In the Case of Bohemia versus Suburbia

The imagined platonic dialogue that follows is an extract from a lecture I gave to university students in Dunedin earlier this year in which I took another look at that rather nebulous and over-rated phenomenon poetic inspiration. To help place the dialogue in context I have included a few extracts from that part of the lecture which preceded it.

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The conception of a poet as a man possessed by a power greater than himself, divine or demonic, has been held by cultures. It is of course largely inaccurate. There is no irreversible driving force to make a man write poems. Almost all of a poet’s life is spent in non-poetic activities – working, talking, eating, drinking, betting, watching films, reading books, playing with his children, courting, sleeping – or that universal hobby of the human race, doing neither what he should do nor what he wants to do. . . .

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To make a poem is an entirely gratuitous act: no one but the poet will really miss it, if it remains unwritten; no one will pay highly for its production; no one’s salvation or damnation will depend on reading it.

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The majority of our successful New Zealand poets have graduated in Bohemia. Bohemia is a state of mind, a view of oneself: its influence is essentially liberating. Bohemian and suburbanite are accustomed to glare at each other across barbed wire. For the sake of making their internal argument clear, I will construct a Platonic dialogue.

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George and Nathaniel Jones, two brothers, are sitting under an apple tree in Nathaniel’s back garden, drinking beer on a spring afternoon. Nathaniel is an intelligent man of thirty-five, First Assistant in a Grade Seven School, temperate in his habits, authoritarian in the classroom, tolerant in the staffroom, a little bald, but still spruce and active. He has two children and is active in the local Parent and Teacher Association; and except for one lamented occasion on holiday in Rotorua, he has always been faithful to his charming wife. He has a rather strong dislike of Leftist political views. In his youth he had a stab at painting, and still wishes his job gave him time to takepage 327 it up again. The sad little water-colours are stacked away in a cupboard in the spare room.

George, on the other hand, has held down briefly a number of jobs – journalism, scrub-cutting, a job as a hotel porter, and lately a short spell as editor of an astrological magazine for better betting. At thirty-three he looks older than Nathaniel, saggy round the jowls, with a heavy paunch and a bloodhound’s eye. He has produced a good deal of literary work – a book of poems and one of short stories (the first obscure and the second rather scabrous); a few inflammatory political articles; and an unfinished novel about his first marriage. He and his second wife and their four children live in a shack in Auckland, on the North Shore, with chickens and an acre of vegetables. Their parties are famous throughout the district.

In real life George and Nathaniel avoid each other like the plague. They never meet except in times of family sickness. But today they are sitting under the apple tree.

Nathaniel: ‘A beautiful day, George. How good it is to relax after the week’s work. Look at the apple blossom on the grass. Like ballet dancers. It reminds me of that great line from Keats –

Beauty is truth; truth beauty; that is all
We know on earth and all we need to know.’

George: ‘The flowers remind me of kapok. From a burst mattress.’

N: ‘What a horrible thought! I sometimes wonder why you are the poet of the family. It seems to me that you’re more interested in the label on a whisky bottle than in any works of nature.’

G: ‘I can answer your Keats with a better line from Durrell –

As for me I now move
Through many negatives to what I am.

The trouble with you boys who don’t write is that you want to eat the icing and leave the cake. What I want is real experience boiled down into a few phrases. Do you know Johnson’s lines on Hart Crane –

. . . he came
pale on that northbound ship, dreaming release
in the lion’s den . . . .

That’s where the steel strikes the flint. It could be you or me crossing Cook Strait.’

N: ‘You or I! No, it couldn’t. You always like the gloomiest poems, George.

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A worm’s eye view of life. What has the suicide of a drunken writer got to do with us?’

G: ‘As the lights in the penitentiary grow dim when the current is switched on for the electric chair, so we quiver in our hearts at a suicide, for there is no suicide for which all society is not responsible . . .’.

N: ‘You must have a filing system in your head; but it makes no difference to juggle quotes. Society can’t be held responsible for its misfits.’

G: ‘Misfits be damned! I believe in the human race: you and me and Hart Crane. You can’t show me a single man without scar tissue an inch thick on his hide. But you want to pretty it up – happy husbands and smiling wives; the manager of the store patting the head of the office boy; progress with a capital “P”. When you were twenty you knew better than that. Or did you? You’ve shut the doors one by one, playing policeman to kids.’

N: ‘You don’t believe in any standards, do you? Well, I’m different. I think we’ve got to be realists. A man is a social being; from the time he is born he has to conform to certain accepted standards of thought and behaviour which he derives from his parents and the people around him. Otherwise we’d have anarchy – each man pulling in a different direction, robbery, rape, chaos.’

G: ‘I didn’t say I had no standards. It’s just that we have a different sense of values. What do you value most in the world?’

N: ‘A clear conscience and the feeling that I’ve done my duty.’

G: ‘Like a baby that’s just come off the pot.’

N: ‘Well, what do you value most?’

G: ‘Love.’

N: ‘Love can mean a lot of things.’

G: ‘There’s a better word for it in the vernacular.’

N: ‘You’re quite impossible, George. If you weren’t my brother I’d say you were insane. When I think of what poor Marge has to put up with. . . .’

G: ‘Don’t you worry about Marge – that’s between me and her. You don’t buy the right to read me a sermon just because I happen to be drinking your beer. I didn’t say it was the only thing I valued; I said I valued it most. After that, the company of friends, a Chinese meal, swimming in the surf, walking in the bush, writing and reading, the earth itself –

This dust, this royal dust, our mother
Modelled by spring-belonging rain
Whose soft blank drops console
A single vineyard’s fever or a region. . . .’

N: ‘Do you believe in God?’

G: ‘Yes, I do.’

N: ‘What God, then?’

G: ‘The Man on the Cross.’

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N: ‘You’re a strange mixture, George. One minute you talk like an out- and-out pagan and the next minute like a lad from the S.C.M. I must admit that lately I’ve been thinking along religious lines myself. Material values aren’t everything, George. Sometimes I wake early in the morning and lie there in the dark, with my life laid out in front of me – school, home, Gillian, the P.T.A. – and it all amounts to nothing.’

G: ‘That’s what I call the two-in-the-morning blues.’

N: ‘Yes. Well, Gillian said I should go and see a doctor; but instead I’ve been making a study of Moral Rearmament. There’s a religion for you, George. Undenominational. Recharge your moral battery from the Great Accumulator. There’s no need to change society: Just change yourself. Let God take over. If you can measure yourself against the Four Absolutes – Absolute Love, Absolute Honesty –’.

G: ‘Absolute bulldust. You try to give an ideological answer to an existential problem. It can’t be done. You remind me of the story about Plato. He lay in his bath one morning, trying to figure out the uses of the navel. Two hours he lay there, running in hot water every time the bath got cold. Working it out by logic, he decided the navel had no use at all. So he unscrewed it, and tossed it over his shoulder. Then he stood up in the bath with a sense of a good job done. And his backside fell off.’

N: ‘Whenever I try to talk sense, you refuse to be serious. Just for once I’d like to hear you justify your own view of life. I don’t think you’re a bad man; just muddled; a bit of an actor too. You say that the world is a kind of a cesspit, full of misery and hardship and wrong-doing. Well, even if that’s so (and I think it depends on our own choice what we make of life) how are you going to set things in order without education, hard work, moral standards and self-respect? If you had your way, we’d all be living in caves – and where would your audience be? Who’d print your books?’

G: ‘All right, I’ll try to answer you – though I don’t like using your language; it twists the things I want to say. Here am I, George Jones. Thirty- three. When I was a boy I looked around me and liked what I saw – things, people, the sky and earth. I wrote my name with a stick on the sand and the tide washed it away again. There was a mystery to which I belonged – it looked back out of the flax bushes, from the holes in the asphalt where we played marbles, from the food steaming on the plate, the rain running down the window, and a girl’s round face, a Madonna with pig-tails. It burned inside me like a hot wire. But the old voices said – “Wait till you’re older, George. Then you’ll understand.” And I listened to them. I went to school and learned how to add money and who were the Kings of England. And slowly I saw myself as a different person – George Jones, accountant, polite to customers, doing the right thing, saying the right thing, digging the garden in the week-end, anxious whenever the train was late. But the stories and poems were not about that – they were full of violence, myselfpage 330 as Prometheus nailed to the rock, mysterious women, impossible adventures in seaport towns. The two selves looked at each other across a barbed wire fence. When I was sixteen, the Dad wanted me to train for the business, I told him what to do with it. The next year I went to Auckland and never came back. You stayed, though, and kept the home together. Well, you made your choice and I made mine.

‘Two marriages, two books, and a lot of booze – what do I get out of it? I think I know myself better than I did then. Did I just leave home in order to get drunk and climb in a woman’s window at one o’clock in the morning? You might as well say that a freezing worker strikes for the threepence an hour raise. We both strike because our society is a half-world, not real enough to live in.

‘Three years ago I nearly changed my mind. Marge had left me, and gone up north with the kids. I’d been hitting the bottle for months, and I lay there in the dirty shack, out of a job, sick, and riddled with self-pity. It seemed to me that a man with a pot belly and a grey business suit walked into the room. “Well, George,” he said, “I’ve got you at last. You’ve no one to blame but yourself. Always you’ve followed your own selfish view of things, and look how you’ve ended up. On the rubbish heap. There’s a razor in the drawer. Why don’t you take it out and use it on yourself?”

‘Then I knew who it was, the Father of Lies: but I couldn’t think of the right answer. He gave me an old, sanctimonious smile then. “There’s no sense in kicking against the pricks,” he said. “We are all sinners. You have the same faults as the rest of mankind – lust, anger, laziness and pride. But the last is the one that is killing you. Why can’t you put your head down and pass under the yoke?” “Whose yoke?” I said. “My yoke. In time you can even come to like it.”’

‘Then I thought of Marge, and suddenly knew the answer. “Go back to where you came from,” I said, “Amo ergo sum: I love therefore I am.” And as he went out the door a new day was beginning.’

N: ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. . . .’

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