Thoughts of an Old Alligator [1]

I have entitled this talk ‘Thoughts of an old alligator’ – it may seem a peculiar title. You don’t see alligators floating down the Waimakariri. But I think I am an alligator in a figurative sense. Not long ago I was thinking about the Catholic Church (of which I am a member) and how it could be compared to Noah’s Ark, which had all types of animals on board it – not just the hummingbird and the antelope, those graceful harmless creatures, or the elephant, which is dignified and useful to man – but as well as that, the alligator. And the thought was very consoling to me.

Later on, I mentioned it to a young woman with whom I was dancing after a dinner party. She asked me if I was going to the Arts Festival; and said she had liked a talk I had given at the last one – and I replied – ‘Yes’ – that I hoped to go to the Festival and give another talk there. And I told her what the title would be. And she replied – ‘Why do you think of yourself as old? You’re not old at all . . .’. And of course she was right at that particular moment, because I was not by any means holding her at arm’s length, and her youth was communicating itself to me. Which is a good thought; but not something you can hang your hat on . . . But at this moment I am strongly aware that I am a man of forty-one, and most of you will at least be under twenty-five – and it makes me wonder what thoughts an old alligator should properly communicate.

There is a touch of awkwardness. It was even greater last year up in Palmerston North, when I stood up behind a rostrum with the Mayor on one side of me and the Chancellor on the other, and said precisely what I actually thought about religion, sex and politics. I didn’t want to upset those good men – on the other hand, they had taken a bomb into their hands – they had asked me, a writer, to speak. And I either had to decline the invitation or speak the truth as I saw it about this country and the life of human beings and the growth or lack of growth of the arts here. I couldn’t both be there and not there – I couldn’t wrap a bandage round my ideas, as you wrap a bandage round a sore toe, and say what would please them – or the audience, who were mainly young people – no, I had to say what I actually thought, for the only contribution a writer has to make is to tell the truth as he sees it. And the truth I see is very often as painful as a wound. It was so on that occasion. And I heard the Mayor shifting and grunting on his seat; and I felt the Chancellor move into a state of suspended animation; but I was also aware that quite a large percentage of the audience was responding at quite a deep level to what I had to say – because it was the nearest to the truth I could get – a subjective truth no doubt – but something they could digest and chew on. For – as Aquinas or somebody else once said – the mind was made to feed on truth, and will die of malnutrition if it doesn’t get it. The old are accustomed to lie to the young. They count it their duty. My duty, however page 304 – because God or Necessity has put on my back the job of being a writer – is to do the very opposite, at whatever cost. And you need a hide as thick as an alligator in order to do it.

Not that the alligator is the only animal who climbed on board Noah’s Ark – no, there were plenty of others. But he was one of them. And his comments are an indispensable part of the complex dialogue that keeps the world in motion. Though I speak with the tongues of men – or of alligators – and have no love, I should not be listened to. I hope there is love in what I have to say.

Not long ago there was a dispute about mixed flatting at the University of Otago. Apparently an innocent and hard-working young man, with his parents’ agreement and the agreement of the landlord and the agreement of the parents of the girls in question, had taken up residence in a mixed flat. And then some slightly less innocent person had made it their business to plant the matter bang in front of the vice-chancellor, Dr Williams. And Dr Williams had groaned to himself, and said – ‘The good I wish to do I cannot do; but what I do not wish to do, that I must do’ – and, bound by the university regulations, had issued an ultimatum that this young bloke had to shift out of his congenial accommodation. And the students felt that they were not being treated as adults. And when I began to chew the matter over in my own mind – being a family man, and therefore in possession of a mixed flat from which nobody could very well expel me – it occurred to me that love had something to do with it – that, setting aside the particular circumstances, the students felt that some couples who were in love might also want to live together and should not be prevented from doing this – while those who made the regulations and kept them in being felt that this possibility was disruptive and might lead to all sorts of unhappy consequences. There is always a vast amount of double-talk on these issues. There was a touch of the conflict between youth and age somewhere behind it. And I began by trying to be honest with myself – because, as the M.R.A. people so reasonably put it, you can’t be honest with other people until you’re honest with yourself – and the only thing I have against the M.R.A. people is that their honesty may not be their own but borrowed from custom and convention and expediency. And I remembered how, twenty years ago, a girl had asked me to get a flat in town – that is, in Dunedin – so that we could see more of each other – and how I had not got the flat, because I was still torn in half between my life at home with my parents and my life with her – and how that choice, or lack of choice, was a bad one, made for the wrong motives, out of timidity, not out of love. And I remembered also how the best poems I ever wrote sprang out of situations that no authority on earth, and – possibly – none in Heaven, could formally approve of. And I thought – ‘Mate, you’ve had a long enough holiday, resting in the shade of the university English Department; it’s time you started telling the truth again’ – so I wrote the following poem, ‘A Small page 305 Ode on Mixed Flatting’, which some of you may already have seen. There is a reference in it to Leander, the legendary Greek youth who swam the Hellespont to visit his girlfriend Hero – and of course ran into trouble – and another reference to Saint Francis who appeared naked before his Bishop when he decided that he was going to obey God rather than his merchant father who wanted him to live a life of security – the connection between these two events may be obscure, but I think it still does exist. Here, at any rate, is the poem:

A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting

Dunedin nights are often cold
(I notice it as I grow old);
The south wind scourging from the Pole
Drives every rat to his own hole,
Lashing the drunks who wear thin shirts
And little girls in mini-skirts.
Leander, that Greek lad, was bold
To swim the Hellespont raging cold
To visit Hero in her tower
Just for an amorous half-hour,
And lay his wet brine-tangled head
Upon her pillow – Hush! The dead
Can get good lodging – Thomas Bracken,
Smellie, McLeod, McColl, McCracken,
A thousand founding fathers lie
Well roofed against the howling sky
In mixed accommodation – Hush!
It is the living make us blush
Because the young have wicked hearts
And blood to swell their private parts.
To think of corpses pleases me;
They keep such perfect chastity.
O Dr Williams, you were right
To shove the lovers out of sight;
Now they can wander half the night
Through coffee house and street and park
And fidget in the dripping dark,
While we play Mozart and applaud
The angel with the flaming sword!
King Calvin in his grave will smile
To know we know that man is vile;
But Robert Burns, that sad old rip
page 306 From whom I got my Fellowship
Will grunt upon his rain-washed stone
Above the empty Octagon,
And say – ‘O that I had the strength
To slip yon lassie half a length!
Apollo! Venus! Bless my ballocks!
Where are the games, the hugs, the frolics?
Are all you bastards melancholics?
Have you forgotten that your city
Was founded well in bastardry
And half your elders (God be thankit)
Were born the wrong side of the blanket?
You scholars, throw away your books
And learn your songs from lasses’ looks
As I did once –’ Ah well; it’s grim;
But I will have to censor him.
He liked to call a spade a spade
And toss among the glum and staid
A poem like a hand grenade –
And I remember clearly how
(Truth is the only poet’s vow)
When my spare tyre was half this size,
With drumming veins and bloodshot eyes
I blundered through the rain and sleet
To dip my wick in Castle Street,
Not on the footpath – no, in a flat,
With a sofa where I often sat,
Smoked, drank, cursed, in the company
Of a female student who unwisely
Did not mind but would pull the curtain
Over the window – And did a certain
Act occur? It did. It did.
As Byron wrote of Sennacherib –
‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold’ –
But now, at nearly forty-two,
An inmate of the social zoo,
Married, baptised, well heeled, well shod,
Almost on speaking terms with God,
I intend to save my moral bacon
By fencing the young from fornication!
Ah, Dr Williams, I agree
We need more walls at the Varsity;
page 307 The students who go double-flatting
With their she-catting and tom-catting
Won’t ever get a pass in Latin;
The moral mainstay of the nation
Is careful, private masturbation;
A vaseline jar or a candle
Will drive away the stink of scandal!
The Golden Age will come again –
Those tall asthenic birdlike men
With spectacles and lecture notes,
Those girls with wool around their throats
Studying till their eyes are yellow
A new corrupt text of Othello,
Vaguely agnostic, rationalist,
A green banana in each fist
To signify the purity
Of educational ecstasy –
And, if they marry, they will live
By the Clinical Imperative:
A car, a fridge, a radiogram,
A clean well-fitted diaphragm,
Two-and-a-half children per
Family; to keep out thunder
Insurance policies for each;
A sad glad fortnight at the beach
Each year, when Mum and Dad will bitch
From some old half-forgotten itch –
Turn on the lights! – or else the gas!
If I kneel down like a stone at Mass
And wake my good wife with bad dreams,
And scribble verse on sordid themes,
At least I know man was not made
On the style of a slot-machine arcade!
Almost, it seems, the other day,
When Francis threw his coat away
And stood under the palace light
Naked in the Bishop’s sight
To marry Lady Poverty
In folly and virginity,
The angels laughed – do they then weep
Tears of blood if two should sleep
Together and keep the cradle warm?
Each night of earth, though the wind storm,
page 308 Black land behind, white sea in front,
Leander swims the Hellespont;
To Hero’s bed he enters cold;
And he will drown; and she grow old –
But what they tell each other there
You’ll not find in a book anywhere. (CP 396)

Perhaps all I am saying is that sexual love is a human mystery, whether or not we connect it with what is Divine. The bureaucratic approach to mysteries is not one that I personally favour.

But somebody may say – You are a Christian, aren’t you? You can’t sit on both sides of the fence. Well, I don’t see a fence. Others may see it, but I don’t. True, it is beyond my power to live without Christ. More often than I think about anything else, I find my mind resting on the thought of His Passion. Do I understand it? No. It is part of me; but I still don’t understand it. It is there like a great tree whose roots are wrapped around the bones of the dead and whose branches give shelter to the living.

A year or two ago, in Auckland, I was in the house of a man I loved, who was dying. An inward affliction had taken hold of him and was destroying him. And I spent the night at his place, telling him all the yarns I could remember, in the hope of dissolving the burden. But it was beyond my power to dissolve it. In the morning, it was Sunday, and I said to him that I might go to Mass – and he said – ‘You don’t have to go; you’re having your Mass here.’ And later in the day, I went into the cathedral, and knelt down in front of the great crucifix behind the altar – and when I looked up at the crucifix, I saw that it was a dead Man hanging there, not a living one – but it was still God I was looking at – God is all things – he is a dead Man as well as a living Man – and I realised that the Dead Man crucified was also my dying friend. No, I cannot complain about a God who shares both life and death with us. But I do not see any fences erected on the bare ground below the Cross. That is my religion.

Ah, yes – the questioner may say – but you’re dodging the issue. Christians have to be obedient to the moral law; and more than what they do personally, they have to avoid condoning wrong behaviour in other people . . .

In a sense, yes; in a sense, no. If you will bear with me, I will tell you a parable. I call it – with no irreverent intention – the Parable of the Bad Samaritan:

There was a young man who grew up in a certain town. And when he came of age, the Governor of the town sent for him. And the Governor said, ‘You are no longer a child; you are a man. It’s time you began to take over a man’s responsibilities. Here is a letter. I’ve sealed it with my own seal, which is also the seal of the King. It contains information that page 309 is necessary to the welfare of the kingdom. I could have chosen another messenger. But I have chosen you. I have decided to entrust you with the privilege of carrying this letter to the King. From this town to the city where the King lives is a three days’ journey. If you allow nothing and nobody to deflect you from your purpose, you should be able to do it easily. But remember. Though the King is entirely merciful, he is also entirely just. He knows all that happens in his kingdom. You cannot lie to him. And if you are late, he will know why and deal with you accordingly. There is no reprieve from the judgment of the King . . .’.

So the young man took the letter, and left the Governor’s presence, and prepared himself for the journey. He sewed the letter inside his shirt. He bought himself a good horse. He took enough money to pay for food and lodging on his way. He washed himself, put on his best clothes, mounted the horse, and set out, full of happiness and confidence.

Towards the evening of the first day, he came near another town. And before he entered the town, as he was passing through a grove of trees, a man in ragged clothes leapt out from behind a rock and grabbed the horse’s bridle. ‘Hey,’ said the man, ‘you must let me have your horse!’

‘I can’t do that,’ said the messenger. ‘I need it as much as I need my own life. Why do you want it, anyway?’

‘Because I am a thief,’ said the man. ‘I stole some jewels from a rich merchant in the town. The police are a mile behind me. If they catch me they will take the jewels back and hang me to the nearest tree.’

The messenger looked at the grey hair and troubled eyes of the man on the ground below him. He seemed to be looking at the face of his own father. Slowly he dismounted from the horse. ‘Here you are,’ he said, handing the reins to the thief. ‘I can’t stand by and see them hang you. But mind you treat the horse well. She’s a good little filly.’

The thief did not stop to thank him. He leapt on the horse’s back, and in ten seconds he was out of sight. The messenger walked on towards the town, cursing his own stupidity and bad luck. As he travelled, he met a squad of the town police, riding hard. They stopped and questioned him. ‘Have you seen a grey-haired man in ragged clothes?’ they asked him. ‘Travelling on foot, like yourself . . .’.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’ve seen nobody.’

The police accepted his reply and rode on their way. The messenger made his own way into the town and rented a room for the night in the poorest hovel he could find, and bought a supper of bread and cheese; for he realised he would need all the money he had in order to get transport to the city. Before he fell asleep he swore a great oath to himself that he would allow no man or woman to detain him, but push on the next day without halting.

On the second morning he had no trouble in getting a lift on the page 310 cart of a peasant who was travelling to the market at the city. He found the company good. He and the peasant exchanged stories and sang songs together. The peasant offered him wine from a jar he carried in the back of the cart. The messenger drank and was happy. When the peasant, who had drunk rather too much of his own wine, fell asleep in the cart, the young man took the reins and guided the horse. That night they stopped at an inn at another town. The peasant would take no payment for the ride. So the young man was able to afford a good room for the night.

He noticed that the woman who ran the inn – a thin woman in her forties – looked unusually sad. Her face was puffed as if she had been weeping. He asked her to sit and drink some wine with him and his companion after their meal. She sat down with them. And in conversation he found out that her husband had died a fortnight before. He spoke gently to her, and tried to cheer her up; and it seemed that he had some success, for she sang a song to them before they went to bed, a song she had learnt in her girlhood in another part of the country.

The young man fell asleep easily. But he woke again after midnight, hearing the sound of quiet footsteps in his room. In the moonlight from the window, he saw the widow, dressed in a dark overcoat. She came towards him.

‘What do you want?’ he asked abruptly.

‘I want you,’ she said in a voice both bold and timid. ‘I’m a woman. You’re a man.’

‘I won’t dispute that,’ said the messenger, now fully awake. ‘But it’s not right. You don’t even know me.’

‘Before you came in tonight,’ she said, ‘I had decided to kill myself. I was going to take the poison that I use to kill the rats. When my husband died it seemed that I died too. I went about. I talked to people. I made all the arrangements for the funeral. But it seemed that the live part of myself was buried and rotting in the ground. I couldn’t stand it. I thought – It’s better to be really dead than neither dead nor alive. And then I thought – It might pass. But it didn’t pass. Not until tonight. When you looked at me and spoke to me I knew I could live again. You’ve brought me back to life.’

The young man was troubled. He hadn’t counted on having the widow’s problems dumped in his lap. ‘Well, I’m glad that’s so,’ he said at last. ‘But we don’t have to sleep together. If you’re alive, then you’re alive. But I’m on a journey. I’ll have to go away from here in the morning. You’d better get yourself a new husband in this town.’

The widow said nothing. She smiled and took off the overcoat. Underneath it she was naked. And she looked curiously young standing in the moonlight. She came to the bed and lifted the blanket and climbed in beside him.

The next morning the young man woke up late. The sun was streaming page 311 in the window. And the widow was still beside him. She was sound asleep and her face looked like the face of a child.

I’ll have to shift before she wakes, he thought. And then he remembered the rat poison. He decided to stay. But his heart was heavy. He picked up his shirt from the floor, and the envelope that contained the message from the Governor to the King crackled inside it. The widow began to wake. She opened her eyes slowly and looked at him.

‘You’ll stay now, won’t you?’ she said. ‘Stay for a little . . .’.

What with one thing and another, it was the morning of the fourth day before the young man left the inn. This may seem impossible to people who have a proper sense of duty. But the young man was not actually prepared to go until he had seen the widow throw the tin of rat poison into the river that ran beside the town. And the leavetaking was by no means an easy matter.

The widow had obtained the young man a good horse. As he rode towards the city at a hard gallop, he remembered the words of the Governor – ‘Though the King is entirely merciful, he is also entirely just. He knows all that happens in his kingdom. You cannot lie to him. There is no reprieve from the judgment of the King . . .’. And he began to wonder if it was worthwhile continuing on the journey. He could return to the widow. Or he could get a job somewhere; or even join one of the gangs of bandits who roamed about the countryside. Towards evening, nearing the city and thinking of these matters, he did not notice where he was going, and the horse swerved under the branch of a tree, so that he was knocked from its back to the ground and stunned. When he came to himself the horse was gone and a boy was standing beside him.

‘You must have had a hell of a knock,’ said the boy.

The young man looked at him. The boy was wearing some kind of dirty sacking. He was unwashed and his hair looked as if it had never been cut.

‘Where do you live?’ asked the young man, climbing to his feet with difficulty.

‘Over there,’ said the boy. He pointed to a rubbish dump just outside the wall of the town. ‘No father. No mother.’

The young man felt a sudden anger against the King. If he was truly merciful, why did he let his citizens live in destitution? He felt in his pockets. There were a few coins left. He gave them to the boy. Then he thought – I need my trousers to go into the town at all. I’ ll have to be decent. But I can give him my coat and my shirt. He took off his coat and gave it to the boy. As he took off his shirt, he felt the letter crackle again inside the cloth. He tried to tear it loose without damaging the shirt, but he had sewn it in too well.

‘Don’t tear the shirt,’ said the boy. ‘My sister can wear it.’

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To hell with the King, thought the young man. Human bodies are more important than bits of paper. So he gave the boy the shirt with the letter still sewn inside it.

The boy thanked him and put on the coat. It was not a very good fit. He went away towards his burrow in the rubbish dump, carrying the shirt in his hand. And the young man walked on slowly towards the gates of the town, through the evening fog, bare-chested, with a bruised forehead, and cursed himself as he went. I’m a bloody fool, he thought. If the King knows what I’ve done, he might have me hanged on the spot. To help a thief escape – to sleep with a woman – to give the letter away to an ignorant beggar lad who’ll have no use for it – there’s no excuse! But he felt inside him a curious longing at least to see the King. It seemed that his experiences had pushed him into a new area where the law no longer seemed to matter. He felt that he had lived a hundred years in the past three days. And for some reason his heart was not heavy but light. It was as if he contained the whole world inside his own breast – trees, mountains, rivers, towns, people, animals – it was as if he was them and they were he. As he approached the town gate, a trumpet sounded from within. An old man was standing near.

‘Father, what does that trumpet mean?’ the young man asked him.

‘It means the King is near,’ said the old man. ‘Every evening at sunset he comes outside the gate to look over his kingdom. They say that he has great joy in doing it; and whoever approaches him at that time may speak to him freely.’

While the young man – no longer a messenger – stood watching, the gates of the town opened and the King rode out, followed by his retinue. His face had the beauty of something carved out of rock; and yet it was entirely human. He is indeed the greatest of all kings, thought the young man watching him. And for the first time he thought – not of his own failure – but he thought instead that he had betrayed the King – it struck him like an arrow. He ran forward and stood beside the King’s horse.

‘Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I had a letter for you – I have lost it.’

‘That is so,’ said the King. And the young man stood silent. Then the King spoke again. ‘But I look at faces, not at letters. Whoever I wish to welcome, I welcome. I am glad to see you. Come with me and we will eat and drink together . . .’.

I suppose that this parable is about the relation of human love to Divine Love. The relation of the Bad Samaritan to the boy at the rubbish dump does not present any real difficulty; nor for that matter, his relation to the thief, because the final authority for a Christian is not Caesar; it is his relation to the widow that is somewhat ambiguous. And I confess I have stacked the cards a little in his favour there. Perhaps all I am saying is that motives are page 313 important; and that in my view of it God is not a moralist; God is primarily a Creator who loves creation, and asfar asweshare in that creative love wefulfil our human destiny. On the other hand, if someone argues against this, I have nothing to say – neither of us can really prove our point to the hilt. But – not without trepidation – I would still assert that I am a Christian – even if the notion of going to weekend camps where students gather together and discuss religion does not appeal to me. After all, I am an old alligator; let the young alligators follow their own noses.

There is the matter too of being some kind of artist – of being a writer. A writer is married to his community – not just to some of them – to all of them – men and women – conservative and radical – mad and sane – believers and those who do not consciously believe. In some ways it is a strange relationship. At times he will find himself garlanded with leaves; but if he is wise, he will know that this is only the preliminary to a further ceremony where he will be decapitated or emasculated or torn apart or disembowelled by those to whom he has joined himself. This ritual happening is something about which he can’t really complain. He has chosen his bed; and he has to lie on it.

Twenty years ago or more, I said to myself – ‘Well, mate, what are you going to be? Some kind of cosmopolitan? Or a colonial Englishman, haunting the libraries and colleges overseas? Or just a Pig Islander?’ And finally I chose the third alternative. There are disadvantages. At times a New Zealand artist will feel like a penguin exposed (without feathers) on the Antarctic ice-cap. After all, very few of his countrymen give a damn whether he produces works of art or not. And there is no Bohemia here in which he can climb into a burrow and hibernate. But there are also advantages.

As I get older, the voices of this country within my mind tend to become clearer – the voices of the rivers which flow not only outside me but also inside me – the Clutha, the Rakaia, the Wanganui, the Manawatu – or that small stream in Southland called the Oreti. There was a character in Dante’s Inferno who remembered continually one of the Italian streams – he could see it before his eyes, he could hear the water running, though he could not drink from it – if I were standing in his shoes – or probably without shoes and without feet – the Oreti would be the stream I’d remember – the manuka bushes drooping on its banks, the clear water flowing over shingle. Even to speak of it gives me a sense of joy.

And then there are the towns, each with their separate voice – the places that have become part of me, because of the people in them whom I have loved, either wisely or unwisely, seeing the world through their eyes – the living and also the dead who are separated from our knowledge but not from our love. First there is my own town, Dunedin, that hell-hole in the South. I wrote a poem about her; a bad poem, because it has anger in it as well as love; but I’ll quote it all the same:

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Three clocks fill the conduits of the air
With news like rings in water spreading, talking
Across this town cold as a griddle-iron.
Learning and secrecy, says one,
Shaking sparrows from his elder’s hat
And frowning at the wicked weirs.
Honour me, cries the second one,
For I have put their hearts in a silk bag
As smooth as money, for dry safety.
Each traveller, replies the third,
Has the horizon for a hangman’s noose,
Will end, will end in a small stone cell.

Well, the recalcitrant second son
I was and am, returning,
Can take note of the statue of Burns
Kept in the high Octagon
Cold in a stone overcoat,
And write this truthful letter home:
‘Patience, my mother! I will come
To roost at last, quiet and good,
Under a one-armed angel, yours,
Among my windy fathers.
Till that fall I have for labour
What will most offend you.’ (Uncollected)

No – it’s not a particularly good poem – but it has something of the cold sooty smell of Dunedin in it. Going further north – there is a beach somewhere near Point Howard, in the only part of Wellington that makes good sense to me – the harbour:

In the abandoned early world
Of rock and sun, where peeled boys tussle
Awkward in their skins among
Dazzling friendship of seawater,
And bearded mussels gape to the tide,
Observe them, not-yet-made,
These younger, abler colonists
Whom summer holds against her tongue,
Pips on an iron spoon.

Mauve girls and white, snapdragons
Flaring from hotbeds of idle noon,
page 315 Who bake their hams, drenched in a passive dream,
Resemble also the high sunflower,
Blind saint who drinks the night,
Whose roots finger under asphalt,
Swaying leaves like hands in the garden
Of a sea cottage, turning to the light
In which her seeds harden.

Or yet younger, the children flung
From forges of wild sleep
To clamber, shout in the old man sun,
Inheritors of pure sense,
Under giant, lopped and dusty branches
Lost in their tribal games,
Can they interpret our graffiti saying –
I warn you of King Coffin;
Avoid the ogress, who is lame?

Not happiness its meaning,
White stone of manhood gained
Wrestling with the demon of the rock.
Without envy and observant,
Walk the bright, relinquished kingdom
Where summer burns and fades. Listen
To the voice of noon on a wide shore,
Your peace not theirs, yet both held
In the hollow of a heart beating. (‘The Not-Yet-Made’, CP 180)

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