Bread and a Pension

Sir: In the second paragraph of his review Mr Jackson, with engaging humility, expresses genuine doubt concerning his own competence to assess Mr Johnson’s work – ‘other reviewers have admired Bread and a Pension andpage 703 . . . my inability to do so may be a fault in me rather than a fault in the poetry’. Indeed this could be the case; and Mr Jackson would find himself in quite august company. I doubt if any New Zealand poet of stature comparable to Mr Johnson’s has received the same blank-faced lack of approval from a number of our qualified critics. I have been astonished to hear university men of good standing wipe Mr Johnson’s achievement off the slate with a single phrase. On the other hand, a number of New Zealand poets (myself included) have learnt something of their craft from Mr Johnson, and a great deal more than something in the avoidance of blind alleys in literature, and in gaining a grasp in words of the louche, the difficult, the sensational, in contemporary life. There is a contradiction somewhere.

I suspect that the fissure between Mr Johnson and some of his readers begins outside the sphere of literary criticism per se. Why did many devoted Wordsworthians in the last century find it so hard to find real merit in Byron? Because of the poet’s subject matter – or, more explicitly, his personal area of knowledge won by conflict – and because of his approach to that subject matter. Many New Zealand readers simply do not find it possible to accept Mr Johnson’s view of himself, themselves, and this country. They do not see that face in the mirror. They do not see that world when they look out the kitchen window. Mr Johnson’s own tendency to polemical dispute has sprung inevitably from this disagreement. I remember how, when his second book of verse, Roughshod Among the Lilies, was published, some hysterical women writers in Wellington tried to get him fired from the teaching profession on the grounds that a man who could write that kind of verse should not be in charge of young children. Nonsensical? Of course; but not irrelevant. In more civilised critics the disagreement show itself in the form of a mental blockage, a curious kind of blankness when confronted with a fully developed Johnson poem.

I think something of the kind must have happened when Mr Jackson examined the first stanza of ‘Down to the City Airport’. Certainly the subsidiary image is that of a gull descending; but the central and strongest image is that of a demi-god defecating from the sky on to a crowded town. It stems, I think, from the phrase in New Zealand vernacular – ‘shit on them from a height. . . .’ Bombs, faeces, eggs – these are the shifts of metaphor – and it is the young blowflies born from eggs who will ‘gorge on crumbs’. They are the images of the spiritual death which the poet-narrator feels he may inflict on his associates; and they are also instances of Mr Johnson’s peculiarly grim humour. I can well understand that a poem which derives a large part of its meaning from a faecal analogy might be obscure to a certain kind of reader; yet, strictly speaking, the fault is in the reader, not in the poem.

There is too a real problem of poetic method. Mr Johnson continually heightens his language by rapid shifts of metaphor. A grammarian would condemn this; yet it is the stock in trade of the two most powerful poets ofpage 704 our century, Hart Crane and the younger Dylan Thomas. I suggest that one should try to get used to it. I found it took me several years to get used to it in Mr Johnson’s work; but when I did, I realised that the poems were the richer for it. If it is accepted a good quarter of Mr Jackson’s formal objections to Mr Johnson’s style crumble to the ground.

Then Mr Jackson takes Mr Johnson to task for the ‘lifeless diction’ of the poem, ‘Any Old Iron’. I cannot understand this. The poem has great fluidity of language, certainly; but the images are numerous and exact – and the identification of the death of love under the slow, wearing pains of age and domesticity with the crucifixion of God in man is, I think, as perfectly handled as anything Mr Johnson has ever done. I can agree that there are certain poems of Mr Johnson’s in which he uses clichés very freely. Mr Jackson suggests that ‘The Madwoman in the House’ is one of them. Surely, though, this poem belongs to a particular genre – the ironic half-poem in which cliché is used in invisible inverted commas. In such poems Mr Johnson uses flat newspaper language as part of a sort of montage – they are nearly always surrealist in character, and the images, when you meet them, almost jump off the page. Incidentally it is Mr Johnson’s very fluid use of language – like pools of mercy dispersing on a table top – from which I have been able to learn most in loosening up my own techniques with language. One has to be very much ‘with’ the subject, very wide awake – but the results can be spectacular. A constipated neo-Victorian use of language is one of the major curses of the New Zealand poetic tradition (look how R.A.K. Mason had to wrestle with it) – and Mr Johnson has done us a service by breaking the ice.

I could examine Mr Jackson’s criticism more closely; but I prefer to draw attention to the fact that he has neglected in his review nearly all the best poems in Mr Johnson’s book – ‘Adversaries’, ‘The Poisonous Mountains’, ‘My Wife Doesn’t Understand Me’, ‘Librarian’s Love Song’, and the title poem, ‘Bread and a Pension’, to name only a very few of them. Where he does examine one of the best (‘Fresco of Boys and Beach’) his criticism is peculiarly carping. In this poem the compression of metaphors and the alternation between sensual images and abstract comment are perfectly sustained. But I prefer not to argue the matter. Mr Johnson is certainly capable of confused and slipshod writing; but not much in this volume, and not at all in its best poems. I suggest that Mr Jackson should re-read the book once a year, and see whether his own experience of life does not increasingly open out to him the poems which are closed at the present time. In particular, I suggest that Mr Johnson is the only New Zealand poet who has shown evidence (on the printed page) of any understanding of the psychology and spiritual crises of women. In his own words –

. . . she stands then,
Slight and hurt but more determined,
page 705 Human as hope, and forward
Walks like a blade carving the wind
As though she had sensed in a word
That what she has always fought remains unseen . . . .

Mr Johnson’s work has its formal merits; but there are other merits to be considered – for example, the ‘originality’ that Mr Jackson mentions with disbelief at the beginning of his review. I suggest that this originality is so basic to Mr Johnson’s work that it constitutes an obstacle to reviewers.

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