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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Writers in New Zealand: a questionnaire

Writers in New Zealand: a questionnaire

This questionnaire raises all, or nearly all, the practical problems that are likely to worry a man who wants to spend some of this time writing. They are chips off a single granite block, possibly from that remarkable boulder which Sisyphus, streaming with sweat, shoves uphill every day and night in the not- so-imaginary Greek underworld. It seems to me that no one is likely to be contented with a series of deadpan answers. The real problem raised concerns the weight, size, shape, geological or theological formation of this boulder, and what handholds (if any) can be found on its surface. So my answers will be aimed, however obliquely, at a solution.

I have never had enough time to write. In my late teens I developed the habitpage 417 of throwing up a job, drinking for a week or so, writing for a month or so, then taking another job. It worked quite well. The best poems I have written (those in Blow, Wind of Fruitfulness) were written in this way. But nowadays I have no time at all to write. From 7.30 to 8.30 a.m. on a weekday I am occupied in getting to work; from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. I am occupied with work; between 4.30 and 5.30 I return home; from then until midnight I am occupied in meeting the very real demands of family life and social life. The weekends are very properly devoted to gardening, family outings, painting the kitchen ceiling, a little reading, changing the night soil for the cat, conversations with my wife, and answering a voluminous correspondence. The time between midnight and 2 a.m., which younger men devote to erotic entertainment, is the only time free for serious concentrated writing. Fortunately I have a robust physique. But the time-picture is a misleading one. In fact, for the past fifteen years, I have found time for writing by robbery – robbery from my employers, from my wife, from my children, and possibly from the Almighty. By an artificial schizophrenia, never giving my full attention to any work on hand, I have been able to sustain that interior life which in its turn leads to crime, divorce, hypocrisy, and the incubation of poems. This requires a casehardened conscience. As the carpenters arrive, as the telephone rings, as children sicken and wives explode like cannon crackers, as the priest repeats the absolution, the poem-making machine grinds on regardless. It is, I think, a genuine diabolical miracle.

Money is also a problem. It distracts the mind from any sustained meditation. If one has it one thinks about it. If one has not got it, one thinks about getting it. I dislike money intensely. Once I earned £50 in one year by writing; and for my worst (and only) piece of sustained non-critical writing, Jack Winter’s Dream, I received about £20 from the N[ew] Z[ealand] B[roadcasting] S[ervice] and about £15 from Landfall. That kept me in tobacco for the year, but not in coffee.

I have been abroad once during my adult life – to India, under a UNESCO Cultural Grant, in 1958. It came as a great surprise to me, and I do not expect to be able to repeat the experience. But I would like to go to France before I die; and to the Holy Land, if that is possible. These are irrelevant wishes. I have had nearly thirty jobs in the past fifteen years; all of them kept me alive and tended to prevent me from writing.

Quite frankly I do not think that travel grants, commissions, different jobs, or even leisure, could give me ‘freedom to write’. It is my family who need the money, not me; or who will need it if I stop work and thus cease to support them, or die, or go for a long rest in Avondale; but they will need thousands, not hundreds, and only hundreds are likely to be offering. In Freudian symbolism, money equals dung, and dung is necessary to manure the crops. I would be glad to see new prizes and grants. I am quite ready to get on the gravy train. But I will never take off my hat to the driver.

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One becomes used to living on the razor’s edge. If my economic or social or domestic condition were alleviated in such a way that I had more leisure to write, and possibly more stimulus to write, I would be a Sisyphus divided from his boulder. The gritty touch of its huge surfaces, the grinding weight, the black shadow which it casts, are the strongest intimations of reality which I possess, and the source of whatever strength exists in my sporadic literary productions.

I remember seeing in the Turnbull Library a document which moved me greatly – a manuscript of Henry Lawson’s, in round unformed writing, in which he described how he had received notice of the acceptance of an article or poem by some periodical (I think it was the Sydney Bulletin) while he was sandpapering the walls of a hearse. The hearse of the Welfare State is jet- propelled. It is part of my peculiar destiny to sandpaper its walls. I fear that more money or more leisure might make me less angry, lessen the muscular cramp, persuade me that it is not a hearse but a winged chariot. I might become divided from my fellow D.P.s. That would be quite fatal.

1960 (215)