Title: No Dream But Life: James K. Baxter’s Spark to a Waiting Fuse and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 28: Autumn 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 2002, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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In Production

The unicorns and heavenly creatures of adolescence inhabit both Spark to a Waiting Fuse and The Lord of the Rings. Written during the early 1940s, when Baxter was still a teenager, Spark to a Waiting Fuse is, to use a filmic term, the poet in ‘pre-production’. Like Peter Jackson's orcs in make-up, he is being shaped, and it is a time-consuming, exacting task. This imaginative formation consumes over 400 pages of the book.

While the letters to and from the conscientious objector Noel Ginn reflect a passionate engagement with the World and the Word, Baxter's early poems (many of which are published for the first time in Spark) attach themselves rather more readily to the latter. Like Frodo Baggins scampering up a hillside, the Gifted One heads immediately for the high ground of the Western canon.

Like the young Baxter in his poetry, Frodo Baggins (played by Elijah Wood, whose name embodies both the film's prophetic and Green tendencies) seems as overwhelmed by all the symbolism he finds himself embroiled in as by events themselves. His lily-white pallor and fine, almost feminine features are troubled not only by the manifest Evil afoot in the world but by the sheer profusion of symbols and portents. In the echo chamber of the New Zealand landscape, Frodo frets and goes pale, is twisted and turned, skewered and rode off with (by Liv Tyler). At once child and man, he is the embodiment, too, of the young poet in whose ‘Groved ruined tomb; sword-winds of Ossian / Hurtle and moan …’ (as Baxter intones in ‘Cry Mourn’).

The boy-hobbit and the hirsute elder, Gandalf, suggest two poles often associated with James K. Baxter—the ‘two Baxters’ Patrick Lawlor wrote of and Margaret Lawlor Bartlett drew for a book cover illustration. Publicity for The Lord of the Rings unconsciously, but instructively, echoed that drawing.

Apart from being launched on the same night, the productions of Jackson/Tolkien and Baxter/Ginn share certain points of origin and, perhaps, have a common destination in mind. The imaginative plateau—this particularly ‘high country’—on which the mythologisers James K. Baxter and Peter Jackson find themselves suggests that maybe all roads do lead to Middle Earth Aotearoa—a place which Baxter would come to via the ‘high road’ of Milton, Shakespeare and Blake, whereas Jackson would come by the ‘low road’ of afternoon television, matiness, splatter movies and trash culture. Differing routes aside, there is definitely some shared pre-history to both productions. Greek mythology and Arthurian legend (and their reinvention through literature and, more recently, film) permeate the work of both poet and filmmaker. It's easy to imagine both artists in their youth gravitating towards Blake, Dante, maybe even Chaucer. Jackson's dark satanic mills under Saruman's tower could have been lifted from Blake's Industrial Revolution London or at a stretch Baxter's ‘Stonegut Sugarworks’—only in this latest rendition the dehumanising of the workers is complete and the slaves are indeed no longer human.

In comparison to the Baxter/Jackson vision of industrialised hell, Peter Jackson's Hobbiton (filmed in the Matamata district) is the arcadia of remembered childhood as encapsulated in Blake's ‘Songs of Innocence’. It is the archetypal Eden threatened from outside by the forces of environmental ruin. From this sanctuary our various heroes venture forth into Baxter's ‘implacable grey forests of the world’ and the ‘iron wood’. At a further remove the child-like company could be seen to be heading in the direction of what Baxter, in a letter to Noel Ginn, calls ‘the authentic and terrible grey rock desert of adolescence’.