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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Rabbit Warren

The Rabbit Warren

Not long ago I was asked to contribute some verse to Craccum. The request pleased me, as I have always felt the varsity newspapers were able to provide a livelier and less hidebound slant on the customs of Pig Island than our established and solemn periodicals are able to do. Instead of giving Craccum my ODE TO A SEAGULL SEEN FROM THE TOP OF MOUNT VICTORIA, a five-hundred line poem in the manner of the early Shelley, which I am keeping as a money-maker for the school anthologies – I sent up THE SAD TALE OF MATILDA GLUBB, the story in rhymed couplets of a primary school teacher who learns too late that she has chosen a dead-end profession. Later on I heard that the story had been printed, but that some people, on the advice of a lawyer, had prevented that issue of Craccum from being distributed.

This information has depressed me. I recognise that not everything a man happens to write can be published. In modern times all rogues and fools in public positions are carefully protected from criticism by laws of libel and slander. But Miss Glubb is a fictitious person. There is also a delicate moral issue which I, as a member of the Catholic Church, have to consider whenever I let a poem of mine be published – would the poem be likely to influence some person, not already so disposed, to an act of self-abuse or some less obvious sexual misdemeanour? I cannot see that THE SAD TALE OF MATILDA GLUBB could lead anyone to do anything except resign from the teaching profession.

There is also the even more delicate matter of my private intention in writing the poem at all. My intention, as I now recall it, was to expose and laypage 667 open one of the deepest ulcers of Pig Island society – the extraordinary self- ignorance and vacuity of mind which overtakes so many of our educational workers and drives some of them, especially the women, to the jumping-off place. Miss Glubb goes mad because she has never understood her own nature.

I remember how, when I had included this poem in a talk to an audience composed mainly of teachers, given in one of the Auckland University buildings, an oldish woman approached me after the talk, fixed me with a very sad eye, and said – ‘I am Miss Glubb’. I could tell you other anecdotes of a similar kind. But the point I wish to make is this – that I was not just letting off my gun into the air for the fun of it; I was shooting at a definite and real target.

Perhaps the lawyer’s objection to the poem was on the grounds of the language used. The word ‘menstruate’ occurs early in the poem; the word ‘penis’ occurs once, and the word ‘shit’ three times, at the end of the poem. In each case a macabre and comic effect is intended; I think this effect is achieved. I had carefully avoided the use of words commonly regarded as obscene. The word ‘shit’ is simply part of the gross vernacular, and is used often by poets – Swift and Robert Burns, for example, – as part of the language in satirical and black-humour poems.

The point here, as I see it, is that the poem involves a breach of decorum – not pornography, that is quite a different matter – and the kind of poem that breaks decorum is a regular part of satire in the English tradition. The word ‘shit’ written large on a lavatory wall, and the same word incorporated in a satire, are expressing different impulses and fulfilling different functions. Perhaps your lawyer is not in the habit of reading verse. His name is Leary, isn’t it? I haven’t heard of the learned gentleman; but the name is Irish. Perhaps he was having a little joke with you. Irishmen love to have their joke.

The thing that troubles me most is not the fact that this issue of Craccum was suppressed, and thus many students were denied the pleasure or annoyance of reading my poem. It troubles me much more that Auckland students should expose themselves to ridicule, and present themselves to any person who hears of the matter and understands the issue, as a bunch of timid old men and maiden aunts, running to the shelter of authority as soon as there seemed a likelihood that somebody might be offended by something published in Craccum.

The conservative group among you may be no more than a very vocal minority; but the outside world may be inclined to judge the whole student body by the actions of this small group. Broadly, I am concerned about the future. No doubt there will always be bureaucrats and censors and academic people with minds as narrow as a bootlace. But it is a great pity that they should come from among the student body.

I remember Bob Lowry, that Aucklander who loved his fellows greatly,page 668 and loved the arts most whenever they were most human – a man who rarely spoke without using a four-letter word – I remember him walking round Auckland University with me, a few days before his death, and pointing out the corners and balconies where he and his girlfriend used to cohabit when both were students. If a poem could have been written about the great rabbit- warren on the hill, he would have been the man to write it; for he had lived without social ambition without money, not concerned with the big names and big ideas, and so the country spoke through him like the breath blown through a flute. I love Auckland because of men like Bob. This matter of the censoring of Craccum (no doubt unimportant in itself ) seems to me contrary to the spirit of Auckland as I have known it.

I suggest that you forget about the buildings that have to be built (what use are buildings if they are inhabited by cretins?) and forget about the law, and let Craccum be distributed as originally intended. The Pig Island garden could do with a little night-soil.

1964 (315)