[NOTICE TO READERS: For five years, Reid's Reader has been presenting an entirely free service to readers with commentary on books new and old. Reid's Reader
receives no grants or subsidies and is produced each week in many hours
of unpaid work. If you wish to contribute, on an entirely voluntary
basis, to the upkeep of this blog, we would be very grateful if you made
a donation via the PayPal "DONATE" button that now appears at the top
of the index at right. Thank you.]
We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“COMPLETE PROSE” by JAMES K. BAXTER, edited
by JOHN WEIR (Victoria University Press, $200)
I
sometimes preface reviews on this blog with an elaborate apologia. When it
comes to John Weir’s edition of the
Complete Prose of James K. Baxter, I am obliged to give a particularly elaborate
apologia. The Complete Prose was
published late last year, and I am only now getting to deal with it.
There
are a number of reasons for this.
First,
given the scale and expense of this publication, I was diffident about
requesting a review copy from Victoria University Press. I am extremely
grateful to VUP that, when I at last plucked up courage to request one, they
generously provided it. But it took me some months to work up the nerve.
Second, this is
a formidably long publication, and as you should know by now, I do not review
things without actually reading them. To read my way through the Complete Prose has taken me – on and off
– a number of months. John Weir’s edition consists of four large hardback
volumes, presented as a boxed set. The cover of the box is illustrated with a
triptych of original paintings, by Nigel Brown, of Baxter in his later bearded
phase. Each volume has a handy ribbon-bookmark. The first three volumes are
Baxter’s prose (i.e. articles, reviews, sermons, letters-to-the-editor, prose
stories – but not personal letters), presented chronologically. The last volume
(all 592 pages of it) is John Weir’s apparatus
criticus. A publisher’s flyer tells me that the whole set amounts to 2662
pages. John Weir, poet, critic, academic and Catholic priest, was a close
friend of Baxter’s for the last decade of so of Baxter’s life. He has
frequently written about Baxter, has edited other posthumous collections of
Baxter’s work and collaborated in a complete bibliography of all Baxter’s writings.
It is highly unlikely that, having spent years on this project, he has omitted
anything of significance.
But where does a
reader begin?
I was tempted to
follow my usual practice by beginning at the beginning and ending at the end.
But in this case, noting that Weir’s Introduction was in Volume 4, I
began with Volume 4 – and I think this is where the wise reader should
begin. To break it down like a conscientious bibliographer, Volume 4
consists of the whole table of contents for all four volumes; a 151-page
Introduction by John Weir which is, in effect, a biography of Baxter and a
critical overview of his work; Acknowledgements; a “Note” in the form of an
elegy Weir wrote in 1972 at the time of Baxter’s death; an 11-page Chronology
of Baxter’s life; and then the bulk of Volume 4 – 250 pages of Notes and
References, essentially the endnotes to the first three volumes. Weir suggests
that readers should have this volume open at the relevant pages when reading
anything in the first three volumes. Wise advice. They illuminate much
(especially in the way of topical references and events in Baxter’s
relationships) that would be obscure in reading Baxter’s prose. If I have a
minor criticism, it is that occasionally Weir seems intent on explaining things
that probably don’t needs explaining – for example the notes telling us in
detail who each of the following people were – Emily Dickinson (p.217); Billy
Graham (p.271); Graham Greene (pp.282-283); Pope John XXIII (p.311). Or am I
assuming a “general knowledge” that does not really exist?
After the Notes
and References comes a 9-page Glossary of Maori terms; 90 pages giving short
biographies of writers and critics who were Baxter’s contemporaries; 25 pages
of Select (!!!) Bibliography and 40 pages of small-type, double-columned Index.
In all this it
was naturally Weir’s 151-page Introduction that I read with most interest. It
begins as straight biography – the parentage and unhappy childhood and
schooling of the young sin-obsessed, sex-obsessed James Keir Baxter. His father
Archibald’s strong moral example as a pacifist. His more tense relationship
with his mother. Then the marvellous boy who had his first collection of poems
published when he was 18 and who immediately appeared in Allen Curnow’s Caxton
anthology and was hailed by Curnow as the salvation of New Zealand poetry. (At
this point in the story I always wonder – though Weir doesn’t – what a negative
influence this premature recognition might have had on young Baxter’s future
development.) There follow the bohemian years, the student years, the
casual-labour years and the long, long hell of alcoholism, with endless boozing
and much verbal abuse of others and much shagging. Baxter becomes an Anglican.
More acclaimed volumes of poetry appear. Baxter lays off the booze when he
joins Alcoholics Anonymous in the mid-1950s. But Baxter keeps shagging, despite
the fact that when he was 22 he married the 21-year-old Jacquie Sturm. As with
other accounts, this part of the story always leaves my sympathies with
Jacquie. She, as a Maori, certainly raised Baxter’s consciousness about Maori
culture. But he was at best a neglectful husband, often leaving her and their
two children to fend for themselves while he was off on his bohemian rambles
and (frequently enough to be worthy of note) seducing other women. In the late 1950s, despite the publication of
what amounted to his first “collected poems”, he feared his poetic powers were
waning. In 1958, aged 32, he became a Catholic.
And here I have
to note something distinctive about Weir’s Introduction. Up to (approximately)
Baxter’s conversion to Catholicism, Weir’s account of Baxter’s life is a
third-person account culled from other sources. But the bohemian-poet and the
priest-poet became friends in 1961. After this point Weir’s account is as much first-person
memoir and reminiscence as it is biography of Baxter. There are long quotations
from Baxter’s letters to Weir and from (unpublished) poems which Baxter sent
Weir. As a conscientious priest, Weir takes Baxter’s Catholicism very
seriously. He presents Baxter as a man on a profound spiritual quest – in his
social criticism, in his years writing apologetic articles for the Catholic
weekly The Tablet, and of course in
his final Jerusalem years. By this stage Baxter had morphed into the bearded
barefoot prophet, now one of the iconic images of New Zealand in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. It all ends when Baxter dies of a heart attack in 1972, aged
only 46.
Obviously not
everybody interprets Baxter’s last years as benignly as Weir does. By the
1960s, former admirers like Allen Curnow and Denis Glover were (occasionally
publicly, but more often privately) dismissing Baxter as a poseur, mountebank
and religious hypocrite. Endless were the stories one heard of the
rosary-reciting sexual exploiter, with Baxter cast as a kind of Kiwi Rasputin. Part
of this at least arose from Baxter’s bad taste in becoming a Catholic –
something very offensive to agnostic academe. Weir acknowledges (p.122) the
type of sarcastic things that were said, by the likes of Frank Sargeson, at the
time of Baxter’s death. Weir himself comes closer to accepting the “Saint Hemi”
image.
Even so, Weir is
an astute critic and an honest reporter, despite his personal interest.
Committed to a full account of Baxter’s life and work, he can’t ignore the
grubby and questionable stuff (Baxter’s sexual frustrations and bouts of
shagging; Baxter’s, in his Jerusalem years, fathering a child on a young woman
half his age) and he is not starry-eyed about everything Baxter wrote. For
example, of the man’s third collection The
Fallen House (1953), Weir remarks:
“There was a great deal of power and urgency
in the poetry, sometime to its detriment, for it could sound like a rhetorical
sermon delivered by a man who knew the answers rather than the musings of
someone who understood that there might not be any.” (p.42)
When he comes to
Baxter’s prose, the occasion of this publication, Weir notes:
“The quality of [Baxter’s] prose writing is uneven. It is strongest
when he is emotionally involved with his topic and when his language sounds
most like his speaking voice. He always needed an audience and wrote best when
he had a particular person in mind.”(p.124)
Weir says that
Baxter’s prose is essentially concerned with five topics: “himself; the nature of literature and art; spirituality and religion;
social injustice; and, a thread of this, the plight of Maori.” (p.124) In
explaining how he came to finalise the contents of these four volumes
(pp.147-149), he notes that this collection does not include Baxter’s plays
(which have already appeared in a collected edition). Weir also says that he
hesitated to include the Catholic apologetic articles which Baxter wrote for The Tablet, given that Baxter later
repudiated them for their bland tone and simplistic theology. (They were once
gathered together in a volume called The
Flowering Cross). In the end, however, Weir decided to include them.
* *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Thus far, I have
done no more than to explain how these four volumes are presented to us, and
what their scholarly editor has done. I have not got to the heart of the
matter, which is Baxter’s prose itself. I am tempted to deal with this in great
detail, but (with regret, discarding many notes I have made over the last few
months) I will restrain myself, attempt to be brief and try to deal with the
three volumes in a few concise paragraphs each.
The 771 pages of
Volume 1 take us from 1943 to 1965 (Baxter between the ages of 17 and
39), being Baxter’s last years in Dunedin and Christchurch and then his 16-year
sojourn in Wellington. Note that this volume covers fully 22 years, whereas the
second and third volumes combined cover a mere six years. In this volume we
first meet Baxter as the schoolboy trying his hand at lyrical prose
description. He rapidly becomes the confident 20-year-old student methodically
planning “Notes for ‘Poetry in New Zealand’ ” (pp.13-14) and reviewing Frank
Sargeson and Henry Lawson in student magazines. He makes his first halting
attempts at short stories. As the volume later proves, Baxter never became
master of this form, but some of his experiments were interesting, even if in
stories like “The Mathesons at Home” (pp.274-281) and the
quasi-autobiographical “To Have and To Hold” (pp.287-292) he is rather too
eager to reach a moralising punchline. His unfinished (and frankly botched)
“novel” Horse, which was published
posthumously, is given in its entirety (pp.529-589). I followed the editor’s
advice throughout my reading by having the relevant “Notes and References” of Volume
4 open for each item in the earlier volumes. John Weir notes that Horse was clearly influenced by Dylan
Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade.
One thing that surprised me as I read Volume 1, was how much Baxter in
the 1950s was besotted by Thomas. As Weir notes, Baxter’s play Jack Winter’s Dream stood in the shadow
of Under Milk Wood, and there are
frequent references to, and apologia for, Dylan Thomas in Baxter’s criticism.
Another surprise was Baxter’s respect for Edith Sitwell, about whom he wrote a
long, appreciative piece in 1965 (pp.693-701). Weir wonders shrewdly if
Baxter’s positive view wasn’t in part influenced by the fact that Sitwell, like
Baxter himself, was by then a Catholic convert. For me, another surprise was
Baxter’s competence when it came to straight reportage, as in his “Akitio: A
Country School and Its Community” (pp.330-343), written for an educational
journal. Similar intelligent factual observation is also found in his diary
jottings and brief pieces of journalism when he visited India and other points
in Asia in the late 1950s.
Much of Baxter’s
prose in the 1950s and early 1960s consists of routine, jobbing book-reviewing,
with short notices written for the Listener
and lengthier ones for the likes of Landfall.
Much of this is undistinguished literary journalism, with Baxter often enough
using a book under review as the pretext for discussing something that
interests him.
Two trends,
however, stand out.
First, there is
Baxter’s emergence as social critic. In a Listener
review of 1951, he suggests that M.K.Joseph’s iconoclastic “Secular Litany” “should be nailed on every schoolroom wall”.
(p.64) He begins to discuss the Maori condition earnestly with the 1953 article
“Is There a Colour Bar in New Zealand?” (pp.124-126). Of course he is always
ready to take swings at “puritanism” and censorship, he frequently campaigns
for tolerance for homosexuals, and he follows his father’s moral example in
regular criticism of militarism and Cold War rhetoric. In all this, social
criticism becomes wedded to his religious concerns as he accepts Catholicism
and begins to discuss regularly theological matters (often – as the endnotes
point out – with John Weir).
Second, there
are his detailed examinations of New Zealand poetry, beginning with his Adult
Education lectures and his “Recent Trends in New Zealand Poetry” in 1951 and
continuing through The Fire and the Anvil,
the whole text of which is given here. (pp.145-198). His key statement on New
Zealand poetry is made in his 1961 review of Allen Curnow’s Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse. The
review is presented here under the heading “The Kiwi and Mr Curnow”
(pp.438-442) and shows Baxter striking out against Curnow’s “intense preoccupation with landscape poetry,
time and the cult of isolation.” This is his definitive repudiation of
Curnow’s melancholy version of “nationalism” which saw New Zealand Pakeha as
aliens in an alien land.
One thing that
often struck me while ploughing through Volume 1 was how different New
Zealand then was, and how controversies were often raised over matters that
would now not raise a comment. It is extraordinary, for example, that in 1960
Baxter felt obliged to write two letters to the press (pp.419 and 421) defending
the (very mild) satirical songs of the American Tom Lehrer against the charges
of obscenity and immorality.
I have one
quibble about the editor’s decisions in this first volume. Clearly Baxter’s
contributions to the publication New
Zealand in Colour consisted of detailed captions to photographs. We are
given 30 pages of these captions (pp.485-514), which may be appropriate if
utter completeness was the editor’s aim but which is odd if they are presented
without the images and hence shorn of much of their meaning.
All 712 pages of
Volume 2 deal with the two years (1966-68) when Baxter returned to his
native Dunedin as Burns Fellow, and then worked for the Catholic diocese and
wrote his apologetic articles for the Catholic publications The Tablet and the Marist Messenger. Not to beat about the bush, I found this volume
the most difficult to plough through and I suspect, given the heavy weight of Catholic
apologetics, this will be the verdict of many other readers. The Tablet articles that became The Flowering Cross are usually from a
“left” Catholic perspective. In them, Baxter raises such heavyweight issues as
alcoholism; the church’s attitude towards trade unions, unemployment and
workers’ rights; what is wrong with pietistic Catholic literature; compassion
and support for homosexuals and so on. Frequently he crosses swords in letters
columns with more conservative Catholic supporters of the Vietnam War, which
Baxter vigorously opposes. Surprisingly, perhaps, in both the Catholic press
and in letters to general newspapers and to the New Zealand Listener, Baxter supports the papal teaching against
artificial contraception. In both the apologetic articles and the
letters-to-the-editor on these issues there is much repetition, interesting
though some individual observations are.
Far more
engaging in these years are his articles and essays on poetry. Drafts of his
talks on poetry (pp.43-95) are still among the sanest and clearest overviews of
thematic development in New Zealand poetry from the 1920s to the 1960s, even if
they are suffused with much autobiography. His analyses of both Curnow’s verse
and the status of Landfall at that
time are still spot-on. More uneven are the Burns Fellowship lectures on poetry
that were gathered together and published in 1967 as The Man on the Horse (pp.129-243). There is much autobiography,
much meandering away from his set topics and (dare I say it) much fruitless
speculation on the place of Catholics in New Zealand literature. But the
lengthy reading of “Tam O’Shanter”, which gives the collection its title, is
robust, vigorous and shows Baxter really trying to connect poetic practice with
a popular voice. The reflections continue in Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand (pp.325-353), which is dedicated
to John Weir.
And yet truly,
as Weir says in his (Volume 4) Introduction, “the quality of [Baxter’s] prose
writing is uneven”. When we force ourselves to read all 24 pages (pp.20-43)
of Baxter’s arts festival talk “Shots Around the Tiger” we are intermittently
amused, but eventually bored, by Baxter’s scattershot of doggerel, deliberate
provocation and grains of real social comment. His introductions to his plays,
his support of a local theatre and his frequent praise for Patric Carey’s
endeavours at the Globe are all admirable but – oh dear! – see how Baxter is at
his very worst in his 1967 talk “Some Possibilities for New Zealand Drama”
(pp.476-492), which mixes Utopian visionary hopes with windy rhetoric as he
imagines a future New Zealand drama which will somehow feed off a sense of
liturgy.
And then there
is the sort of rhetoric, which automatically alienates many. Dramatically
casting himself in the role of prophet, Baxter has a dream calling him to
Jerusalem and writes a letter (pp.569-571) to the Catholic Bishops of New
Zealand which begins “From Hemi the
charismatic, the nobody, the dead man, who is also the Seed” and continues
very much in the same self-dramatising vein.
Which brings us
to the 584 pages of Volume 3 . This is the final phase, the “Jerusalem
Years” (1969-72), with Baxter trying (and frankly failing) to separate himself
from the literary life and run a commune for young dropouts at Jerusalem; and
then returning (a little chastened and disillusioned) to Auckland and dying.
Baxter’s social perspectives in these years are very much the same as they were
in the mid-1960s, but – at least in small doses - this last volume is more
readable than Volume 2 because it is more often angry and engaged. Baxter is
still immersed in religion. He writes two long series of “Letters to a Priest”,
all of them signed “Hemi” (pp.79-110 and pp.134-155). He does a form of social
work among junkies in Grafton in Auckland and writes many articles of advocacy
for them, including his long submission to a Committee on Drug Dependency and
Drug Abuse (pp.73-78). Baxter is far more engaged with Maori, entering into
dialogue with Nga Tamatoa and trying to reach deeper into the culture at
Jerusalem on the Wanganui.
While he still
contributes many book reviews to the New
Zealand Listener, he himself now becomes the object of popular journalistic
enquiry. John Weir chooses to include in this volume many articles, profiles
and interviews written by journalists about Baxter. (Many are from the
major dailies but a surprising number are from the Wanganui Chronicle, which would have been nearest to the Jerusalem
commune.) We are given various drafts of Baxter’s Jerusalem Daybook about life on the commune, including the final published
article (pp.294-341). There are still anti-war articles as the Vietnam War
continues, and there are (sometimes in the Catholic press, sometimes not)
Baxter’s rancorous arguments with his fellow Catholics. In a 1970 newspaper
report “Poet Warns Against Seeking Possessions” (p.202), Baxter is quoted as
saying “The Church is Catholic –
universal – for all the people, yet it has given the Maori a European God. They
will lose the Maori as they lost the working classes in France.” He is
never slow to tell Catholics that they are Pharisaical, bourgeois and
apparently lacking the spark, vision and lively spirituality that James K.
Baxter himself possesses. Frequently Baxter curses New Zealand for having “a secular Trinity – the Dollar Note,
Respectability, and the School Cert. exam.” (The phrase turns up in various
articles – at pp.129-134; pp.181-182; and p.224). In other words, we are
materialistic, class-bound and stifled by unimaginative formal education.
Baxter in these
years was capable of the analytical lucidity that he had earlier brought to his
long articles on New Zealand poetry. You can see this in a long interview he
did with John Weir (pp.356-365) in which he calmly dissects his own public
image, and answers pointed questions, as when Weir asks “[in using mythological
references and imagery] are you not going
against your stated position of reflecting the world as it is?”
But as I have
said judiciously above, this third volume is bracing to read “in small doses”.
The fact is, much of Baxter’s vigorous polemic in these years becomes
oppressive and repetitive. Indeed, it becomes rant. As he curses and excoriates
bourgeois and capitalist society, Baxter will every so often drop in a phrase
telling us that he is no Marxist and that he is guided by Jesus. But there is a
fearful naivete to much that he writes – a readiness to assume that people can
be neatly categorised as humane or inhumane, truly Christian or sham Christian,
middle-class or “authentic”. There is little nuance, little middle ground. He
often enough condemns old puritanical theologies (Calvinist or Jansenist) that
threatened people with hellfire, yet he clearly sees the world as divided into
the saved and the damned.
If you wish to
see him at his worst, look at his “Militancy in the Schools” (pp.558-562),
supposedly about education, which begins “If
you are happy at school, it may be a sign you are a volkwit [tee hee] who would be happy in Buchenwald.” It
continues in much the same hysterical vein. There is little room for nuance in
later Baxter’s prose and frankly there is little exercise of real charity,
except to those whom Baxter has anointed as his comrades.
How do I sum up
this boxed set of (nearly) all the prose that Baxter wrote, outside private
letters? It is a titanic job of editing. It is a job that will not have to be
done again. If anyone requires book-and-verse for Baxter’s views on literature
and on a whole range of social issues, they will find it here. John Weir has
produced a colossal piece of work. Not only are we reminded of the sheer volume
of Baxter’s writing, but we are reminded of how good he was as a critic –
especially of New Zealand poetry. His critical art was one of engagement –
trying to connect poetry to the popular voice, not getting mired in academic
technicalities, and showing a thorough insider knowledge of what he was talking
about.
But, though I
have read my way through these volumes, I would not advise other readers to do
so. Baxter’s Complete Prose would be
better approached as a work of reference. When read in toto, one finds that too many of the same themes are struck
again and again. In his later stages, Baxter’s polemic becomes shrill. His
simplifications grate. I would accept that, for all his posturing and
self-dramatising, Baxter was set on a genuine spiritual journey (which is
treated with reverence by Weir). His views on Maori were a couple of decades
ahead of other Pakeha thinking. But too often he wrote as if he were the only
person in the land enlightened enough to see the dangers of materialism and
monoculturalism. Suburb-dwellers are repeatedly demonised. A Manichaean dichotomy
rules in his thinking and one’s head is done in.
A
Small and Possibly Presumptuous Footnote: In
reading all the collected prose of James K. Baxter, and especially reading the
notes in the 4th volume, I was surprised at the number of times
literals render 20th century dates as 19th century
ones. For example, in Volume 4, Note
465, p.348, we are told that T.S.Eliot lived with John Hayward from “1846” to “1857”,
when obviously 1946 to 1957 is intended. There are other examples of this
particular glitch.
Excellent work. Thank you for reading that so I don't have to. Funnily enough, I was scratching my head yesterday trying to remember the name of Baxter's unfinished novel (my copy has long since gone). All I could remember of it was an odd line about "suffer the autumn of the succubus". It sounds as if I should not search it out to reread!
ReplyDeleteI hope you also took the time to read the Something Thoughtful section "The Baxter Problem".
DeleteOf course! I usually read all three Somethings every week when they first appear.
Delete