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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Crashpad Notes: October-December 1971

Crashpad Notes: October-December 1971

1

N— writes me a huge letter from Auckland. Her message, decoded, boils down to a simple statement – ‘People don’t want the moralising part of you, Jim. It is a shield and a nuisance. They just want you, the person and the man.’

Though I have never met N— face to face it would be easy to dismiss this as the conflict of a woman who feels neglected by a symbolic lover. But she is probably right. It is so easy to put on the coat of a . . . prophet.

page 391

I am on a fast that may last for a month. It seems to me necessary, as a Gandhijian approach to problems of housing and the brutish conflicts between Dives and Lazarus. To fast is a kind of [low-level?] militancy. We have shifted into the old three-storeyed house in MacDonald Crescent. There are no lights, no water, and the lavatories are all broken. But we cook with open fires, and the people in the house alongside let us use their facilities.

To dispute about social matters is hardly part of the . . . on ethics that puts all things in the hands of God. Yet Gandhi himself will moralise on occasions. On Fridays I go down to the Catacombs, at Godfrey Wilson’s invitation, and bash on to a full house in the theatrette. They pass the ball round in prolonged discussions about Christianity and loneliness and the decay of communal life in our present society. It is probably entirely useless. Enquiry breeds arguing, but never proceeds to action. These discussions are the ephemeral safety-valve of a liberal democracy in which the rich continue to oppress the poor. The people go away from them with a sense of [satisfaction?] turning back to the same observances they came out of. The middle class norms remain unshaken.

To shift the rats and the rubbish out of MacDonald Crescent is a more merciful act. We get to know one another here. The tribe has begun to find another focus. But N— has missed one aspect of my noise-making on the TV or the radio. These public appearances achieve a small peace with the Establishment. The fuzz are less likely to arrest my friends for being out of work when they fear they may be subjected to public criticism for doing it. And I notice the Health Department are handling us with kid gloves. Moreover, if I can screw thirty dollars out of the TV people for an interview, it goes to help keep the tribe in food and cigarettes. . . . To write and speak is the only trade I know.

2

[‘Ballad of the Third Boobhead’, CP 525]

3

It is eleven o’clock at night. S— is down in the street, smashing bottles in the gutter. It is a sign of his respect for us that he does not smash them in the house, though he is explosively drunk and has been given the boot by his girlfriend F—. The noise of splintering glass echoes through the dark street. As far as I can gather, S—’s demonstration is chiefly against his family. He is sixteen years old and very recently received his marching orders from home. His parents told him they did not want to see him again. Now F—’s rejection has brought the basic conflict to the surface. Yet I can understand that she found him too hard to carry, for he is very young still and therefore very dependent.

page 392

I have been to the lawyer’s office with him, to prepare the ground for his Court appearances on breaches of probation.

‘What do you want to do with your life?’

‘I don’t know. . . .’

‘What do you remember about school?’

‘I was no good at maths,’ S— replied, ‘The teacher used to stand me in a waste-paper basket in front of the class during the maths lessons.’

The early negative conditioning never seems to wear off. The boobheads always take too seriously the fact that they have been regarded as garbage by their relatives and institutions. If they could break free of this negative self-image, they would make good revolutionaries, not Marxist certainly, (an affluent society makes it too difficult for them to see behind the masks to the hidden face of permanent injustice) but clear-headed and capable of communal action. But their hara haunts them, the largely imaginary crimes by which they have desecrated the shrines of the also imaginary perfect family. But the ‘crime’ reports itself, obliquely, in mirror acts of anger and vandalism which are in truth directed against the relatives who have regarded them as rubbish.

L—’s relation to the police interests me deeply. On his forearm he wears a crude tattoo with the word DAD inside a diamond shape, and on either side of it the words LOVE and HATE. He explains to me that LOVE means LSD, opium, valium and ephedrine, and that HATE means heroin, acid, some other drug whose name begins with T, and ephedrine again. But this explanation is a red herring designed to lead us away from the sensitive area. DAD means DAD; LOVE means LOVE; and HATE means HATE. L—’s own father, who died when L— was ten, was a loving man; but his stepfather did not like him. The police are his obliging father images whom he must hunt and fight till the day he dies.

L—’s Court appearances are as dramatic as the Swan Lake ballet. He sails up to the box, his head held high, his eye glaring, tossing back the forelocks that hang down to the bridge of his nose, his frockcoat split at the back like a duck’s tail or the dress of an eighteenth century dandy. He is there for the admiration of his friends. The woman side of L— is extremely gentle and tender. But the Kiwi style . . . forbids him to act or feel like a woman.

The fistfights with the police and other people involve an endless effort to express the personal masculine image. I am able to maintain quite a rich and fearful rapport with L—with my accepting his despised woman self, and acting out dramatic charades in which I pretend to be an aggressively camp actor. L— rolls on the floor in paralysed laughter. Then he comes to me, kisses me, and tugs my beard. ‘Hemi, you dirty old bastard,’ he says, ‘I’ll kill you!’ But I know he is cheerful in my company.

The Courtroom is the arena where the crises and explosions of the boobheads, so subjective, so tightly related to their own fixed subconscious page 393 roles, are exposed to the rigours of distorted property morality. We create our ‘criminals’ very simply. If you despise somebody, and he happens to love you . . . he will act out the role he has been given in order to remain in relation with you, however negative that relationship may be. . . . No doubt L— loved both his fathers with a love resembling that of a dependent daughter. He learnt from his second father that ‘love’ was to be expressed by blows. Now he ‘loves’ the police by punching them and being punched by them. The alternative is the terror of a bottomless abyss.

A legal system that totally ignores the person who does whatever he does, and concentrates solely on what is done is bound to be an oppressive fiction. It derives from the basic Puritan fiction, dear to the heart of the capitalist, that the rich are rich because they are good and the poor are poor because they are evil. To maintain these fictions one has to stage-manage an atmosphere . . . S— guyed up in a borrowed suit to . . . with the magistrate – ‘Stand up straight in the dock!’ The interruption of Skully himself, when F— and G— [reacted with] joy at the back of the Court, after C—’s astonishing acquittal – ‘Get those two girls out of here!’ These are all a necessary part of the centuries old melodrama. I hope I will die laughing at it.

4

[‘Ballad of Firetrap Castle’, CP 527]

5

I paid a visit to Mr L— the landlord. He lives in a small house in one of the better suburbs. We held an unconstrained argument on his front door step. I offered him some rent money but he refused it. . . . No landlord in his senses would charge us rent for a house that lacks water, lights and a place to shit. I take it that he does not [intend to] put himself to the expense of renovating it.

He hints vaguely that he intends to go to the Public Trust. This may mean an eviction notice later on. ‘I don’t want to be mixed up in anything religious,’ he said. Eyeing my bare feet and oilskin with dislike . . .

I shake hands with him at parting. ‘You are a card, Mr Baxter!’ he said. The interview concealed all the inevitable tensions of negotiations between property owners and those who lack property and may not desire to possess it. I had to [stir] myself up to go and see Mr L—. It is not the poor man’s fault that we happen to have chosen his derelict house to squat in.

One Saturday morning he called to visit us. He carried a pencil and a notebook. It depressed him that we had not ourselves made any external renovations. I think he was being illogical. We would have had to be accepted in some degree as tenants before it might make sense for us to renovate page 394 the place. It would take at least five hundred dollars to make the house immediately habitable. If we did renovate it . . . it would be money wasted that should have been spent on kai and clothes and lawyers’ fees for those who invite the attention of the police.

I [talk] to him in an uninhabitable house. It does keep the rain out. And it is a way of holding a lighted candle under the backside of the City Council. They know we need one . . . house at a cheap rent. And I know the bureaucracy are habitually incapable of turning over any property to the poor. At least they prefer that the awkward squad (whom their own children may one day join) should be [housed] institutionally in the bins or the jails. I think that what they fear most is that the destitute may prove capable of joining together in groups and supporting one another. It could overturn their whole subjective system of class morality.

As with the police, so with the City Council – undoubtedly they are relatively humane people. But their collective tension resembles the action of a limpet ferociously gripping the rock when you try to kick it off with your boot. The first reaction is defence. The second reaction is a dull but real desire to eliminate the source of annoyance. I observed it at Jerusalem, when the farmers and at least one of the clergy, working to get the community disbanded, were careful not to visit us or get to know us as people, in case the knowledge gained might force them to abandon their a priori assumption that we were a crowd of dangerous no-hopers.

In our weakness is our strength. Once a revolutionary begins to look for the approval of the Establishment his powder gets damp. His solution is not political. It rises from the very heart of the middle class. By using drugs, by refusing to work, by wearing old clothes, by becoming thieves, by sleeping with those they want to sleep with, a number of the young adults say in effect – ‘We would rather be united criminals than fit into your intolerable structure.’ The resolution already exists. It is the ugly child of desperation. I try constantly to give it a constructive direction. But what is constructive only my conscience can tell me. One answers to God, not the Establishment, for what one thinks and does.

Mr L— explained to a newspaper reporter that we had speeded the deterioration of his house. His statement was incorrect. We cleaned up nearly all the rubbish and even mended a couple of doors. But I think he had to make this statement to rationalise his own wish to turf us out.

1971 (666)