Baxter Sees Fellowship as a Compromise

The Burns Fellow for 1966, James K. Baxter has moved into the Fellows’ room in the English Department. Here he will write poetry, plan talks and edit the memoirs of C.J. Macmillan Brown, his grandfather. His third volume from the Oxford University Press, Pig Island [Letters], will appear during April.

Baxter is probably the most widely read, and certainly the most out-spoken of New Zealand’s poets. One of his recurrent themes is the sterilising effect of university life on original writing. When questioned, he readily admitted the compromise inherent in his acceptance of the fellowship, but saw it as slight.

As advantages he has the opportunity of a free year with no visible ties, his parents live near Dunedin and he has a wife and children to support.

Part of Baxter’s objection to academic life lies in its emphasis on teaching the student other people’s ideas rather than encouraging him to develop his own.

The emphasis on examinations as an index to success, the invisible financial ties to family also cramp the individual talent.

The effect of the number of contemporary poets (Alvarez in The New Poetry lists 15 out of 20) engaged in teaching poetry, is deadness in expression and technique.

‘Taking in one another’s washing,’ as Baxter puts it. He sees a poet as a man talking to men, rather than to professors.

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Baxter’s criticisms are based on his experiences in gaining a BA, variously from Otago, Canterbury and Victoria. He has since worked in school publications and, mainly, as a postman. Work being a necessary evil for the poet, he should at least work manually and retain the independence of his mind.

There is no doubt of Mr Baxter’s dissatisfaction with contemporary society, and his criticism of it has been loud and pointed: ‘It isn’t that I want to criticise so much, it’s that I just can’t stand it.’

A distrust of Government once it extends its function beyond the building of roads, and begins to take action on matters where moral judgment is involved, is basic to Mr Baxter’s criticisms. These little digests of opinion can hardly be taken as typical of the man. He talks most of the time and shifts the subject frequently – usually through metaphor.

But drift as the conversation did, Baxter’s side of it never departed far from what he saw as the only basis of poetry, or of anything else – his own life, and the problems and responsibilities of the individual man.

There was no literary chit-chat – or discussion of abstract critical principle; if we discussed Lowell, it was not his technical innovations that mattered, but his view of life, and the honesty of that view.

That Mr Baxter’s utterance, in speech and verse, is as often blunt enough to draw the condemnation of the academically correct as it is to draw the affection of the intellectually pretentious (those who imagine jeans and free verse are the inescapable antecedents of literary genius), hardly affects the main issue, which is that Mr Baxter has seen his responsibilities and is trying to face them.

The poet’s task is like that of Sisyphus; he cannot be finally successful but must serve as necessary example. ‘After all, we may be the only free men left.’

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