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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Poetry Yearbook

Poetry Yearbook

Sir: I wish, if possible, to make some moderate comments on your immoderate and illiberal editorial on the matter of the withholding of a grant for the last issue of Poetry Yearbook by the Literary Fund Advisory Committee. I am one of the members elected to represent New Zealand writers on that Committee; and three of the poems which your editorial designates as ‘bad’ were written by me. Naturally, when the decision to withhold the grant was made, I offered to resign from the Committee; and remain at present a member only on condition that I should be free to make public comment on that decision. Further, I made a private decision to avoid personalities in any such comment, and to avoid divulging the proceedings of the Committee. The second point I have departed from, in one minute particular, by including in a statement for the Christchurch Press the information that the Committee’s decision would not have been unanimous even if I had abstained from voting. If the reason for this departure is not clear, it should be to anyone who thinks the matter over.

As a person quite as deeply involved in the present dispute as he is, I wish to point out that my own action has been undertaken quite independently from Mr Johnson. We are not, and have never been, Siamese twins. For example, when I allowed Truth to publish one of my own condemned poems, it was without Mr Johnson’s knowledge and contrary to his later expressed judgment. What Mr Johnson and I have in common is that we are both New Zealand poets and both have reason, in the present dispute, to object to a judgment based on a standard of gentility.

I wish to express astonishment and concern at the tone and content of your editorial. Without breaking that same membrane of gentility, I cannot see how the attack on Mr Johnson’s editorial efficiency could have been made stronger. How can such an attack be objectively justified? No editor is infallible. Yet, going simply by the poems I have read (and had published) in these periodicals, I see no reason to suppose that Mr Johnson’s selection for Poetry Yearbook has been less capable than that of the Editor of Landfall or the Listener. The Literary Fund Advisory Committee itself bore negative witness to his editorial judgment by continuing to make a grant until this occasion. It is Mr Johnson’s lack of editorial gentility which has raised thepage 665 Committee’s hackles. My argument is borne out by the fact that the solitary objection which was made by the Committee before the present issue of Poetry Yearbook was an objection to the use of a four-letter word in a poem by a most capable poet. The poet solved the problem by agreeing to change the word; much to my own dissatisfaction, since the poem was better with the word left in.

I think Mr Johnson can reasonably claim that he has been shabbily treated. I can understand and in a large measure accept the view that the Listener should be bound by the standards of gentility held by many of its readers, since it is only in part a literary periodical. But why should the Literary Fund Advisory Committee choose to consider that it was its job to perpetuate these standards, which are of service neither to good writing, good spoken communication, or good mental health? I notice in the same issue of the Listener as your editorial, the comment of Ernest Hemingway’s mother on her son’s writing: ‘With the whole world full of beauty, why does he have to pick out thoughts and words from the gutter?’ Exactly. Her lament strikes a chord in all of us, who would like to live in a world where honesty cost nothing. But she did not take on the job of writing the books. Nor could she have. Her gentility would have prevented it.

1964 (313)