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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Thoughts of an Old Alligator [2]

Thoughts of an Old Alligator [2]

I have been asked to speak about the responsibilities of students to themselves and to the community. And if I were to say to you that the first responsibility of a student is a rigorous intellectual honesty, applied to all occasions and to all persons whom he or she may meet – and then if I were to proceed to serve up, for half an hour or forty minutes, a cold rice pudding of platitudes, interspersed with the raisin of an occasional joke – then you could justly claim that I had failed to exhibit the quality which I expect from others. Writers, as well as students, have to be honest in order to survive. It can be damned difficult; because honesty is in the short run a somewhat anti-social virtue. You get no medals for it. And you may find it hard to retain the approval of those who think differently from yourself.

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I had thought of calling this diatribe ‘Thoughts of an Old Alligator’ partly because I am no longer young; partly because an alligator is an animal whose strength is contained in his jaws and his tail. He may seem to be asleep on a mudbank. But when you go near him, the jaws and the tail are what you have to watch out for. In my own case, the jaws are simply jaws – what I am now talking with – and the tail represents, I suppose, the instinctive subconscious life of the mind – those obsessions and intuitions by means of which a writer has to feel his way. I imagine that the people who asked me to speak here must have known that I would not be able to give a conventional talk; that I would feel obliged to challenge this or that social preconception; that my particular vocation forbids me to compromise in any way my own picture of what is true. That’s why they asked me. They thought – ‘Baxter may provide a few fireworks’ – though, God knows, I am not sensationalist, and very far indeed from being a volcano. I am simply a writer who has to tell the truth as he sees it, under the very real threat that otherwise he will lose his gift.

Perhaps I should welcome you to the university – this intellectual paradise and prison-house, where a good many of you, happily or unhappily, will be spending some years of your working and social life. And doing this, I remember an occasion, in the winter of 1962, when I revisited Dunedin after an absence of nearly twenty years. On that occasion I looked at the university buildings, standing alone in the winter moonlight, and thought – ‘Nothing ever happened inside those buildings that made sense to me. A good deal happened outside them – parties, conversations, what have you – but what happened inside never connected with the person I actually was . . .’.

Now I could blame this reaction of mine on the university; or, alternatively, I could blame it on myself. But neither view would be wholly truthful. I think part of my difficulty was that I did not arrive at the university under my own steam. I did not ever make a clear decision to go to university or not to go there. The main reason I went was because my parents thought I should. Later on, I realised what was happening, and decided to leave the university. This did not please my parents; but it was the beginning of my independent development as a man and a writer. Throughout this brief talk I will be emphasising a responsibility by no means restricted to students – the common human responsibility to take charge of one’s own life, to make one’s own decisions, right or wrong, on whatever evidence is available – and to continue in this course of action, even when it may be thoroughly uncomfortable to do so. Human beings are decision-making creatures: certainly the effect they have on others depends on that faculty; and I think their salvation may also depend on it, though some of you may feel that the term is ill-chosen.

More or less unconsciously, in talking to you, I tend to classify you mentally into three groups or tribes. The first is the tribe of the obviously able and well-adjusted. If you belong to this tribe, I doubt if my communications will be of much help to you. I can be friendly, I can say – ‘Good luck! Long page 536 may you live.’ Perhaps on occasions we may sit together at a table or kneel together at the same altar rail. But you don’t really need any information from me.

You are already thoroughly responsible people, in the sense that you rarely if ever see any radical conflict between what you expect of yourself and what other people expect of you. For nearly twenty years you have been getting on reasonably well with your parents. Your teachers have been glad to have you in their classes. Your social life is moderate and well-controlled: neither an orgy nor a frost-bound desert. When you see the sun rise in the morning, your first thought is something like this – ‘How nice! There’s the sun again.’ It doesn’t remind you, as an old alcoholic friend of mine always said it reminded him, of a pig’s arse set round with parsley. You know more or less where you’ve come from and where you’re going to.

In Russia you would be capable and serious members of the local Komsomol. In China you would be a real asset to your commune. In America you would be doing your best to pass your grades, deploring the race riots and the nasty side of the Vietnam War perhaps, but on the whole convinced that those-in-charge had a good idea what they were doing, and that the only real blot on the landscape was that bunch of college drop-outs who spent their time locally playing the xylophone and smoking marihuana. No doubt this is as it should be. How can I possibly find fault with you? You are the salt of the earth; the backbone of the community. Twenty years from now you will be senior lecturers in science or managers of companies or members of the local Play Centre Committee. The trouble, from my point of view, is not that you are active and able; but rather it springs from the fact that you have never felt, and will very likely never feel, any need to challenge in a radical way the individual aims of power and security that our society proposes to us.

This reaction – or lack of reaction – could, of course, change; for human beings do not run on rails, even when they think they do. But probably the only thing that would bring about a change would be some kind of private catastrophe. A mental breakdown; a very unhappy love affair; a spell in a TB sanatorium; or the experience of being accidentally beaten up – in mistake for someone of another social group – by a couple of our over-zealous local police. Yet even in such circumstances you might feel defeated or miserable, but still retain a positive view of our social institutions.

An Englishman who was teaching philosophy at the university in Wellington once said to me that students of philosophy are quite different from philosophers; that to become a philosopher a human being has to go through a kind of tunnel, an anguish of scepticism, in which doubts concerning the stability of the universe cease to be academic and become personal – so that, for example, it will really concern him personally whether or not some article of household furniture exists when he is not there to look at it. I think critics of society have to go through a similar crisis. There has to be a time when page 537 they ask themselves, as a real burning question, whether the conditioning they received in the nursery has really fitted them for life in the adult world – whether the answers to problems of human conduct can really be found in the libraries, either secular or theological – whether a conception of human love based on clothes, physique, race, income bracket, and politeness or lack of politeness in speech, is actually workable – whether it is more important to have a new child or a new car – whether all the criminals are in the jails, or indeed whether any of the people there are actually criminal – whether God actually exists, or at least whether the kind of Divine goodness that permitted the bombing of Dresden and the massacre of the Jews in Belsen is a kind of goodness easily recognisable in human terms. This kind of thinking does not make people immediately joyful; but it does make them more deeply honest. I recommend it to university students, partly because they may have the leisure for it, and partly because some of them may later find themselves in positions of social control; and if they have never learnt to be honest, they will still find themselves going through the same reflexes of mind and feeling that their parents have gone through – in which case, God help terra firma! It is not safe at all these days to think that our society is a good mother or a trustworthy nurse. Indeed the whole notion of safety needs to be re-examined.

I have mentioned the tribe of the able and well-adjusted; and hope that God will have mercy on them and us. There is also a second tribe. To you I can only say in the corniest fashion: ‘Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! You are the Awkward Squad, the No-Hopers’ Brigade, closer to me than my own flesh, my own skin. For you, all social events have been traumatic, from the time you first entered the kindergarten, tripped over a pile of building blocks, and had to be led away howling to have your underwear changed. For you, education, is only another snoring-off place on the road to some incomprehensible Golgotha. If you are male, your chief memory of your days at school is the time you were found drunk in the boiler house in the middle of the big Inter-College Sports’ Festival. If you are female, you did not become captain of the basketball team or look beautiful at the school dances – no, the thing you won’t forget is that by the age of fourteen you had already earned the title of the Waikikamukau Bicycle. Waikikamukau is a small place. But you didn’t know that. Or perhaps you did nothing spectacular – you spent all your available spare time locked in the lavatory with a packet of cigarettes, wondering why God had put life into human beings and potatoes and you in particular. Welcome! Welcome! Perhaps I fear you a little because I love you so much. You and I will always share the sense that life is a catastrophe. And I think we are probably right.

‘Here, at the university, just as at school and at home, people will assume of course that you are looking for trouble when you are only behaving naturally. When you arrive back at the hostel at four in the morning, or not at all, and have to interview the Women’s Warden, there will be no point page 538 in trying to tell her that you felt happy and wanted to look at the Town Belt – even if it happens to be true. When you ring up the senior lecturer in Physics or Psychology, the night before the final exam, from your burrow in the Bowling Green Hotel, and ask him what the set books for the year are, he won’t believe you are having an honest difficulty. But I will. Though I love you, I hope I will only meet you one at a time.

‘In religious moments, especially in a bad hangover, you may come to the conclusion that God has some kind of private snitch on you. There’s no real reason to suppose that this is so. God who made the turtle and the albatross also created a great variety of human beings. As a matter of fact, a religious view of your insoluble difficulties might be the wisest one to take. Remember Job. When he sat down in the ashes and scraped his boils with a bit of broken pot, the people round about told him he was badly out of gear – but in fact his troubles were a kind of religious code message. The Almighty was communicating with him quite intensely. So my message to you – the people of my own tribe – the No Hopers’ Brigade – the echelon of the apparently useless – would run something like this: “Don’t blame yourselves unduly. You’ll probably never be out of trouble. But there is company. And don’t allow the headshrinkers, the male and female cops, the parents and wardens and lecturers and other social authorities with whom you may come in contact to intimidate you. You also have a right to exist. You have a life to live; and trouble is a necessary part of it. Goodbye. Remember there are quite a number of us on the face of the globe.”’

To communicate properly with my own tribe, I would require a place different from this, and I would have to use a different kind of language. Possibly swear words; used in a loving fashion. But it can’t be done in the right way from a public platform.

There is, however, a third tribe – perhaps the largest one – the tribe of the not too comfortable; the uncertain; those who are not committed by their natures either to automatic conformity or unavoidable rebellion; those who may perhaps see some sense in the educational process, yet fear its dehumanising aspect. And it is the middle tribe to whom I can properly address a few words about student responsibility.

An unexamined responsibility is generally useless. To illustrate what I mean by that, I will tell you about a medical student I knew twenty years ago, whom I might as well call Ivan. Ivan used to suffer from a great deal of conflict and tension. His father was a pub-owner down South. Now I may be doing his father an injustice, but I think he had the notion that it would be nice to have a son who was a doctor, because a doctor in New Zealand stands right at the top of the social ladder. So (I take it) he sent Ivan off to Dunedin, with enough money to pay for his up-keep and the very considerable fees necessary to get a young man through the Medical Course. Ivan’s side of the bargain was of course that he should do the work.

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In fact Ivan did try to do the work. He may be a doctor by now for all I know. But when I knew him, he used to have frequent mental blockages when he couldn’t work at all; and he tried to ease these blockages with a fairly regular diet of grog. I don’t think a celibate life was agreeing with him either.

Now, some people would say that Ivan’s responsibility was to keep his side of the bargain, and do the work, and so please his old man, and finally, as a doctor, to serve the New Zealand community. I don’t agree with them. Ivan never had the chance to make a clear choice in the matter. I’m pretty certain that if he’d really felt that he had a vocation to become a doctor, then the mental blockages would have been much less frequent. His grog consumption would probably have dropped as well. The trouble was that Ivan was letting his old man make his decisions for him. Perhaps his old woman had a say in it too – ‘How nice to have a doctor in the family! And with that long medical training, there’s no danger the dear boy will get tied up with some wretched unsuitable girl before he’s old enough . . .’. Again, I may be doing her an injustice. But definitely Ivan was a singularly unfree individual. He had never really examined his responsibility to work, in order to see whether it was his or somebody else’s.

There was money involved in Ivan’s case. There often is money involved. So it may be worthwhile to examine student responsibilities in money matters. Ivan’s old man might have said to him, if he’d tried to rebel and do some other kind of work (scrub-cutting, let’s say) – ‘Look, son, your mother and I have made many sacrifices for you.’ I think this would be a form of blackmail, an attempt to make the son’s choices for him on the grounds that the parents had already chosen to suffer pain for an objective which they considered suitable for the son. The argument won’t hold water. Ivan’s old man would have had a perfect right to say – ‘Well, son, do whatever kind of work you like; but don’t expect me to support you financially unless I think it’s the kind of work you should do.’ That way, Ivan might have had to work in the vacations; he might even have stayed for a couple of years in the freezing works, to get enough dough to put himself through varsity. And he would have been a free man; not a dominated boy.

One has to assume that somewhere during adolescence – and probably a good deal sooner than the social authorities are prepared to recognise – the power to make one’s own decisions rises to the surface. And if it is not used at all, there is a terrible backlash of boredom and sterility: a kind of clogging up of the spiritual reflexes. Most of us have endured a certain amount of this during our education. On the other hand, most young people do assert their power of choice, in small sporadic acts of volition and rebellion – a slow guerrilla warfare about such matters as money for buying clothes, or hours of staying out at night, or the use and ownership of vehicles.

The point is, though, that this warfare is not a genuine revolution – it does not challenge the notion that power and security are the primary values, or page 540 question whether twenty dresses are twenty times better than one, or whether it’s a marvellous thing socially to be at the wheel of a car. And I’m afraid that nearly all parents – I’m a parent myself – fear any attempt by their children to really take charge of their own lives far more than they fear this frittering pointless warfare. They’d rather have the boy wheedling dollars out of them, like an irritable five-year-old, to pay for the booze at a local party, than have him studying Zen Buddhism or going to work in a garage or trying to make an early marriage. They’d rather have the girl thinking about cosmetics for eight hours a day than have her taking a job as a waitress or forming a close friendship with a male student from Ghana.

I suggest for your consideration the revolutionary Christian idea of poverty – that one needs no more than food to eat and a few clothes to wear and a shelter from the rain – that all the rest is useless in terms of human happiness. People identify themselves with their possessions. Therefore they hate poverty. But the spirit of poverty means not giving a damn about possessions. If you don’t mind being poor then no one can blackmail you by refusing to provide you with financial support if your choices don’t happen to fit in with theirs.

There is a certain dignity about poverty as well. There was an old story about a poor priest who was given a donkey by a friend of his. He tied it up outside the church while he went in to say Mass; but all the time he was saying Mass, he kept on worrying that somebody might have stolen it. So when at last the Mass was over, he went out and untied the donkey, and gave it a slap on the rump and sent it galloping off – saying at the same time – ‘God forbid that my soul should be tethered to an ass!’ A soul which is tethered to asses or dresses or highly paid jobs or houses with two garages, or even (as in my own case) to books of verse and the desire to appear smart in the eyes of others, is inclined to be a sad soul. I think students have a responsibility to try to obtain a spirit of poverty, so that their choices will be their own choices, and their work will be the work they want to do, and their stupidity will be less than that of the generation that came before them.

I intend now to make some comments about the sex life of students; and some people are bound to think I am putting my foot in my mouth by doing so. They have a little reason on their side; for I must admit that I’ve never yet met a person who was able to think entirely sanely about sex. What appears to be sanity is often mechanical shallowness. The thing is that when a man talks about sex he is talking at least partly about his own and other people’s wounds. And this is not a popular or an easy topic.

On the other hand, from your point of view, there is the advantage that I have no special axe to grind. A parent, a teacher, a lecturer, a warden, even a university chaplain, is under all kinds of pressure to give you opinions that are prudent, in the special sense that they are not quite his own.

‘But’ – you may say, if you know me – ‘Mr Baxter, you are a Roman Catholic. How the hell can you give an honest unbiased opinion on the sex page 541 life of students? You’re hamstrung from the start . . .’.

If this were so it would be a very sad thing – both for me and ultimately for the Church to which I belong – if there were many others like me. Since the Church offers me her doctrinal and ethical map, and since I endeavour to use it, I am therefore bound to be twenty times as careful never to pretend to see what I don’t see, or pretend to believe what I don’t believe. The Church may have sharpened my eyesight a little; if I choose to wear a bag over my head that would be my fault, my cowardice, and not hers.

I could take the easy road by proposing you should consider trying to obtain a spirit of Christian chastity; and leave it at that. Chastity would then mean not giving a damn about sex; not worrying and fretting about it; not attaching your notion of spiritual and psychological security to having sex experience or being sexually attractive. That might make sense to me personally. After all, I’m forty-one; but I still have to confess to a curiosity whether or not the females among you like the look of my beard. If I find it hard not to give a damn about sex at forty-one, it’s likely that you will find it harder at twenty-one, or whatever age you may be.

No; I can’t dodge the issue that way. I have to give you something relevant to your possible condition. A story may help. So I will quote the case of Jonathan.

Jonathan was a student I met when he and I were working for the Post Office in Wellington. He had formed a close relationship with a particularly good-looking, lively, intelligent Maori girl who was there as a post-woman, and who was not a student. I think they had slept together; though I can’t be sure of that. At any rate, I said one day to Jonathan – ‘Do you think you and Sally might get married some day. She seems pretty keen on you. And I reckon you might be doing quite well for yourself. She’s something right out of the Christmas cracker.’

Jonathan blushed. And then he said – ‘No; I can’t marry Sally.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘You seem to like one another a lot. Is it because she’s a Maori? That shouldn’t make too much difference.’

He blushed again. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not because she’s a Maori. The trouble is I have to think of my career. I’m going overseas to work; and I don’t think Sally would fit in. Anyway, it’ll be quite a while before I can think of getting married.’

I didn’t question Jonathan any further. It was really none of my business, except that I liked him and liked the girl. But I did feel he was acting unchastely.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think a young man should have to marry a girl, just because he happens to have slept with her. Perhaps he should consider whether or not he can marry her, before he sleeps with her; but human beings are not geometrical. They don’t always weigh the pros and cons. To marry the girl, if he didn’t care for her, might have meant that my friend would inflict a page 542 much greater injury on her and on himself – a quick, bloody separation, or a long spell of mutual misery.

The reason I felt that Jonathan was acting unchastely, was because when he said he didn’t think Sally would fit in, it was not his own voice that was speaking, but the old, hollow, weary voice of a home in the suburbs that had put all its eggs into the basket of power and security. He was not prepared to follow his own intuition that Sally was the girl for him; that in her company he would be able to use his sexual faculties in a creative and loving way – which is perhaps the fullest and best meaning of chastity.

I think the conflict between two scales of values – the inherited one, and the new one he had begun to develop in Sally’s company – was what made him blush. It wasn’t just that he was embarrassed but he knew at the back of his mind that he was selling out the girl he had begun to love for the sake of a good career and a trip overseas. Perhaps the girl would be better off without him; but I still felt sorry for him and her. He was not strong enough to fight his environment; and she did not hold the right cards to play in the game of power and security. In ten years’ time he would become, very likely, an average flat-minded business man or bureaucrat. No doubt he would get his end in with various English and European girls, and marry a woman who would please his family more than Sally ever could. According to our twisted morality, he would be doing the right thing.

Last year there was a rumpus here at the university when the authorities decided not to let the students go in for mixed flatting. I wrote a ballad on the subject and had it printed and circulated, pointing out in a humorous way that the authorities were acting as persecutors of loving couples; and a number of people questioned my attitude on the matter. The point was that they were equating chastity with celibacy; and I was not.

To understand this, I think one has to have a good long look at the phenomenon of adolescence as we know it in our society. I think nearly all cultures have recognised that there has to be a gap, some kind of ritual shelter for those who are ceasing to be children and becoming young men and women. We recognise it, in a way, by making the legal age of female consent sixteen instead of fourteen or thirteen or twelve. At the same time, mediaeval women quite often got married at thirteen, and mediaeval men were quite often leading armies in the field at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Are we in fact a different race of people? I don’t think so.

Adolescence, as we have it, lasting perhaps from thirteen to eighteen – or, in the case of university students, from thirteen to twenty-five – is a state of mind created socially by a kind of brainwashing – by emotional retardation – by a common agreement that young people should not use their sexual faculties seriously until they have completed the very lengthy preparation needed for them to become fully fledged citizens of a technological society. It is a hell of a time to go through. And it does not make me happy to see page 543 the Christian injunction of chastity misused by an attempt to patch up the difficulties our type of society creates – that is, by trying to persuade young men and women who are already sexually mature that they have a moral obligation to remain single.

At least for young men, the power of the sexual impulse is at its peak somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five. By demanding that they should not use their sexual faculties our society guarantees in effect that a good many of them will use those faculties irresponsibly. And young women, whether or not their sexual impulse is at its peak – it seems likely that their peak comes later, in the early thirties – are still emotionally wide awake. We have only one life to live, in this world at least; and it troubles me that our society is so geared that people are trying to maintain a difficult celibacy at the time when their sexual nature is most pliable and responsive, the time of early manhood and womanhood which does not come again.

There is of course an ancient tradition that students should be celibate people. But it was strongest at a time when universities belonged to the Church and students were clerics in minor orders. All the students were men. In practice I don’t think many of them were strictly celibate. They had mistresses or they visited prostitutes. And I have heard that even in the English universities at the present day, in colleges where all the students are men, homosexuality tends to flourish.

I am aware of the argument that celibacy in itself is a psychologically healthy condition. But I think this argument is only valid when the celibacy is freely chosen, and most of all when it is chosen on account of a religious vocation. A young man or woman may succeed in suppressing their sexual impulses from the middle teens to the middle twenties; but they may have to pay for it later in married life by various forms of introversion and frigidity. This social dog’s-breakfast does not deserve to come under the heading of chastity.

No doubt a fair number of students do achieve a total celibacy. I have honoured the male members of the clan with a short poem adapted from A.E. Housman’s ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’. I call my poem ‘Epitaph on an Army of Students Neutered by our Educational System’:

Like lambs they swotted, grizzled, drank their booze,
Played football, wrote their letters home to Mum;
Sex, to be sure, is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is, and these were young. [Uncollected]

In fact one is well aware that celibacy is not quite the correct description of the state of life endured by most students. They find they have to depend on masturbation. It would be stupid to moralise about this state of things. The university masturbator is a sexually adult person caught in a social trap. page 544 But the feeling of depression and inferiority – of being out on a limb – that ten years of masturbation may engender is hardly a perfect preparation for the married state. It is no doubt the good boy’s or the good girl’s way of keeping quiet and staying out of trouble. But it is a dubious kind of chastity.

Then there are those sporadic liaisons of an experimental character which may easily spring up in university life. I have heard some social experts advocate these as the healthiest thing in the world; granted always that the girl is on the Pill. But I think these liaisons do harm by breeding bad faith between the sexes. The girls get the impression that the young men are predatory and selfish; the boys get the impression – shades of Jonathan perhaps – that the girls are trying to wangle them into a marriage they don’t feel ready for. In fact neither group are as tough as they appear. The varsity libertine is a familiar figure – but he is the product of a special environment where adults are being treated as if they were still half children. Most young men are not natural libertines. After a certain adolescent curiosity is satisfied, they desire at least unconsciously a permanent and loving relationship. Most girls are not so stupid or so marriage-hungry that they will grab the first man who comes along. Given a bit of leeway to work things out, both male and female students are capable of achieving mutual respect and tenderness and understanding. But the social pressures are painfully real – for the young men to shove on and get the best job possible; for the young women to get a good job and also a man who is high up on the social ladder. No doubt the situation is more subjective and romantic than my remarks indicate. But sporadic liaisons do not improve the situation. And the society, which values power and security more than love, may itself be a corrupting influence.

Another possibility is the mediaeval type of engagement. Engagements in the Middle Ages were held to be almost as binding as marriage on both parties; and it was something like this which I had in mind when I wrote my ‘Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’. If couples live together and intend to get married when they are financially able, then they are certainly trying to act responsibly; and I can’t see that one is dealing with a case of simple fornication. I mean something even more binding than trial marriage – something involving a genuine and faithful decision. In the peculiar circumstances in which students find themselves many of them move in this direction and it may be better than some of the other alternatives.

Personally I think that university students should try to spring the social trap, and get married young, whether or not their elders like it. Who is to say they are not responsible enough? If they are irresponsible, it is commonly because they have never been given real responsibility, but others have insisted on making their decisions for them. I noticed that when one of the college authorities involved in the mixed flatting decision wrote a letter of complaint to me about my Small Ode, his argument was that students resembled small children who needed to be disciplined by spanking. This nursery view of the page 545 matter astonished me; and strengthened my conviction that the students are often more adult than the authorities. Marriage is not the perfect solution for anyone’s sexual problems. There is no perfect solution. But marriage does open up the possibility of a responsible and loving use of one’s sexual faculties. I suggest that if you want to get married, you should marry without money. I myself got married without money or a job.

Behind the whole university picture lies the problem of the individual student’s conformity to or conflict with authority – parental authority, teaching authority, perhaps religious authority. I do not advocate blind rebellion but an intelligent obedience to the best that one knows either inside or outside oneself involves a preliminary cutting of the leading-strings of the nursery. I will quote you a poem I wrote some time ago which has a bearing on this matter. I wrote it in a state of mental nausea after having already written a ghost speech about the value of sport for the Duke of Edinburgh to use during a visit to this country. Sport does not appeal to me. And the Duke of Edinburgh, to whom sport does appeal, was wise enough not to use my speech, preferring his own ideas to what was neither mine nor anybody else’s, but a bureaucratic farting noise.

The poem is an imaginary talk given by a school inspector at a prize-giving ceremony at a secondary-school for boys. In the course of the talk, the old man realises that his chronic heart complaint has caught up with him – that he has probably only a few more minutes to live – and for the first time in his life, he says what he really thinks:

Prizegiving Speech

Thank you for the introduction, headmaster.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, members of the Committee,
So ready to listen to nothing. Good morning, children.
When I came into this hall I was still myself,
Mr J.G. Magwort, a well paid school inspector,
Respected by many, liked by a few,
Author of a book on Manual Training,
Running like a tram in polished grooves –
Who has unsettled me? What has derailed me?
I had my speech prepared –
‘Boys, be alert. Model yourselves
On your chief prefect and cadet captain.
You have nothing to fear as long as you behave,
Work, keep fit, and honour your School . . .’
I even had a little anecdote ready
To show I was once a young rascal myself,
A little story about catching eels.
page 546 Then I looked up, from my chair on this platform,
And saw your absorbed faces, absorbed in private knowledge,
Totally incommunicable. I saw too the cherry tree
Planted by your Founder in the green quadrangle
Dropping its feminine petals.
Came like a thunderclap
The expectation of my certain death –
Angina pectoris, a very painful disease.
I heard Miss Higgins, your music mistress,
Fart like a draught mare. I saw myself
As an old ghost pierced by sunlight, unreal, already damned.
Do not believe us. Do not follow us.
Our systems of authority, built for security,
Deceive us into incorrigible vanity.
If virtue cannot, cunning may defend you,
Your dreams of gunmen and black-stockinged girls,
Misery at midnight in the murderous dormitory.
If one of you, or two, even by law-breaking,
Larceny, sodomy, destruction or revolt,
Could escape the virus concealed in the prizegiver’s palm
And defeat our intention to make you like ourselves,
Old ghosts and bags of wind, gourds of the Judas tree!
Be reconciled to terror! The night is terrible
In which we move and live and find our being.
Though for me it is late, accept my apology
For having been deceived . . . (Uncollected)

At the end of the poem, I added a newspaper report about the death of Mr Magwort: ‘Mr J.G. Magwort, senior inspector, died suddenly on the platform while making a speech at a prizegiving at Bendover School. Our reporter, who was present, noted that Mr Magwort’s delivery, after a normal beginning, became confused and erratic. This was no doubt a symptom of the onset of the attack of angina pectoris from which he died. The loss of Mr Magwort will be deeply felt in educational circles. To him is due much of the credit for progressive trends in education during the past thirty years. A most accomplished humorist, Mr Magwort was known among his colleagues for the fund of droll stories with which he was always ready to enliven any social gathering . . .’.

I am not Mr Magwort; but I will let him speak for me. I have said something about money, sex and authority, and the need to make one’s own choices; not responsibilities of the student body alone, but responsibilities which students have to carry in a special way. I hope what I have said is of some use to you. It may not be – one man’s view of things is bound to be page 547 rather one-sided – but at least I have tried to give you my own views of what your responsibilities might be.

You could remember again that I gave this talk the title of ‘Thoughts of an Old Alligator’. Other people will try to tell you what work to do and the way to go about it. That is their function. Mine is the much more dangerous one of trying to help you to know who you are.

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