Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

3 — The Virgin and the Temptress

3

The Virgin and the Temptress

Among the various notions of the function of art, there are two broad categories which I would like to consider – art as prophecy, and art as therapy. The Muse of prophetic poetry has been described by the Scotsman James Hogg in his ‘Queen’s Wake’:

Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen;
But it wasna to meit Duneira’s men
Nor the rosy monk of the isle to see,
For Kilmeny was pure as pure could be.
It was only to hear the yorlin sing
And pu’ the blue cress-flower round the spring;
To pu’ the hip and the hyndberry
And the nut that hung fra the hazel tree . . .

Kilmeny journeys to the land of spirits, sees many visions, and dies young. It is important to recognise that she is a child-woman; her mind is not occupied, as any other girl’s would be, with the hedonist monk or the laird’s men-at-arms; she lives in the paradise of childhood, a contemplative spirit, gathering flowers and listening to bird-song; though the nut that hangs from the hazel tree is the nut of wisdom, and perhaps it is unwise of a child to pluck it. Her visions, though fiery and crystalline, are not definite: battle in the clouds, a lion devouring a woman, the earthly paradise that the human race cannot enter. Yet I feel that the Muse of prophetic poetry has a greater grip on the popular imagination than most critics realise. There are very few great works of literature to her credit – I can think only of certain portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Langland’s Piers Plowman, and the songs of William Blake. But the works of adolescence are commonly prophetic. I remember in my early teens, prophesying, under her influence, the doom of contemporary civilisation:

Great is the fall of Babylon
Of Babylon the great!
The nations look on Babylon
And tremble at her fate;
Gone are the towers of Babylon
And shattered is her gate . . .

Women writers also are particularly susceptible to her. When I have – not often, and not for a long time – allowed myself to be dragged into the unsavoury task of making critical remarks about poems entered for literary competitions sponsored by women for their own sex, I have found that nearly all the poems were concerned to tell us that Truth will triumph and God is good. However debased the coinage, the confidence that this was the right kind of poetry must have sprung from some contact with the prophetic Muse – at least a pseudo-intuition that poetry is the work of the unworldly, the contemplative activity of an innocent soul, a child-man or a child-woman, looking at the adult world as if through glass, and repudiating as unpoetic all that happens after puberty.

I have a concealed weakness of sympathy for the prophetic attitude. Some intuitions do come from the well that Kilmeny visited and the experiences page 173 of childhood do play a part in the maintenance and growth of the creative powers. But the main danger is that the prophetic themes lack substance – too much is repudiated, too much is set aside – and the attitude has already let loose on the English-speaking world for the past hundred years a flood of schizoid writing. Actual visions are very rare indeed. They do occur, however; I think there is one embedded in the rough Puritan balladry of John Masefield’s ‘Everlasting Mercy’:

O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter
Of holy white birds flying after,
Lo, all my heart’s field red and torn,
And Thou wilt bring the young green corn,
The young green corn divinely springing,
The young green corn for ever singing;
And when the field is fresh and fair
Thy blessèd feet will glitter there . . .

I would not like to be a narrow-minded modernist, weighing Auden against Eliot and coughing up tacks, unable to recognise the vision seen by a drunk on his way to becoming a Salvation Army bandsman; but on the prophetic road the wastage isimmense;for twenty powerful lines in Masefield one has to wade through a debris of half-and quarter-truths, ill-conceived and ill-expressed by five generations of twiddling nature poets immune to any natural influence. Their descendants are now being taught in our schools to observe that the heads of thistles resemble shaving brushes. I do not feel that this is any great advance.

A view of art as therapy seems to me more fruitful – The young men will see visions and the old men will dream dreams. Perhaps I have it back to front; but the vision is prophetic and the dream is therapeutic, a bringing to the surface of those events in one’s own experience or the experience of the tribe which have been pushed underground – deaths and births, crises, initiations, violations and reconcilings.

A friend once told me a fable about a pirate ship. This ship had been sailing for some time, plundering and sinking other vessels; but she was captured, and a new crew took over, and the pirates were nailed down under the hatches. A very real improvement, no doubt; but there was a problem which might seem hard to solve. The good crew were few in number and clumsy in their handling of the ship. She could sail at half the speed; she could not swing round in her own length; and there was always the danger that the pirates would burst their way out at dead of night, cut the throats of the crew, and take over the ship. After discussion the crew reached a compromise. One by one they let the pirates join their number, pulling the ropes beside them and sharing their meals. It meant they had to get used to four-letter words page 174 in conversation and anecdotes which their sisters might not have approved of; it meant a certain disorder in the sleeping accommodation. There were quarrels from time to time, but no actual mutiny; and by degrees they found that they had a crew worthy of the ship and that their clumsiness and fear had vanished.

The parable indicates a process of psychological integration; and I would probably never read or write a line of verse, if I did not feel that works of art helped me, and might help others, to become more integrated. The pirates, to my mind, are the impulses of the id which may overpower the super-ego (I do not mind what terms are used, but the Freudian ones will do for a rough diagram) and the ship is the total personality which needs to be well manned and well controlled, while allowing for an ordinary degree of conflict. We have been or seen any number of pirate ships. But the social problem of a therapeutic artist lies in the fact that most of his neighbours are sailing a short-manned, clumsy ship with the pirates under hatches; their notion of the good life involves a high degree of rigidity and neurosis; and those works of his in which the pirates have their say appear to them a purely piratical assault against social decorum or even against the virtues. I take a different view of pirates; I do not want to be ruled by them, but I value their energy, their toughness, and their sense of humour.

In this talk I wish to examine a poem of mine in which the pirates have had their say. It is called ‘Henley Pub’; and it moves at three levels – mythical, personal and local. At the mythical level it is concerned with the story of Samson, the hero of the Jews who was betrayed by his mistress Delilah into the hands of the Philistines; the mouthpiece of the poem, at the personal level, is an alcoholic commercial traveller, a semi-lapsed Roman Catholic, who drinks in the bar of the Henley pub on a Saturday morning and worries about his mistress who lives in Dunedin. He is tempted to suicide by drowning. On the local level, the Taieri river dominates the poem, as an archetype of life and death, with some backing from the Leith Stream; there is an unlocated priest called Father Hogan who has in the past heard the traveller’s Confession; and a flat in Royal Terrace is the scene of the traveller’s sexual victory and humiliation. I imply in the poem that the Leith Stream in full spate could be heard from the window of a house in Royal Terrace; and this troubles me a little, because it might need good ears or at least a night when sounds are carrying well; but I have not felt strongly enough about it to conduct any personal research. The traveller addresses first his mistress, then the Blessed Virgin, then his mistress again under the title of Delilah; the shift of intention is clear enough on the printed page, where it is marked by two breaks in the setting-out of the poem. In speaking, I will indicate it by two long pauses:

page 175

Henley Pub

(a traveller’s soliloquy)

Brown-bellied curtains, blood-beat of
The radiogram . . . I’ll not forget
Your flat in Royal Terrace where the wet
Tom-kitten squealed at the porch door: you’d smile
And call him grizzle-guts . . . I drove
Drunk as a crocodile
At eighty round the bends to Henley
Under an asphalt moon. It’s morning. Look:
The Taieri flood, Jehovah’s book,
Ruffles its page, does not untwist our sin
Which is itself, the triple snarling grin
Of Cerberus. The barman’s heel
Crushes a hot butt, and I
Burn. The vacillations of the sky
Shine through the brandy glass.
Hail holy Queen!
Beyond the serpent waves they glitter green,
Your willows on the far bank. Mother, my dream
Of God has died. The bog-black stream
Swallows time. Trout and eel
Are sliding through my rib-cage. They will eat
The self no fire could touch, your faithful deadbeat
Altar-boy. One room
Contains the bandaged glory and the doom
Of Israel. In Father Hogan’s box
I gripped the lion by the jowls,
Splitting her sin from mine to feed the fowls
Of judgment. Then wild bees among the rocks
Loaded miraculous honey in the white
Carcass.
I loved you well
Delilah; and I lost my hold on life
The day you burnt that letter from my wife.
Your body is my Hell.
The waves of Taieri are bending bright;
A car and a man could go down
Easily under it. Last night in town,
The gin-glass empty on the floor,
I felt the rustle of the hunter’s net –
page 176 A Swedish novel on the coverlet,
Your window open to the Leith Stream’s roar,
Your head thrown back like one about to die,
Your body plump and bare
I thought, shoving my muscle through black hair,
‘What is a man, this glittering dung-fed fly
Who burrows in foul earth?’
And that is all;
All; Jehovah’s sky
And earth like millstones grind us small. (CP 324)

The poem cheered me up. By the time it had reached its final version (after the necessary tinkering at the end of the road, when one can spend three days finding a single adjective) I knew I had a live octopus on my hands – not a small dry splinter from the rock of common knowledge, but something that moved in its own dimension. All the same, it disturbed the literary shopkeeper at the front of my mind who tries to square off the aesthetic and the ethical accounts. I had to know what people thought of it; not just the literary men, who would comment on the use of full rhymes and detect the influence of Robert Lowell, but the ordinary reader who looks on any work of art first of all as a human document.

My wife said, ‘It’s a fine bit of work; but you’ll never get anybody to publish it’ – she was speaking as a fellow-craftsman who had run up against the stone face of the local hair-splitting publishers’ readers, and also to some extent the fat backside of the Women’s Trade Union which is turned towards any woman in this country who dares to write about what she knows. In the event she was partly right – ‘Henley Pub’ – though at that time the poem stood in an earlier draft and went under a different title – was one of the poems which led the New Zealand State Literary Fund Committee (not unanimously) to refuse a grant to the 1964 issue of the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook, edited by Louis Johnson, on the grounds that some of the material was not fit for public consumption and so should not be sponsored by the use of public money. Later I developed the poem a little further, without leaving out any of the images which the Committee had found objectionable, and included it in the manuscript of a new book, Pig Island Letters, then in the hands of the Oxford University Press. They had no adverse comment to make on it.

But I needed an oracle, the New Zealand equivalent of that old woman in the marketplace to whom one of the early Chinese poets used to show his work, so that she could tell him whether it made sense or not. We are not exactly a peasant nation. The nearest thing I could find to her was a good woman with whom I had had some discussion about social issues: a woman of experience, who had dealt with children, read a certain amount, attended the local church of her own denomination and tried to make the best of a difficult page 177 world. If anyone could (I thought) she would be able to tell me whether the big job I’d just finished was of any use to her and her neighbours. I sent the poem off to her with an explanatory note and she did tell me, in her own way, just how she felt about it. I can’t give you all she said; I can only dip a bucket in the river, as it were; but this is a fair sample of it –

. . . Your attempts to scale the literary ladder will never bring you true success. The present ladder, which you and several others have built and placed against the wall of modern times, that ladder has false rungs which you will live to see come crashing down. But the sound and solid ladder which leads up to literary fame rests on the ancient standard of decency, goodness and honourable truth. There is too much damage being done by your pen, driven no doubt by a mind in utter confusion and mistrust of your fellow men. Your mind is completely impoverished of any worthwhile intelligence – your thinking machine is jammed in one sticky groove – sex! I, and many another, will never slacken in our task to eradicate a system which pays, often out of the public purse, for published filth . . .

I’m a little too mature not to recognise the pervert when I meet one. I think you have aimed at being among the great, without the balance of good that it takes to get there. I’ll always fight to keep New Zealand clean (as well as green) and I’ll pray that somewhere in your make-up you will find a response to this new line of thought. Do you call what you write ‘Poetry’? Yours is the magnificent style, the perfect word – but, God help the young impressionable reader and comfort the sickened old one! To me, it’s just like being asked to a banquet that finally ends up as a drunken revelry in a common prostitute’s habitat. Being the Big Boy in the world means more to you than walking the saner levels and trying to help the lame dog along the way . . .

The poem is diabolical. When I think of Henley pub – a nice country inn beside a lake – I wonder how you could defame it so! That you should possess the gift of words, and use them as you do, is grief indeed – never forget that universal education makes your work readily assimilated by young as well as old – but the young are influenced wrongly almost every time, and you are helping their downfall.

The matter spilling out of your pen (and that of your few contemporaries) is greatly responsible for the trials now besetting our youth: our beautiful, loyal and valuable youth! Never have you written a line to uplift or encourage. This stuff is no more literature than striptease acts are ordinary entertainment, or jangling guitars and nasal voices, music. Turn from your wickedness, and live, and write something in gratitude to the Almighty for his gift of words. Your use of his gift will send you to Hell, where you have helped many of our youth to pitch headlong – and never have your raised a finger to help one out again. . . .

My first impression was that the good woman had confused me with someone else – a bad uncle, or someone who had frightened her in the park. Her criticism was rather generalised; it combined a free character analysis with a prophetic statement about modern life and my own supernatural page 178 destination. Yet her way of expressing herself was lucid enough, and plainly her reaction was an honest one, springing from a depth of suffering that my poem had inflicted on her. So I thanked her for her criticism, apologised for any pain I had caused her, and advised her to forget our correspondence. This left me, however, with the problem of sorting out my own reactions. I had consulted the oracle and received a negative reply. If I accepted even a quarter of her folk wisdom, I would have to abandon writing entirely and take up stamp collecting; if, on the other hand, I simply regarded her as a crank, and turned my back on her horrified, admonitory face, I would run the risk of living in an ivory tower, cut off from the non-literary judgment and experience of my own people; for it stuck in my mind that her diatribe did have some oracular quality, connected with this country, and might even be an utterance of the vox populi itself.

Gradually the meaning of her statement became clearer to me. I found I could accept her comment provisionally, with an eye to the source from which it came: the ancient and aggressive god of the kitchen speaking through her mouth. The kitchen god embodies the crude, unshaped conscience of the tribe. He is pre-eminently a god of safety. It was he who told the Arabs to sew up adulterers in a freshly flayed camel skin and leave them out in the sun to be crushed into a pulp as the skin tightened – he who told the women of the Indian hills to put a red hot basin on the heads of prisoners taken in battle – he who now tells our Government that our young people should go overseas to kill Marxist villagers and exorcise the vaguely phallic Devil who has a yellow skin. Many proverbs come from his simple wisdom – A stitch in time saves nine; Waste not and want not; Good walls make good neighbours; Marry in haste and repent at leisure; There’s no smoke without a fire . . .

His particular attraction for modern man comes from the fact that he is also the god of the nursery. The taste of porridge, the smell of fresh linen, old and half-remembered phrases out of hymns – the savour of innocence which he brings with him can tempt any man, especially if he is feeling tired or sick or lonely, to retreat from the area of self-knowledge and go back to the pieties of childhood, when the kitchen god smiled down from the shelf between two brass shell-caps that uncle brought home from the First World War, and the good child was the one who never went out the gate, who never tore his trousers, who never used a bad word. The trouble is, though, that returning, one becomes not a child but a schizophrene.

In the last century the kitchen god was very strong. Speaking through the parson, the bureaucrat and the Victorian museum official, he commanded that the Maori ancestor figures should have their private parts chiselled off before they were set up for public admiration. He is the enemy of Priapus, the god of masculine sex and fertility: for this reason, when, rarely, he makes an utterance regarding sex, he tends to favour contraception. He has no time for the Dusseldorf Venus, the one with the big hips, the mother of civilisation, page 179 and tells her she is a whore. He is rarely on speaking terms with Dionysus the god of wine. But he has an uneasy truce with Eros, the pretty god of love, as long as he stays well clothed and sings in opera. Sometimes on the kitchen shelf he guards old bundles of love letters, valuing them more because they signify the defeat of love than because they are documents of human feeling. When love begins to fade and smell of the cemetery it no longer offends his deep sense of propriety. But between him and Apollo the god of art there is absolute war. Each makes raids upon the territory of the other; each claims that the other is a rogue. Apollo uses his gift of satire, but the kitchen god is never helpless, for he knows he has the support of the majority of the tribe, who long ago mistook him for Jehovah. And his power of invective may almost seem to be the thunder of Sinai.

I have no wish to despise the kitchen god, who is such a strong and permanent principle of order; like most men, I value his support in my domestic life. But though, like a certain boxer, he claims to be the greatest, he is no more than a powerful principle located in the human breast. He is not the Crucified One, who stands behind all subjective and objective reality. And as an artist I have to claim freedom outside his jurisdiction. He would require me to repent not only of my sins but also of my personality. The turbulence of the adult mind will always seem to him to be the activity of Satan. I can understand why, speaking through the mouth of one of his priestesses, he reacted unkindly to my poem, ‘Henley Pub’. Let us now look at the poem itself:

Brown-bellied curtains, blood-beat of
The radiogram . . .

The brown curtains, bulging with the morning breeze in the private bar of the pub, symbolise the safe and fertile enclosure of the womb itself; and the blood-beat of the radiogram could be the ticking of the foetal heart. My hero is a man who has not travelled far from the gates of the womb; hence, his extreme vulnerability to the faults of the flesh. There is an undeveloped Oedipal quality in his relation to his mistress, in his closeness to water and earth, in the complete passivity of his Marian devotion. Women are all mothers to him; and though his status as a married man is only indicated formally within the structure of the poem, a social analyst could put forward the conjecture that his deadlock in marriage had sprung from his remaining a permanent eldest child in relation to his wife. The poem begins with him resting in the nearest approximation he can find to the foetal condition: the pub, the birth cave which is also the death cave, because there is nowhere else to go:

. . . I’ll not forget
Your flat in Royal Terrace where the wet
page 180 Tom-kitten squealed at the porch door: you’d smile
And call him grizzle-guts . . .

The figure of the Temptress is a strong archetype. Though, on the face of it, the attitude of the traveller remains positive towards her, there are indications that she is not all she appears to be. Living at Royal Terrace, she has the honorary status of a queen; yet the cat who squeals at the porch door of her temple could be the animal familiar of a Witch. Playfully, she calls him Grizzleguts, a very human touch; yet the hags of popular fantasy gave very similar names to their pets which were also the demons they suckled privately with blood. The traveller has a feeling that all is not quite as it should be:

. . . I drove
Drunk as a crocodile
At eighty round the bends to Henley
Under an asphalt moon . . .

He has perhaps, without knowing it, been transformed into an animal himself. Such things have been known to happen to those who kept company with witches. The animal is vital enough: the crocodile, whose strength is in his jaws and his tail. But one hears of stuffed crocodiles being hung from the ceiling in places where sorcery is practised. He has fled very rapidly from his beloved, under the black witches’ moon, the colour of pitch, a sign of fertility turning into death. Asphalt, when it is new, can be hot and stick to the skin; it was one of the preservatives with which mummies were made. He is undoubtedly in some psychological danger. But the day has given him a new lease of life:

. . . It’s morning. Look:
The Taieri flood, Jehovah’s book,
Ruffles its page, does not untwist our sin
Which is itself, the triple snarling grin
Of Cerberus . . .

He is, after all, a Christian who has strayed into the pagan underworld. The image of the book of the water, whose pages are turned by the wind, Jehovah’s book, implies the innocent mystery of the created world, open to the eye of God, from which he feels cut off. His sin – or rather, our sin, for he recognises that he and his mistress are linked in the same calamity – belongs to the pagan underworld, since it involves a rebellion of the natural powers. It appears to him in the shape of Cerberus, the three-headed dog at the gate of the Greek Hades: the three heads being remorse for past evil, page 181 attachment to present evil, and dread of future evil. But by the introduction of Jehovah as the God of nature the basic conflict between Christian obedience and pagan energy has already entered the poem. The hero has remembered that he is Samson, a figure of the Christian hero. He meditates on eternal damnation:

. . . The barman’s heel
Crushes a hot butt, and I
Burn. The vacillations of the sky
Shine through the brandy glass . . .

The barman is a symbol of the natural order which is now rejecting him. His life still contains the heat of pain and desire; it is burnt down, though, like the cigarette butt. To an alcoholic a barman may seem at times almost almighty, the dispenser of life and death; and the crushing of the butt could even be an image of his possible extinction under the heel of God. Meanwhile the movements of clouds and light, the vacillations of the sky, are reflected in the brandy glass, which is in turn a subjective mirror in which he perceives the vacillations of his own soul. At this point he begins to invoke the Blessed Virgin:

. . . Hail, holy Queen!
Beyond the serpent waves they glitter green,
Your willows on the far bank. Mother, my dream
Of God has died. The bog-black stream
Swallows time. Trout and eel
Are sliding through my rib-cage. They will eat
The self no fire could touch, your faithful deadbeat
Altar boy . . .

He has recited the first three words of the ‘Salve Regina’, one of the oldest and most traditional Marian prayers, which Dante puts in the mouths of the spirits at the beginning of the Mountain of Purgatory:

Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious Advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ . . .

The willows which he can see across the flooded waters of the Taieri river glitter, as if in a vision of a life that no longer belongs to him; they are symbols of fruitful grief, such as is contained in the ‘Salve Regina’. His fear page 182 is that he will drown when crossing the river of death, whose waves resemble serpents because they are harmful to his soul. The symbol of the river is dominant in the poem. On the pagan level it is the river Styx which encircles the underworld; or the world serpent of Norse mythology which coils itself around the globe.

The faith of the traveller in retrospect seems to him a dream. Yet by addressing the Blessed Virgin very simply – ‘Mother, my dream of God has died’ – he re-asserts it on another level. What has died is his image of himself as Our Lady’s altar boy, a figure of childhood spirituality who is able to stand in the furnace of the world and not be burnt, like the Three Children of the Old Testament story. His life has become polarised between the Blessed Virgin, an archetype of the good mother, and the Temptress, an archetype of the bad mother, with the dubious implication that the first rules over the spirit, the second over the flesh. It is a trap of dualism. (Naturally, for me, as a Catholic, and for the traveller in the poem, the Blessed Virgin is not an archetype, but an historical person with a particular function in the economy of grace; but poems are not doctrinal statements, and so, for the purposes of normal criticism she must stand within the poem as an archetypal figure.) Personally I feel that an unexamined devotion to the Blessed Virgin, including excessive emphasis on her physical virginity, can be dangerous because dualist; up to a point the poem shows the traveller trying to struggle out of this trap towards an ordinary charitable love of his mistress, but he is pulled down again by the tendency to dualism inherent in a sex relation cut off from spiritual stability, and by the positive and negative projections which are the main content of romantic love.

It would be natural for the traveller to see his own predicament in terms of death by drowning. Though the primitive quaternity of earth, air, fire and water are each represented, ‘Henley Pub’ is predominantly a water-poem. The Taieri river flooding its banks, and later, the roaring of the Leith Stream in spate, symbolise the obliteration of the conscious mind by subconscious forces. Time, the chief dimension of human knowledge, is sacrificed. The traveller sees himself as a decomposing corpse underwater, eaten by the eel and the trout, which have replaced the heart inside his ribs – a very apt image for any South Islander acquainted with the Taieri and the Clutha rivers. Where the fire of temptation had not succeeded in harming the adolescent, the waters of the grave have extinguished the spiritual life of the adult:

. . . One room
Contains the bandaged glory and the doom
Of Israel . . .

This image holds the metaphysical core and matrix of the poem. The Catholic in a state of mortal sin is aware, however obscurely, of betraying, in page 183 his own person, Israel, which is the Mystical Body of Christ. Because Christ dies again in him, the Mystical Body, which cannot die, nevertheless dies in one of its members. Thus the ordinary human complication of adultery, from a supernatural point of view, recapitulates the history of Samson shorn, Samson bound, Samson given over to the Philistines, who signify the natural powers in rebellion against the supernatural order. The bandaged glory could be, at one level, the body of Christ laid in the tomb of His Crucifixion; at another level, the immobilised energy of a child that does not or cannot leave the womb, and therefore dies there.

A supposition – most unpopular with many readers – occurs from time to time in the works of Graham Greene: namely, that the dead lion is in some way superior to the live or the dead dog; that the man self-robbed of supernatural life, who may yet regain it, has a more complex humanity than the man who proceeds only by natural motives. It looks like a Catholic arrogance, above all in Brighton Rock, where the young gangster glories in the fact that he knows Hell is waiting round the corner for him if for no one else; and I think Greene does show bigotry in excluding other Christian or non-Christian groups from his echelon of the illuminated – a bigotry he expiates in his later novel, A Burnt-Out Case. Yet it would not be fair to call it simple arrogance if it happened to be subjectively true. I think I have assumed something of the sort in this poem. My fallen Samson resembles a Greene hero; the pathos of unrelinquished belief gives an extra dimension to what might otherwise be trivial. After all, the stakes are very high: the gaining or loss of the sight of God:

. . . In Father Hogan’s box
I gripped the lion by the jowls,
Splitting her sin from mine to feed the fowls
Of judgment. Then wild bees among the rocks
Loaded miraculous honey in the white
Carcass . . .

The historical Samson tore a lion in two by the jaws, and later, when he returned to the dried carcass, found that bees had built their hive there and made wild honey. The lion is a familiar Christian symbol for Satan; in the poem it signifies rather sin itself. At some earlier time the traveller has made a direct attack on this lion, by way of the Sacrament of Penance; and significantly he speaks of it as splitting her sin from mine, speaking of his mistress in the third person – for the difficult crux of his situation is that repentance implies a repudiation of the relationship, and thus a symbolic repudiation of the person, at least according to the canons of romantic love. He has made this difficult renunciation; and the honey which he finds in the carcass of the dead lion might be the grace of the Eucharist; the white carcass page 184 does bring to mind the whiteness of the Host raised above the congregation; but I had rather in mind a free and charitable love towards his surrendered mistress, and the sense of liberation that occurs when a positive use has been made of calamity, within the meaning of Augustine’s words – Etiam peccata serviunt – Our faults also are of use . . .

. . . I loved you well,
Delilah; and I lost my hold on life
The day you burnt that letter from my wife.
Your body is my Hell . . .

He emphasises that the love was real; but he speaks of it as something no longer possible. The burning of the letter recapitulates the shearing of Samson’s hair, the removal of sacred strength – in the case of the traveller, a symbolic link with his now defunct marriage. It is also an act of witchcraft; as witches were supposed to burn objects that had been in bodily contact with their victims, in order to kill or in order to obtain power. The process of the liaison has also at length pushed the traveller into dualism. The body of his mistress, which he has regarded as a positive good, is now the chaining element, symbolised in the poem by the fire of Hell itself. He turns to consider the element of water:

The waves of the Taieri are bending bright;
A car and a man could go down
Easily under it . . .

The notion of suicide by drowning, already latent in his earlier meditation, rises to the surface of his mind. If he and the car were to go down together it would look like an accident: it would be ‘easy’, and there is a certain Oedipal undertone in the choice of death, a return to the womb of the river, to the waters of the unconscious mind:

. . . Last night in town,
The gin-glass empty on the floor,
I felt the rustle of the hunter’s net . . .

In the story of Samson this is the final betrayal to the nets of the Philistines; at the personal level, the traveller has felt the presence of Satan, the hunter of souls – the rustling is that of a man moving among leaves, or of a spider shifting out of its web. At this point, various negative projections lie just under the surface of the poem, because the positive projections of romantic love have begun to fall apart. The terrible phase in any liaison is the point where the subconscious projections with each partner has been willing to clothe the page 185 other cease to be positive; when the figure of the beloved changes from life-giver, consoler, perfect friend and mirror, to something else – vampire, living corpse, Jack the Ripper, spider woman, werewolf. It is the negative side of the romantic equation, firmly repressed at the beginning of the liaison but likely to come to the surface as it proceeds. Doris Lessing has made a remarkable study of it, from a woman’s point of view, in her Golden Notebook. And I find it magnificently expressed, from a man’s point of view, in a ballad by the Australian poet John Manifold:

. . . The snow lay thick, the moon was full
And shone across the floor.
The young wife went with never a word
Barefooted to the door.

He up and followed sure and fast,
The moon shone clear and white.
But before his coat was on his back
His wife was out of sight . . .

He followed fast, he followed slow,
And still he called her name,
But only the dingoes of the hills
Yowled back at him again.

His hair stood up along his neck,
His angry mind was gone,
For the track of the two bare feet gave out
And a four-foot track went on.

Her nightgown lay upon the snow
As it might upon the sheet,
But the track that led on from where it lay
Was never of human feet.

His heart turned over in his chest,
He looked from side to side,
And he thought more of his gumwood fire
Than he did of his grisly bride.

And first he started walking back
And then began to run
And his quarry wheeled at the end of her track
And hunted him in turn . . .

page 186

Manifold places it boldly within marriage; but there are usually modifying factors in married life which prevent the negative projections from wrecking the relationship. I feel that my own poem would have lacked psychological realism if the negative projections had been left out of it:

A Swedish novel on the coverlet,
Your window open to the Leith Stream’s roar,
Your head thrown back like one about to die,
Your body plump and bare . . .

The images are cumulative. They are intended perhaps to have a pictorial richness like that of an oil painting. I rarely use visual imagery to this extent. But some such climax was needed to give the Samson and Delilah story a local situation. The Temptress as an archetype is usually shown as a foreign woman, because racial differences allow the projection to take form more clearly: what is unknown is also subconscious. Hence the detail of the Swedish novel. The Leith Stream roaring in its bed symbolises the natural sexual power; and the physical attitude of the traveller’s mistress is appropriate, since to ‘die’ signifies in folk tradition the sexual act. There is something of the waxwork show about the whole thing; and this is by no means unintended. The body of the woman has a corpse-like appearance as the relationship deteriorates from loss of charity to loss of natural affection and communication – she is becoming an object, the living corpse of the negative projection:

I thought, shoving my muscle through black hair,
‘What is a man, this glittering dung-fed fly
Who burrows in foul earth? . . .’

I can understand that the genital image may be shocking; perhaps this is the reason why some critics have thought the poem should not be published. Yet it could have occurred without much disturbance in a novel. And the parallel with the visual arts should be considered. It would be the same kind of critic who called in the police when Michael Illingworth’s geometric Adam and Eve were shown in the Auckland Art Gallery. I cannot feel entirely sympathetic to them. I feel that even a poem praising adultery would not have offended the kitchen god so much as a poem such as this, which presents the layers of illusion and motivation, and ends – as must happen – with the failure of the positive projection and a situation where the beloved is seen as an It, an external unrelated object. The process is shocking, in reality or image. No doubt my critics felt that the moral danger of the poem was that it might stimulate some readers to pornographic fantasy or masturbation; yet I am loath to accept that the sorrows of the masturbator, however human and common they may be, should be the main focus of attention for the writer page 187 and the critic when one is dealing with a work of art that functions at many levels. One has to suppose an imaginary reader of moderate inflammability; such as I feel I might be myself; and if others are more inflammable, it is their business to keep away from the fireplace, not mine to get rid of the wood and the coal. One member of the State Literary Fund asked me why I had not used the word ‘penis’ instead of the word ‘muscle’ in the disputed lines. In the circumstances it was useless to tell him that I am a poet concerned with symbols and images, not a journalist concerned with reportage. But these are old battles. Perhaps I had a different notion of mental health from that of my interrogator.

In the poem the black hair of the woman’s body could indicate the fur of the werewolf. The projections have moved into the animal subconscious. The traveller feels the intellectual separation both from his mistress and himself which characterises this final descent into lovelessness. He sees himself as an insect, a fly feeding itself on dung and death, with the glitter of intellectual knowledge still surviving. Not himself only; it is a negative cosmic vision of man burrowing like an insect in the sacred earth, sacred no longer but a source of death:

. . . And that is all;
All; Jehovahs sky
And earth like millstones grind us small.

Again he is Samson – this time blinded in Gaza and turning the mill to grind wheat for the Philistines – but his vision has shifted so that he sees it as the common destiny of all men to be wheat ground between Jehovah’s double millstones of earth and sky. In a way it is a positive conclusion. He has left behind the narcissism which tempted him to suicide. Water images no longer dominate the poem. Water tends always to be a subjective symbol, what one sees in the mirror, the soul looking at itself: thus his return to sky and earth indicates a new recognition of objective reality, perhaps the endurance that conceals a beginning of hope.

A work of art is like a boulder thrown into a pool, that first upsets the fishes; but later they swim over it and around it and even shelter among its crevices. It will probably be so with ‘Henley Pub’. What disturbed me about my critics, some of them trained in the academic field, and has made me give thought to them, was that they seemed to miss the point of the poem – not an ivory tower job at all; nor for that matter an exercise in sensationalism. In ‘Henley Pub’ I was gunning a little for the green-slimed Eros of the fountains, in my opinion a more dangerous god than Priapus, because he disguises himself more and claims to be the lord of heaven and earth. I had introduced the Catholic ethic into the romantic equation, and so brought to the surface what is always latent there: a breakdown of objective charity page 188 among the unstable projections of the erotic climate. At the same time, I was not content to follow the simplest Catholic symbology: an innocent love of the creation connected with and signified by the figure of the Blessed Virgin, set against a destructive love typified by the ancient figure of the Temptress – Eve in the Garden of Eden, or those ambiguous figures who appeared in the visions and hallucinations of the desert Fathers. This view attributes too great an immobility to the Mother of God, and moreover contains a traditional masculine bias against the sexuality of women with which I have little sympathy. The Samson of the poem is in a more complex situation. His basic defect is lack of spiritual growth; he resembles somewhat the lad in a short story by Sargeson who says, in effect – ‘I’ve done wrong but I’m still a good boy; I killed off my wicked girlfriend, because her sex was doing harm, and now they’re going to hang me, I’m pure again. I’m back under the family roof . . .’. Yet he recognises he has travelled beyond the pieties of childhood, and is searching for the lost key of charity. So I leave him at Henley pub, a typical enough Kiwi, with his sex and his charity still at odds; perhaps too self-condemning; his impulses socially unrelated, like a parcel of greens that have been left to rot in the Dead Letter Office.

An artist will often be tempted to pretend to accept the arguments of the uninformed at their face value – if they assume that his intention is to corrupt his audience, he may put on the mask of an artificial Satan – like Byron, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or the great Goan artist, de Souza – and perform a ritual dance with the appropriate grimaces; or – like Dylan Thomas and many lesser men – he may acquire the defensive habits of a clown, who makes mock apologies while slapping the best-dressed onlooker in the face with a wet fish. These gestures are an oblique tribute to the power of the kitchen god. They fill in the long gaps of barrenness when the artist is incapable of contemplation but still has time to kill. They may even have a positive social function. I remember an occasion when I attended a Teachers’ refresher course at Ardmore Training-College. We were told to lie on the floor and relax and imagine we were floating down the River Nile. Then we were supposed to set down our free associations and make a poem each. It was classroom parody of the act of natural contemplation by which works of art are produced. To ward off the biting atmosphere of sterility and boredom, I wrote down and passed around like a hand grenade an eight-line ballad which I had picked up somewhere in a pub:

The sexual desires of the camel
Are stranger than anyone thinks:
After a long day in the desert
He puts the hard word on the Sphinx;
But the Sphinx’s posterior channel
Lies deep in the sands of the Nile,
page 189 Which accounts for the hump on the camel
And the Sphinx’s inscrutable smile . . .

It is not important; but it happens to be the commonest point of contact between writers and the general population – one is carrying out the old function of the clown, who gets rid of the devil of boredom by laughing at him. And while it has little to do with complete works of art, it may help an artist to survive until he gets back to his home base.

There was a rigorous formal side to the making of my poem, ‘Henley Pub’. It passed through many drafts over a period of four or five years. The earliest version of it which I can find was a structure of three tight, crude stanzas taken over from the American poet Robert Lowell. Lowell had also helped me to accommodate Catholic imagery in my verse by showing me the dramatic possibility of the figure of the Catholic who is morally ill at ease. At that stage the first stanza ran like this –

Brown curtains, blood-beat of the radiogram,
Your pleated skirt, the gin beside our bed,
Have elbowed out the voice inside my head
Of a priest who mutters at the rock of Etam,
Et quare tristis . . .’ Now that you hold the knife
I am your dog. One room
Contains the bandaged glory and the doom
Of Israel. I lost my hold on life
The day you burnt that letter from my wife . . . (Draft of CP 324)

Most of the basic intuitions of the theme were already there, but the bones of the Samson legend stuck out through the flesh of the poem, and the Catholic element was crudely indicated by the words of the priest at the beginning of the Mass. It lacked two things to make it hold together – the relocation of the poem at Henley, allowing the river image to establish it firmly in the New Zealand soil, and the interior contrast between the Blessed Virgin and the Temptress figure. The third stanza, however, contained a point of emphasis which I later allowed to drop, and only restored after the poem had been sent overseas for publication:

A year ago in the small stuffy box
I gripped the mountain lion by the jowls,
Splitting your sin from mine to feed the fowls
Of judgment . . .

Later ‘the fowls of judgment’ became ‘the fowls of Etam – Etam being the desert rock where Samson sheltered, and symbolically the altar, which is page 190 referred to in liturgy as the ‘holy hill’ – and later still ‘the fowls of custom’ – but my friend John Weir, a poet, an intelligent critic and a priest, pointed out to me that my dramatic hero would hardly have come to the confession box simply for the sake of custom or propriety; and that if he did the Confession would be invalid. So the final version became once more ‘the fowls of judgment’ – with an echo of the enigmatic saying that where the carcass is the eagles will be gathered; since my hero, to his discomfort, had confused the body of his mistress and the Body of Christ.

At several stages I tried to use another episode from the life of the historical Samson – the occasion when he set fire to the cornfields of the Philistines by loosing among them foxes with firebrands tied to their tails:

. . . On Saturday I drove
Drunk as a crocodile
At eighty round the bends to Henley
In the big Holden. That’s my style.
To tie a sparking rag to the tail of the fox
And let him run to set alight
Somebody’s haystack . . .

And alternately –

. . . The barman’s heel
Crushes a cigarette, and I
Burn. The vacillations of the sky
Shine through the brandy glass. The sun is a running fox
With a firebrand at its tail . . .

But I had to abandon the image because it never worked well at the double level. There were a hundred other changes; the main advance being that the poem was finding its own form, bursting out of the straitjacket I had contrived for it. I hope you have derived some benefit from this close examination of a single text, and that I have made clear what I meant when I said I have come to regard art as therapeutic rather than prophetic. Now I will read the poem again.

Henley Pub

(a traveller’s soliloquy)

Brown-bellied curtains, blood-beat of
The radiogram . . . I’ll not forget
Your flat in Royal Terrace where the wet
page 191 Tom-kitten squealed at the porch door: you’d smile
And call him grizzle-guts . . . I drove
Drunk as a crocodile
At eighty round the bends to Henley
Under an asphalt moon. It’s morning. Look:
The Taieri flood. Jehovah’s book,
Ruffles its page, does not untwist our sin
Which is itself, the triple snarling grin
Of Cerberus. The barman’s heel
Crushes a hot butt, and I
Burn. The vacillations of the sky
Shine through the brandy glass.
Hail, holy Queen!
Beyond the serpent waves they glitter green,
Your willows on the far bank. Mother, my dream
Of God has died. The bog-black stream
Swallows time. Trout and eel
Are sliding through my rib-cage. They will eat
The self no fire could touch, your faithful deadbeat
Altar boy. One room
Contains the bandaged glory and the doom
Of Israel. In Father Hogan’s box
I gripped the lion by the jowls,
Splitting her sin from mine to feed the fowls
Of judgment. Then wild bees among the rocks
Loaded miraculous honey in the white
Carcass.
I loved you well,
Delilah; and I lost my hold on life
The day you burnt that letter from my wife.
Your body is my Hell.

The waves of the Taieri are bending bright;
A car and a man could go down
Easily under it. Last night in town,
The gin-glass empty on the floor,
I felt the rustle of the hunter’s net –
A Swedish novel on the coverlet,
Your window open to the Leith Stream’s roar,
Your head thrown back like one about to die,
Your body plump and bare –
I thought, shoving my muscle through black hair,
‘What is a man, this glittering dung-fed fly
page 192 Who burrows in foul earth?’
And that is all;
All; Jehovah’s sky
And earth like millstones grind us small. (CP 324)