Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Kiwi Habits [2]

Kiwi Habits [2]

It is impossible to tell the truth about the events that make a life fruitful rather than barren – because strength and weakness are the two sides of the same coin. This struck me the other day when I was talking about Fairburn to some people who wanted to hear about him. I tried to express the impossible in two myths – that Fairburn was when young the doomed Adonis who courted the goddess Venus and was wounded by the wild boar Reality, and that his poems were the blood that fell from the wound and turned into flowers; and that he was also the man who had heard the song of the Sirens, strapped to the mast and sweating, and remembered some of the words of that terrible song, while others had their ears stopped safely with wax.

But I remember standing in a pub in Wellington and talking to Fairburn, a Martian visitor to that town. No doubt because he cared about other people, he seemed a little dissatisfied with my habitual chaos and inertia. ‘What do you really like doing?’ he asked – ‘What do you like doing most?’

‘F--ing,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, after a pause. ‘A fine thing. But best when it happens inside marriage.’ To the literal-minded, this would seem to prove that Fairburn was a monogamist.

And there was the time he came to me in another pub in Auckland, where you could drink from bottles set on the bar, and showed me the typescript of his long poem, ‘The Voyage’, which he later dedicated to Philip Smithells. He was a humble enough man to be diffident and uncertain in the company of another man who could at times write poems that held together – on that ground we were in fact equals, and he knew it. And it seemed when I read the poem that the waves of the sea entered the bar and shook it. The poem referred to impossible truths that we both knew about, not able to be detached from the country we lived in:

And hairy men are riding from the mountains
To scatter forest flowers and join the dance . . .

page 398

Those images had to do with the moment when the Fall of Man is reversed, and the instincts and passions are seen as positive – like a sign suddenly given to those who struggle to understand the unbaptised wilderness in the soul – particularly real to me, in that Auckland bar, after a week-long drinking bout among the sexual idols and ikons that spring up like tarry mushrooms from the northern soil.

And there was another occasion in another place when I arrived at the party unwelcomed, having been there a few days before; and under the glacial eye of the hostess proceeded to put away a half bottle of gin and half a dozen of beer. In that cold limbo, before I went to sleep on the floor, I remember Fairburn’s quiet voice at my earhole – ‘It’s all right now. But what will it be like in ten years’ time?’

He was in a sense a visitor to the human menagerie, possessed by a desire to bless what he found there. He had come to understand that human beings cannot be understood, or relied on, but only accepted. And I think he accepted his fellows with an endless Franciscan patience.

*

Progress: an old railway line that ends in the bush. You climb out of a dusty truck (used once for carrying logs) and two hundred yards beyond the terminus you might as well never have seen a bridge or a railway sleeper. Bellbirds; dropping water; rotting leaves and branches; spider-webs glistening with rain – the bush is what it has been, living and dying beyond human help. Progress – the shunting of trucks, the raising and lowering of signals – is not exactly a lie; it is merely totally irrelevant.

*

‘The existence of death makes everything else look absurd,’ my Jewish friend said to me. And I knew (though he had thrown away the holy candlesticks) it was far from being a philosopher’s comment. He was thinking of Belsen and Auschwitz – that the worst of the goyim had had the power to all but destroy the children of Israel. And to his mind – as indeed to my own – it showed that God was a terrible and enigmatic Father. My answer was to put my arm round his shoulders and talk about Karl Marx and Freud, the humanist mediators.

*

Throughout their lives women are again and again in the process of having something removed from them. The little girl comes weeping to her mother – ‘Billy’s taken my dollie!’ After that, there are a continual succession of thefts page 399 and removals: virginity, reputation, God, peace of mind, sleep, the children that are lifted from her womb, and eventually youth and beauty. She will regard other women chiefly as potential thieves, whether they steal a hair-clip or a husband; not that the person or object is so dearly treasured when had, but rather that its removal makes it valuable, a symbol and representative of some archetypal theft. To see the old woman rooted like a willow tree among her relatives and possessions, half green wood and half dry bark, you might think of her as one who has survived a thousand losses, bearing her destitution with an eccentric grandeur – until you notice those white bones scattered around her roots, remnants of parents, boyfriends, husbands, children and friends, who have died to nourish an essentially innocent and vigorous egotism.

*

At the abattoirs where I was working, the man in charge of prodding the cattle to the death chamber was a garrulous type with a mobile face. When we ate our lunches together, picking up the bread with half-washed hands and sitting on the hard benches in the concrete lunch-room, he would entertain us regularly with stories about women. It cheered him up; though at home I imagine he said nothing and washed the dishes to an exact schedule. But one day he tackled an old Dalmatian butcher, an unmarried man of fifty, with a sereneface, who sat and said nothing at all,in a ragged black woollen vest, his hands lined with small white scars where the knife had slipped over twenty-five or thirty years of working on the chain.

‘Have you ever had a woman, Jack?’ asked the innocently ribald raconteur.

‘No,’ said the old man. ‘I’ve never been married.’ And an awkwardness felllike a blanket over the lunch-room. We knew that the raconteur had spoken to the wrong man. It seemed at that moment that he was a restless child; and the old Dalmatian was his father and the father of us all.

*

I was sleeping in a hut at Curious Cove a few years back. And the bunk above mine was occupied by a young red-bearded man. One night I came in early and lay down; and a little later the young man arrived with his girlfriend. They both climbed into the upper bunk. There was a silence interspersed with the sounds of lovemaking. But soon a conversation began between them.

It seemed that the girl felt the young man lacked something. Something highly intellectual and all but indefinable. Honour, honesty, some precise focus of intellectual integrity – it seemed that he lacked this indispensable quality, and she was unhappy about it. On the other hand, he felt that he had quite enough of it to get along with. Their argument was long, abstract and circular. At last, after what seemed to be a pause of exhaustion, he said very page 400 distinctly – ‘You know, Stella, I really do love you.’

Neither of them said a single word more than this. And very soon the noises of lovemaking began again.

1967 (459)