suffering comes from, in which the human race is more or less submerged. This same sexual idealism, I think, is intimately or closely connected with the production of any works of art. . . .

Metaphorically I tend to think of my own poems . . . as semen deposited by me in the sad barren belly of this country, this society. She is determined to bear no children, that is, she won’t allow any living arts or thought to survive inside her. Her other boyfriend, a businessman and politician, has told her that what she needs is material security – cosmetics, washing-machines, English cars, plenty of butter on her already overloaded plate. In return she lets him practise experiments on her – gouging out her guts, ruining her lakes, drying up rivers to flood the Maori villages and graveyards: all in the name of progress. It’s a peculiar relationship. In my turn, I take it that I love this poor old maltreated bitch, this graveyard among the nations – in spite of the fact that every visiting celebrity, after admiring the trout-fishing and the sunset on Lake Te Anau, shudders and runs a mile to get away from the politics of the pay packet and her pervading stench of money and dullness. I must love her. Why otherwise do I have this grief, amounting at times to agony, when I look round at her – at the towns like well-filled morgues and the farmlands where even the farmer’s dog barks ‘Money! Money! Money!’ This also is a familiar relationship. Who could want to be an artist in an art-killing society? At times one does feel the solitude and peace of the graveyard. . . .

To be less general: what are the strong satisfactions of the majority of young New Zealand men? I would say – sport, grog, masturbation, and types of machinery such as cars and motor-bikes. And what for the New Zealand woman? Here I tread on less certain ground. But I suggest – clothes, scone-baking, long-lasting family feuds, and let us say, to be polite, hypochondria. The list could vary, of course, for either sex. But if you put a bit of art in place of sport or scone-baking, I think there will be something wrong with the art. It will lack guts; it will just be something extra. It takes a revolution of some kind to change empty minds and bad reflexes. Some people see a religious answer to the problem. If, they say, you can put a genuine religious enthusiasm in place of grog and masturbation, or clothes and family feuding, you’ll have better, happier people. I rather doubt it. I’ve never found it worked page 19 that way with me; or at any rate, for short periods only. Religion is not a door-stopper . . . And some see the answer in education. I can’t see that either. . . .

But I do see going on around me a sporadic, often muddled, sometimes violent social revolution. I refer to the widespread changes in the habits of young people. You would know more about it than I do. It gives me hope. Anything that changes deeply the patterns of satisfaction in our society gives me hope.

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