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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

The House of Lazarus

The House of Lazarus

I think Te Ariki wanted me to come to Jerusalem. He gave me some indications that he would send a tribe to join me there. A tribe did come. But some of the local pakeha farmers, naturally enough felt a fear of us as neighbours. I have heard, though not directly, that the tribe killed two sheep. But the fear sprang more from the unknown, from a bottomless doubt of what could happen, than from actual occasions. And one priest held the opinion that I was managing a brothel up here. He had never paid a visit, but he was clairvoyant.

I should be thankful that these prudent neighbours asked the house owner to give us our marching orders. It takes a load of responsibility off my back. Now that I am back again, with the permission of the house owner and the approval of the pa people, I cannot have many to stay with me, only a small family. This gives me a strong sense of peace.

The reaction of our neighbours was a natural one. Their aims for their children would not include membership of a ‘hippie’ community. I [interpret this] to be an expression of the permissive will of God. Now, if Te Ariki wants me to look after a tribe, he’ll have to find a different way of sending them to join me. And I no longer feel obliged to shout in the half-deaf ears of my pakeha neighbours telling them why their kids use drugs, go mad, refuse to work, go to jail, beget illegitimate children. With a really quiet conscience I can leave these problems to people who feel they have better answers.

Though I do not like to give way to fear, the fact remains that I do know that every twentieth New Zealander is a latent paranoiac, ready to page 452 attribute his financial difficulties, his matrimonial sorrows, and his inability to come to terms with his adult children to noisy public figures like myself. From time to time, in a railway station in a pub doorway, at the back of a lecture hall, or even in a presbytery parlour, I meet the glittering eye of somebody who knows the instant he meets me, that I am corrupt . . . This total and immediate personal diagnosis makes my flesh creep, as does also the nonchalance with which he visualises a lynching. One man, well dressed and only half-drunk, came up to me in the street in Wanganui late at night and gripped me by the beard.

‘We’ll come up one night and burn you out of that filthy hole of yours,’ he told me. His gaze was branded with the semi-sexual obsessive hatred of his kind – no, not hatred; it is a form of love.

‘Thank you, brother,’ I replied. There is really no meaningful answer we give to the true paranoid.

My neighbours have taken from my back the need to hang myself open to such encounters. Since paranoia is a very lonely disease some sufferers are still likely to seek me out, to tell me that I am Satan. . . .

In the following ballad . . . I sit through a fruitful account of a pub monologue by a Kiwi father, whose brain has finally caved in under the pressures of modern life and alcohol. After writing it, I showed it to a clergyman of my acquaintance.

‘I’ve heard this almost word for word,’ he said gravely. ‘Not in rhyme of course. It’s alarming, I know, but anyone who does anything in this country is bound to stir up this kind of reaction.’

*

Poem inserted, ‘The Father’s Lament’. (Text supplied in No. 645, ‘Jerusalem Journal’.)

*

Being born under the sign of the Crab, from time to time, like that remarkable creature, I find it necessary to put off my shell and go under a rock till a new shell has grown. This is one of those times. If somebody stepped upon me I would be crushed to a pulp. I am sensitive to the faintest tremor of disapproval or dislike, even on the part of people I don’t know who don’t know me.

Returning to Jerusalem, I am aware of weakness, just like the transparent-bodied crab crouching behind a wall of seaweed. Last night I dreamt of Adolf Hitler. He had taken up lodgings inside a barrage balloon. From there he was directing the German air force at the end of World War Two. I was an Allied correspondent deputed to interview him. The mind of the arch-paranoiac was open to me. The thing was, it seemed right to him: the death camps, the page 453 master race . . . it was just a matter of getting an intricate schedule in order.

I think we are living now in Hitler’s world. Once you get people to accept the fact that they and anybody else may be blown to shreds in tornadoes of red-hot metal – well, they have accepted the paranoid images as the norm of active life. The guns and jails are the crab-shell always [protecting] the weak humanist truth into which we are born from our mother’s belly. Nobody may love us. We forestall this by tying on sheets of iron. The guns and the jails are then to seek . . .

If there is ever a Revolution in this country, it will be a Rightist one.

So many have been brought up to hate themselves. If you hate yourself enough, you have to find somebody else to hate. The choice is quite wide: hippies, drug-users, people with yellow skins, people with brown skins, students, women, homosexuals, radicals, or even (if a . . . skin does not prevent you) that most . . . whipping-boy, the Jew himself.

G— is lying curled in the . . . across the cottage from me. Her tousled hair, her old jeans, her legs drawn up in a foetal crouch, her flowered jacket – these attributes can provoke equally a desire to stroke her cheek, with a . . . that seems to rise from the centre of the earth itself, or an access of paranoid rage. I prefer the first reaction.

If Father D—, or one of the local farmers, were to enter the cottage at this moment, their hackles would rise. They would immediately suspect the worst. I think they [misinterpret] the force of human sexuality. G— wants to sleep on a rainy day. I want to write. Neither of us wants to make the two-backed beast. There are a number of good reasons that count against it.

The noise of the rain dripping is sweet in my ears. This is Jerusalem. I am glad to see G— resting. The doctors who gave her shock treatment and the hellfire dialecticians of her childhood did not care enough perhaps about the girl she is. I try to care.

My friends, you who are wanting to break in with your gun-butts, what’s the problem? I hear you shouting. I see you press towards us with fire and rage. Do you want to run the meeting?

‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘No . . .’.

‘What is it, then? You believe I am corrupting G—? Is that it? But she is free to go to any of you. Let her make her own choice. Perhaps your view of her is too exclusively severe.’

. . . The gun-butt in the mouth is the right answer to authentic argument. It is convincing in its way.

The message I was trying to get over before my mouth filled with blood – ‘However excruciating we find it, brother quadrupeds, life demands we should get up on our hind legs and . . . Politics . . . simply means that the . . .’.

*

page 454

When will the new Hitler reinvent his name? He has only to take root in the inexhaustible ash-pit of the middle class.

*

My friend T— is picked up by the fuzz on an Auckland street for the double crime of being out of work and being Maori. It is the second crime that oppresses most the Catholic pakeha sergeant who arrested him, Escorted into the police station T— sits down on a chair and looks at the wall chart.

The sergeant kicks the chair out from under him. Don’t pretend you can read, you illiterate black shit!’ There should be a law to exterminate people like you!’

T— feels depressed. He spends a period in Mount Eden on remand, is released on bail. As we walk down the street together, he says to me, ‘Hemi, I’d like to get some speed.’

‘What the hell do you want speed for?’

‘In the town we need drugs as a shield.’

T— is now on probation, not using drugs in Nelson. Who precisely is the criminal? T—, for being out of work and for being Maori; the sergeant, for being come out of a Catholic home and school with no social conscience, apart from the steel-strong [prejudice] against the masturbator, and a racist prejudice as big as a house; myself, for worrying about both of them? Tame Hemahema always used to say, ‘If a dog worries, they shoot it.’

What I fear is fascism under a different name, or very likely with no name at all. Fascism is atrocity accepted by all except the victims with the deepest equanimity. I think we always have it here in embryo.

*

About drugs. The story is not simple. I am laying off smoking tobacco at the moment, and have several gruelling withdrawal symptoms – dizziness . . . nausea, insomnia. The booze nearly killed me when I was young. Well –

Up in Auckland I pay a visit to K—. On a twelvemonth suspended sentence for being in a house where somebody had hid drugs. He lies on his back all day and smokes pot. I rest my head on his . . . polo neck jersey, and hear his heart beating quietly. After half an hour . . . the sleep form begins which always invades my soul in K—’s presence.

‘Get smashed with me, Hemi,’ he suggests.

‘You must think I’m a bloody imbecile. I’ve made too many holes in my head with the booze already.’

‘Nepalese flower top. The best.’ K— is exactly like a poor man who has nothing but a bottle of Drambuie, and wants to share it out of joy. It is hard to resist. K— is seventeen.

page 455

‘I know it can’t hurt you, kid. It’s easier on the head than whisky. But I’ve got other things to do. People to see. If I get smashed, I won’t be able to talk to them.’

For four days I stay in Auckland. Each morning K— says to me, ‘Get smashed with me, Hemi.’

I lose my temper. I say to him, ‘Look, it’s all right for you. You’re sitting on the bones of your arse. But I’ve got things to do. I’ve got to give a talk in Hamilton tonight.’

He gives me a long slow look. Light begins to break on me. K— has never been a fool. The message – ‘Get smashed with me’ – [translated], means something like this –

‘You are becoming increasingly rigid and moralistic. Though I love you I find it hard to bear. These wires that fix you to the Establishment – I think they’re doing you harm, you’re getting to be a timid old man; your thinking is affected by your fears. You’re like Gulliver in Lilliput, tied down by a thousand little threads.

‘And there is one other thing – do you really court the success of a talk to students . . . You know bloody well, if I go out of here onto the street, the fuzz will pick me up any minute on an I. and D. charge and shove me back in clink. I’m not asking you to become smashed and hurt your brain, just to put your head on the chopping block for half a day, run the risk of a three months sentence, get rid of the bogey of security . . .’.

I get smashed with K—. At midday I went up to the university, took hold of a mike in the quadrangle, laughed solidly for ten minutes, and said, ‘This place deserves a good laugh. Boxes within boxes.’

K— had rescued me yet again from the most dangerous risk of youth. We parted very harmoniously. The first time I had been stoned in two years. The Hamilton talk was lucid enough. It is tobacco, not pot, that makes my boxes. . . .

*

Crash pad, communal home, community: three stages of group life, often reversible. Tim Shadbolt described Jerusalem as a rural crash pad. It was probably much like that at the time he visited. The differences depend a good deal on who is there at the time, what qualities of group feeling, capacity for tolerance, capacity for order, they are able to communicate.

The basic difference between the crash pad and the other two types of group is the open-door policy. A crash pad is not exclusive. It simply provides food, if food is available, some friendship and a place to lie down out of nose-range of the persecutors. For many, it may mean the difference between freedom and being hauled off to the bin or the clink for being out of work or for smoking a joint. In a crash pad, thank God, nobody wants to reform anybody.

page 456

I like crash pads. I like the unpredictable life, the charity displayed on the cliff-faces of paranoia, the rock-bottom intransigence that makes a frail junkie lad say to the bull-like cop who is interrogating him and breathing heavily on account of that exertion, ‘Man, are you coming on strong to me, or have you got asthma?’ There is no joy like seeing the wild horses in the mountains, even if they are born meat for the bullet or bone for the kiln.

On the other hand, as the conscientious tell us, one has to be parented. If you shut out the drug-users, you will be shutting out the star-gazers, the death-or-freedom boys, the girls whose laugh can be heard from blocks away, the ones who probably [interpret] best the nihilistic entrails of our civilisation. They have to understand it to avoid being driven mad by it. Drugs are their personal modes of control. And if you keep in your houses only people of a similar form of mind, then you become . . . identical bigots and world-reformers. But the cost has to be paid if you want some kind of order and development. . . .

I should not have got onto this subject. Most planning is bogus. Most ‘development’ leads directly back to the jail one has come out of.

Somewhere within this dunghill there is a jewel concealed. Human freedom. I know it is possible because I have lived it. Bury me in a lead coffin in case my bones are radioactive. Sartre caught sight of it. The terrible words that cracked the metaphysical atom . . .

How can I translate them? Not by what I say; by what I do.

[‘Ballad of Firetrap Castle’, CP 527]

*

The Three Good Boys

It was some time ago. I am sitting on my fat in Boyle Crescent. If you have not heard of that mansion, Thirteen Boyle was the junkies’ homing ground, an old love house like a tired moll, but honest, one might say, honest as a mother’s kiss. Nobody ever grovelled there.

I am sitting having a drag on a straight and inspecting the marks on the bedroom wall . . . when there came the patter of little feet and a knock at the back door. I go out to look. A small man is there, with a false beard. A small sad gnome in his fifties. He is unhappy. ‘Three young men are following me,’ he tells me. ‘They want to kick my head in. That’s what they say. I don’t know why. I don’t know why.’

I bring the small man inside and sit him on my bed. Then I put my arm round him and offer him a straight. ‘Nobody is going to hurt you here,’ I say. . . .

The . . . comes crashing through the non-existent fern outside the page 457 bedroom window. The three young men are there. Like Buck Rogers they are in uniform. ‘There he is! There he is!’ one of them shouts. I dream that he is pointing to myself and the small man.

They too signify their desire to enter the premises by kicking. Will light up. I tell the small man to stay where he is. I go out and face the bush area. The three young men express excitement. Perhaps euphoria . . . I suggest alternatives to head-kicking. They begin to express a need to kick my head in as well. . . .

*

Some people have told me that I make unfair criticism of the police. This is hardly the case. I do not expect the police to reform unless the social system is radically changed. The problem is not really what I ever thought it to be – that some cops beat people up, plant drugs, tell lies in Court, pressure girls – no, the reason why even the best of them . . . can’t reform the Force is precisely because they are [trained] to respect a social structure that [protects] the rich and oppresses the poor. I have yet to meet a policeman who is radical in his politics.

Once when I was in Auckland, staying at Newman Hall, I came back to the Hall to find a message waiting for me. Detective-Sergeant Y— wanted to see me.

Since he had called on me, I called on him. . . . I went gingerly up some floors in the lift. Perhaps Mr Y— had decided to arrest me, on my own confession, for smoking pot.

No. He wanted to know if I knew where a thousand detonators and three thousand sticks of dynamite had got to. They had been stolen from a quarry. He thought the P[rogressive] Y[outh] M[ovement] had taken them. I told him I knew nothing about it.

That night I happened to ring up a friend of mine. I mentioned Mr Y—’s enquiry.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘The Young Nazi Party has got the explosives. My boyfriend’s one of them.’

So began a tug-of-war between my conscience and myself. Half my conscience told me that it was criminal to tell a policeman anything short of immediate danger [because they persecute the poor] . . . The other half insisted that this was a special case, because the Fascist bombers might start blowing up Jewish quarters and synagogues . . . The second half of my conscience won. I went down to Fuzz Castle and told Mr Y—.

He seemed mainly unenthusiastic. I had forgotten that some policemen were members of the Young Nazi Party. . . .

*

page 458

Like Tim Shadbolt, I find the bikeys congenial company. They have their rituals. When some of the Satan’s Slave group raided the Mongrels’ flat in Wellington, W— went in carrying a carton and a Molotov cocktail. Skully gave each of the Slaves a year in clink. I went up to Mount Crawford to see if W— had a lawyer. He did not have one.

W— is a clear-eyed Maori lad. He is continuing the last tribal battles in the streets of Wellington. All that the fuzz would require of him would be to bare his head; and that is precisely what would ruin him, since his only spiritual capital is a courage . . .

When the fuzz went in with dogs to attack the bikeys . . . one bikey had his testicles chewed and one thirteen year old girl was savagely mauled. What is the point of these shenanigans? . . . I am aware that these anecdotes about the police . . . are hardly charitable. I do not believe the police are capable of reforming themselves. . . .

*

How do you force a man to become a thief? It is not very difficult.

You wait till he has been sacked from his job, either for the fault of being sick, or because the economic situation is such that the local branch of the firm of New Zealand Ltd has decided to dispense with his services. Then you offer him another job under a boss who is capable, honest in business, amiable to his family, but has one vice that will bring him to Hell – namely, that he has a secret desire for slave-owning. He requires his employees to lick his metaphorical arse to keep these vital jobs.

When some man has once accepted a job under such a boss, you can sit back and wait, your own work is over. The net will tighten of its own accord. Now your man will have two choices – to be a slave, or to be a thief.

The boss approaches your man at eleven o’clock in the morning, when your man is sitting on a bale having a smoke. The boss is about to rob him of his joy in the work, a blasphemous happening, because the boss pays wages only in money, whereas it is God who gives joy; and the joy, once removed, does not go to the boss, it goes back to God and turns into a flaming arrow that points directly at the boss’s back.

‘Why aren’t you working?’ asks the boss.

‘The foreman told me . . .’.

‘I don’t care what the foreman told you. Get back to work.’

‘What work?’

‘You can begin to lift those bales onto that trolley. Take them to the gate.’

The man puts out his cigarette and begins work. The boss goes to the foreman. He says, ‘I found that new man doing nothing. Make sure he’s kept busy.’

The foreman knows what the boss means. With many jobs to be done, and page 459 some finishing and some beginning, each hour of the day, it is impossible for him to keep all the men working all the time. He knows also that they can’t be kept from resting their muscles from time to time, or taking time off for defecation. But they can be warned to ‘look busy’ when the boss is around.

‘All I want is for you to look busy,’ he tells the new man. ‘. . . If you see him make sure you’re doing something. Sweep the floor. Shift some bales. Do anything.’

The new man accepts this ruling. From then on a cloud of anxiety always rests on his mind. If he has finished sweeping a floor, and is resting and waiting for the foreman to give him his next task, and sees a shadow in the doorway, he thinks it may be the boss, and jumps up like a monkey and sweeps a part of the floor he has already swept. He begins to loathe his job and the factory. The black dog sits on his back, in the pub, in his own house . . . Fear has turned him into a slave, the fear of losing his job for some other reason than his working ability. The boss owns him as well as his work. By then the boss has got into the secret [part] of his mind.

He is a slave, but not yet a thief.

The boss does not like the new man. Something about him is jarring. The boss likes to have his metaphorical arse licked with a certain smuttiness and relish. The new man does not possess these qualities. He is a sullen slave. Moreover, he is not a talebearer, and in this factory, to get anywhere, you have to be a talebearer. . . .

The boss learns from some talebearer that the new man has said he would like to see a strong union in the factory. By the time the talebearer has finished, they have turned the new man into a reincarnation of Lenin. . . .

One morning the boss himself takes the new man aside. . . . ‘What would you say if I told you that you’re the poorest workman I’ve ever had in this factory?’

. . . ‘When can I collect my pay?’

‘The pay clerk will make it up after lunch.’

. . . He collects his pay and leaves the factory. For a fortnight he looks for another job. By that time his money has gone. He goes to the Labour Bureau. After two hours of waiting, the clerk calls him up.

‘What’s your problem?’

‘I need a job.’

‘What kind of job?’

‘Any job.’

‘What are your qualifications?’

‘I’ve worked in different jobs. On the wharf. At the freezing works. Construction jobs.’

‘Have you been in jail?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see. Are you going with anybody?’

page 460

‘What do you mean?’

‘Any woman. Are you married, or – ’.

‘What the hell difference does it make?’

‘We’re just trying to help you.’

‘All I want is a job.’

‘There’s no jobs offering at present. Not to a person with your lack of qualifications.’

‘Well, then, what about the Unemployment Benefit?’

‘Didn’t you leave your last job voluntarily?’

The boss and I didn’t see eye to eye. Yes, you could call it voluntary. He didn’t sack me. I walked out.’

‘I’m sorry. You can’t get the Unemployment Benefit. Not if you left your last job voluntarily.’

‘What do I do then? . . .’

Your man is not yet a thief. Since he has no friends he can’t count on food or a place to lie down. He knows that he can’t continue to owe rent at the big boarding-house. . . .

On Monday he visits a presbytery. The priest gives him a St Vincent de Paul ticket for a meal and a night’s lodging, but tells him it is not renewable. He has a meal of steak and eggs and feels better. That night he sleeps between sheets.

On Tuesday . . . he goes back to the Labour Bureau. The clerk makes it quite plain that neither work nor Benefit are available. . . .

Early on Saturday morning he busts a dairy and takes away a carton of vegetables . . . a pint of water, three bars of chocolate and three packets of Weetbix.

Your man is a thief.

On Saturday night he is picked up by the fuzz. Next week he is charged and committed and sentenced to three months in Mount Crawford. This . . . shows he has committed a number of ‘crimes’:

trespass . . .
loitering on enclosed premises . . .
being idle and disorderly . . .
consorting with known criminals . . .
breaking and entering . . .
burglary . . .
obscene language . . .
resisting arrest . . .
but most of all the crime of poverty. . . .

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

A boy of sixteen told me he came up from the South Island to Wellington. There was a great hope in his mind. He believed that the quarrels of his family, page 461 the idiocies of his school, the pressure to get money, were only temporary afflictions. In Wellington he would find the Beautiful People, the ones who had learnt to love one another. He did not find them, and his inner world collapsed. Then he turned to the hard drugs to take away the pain of having nothing to believe in.

Those who come to Jerusalem have the same hopes. They come like refugees from a plague city. The critics who tell me I should say to the young, ‘Go back and get a good job,’ don’t understand the score. One is dealing with a crisis of hope.

Perhaps the Beautiful People don’t exist. But if they don’t exist, we run the risk of breeding a society of nihilists. To some acceptable degree I have to try to bring them into existence.

The young are not stupid. They know that the pioneers were land-grabbers who came near to committing genocide. They know the difference between military heroism and a war in Indo-China that produces eighty per cent civilian casualties. They know also that compulsive drug-taking is a sickness . . . They know that their parents have failed to love well when they divorce one another or stay together in mutual jousting and lethargy. . . .

*

When C—, one of the Protestant Pentecostals, began to pursue me with the offer of salvation, I gave him a mixed welcome. The path of immediate sanctification is attractive to a man of my faults and temperament. My coarse speech and familiarity with women (necessary, I believe, in many cases to set them at ease and remove the Cross of respectability from their shoulders) would naturally concern C— that I am wandering on the fringes of the Kingdom of Satan. He is an honest lad, though much disturbed in his own nature.

I decoded his message – ‘Turn to the Lord, Jim’ – and applied it to my own life by undertaking a twenty-five day fast. Certainly there was, during the fast, an occasion of great peace and illumination, when the ego, that sentry at the door of the house of the mind, fell asleep and the Lord was able to enter.

But the Pentecostal experience, valid as it may be, does not seem to be the road for me. I have attended several meetings of the Protestant Pentecostals, and their sincerity does not hide from me the fairly Calvinist approach to God. These areas are enormously delicate. . . .

Among my Catholic brethren I accepted the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. There was a great hunger in my soul for a truly open and complete relationship with Christ. I think I was resigned to whatever gift the Holy Spirit might have to give me.

My life, however, is what it was. I think . . . that he has chosen to let me remain in an area of darkness, believing, convinced . . . of my own inanity page 462 and weakness, but with only the gentlest and slightest perception of his presence and help. Perhaps one has to live in the wrath of God to share fully the pains of one’s fellows. But even that is too short a statement. I am an old fool walking in the dark.

*

The house of Lazarus is different from the house of Dives. Dives has built his own house, making it strong and comfortable . . . When he wishes to eat, he sits at a polished table. When he wishes to defecate, he retires to a special room with green or pink paper hanging on the wall, and water to wash away the heavy turds he explodes from his bowels.

Pardon these images; but they are necessary. In the house of Lazarus there is no water [connected]. The water comes from a tap behind the house. There is no light except for candles stuck in bottles. The beauty of Lazarus has been provided by God himself. He lives in the grass alongside his front steps.

The house of Lazarus is more beautiful than the house of Dives. . . . But that is not the reason why God has blessed Lazarus and withheld his blessing from Dives. . . . Lazarus shares his goods – a pot of rice, a bottle of beer, a mattress on the floor – availability with things. . . .

1972 (685)