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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

[The Burns Fellowship]

[The Burns Fellowship]

When I applied for the Fellowship I was tired of pounding the Wellington streets on a postman’s round, and a bit of leisure seemed a good idea. Thirty-nine was a stopping place: a place to sit down and think about the road ahead. And I had heard others say that if a man had leisure he could write, at least without tiredness, perhaps with a new drive. I’ve never planned more than a year ahead if I can help it; and the Fellowship would last a year. But when I got the Fellowship I thought: ‘Man, you’re mad.’ Others had gone down to Dunedin to drink from the big gravy dish. They had come back boozed or haunted, needing longer to recover from their leisure than others do to recover from work. And I knew about America. In America there are many Fellowships offering. The poets wander round the campuses like tame bespectacled sheep; and the results of their meditations are published in glossy volumes priced at six dollars.

The main trouble is of course that the Muse, that primitive and prejudiced old Lady, does not smile on Fellowship holders. Our good morals seem to bore her. She goes away from us to whisper in the ear of a young poet with a raging hangover and three mistresses and no money at all, who inhabits a blanket-shrouded bedroom in a flat above a wineshop in Greater King Street. She says to the Fellowship holder: ‘All right, mate. You’ve made your choice. You want money and status – well, you’ve got them. Don’t ask to have me as well, thrown in to make up the full bundle.’

But in my time I had already done all the wrong things. I had made a strenuous effort to remain married. I had got off the booze before it gave me a wet brain. I had reduced my late adolescent adulteries (in this country it’s a lucky man who’s out of adolescence by the age of thirty) to an occasional sniffing of little girls’ bicycle seats. And I had learned cunningly to twist page 615 the Muse’s arm. She did not even leave me for more than two years when I became a Roman Catholic. I think my own brand of ugliness must have attracted her or perhaps the fact that I am not always a liar. Furthermore, I travel under the protection of Baron Saturday, the voodoo god of graveyards, coarse, truculent, tough-minded, who has a special weakness for drunks because he himself likes to drink rum flavoured with a number of different kinds of pepper. I used to pray to him during drinking bouts. He had not forsaken me when I swallowed the Church’s anchor; and he is a cousin of the grim Old Lady herself. To accept a Fellowship is to enter a graveyard. He would no doubt look after me.

So I came down to Dunedin. The first year I wrestled with the ghost of an ancient mistress who came back to haunt me, and got a number of written lectures and some grim, dry poems out of the encounter. Sitting half asleep in that sun-soaked Trappist cell in the English Department, I began to think that I had the Fellowship by the short hairs. But there were harder times to come. In some ways I am sorry that I did not receive the Fellowship while I was still an active alcoholic. To spend a year roaring drunk – the committee that administers the fund would of course in those circumstances never have granted me a second year – but to do this would have truly honoured the Muse, who likes a rumpus better than she likes omelettes, and it would have left a hairy legend of the Abominable Snowman to gladden the hearts of the young and offend the nostrils of the old. But I am myself too old to sleep out on park benches; and on the whole I think I made an exemplary Burns Fellow. My misdemeanours were purely verbal. Without the assistance of Father O’Flanagan and Father Jones this might not have been so. Confession is good for the soul. If a big-eyed nymph occasionally visited me in my concrete burrow, hoping for an alleviation of the varsity horrors – well, all that happened was that I bored her with theological information and fatherly advice, and sent her away with a pat on the rump to be seduced by somebody else in a mixed flat that I would most carefully avoid entering. Instead, I wrote an ‘Ode on Mixed Flatting’, to show that though my gonads were wrapped in steel wire, my mind was still mellow.

There were some interesting events. There was the time I climbed from my insomniac bed at 2 a.m. and drove in the pouring rain first to a hash-shop where the company of the drunk and destitute soothed me, then twenty miles further out through the howling night to Taieri Mouth, where I sat in my car and smoked and listened to the long wild mad black surf grinding on the beaches and communicated with the dead who had also frequently lived in despair. There was the time in Palmerston North when I stood on a platform between the Mayor and the Chancellor, like a frog in a bell-jar, sweating but honest, and told the assembled students that Kiwis should smoke a bit of marihuana now and then, that we should hold bullfights instead of flower festivals, that the age of female consent should be lowered to fourteen, and page 616 that I was tired of seeing homosexual artists being ridden to death by big ugly stupid homosexual policemen. I received warm thanks for these kind words afterwards from a number of homosexuals of every profession, and particularly from some of the better teachers in the country.

That was all right. And I received the Fellowship for a second year. And the thought stuck with me: ‘O.K., mate. But what’ll you do when you have to get out of this Old Man’s Home, get off the bone of your arse, and contend directly with whatever wad of rubbish society can deposit on your doorstep?’ The problem was security. Booze and women kill their quota; but the victims of imaginary security through money can be numbered in millions. And I could feel the death trance beginning.

I shook if off by going up to Patric Carey’s place and writing seven or eight plays for him. I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else. Patric is a witty man and a begetter of life in others. But in the plays I took our society apart and shook the bag, and what dropped out was what I had always suspected was there – a baby’s dummy and a small dry dead bird which may have been the corpse of the Dove of Pentecost.

Family life has always been impossible for all people since Adam ate the apple and Eve made the core into the first contraceptive. I visited my parents regularly, which was a pleasure, since they are more alive than I am. And on the very first day of the first year of the Fellowship I noticed that my daughter, like a dog shifting after rabbits, had found out the name and location of every underground coffee bar in Dunedin. Such miracles of natural adaptation never fail to please me. My son became a Buddhist. I made a number of friends. There was a painter, Illingworth; a producer, Carey; and a professor, Durning. Each became wholly real to me; and each of their wives too, each in a different way. This dry inaccessible drunkard’s soul is curiously like Noah’s ark. My wife and I went on holidays to Stewart Island, Naseby, the West Coast, Queenstown, the Milford Track and Wanaka. From each place I came back with icy solitary poems that described the landscape in terms of the third and grimmest face of the Muse, which is a skull. There was a bit too much death inside me.

I wonder now how much of the death was my own and how much came from the Fellowship. Lately it has seemed to me that God was trying to say something to me. It is hard to hear through the static of frost and cigarettes and Tablet articles and TV documentaries. But it seems to say something like this: ‘You poor old sod! I meant you to be a primitive, not a civilised talker at Women’s Social Evenings. You’ve balled it up. Remember your clan motto: Don’t die till you’re dead. I know you believe in Me; but that’s not quite enough to believe in. Try growing kumaras for a change. I make very few primitives and I like to see them survive. The Fellowship was a conditional mistake. You knew that all along. Why don’t you use your radar? I’m not angry about it; I’m only sorry. . . .’

page 617

Something like that. The Fellowship hadn’t exactly done me in. But my asbestos suit had worn through in a few places.

1968 (531)