Poet returns to home town; in ODT (12 Jan. 1966) 7.

During 1965 it was announced that JKB had been awarded the 1966 Robert Burns Fellowship atthe University of Otago. (He was given one year’s leave of absence from the post office.) The Fellowshiphad been established in 1958, the bicentennial year of the birth of the poet, by a group of Dunedin benefactors, including Charles Brasch. Its purpose was ‘to encourage and promote imaginative New Zealand literature and to associate writers thereof with the University.’ It was attached to the Department of English. Lecture obligations were confined to a single university term in order not to obstruct the writer’s opportunities for creative writing. As JKB’s parents, married brother Terence, and other relatives lived in the province, his move to Dunedin enabled him to re-encounter his origins, his youth, and the sources of his art. He was aware of the irony:

* * *

And I who wrote in ’62,
Dear ghosts, let me abandon
What cannot be held against
Hangmen and educators, the city of youth! –

Drink fresh percolated coffee, lounging
In the new house, at the flash red kitchen table,
A Varsity person, with an office
Just round the corner – what nonsense!

If there is any culture here It comes from the black south wind
page 318 Howling above the factories
A handsbreadth from Antarctica,

Whatever the architect and planner
Least understand . . . (‘On Possessing the Burns Fellowship 1966’, CP 335)

To be able to write at all, there must be some sort of tension. The tension that taps my unconscious is that produced between my point of view and the status quo: this statement discloses the source of much of his best his poetry.

Baxter’s closing remark about consigning the unwanted poetry manuscripts of aspiring poets to the basement elicited a whimsical response from ‘Prester John’ under a sub-heading ‘Muse’s Flame’ in his column ‘Talk of The Times’, in ODT (13 Jan. 1966) 4.

Robert Burns Fellow ‘more than a poet’; in Dunedin Evening Star (12 Jan. 1966) 4.

The Solitary Man; review of John Nobody, by Dom Moraes. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, [1965]; in NZL 1377 (25 Feb. 1966) 17.

he is one of the moderns who have refused to abandon rhetoric: like JKB.

Recollections of School Days; in NZMR vol. VI, no. 65 (Mar. 1966) 17.

It was preceded by a note, ‘This article was commissioned as one of a series for the Department of Education periodical, “Education”, but the Department thought it unsuitable to be read by teachers, and decided not to publish it.’ A slightly modified version was included as Part 2 of ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’ in The Man on the Horse.

An Impression of Speed; review of Our Burning Time, poems by Vincent O’Sullivan. Wellington: Prometheus Books, 1965; in NZL 1137 (4 Mar. 1966) 18.

Vincent Gerard O’Sullivan (1937- ), poet, writer, critic and editor: see SB.

Baxter Sees Fellowship as a Compromise; reported by Kevin Cunningham in Critic (17 Mar. 1966) 12.

The Unknown Place; review of Settler and Stranger, poems by Raymond Ward. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1965; in NZL 1380 (18 Mar. 1966) 19.

Raymond Ward (1925-2003) was a poet, teacher and art critic. His poetry is represented in Real Fire (2002), an anthology selected by Bernard Gadd.

Walking Poets; review of Walking Wounded, poems 1962-65, by Vernon Scannell. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965; Nonsequences, poems by page 319 Christopher Middleton. London: Longmans, 1965; A Reed in the Tide, poems by John Pepper Clark. London: Longhams, 1965; and The Feast of Ancestors, poems by J.R. Rowland. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965; in NZL 1384 (15 Apr. 1966) 18.

Vernon Scannell (1922-2007) was a British poet, particularly significant for his war poems. He won several awards and was working on his final collection in the year he died.

Christopher Middleton, (1926- ), poet and translator, emigrated from England and became professor of Germanic languages and literature at the University of Texas. His poetry abandoned traditional poetic discourse, especially avoiding attempts to explain experience.

John Pepper Clark[-Bekederemo] (1935- ) is a Nigerian poet and dramatist. He was professor of English at the University of Lagos.

J[ohn] R[ussell] Rowland (1925-96) was an Australian diplomat and poet.

Draft of ‘Shots around the Target’ 1; MS-0975-104.

This notebook contains the following items:

Unpublished draft poem ‘As the cigar like a drooping phallus’;

A draft of the lecture ‘Literature and Belief’;

A draft of the lecture ‘Conversation with an Ancestor’;

A draft of an unpublished poem, ‘Thoughts on Ecumenism’;

A draft of the lecture ‘The Virgin and the Temptress’;

Notes for a talk ‘Literature and Education’; talk not found;

A draft of the lecture ‘The Man on the Horse’;

A plan for a talk ‘N.Z. Poetry No. 1’; talk not found;

An embryonic plan for a talk ‘N.Z. Poetry No. 2’;

An embryonic plan for a talk entitled ‘Address to Nihilists’; (its headings are ‘Death of God’, ‘Vietnam issues’, ‘Vocations’, ‘Marriage’, ‘Intelligent rebellion’, ‘Poverty’). There is no evidence that this proposed talk was written, delivered or survived);

A second, untitled, draft of ‘Shots around the Target’; see following item in CPr;

Draft of an uncompleted poem ‘When I meet a young girl’;

A third, untitled, draft of ‘Shots around the Target’; also included in CPr;

Uncompleted draft of a poem ‘And as the water runs at the lake outlet’;

Draft of an uncollected poem ‘Clerk Saunders and May Margaret’;

Drafts of various poems including ‘The Maori Jesus’ (CP 347); ‘Verses to a Sad Priest’; ‘A Question of Rape’ (CP 348); ‘To a Rigorous Priest’; ‘Grief of a Boozing Poet’; ‘Horse’s turds; bush nettles growing’; ‘Daughter’. . .

Draft of ‘Shots around the Target’ 2; MS-0975-104.

Not long ago I met a young man: Peter Olds. See SB.

The Responsibility of Students to the Community and Themselves; Hocken MS-0975/104.

This appears to be a draft of a talk which JKB intended to give to students at the University of Otago.

Shots Around the Target: an Arts Festival Talk; text of a talk given in Palmerston North at the opening of the NZ Universities Arts Festival, May, 1966. Hocken MS-0975/123.

Excerpts were published in Chaff XVIV.2 (Sep. 1966) 6, and in Eikon 2 (Dec. 1966) 16-19.

The manuscript version is preferred to either of the two published versions because they have been truncated.

JKB referred to some comments he made in 1968 on his tenure of the Burns Fellowship:

I stood on the platform between the Mayor and the Chancellor, like a frog in a bell-jar, sweating but honest and told the assembled students that Kiwis should smoke a bit of marihuana now and then, that we should hold bullfights instead of flower festivals, that the age of female consent should be lowered to fourteen, and that I was tired of seeing homosexual artists being ridden to death by big ugly stupid homosexual policemen.

George Wilder: On 29 January 1963 Wilder escaped from Mount Eden Prison and was free for one hundred and seventy-two days. A serious riot at the prison on 20 and 21 July 1965 resulted after guards caught two prisoners trying to escape.

The Reverend Lowe: Robert Lowe (1927-2003) was born in Auckland. He taught at Taumarunui and Wesley College, South Auckland. After training at College House, Christchurch, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1953. His first appointment was as curate in the Timaru parish where he married Elaine Ruston. The couple had three children. After leaving Timaru, Lowe became vicar of St Nicholas’s Church in Barrington,vicar of Geraldine parish, and then, in 1966, took over the parish at Fendalton, Christchurch, where he stayed for twenty years. He retired in 1986. He was a popular, provocative and sometimes controversial writer and speaker.

‘Doctor Paul’: An Australian-made radio programme which began in the 1950s and continued into the 1960s with Alan White as Doctor Paul Cabot.

Marathi: An Indo-Aryan ethnic group living in the Maharashtra region of Western India.

Bob Dylan (1941- ), American song-writer and singer, was born Robert Allen Zimmerman. During the 1960s and after he was regarded as an inspiring chronicler of social change and his songs were regarded by many as summoning people to engage in the social revolution (including anti-war and anti-racism). In 2012 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Pete Seeger (1919-2014) was an American folk-singer. Originally a member of the Weavers, he and they were blacklisted during the McCarthy era because of their supposed radicalism. During the 1960s he emerged as a frontline singer of protest songs about war, civil rights and environmental issues. During the Vietnam War his guitar was inscribed ‘This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender’. On 26 April 2012 his song ‘My Rainbow Race’ was sung in translation by 40,000 people in Oslo, Norway, in protest at the assassination of sixty-nine young people by the fascist Anders Behring Breivik.

[Rupert] John Cornford (1915-36) was an English poet. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. A committed Communist, he fought on the side of the Internationalists in the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in December 1936.

the son of Bernanos: Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was a famous French writer who initially supported Francoism, but soon rejected it. Of his four children JKB is probably referring to the third son, Michel, who discarded his father’s surname as a writer of poetry and fantasies – his books were attributed to Michel Talbert or Michel Drown. He died by suicide.

Marshal Ky: Nguyon Cao Ky (1930-2011), Marshal of the Air Force, prime minister of South Vietnam 1965-67 and then vice-president until 1971. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 he fled to the United States aboard a United States warship. He settled in California where he opened a liquor store.

Earlier New Zealand Poetry; Hocken MS-0739/016. Est. date.

The Te Anau Glowworm Caves are on the western shore of Lake Te Anau. They are entered by boat. The glowworms are located within the cave system in a silent grotto.

Draft Introduction to ‘The Innovators’; Hocken MS-0739/009; last two pages.

The Innovators; Hocken MS-0739/009. Est. date. Sub-title ‘Burns Lecture No. 4’ lined through. This and the following lecture were combined and edited to become

No. 438, Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand.

Thomas Bracken: see SB.

Denis de Rougemont (1906-85) was a Swiss writer who wrote in French after moving to Paris in 1930. His scholarly interests included courtly love and this caused him to write Love in the Western World (1939) in which he linked courtly love and the Cathari.

Catharists: Members of the Cathari, a dualist and gnostic Christian sect which became a significant force in Western Europe in the eleventh century. Because it rejected many of the doctrines and practices of the Catholicpage 322 Church its members were attacked and killed by papal armies. The movement was extinguished by the Inquisition in the thirteenth century.

The Broadeners; Hocken MS-0739/010 Est. date.

Sub-title ‘Burns Lecture No. 5’ lined through.

The first three Burns Lectures were probably ‘The Man on the Horse’, ‘The Virgin and the Temptress’ and ‘Conversations with an Ancestor’. These three were incorporated into The Man on the Horse.

W[illiam] S[tevenson] Broughton: scholar and teacher with a special interest in New Zealand literature. He is the author of A.R.D. Fairburn (Wellington: A.H. and A.W. Reed, 1968), and has made numerous scholarly contributions to the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand, the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, and the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

Chapman and Bennet anthology: An Anthology of New Zealand Verse, selected by Robert Chapman and Jonathan Bennett (London: Oxford University Press, 1956).

the Doyle anthology: Recent Poetry in New Zealand, edited by Charles Doyle (Auckland: Collins, 1965).

Starveling Year (by Mary Stanley): Christchurch: Pegasus Press, 1953. In 1994 Auckland University Press published Starveling Year and Other Poems, with an Introduction by her husband Kendrick Smithyman.

Gloria Rawlinson: see SB. Short Biographies also contains entries on the other writers mentioned, including C.K. Stead, Charles Doyle, Barry Mitcalfe, Hone Tuwhare, Rowley Habib, Peter Bland, Richard Packer, Ruth Dallas, John Weir, Gordon Challis, Owen Leeming, Victor O’Leary, Hilaire Kirkland, Paul Henderson, F.M. McKay, Vincent O’Sullivan and Raymond Ward.

The Eye of the Hurricane: see entry on Fleur Adcock (SB).

Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947) was a Muscovite who was taught esoteric doctrine between 1915 and 1924 by George Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian. Ouspensky settled in England where he raised funds to allow Gurdjieff to settle in France. Ouspensky’s impact was widespread and his London lectures were attended by T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and other leading thinkers and literary figures. His books include The Fourth Dimension (1909), Tertium Organum (1912), A New Model of the Universe (1931), and some works published posthumously. In the later part of his life he discontinued contact with Gurdjieff, claiming that he could not understand him.

No patriotic poetry; in ODT (12 July 1966) 12. One month later, when he successfully applied for the Fellowship for a second year, he stated that he had written ninety poems and delivered six talks.

Roy [Broadbent] Fuller (1912-91) served in the Royal Navy during World War Two. His first poetry collection was published on the eve of the war (1939). This was followed by two collections published during the war. From 1946 topage 323 1958 he wrote a book every year or two years. (They included fiction, which he began writing during the 1950s.) He began writing apace again in 1968 and produced virtually a book a year until his death. Between 1968 and 1973 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. His lectures were published as Owls and Artificers: Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1974) and Professors and Gods; Last Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1975). In the year of his death his reminiscences were published as Spanner and Pen: Post-War Memoirs.

Keith [Castellain] Douglas (1920-44), English poet, is known for his war poetry and his Desert War memoir From Alamein to Zem Zem. At Merton College, Oxford, he was tutored by Edmund Blunden, who thought highly of his poetry. When war broke out he volunteered immediately and after a short period of waiting began officer training at Sandhurst. He was sent to the Middle East in July 1941. After the North African campaign ended he returned to England to take part, as it turned out, in the Normandy invasion. Three days after D-Day he was killed by mortar fire. His Collected Poems was published in 1951; his Complete Poems in 1978.

‘Pope John among the French’; review of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (Pope John XXIII); Mission to France. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1966; in MM XXXVI.9 (Sep. 1966) 6.

Poet in a Tower; review of The Lonely Tower, studies in the poetry of W.B. Yeats, by T.R. Henn. London: Methuen, 1966; and W.B. Yeats, a critical introduction, by B[alachandra] Rajan. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965; in NZL 1405 (9 Sep. 1966) 21.

The poetry of Yeats sometimes had a negative effect upon JKB’s early poetry. He found it difficult to break the stranglehold which Yeatsian structure and rhetoric had on his own verse.

On returning to Dunedin; in ODT (22 Sep. 1966) 4. The article was introduced in this fashion:

The New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter, has returned to Dunedin as the 1966 Burns Fellow at Otago University, and in poem and in prose he explains at the request of the Daily Times something of his feelings at coming back to a region he knew so well in his youth.

Baxter’s latest collection of poems has just been published by the Oxford University Press, and has been well received by British literary critics.

The poem which JKB cited as ‘Arriving in Dunedin’ was included in Collected Poems (p. 366) under its later title ‘Travelling to Dunedin’. In the course of his statement he said,

the hardest thing for me when I returned to Dunedin, not just for a few days’ visit, but for a year, was to encounter, understand, sometimes forgive, and finally exorcise the ghosts of those who had been young with me when page 324 I was young. Now there are no more ghosts in this town; not for me. It was a necessary labour, and perhaps in its final meaning a labour of love.

Part of his therapy was his writing of ‘Words to Lay a Strong Ghost’ (CP 356 ff.), a group of poems based upon some poems of Catullus, in which he attempted to exorcise the memory of Jane Aylward, the girl who abandoned him twenty years earlier.

Social Satirist; review of Go Back, Lazarus! poems 1959-64, by Mark Richards. Auckland: Pelorus Press, 1965; in NZL 1407 (23 Sep. 1966) 21.

Born in England in 1922, Mark Richards emigrated with his family to New Zealand in 1927. He became a teacher and subsequently a friend of Mason’s and Fairburn’s. In 1960 he won first prize for the title poem of this book in the prestigious Cheltenham Festival Poetry Competition.

To Enlarge Reality; review of Maui’s Farewell, by Dora Somerville. Christchurch: Nag’s Head Press, 1966; in NZL 1408 (30 Sep. 1966) 21.

The book was hand set and produced in one hundred and fifty copies. In 1969 the dramatic monologue was reproduced as a Kiwi record (twelve-inch vinyl) directed by William Austin. The dramatic verse monologue was read by Inia te Wiata. Te Ao Hoū reported that Dora Somerville, of Wellington, was ‘coyly reticent about her curriculum vitae’.

James K. Baxter Joins the Teilhard Discussion; MM XXXVI. 10 (Oct. 1966) 3.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), French palaeontologist, philosopher and Jesuit priest. During World War One he served as a stretcher-bearer and his heroism was recognised when he received several citations and the Legion of Honour. He originally trained as a geologist and palaeontologist and later developed an interest in cosmology. Some of his writings caused Catholic authorities to deny him the right to teach or publish his philosophical theories which seemed to be in conflict with traditional Catholic teaching on Creation and Original Sin. Subsequently he spent twenty years as a research geologist in China, doing important research in the field of human palaeontology, and he was involved with the discovery of Peking Man. He made his name internationally with The Phenomenon of Man (1955). In 1957 the Holy Office, a Rome-based organ of the papacy, decreed that his books could not be held in Catholic libraries, sold in Catholic bookshops, or translated into other languages. But his status was recognised outside the Church and in 1950 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences. Despite the rejection of his ideas by the Church he did not reject the Church or his membership of the Jesuits. In 1955 he expressed a hope that he would die on Easter Sunday; on the evening of that day, while engaged in an animated discussion, he had a heart attack and died a few minutes later.

His contribution to the field of convergent evolutionist thought is remarkable. Apart from The Phenomenon of Man, his most important books include The Divine Milieu (1957, French/1960, English), The Future of Man (1959/1964), and Hymn of the Universe (1961/1965).

The editor’s note follows:

The Dr Duggan–Pat Lawlor letters on that controversial figure, the late Father Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., in our September issue aroused much reader interest. Already we have received appreciative comments from Auckland and Wellington. And now from the University of Dunedin comes the above article by a well-known writer, highly esteemed by ‘Messenger’ readers – James K. Baxter.

O’Neill in Paperbacks; review of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra, and The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O’Neill. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966; in NZL 1408 (7 Oct. 1966) 20.

The true Romantic writer is invariably obsessed by themes of innocence, by that traumatic moment when innocence is ruptured by a more than personal knowledge of guilt; he is a backward-looker, a haunter of the closed gates of Eden: this is true of a group of Baxter’s early poems, including ‘The Bay’ (CP 44) and ‘Tunnel Beach’ (CP 53).

Unquenchable Spirit; review of Seven Years Solitary, by Edith Bone.

London: Faber & Faber, 1965; in NZL 1410 (21 Oct. 1966) 8.

It was first published by Hamish Hamilton (London, 1957).

Edith Bone (1889-1975) was born in Hungary and became a correspondent for the London Daily Worker. She was arrested as a spy and confined for seven years without trial or an identification number. During that time she developed various techniques for staying sane.

The Human Condition [2]; review of The Testament of Samuel Beckett, a study by Josephine Jacobsen and William R. Mueller. London: Faber and Faber, 1966; in NZL 1411 (28 Oct. 1966) 21.

Josephine Jacobsen was a US poet, short story writer and critic. William R. Mueller published The Prophetic Voice of Modern Fiction in 1959 and also wrote books on Robert Burton and Edmund Spenser.

JKB honoured Beckett when he wrote The Silver Plate; an eclogue in honour of Samuel Beckett (Radio Production, 2YC) on 12 June 1961, previewed in NZL 1135 (9 June 1961) 12. The play, which was set in the Wellington railway station, presented the thoughts of three pensioners named Glub, Smogg and Erg. As the NZL preview admitted, the production was a ‘direct parody’ of Beckett’s technique.

JKB’s notion that Beckett inhabited the middle ground of human existence, where wholly negative forces were at work, was also expressed in Pig Island Letters, his own outstanding poetry collection published late inpage 326 1966 with a recommendation from the Poetry Book Society.

What is a Poem? reply to a question in NZL 1411 (28 Oct. 1966) 10.

This question was put to JKB and other writers after a correspondent named F.M. Price argued that Peter Bland’s poem ‘The Happy Army’ (which had been published by NZL) was prose rather than poetry.

JKB’s response is unconvincing. He had studied metrics as a boy and chose to apply his ‘early schoolroom conditioning’ to Peter Bland’s unmetrical free verse poem in an attempt to preserve the status of contemporary poetry as ‘real’ poetry. Others invited to comment on the poem (James Bertram and Vincent O’Sullivan of Victoria University, and MacDonald Jackson of Auckland University) refused to be drawn into the business of counting feet and enumerating half-rhymes. It seems as if in the company of academics JKB needed to be more academic than the others. They preferred to comment on the language used (based on images, not scientific), on the necessity of rhythm, but not metrics, and the key distinction between poetry and verse. JKB used his approach previously in The Fire and the Anvil and on another occasion when he commented on the metrics and rhyme-scheme of a poem which he sent to me (see No. 418, [Notes on the Making of ‘The Martian’ 1].) This indicates that JKB was a traditional poet, educated in an older understanding of poetry which he resorted to during academic discussions. He ended his lesson to Mr Price in the hope that he had ‘diminished his bewilderment’. It is more likely that he increased both Mr Price’s and Peter Bland’s.

A Plea for Charitable Action; in Zealandia XXXII.25 (10 Nov. 1966) 9.

our alms-deeds go to Hell before us to wait for us there and put out the flames: I have not been able to trace the source of this quotation but St John Chrysostom (c. 345-407), Archbishop of Constantinople and a Father of the Church is reputed to have said ‘The rich man is not one who is in possession of much, but one who gives much.’

Philip Ashton Smithells (1910-1977) was born in Leeds, Yorkshire. After graduating from Clare College, Cambridge, in English and Economics, he joined the staff of Gresham Free Grammar School where he taught English and Physical Education, being especially concerned for remedial work with pupils whose physical and motor skills were not well developed. In 1937 he was appointed to a lectureship in physical education at University College of the south-west of England. Two years later he emigrated to Wellington, where he was appointed superintendent of physical education in the Department of Education. During World War Two he advised the New Zealand armed forces on the rehabilitation of the wounded. In 1947 he was appointed founding director of the School of Physical Education at the University of Otago. In 1957 he became associate professor and in 1969 was given a personal professorship. After his retirement he and his wife lived in page 327 the Quaker community in Whanganui.

Murder and the law; (letter to editor); in ODT (15 Nov. 1966) 4.

JKB’s later attitude to the police is in evidence here, presumably based upon the reports of the alcoholics he helped.

The Prisoner Describes Himself; in Hocken MS-0704/026, MS Book XXVII (p. [38]). In the manuscript book it follows the poem ‘To Speak Truly’.

Introduction to Mr Brandywine Chooses a Gravestone; from CPl 329.

According to McNaughton (p. 64) JKB wrote this play in November 1966. It was not produced until 2 February 1968 when it was presented on radio by the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation, directed by William Austin. It was reviewed in NZL 1481 (23 Feb. 1968) 11. It has been assumed that JKB wrote the Introduction about the time he wrote the play.

Under their Skin; review of How Colour Prejudiced is Britain? by Clifford S. Hill. London: Victor Gollancz, 1965;and Return to the Fairy Hill, by Naomi Mitchison. London: Heinemann, 1966; in NZL 1416 (2 Dec. 1966) 21.

Clifford Hill, a minister of religion, published a large number of books about race relations and immigration into Britain, especially involving West Indians.

Naomi [May Margaret] Mitchison lived and worked with the Bakgatla tribe in southern Africa for a time. She was the author of some ninety books, mainly historical novels and fantasies, and as a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, was one of the proof readers of The Lord of the Rings.

Peace in Vietnam; (letter to editor); in NZL 1417 (9 Dec. 1966) 13.

JKB was actively engaged in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement. On 1 May, at a large public meeting, he was a member of a panel which explored the topic ‘Ethics of the Vietnam War’. On other occasions he joined marches and spoke at public meetings. He inherited his father’s stringent anti-militarist views, supporting these by Catholic theological teaching about war and peace. He continued his committed public opposition during the next two years and gave it vitriolic expression in open letters and broadsheets.

On 22 August 1966 NZL carried an anti-Vietnam War advertisement which was organised by Roger Boshier, Wellington, and signed by one hundred and seventeen writers, artists and musicians, including JKB. The text read:

We, the undersigned artists, writers and musicians, urge

• Withdrawal of N.Z. troops from Vietnam
• Cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam page 328
• Immediate replacement of N.Z. combatant forces in Vietnam with extensive noncombatant humanitarian aid in South-East Asia

The novelist Ian Cross, who was not a signatory, wrote on 16 September deploring the fact that so many artists ‘mustered like sheep behind a few muddled slogans’. Maurice Shadbolt immediately criticised Cross. JKB’s letter of 9 December fired another salvo at him.

A Poet’s Garden; review of Day Book, poems of a year, by Ruth Dallas. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1966; in NZL 1418 (16 Dec. 1966) 21.

This Time the Flood; Alexander Turnbull Library; Louis Johnson Literary Papers; MS Papers-8055-077, [1966]

The Puritan Devil; MB 599, Weir Papers, MB 599, Item 6-7, Box 1. Est. date. FALUS: the capping magazine of the University of Otago.

A Poet’s True Prayer; Note accompanying ‘At the Grave of a War Hero’; Hocken MS-0704/026, MS Book XXVI, pp. [174-75].

Part of the text published in the body of Complete Prose is also found in Hocken MS-0704/027, MS Book XXVII (p. 33) as Section 4 of an unpublished poem entitled ‘To Bob Chapman’.

Introduction to John Macmillan Brown. The Memoirs. [General Editor A.N. Brooks], Christchurch: Whitcombe and Tombs for the University of Canterbury, [1974]. pp. xxxiv-xxxvi.

JKB intended to edit his grandfather’s memoirs during the third university term of 1966 but found he could not do so. Eventually Professor R.A. Copland, of the Department of English, University of Canterbury, and Mr Clifford Collins, a former University of Canterbury librarian, took over the responsibility. (JKB’s mother and paternal aunt also contributed introductory material.) It had been hoped that the volume would be published in time for the University of Canterbury Centenary celebrations (May 1973) but production problems meant that it was not published until the following year. At an earlier time, in a letter to me, JKB described his grandfather as ‘a tough old Scottish academic, full of fire and prejudices and Utopian dreams.’ (10 May 1962).

The Man on the Horse. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1967.

A fair copy of the manuscript exists: Hocken (ARC-0027) MS-0975. Versions of individual lectures also exist at Hocken: MS-0739/008 (‘The Man on the Horse’); MS-0739/008 (‘The Virgin and the Temptress’); MS-0739/006 page 329 (‘Conversation with an Ancestor’); MS-0739/007 (‘Literature and Belief’). In ‘Drama among the Faceless’ (q.v.) JKB told Arthur Baysting:

I was on the Fellowship for two years. A bit of an old man’s home, with due respect to the institution. I’m glad it exists but you get a certain feeling of undue security. Anyway, the first year I was down there [i.e. 1966] I wrote the talks published under the title The Man on the Horse – fairly subjective stuff – and I had enough time to put a bit of polish on them.

Part 2, ‘Literature and Belief’, contains the poem ‘A Ballad for the Men of Holy Cross [Seminary]’. Before JKB gave this talk in 1966 he distributed copies of the ballad in cyclostyled form.

Bertram remarked in his review (NZL 1461, 6 Oct. 1967, p. 20), that Part 5, ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’, comprises ‘a series of autobiographical fragments retrieved from scattered corners in literary journals.’ A version of Part 1 of ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’ was originally published as ‘Beginnings’ in LF vol. 19 no. 3 (Sep. 1965) 237-242. Part 2: Apart from the opening story the remainder was published, with minor differences, under the title ‘Recollections of School Days’ in NZMR 65 (Mar. 1966) 17-19. In the Preface to the collection JKB wrote,

The ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’ with which I conclude this book were gathered from several sources – the first section from an article I wrote for Landfall; the second, from another article first published in the New Zealand Monthly Review, which I later included in a revised form as part of a talk given to a group of post-primary teachers in Christchurch.

In an undated letter to me, written before he gave his talk, JKB described its purpose: ‘The talk will be mainly devoted to showing that universal compulsory secular education is the black blight on the potato crop as far as the making of poems goes.’

Some years ago, before I became a Catholic, I spoke of this problem in an early lecture: the ‘early lecture’ JKB mentions and cites has not been found.

Part 3: A very lightly revised version of ‘Venus in Her Western Bed’, Salient Literary Issue (Sep. 1955) 4-8.

Part 4: Published as ‘Blue Peter’ in Hilltop 1.3 (Sep. 1949) 10.

Part 5: Published as ‘Some Time Ago’ in Meanjin vol. XIV no. 2 (June 1955) 292.

I remember a poem of my own which my fellow-members of the New Zealand State Literary Fund Advisory Committee felt they could not accept as part of an anthology to be sponsored by public money, because it would not meet with the approval of all members of the public: JKB was referring to the 1963 dispute over NZPY.

The section entitled ‘The Virgin and the Temptress’ is an extensive commentary upon JKB’s poem ‘Henley Pub’. He wrote about it to his father:

It is the Samson and Delilah story in modern dress. A heavy-drinking Catholic commercial traveller, not young, is considering suicide in the bar room of the Henley Pub. This, if you like, is the blindness of Samson about to pull down the world on his head. He remembers his mistress in Dunedin whom he can neither live with nor without ...

The poem swings between those two great poles of Catholic manhood – the image of the Blessed Virgin (the created world redeemed) and the image of woman seen as the Temptress (nature unredeemed) – no doubt it shouldn’t be so. Catholic men should see women as their sisters and co-heirs in salvation, but in Chaucer and Villon and old Dunbar – and in the mind of a modern Irish drunk – the two poles remain separate and standing. (2 Aug. 1965; McKay 198)

One week later he sent me a copy of ‘Henley Pub’, describing it as

. . . a lengthy poem [which] I have finally completed after . . . many drafts – a modern statement of the Samson and Delilah theme . . . I weigh the figure of Our Blessed Lady and that other darker figure of woman seen as Temptress against each other in this poem . . . some such duality lies deep in the hearts of Catholic men . . . we project our ideal love upon the Blessed Virgin and our sensual love upon the Temptress. (9 Aug. 1965)

In a further letter to me (25 Oct. 1967) he wrote that the ‘romantic vitalists (as I once was) want to be told that sex is in itself a source of spiritual life. My own position is more a middle one: that in some circumstances sex helps us, in some circumstances hinders us . . . Mind you, sex and sexual intercourse are two separate things.’ Yes they are, but JKB sometimes confused the two. James Bertram reviewed The Man on the Horse for NZL (no. 1461, 6 Oct. 1967, p. 20). An extract follows:

The whole thing makes up the most substantial prose work Mr Baxter has yet published, though to call it a book of prose is misleading: it is really a comment on the development of a poet’s mind, in a particular time and place, appropriately illustrated at key points by passages in verse. The scheme of the book (if, as I suggest, the ‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’ are taken first) then becomes: recreation of childhood and of turbulent alcoholic youth; confrontation of that past and of a deeply felt ancestral legend; an excursus on ‘Literature and Belief’ – an address offered to Roman Catholic seminarists which restates firmly, with a good deal of tact and some saving humour, the necessary Gnosticism of art – and finally the close consideration and exposition of two particular poems: a bad one by Baxter, ‘Henley Pub’, and a very good one by Burns, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’.

Bertram considered the literary criticism poor:

What carries The Man on the Horse over some sticky ground, and gives it life and urgency, is a consciousness of poetic vocation as clear as Wordsworth’s and a Wordsworthian sense of kinship with suffering humanity – above all with society’s outcasts. Mr Baxter’s myth includes the availability of salvation as well as the necessity of revolt: Prometheus may here becomepage 331 Prince Myshkin, or even Gorky’s grandmother. Whatever fears might once have been felt for the mythical standing of a Dionysian poet who gave up drink and got religion, are seen to be groundless: in Mr Baxter’s case it has made him more, not less, of a man speaking to other men. And this, as I see it, has always been his chief strength as a poet....

Other reviews were written by H. W[inston] R[hodes] in NZMR, 84 (Nov. 1967) 23; B.J. O’Brien in NZT, (27 Dec. 1967) 18; and Kendrick Smithyman in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 9 (July 1970) 128.

Nicholas V. Zissermann, to whom the book was dedicated, was Professor and Head of the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the University of Otago.

Is Napalm the Only Answer in Vietnam? in NZT XCIV.5 (8 Feb. 1967) 13.

The New Jerusalem Bible; in The Flowering Cross [henceforward referred to as TFC]. Dunedin: New Zealand Tablet Co., 1969, p. 161. This is a lightly revised version of ‘The new Jerusalem bible – a miracle of daring freshness’ in NZT XCIV.6 (15 Feb. 1967) 26.

In 1943 Pope Pius XII called on Catholic scholars to translate the Scriptures from the original Hebrew and Greek rather than from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. Scholars from the École Biblique in Jerusalem produced a French translation in 1955. An English translation of the French was then made. This draft was compared word for word with Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek originals and in 1966 the Jerusalem Bible was published.

JKB composed the following introductory note for The Flowering Cross:

All the essays in this book are selected from material originally published in the New Zealand Tablet. I must acknowledge a debt to the editor of that periodical, Mr John Kennedy, for the encouragement and stimulus he has given me. An acknowledgement is also due to the editor of the Marist Messenger, in which the poem ‘Mary at Ephesus’ was first published. More broadly, the question may arise: Why should a writer wish to reprint his occasional articles? The answer lies perhaps most of all in my own sense that I was discovering the Faith as I wrote about it, and that I had managed from time to time to isolate, as it were, certain modules of experience where the unconscious influence of the possession of the Faith on my own life suddenly became more conscious and explicit. I have made some minor emendations to mark a possible transition from article to essay; but on the whole, where the original seemed to me spontaneous, I have left my writing much as it stood. I have never been able to write a poem or a play or a story or an article simply from cold; there has had to be some prior movement, however obscure, of insight or intuition. The fact that these essays are thus in some measure also works of literature has encouraged me to hope that they are worth preserving in the form of a book.

Mr Brandywine Chooses a Gravestone was written in November 1966 but not produced until 2 February 1968 when William Austin directed its performance for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service.

Holy Cross Seminary: the national seminary for the training of diocesan priests in New Zealand. It is situated in Mosgiel, Dunedin.

breviary: a book containing the Liturgy of the Hours. This is recited daily by priests and religious. It is also known as The Prayer of the Church.

Daniel: 6.17-18.

King James Version: Also called the Authorised Version, it was commissioned by King James I in 1604 to correct errors which the Puritans detected in the Great Bible of King Henry VIII and the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. The project was undertaken by forty-seven scholars of the Church of England who translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew and the New Testament from the Greek. The King James Bible was completed in 1611.

Knox Version: Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (1888-1957) was born into an Anglican family; his father was eventually appointed Bishop of Manchester. Ronald Knox went from Eton to Balliol College, Oxford. At university he was recognised as a brilliant classical scholar and won the Craven, Hertford and Ireland scholarships, as well as other prizes. He was appointed a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and ordained in 1912. After his ordination he was appointed chaplain of Trinity College. In 1917, when he converted to Catholicism, his father cut him out of his will. In the following year Knox was ordained a Catholic priest and began teaching at St Edmund’s College, Hertfordshire. In 1926 he became Catholic chaplain at Oxford University. At about this time he began a regular series of programmes, including satirical reports, on BBC Radio. He published many books, including a popular series of detective books. His first biography was written by Evelyn Waugh, his literary executor.

Douai or Douai-Rheims: a version of the Bible undertaken by Catholic priests of the English College in Douai (France) when they were not allowed to enter England. It was a version of the Latin Vulgate and although its vocabulary was highly Latinised it was regarded as an important instrument of the Counter-Reformation. The New Testament was published in France in 1582; the Old Testament in 1609-10. A less Latinised vocabulary was introduced by Bishop Richard Challoner when he revised it between 1749 and 1752, partly because he used the King James Version (rigorously compared with Catholic versions) as his basic document.

Vulgate: In 382 A.D. Pope Damasus I commissioned St Jerome to make a Latin translation of the Bible. His version, to which others contributed, relied on Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic and Old Latin texts, including the Hexapla of Origen (184/5-253/4).

American Poets; review of Connoisseurs of Chaos, ideas of order in modernpage 333 American poetry, by Denis Donoghue. London: Faber & Faber, 1966; in NZL 1428 (17 Feb. 1967) 16.

The book’s title cites the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.

Denis Donogue (1928- ), Irish-born scholar and literary critic, published books on Irish and, especially, American literature. He held the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.

New Directions; review of Death of a Naturalist, by Seamus Heaney. London: Faber and Faber, 1966; and The Hollow Hill and Other poems 1960-64 by Kathleen Raine. London: Hamish Hamilton, [1965]; in NZL 1429 (24 Feb. 1967) 21.

If JKB had lived longer he may have agreed with others that Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was the most important Irish poet since Yeats. Brought up on a small farm he eventually found the universal in the local, the large in the little. Like JKB he believed that his poetry emerged from a ‘quarrel with himself ’.

The literary achievements of Kathleen [Jessie] Raine (1908-2003) were recognised in 1992 when she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. She was a meditative poet whose philosophical position was neo-Platonist, which explains why her chief contributions to literary criticism were reflections on the writings of Blake, Coleridge and Yeats. Her work was imbued with the sacred and JKB obviously found this attractive although he here remarks that he wished she would relinquish the hermetic philosophy of the books and focus on her personal experiences. What he found most attractive in this collection was her ‘struggle to let go of youth, sensation and certain strong attachments . . . and find a new spiritual direction’. JKB was engaged in the same search, remarked ‘I find them moving in a personal way.’ Like her he hoped for ‘not struggle . . . but a terrible acceptance’.

The format of the poem he cites from Kathleen Raine’s collection may have suggested to him the format he used in his poem ‘Winter Poem to my Wife’ (CP 393) which he wrote in the year that he wrote the review.

[Replies to Questions about Poetic Composition] in ‘Five New Zealand Poets’ by John Weir, PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, 1974, pp. 241-42.

I asked the questions in February 1967 as part of the research for my doctoral thesis. The response was sent with an accompanying letter dated 25 February 1967).

Draft of ‘The Unicorn: a consideration of adolescence’; Hocken MS0975/046.

The version in this volume is assembled from the Hocken manuscript. To see a rendering of the entire draft manuscript refer to Millar (pp. 535-9).

Mahabalipuram: a town and seaport in India built in the first centurypage 334 A.D. It is the site of the famous Shore Temple, which is threatened by the sea. In fact it is claimed that there were six other temples and that these have been swallowed by the waves.

the Titan Prometheus, from whose wound the iceflowers of art can grow: one of his early poems which used the Titan Prometheus as an image of himself was entitled ‘Prometheus’, who was depicted as ‘bleeding on the cross of time’ (CP 35).

In ‘Choice of Belief in Modern Society’ (CP 52): ‘In the genuine arts the Promethean myth takes another form – no longer man the Light-Bringer, but man chained to his Caucasian rock of suffering and isolation, and groping for self-understanding.’

In the same: ‘The Promethean view is in the main individualistic; the occasion for works of art, with little immediate application in the social and political sphere.’

In a poem entitled ‘The Titan’ (CP 372): ‘The rock limbs of Prometheus / Lie twisted at the entrance of the bay’. Looking back, the poet considered that a long time had passed ‘since he brought / The fire of Zeus to us’. Meanwhile ‘We had / All but forgotten his pain and his gift. / Calamity, time, deeply thwarted desire’. His article ‘Some Notes on Drama’ (CP 439) identifies his play The Spots of the Leopard as rendering ‘the Promethean myth’.

[Notes on the Making of ‘The Martian’ 1]; Weir Papers, MB 599, Item 12-13, Box 2.

They were included in a letter to me dated 25 February 1967.

the ideas and language of science fiction: JKB mentions more than once

that he enjoyed reading science fiction. The notes were incorporated into a letter. After section 5(e) of the notes the letter continues:

I’m still trying to nut out whether I sent you a small blue verse notebook – the one with Milford track material in it – along with the first batch of drafts I sent you. Not that I mind at all which of us has it – but yesterday when I was sending off the drafts of ‘The Martian’ to you, I looked for it to send to you as well, and couldn’t find it – I’d assumed I had it; and then seemed to remember dimly tucking it into the envelope of the first batch. You must enlighten me, since it is you who have the non-alcoholic memory; not that the matter is worrying me, for I won’t be using that material; but I want you to have the notebook. [I did have it.]

Every now and then a sense of shame strikes me like a vulture at the notion of you having clear access to the meanderings of my balmy mind, as it works before a poem is complete; and if – as I intend to – I send you some Xerox copies of my ms. Books to mull through, in a month or two when the Varsity library here has them done, you’ll find scatterings of thepage 335 casual or the careful obscene in them – it did cheer me up, though, to find precisely the same in an early ms. book of W.H. Auden, whose work I deeply admire. Somehow the Turnbull Library in Wgtn had it. After all, what is friendship if you can’t see your friend’s clay feet, and remain his friend – if anything more deeply so, more Christian, less Platonic. You are entirely free to use any part of what I send you, and to speculate freely about it.

I had thought of including a prayer for the soul of the adolescent suicide in ‘The Martian’ – but the problem is, the character is fictional – I have an aversion to writing fictional prayers. It is quite different when I write at the end of a poem, ‘The Monument’

‘. . . You who lie
In dry beds, before you sleep
Or hold the friendly body of your wife,
Say a short prayer for mountaineers, deerstalkers,
Guides, explorers, men of the death-bound kind,
And for McKinnon, never washed ashore
By Lake Te Anau, 1892,
From ridge to ridge like a gun-dog driven by
The celibate angers of the northern mind.’

There McKinnon is an actual historical personage; and the others are real people, though also types . . .

When I write to you, it would be as well if you mentally halved a good deal of what I say, positively or negatively – for I am an emotional person, and my thinking is nearly always either short of or in excess of objective truth. . . .

P.S. You are free to use any of my notes as your own thought, without formal attribution to me – I do not want you to told to any legalistic meum and tuum. Just a general comment where such comments are made that you are indebted to me for such material, is more than sufficient.

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
Of the sharp enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face . . .
To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners . . .

Dylan Thomas

You and I, John are on one side of the fence, Prof. Garrett on another. Remember that; and use what I give you to bamboozle the bastards.

Despite JKB’s suggestion I did not take advantage of his offer, preferring to make my own decisions and interpretations and abide by standard academic regulations and conventions.

[Notes on the Making of ‘The Martian’ 2]; Weir Papers, MB 599, Item 12-13, Box 2.

In a letter of 4 March JKB told me

Your letter makes me happy which is more than adequate recompense for any work I put into gathering and preparing (with typescripts) those ms. There is a selfish side of it you see, if John Weir makes a study of Jim Baxter’s work part of his degree thesis, it is suitable he should have exact and intelligible ms; especially the latter, since Baxter’s private handwriting is indecipherable to all but Baxter – a code language unconsciously developed to keep his wife from seeing what he writes at home!

It's a Difficult World, David; in Salient (2 Mar. 1967) 13.

A curtailed version of JKB’s talk ‘Shots Around the Target’ was reported in Salient under the title ‘Poet’s plan for an art-loving New Zealand’ (23 Sep. 1966; vol. 29, no. 13). David M. Roughan replied in a subsequent letter under the heading ‘Not paranoid’. The letter ‘It’s a difficult world, David’ is JKB’s reply to Roughan.

Homosexual law reform [1]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1431 (10 Mar. 1967) 12.

See also ‘The difficult tribe’ (CP 445), the revised form of ‘Prudence, charity – these should govern the attitude of a Christian – the problem of homosexuality’.

Two Comedies; review of The Killing of Sister George, a comedy by Frank Marcus. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965; and The Cresta Run, by N.F. Simpson. London: Faber & Faber, 1966; in NZL 1432 (17 Mar. 1967) 22.

British dramatist Frank Marcus’s hit play became a successful film directed by Robert Aldrich.

N[orman] F[rederick] Simpson (1919-2011) was another British dramatist. His work may seem to be related to that of the European Theatre of the Absurd but is much more indebted to the BBC run of The Goon Show. His spoof on spying illustrated his lack of interest in plot or characters and he and his plays fell so far out of fashion that in 1983 he stopped writing. But he came slightly back into fashion in 2007, at which time he began writing If So, Then Yes, in which a resident of an old people’s home dictates his reminiscences despite numerous interruptions from visitors. One of the characters asserted that the serpent which inhabited the Garden of Eden was actually a long thin sausage dog. The National Theatre had difficulty staging the play because of the size and nature of the cast, which included ‘5000 Red Indians’.

The Church and the Alcoholic; in TFC, 18.

JKB restructured this article from ‘Christianity and the alcoholic (by an alcoholic)’ NZT XCIV.9 (8 Mar. 1967) 30; ‘Temperance people oftenpage 337 sidestep issue of alcoholism (by an alcoholic)’ NZT XCIVC.10 (15 Mar. 1967) 30; and ‘There’s no such thing as complete recovery from alcoholism’ NZT XCIV.11 (22 Mar. 1967) 26.

JKB was writing with first-hand knowledge. He was an alcoholic who began the process of giving up drinking in 1954, when he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. By 9 July 1957 he was able to say to Rae Munro, ‘I have A.A. to thank that I am not in gaol, under the sod, or in a permanent residence in a natty little villa up at Porirua [Asylum].’ (McKay 147).

Matthew Talbot (1856-1925) was born in Ireland. At about the age of twelve he started drinking alcohol, being affected by the example of his father and brothers who were alcoholics. He worked as a messenger boy for three years and then became a bricklayer’s labourer. During his teenage years and early twenties his drinking got him into trouble: he stole other people’s property to sell in order to buy alcohol; he developed a bad temper and got into fights; and he often tried to buy alcohol on credit. In 1884, at the age of twenty-eight, he took a pledge to give up alcohol for three months. When this was successful he took a pledge for life. He continued to work as a labourer, paid back his debts, lived a frugal life, gave away his earnings to charitable causes, fasted and undertook various mortifications, attended Mass daily, and undertook other devotional practices. The formal process has begun to have him declared a saint of the Catholic Church.

Pioneer Group: the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association of the Sacred Heart was founded in Dublin in 1898 by James Cullen, a Jesuit priest, to counter alcoholism among Irish Catholics. It has become a world-wide movement. Its members are known as ‘Pioneers’.

A.A.: Alcoholics Anonymous is an international movement which was founded in Akron, Ohio, in 1935 by Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith. Its fundamental purpose is ‘to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety’. The two founders and its earliest members developed the Twelve Step Programme.

Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius: St Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) developed, between 1522 and 1524, this set of religious meditations and prayers designed to occupy a retreatant for between twenty-eight and thirty days. Those who undertook them were assisted by a spiritual director to discern the place of Christ in their lives and to commit themselves to follow through with that experience.

Trade Unions and Unemployment; in TFC, 41.

This is a revised form of two articles: ‘We’d be worse off without belligerence by the unions; the dignity of the worker is at stake’; in NZT XCIV.12 (29 Mar. 1967) 34; and ‘Why should a man suffer because of the omisssions of others? Unemployment can disrupt family life and demoralise the individual?’ in NZT XCIV.26 (5 July 1967) 10.

Mary at Ephesus; in MM (Apr. 1967) 14. The prose commentary is subtitled ‘A poet comments on his poem’.

The right to read and write examined; in ODT (4 Apr. 1967) 12.

This item was repeated as ‘Censorship and Human Rights’, report of an interview conducted by a representative of the executive of the New Zealand Universities Students’ Association in Canta XXXVII.7 (6 June 1967) 7.

JKB was referring to a commonly held belief that the books held in the Great Library of Alexandria were burned on the instructions of Amr bin Aas who was himself instructed by Second Caliph, Umar (reigned 634-44), to arrange the incineration because the books were contrary to the Quran. This belief has been much disputed.

A Russian Poet [1]; review of Voznesensky: selected poems, an authorised translation, with Introduction and notes, by Herman Marshall. London: Methuen, 1966; in NZL 1437 (21 Apr. 1967) 21.

Andrei Andreyevich Voznesensky (1933-2010), Russian poet, published two books, in 1958 and 1959, which were considered sensational. During a cultural freeze he was permitted to travel to Europe and the United States in 1960 where he gave electrifying performances of his work. In 1963 he came under a heavy attack from President Kruschev who did not back off until President Kennedy intervened with a phone call. During the 1960s he continued to give sensational performances in Russia, although some of his workwas banned. Some considered him the age’s greatest poet buttheir views were coloured by their anti-Communist leanings.

The Spirit of Mary; in TFC, 12.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘Mary and the Modern Christian’; in NZT XCIV.16 (26 Apr. 1967) 20.

Mariolatrists: worshippers of Mary.

Hyperdulia: the Catholic Church teaches that there are three levels of reverence: latria, due to God alone; hyperdulia, due to Mary; and dulia, due to angels.

St Mary’s Church: the Church of St Mary of the Angels, Boulcott Street, Wellington.

The article was accompanied by a poem ‘Mary at Ephesus’ (CP 383).

The Tree of Jesse; in TFC, 99. This is a lightly revised version of ‘They are daughters of a bureaucratic age; birth control and the Christian’; in NZT XCIV.18 (10 May 1967) 27.

[Thomas] Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-90), was an English journalist and media personality. Son of a Labour Party politician, he graduated from Selwyn College, Cambridge, before teaching briefly in India. After returningpage 339 to England he married Katherine Dobbs, niece of Beatrice Webb. After a brief spell teaching in Egypt he became a writer for the Manchester Guardian. At this stage he had Communist sympathies but these did not last. During the Second World War he worked in Intelligence. Afterwards he wrote for the Evening Standard and Daily Telegraph; he edited Punch from 1953 to 1957. A 1957 article entitled ‘Does England Really Need a Queen’ caused him employment difficulties so he turned to radio and television. During the 1960s he denounced the Beatles (‘vacant youths’, ‘no talent’) and moral laxity (he called birth control pills and marihuana ‘Pills and Pot’). He resigned from the rectorship of Edinburgh University because of the Student Council’s attitude to these. Towards the end of the decade he became a Christian and denounced the Life of Brian as blasphemous, debating the issue on television with John Cleese and Michael Palin. In 1982, influenced by Mother Teresa, he became a Catholic.

Julio Neffa: no information available

Pax Romana: An umbrella title for various Catholic lay movements and also for a journal published as the organ of the International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs.

Neapolitan slum: Having made reference to India it might have been thought that JKB would refer to an Indian slum. Instead he referred to the slums of Naples, perhaps because he knew about them from Morris West’s Children of the Sun, which centred on the work of Father Borelli in the Neapolitan slums.

A Russian Poet, [2]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1444 (9 June 1967) 12.

Natasha Templeton (1936- ) spent much of World War Two in refugee camps in Russia and Germany with her mother and siblings. In 1951 they emigrated to New Zealand where she made a name as an actor in theatre circles in Wellington. In 1959 she married Hugh Templeton, who subsequently entered politics. She wrote novels and short stories and from 1966 wrote reviews for the NZL, specialising in drama and Russian history and literature. She also spoke regularly on the Radio New Zealand concert programme.

Australian Moods; review of Noonday Country, poems 1954-65, by Charles Higham. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966; in NZL 1441 (19 May 1967) 20.

Charles Higham (1931-2012) was born in England but moved to Australia in 1954. In 1964 he became literary editor of The Bulletin (Sydney). Later he moved to Los Angeles where he became a biographer of Jennie Churchill, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Howard Hughes, Charles Laughton, Louis B. Mayer, Merle Oberon, Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.

Thoughts of an Old Alligator [1]; Hocken, MS-0975/140, 1967.

Other copies are found at Hocken: MS-0975/131 and MS-0783/002. An annotation to the entry for MS-0783/002 discloses that JKB deposited it in 1968, before he left Dunedin.

The Waimakariri River is situated between Canterbury’s Rakaia and Hurunui rivers. It runs from the main divide to the ocean eight miles north of Christchurch.

The opening parable is also found at Hocken, MS 0975/124, where it is recorded on its own under the title ‘Kiwi Habits’ [2]. (This manuscript has two pages numbered ‘9’.) The provision of an alternative poem, with other minor changes, is evidence that JKB repeated the talk in Dunedin and provided the alternatives to avoid offending his relatives:

First there is my own town, Dunedin, where I lived when I was young, and where I am living now, after an interval – a place with which I have a love-hate relationship. I wrote a poem about her; a bad poem no doubt; but I’ll quote it just the same. It would be a pity to let it matter too much whether poems are good or bad.

He then read ‘Dunedin Revisited’ (CP 235) annotating the reference to Castle Street: ‘That’s the Scottish pronunciation – “Cassell”.’ After the reading the talk continued, ‘No, it’s not a particularly good poem . . .’.

M.R.A.: Moral Re-Armament. Founded by Frank Buchman (1878-1961), an American Lutheran Minister, ordained in 1902. The origins of the movement are found in 1938 in Buchman’s Oxford Group. Members were taught that social peace could only be achieved by moral change, notably commitment to Christ. After World War Two, MRA members worked tirelessly to achieve reconciliation between the previously warring parties. Afterwards, increasingly, it became a network of people of all religious faiths and no faith, and developed the doctrine that no change in the world could be achieved without a change within oneself. In 2001 the movement changed its name to Initiatives of Change.

Why Shouldn’t our Priests Marry? in TFC, 119.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘Priests with wives’ in NZT XCIV.21 (31 May 1967) 27.

A True Rhodesian; review of Rhodesia, by Judith Todd. London: Panther

Books, 1967; in NZL 1444 (9 June 1967) 20. It was published in the previous year by MacGibbon and Kee, London. Judith Todd. See SB.

Ulysses; (letter to editor); in ODT (19 June 1967) 4.

In 1916 the office of Chief Film Censor was established in New Zealand, at a time when decisions about acceptable art were ceded to the British page 341 Commonwealth. In 1919 the Commonwealth banned the importation of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was unbanned in1937 but rebanned in1941. The film version was completed in England in 1967 (Joseph Strick, director). The office of the British censor required twenty-nine cuts before it could be released to theatres. Strick responded by replacing the offending segments with blank screens and a shrieking sound. The British office then rescinded their demands.

D.C. McIntosh, the New Zealand film censor, took heart from the British decision and allowed the film to be shown to New Zealand audiences, but only on condition that they were segregated on the basis of gender.

The Times of London reported that the device of sexual separation spawned ‘neither riotous orgies nor any great crisis of morals’. Obviously the Irish were not as culturally and morally mature as New Zealanders because the film was not approved for general release in their country until the year 2000.

Way of a Prophet; review of Life as a Parable, by Pinhas Sadeh. London: Anthony Blond, 1966; in NZL 1446 (23 June 1967) 20.

Pinhas Sadeh (1929-94) emigrated to Israel from Poland. He had no formal education after primary school, but this did not prevent him from publishing six collections of poetry, two novels and other books. Life as a Parable was recognised as a classic and won him a cult following.

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1952). See Note 260.

A book that ‘I treasure and admire’; review of On Trying to be Human, by Rosemary Haughton. London: Geoffrey Chapman Ltd, 1966; in MM XXXVII.7 (July 1967) 17.

Charles Alfred Davis (1923-1999) was a Roman Catholic priest, theologian and member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). He became rector of Heythrop College and editor of The Clergy Review. He was the most celebrated of English Catholic theologians of his time but his writings became ever more controversial and in 1966 he left the Church after rejecting papal authority and attempts at controlling his teachings. His autobiography A Question of Conscience was published in the following year. He subsequently became professor of religious studies at the University of Alberta. From there he moved to Concordia University in Montreal to take up the chair of the department of religious studies. In 1991 he moved to Edinburgh. Late in his life he became reconciled with the Catholic Church.

Juddi Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was a philosopher, teacher and writer on spiritual topics. In his role as an educator he became a world traveller. One of his central ideas was the notion that all people need an intense interior personal transformation if they are to achieve their potential. He won followers in many countries but especially in England and the United States. A number of schools have been set up to foster his ideas on education.

Dominical: ‘emanating from Jesus as Lord’. The word also has a secondarypage 342 meaning, ‘relating to Sunday as the Lord’s day’, which is not intended in this context.

Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand. Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1967.

Cover note: ‘This talk was given in July, 1967, at Victoria University of Wellington as one of a series of six lectures on the Arts organised by the university.’

Hocken holds a manuscript copy: MS-0739/011.

In a review in Comment (vol. 9 no. 3; June 1968, 39), K.O. Arvidson remarked that ‘This, to my mind, is the essential Baxter talking, applying directly to the work of others the criteria we commonly discover in his own poetry.’ Arvidson identified JKB’s central thesis: art has therapeutic value. He concluded ‘Baxter alone in New Zealand has tackled this problem squarely, and at present, to my mind, Baxter alone is equipped to analyse the problem further. His criticism is unique here, and does much more than merely fill a gap in our writing. It offers a new dimension.’

Charles Marris (1876-1947) edited New Zealand Best Poems (1932-43) and Art in New Zealand (1927-42): see SB.

J[ohn] H[enry] E[rle] Schroder (1895-1980) graduated with an MA from Canterbury University College in 1920. He was a schoolteacher who became editor of the literary page of the Christchurch Sun. and then of the Christchurch Press, where he also became associate editor. When Marris moved to Wellington, Schroder became literary editor of the Auckland Star. He published poetry, essays and the talks about language which he gave on radio. He was appointed to the State Literary Fund, the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, and the Indecent Publications Tribunal.

Alan [Edward] Mulgan (1881-1962): see SB. JKB recognised Mulgan’s Georgianism but liked parts of his long poem Golden Wedding (1932).

JKB eventually excluded Schroder from the triumvirate, acknowledging instead his ‘intelligent criticism’ and ‘the breadth of his literary awareness’ (letter to editor; in NZL 1465, 3 Nov. 1967: 12).

Mate: a literary periodical, first published in Auckland in 1957, edited by Kevin Ireland. From the second number until the fourteenth (1967) the editor was Robin Dudding. Other editors followed – Tom McWilliams, Bert Hingley, Alistair Paterson. In 1977 it became a journal of Australasian writing and in the following year its name became Climate. In 1981 it merged with Pilgrims (Dunedin) but did not survive.

Image (1958-1961) was edited by Robert Thompson in Auckland.

Fleur Adcock (1934-), New Zealand poet: see SB.

K[enneth] O[wen] Arvidson (1938-2011) graduated from the University

of Auckland with an MA in English. He lectured at Flinders University, South Australia, before moving to the University of the South Pacific in Suva. Riding the Pendulum: Poems 1961-69 collected his early verse. It was page 343 published in 1973. From 1974 to 2002 he taught in the English Department at the University of Waikato.

Some Notes on Drama; in Act 1.3 (July-Sep. 1967) 20-22.

The published copy bears the note ‘This lecture was given informally by Mr Baxter at Downstage during the run of his The Spots of the Leopard. We are grateful to him for permission to publish.’ Some passages from these ‘Notes’ are included in No. 487, ‘Some Possibilities for New Zealand Drama’.

Downstage Theatre: founded in 1964 by a group of actors and artists which included Peter Bland, Tim Elliott, Martyn Sanderson and Harry Seresin. It was originally a café theatre. Its first production was Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, but its management was also interested in producing New Zealand plays. In 1973, with financial assistance from Edith Campion, the productions were moved into the Hannah Playhouse. The year 1974 became the first full season for New Zealand plays, including an ensemble of plays by JKB.

A Game of Magic; review of Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957, by W.H. Auden. London: Faber and Faber, 1967; in NZL 1448 (7 July 1967) 21.

When JKB was only seventeen he acknowledged his debt to ‘Auden my master. Auden I consider the best modern poet.’ (Letter to Noel Ginn, 16 July 1944). He now regretted the fact that Auden had abandoned ‘the semi-prophetic intuitions’ of his earlier poetry for the word games of the later poetry.

Play By Baxter Is Welcomed; ODT (10 July 1967) 11.

Mixed flatting; (letter to editor); in ODT (12 July 1967) 16.

When a member of the public enquired if male and female undergraduates were allowed to share the same flat the vice-chancellor Dr Robin Williams announced a ban on the practice. The students responded by engaging in a grand mixed accommodation in the university registry. JKB wrote ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’ (CP 396) and read it to a thoroughly appreciative large gathering at the student union. Afterwards he wrote in LF that he composed the poem because he wanted to demonstrate ‘that though my gonads were wrapped in steel wire, my mind was still mellow’. The students were appreciative but the university authorities were not.

A Human Voice; review of The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, edited by E.R. Dodds. London: Faber and Faber, 1966; in NZL 1449 (14 July 1967) 21.

E[ric] R[obertson] Dodds (1893-1979) was expelled from Campbell College in Belfast for ‘gross, studied and sustained insolence’. He read classicspage 344 at University College, Oxford, but was sent down in 1916 for supporting the Easter Rising. He returned in the following year and achieved first-class honours in his final examinations. In 1924 he became professor of Greek at the University of Birmingham and in 1936 he was appointed regius professor of Greek at Oxford. In 1965 he finished editing The Strings are False, the incomplete autobiography of his friend and fellow-Irishman Louis MacNeice. His edition of MacNeice’s collected poems appeared in the following year.

Homosexual Law Reform [2]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1449 (14 July 1967) 13.

Varian J. Wilson of Christchurch was a clinical psychologist. He and his fellow coin-collecting friend W. Ray Dobson were the only two members of Nuphil Associates Ltd, a company which produced philatelic numismatic covers. The issue of the New Zealand Rationalist for December 1944 contained an article by Wilson entitled ‘The Problem of the Negro’.

The difficult tribe; in TFC, 76.

This is a lightly revised form of ‘Prudence, charity – these should govern the attitude of a Christian – the problem of homosexuality’ in NZT XCIV.28 (19 July 1967) 27-29.

In the course of the article JKB imagines a particular situation which could lead to homosexual tendencies in early youth. The situation he describes may reflect his own situation, particularly the nature of his relationship with his mother.

Small Theatres Are Home of Live Drama In N.Z.; ODT (20 July 1967) 13.

Unmarried Parents [1]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1450 (21 July 1967) 12.

The sacrament of mercy; in TFC, 69.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘The hoboes, the old, the children, the good – this tribunal serves them all – there’s no substitute for confession’; in NZT XCIV.29 (26 July 1967) 20.

The Maori view of life and death; in TFC, 54.

This was developed from ‘The Maori in the towns’; in NZT XVIV.30 (2 Aug. 1967) 26, and combined with ‘Death – the mercy of God is the final bridge’; in NZT XCIV.35 (6 Sep. 1967) 30-31.

JKB’s poem ‘Tangi’ (dedicated to Betty Murchie) was published alongside the article.

The Māori words ‘pakeha’ and ‘pa’ which JKB used in the original articles have been changed to ‘European’ and ‘village’ in The Flowering Cross version. I assume, without evidence, that John Kennedy, the Tablet editor, asked forpage 345 these changes as it seems unlikely that JKB would move to abandon the Māori terms he used in the original articles.

Mater et Magistra: a papal encyclical issued by Pope John XXIII on 15 May 1961. Its theme is Christianity and social development.

Father Wall: a priest and member of the Society of Mary, Father Francis (‘Frankie’) Wall (1905-83) was born in Karangahake. He attended St Patrick’s College, Wellington (1924-28) before entering the Marist seminary where he was professed as a member of the Society of Mary in 1931. He was ordained priest on 8 March 1936. All of his subsequent appointments were in the Māori Mission, beginning with a period as assistant at Jerusalem (1936-39). After that he served for many years in Taranaki and the Wellington mission, which included the South Island. His final appointment (1974-83) was to Otaki. His enthusiasm and energy for Māori were legendary and earned him the CBE (1974) and the Queen’s Medal (1977).

Thomas Hood (1799-1845), poet and humourist, was born in London, son of a bookseller. As a teenager he was sent to live with relatives in Scotland and there began writing poetry. He married in 1824 but prolonged ill-health meant that he could not earn a satisfactory living and he and his family remained poor. He sometimes resorted to humour to counter sadness; at other times he remained sentimental. His best-known poem was ‘The Song of the Shirt’, a tear-jerking tale of an impoverished London seamstress.

‘Where are the flowers of summer?’: this is probably meant to be ‘The Departure of Summer’.

The article was accompanied by the poem ‘Tangi’ (CP 400), which was dedicated to Jacquie Baxter.

Baxter employing mime technique; in ODT (7 Aug. 1967) 12.

A Man with a Mask; review of Interviews with Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967; in NZL 1454 (18 Aug. 1967) 20.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was awarded so many honorary degrees for his literary achievements that he had the hoods made into a quilt.

Edward Connery Latham (1926-2009) was a close personal friend of Frost’s. Dean of Libraries and administrative officer at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, he was also the author of over thirty books. But it was his writings on Frost which were most important: Selected Prose of Robert Frost (1960), Interviews with Robert Frost (1966), The Poetry of Robert Frost (ed. 1969), Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose (1972), North of Boston Poems (1972), Prose Jottings of Robert Frost (1982), Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged (2002). He edited other Frost texts as well and when he died at his desk in 2009 he may have been working on Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus, Excerpts from his Talks, 1949-62.

When is a Book Pornographic? in TFC, 112. A lightly revised version of ‘Steps to curb indecent books seem positive, sensible – but what is pornography?’ in NZT XCIV.33 (23 Aug. 1967) 34.

Co-ordinating Committee on Indecent Publications: a committee established to review the workings of the Indecent Publications Tribunal. The first Offensive Publications Act banning ‘indecent’ publications became law in 1892. It was revised in 1910 as the Indecent Publications Act. In turn, this was revised in 1963, in which year the Indecent Publications Tribunal of five members chaired by a lawyer was established. The workings of the Tribunal were examined in 1967.

Brendan [Francis] Behan (1923-64), Irish writer and patriot, was born in Dublin, son of a painter active in the campaign for Irish independence. His mother was also a political activist. As a boy Brendan contributed poetry and prose to an IRA youth journal. At the age of sixteen he joined the IRA and travelled to England with explosives to blow up the Liverpool Docks. Apprehended, he was given three years in borstal; he wrote about this in his 1958 biography Borstal Boy. In 1941 he returned to Ireland. There he was arrested for planning to kill two detectives and sentenced to fourteen years in gaol, but he was released in 1946 as part of a general amnesty. That year, when he was only twenty-three, he left the IRA. As books, especially plays, flowed from his pen he became one of the leading writers of his generation. He also became an increasingly heavy drinker, describing himself as ‘a drinker with a writing problem’. His love for alcohol, especially a mixture of champagne and sherry, multiplied his diabetic seizures and he collapsed in a bar in Dublin. He subsequently died in hospital, aged forty-one. He remained a great patriot to the end and thousands lined the streets of Dublin as his body passed on its way to Glasnevin Cemetery where he was given an IRA funeral. Gerard Manley Hopkins was buried much more quietly in the same cemetery sixty years earlier.

Index of Forbidden Books: this list of books banned to Catholics was in use from 1559, when it was promulgated by Pope Paul IV, until 1966, when it was abolished by Pope Paul VI.

Vietnam [1]; (letter to editor); in ODT (24 Aug. 1967) 4.

‘The Grand Tour’ (CP 381) and ‘a death song for mr mouldybroke’ (CP 411) featured Holyoake in 1967.

Unmarried Parents [2]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1455 (25 Aug. 1967) 13.

Personal Issues; review of Poems of Cornwall and America, by A.L. Rowse. London: Faber & Faber, 1967; in NZL 1455 (25 Aug. 1967) 21.

A[lfred] L[eslie] Rowse (1903-97) biographer, historian, poet and Shakespearian scholar, was born in Cornwall. He was awarded a scholarshippage 347 to Christ Church, Oxford, where he won first class honours in history. His poetry also evoked some of JKB’s personal issues – standing on home ground in Otago, the freezing oceans, time passing, and much earlier the boy-poet visiting Cornwall, where he bought a copy of Rowse’s poems and felt the frigidity of the Englishman’s verses and of his own adolescence. (He probably read Rowse’s Poems of a Decade: 1931-1941. London: Faber, 1941.) Rowse became increasingly conservative as he became older and is said to have complained ‘This filthy 20th century. I hate its guts.’ (The lack of candour in the book under review was the result of his homosexuality.)

Police force; (letter to editor); in ODT (1 Sep. 1967) 4.

Programme Note for The Sore-footed Man. (CPl 333).

The play was written in 1967 and produced on 4 September of that year at the Globe Theatre, Dunedin, with Rosalie and Patric Carey as directors. It was reviewed with JKB’s three mimes (‘The Bureaucrat’, ‘The Woman’, ‘The Axe and the Mirror’) by Philip Smithells in NZL 1467 (17 Nov. 1967) 14.

Globe Theatre, Dunedin: a regional theatre established by Patric and Rosalie Carey (see SB.) They lived at 104 London Street and in 1961 had an extension built onto their home which became the Globe Theatre.

Kiwi Habits [1]; in Otago University Review (1967) 3-10.

Kiwi Habits [2]; Hocken MS-0975/127.

a Martian visitor: Fairburn rarely left Auckland. In the year he died he explained to a friend from the past that he went to Wellington about once a year and spent ‘two or three appalling days and nights with Glover, Vogt et al.’

Notes on Being a New Zealander; Hocken MS 0975/124. Est. date.

Hocken also holds a copy (MS-0975/124) comprising galley proofs of an article intended for publication in Education. In the course of the article it seems that JKB is paraphrasing his 1946 poem ‘Returned Soldier’.

Sabbatarianism: in the context of this essay it probably means ‘a movement which advocates a strict observance of the Sabbath’. Its other meaning, ‘the movement advocating the observance of Saturday as the Sabbath’, is less likely in the context of the essay.

What is Art? Baxter: The Human Being is Object and Subject; in Critic XLIII.12 (5 Sep. 1967) 21.

The full article comprises twenty-one paragraphs; the first nine paragraphs have had to be reconstructed because the surviving copy has been bound so tightly into a volume that the first six (or so) letters at the beginning of each line of the nine paragraphs cannot be seen. Thus some words are indecipherable.

In some cases I have supplied (in square brackets) the word from the sense of the passage and/or the surviving letters. In other cases I have indicated the omission in the following manner: [ . . . ].

The semi-final paragraph sounds like a précis of a passage written by Nikos Kazantzakis.

The Lapsed Catholic; in TFC, 84.

This was first published as ‘The lapsed Catholic; why do some lose the faith and others keep it?’; in NZT XCIV.36 (13 Sep. 1967) 26.

Sharp Metal; review of Modern Arabic Short Stories, selected and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967; in NZL 1458 (15 Sep. 1967) 21.

Johnson-Davies, who lived mainly in the Middle East, published at least fifteen volumes of Arabic literature.

The Flowering Cross; in TFC, 89.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘Marriage: a sacramental union with human problems and joys’; in NZT XCIV.37 (20 Sep. 1967) 26-27, 29.

The Young Eliot; review of Poems Written in Early Youth, by T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1967; in NZL 1459 (22 Sep. 1967) 21.

The poems were selected by John Davy Hayward. Between 1846 and 1857 Eliot shared an apartment with Hayward who became archivist of his papers. These included the poems written before 1915, when Eliot published ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, especially those which had appeared in the pages of the Harvard Advocate, a student literary magazine.

Schoolteachers and Bureaucrats; in TFC, 126.

This was revised from two articles, ‘May the critics of our schools never be brow-beaten into silence (You could call it a fight between the Commando squad and the Holy Lid brigade)’; in NZT XCIV.38 (27 Sep. 1967) 35; and ‘It’s time to call the state’s bluff’; in NZT XCIV.43 (1 Nov. 1967) 30.

The two articles do not merge comfortably.

Manichean: Manichaeism, a gnostic religion amalgamating elements of Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism, thrived between the third and seventh centuries when it was the major adversary of Christianity in the contest to replace paganism in the classical world. Depicted as a deadly conflict between light and darkness (good and evil) it survives in those who are drawn to moral dualism.

A Letter to Mr Holyoake; in NZMR 83 (Oct. 1967) 6-8.

That year JKB published ‘a death song for mr mouldybroke’ (CP 411).

In 1965 he published ‘A Bucket of Blood for a Dollar’ (CP 320). Keith Jacka Holyoake, prime minister of New Zealand, was also mentioned in ‘The Gunner’s Lament’ (CP 323).

Purgatory; in TFC, 139. This is a lightly revised version of ‘Purgatory’; in NZT XCIV.41 (18 Oct. 1967) 26.

In Catholic teaching those who hope to see God after death must be perfectly pure. For that reason the Church teaches that those who die with unrepented venial (not serious) sins must be purified before they can enter Heaven. The state or place in which the process of purgation occurs is known as Purgatory.

Poet to stay in Dunedin; in ODT (20 Oct. 1967) 3.

It is significant that he intended to teach the Romantic poets rather than Modernist or New Zealand poets.

Campus Laureate; review of Near the Ocean, by Robert Lowell. London: Faber and Faber, 1967; in NZL 1463 (20 Oct. 1967) 21.

Hell; in TFC, 146.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘Hell really does exist’; in NZT XCIV.42 (25 Oct. 1967) 12.

Heaven; in TFC, 153.

This article was first published in NZT XCIV.43 (1 Nov. 1967) 20, where it provoked correspondence by V.H. Anderson, NZT XCIV.45 (15 Nov. 1967) 38 and NZT XCIV.49 (13 Dec. 1967) 27; and by Colin Durning, NZT

XCIV.47 (29 Nov. 1967) 26. After the publication of The Flowering Cross JKB remarked in a letter to me (18 June 1972) that the articles ‘disgust me, except the one on Heaven.’

The lad who hopes for Heaven / Will fill his mouth with mould: actually ‘The lad who hopes for Heaven / Shall fill his mouth with mould.’ From Housman’s More Poems XXII (‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’).

Komsomol: The Communist League for Youth (aged 14 to 28). It was established in 1918 to combine different youth groups that fought on the revolutionary side in the civil war. In 1922 it was given new goals: in education, sports, publishing, and various other projects.

There are Shadows – but Greater Lights – in the Christian’s Death; in MM XXXVII.12 (Nov. 1967) 7.

Aspects of Poetry; (letter to editor); in NZL 1465 (3 Nov. 1967) 12.

Programme Note for The Bureaucrat. (CPl 336).

This play was written in 1967 and first produced in November of that year at the Globe Theatre, Dunedin. The production, which was directed by Patric Carey, was reviewed in NZL 1467 (17 Nov. 1967, p. 14) by Philip Smithells. It was reproduced at the ‘Festival at the Globe Theatre / 1968’, in Dunedin, January 1968 and at Unity Theatre, Wellington, directed by Patrick Craddock, in May 1968.

There is a copy of the letter in Weir Papers, MB 1184, Box 14, Folder 1. Undated.

Faith; in TFC, 7.

This article was based upon ‘Faith – a spring which flows from God Himself ’; in NZT XCIV.45 (15 Nov. 1967) 20. Unlike his social theology, JKB’s doctrinal theology was simple, orthodox and conservative. (See his article ‘Heaven’, No. 472.)

Magisterium: the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

Mysterium Tremendum: Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), German Lutheran theologian, wrote in Das Heilige (1917) that an experience of divinity resulted in ‘mysterium tremendum’ (fear, trembling) or ‘mysterium fascinans’ (attraction). In this article JKB seems to be using the expression to signify God.

The Pleasures of Middle Age; in TFC, 168.

This was first published as ‘Middle Age’; in NZT XCIV.46 (22 Nov. 1967) 20.

A Certain Spirit; review of Four Lamas of Dolpo, Tibetan biographies edited and translated by D.L. Snellgrove, Volume I: Introduction and Translations. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1967; in NZL 1469 (1 Dec. 1967) 26.

[Notes on Religion and the Church]; Hocken MS-0975/152.

The Hocken catalogue entitles it ‘Notes, possibly written for another priest, mostly reflections on religion’. In fact it is probably written for Vincent Buckley, Australian poet and academic. (See below.) The McKay collection contains a letter from Buckley to JKB dated 12 Sep. 1966 (Item 20/1/5).

The dating, and consequently placement, of this document is estimated solely from its content.

Rachel and Leah: wives of Jacob (Genesis 29 and 30).

you have discussed so ably in your book Poetry and Morality: JKB intended to dedicate this article to the Australian poet and academic Vincent Buckley (1925-88), author of sixteen books and Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. Buckley’s Poetry and Morality: Studies on the Criticism of Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis was published by Chatto and Windus (London, 1959). When JKB’s Pig Island Letters was published in 1966 it was recommended by the Poetry Book Society. Buckley wrote from Cambridge to congratulate him on his achievement.

Buckley and JKB also had in common the fact that they were Catholics. It is not known when JKB visited Buckley in Melbourne, although it may have been before or after his visit to India.

‘et quare tristis incedo, dum affligit [me] inimicus?’: ‘And why do I proceed in sadness, while my enemy afflicts me?’

‘Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem tuam: ipsa me deduxerunt, et adduxerunt page 355 in montem sanctum tuum. . .’: ‘Send for your light and your truth; let them be my guide, and lead me to the holy mountain’.

. . . then we can say with Valéry – ‘J’ai pitie de nous tous, ô tourbillon de poudre!’: the French writer [Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules] (Paul) Valéry (1871-1945) broke twenty years of silence with the publication in 1917 of his long poem La Jeune Parque, a meditation on life, death and chance. (The title refers to the youngest of three related Roman deities, ‘the Fates’.) This line from his poem can be translated as ‘I feel pity for all of us; we are nothing more than a whirlwind of dust!’

Wrestling Jacob: Jacob wrestles with God (Genesis 31.23-32).

The Sorrows of Our Lady; in The Bedean (1967) 102. The Bedean is the annual magazine of St Bede’s College, Christchurch.

A Second Letter to Mr Holyoake; in NZMR 85, (Dec. 1967-Jan. 1968) 19-20.

The Body and Blood of Christ; in TFC, 175. This is a lightly revised version of ‘The body and Blood of Christ’; in NZT

XCIV.49 (13 Dec. 1967) 20.

Less than Major; review of Nineteenth-Century Minor Poets, edited by W.H. Auden and George R. Creeger. London: Faber and Faber, 1967; in NZL 1471 (15 Dec. 1967) 21.

Creeger, a literary critic, specialised in 19th-century English literature. His major work is probably his edition of George Eliot: a collection of critical essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, [1970]).

The Holy Family; in TFC, 182.

This is a lightly revised version of ‘The holy family’ in NZT XCIV.50 (20 Dec. 1967) 20.

Eastern Weeping; review of The Trojan Women: Euripides, adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre (English version by Ronald Duncan). London: Faber and Faber, 1967; in NZL 1472 (22 Dec. 1967) 21.

In 1967 Alexander MacLeod became editor of NZL, holding the position until 1972 when he was dismissed by the Board. Holcroft was recalled and appointed acting-editor. A year he was succeeded by Ian Cross.

Theatre Subsidies; (letter to editor); in NZL 1473 (29 Dec. 1967) 10.

Philip Smithells reviewed The Sore-footed Man with JKB’s three mimes (‘The Bureaucrat’, ‘The Woman’, ‘The Axe and the Mirror’) in NZL 1467 (17 Nov. 1967) 14.

John Casserley, dancer, mime artist, choreographer, and one of the pioneers of modern dance in New Zealand, was the author of ‘The Theatrical Illusion: Notes on Dance and Drama’; in LF vol. 22.1 (Mar. 1968) 65. See also Howard McNaughton’s ‘John Casserley in Interview’, LF vol. 29.4 (Dec. 1975) 333.

Peter Olds (1944- ): see SB. This seems to be the first time in his writing that JKB mentions the young poet Peter Olds who became a close friend.

Some Possibilities for New Zealand Drama; Hocken Misc-MS-0531. Hocken Misc-MS 117, MS-0739/012 and MS-0975/114 are other versions. MS-0975/117 is a later version of a talk originally given at Downstage (Wellington) during the run of The Spots of the Leopard in 1967 and published in Act 3 (July-Sep. 1967). Another version is held by Hocken (MS-0975/118).

Joan Maud Littlewood (1914-2002), British theatre director, developed the leftwing Theatre Workshop. In 1975, after the death of her partner, she moved to France where she lived with Baron Philippe de Rothschild. Her autobiography, Joan’s Book, was published in 1994.

Ngaio Marsh (1895-1982), drama director and writer of crime stories: see SB.

Rodney [Eric] Kennedy (1909-89), drama tutor, art critic and advocate: see SB.

Bruce [Edward George] Mason (1921-82), dramatist: see SB.

The Pohutukawa Tree: early in his writing career Bruce Mason decided to explore Māori-pākehā relations in a play which he was then contemplating. In 1957 he took his draft of The Pohutukawa Tree to Richard Campion, who feared that it would anger pākehā audiences and decided to present it as a workshop experience at the rehearsal rooms of the New Zealand Players in Newtown, Wellington. As a result of the workshop Mason made changes to the play. The text was published in 1960. After a performance in Dunedin the play was further revised. This revised text, published in 1963, is the standard version.

Maria Marten in the Red Barn: Maria Marten (1801-27) was murdered by Richard Corder, her lover, in Suffolk, England. Corder arranged to meet her at the Red Barn before they eloped to Ipswich but instead of eloping he shot and buried her. Subsequently Corder claimed that Maria was living with him in various places but Maria’s mother dreamt that she had been murdered and buried in the Red Barn and her remains were uncovered there. Corder was then tracked down, tried and hanged. In 1935 Milton Rosmer directed the film Maria Marten, or The Murder in the Red Barn.

Frank Sargeson’s play about the missionary Kendall: In 1953-54 Frank Sargeson wrote The Cradle and the Egg, a comedy. He followed this with A Time for Sowing, his play about Kendall. The plays were produced in Auckland in 1961 and 1962.

varsity critic: James Bertram.

Humphrey Davey Findley Kitto (1897-1982), British classical scholar, graduated from St John’s College, Cambridge, before writing his doctorate at the University of Bristol. Subsequently he was a lecturer in Greek at the University of Glasgow (1920-44). In that last year he transferred to Bristol where he became Professor of Greek in 1962.

Breaking through the Fences; review of Collected Poems 1936-1967, by Douglas Stewart. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967; in NZL 1474 (5 Jan. 1968) 12.

C.A. Marris’s mandarin collections: between 1932 and 1943 C[harles] A[llan] Marris edited New Zealand Best Poems, issued annually by Whitcombe and Tombs.

Central icon for Christians; in NZT XCV.1 (10 Jan. 1968) 9, 24. After JKB’s Fellowship expired at the end of 1967 he accepted employment (teaching and writing) offered by the Catholic Diocese of Dunedin.

In the first year of the Fellowship he wrote about ninety poems; some of them were collected in Runes (London, Wellington etc.: Oxford University Press, 1973). He also wrote three plays and the lectures collected in The Man on the Horse (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1967). In his second year he wrote more poems, some of which were collected in The Lion Skin (Dunedin: Bibliography Room, University of Otago, 1967).

Trappist: the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance (OCSO) is a Catholic order of cloistered and contemplative monks who live according to the rule of St Benedict.

Poor Clare: a member of a Franciscan contemplative order for women founded by St Clare of Assissi and St Francis of Assissi in 1212.

The Angels; in NZT XCV.2 (17 Jan. 1968) 30-31.

Among the Rocks; review of A Taste of Salt Water, poems by Thomas W. Shapcott, and An Island South, poems by Vivian Smith (both books by Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1967); in NZL 1476 (19 Jan. 1968) 19.

Thomas W[illiam] Shapcott (1935- ) was awarded the Myer Award for Australian Poetry for this book.

Angry Penguins: the title of an Australian modernist literary magazine which first appeared in 1940 with Max Harris as publisher.

Ern Malley: Confident that Harris could not tell the difference between a true poem and a piece of surrealist rubbish, James McAuley and Harold Stewart decided to hoax him. They invented a young poet named Ernest (Ern) Lalor Malley and concocted a sequence of cut-and-paste poems which Harris rushed into print, confident that he had discovered a genius. When the hoax was finally uncovered by the mass media Harris was exposed in thepage 358 manner that McAuley and Stewart hoped he would be.

Vivian Smith (1933- ) taught French at the University of Tasmania and then English at the University of Sydney. Between 1975 and 1990 he was the literary editor of Quadrant. This journal was co-founded by McAuley in 1956. Smith was its sole editor until 1963 when Donald Horner became co-editor.

Man’s quest for peace; in NZT XCV.3 (24 Jan. 1968) 30-31.

Georges Bernanos (1888-1948), French writer, was awarded a French Academy Prize for his Diary of a Country Priest. Initially anti-democrat, he became anti-Fascist and rejected Francoism, which he had initially supported. He wrote about this in Diary of my Times. When the Second World War threatened he emigrated to Brazil, from where he supported the Free French forces under Charles de Gaulle. At war’s end de Gaulle invited him to join the French Government. Bernanos returned to France but did not become involved in politics, which he distrusted. He continued to write scathingly of the impact of Government and technical development upon personal freedom.

Hussein: King Hussein of Jordan (1935-99).

Bernardus Johannes Alfrink (1900-1987) was a Dutch Cardinal. After completing advanced theological studies and a period in pastoral ministry he was appointed Coadjutor Archbishop of Utrecht in 1951, becoming Archbishop in 1955 and holding the position until 1975. At the Second Vatican Council he was one of the members of the Board of Presidency and was chosen to deliver one of the final addresses.

Populorum Progressio: This encyclical of Pope Paul VI was issued on 26 March 1967. Its English title is ‘On the Development of Peoples’. It includes such topics as the right to secure employment, a just wage, the right to join a union and the obligation to share resources fairly.

Pacem in Terris: an encyclical issued by Pope John XXIII on 11 April 1963, which called for universal peace based on justice.

The religious life; in NZT XCV.4 (31 Jan. 1968) 30.

Where marital guide-books go so sadly astray; in NZT XCV.5 (7 Feb. 1968) 20-21.

Van der Velde: Presumably Frances Vander Velde, author of Christian Home and Family Living (Grand Rapids, Illinois: Zondervan Publishing House, 1959), which was probably the book Baxter mentions. Its first five (of fourteen) chapter titles are ‘Christian Marriage’, ‘The Christian Home’, ‘Harmony in the Husband and Wife Relationship’, ‘The Husband as Father’, and ‘The Wife as Mother’. The articles were originally published in The Illinois Observer. Its editor referred to this fact in a Foreword:

We prevailed upon the author to be frank, realistic and positive in setting forth both outlines and questions. The reader will soon discover that the page 359objectives have been attained. One cannot read far before the pertinency of the subject matter and the clarity and skill with which it is presented will result in a personal involvement with the problems of the homemaker and parent. This volume will make a valuable contribution to any library of Christian literature and will especially serve women who meet together to study God’s Word.

Vander Velde also wrote She Shall be Called Woman.

Casti Connubii (‘On Christian Marriage’) was the title of an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI on 31 December 1930 in response to some positions adopted by the Anglican Church at the 1930 Lambeth Conference. The encyclical stated the Catholic position on eugenics, birth control and abortion.

The New Morality [1]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1480 (16 Feb. 1968) 12-13.

Introduction to Mr Brandywine Chooses a Gravestone. NZL 1481 (23 Feb. 1968) 11.

The play was written in November 1966 but not produced until 2 February 1968 when William Austin directed its performance for the New Zealand Broadcasting Service.

The cruel Catholic; in NZT XCV.8 (28 Feb. 1968) 20.

Lord Acton: John Emerich Edward Halberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (18341902), belonged to an old English Catholic family. Refused entry to Cambridge University because of his religion, he studied privately. He became an influential thinker and writer, having a particular influence upon British prime minister William Gladstone, who greatly admired him. Acton opposed the First Vatican Council’s declaration of papal infallibility, remarking in a letter on the subject that ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Nonetheless he remained in communion with Rome, which he believed was greater than its particular doctrines. His remarkable scholarship and influence, as well as his elegant writing, caused Lord Rosebery to appoint him regius professor of modern history at Cambridge (which had earlier refused to accept him as an undergraduate). It also earned him honorary doctorates at the universities of Munich, Cambridge and Oxford.

Monica Baldwin (1893-1975) was a niece of Stanley Baldwin, the British prime minister. In 1914 she joined an enclosed religious order. With the approval of Church authorities she left twenty-eight years later, after concluding that she was ‘no more fit to be a nun than an acrobat’. In 1949 her thoughts about the difference between the world inside the convent and the world outside appeared in a book. I Leap Over the Wall: a Return to the World after Twenty-eight Years in a Convent became a best-seller. In the 1960s she moved to Aldeney in the Channel Islands.

Notes Accompanying the Text of The Band Rotunda. The first note was published with the text in LF vol. 22 no. 1 (Mar. 1968) 27. The text of the second note is found in CP 330.

This play was written in 1967 and produced on 15 July 1967 at the Globe Theatre, Dunedin, directed by Rosalie and Patric Carey. (In a letter to me of 14 July 1967 JKB wrote, ‘Am just coming out of midwinter hibernation. The Globe Theatre is starting to put a play of mine on tomorrow – The Band Rotunda – an obscure recapitulation of the Passion in N.Z. terms, with floods of crude jokes and street language, but not without its moments of drama’.) The second note accompanied the programme for that production. (CPl 330).

In ‘James K. Baxter: the Poet as Playwright’ (LF XXII, 1968: 56) Harold (Hal) Smith wrote: ‘Baxter the playwright can be seen to have several things in common with Eugene O’Neill whose raw strength and vitality launched the modern United States drama – Catholicism, the cup of Dionysus, an affinity for Greek tragedy, and a searing integrity.’ He regarded it as ‘a play about the human condition in our time, for which the New Zealand terms are only metaphors’.

Dear Joseph – Look after them; in MM XXXVIII.3 (Mar. 1968) 3.

The bones of our saints; in NZT XCV.9 (6 Mar. 1968) 20.

Thoughts of an Old Alligator [2]; Hocken MS-0783/002.

A talk to University of Otago students, February, 1968. JKB made a number of manuscript additions to this typewritten text. Some have been omitted because they are indecipherable. Hocken holds other versions of this item.

Komsomol: the Communist Union of Youth, an organisation for young people aged fourteen to twenty-eight intended to prepare them to become members of the Communist Party.

I wrote a ballad on the subject: ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’ (CP 396).

Christian Humour; in NZT XCV.10 (13 Mar. 1968) 13.

Dominic Savio (1842-57) was born near Turin, in Italy. He became a pupil of St John Bosco and intended to become a priest but he died of illness at age fourteen. The heroic nature of his daily life was recognised when he was declared a saint by Pope Pius XII in 1954.

The New Morality [2]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1486 (29 Mar. 1968) 13.

What is Our Lady's Crown in Heaven? in MM XXXVIII.4 (Apr. 1968) 7.

Our political apathy; in NZT XCV.15 (17 Apr. 1968) 20-21. Letters of reply by S.L. Dikson, R. Martin, Noel Johnston, and B.P. Morahan in NZT XCV.18 (8 May 1968) 27.

Unconditional Surrender (1961) was the third book in Evelyn Waugh’s trilogy The Sword of Honour. The first two were Men at Arms (1952) and Officers and Gentlemen (1950). In the United States Unconditional Surrender was entitled The End of the Battle.

Stephen Vizinczey (1933- ) wrote poetry and plays before taking part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Subsequently he emigrated to Canada where he learned English. His first novel was In Praise of Older Women: the amorous recollections of Andras Vajda (Toronto: Contemporary Canada Press, 1965).

John [Alfred] A[lexander] Lee (1891-1982): see SB.

Fintan Patrick Walsh (1894-1963) was born as Patrick Tuohy at Patutahi. In 1916 he joined the merchant marine and became involved in militant unionism in the United States. Returning to New Zealand in 1920 he worked as a seaman. Originally a member of the Communist Party he became a staunch anti-Communist by the 1940s. Heavily involved in union politics, he forcibly took over the presidency of the Seamen’s Union in 1927, a position which he retained until his death. He held various other positions and in 1944 became a member of the executive of the Federation of Labour. During the catastrophic 1951 Waterfront Strike he sided with the Government against the Watersiders’ Union. In 1953 he was appointed president of the Federation of Labour. His combative, even menacing approach divided the Labour movement at the same time as it enabled him to retain power.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903, was discredited as a hoax but continues to be referred to when anti-Semitism breaks out. The Protocols pretend to be instructions to members of ‘the Elders’ about controlling world society.

‘Social Credit’ was the name of a particular economic theory of an Englishman, Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952). The New Zealand Social Credit Party was founded in 1953. Its leader in 1966 was Vernon [Francis] Cracknell (1912-89) who won the Hobson (Northland) seat in 1966 but proved ineffective and was not returned in 1969. As a result, after a torrid struggle he was replaced as leader by John O’Brien (1924-90). In 1985 the party was renamed the New Zealand Democratic Party.

The League of Empire Loyalists was established in 1954 to campaign against the dissolution of the British Empire. Its members were discontents from the Conservative Party, a few having fascist ideas. The official Conservative Party disapproved of their antics so the League gave up on the Party and cofounded the National Front in 1967 to oppose non-white immigration.

The John Birch Society is a right-wing, anti-Communist group which advocates small Government and personal freedom. It was founded inpage 362 the United States in 1958 and named after John Birch, a spy and Baptist missionary during World War Two who was killed in 1945 by Chinese Communists.

Do you want to drive them from the Church? in NZT XCV.19 (15 May 1968) 6.

Some aspects of ecumenism; in NZT XCV.20 (22 May 1968) 20.

The modern home; in NZT XCV.21 (29 May 1968) 20-21.

On 19 April 1967 JKB wrote to me about the problems he experienced with domesticity: ‘What I have feared most in life is never some inward or outward pain, but the situation of being trapped in domesticity, in normality, in that segment of life which others no doubt quite properly find satisfying; I have feared it because it might choke up in me the double source of fantasy and truth.’

Contra naturam: ‘Against nature’ (L.)

Some Points of Difficulty; Hocken MS 0975/166.

This item was given to the Hocken Library by JKB in 1968, shortly before he left for Jerusalem. Hocken holds two other versions of it, one of which was lodged by his wife Jacquie – which means that she was aware of the reservations about their marriage which he listed in it.

JKB had been given a position with the Catholic Diocese of Dunedin for one year so it was necessary for him to consider what to do next. In this paper he considered some of the obstacles he needed to confront, including marriage difficulties.

Parts of the document proved impossible to decipher.

[A letter to the Catholic Bishops of New Zealand]; Weir Papers, MB Item 4/1 Box 14. Macmillan Brown Library.

One night in late March 1968, troubled by various difficulties, JKB prayed for relief:

Then I went to sleep. And when I woke in the morning the first thought in my mind – was ‘Jerusalem’ – meaning not the city in Palestine, but the mission station on the Wanganui River. And either immediately or very shortly after a linked thought came into consciousness – that I should go to Jerusalem without money or books, there learn the spoken Maori from a man whom God would provide for me – whose name might or might not be Matiu – and then (God willing) proceed quietly and slowly to form the nucleus of a community where the people, both Maori and Pakeha, would try to live without money or books, worship God and work on the land.

(b) Two central ideas were linked – poverty (somewhat of the Franciscan kind) and aroha, which then seemed to me to be the Humanity of Our page 363Lord, dismembered among the pakehas, in process of being dismembered among the Maoris. The Lord (I speak as if the communication were a genuine one) indicated to me that He had in this country, as it were, two faces on one Head, a Maori face and a pakeha face, that the Maori face was being mangled and hurt by our civilisation, and that He desired me to begin the labour of washing and cleaning it. I was to learn spoken Maori, and assume as far as possible a Maori identity – this because the Maori is in this country the Elder Brother in poverty and suffering and closeness to Our Lord – and it is suitable the pakehas should learn from him not vice versa. (McKay 237)

Let’s be led by the Holy Spirit; in MM XXXVIII.6 (June 1968) 7. Magisterium: The Catholic Church’s teaching authority.

Should we shear the young sheep? in NZT XCV.23 (12 June 1968) 6.

This article provides a further example of JKB’s sympathy for adolescents, based on his memories of his unhappy adolescent experiences.

Peace, power, politics; (letter to editor); in NZT 1497 (14 June 1968) 6.

The Holy Father; in NZT XCV.25 (26 June 1968) 13.

Should Diocesan Priests be Married? In MM XXXVIII (July 1968) 18.

In my View [1]; in NZL 1501 (12 July 1968) 13.

517.The adolescent Christ; in NZT XCV.28 (17 July 1968) 20. The article was accompanied by a poem of JKB’s, ‘The Desert’:

Now that the boy has lost belief (not knowing quite
How or why) many familiar things
Have changed their shape. The stars do not burn
Like fires of home, God’s signal fires, but flare
As barren furnaces in an unending night
That will engulf him. His parents are
Strangers, with faces of grooved stone,
Incomprehensible as those high bulls with wings
Carved in Assyrian quarries. Somewhere, though,
At the centre of the dark remains
The figure of the Virgin bent above
Her Son. He is aware that her tears flow
Without judgment for his and for all sins
And feels in that grey adolescent desert grow
The contradiction of one green shoot of love. [Uncollected]

Gentle and Discreet; review of T.H. White, a biography, by Sylvia Townsend Warner. London: Jonathan Cape with Chatto and Windus, 1967; in NZL 1503 (26 July 1968) 19.

Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) was a novelist, short-story writer and poet. In 1926 she fell in love with Valentine Ackland, a young woman poet. They lived together from 1930 until Ackland died in 1969. Warner was a significant figure in the feminist/lesbian movement. The New York Times described her biography of White as ‘a small masterpiece’.

T[erence] H[anbury] White (1906-64) was born in India, but mainly educated in England. At Queen’s College, Cambridge, he is said to have written a thesis on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur without having read it. He graduated MA in 1928. After teaching for four years he became a fulltime writer. He then read Malory and wrote The Sword in the Stone (1938), the first novel in The Once and Future King, his Arthurian sequence. Not wanting to be involved in World War Two he moved to Ireland for the duration of the war and wrote The Witch in the Wood in 1939. (The ultimate title The Queen of Air and Darkness was borrowed from a poem of Housman’s.) His feelings about the war and other fears darkened his novels. In 1946 he moved to the Channel Islands and in 1948 he published The Candle in the Wind, the fourth book of The Once and Future King. He died in 1964. The Book of Merlyn was published posthumously in 1977. Warner’s biography depicted him as homosexual and sadomasochist, although this was denied by David Higham, his friend and literary agent. But he was certainly an agnostic and drank too much, causing Warner to remark ‘Notably free from fearing God, he was basically afraid of the human race.’

John Malcolm Brinnin (1916-98) graduated from the University of Michigan before undertaking post-graduate studies at Harvard. He brought Dylan Thomas to the United States and subsequently wrote Dylan Thomas in America (London: John Dent & Sons, 1956). He taught at various American universities and wrote on Truman Capote, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. He also published six collections of his own poetry.

519.The Weight of Slavery; review of The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967; in NZL 1504 (2 Aug. 1968) 18.

William [Clark] Styron [Jr] (1925-2006), US novelist, was born in Virginia. In The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) he told his version of the story of the slave who led the 1831 slave revolt in Virginia. His book provoked harsh criticism from both blacks and whites, particularly for his depiction of Turner’s fantasy about raping a white woman and also because of an episode he wrote about Turner and a young slave having a homosexual experience in a wood. Nonetheless the novel was a huge success and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice was also critically acclaimed. In 1982 Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Sophie. Inpage 365 1993 Styron was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Nat Turner (1800-31) was convinced by a vision he had of God that he must kill his enemies. On 21 August 1831 he and several associates travelled from house to house freeing slaves and killing whites of all ages. The rebellion was put down after two days. He was captured, tried and hanged; his corpse was beheaded, flayed and quartered. The authorities executed fifty-six blacks and many others were tortured and killed by slave owners and southern whites.

His lawyer published the basic source document. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a result of research and conversations with Turner after he was captured.

The quotation is from William Sidney Drewry’s The Southampton Insurrection (Washington: The Neal Company, 1900).

Constructive Defence; (letter to editor); in NZL 1504 (2 Aug. 1968) 6.

Mr Hunn has not always been my pin-up boy: in a prefatory note to Pig Island Letters JKB expressed his dislike of Hunn’s right wing and doctrinaire opinions when he wrote, ‘The Hunn Report is a negative and officious statement on Maori social conditions, which some Maori leaders have ironically called their Bible.’

In MS Book 24 JKB noted alongside the relevant passage in ‘Pig Island Letters’, ‘The Hunn Report which some Maoris have referred to ironically as their bible, is a gloomy and erroneous account of Maori social habits, commandeered by the Government to quiet the chronically bad conscience of its bureaucrats.’

This Saint was not made by eating well and being kind; in MM XXXVIII.8 (Aug. 1968) 7-10.

This article was written to celebrate the feast (8 August) of St John [Mary] Vianney, Curé (parish priest) of Ars. He was born in 1786 and after remarkable experiences during the revolution and Napoleonic Wars was ordained a priest in 1815. He became renowned for his prayerful life, his mortification, his devotion to Mary, and his ministry of the Sacrament of Penance (in summer he would spend up to eighteen hours a day in the confessional because people came from other parts of France and even from other countries to make their Confessions to him). He was canonised as a saint in 1925. JKB dialogued with him in ‘Jerusalem Sonnets, 3’ (CP 456).

Unhappiness in Marriage; (letter to editor); in NZL 1505 (9 Aug. 1968) 6.

Are we a nation of skinflints? in NZT XCV.32 (14 Aug. 1968) 38-39.

The National Government (prime minister Keith Holyoake 1960-72) decreed the cutbacks.

Rev. R.M. (Ron) O’Grady BA, MTh was a minister of the Christian Church (Churches of Christ). He served in parishes in Naenae and Christchurch and became associate general secretary of the New Zealand Council of Churches in New Zealand. Later he was appointed associate general secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia, based in Singapore. In 2007 he was a minister at Onehunga Cooperating Parish, Auckland, with Rev. Fakaofo Kaio and Rev. Murray McMeikan.

Vietnam [2]; (letter to editor); in [Dunedin] Evening Star (15 Aug. 1968) 2.

Father Raymond de Jaegher was a mission priest of Belgian extraction who considered himself more of an Asian after spending thirty-five years as a missionary working in China, Vietnam and Taiwan. In Vietnam he became a personal friend of President Ngo Dinh-Diem and accompanied the president on formal visits to Washington as his interpreter. De Jaeger founded the Free Pacific News Agency for Chinese language newspapers in Vietnam. After the president’s death he made a lecture tour of various countries, including the United States and New Zealand, presenting his views on the conduct of the war. He considered that compromise would be fatal and because he accepted the Domino Theory he supported the invasion of North Vietnam by South Vietnamese and other Asian forces. The United States would provide logistical support, bombing, and secure strategic points in the south. He correctly believed that people in the United States would refuse to accept a long war which ended in a stalemate.

Francis Joseph Spellman (1889-1967) was appointed Archbishop of New York (1939), apostolic vicar in charge of pastoral services to Catholics in the armed forces (1939), and Cardinal (1946). He was a strong supporter of the Vietnam War, his stance alienating many clergy and lay people. He also tried to block the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, famously remarking ‘No change will get past the Statue of Liberty.’

Ice-cream and ecumenism; in NZT XCV.33 (21 Aug. 1968) 10-11. Hocken MS-1136/004 is a fair manuscript copy. It was annotated ‘This is the text of a sermon preached by Mr James K. Baxter, at the service in the Anglican Cathedral, Christchurch, which opened the annual conference of the National Council of Churches’ Conference. It was the first time a Catholic layman had spoken from its pulpit. It was reported in Christchurch Press on 16 August 1968, p. 14, under the heading ‘Religious Differences Found Laughable’.

In this talk JKB makes some of the points to which he gave expression three years later when he published Jerusalem Daybook.

a poet of Welsh Methodist extraction whose verses became my private bible: Dylan Thomas.

and by a popular Anglican theologian: C.S. Lewis.

a wooden church not far from this place: the Anglo-Catholic Church of St Michael and All Angels in Oxford Terrace.

My wife grew up as a Congregationalist: the religious movement known as ‘Congregationalism’ is named after the fact that each congregation manages its own affairs. It emerged in Great Britain in the 1560s among small groups of believers who considered that the reformation of the Church of England was insufficiently stringent. Early Congregationalists were punished by the State, which regarded them as a threat to Anglicanism, a State-sponsored religion, so some emigrated to Holland or the United States. (They were represented among ‘the Pilgrim Fathers’.) Congregationalists reject external religious authority, maintaining that authority is located within their congregation and that Jesus Christ is their head. Doctrinally, they believe in one God but assert that Christ is not divine. They rely on the Bible alone for their source of doctrine and emphasise the priesthood of all believers. Rev. Barzillai Quaife was the first known Congregationalist to settle in New Zealand (1940, in the Bay of Islands) but his ministry achieved nothing significant and Jonathan Woodward, who held services in his home in 1842, is generally credited with being the founder. There has always been tension between the doctrine of the single congregation as ‘Church’ and the need for union. The first Congregation of New Zealand was formed in 1884. In 1969 most congregations and their ministers joined the Presbyterian Church. Any Congregationalist ideas which Jacquie Baxter held after she married would have been entirely at odds with her husband’s Roman Catholicism.

‘The bloody sweepings of a loving smile / Scattered like Osiris among the dunes’: actually ‘The bloody sweepings of a loving smile / Strewed like Osiris among the dunes’. From Laurence Durrell’s ‘A Portrait of Theodora’, in Collected Poems 1931-74, edited by James A. Brigham (London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980).

And when Christ, in His great love, refuses to abandon us, but breaks the door down by means of sickness or death or mental breakdown or some other calamity, we shout at Him to go away and leave us alone: JKB used this notion when he wrote the introductory parable to Jerusalem Daybook (1971). He repeated it later in the talk when he said ‘The first cause of our joy is our deliverance from the prison of ancient bigotry – racial, religious, national, economic. The Holy Spirit is smashing down those walls for us.’

In my View [2]; in NZL 1507 (23 Aug. 1968) 13. See letter by Arthur Walker, NZL 1510 (13 Sep. 1968) 6.

The tiger is Christ. When JKB wrote that his ‘wife and other relatives’, in contrast to him, ‘are not happy about my situation’ he meant that Jacquie and others were not happy about the fact that he had chosen to embrace a Christian disciple’s solution to life and life’s problems.

This is emphasised by the apparently casual remark that ‘They are close page 368to the house of a Christian Scientist friend.’ Christian Science advocates a rational approach to religion – and JKB’s abandonment of society, based on faith, appeared to be irrational.

I believe the Church is in the right; in NZT XCV.34 (28 Aug. 1968) 12.

Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical Humanae Vitae (‘On the regulation of human life’) on 25 July 1968.

The Sense of Giving; (letter to editor); in NZL 1508 (30 Aug. 1968) 5-6.

World Scene; (letter to editor); in Dunedin Evening Star (30 Aug. 1968) 2.

Property and Poverty; in Otago University Review (Sep. 1968) 26.

Walter Nash (1882-1968), was the first minister of finance (from 1935) of a Labour Government in New Zealand. He was prime minister from 1957 to 1960 and remained member of parliament for the Hutt electorate until his death.

In 1963 JKB wrote ‘The Ballad of the Soap Powder Lockout’ [uncollected]. It was published posthumously in NZMR 140 (Dec. 1972) 8, where it was noted that ‘This was written during the lock-out of Wellington postmen in 1963 over their refusal to distribute sample packets of soap-powder as part of their regular mail deliveries. JKB was working as a postman at the time, and was on the Posties’ Action Committee. Copies of this ballad were cyclostyled and distributed to selected addresses, P.O.A. is the Post Office Association – the Union covering all P.O. employees which at first refused to support the posties in the dispute.’

It is a country for angels: see ‘Ferry from Lyttelton’ (CP 571).

Australian painter’s picture of Ned Kelly: the painter was Sidney Robert Nolan (1917-92). The painting was ‘Kelly in Spring’.

[The Burns Fellowship]; in LF vol. 22 no. 3 (Sep. 1968) 243-247.

grim, dry poems: these poems comprise the sequence ‘Words to Lay a Strong Ghost’ (CP 356).

Michael Illingworth (1932-88), painter and close friend of JKB, was born in England. He came to New Zealand in 1951 when he was still in his teens and worked for a time as a photographer. In 1955, while considering becoming a painter, he visited London, Paris and Greece. He returned to New Zealand in 1961, married, and moved into a farmhouse near Puhoi. In 1965 he became the first Francis Hodgkins fellow at the University of Otago. JKB met him in Dunedin and kept up contact when he left Dunedin. In fact he spent part of the last week of his life in the home of Michael and Dene Illingworth. They were anxious because they could see how ill he was. He wrote his last three poems there.

[William] Colin Durning was born in Timaru on 18 January 1927. In 1945 he undertook medical intermediate studies at Canterbury University and consequently gained entry to Otago University where he graduated as a Bachelor in Dental Surgery. In 1950 he completed the requirements for his Master’s degree. In 1951 he married Eve Black and early in 1952 he and his wife moved to Chicago, where he took up a fellowship at the University of Chicago which allowed him to complete a PhD in Science and undertake teaching. He stayed there for seven years. He taught in a medical school in Puerto Rico for a short time before spending three and a half years as associate professor at the University of Detroit Dental School. In 1963 he was invited by the University of Otago to apply for a professorship in clinical dentistry and as a result he, his wife and their six children returned to New Zealand.

He met JKB in 1965 at a Catholic University Graduates’ meeting and the two men got on well. Durning was interested in Māori language and culture and became a friend of Jacquie’s also. When he told her that he wanted to learn more in that field she put him in touch with a group which could help him. By this time he was Professor of Prosthetic Dentistry.

After JKB settled at Jerusalem, Durning made several visits there. By this time he had become one of JKB’s closest friends and confidants and during 1969 he received letters with poems enclosed, entitled ‘Poem for Colin 1’, ‘Poem for Colin 2’, and so on. In a letter to me Durning explained

The sonnets came titled ‘Sonnets for Colin Durning’. They came a few at a time usually with a letter Jim wrote ‘written while I settle in here, at Jerusalem. Make no copies but show them to a friend if you wish.’

I did make a copy – for safety reasons. I recall clearly that I had them all at my fortieth birthday, 18 January 1967. [He presumably meant his forty-third birthday, 18 January 1970.]

I kept reading them and a few years [later] – perhaps only eighteen months – I rang Jim and suggested they be published. He agreed and said ‘do what you like with them’. I suggested, later, a new title: ‘Jerusalem Sonnets. Poems for Colin Durning’ and he agreed.

He corrected the proofs when he came down to Dunedin to see his terminally ill father.

After publication I took 250 (?) copies to Jerusalem. He looked through one and said, ‘Now I’ll find out who my true friends are.’

Colin Durning paid for typewriting of the poems but could not afford to pay other costs associated with the book’s publication. At that point Dr Maslen suggested that the book be issued from the Bibliography Room at the university. After Ralph Hotere provided the cover artwork, five hundred copies of the book were printed at the jobbing department of the Otago Daily Times. (The university covered its costs by retaining two hundred and fifty of these for sale.) Copies were sold at a price of $1.25 each. Two further impressions were issued during the next eighteen months.

Durning had never felt fully committed to a career in dental teaching but it came as a shock to some people when he resigned from his position in 1970, his resignation taking effect in January 1971. After that, he told me, he ‘walked off into the darkness’. His journey took him to Invercargill where he did social work before returning to Dunedin where he worked as a tannery chemist.

He was at the Port Chalmers tannery when JKB died on 22 October 1972. In response to a request from Jacquie he flew to Wellington and accompanied her, Hilary and John to Auckland. He helped Jacquie in various ways, including organising a coffin, and then went to Jerusalem with JKB’s body and the family in a van supplied by Ngā Tamatoa. After the funeral Durning travelled back to Dunedin but he returned to Jerusalem in 1973 and stayed there for four months.

After leaving Jerusalem he gained short-term employment in the dental department at Wellington Public Hospital and then long-term employment as head of the dental department at Porirua Hospital, where he came to love the people. He felt a close bond with Māori, who were frequently mocked within the system. He helped establish a support group for them, became involved with other Māori groups, and was eventually invited to become a catechist to the Catholic Māori community.

By 1994/95 two of the people said to him ‘We need a priest!’ and suggested that he begin training for the priesthood. Nearly seventy years old, he spent eighteen months doing theological studies and pastoral training at Holy Cross College in Dunedin. In 1996 he was ordained for the Archdiocese of Wellington, with a special ministry to Māori. He originally worked at Holy Family Parish, Porirua, then at Elsdon, and finally at a unique newly founded Māori parish in Porirua named Parihi o te Ngakau Tapu (Parish of the Sacred Heart).

Colin Durning is now (2012) retired in Porirua, although he regularly helps in ministry when help is required. He has eight children

Birth Control Clinics are the New Temples; in MM XXXVIII (Sep. 1968) 9.

Sane or Mad; review of William Blake, an introduction to the man and his work, by T. Raymond Lister. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1968; in NZL 1509 (6 Sep. 1968) 20.

On 4 May 1943 JKB told Ginn that ‘Blake is to me pure poetry.’ (Millar 215).

Eidetic images: On one occasion when JKB was stayingatmy invitation at St Bede’s College, Christchurch, he told me during a walk after breakfast one morning that on the previous night he had had a vision of Mary. Somewhat taken aback I asked him what she looked like. ‘Much the same as previously’, he said, adding that he had seen her on other occasions. He mentioned page 371that his daughter Hilary had also seen her. Later, having thought this over, I mentioned Blake’s visions to him and, in an attempt to learn how JKB explained the source of his own visions, I asked him if he could account for Blake’s visions. He replied ‘Yes, he had the gift of eidetic imagery.’ So I concluded that JKB believed that he himself had this gift.

It all depends how you feel; James Q. Oxter’s dictionary of gobbledygook; in NZT XCV.36 (11 Sep. 1968) 8.

Charles Davis (1923-99) was one of the most heralded Catholic theologians (along with Hans Kung, Edward Schillebecx and Karl Rahner) at the time of the Second Vatican Council until he left the Church in 1966. The immediate trigger for action was Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned contraceptives. In his 1967 explanation A Question of Conscience Davis explained that he was no longer able to accept the Church’s claim to have a monopoly of truth.

James Q. Oxter was a see-through pseudonym occasionally used by JKB.

The fortunate country; in NZT XCV.36 (11 Sep. 1968) 13, 15.

By this time JKB was disillusioned with the articles he was writing for the NZ Tablet – as he told Sam Hunt:

Dear Sam. I thank you for your letter
And for the poem too, much better
To look at than the dreary words
I day by day excrete like turds
To help the Catholic bourgeoisie
To bear their own insanity . . . (‘Letter to Sam Hunt’, CP 429)

Sam Hunt (1946-), poet and friend of JKB: see SB.

The first question we ask when somebody suggests that a new branch of industry should be established is ‘How will it affect the relationships already existing among people in that neighbourhood?’ And the second is: ‘How will its waste products affect the natural environment?’: JKB is supporting the need to care for the environment but is putting the needs of the community of people first.

Contraception and the Pope [1]; (letter to the editor); in NZL 1510 (13 Sep. 1968) 5-6.

This was provoked by Alexander MacLeod’s editorial ‘It is Paul VI who writes’ in NZL 1507 (23 Aug. 1968) 5. McLeod chose the title to mimic the statement of the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (Ch. 16. v. 21) or Colossians (3.18).

MacLeod appended an editorial note to JKB’s letter: ‘Mr Baxter has no grounds for saying that the editorial suggested or assumed that “artificialpage 372 contraception leads to marital joy and the forbidding of that practice leads to misery”.’

Rebellion or resignation; in NZT XCV 37 (18 Sep. 1968) 20-21.

Changing Over; review of Journeys in Belief, edited by Bernard Dixon. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968; in NZL 1511 (20 Sep. 1968) 21.

first a believer in Christ, and secondly, when I come to define that belief, a Catholic: an important distinction more easily made by one who had converted to Catholicism. (See No. 525, ‘Ice-cream and Ecumenism’.)

[Joseph] Hilaire [Pierre René] Belloc (1870-1953) was born in France, although his mother was English. He graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with first-class honours in History. In 1902 he became a naturalised Englishman. He served one term as a Liberal member of parliament but became disillusioned with politics. He produced numerous essays, poems, pamphlets and books. His attitude was often controversial and his style sometimes satirical. A staunch Catholic, he frequently partnered G.K. Chesterton in debates and discussions. Belloc, Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells were the best-known prose writers of the Edwardian period. The Life of Hilaire Belloc was written by Robert Speaight and published in 1957.

William Franklin (‘Billy’) Graham Jr (1918-), US evangelist, was born in North Carolina. While attending the Florida Bible Institute he experienced a call to become a preacher. In 1943, the year he graduated in anthropology from Wheaton College, Illinois, he married Ruth Bell and they subsequently had five children. In 1944 he began a radio ministry. From 1948 to 1952 he was president of the Northwestern Bible College. In 1947 he began revivalist meetings at which those attending were invited to come forward and accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour. It has been said that he preached to two hundred and fifteen million people internationally and to many more through TV, radio and video. A friend of many US presidents, he has been honoured with numerous awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Abraham Isaac Carmel, as Kenneth Charles Cox, was ordained a Catholic priest in St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh. Ten years later he became the first priest in a thousand years to convert to Orthodox Judaism. He lived in Israel for a short time but as a result of illness decided to emigrate to the United States where he was employed as a teacher at a high school and travelled the country telling his story chiefly to children and young people. He experienced discrimination at the hands of ‘the Jewish autocracy’ and was not permitted to have a significant ministry. He believed that he was not taken seriously because he had not achieved financial prosperity and said that he regretted not taking the steps to achieve it. This experience caused him to regret leavingpage 373 Israel where he had been happy. His body was buried there. He told his story in So Strange My Path.

Christopher [William Bradshaw] Isherwood (1904-86) attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, but left in 1925 without achieving a degree. That year he became a close friend of W.H. Auden. Through Auden he met and became a friend of Stephen Spender. During the early Thirties he lived in Berlin, attracted by its sexual freedom. He had affairs with young men and wrote stories and novels, some based on the theme of mother-son conflict. In 1933 he left Berlin to live with a German youth in various European cities. His novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) became the basis of his play I Am a Camera (1951) which, in turn, formed the basis of the musical Cabaret (1966). He and Auden collaborated on three plays, The Dog Beneath the Skin (1935), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1939). The pair went to China in 1938 to research material for Journey to a War (1939). In 1939 when they emigrated to the United States, Isherwood initially stayed with Auden in New York but then moved to Hollywood, California. He soon became committed to Vedanta, collaborating with Swami Prabhavananda to translate some Hindu scriptures. In 1946 he became an American citizen. In 1953, aged forty-eight, he began a relationship with eighteen-year-old Don Bachardy which lasted until Isherwood died in 1986, aged eighty-one. His autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, was published in 1976.

A letter to a layman; in NZT XCV 38 (25 Sep. 1968) 20-21.

A Costly Vision; review of The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, by Theodore Roethke. London: Faber and Faber, 1968; in NZL 1512 (27 Sep. 1968) 21-22.

First edition 1961 (Garden City, New York: Doubleday). First Faber edition 1966.

Theodore (Ted) Roethke (1908-63), US poet, studied at Harvard before teaching at various universities including Michigan State, where he began experiencing episodes of manic depression which had an effect upon his poetry. He married in 1953 but even though he did not tell his wife beforehand about his illness she became a great supporter. His last teaching post was at the University of Washington. In 1966 his Collected Poems was published. His biography The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke was written by Allan Seager (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

Maenads: the female retinue of the Greek god Dionysus. They were sometimes depicted in a drunken, sexual frenzy and were reputed to tear animals to pieces and devour them.

Hebrus: a Thracian river god, personalised from the river Hebrus which flowed from Northern Greece into the Aegean Sea.

Eurydice: daughter of Apollo and beloved wife of Orpheus. After she died he mourned her by playing such affecting music that he was permitted to recover her from the underworld.

Don't water down the wine of Catholic doctrine; review of Your Word is Near, by Houb Oosterhuis. Westminster, Maryland, USA: Newman Press, 1967; in MM XXXVIII (Oct. 1968) 25.

This book costs too much: Its cost was $4.95.

In my View [3]; in NZL 1513 (4 Oct. 1968) 12.

Last Retreat of a Senile Poet; Critic XLIV (10 Oct. 1968) 8 (where it is entitled ‘Baxter on Student Poetry’).

It was reprinted as ‘Last Retreat of a Senile Poet’ in Salient XXXII.25 (9 Oct. 1969) 18. The second title is preferred for this item.

Sea and Land; review of My Beachcombing Days: ninety sea sonnets by John Blight. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1968; and Poems, Volume Two, by Gwen Harwood. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1968; in NZL 1514 (11 Oct. 1968) 21.

Gwendoline (Gwen) [Nessie] Harwood, Australian poet and librettist, won a number of awards and honours.

The safe world; in NZT XCV.41 (16 Oct. 1968) 20.

Digging Deep; review of The White/Garnett Letters, edited by David Garnett. London: Jonathan Cape, 1968; in NZL 1515 (18 Oct. 1968) 21.

Correspondence between T[erence] H[anbury] White (1906-64), novelist, and David Garrett (1892-1981), writer and publisher.

Contraception and the Pope [2]; (letter to editor); NZL 1515 (18 Oct. 1968) 6.

This correspondence was generated by M.H. Holcroft’s editorial in the NZL issue of 23 August, opposing the papal ban on contraceptives imposed in the encyclical Humanae Vitae. JKB first replied under the heading ‘Contraception and the Pope’ in NZL 1510 (13 Sep. 1968) 5, then replied further in this issue of 18 October. In the same issue C.K. Stead wrote that Catholics in the Auckland Diocese were not allowed to use the Pill or to purchase copies of the NZ Tablet, emanating from Dunedin, in which JKB published articles regularly. Through the letters column in the Listener, Stead invited JKB to write ‘another of his very long letters’ which might justify this move by the Bishop of Auckland. The editor replied ‘Mr Baxter may write if he wishes, but briefly.’

Contraception and the Pope [3]; (letter to editor); in NZL 1517 (1 Nov. 1968) 6.

Our Lady and the Sacrament of Penance; in MM XXXVIII.11 (Nov. 1968) 5.

Another Baxter Globe Premiere; in ODT (4 Nov. 1968) 15.

In my View [4]; in NZL 1520 (22 Nov. 1968) 13.

Martin Buber (1878-1965), philosopher, was of Jewish descent. He was born in Austria. In 1923 his celebrated essay Ich und Du (‘I and Thou’) was published. It developed his philosophy of dialogue, in the course of which he distinguished between the I-Thou and I-It relationship. In 1930 he began teaching at the University of Frankfurt but he resigned in 1933 when Hitler came to power. Before long he was refused the right to teach. In 1938 he abandoned Germany for Jerusalem, where he lectured in anthropology and sociology at Hebrew College. He supported the development of both a Jewish and a Palestinian State.

Western Commentary; review of Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, by Edward Conze. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1968; in NZL 1520 (22 Nov. 1968) 22.

[Eberhart] (Edward) [Julius Dietrich] Conze (1904-79) was an Anglo-German scholar. In mid-life he turned to Buddhism, adopting spiritual practices and translating many Buddhist texts.

Prajnaparamita hrdaya Sutra: ‘Prajnaparamita Thought’ is ‘The Perfection of Transcendental Wisdom’. A ‘Sutra’ is a form of composition which uses aphorisms.

Dharma: the teachings of the Buddha expounding natural law.

Sanga: Sanskrit for a monastic assembly or association.

Chán sect: Chán (Zen Buddhism) developed in China after the arrival of an Indian monk named Bodhidharma. In the ninth century the Buddhist schools in China were subjected to persecution but a rural Chán survived and developed into five schools which have come to be regarded as five sects.

Suzuki: Daisetu Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), a Japanese writer on Buddhism, influenced Western thought by his translations and periods of teaching at Western universities.

Tantra: a spiritual movement in medieval India expounded in Tantras (scriptures) which interpreted the whole of reality as expressing the joy of Divine Consciousness.

Hakuin [Ekaku]: Japanese Master of Zen Buddhism.

Mahayana: Mahayana Buddhism is one of the two chief traditions of Buddhism practised today.

Bodhisattvas: enlightened beings in Bodhisattva Buddhism. Some of the young people JKB met were interested in Buddhism and this experience helped him recognise its ‘clarity and warmth’.

Conscience and the Pill; Dialectic (Dec. 1968) 27-33.

St Joseph’s Trials – and Joys; in MM XXXVIII.12 (Dec. 1968) 39-41.

These are sincerely held but nonetheless loaded comments about marriage as JKB knew it, especially in regard to the role of a father.

Nowadays, if any husband had a dream which he thought might have been sent him by God, it is likely that his wife would shake her head and suggest either a holiday or a visit to a psychiatrist: this is an oblique comment on Jacquie’s response to his religious experience in Dunedin.

In my View [5]; in NZL 1524 (20 Dec. 1968) 13.

Karma: in Buddhism and Hinduism, the ultimate effect of a person’s actions during their lives which dictate their destiny.

Pope John; Hocken (ARC-0027) MS-0739/021. Est. date.

This is the script of a radio review of a biography, published in 1967, written by Muriel Trevor (1919-2000). She graduated from St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 1942, and was received into the Catholic Church in 1950. As well as her biography of Pope John she also wrote biographies of Philip Neri, King James II, and John Henry Newman. (The latter was awarded the 1962 James Tait Black Prize for biography.) She also wrote historical novels and children’s stories.

[Review of Fleur Adcock’s Tigers]; Hocken MS-0739/020 Est. date.

This was another radio review, presumably from 1968. (Tigers was published in London by Oxford University Press in 1967.) Adcock was a longterm friend and correspondent of JKB’s. In her 1974 collection The Scenic Route she recalled their friendship in ‘In Memoriam: James K. Baxter’:

Dear Jim, I’m using a Shakespearian form
to write you what I’ll call a farewell letter.
Rhyming iambics have become the norm
for verse epistles, and I’m no trendsetter.
Perhaps you’ll think it’s going back a bit,
but as a craftsman you’ll approve of it.

What better model have we, after all?
Dylan the Welshman, long your youthful passion,
doesn’t quite do now, and the dying fall
page 377 of Eliot was never in your fashion.
Of North American the one you’d favour
is Lowell. But his salt has the wrong savour:

our ocean’s called Pacific, not Atlantic –
which doesn’t mean to say Neruda meets
the case. As for the classically romantic –
well, maybe it was easier for Keats:
I’d write with more conviction about death
if it were clutching at my every breath.

And now we’ve come to it. The subject’s out:
the ineluctable, the all-pervasive.
Your death is what this letter’s all about;
and if so far I’ve seemed a bit evasive
it’s not from cowardice or phoney tact –
it’s simply that I can’t believe the fact.

I’d put you, with New Zealand, in cold storage
to wait for my return (should I so choose).
News of destruction can’t delete an image:
what isn’t seen to go, one doesn’t lose.
The bulldozed streets, the buildings they’ve torn down
remain untouched until I’m back in town.

And so with you, framed in that sepia vision
a hemisphere away from me, and half
the twenty years I’ve known you. Such division
converts a face into a photograph:
a little blurred perhaps, the outlines dim,
but fixed, enduring, permanently Jim.

I saw you first when I was seventeen,
a word-struck student, ripe for dazzling. You
held unassuming court in the canteen –
the famous poet in the coffee-queue.
I watched with awe. But soon, as spheres are apt
to do in Wellington, ours overlapped.

I married, you might say, into the art.
You were my husband’s friend; you’d wander in
on your way home from teaching, at the start,
page 378 for literary shop-talk over gin.
And then those fabled parties of one’s youth:
home-brew and hot-lines to poetic truth.

Later the drinks were tea and lemonade,
the visits family ones, the talk less vatic;
and later still, down south, after I’d made
my getaway, came idiosyncratic
letters, your generous comments on my verse,
and poems of your own. But why rehearse

matters which you, acute observer, wise
recorder, don’t forget? And now I falter,
knowing your present case: those tolerant eyes
will register no more. But I can’t alter
this message to a dirge; the public attitude
isn’t my style: I write in simple gratitude.

To think of elegies is to recall
several of yours. I find, when I look through
your varied, eloquent poems, nearly all
frosted with hints at death. What can I do
now, when it has become your own condition,
but praise all that you gave to the tradition?

Some Problems of Ecumenism; Hocken MS-0975/140. Est. date.

JKB refers to Miss Ethel Law, a gracious woman, who coached him and me (separately) in Latin when we were attending Victoria University College in 1954. She asked me if I knew him (I did not); and told him she was tutoring me. But we did not make contact until some years later.

The Fisherman’s Licence; Hocken, MS-0975/139. Est. date.

A Minister of Culture; radio talk for YC Programme; Hocken MS0975/126. Est. date.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: A television series from 1964 to 1968 about the undertakings of two secret agents who represented United Network Command for Law and Enforcement (although one of its two writers originally wanted the acronym to imply either ‘Uncle Sam’ or the United Nations’.

The Prodigal Son; Hocken MS-0975/141. Est. date.

MS-0975/132 is a further copy.

Even though this is a common enough title it is possible that JKB borrowed it because on 17 June 1960 he reviewed James Kirkup’s poetry collection The Prodigal Son in NZL 1085.

[About the Globe Theatre]; in Rosalie and Patric Carey Present the Globe Theatre, Rosalie Carey and Patric Carey. Dunedin: John McIndoe Ltd, 1968. No pagination.

The Devil and Mr Mulcahy was first produced at the Globe Theatre in 1967. (It was reviewed by Philip Smithells in NZL 1476, 19 Jan. 1968: 20.) See H[al] W. Smith, ‘James K. Baxter: the poet as playwright’, in LF XXII (1968) 56.