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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Bush Carpenter’s Outfit

A Bush Carpenter’s Outfit

1

Most critics spend their time wrestling with their own mental processes, instead of shedding some light on the books they have read. Like a man going on holiday who spends half of the first morning oiling his car: he gets there, but he gets there late. New Zealand critics are no exception. The best of them, Allen Curnow, is the cruellest. He beats his nurse, the big jaw-boned drayhorse of a New Zealand muse, continually, and only comes as an afterthought to the corpus of New Zealand poems which he didn’t write himself. The broadest of them, McCormick, tries to set down everything important that has happened. It all has to be measured and noted, like the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple; of course he merges the critic in the historian. I have never been a critic’s arse, thank God, and become less of one as I get older; just an occasional reader who also thinks; and I’m too long in the writing job myself to think I know the answers.

2

I remember coming near the end of a long poem called ‘The Sirens’, and going down to a certain Wellington hotel to see the barman, Fitz. When I had no money on me, I’d bring a half bottle of gin, and Fitz would put it under the counter and serve me from it. There was a word in the poem I wasn’t satisfied with –

How then shall your heart that like the sea becomes
Carnivorous, a sepulchre of storms,
Love concord and an old man’s idleness? . . . (CP 130)

The word ‘carnivorous’ didn’t suite the sea or Ulysses’s heart. I explained the difficulty to Fitz. He thought for twenty seconds, and then said, ‘It should be omnivorous. The sea eats up everything. So does life.’

Of course he was quite right; and the poem stands as he amended it. If I had asked one of our varsity critics he wouldn’t have had a clue.

3

I remember going up to the chartroom on a fishing trawler, the first morningpage 527 at sea, when my stomach was still groaning. I pointed to the echo sounder on the wall (I’d never seen one before) and asked the Skipper – ‘What’s that instrument for?’

‘It’s an instrument for measuring the depth of a woman’s c—’, he replied. The Skipper, like the barman, knew something. If you split an idea too far it will wound your mind. By his reply the Skipper gave me the first part of another poem –

Woman, wife, sailor’s rib,
I think no surgeon could divide us,
So high you rule, so deep you flail,
So wide you make my rudderless horizon.
All the sea barns are banging empty
From Castle Rock to Turnagain,
And you possess the years below my keel
Where the net slides, while star and captain sleep . . . .
(‘Trawling Poem’, CP 218)

I just had to paraphrase his intuition, set it down in terms of my own life. Any bright member of the Department of Fisheries could have told me all about echo sounders, how they worked, what they were made of, how many ships had them. I wouldn’t have got a poem out of those boys.

4

It seems ignorance is the best teacher. You have to go back where you started from to find out where you’re going to. The Catholic Church has always understood this. The darkness of the confessional is the darkness of the world, of the depths of the sea, the whale’s belly, and one has to enter this darkness to be reborn. The Mass is a daily return to the darkness of Mount Calvary, when the sun was darkened and the Temple veil torn in half by the shuddering of the world at the death of God. Knowledge of ignorance is the pre-requisite of any new creation.

5

If a new literature were to grow up in the country, or if the literature we have were to put down roots, I can’t see that the universities would do much to help it. By comparison of and comment on the writing that exists, they can help people to cultivate a sense of form; but they can teach no man with any sense unless it’s by reading and discussion with his friends.

1962? (277)