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A discursive essay about JerusalemW. S. Broughton aa Massey UniversityPublished online: 18 Jul 2008.

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A DISCURSIVE ESSAY ABOUT JERUSALEM

It must of course have been a rather public sort ofhermitage, but it was none the less in a very realsense withdrawn from the world. St. Simeon Sty-lites on the top of his pillar was in one sense an ex-ceedingly public characterjbut therewas somethinga little singular in his situation for all that.

(G. K. Chesterton,St. Francis of Assisi)

There are several New Zealand writers in recent years whocome to mind as cult-figures, men who have attracted to themselvessupport, admiration and disapproval for reasons that stem as much fromthe impact ofpersonality as from the impact of the writing. A.R.D. Fair-burn was one such, Barry Crump is another, James K. Baxter in the lasthalf-dozen years of his life was a third. In the case of each of the threenamed, the writing did much to foster and sustain the image that the manhimself was to project, yet it is reasonable to suppose that few New Zea-landers, comparatively, would have heard of any of the three had theirreputations depended solely upon writing. But when James K. Baxterdied during Labour Weekend in October, 1972, his death was a publicevent; it was news, as.had been the last few years of his life. The deathwas announced onthe billboard of the capital's morning newspaper. Hisfuneral, a Maori tangi on the ma rae of the Ngati Hau people, into whosetribe Baxter, a European, had been received a few months before, wasa Roman Catholic one, assisted by nine priests. In the tiny isolatedWanganui River settlement of Hiruharama (Jerusalem) where there areless than a hundred inhabitants, the burial drew five hundred mourners.Network television coverage showed the afternoon to the whole country,and a leading publisher rushed out an illustrated memorial book just intime to make the Christmas sales.

At a tangi. the ceremony of lamentation and parting, the bodylies in an open coffin until the burial service begins. Friends may comeforward and address the dead, speaking of what he did in life, thankinghim, perhaps taking the final opportunity to pay undischarged debts.

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• Jim Baxter

Jim Baxter'sTangi atJerusalem

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Many people spoke in this way at James Baxter's funeral, speaking ofhis life, his works and the example that his social conscience had beento a bemused and not-always-approving country. I did not hear one per-son of those who spoke in English allude to Baxter as a writer. Thosewho came because their friendship had been that of a reader or a fellow-writer were few, compared with those whose friendships stemmed fromreligious, ethnic or social associations, and in that company they weresilent.

The point is not made to denigrate those who knew Baxter bestas a writer. Every man's mourning is a private communication, r e -gardless of the rituals invoked by Church or tribe. But I think at thattime at least James Baxter was known for many things, of which writingwas only one. Many people, I believe, accepted the journalists' glibsummary of his "career" as "philosopher, guru and poet" ignoring thethird ascription while overlooking the fact that the first two were incor-rect. Yet, perversely, we cannot know the full significance of the poetrywritten after 1967 unless we know why Baxter was popularised in thisway.

Perhaps the tendency was always there, but certainly throughthe decade of the 1960's Baxter became more concerned with public af-fairs than he had been in the past. This concern showed itself in allthose areas with which he felt involvement—political morality, religiouspractice, social morality—and in each of them Baxter involved himselfas an active participant and critic. It was the peculiar nature of theparadoxical involvement and withdrawal, so appropriate to the temperof the decade, that gained for him the publicity that surrounded the lastyears. An "establishment" person critical of his society might haveentered politics, the church, or the Department of Social Welfare; a"radical" might have demonstrated or formed an Action Group. Baxterwas in style nearer to the second rather than the first type, but his meth-od was to draw upon those phenomena of the later I960's "counter-cul-ture"—the freaking, the hippie vision, the love-cult, the anti-material-ism, the commune-ideal—and adapt these North American institutionsto the New Zealand setting. His mode of adaptation showed a shrewdawareness of what could be appealingly utilised in this country. TheRomantic anti-materialism, the wish for a withdrawal from urban "ar-tificiality" to rural "nature" is international enough, though its intensityin the New Zealand literary tradition is noteworthy.

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Baxter saw that an indigenous New Zealand society alreadyexisted, only half-recognised by the European world. This was the ruralMaori community whose sense of identity, family and society few pakehahad recognised as a vital alternative to their own society. But the later1960's saw the beginnings of a popular revival of interest in Maoritangathat continues up to the present. Much of the interest may be sentimentaland "trendy, " the pop-cult condescension of middle-class amateur an-thropologists. Nevertheless its positive features point to a recognitionof the validity of an alternative style of life and an expression of discon-tent at the material values of the dominant European society. Maori so-ciety, then, with its emphasis upon community rather than individualismand its ethic of arohanui (does the word caritas translate this better thanthe word love?) was one of the sources of Baxter's inspiration. Theother was Catholicism. Baxter's Catholicism, however, was not thepuritanical Jansenist inheritance of New Zealand Catholicism which is,for explicable historical reasons, largely lower-middle-class and longdominated by an Irish priesthood and teaching orders.

The New Zealand temper is puritanical, and the anti-estab-lishment movements of the late sixties and early seventies are no excep-tion. But its temper is also sectarian. The social orthodoxies of localCatholicism would have been no more suitablean ethic for Baxter's worldthan would the orthodoxies of bourgeois Protestant puritanism. Baxterthen was to turnto a medieval ideal, and adapt itin ahighly idiosyncraticway. The profession of a personal life-style derived from the ideal ofthe Franciscan friar embracingat least poverty, had immense potential.It could contain the rejection of contemporary materialism, and harmo-nise with the Maori world while rejecting the pakeha ethic, far more ef-fectively than could the puritanism of either Calvinism or Jansenism. Itcould supply an ethic that could refute the charges of libertinism andanarchy so often levelled against alternative life-styles. It was news-worthy in a way that enabled it to irritate the bourgeoisie and feed mostof their dearest-held prejudices. And it allowed Baxter a position thatwas unchallengeable because of its esoteric nature. Of another messi-anic visionary (D'Arcy Cresswell) Denis Glover had remarked, "He didcreate a cosmogony, and he was immovably its centre." The remark isappropriate to James K. Baxter at Jerusalem.

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One death is enough, I won't kill youover again, ritually,being only one other poetwho knew you younger and never better

(Allen Curnow, "A refusal to read poemsof James K. Baxter ata performance inhonour of his memory in CranmerSquare, Christchurch, " 1973.)

James Baxter was acknowledged to be an important poet fromthe time of his first volume, Beyond the Palisade, published when thepoet was only eighteen. In the following year Allen Curnow included workfrom it in his Book of New Zealand Verse 1923-1945, with the editorialobservation, "It seems to me that since Mason in 1923, no New Zealandpoet has proved so early his power to sayand his right to speak." Itwasa recognition that dogged Baxter for twenty years, because it marked theyoung poet as a disciple, and, when he moved rebelliously in new direc-tions inthel950's, it marked him as an enfant terrible, even an apostateto the older generation of poets that Curnow had anthologised. The some-times amusing and sometimes unedifying hassling between two "schools"of New Zealand poets in the 1950's and early 1960's is now literary his-tory; in retrospect it seems that a spectacular amount of misrepresenta-tion and of confusion over means and ends was generated, particularlywhen one considers the superior level of critical intelligence of the bestof the protagonists. Baxter was never the leader of a "school, " thoughhe was much admired (or disliked) for his rejection of Allen Curnow'seditorial prescriptiveness as he saw it, after the publication of the sec-ond edition of the Book of New Zealand Verse in 1951 and the PenguinBook of New Zealand Verse in 1960.

Curnow saw Baxter's work as moving into a decline in theyears after the publication of The Fallen House, and the Baxter of InFires of No Return (1958) and Howrah Bridge (1961) has noplace in Cur-now's pantheon. "Mr. Baxter," Curnow declared in a University of Auck-land Winter Lecture on 16 July 1963, "has a sense of origins and of po-etic métier, which may at any time reward us again, as he has ceased todo since The Fallen House, his 1953 volume. " Readers who know Vin-cent O'Sullivan's Anthology of Twentieth Century New Zealand Poetrycould test this judgement on the eleven Baxter poems from "The Home-coming" to "Ballad of Calvary Street" which O'Sullivan takes from the1958 and 1961 volumes.

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The divisions between writers over questions of criticism andliterary principles that made the 1950's sucha noisy decade in New Zea-land poetry had one effect among several: in emphasising the disagree-ments between two "generations" of New Zealand poets, the controversytended to conceal the fact that Baxter was a poet whose verse could stilland always be described within the main tradition of New Zealand verse.It was not a thematic tradition as explicit as the one Curnow spoke of inhis remarks upon "some common problem of the imagination" in 1945,or upon "reality" being "local and special at the point where we pick upthe traces" as he declared in 1960. But the continuity of tradition thatlinks the generation of poets who were Curnow's contemporaries withthe poetic world that Baxter inhabited until his death is a Romantic onein which actuality and ideal confront the poet in an agony of impossiblechoice, and a recognition of irreconcilable antithesis. Such poetry,though it may wear the mask of social concern (as it did often in the workof Cresswell, Mason, Brasch, Fairburn, Curnow, Glover, Baxter) isalways finally personal. Yet that mask of social concern exhorts us sooften to recognise the need for a change of heart, a spiritual rather thana political conversion to some new metaphysical or religious vision. Theword "religious," rather than the word "social," is probably at the heartof New Zealand Romantic poetry, and maybe we should say that poetry inNew Zealand has always been religious in a rather pagan way. The mes-sianic and vatic elements of our verse go back at least to D'Arcy Cress-well, and that long and worthy line of successors to him that I catalogueda few sentences above have given to us messages which have much incommon in spite of the different voices that convey them. They are likethe messages that we heard nearly two hundred years ago, from Words-worth, from Blake, but these are now messages that are coming from asociety that has adapted and differentiated itself, in time and in place,from that earlier England of the first Romantics.

Somehow, each poet tells us, mankind has fallen from grace,and has become dissociated from an ideal that he still dimly apprehendsand desires. The state of grace, the cause of the fall, and indeed itsvery nature will vary according to the poet, but the basic idea is com-mon. So too is the proposition that a rejection of those false creeds thattempted us to fall is a necessary preliminary to the regaining of the de-sired state of, if you will, redemption.

In describing Baxter in these terms we are speaking most ob-viously of the later years of poetry and social activity, but there are

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ways in which the themes and concerns can be traced back to the earli-est verse. The recognition of mortality, and its acceptance in an ani-mistic universe is evoked in poems from the 1940's on; if the tone shiftsto a greater sense of despair in the verse of the fifties and early sixties,we may choose to equate this to a biographical narrative, the Dionysiacstudent poet becoming the drunken postie before the sixties when asC. K. Stead described it in his memorial note in Islands 3, "the trans-formation was occurring in which Jim the Catholic family man becameHemi the prophet."

Transformations and becomings are the stuff of this biographicalnarrative. At no time perhaps before the last few years can the poetaccept his own exhortation of an early (1947) poem:

Upon the upland road,Ride easy, stranger:

Surrender to the skyYour heart of anger

But the years that precede the 1960's show poem after poem in which therecognition of anger, pain, or the despair that the medievals called ac-cidia, haunts the poet and forces him to a reluctant acceptance of mortaldoom:

loss is a precious stone to me, a nectarDistilled in time, preaching the truth of winterTo the fallen heart that does not cease to fall.

Death had shifted house to his true homeAnd mansion, ruinous, of the human heart.

Remember iron-coloured skullsOf cattle thrown to the crab's crypt,Driftwood piled by river floodOn the long beach, battered limbAnd loin where the red-backed spider breeds,By a halcyon sea the shapes of man,Emblems of our short fever.

The awareness of personal pain or grief that the poet accepts inparadoxical, almost perverse, joyfulness is a subject of countless poems

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in the mid-1950's and after. One should not too much dwell upon the bi-ographical explanations thatwould tell little enough that the poet had notalready revealed. The university critic has, too, the caveat of a littleverse from about 1962:

Urbanus fears I'm lunaticThrough women, grog and popery.Teetotal, celibate, agnostic,Urbanus cultivates his barren fig-tree.

It was probably this necessary shift from the themes of theCaxton generation which the younger Baxter had followed in his firstthree volumes, that led to Curnow's rejection ofthat new, more tor-tured poet. The repetitive sense of personal anguish does mar'T'poemsand "persona" poems alike so often in this period. But it is too simpleto dismiss everything between 1953 and 1966 as finally flawed by thehysteria of despair. The best of Baxter in this period, as a decade later,is aware of the risibility of the human condition and the need for com-passionate observation. In that awareness his best poems find theirplace alongside the great humanistic sonnets of R.A.K. Mason. Consid-er as one of the finest examples, looking forward to what will come inthe Jerusalem Sonnets, "The Homecoming, " where the Returned Serv-iceman Odysseus comes back not to Ithacabut to "the gully farm /Wherethe macrocarpa windbreakshieldsahouse/Heavywith time's reliques,"and where he is reunited not with a wife, but "his mother, grief's Pe-nelope. "

She will cook his meals; complain of the south weatherThat wrings her joints. And he—rebels; and yieldsTo the old covenant—calms the bleatingEwe in birth travail. The smell of saddle leatherHis sacrament; or the sale day drink; yet hears

beyond sparse fieldsOn reef and cave the sea's hexameter beating.

It is an important transitional poem, perhaps the fulcrum of In Fires ofNo Return, for its style and rhetoric is finely that of the best lyric, som-bre Baxter of the 1950's. Its insights show compassionate recognitionof pain and terror suppressed within the "matrix and destroyer" not ofthe land (as he had said a few years earlier in "Poem in the MatukitukiValley") but of the love-abusing family. Here the reader must begin to

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follow some of the poems (more as we move closer to Pig Island Let-ters), the plays of the mid-sixties, and finally the last poems, towardsa new departure. For it is out of this new compassion, presented notwithout difficulty and failure on many occasions, that Baxter was to for-mulate his social concerns in the next decade.

The general overview was orthodox enough. Baxter's liberal-ism in the 1960's found its negative focuses first in the Campaign forNuclear Disarmament, then in opposition to the Vietnam War, and, clos-er to home, in his perceptive recognition of the blighting nature of somany of the institutions of our society that contributed to the alcoholicand narcotic problems that he was personally and concernedly involvedwith. The theology within which he came to judge these concerns wasthat of the Roman Catholic Church to which he had been converted in thelater 1950's. But the curious thing is that the grog and Popery at leastdo not manifest themselves overmuch in the poetry of this time. Thenew compassion which I suggest is there in this middle-ground poetry,looks forward to the activities of the 1950's, but without at this timedrawing upon the new beliefs and experiences to a noticeably explicitdegree. The degree of greater explicit social and religious commitmentcomes at the time when the poet has already begun to explore the rheto-ric of his new perceptions in prose, (essays, journalistic articles, ser-mons) and in prose-drama, (for radio, for the stage, and as a verbalaccompaniment to mime). It is another vast subject for another writerto explore, this exploration of alternative languages by Baxter in the1960's. Here we can only note that the eventual consequence of the shiftof sensitivity in the 1950's seems to have been the evolution of a newrhetoric and a new eloquence over the next ten to fifteen years.

Baxter's eloquence has long been one of the most evident fea-tures of his verse, a feature that led Allen Curnow in 1945 to observe"he seeks the eloquent rather than the inquisitively precise word." Therange of poems from 1944 to 1966 shows the poet testing with undimin-ished enthusiasm, and sometimes little enough discrimination, the pos-sibilities of metaphor, conceit, and simile in a career of inventivenessthat has no equal in New Zealand. When the lyric inventiveness fusedwith thegrowingly austere, pessimistic themes that the poet was explor-ing in the 1950's, it was inevitable that a ring of sonority would becomethe poet's hallmark.

The poet who had seen the loss of animism as the prime experi-

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ence of our private and our public fall, could see that man would

turn to the gentleDark of the human daydream, child and wifePatience of stone and soil, the lawful cityWhere man may live, and no wild trespassOf what's eternal shake his grave of time.

Nature, which was to the poet something rather more than a pantheisticsource of effusion and something less than a teacher in any Wordsworth-ian sense, was always the setting in which the evidence of mortality wasfound side by side with evidence of Nature's vital unconcern:

Meanwhile on maimed gravestones under the toweringfennel

Moves the bright lizard, sunloved, basking inThe moment of joy.

The image of mortality is a grave in both the examples here, and forBaxter the image is common to the point of repetitiousness. The poetrycelebrates life in the awareness of death; the sense of sepulchral gloomis never too far from the centre of Baxter's verse; it strikes me as Iwrite that there is something supremely fitting about the fact that thegreatest single public occasion in the career of this poet should be thetangi that I mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this essay.

But what can diminish, if not completely dispel, the sense ofaccidia is not the temporary distraction of Petrarchan or Romantic love,though that may defy time:

Your mouth was the sunAnd green earth underThe rose of your body floweringAsking and tenderIn the timelost seasonOf perpetual summer.

Rather in the mid-1950's Baxter seems to be moving, however tenta-tively, to a stance of acceptance where man in his vitality which is mor-tality, (fallen if you wish) is the subject of celebration. The sense ofloss is a "precious stone" to the poet, speaking to him of "the fallen

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heart that does not case to fall." The "heart of anger" will probablynever be wholly surrendered to the sky, but in the acts of mourning andrecognising loss we come close to saying to the dead what we perhapsnever said to them while they were living:

The regular boys and the loud accountantsLeft their nips and their seven-ouncesAs chickens fly when the buzzard pounces—

"Have you heard about old Flanagan?"

The idea of a human community, the community not of a Ship of Fools orof lost and damned souls (though they may be all these things) but ofthose who value each other simply because of their commonbond is whatis emerging:

The man who talks to the masters of Pig IslandAbout the love they dreadPlaits ropes of sand, yet I was born among themAnd will lie someday with their dead.

If we speak of eloquence in contrast to the idea of inquisitiveprecision, as Curnow did in 1945, we are hinting that the oracular orrhetorical fascination of the poet's images may be distracting us froma certain imprecision, a lack of real knowledge, at the centre of thestatement. There are probably enough places in Baxter's work wherethis could be illustrated. He was a very prolific poet, and either wasnot or did not choose to be very selective about publication. For thisreason there is no time at which there could not be discovered "minor"poems, in which the examples of sonorous wordmongering or even out-right flatulence could be discovered.

But in the volumes after How rah Bridge a new rhetoric isemerging. The inventiveness is as great, and the poems show the samedaring proficiency in moving from the natural to the moral image, aninheritance of the rhetoric of the sermon more than of any poetic tradi-tion, I think. But the new rhetoric conveys more truthfully than everbefore the individual voice of Baxter, that distinguishable habitof speechthat was too often lost in the eclecticism of the less certain poet of the1950's, the poet who "heard" Thomas, Lowell, Durrell. If in the lastyears the poet heard other voices, they were the voices of the devotion-al writers whom he studied, whose ideas he sought to transform into a

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spectacularly egotistical experience of humility. But the speech washis own. In two major books before Jerusalem and three afterwards,the new rhetoric replaces the lyrically effusive style. A direct speechincorporates more often than before a poetic " I ," the masks of othercharacters and projections being reserved more for the series of playswhich the poet was to write in the mid 1960's. In the new landscape, somany of the old truths are heard again, but made new:

Under rough kingly walls the black-and-whiteSandpiper treads on stilts the edges

Of the lagoon, whose cry is likeA creaking door. We came across the ridges

By a bad road, banging in second gear,Into the only world I love:

This wilderness. Through the noon light rambling clearFoals and heifers in the green paddocks move.

The sun is a shepherd. Once I would have wantedThe touch of flesh to cap and seal my joy,

Not yet having sorted it out. Bare earth, bare sea,Without fingers crack open the hard ribs of the dead.

The only New Zealand poet who occasionally produced an equivalent fe-licity of response to the emotive effect of a landscape upon the viewerwas Fairburn, and he, like Baxter, could often enough botch the job withan excess of mellifluity. But Fairburn could not so easily move fromthe even resonances of the metaphor of aphial ("the touchof flesh to capand seal my joy") to the laconic vernacular of the poet knowing that thenit was a case of "not yet having sorted it out," putting it into perspective,applying whatever knowledge time might have given him since.

The flies are using my scalp for a bush picnic,Jumping one another and shitting among the hair-roots,

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And I don't like it. Brother, it is not the social circusTroubles me most, but the lack of significant action.

(James K. Baxter, letter too peter olds, 1972)

Should we agree with C. K. Stead when he said that he admiredthe Jerusalem Sonnets "as much as or more than anything else" of Bax-ter 's? The Sonnets need tobe seen as apart of that continuity of changein Baxter's verse through the mid-1960's and after. They must also beseen as onepersonal expression ofa life thatwas becoming increasinglyconcerned withaquest for secular and spiritual significance. The para-doxes of Baxter's verse in these last years are the paradoxes of the Ufeitself. The last poems contain some intense and beautiful illuminations:they also contain much that is trivial and banally self-obsessed. Yet atthose points where that concern with the self which is near the centre ofall Baxter's good poems shows itself sincerely, there the paradox of theloss of ego and the awareness of self gives to us the best religious versein this country's literature.

In 1966, James Baxter moved from Wellington to Dunedin totake up the Robert Burns Fellowship, an endowment at the University ofOtago that allows a full year's time for creative work on a lecturer'ssalary. Baxter held the Fellowship for two years, years which saw thepublication of Pig Island Letters in 1966 and The Lion Skin in 1967, aswell as a fruitful collaboration with the Dunedin theatre director PatrieCarey and mime artist John Casserley. Pig Island Letters contained amajor sequence of thirteen verse letters on the intimate and public facesof the poet, the man seeking to express the personal causes of poetry,its use and need in a world that does not really think that it needs or canuse it. There is so much in this sequence that the critic can not easilysay "this" or "this" illustrates the Letters best. They are poems thatallude much to the growing fear of aging that the poet in his fortieth yearseemed now to know:

And this manOn the postman's round will meditateThe horn of jacob withered at the rootOr quirks of weather. NoneGrows old easily. The poem isA plank laid over the lion's den.

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They speak of new modes of the knowledge of self:

The dark wood Dante wrote ofIs no more than the self, the wandering gulf ,That calls itself a man, seenThrough the dark prism of self-love . . .

and they look forward to the newer social commitment that was to comein the Boyle Crescent drug-hospice in Auckland and later in the com-munity at Hiruharama:

This love that heals like a crooked limbIn each of us, source of our grief,Could tell us if we cared to listen, whySons by mayhem, daughters by harlotryPluck down the sky's rage on settled houses.

Most of the time at Dunedin seems to have been centred on thepoet's theatrical experiments, but it seems that the return to Baxter'sold University contributed to the Pyrrha poem sequence that was pub-lished after his death in the volume Runes. The Lion Skin, a handsetedition of 240 copies of eleven poems, now out of print, was publishedfrom the Bibliography Room of the Univers ity of Otago in 1967. Itseemsto mark if anything a cautious movement of retrenchment, the poemsshowing a more opaque surface of detached blandness, in comparisonwith the Pig Island poems. Only the title poem, emblematic in deliber-ately contrived images of mystery, looks forward to the paradoxes ofthe next few years.

In the two or three years after his holding the Robert BurnsFellowship, the poet seemed increasingly restless. The transition from"the poetas family man, /Head between thumbs at mass, nailing a trol-ley, / Letting the tomcat in" to the flagellant Franciscan in the whare-puni* of the Jerusalem community—

I undo my belt

And begin to hit my back with the two brass ringson the end of it—twenty strokes are more than enough

•Meeting house.

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Soon I climb wincing into my sleeping bag

—was in no sense, spiritual or social, an easy one. Baxter moved northto Auckland and settled for a time in the inner suburb of Grafton in acrashpad where he sought to create a hospice for drug-users, a commu-nity of refuge from the legal, social, medical pressures that he felt werethe causes of addiction. The reformed alcoholic was directing his en-ergies to assisting those mostly young victims of social destruction; itcould have been the fulfillment of a private social ambition, which mightwell have been accompanied by the death of the Muse. In these yearsBaxter declared more and more frequently that verse was now somethingthat he had put behind him. He wrote comparatively little, and what sur-vives is interesting only because it shows the poet using a rough ver-nacular-rhythmed loose line form that often fails to accommodate therhythmic compression that Baxter's images always seem to demand.Perhaps the Auckland sojourn was doomed because Baxter sought tocriticise the institutions that he was coming to see as anathema—family,police, middle class materialism—from a position in which neither henor those he was trying to support were removed from their influences.Whatever the reason, he withdrew from Auckland about the beginning of1970 in some disconsolation but found within a few months a new locusand indeed a new role, for both the public and the private man. In thisnew role he was to write his last major sequences of poems.

Do we need at this point to recall the plays that Baxter waswriting with the stimulus of Patrie Carey at Dunedin's Globe Theatrethree and four years before? Few of the personae of those plays spokewith voices other thanBaxter's. The voicehas many tones andcadences,but it seems always the same voice. Like the poet, the personae of theplays tend to preach and philosophise. This may not be a failing in lifebut it does tend to diminish them as dramatic characters in a work ofart. Perversely, the plays are most instructive at those moments whenthey fail as plays, leaving their audiences suspecting that they couldsucceed as poems. Let us suggest that what Baxter did, and did withspectacular success in the last three years of his life, was to discovera scene in which a dramatic poem could be declaimed.

The scene was Hiruharama, the Maori form of the name Jeru-salem. It is a Maori p_a* forty miles up the Wanganui River, a settle-

•Village.

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ment with ninety years' association with European Catholicism and mis-sion hospice. There in 1883 a remarkable French nun, Mother MaryJoseph Aubert, had established a mission, schools and a church, in oneactivity among many that crowded sixty-six years of social work amongMaori and pakeha* in New Zealand from her arrival in 1860 till her deathin 1926. She may be the only New Zealander whose case for beatifica-tion is currently being urged. Jerusalem is still dominated architectur-ally by its church, but the mission is now closed and only a couple ofnuns are still in residence. In this setting, natural, even primitive, andrife with associations of some religious, historical and imaginative com-plexity, the sustained dramatic poem could be written and declaimed.Baxter was to be its author. Its main protagonist was a medieval layintellectual, sinner, penitent, flagellant, self-consciously modelling him-self upon the Mirror of Christ, the character revealed in the Fioretti ofSt. Francis of Assisi, drawing to himself what he could absorb of Maori-tan ga, the culture and life of the Maori community in which he had cho-sen to live. The protagonist, searching with medieval intensity for anunderstanding of the paradox of self-awareness and abnegation, calledhimself Hemi te tu tua—James, the person of nö account.

The audience for this performance was three-part. Not neces-sarily in order of merit, it included the readers of Baxter's poetry, themembers of the Hiruharama community and those who supported orsympathised with it, and, via the news media, about three million be-mused middle class New Zealanders who were not quite sure what it wasall about.

Baxter's community survived at Jerusalem for about threeyears until his death in October, 1972. At the time of writing it contin-ues on a much smaller and perhaps more functional scale, while thepresent Government takes up some of its ideas in a controversial ohu**policy intended to promote the establishment of indigenous communes.But it seems that Baxter never really intended a commune, rather thana community, to grow up in Jerusalem. The poet's argument (at thispoint one thinks more of Jeremiah than of St. Francis) was that a com-

* J. K. Baxter's definition (his own notes to Autumn Testament) reads"New Zealander of European descent"; see notes to Muirhead's articlehere.

**Working party; official term for current Government-sponsored com-munes.

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munity which rejected materialism could be an antidote to the evil soci-ety that had made its children fatherless. It was a desire to care fornga mokai, the fatherless ones, and had something of Mother Mary Jo-seph behind it. But the evil society was a constant necessity in themythology of Jerusalem. Twenty years before young Baxter had spokenof the poet as the "cell of good living in a corrupt society." The prose ofthis period, rather than the verse, continually proposes the idea of so-ciety's corruption—its materialistic abuse of the human spirit, its legaland social annihilation of the underprivileged. If at times the abuse ofsocial institutions seems simplistic, it is worth recalling that only now,in the mid-1970's, is middle class liberal opinion coming to recognisethe complex horror of some of the racial and police problems that Bax-ter railed against. To Baxter it seemed that police brutality, unfairvagrancy laws, racialism, and middle class materialism were all con-tributing to the nihilism of "modern life":

the deaf blind worldHowling on all fours would like to deafen

Its imaginary brother, the great water lizard?

Should we see in that image two culturally disparate creatures from theHebrew and Maori bestiaries—Nebuchadnezzar and the taniwha* ? If so,it is no more than is offered to us in most of the last poems, where Bax-ter blends the world of Maori and European culture, society and religion.What is so striking is the effectiveness of this blend, in the JerusalemSonnets and in the poems of Autumn Testament (a volume that Baxterwas preparing for the press at the time of his death). In the community,Baxter proposed that the Maori sense of community and sharing shouldreplace the European sense of acquisition and individualism. By Euro-pean standards, which are the cultural norm in this professedly multi-racial nation, the community was a dubious alternative to the societywhich its members had left, and the Departments of Police, Child Wel-fare, Education, and Health all reportedly took cognizance of it fromtime to time. But to Baxter it represented a statement whose impor-ance was in direct proportion to the intensity of the anger that it gener-ated:

* Legendary water monster.

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The agents ofA paranoiac culture will one day come with keroseneTo burn us out of our burrow. Then will be the time to say

"Brothers, I have expected youFor a long time. Do you want to share your pain with us?"

The Jerusalem vision required more than merely a secular ex-pression of belief in an alternative culture to sustain its creator. It isperhaps here that the most controversial aspects of the subject becomeapparent. Baxter wrote four books of verse in this period: the Jeru-salem Sonnets are a sequence of thirty-nine poems, letters to a Dunedinfriend; the Jerusalem Daybook is a record in prose and poetry of the lifeof the community, published in 1971; letter to peter olds is described as"a poem, " a verse sequence of seven sonnets formally similar to the"poems to Colin" that are the first sonnet sequence, though of less po-etic stature; and finally the Autumn Testament. The Testament containsa sequence of love poems for the poet's wife, ïte waiata mo Te Kare, theforty-eight poems of the title sequence, a prose letter to a friend, andanother seven-poem sequence. I call this body of work "controversial"because there emerges from it a vision of great egotism, a repetitiveconcern not only for self-understanding (which is to be found in the ago-nies of all of Baxter's verse) but now also for self-definition in the formof the mendicant penitent sometimes recognising the value of humilityand poverty, but sometimes dangerously near to a Lucifer-like pride inthat same abnegation.

It is difficult to read the Jerusalem Sonnets without being a r -rested by the awareness that lines such as

Tribe of the windYou can have my flesh for kai*, my blood to drink

imply not only that the poet will offer himself as sacrificial victim, un-derstood either in Maori or in pakeha terms, for the sustenance of the"tribe of the wind," those dispossessed by the century of European oc-cupation, but also that the poet is presenting himself as a Eucharistieoffering. Perhaps there is a theological subtlety by means of which thisavoids blasphemy, yet the reader may feel that the disclaimers never

*Food.

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really persuade him that the vision of a barefooted, lice-infested men-dicant is not in fact a very prideful one. The balance between listeningto the commands of God, and feeling rather smug about the fact that Godtalks to one, must be a fine one for the Christian reader, as it seems itwas a fine one for the Christian poet.

The last three books do not, I feel, show the same unity of pur-pose, the same poetic cohesion that infuses the Jerusalem Sonnets. Theintensely personal voice of the poet writing to his auditor tells more ef-fectively of the life of Baxter in Hiruharama—

this man has to make a gameEven out of digging; my pants and shirtFrom Father Te Awhitu; my boots from the Vincent de Paul

Society—when the wind flutters round my chestIt seems to say, "Now, now, don't be proud that you are poor!"

—than do the more strident poems of the letter to peter olds orthe morepublicly directed verses of the Autumn Testament.

If in that last-named book there is much that is worthwhile, itis to be found in the poems that speak of Baxter's compassion for thosewhom society dooms, those for whom the community exists:

Richard will not come here, the shy one,Wary as a crayfish whose feelers jut out

From a crevice in the rock. When he was thirteen,In the maths class, his teacher used to stand him

In a wastepaper basket at the front of the room,And once I heard his lawyer ask him,

"Can't you think of something better to do with your life?""No. " The face like a young stone mask:

"Idiots have no opinions."I heard him breaking bottles in the street

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The night Naomi turned him down;Naomi was a mother who had found him

Too hard to carry. Yet he broke no windows.It hurts me to watch the snaring of the unicorn.

This Baxter has found a vernacular speech that conveys with precisionthe recognisable and yet new lineaments of the "situation" of the poem,those unique apprehensions that move us more than the recordings ofpleasant trivia in the life of the "tribe" and more than the sentimentalinvocations to pity for "the drunks , . . the boobheads. . . . the studentswho hoped to crack/The rock of education." Pity is seldom engenderedby Baxter's appeals, just as we seldom feel moved to admire the pietyof the poet reciting the Mysteries in the day-to-day world of Jerusalem*-Hiruharama:

He drives on through the dust.

I keep him in mind through the Carrying of the Cross,Then kneel for God's Death by the black plastic tank

Where troughs are stuck in the moss to catchThe meagre trickle of midsummer

That flows through the pipes to the house.

Pity or admiration is rather what Baxter's characters requireof us (and the poet is himself a character within his poems) precisely atthose moments when such responses are least on their minds. So Rich-ard in the poem quoted in full a little earlier is worthy óf the compassionthat is asked of us, precisely because neither he, nor the poet who makeshim, seeks to manipulate our emotions or extract from us anything thatmight not freely be given. It is the opposite case when the poet asks usto admire the conceit (in either the "prideful" or the "metaphysical"sense) of his Jerusalem devotions. It would all be too sanctimonious totolerate were it not for the major poems that say something else, some-thing rather unique in our devotional literature, and for those lesserpo-ems which still manifest flashes of redeeming humour, mostly at theprotagonist's expense:

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if you are consultedOne day, Colin, about my epitaph,

I suggest these words—"he was too much troubledBy his own absurdity"

It is those words "too much" that restore balance to the poem and to thepoems around it. Prior to those words, we might have feared that wewould encounter some injunction just as heavy with portent as Yeats'limestone command to the horseman. Similarly, to be much concerned,or troubled by the question of absurdity would be to be occupied with asubject eminently suitable for Jansenist, Calvinistor existentialist. Butto recognise that one is "too much troubled" is to point out that obses-sional concern with self that can turn the Romantic poet into a crashingbore. To be too much troubled with the recognition of one's own absurd-ity is to know the dangers inherent on the vocation of the Mirror ofChrist. Humility and self-abnegation may be virtues to the followers ofSt. Francis, but the line between humility and the arrogance of self-righteous denial is fine. It is a moot point whether James K. Baxterwas concerned about the line. The protagonist of these poems, thellemiof the Jerusalem world, certainly is. That protagonist declares a ter-ror couched in terms as strong and real as those of Hopkins in the Ter-rible Sonnets:

love drives, yet I draw back

From going in step by step in solitudeTo the middle of the Maori night

Where dreams gather—those hard steps taken one by oneLead out of all protection, and even a crucifix

Held in the palm of the hand will not fend offPrecisely that hour when the moon is a spirit

And the wounds of the soul open—to be is to dieThe death of others, having loosened the safe coat of becoming.

In reading devotional poetry of that order, we encounter anawareness of experience that is marked by the European and Polynesiancreeds that the poet has espoused, and an awareness of the humanity of

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those creeds' essential concerns. In this sort of devotional poetry thereader's acquiescence to the poet is not a consequence of any affinity ofbelief. The poetry challenges and demands acceptance, because its hon-esty and the validity of its recognition is not circumscribed by theologyor doctrine, but only by the language itself. Out of that, James Baxterwas able to make some very great lines of poetry. One such, wrencheddeliberately enough out of context, seems to me to sum up much of whatwas important both about Jerusalem as a place of poetry and a place inwhich (by coincidence unless you happen to believe in Providence) theapparently disparate cultures of the Maori and the pakeha Roman Cath-olic met twice within a century to attempt to express a compassionateideal. In the first poem of the Jerusalem Sonnets the poet tells of how alouse torments him to go down to the church to pray to God the joker.The poem, which C. K. Stead has already remarked on in his commen-tary, does not need a further analysis here. But it concludes:

"Lord," I ask Him,"Do You or don't You expect me to put up with lice?"His silent laugh still shakes the hills at dawn.

Like most of the "sonnets" the poem is metrically irregular, followingthe needs of the vernacular rhetoric that Baxter sought unsuccessfullyto use in his plays like The Band Rotunda and mastered finally only inthese later poems. But the last line is a perfect pentameter, and theadjective "perfect" applies not merely to prosody. The sonnet is com-pleted with a line whose antecedents should be sought in the last yearsof the sixteenth century, a line written by a poet who could sometimes(and that is often enough) combine the inseparable elements of language,sound, meaning, into statements which have the touch of greatness.

• W. S. Broughton1 Massey University

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