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[Notes on the Making of ‘The Martian’ 1]
(Final faircopy)
The Martian
It does not matter now if a motorbike should stutter
Tuning up in a street behind the cathedral, or
What boots, if any, his girlfriend may happen to prefer
To wear tonight. As if they were flying underwater
Squadrons of wax-eyes flutter and feed on
The heads of grass in the section at the back
Of the boarding house. He is lying down
On the unmade bed, in a rubbed black
Jacket draped with silver chains. Consider
The hair in ringlets, the long pale jaw
Of a stone Crusader. Our son does not belong
To our dimension. He has chosen
To die in the lap of the cruel virgin
We call Reality – rum, vomit, girls, police
And motorbikes. Take off his heavy Martian crown.
If he could breathe gas, not oxygen;
If he could eat radium;
If he’d a blob of solder in the brain and groin –
There’d be no problem. He’d have been quite able
To get his union ticket and belong. (Uncollected)
| 1. | There were two distinct sources in experience from which the material of the poem was taken. The first was personal recollection of a period in 1948 when I was living at the back of a Christchurch boarding house, and was occasionally more strongly tempted to suicide than at any other time in my life. I recreated some of this experience in an autobiographical prose sketch
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(‘Some Time Ago’) which I wrote and had published in the June 1955 issue of Meanjin –
In the Meanjin sketch I mention also a period when I had neither money nor food –
The second source, which made me start again on the poem after having given it up as a bad job, was an awareness of the problems of a particular young man, a member of a motorbike group, who had recently been to the funeral of a friend in Christchurch who had been killed by a motorbike accident. In such deaths there is, I think, some element of subconscious choice. The final description of the ‘Martian’ takes something from the physical appearance of the young man I happened to know. There was a third minor source in a science fiction story in which the spacemen involved in a permanent interplanetary war are described as ‘sacrificial kings’ – and in general the final shape of the poem owes something to the ideas and language of science fiction. |
| 2. | On the morning of the 23rd February 1967 I was looking through one of my MS. books and struck the two unsuccessful drafts (1a and 1b) – and felt that there was some experiential truth embedded in them which could page 257 still make a poem. Having in mind the way I had tackled writing the poem ‘Farmhand’, I began with a short atmospheric prose statement. Drafts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 were written fairly rapidly in the course of the morning. I was then obliged to go out with my wife and daughter for a picnic lunch on the Peninsula, and took the beginning of Draft 8 along with me, somewhat resenting the interruption in composition; but, as often happens, the break was helpful; and the new ikons of the Crusader and the Unicorn began to take shape. I made the new notes standing on a beach and looking at the harbour water: a physical situation that often frees my mind to move in a somewhat trancelike way. The image of a unicorn applied to masculine adolescent spirituality comes from several sources. One of the poems in my first book of verse is called ‘The Unicorn’, and deals precisely with the adolescent condition; and I have often reflected on the unicorn myth – once I wrote an article which was published in the Catholic paper Zealandia, called ‘The Virgin and the Unicorn’, in which I tried to set down in symbolic terms the way in which the influence of the Blessed Virgin frees a self-centred intellectuality and makes it fruitful. I had also the myth of Icarus and the Arthurian myth in mind, though vaguely. But in Draft 8 the main new development was that I seemed to have found a myth to contain both the isolated energy and innocence of adolescence, the death into maturity symbolised by the unicorn being trapped by a virgin – the adolescent suicide is this death in its most negative aspect – and also I identified myself with the adult hunters who kill the unicorn, and eat its body, which is a type also of the Body of Christ consumed by Christian believers. Some notion of the Pietà remains in the final version of the poem; but the Eucharistic reference seemed to me both too obvious and too inexact. |
| 3. | In Draft 9, written early on the evening of the 23rd, I began to draw the various symbols together, abandoning the abba half-rhymed quatrains to which I had been steering the poem (the pattern of ‘Farmhand’) and using instead a looser more conversational structure. It was only in Draft 10 that the Martian image rose to the surface of my mind, with the words – ‘Take off his heavy Martian crown’ – and this led me in turn to change – ‘Our son does not belong / To us’ – to – ‘Our son does not belong / To our dimension’ – and also helped me to give a different ending to the poem. I went later that evening to a PTA meeting with my wife, and while various teachers spoke interminably from the platform, I revolved and polished the last five lines in my mind; at one stage I had it – ‘If he could eat cobalt and radium’ – with a reference to atomic warfare – and also – ‘If he could eat stone’ – and – ‘If he could eat iron’ – but it became stable as – ‘If he could eat radium.’ What freed me to write the last five lines was the sudden recognition, on a bench at the PTA meeting, that if the suicide were able to breathe gas, he would have no problem – this further led me to consider that, metaphorically, we ask our adolescents to ‘adjust’ to a society devoid of spiritual values – to breathe page 258 gas instead of air, to eat radium instead of bread, to install a wiring system in the brain and genitals which will obviate both rational decision and vital instinct. Just before the recognition, the words were in my mind – ‘The gas will choke you. Turn / The jet off . . .’. I finished writing the poem when I came home after the PTA meeting. It did not trouble me much that the fact that the poem is on one level about an adolescent suicide might be now hidden from the reader – the word ‘gas’ is the only direct clue – because I felt I had constructed a satisfactory myth to contain the various levels of intuition and experience. |
| 4. | There are perhaps narcissist, homosexual and necrophiliac nuances in the poem: the dead body is passive and in a degree androgynous. I had had one or two dreams with similar nuances before writing the poem. Plainly, though, the poem would not have ‘come clean’ if I had not found a way of using these nuances without being submerged by them. I accede fully to Freud’s humbling view that all human minds are subconsciously and permanently polymorphous-perverse. It seems to me that an artist just has to accept this within himself and work with it. Since one’s subconscious patterns are not determined by the will, it is not strictly a moral issue. |
| 5. | Comments on the images |
| (a) | The motorbike is in the context of the poem an obvious symbol of masculine energy – from the Freudian angle, phallic, as the street in contrast is a female sex symbol – and its ‘stuttering’ suggests a partial failure of masculinity. The cathedral is maternal as well as religious: ‘behind’ also means ‘out of sight of ’, implying that what interests the adolescent group is out of sight of the matriarchy and the religious tradition. The girlfriend who wears boots implies a femininity that has become partly masculine: a minor lead-up to the ‘cruel virgin’ later in the poem. In general this portion of the poem indicates a social group in which the masculine and feminine roles are not firmly established as opposites. The ‘if any’ indicates that the girl with boots on feels clothed – the boots are part of her essential image of her social role – without them she would be naked – as if one said ‘what clothes, if any’ – and there is here a possible implication of promiscuity. |
| (b) |
The wax-eyes represent the whole natural creation: they are, as it were, friendly mourners at the death of Adam, as in Webster’s lines –
. . . the robin redbreast and the wren . . .
|
| (c) | The blackness of the jacket and the silver of the chains are lunar colours. The chains are the chains of office of the sacrificial king. They are also, one is aware, self-made chains, the chains of imagination which is the territory of the moon. The Crusader image amplifies the notion of sacrifice by its connection with the Cross; moreover, it brings in a notion of tradition which is at odds with the untraditional modern world. A sacrificial king does not belong to ‘our’ dimension; nor does a Martian, who is by definition an alien creature. |
| (d) |
‘He has chosen / To die in the lap of the cruel virgin / We call Reality . . .’. This statement is the metaphysical core of the poem. Who is the cruel virgin? I suggest – Diana, the moon-goddess – though in my early poem, ‘The Unicorn’, she was Aphrodite –
. . . but see
She represents an implacable and devouring Reality that confronts the adolescent soul. In a sequence of prose poems published in one of the issues of the Victoria University students’ periodical Salient I refer to the cry of the Furies as ‘an echo of that first cry of horror that rose at the breaking of the virgin sleep of Mother All . . .’. And this Unblessed Virgin is creation seen as chaos, the emptied and non-sacramental universe which modern man has to try to penetrate, master and understand. The protagonist of the present poem is mastered and defeated by it. The implication of a Pietà is not unconsidered; since the dead Christ resting on the knees of the Blessed Virgin is the positive and sacramental pattern of what here occurs negatively. Thus too the Martian crown is an obverse image of the Crown of Thorns. |
| (e) |
The remaining images simply establish that the failure of the ‘Martian’ to penetrate ‘our’ Reality may be a sign of his humanity. We are the Martians; and he the visiting Earthman who has tried and failed to breathe the Martian atmosphere. If he had succeeded, he could have entered our economic and technological world and so gained his Martian ticket. . . . [The notes included the following interesting but futile passage on the rhythmical and aural effects of the poem.]
1967 (418) |