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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Imaginary dialogue between a sinful Catholic poet and a sorrowful Irish Jansenist

Imaginary dialogue between a sinful Catholic poet and a sorrowful Irish Jansenist

[Pat Lawlor is the SIJ (sorrowful Irish Jansenist). Baxter is the SCP (sinful Catholic poet)].

SIJ: ‘I see you’ve been dabbling in the mud again, James.’ SCP: ‘Very likely, Pat – but how exactly, this time?’

SIJ: ‘In the fifth stanza of the “Ballad of the Holy Ghost” – oh, what a pity you have to drag in that sort of thing! It is a relic (no, a remnant) of your non-Catholic days.’

SCP: ‘Mea culpa! It has obviously already offended one adult reader, so I’ll have to take a close look at it. Is it the intention behind it that you feel to be at fault? Or its likely effect?’

SIJ: ‘Both, James. Your intention, if not actually impure (let’s be charitable) is thoroughly flippant, making fun out of fornication. And its effect would be to scandalise the pure-hearted, in a ballad with such a title, and to give an unstable youngster the notion that fornication was just fun.’

SCP: ‘But, Pat, the whole poem, on the same score, mentions heavy boozing as if it were a joke – which we both know it not to be. Indeed, the mediators of grace are Irish Catholic barmen. I grant you, it is the Faith, not their boozing, that gives them gay hearts.’

SIJ: ‘A man can drink without sin, if he’s lucky, and can carry it – but not the other.’

SCP: ‘I think you have me there. Still, the old Catholic tradition of the drinking song and the wenching song grew up in the shade of the monastery wall.

‘The young lay clerics roamed the roads, slept in the ditches, drank in the pubs, prayed and cursed and read Aquinas, had their love affairs (real or imaginary), and started European literature. In a picaresque ballad, with a moral, you should allow me one stanza devoted to the frail sex.’

page 376

SIJ: ‘Father Murphy takes my view.’

SCP: ‘Father O’Rourke grinned all over his dial when he came to the doubtful passage.’

SIJ: ‘It’s a matter of whether a dog has fleas, or not. Even one flea can be a carrier of sickness. Could you turn quite happily to pray to the Mother of God immediately after writing that stanza?’

SCP: ‘Before her face nearly everything I do or write looks like rotten wood. If I took that approach, my vocation would be silence, not poetry. But she knows I am like a child spluttering over its porridge – to eat it, I must splutter, though spluttering is not part of eating.

‘Certainly, I couldn’t allow myself to write a pornographic poem now. If I were a saint, then I’d write her a thousand perfect songs, pure as crystal, but in writing I express that imperfect nature, labouring under the Grace of God, that it seems I must carry to the grave and beyond.’

SIJ: ‘But does that allow you to make an easy joke of fornication?’

SCP: ‘Not just a joke, Pat – “But still the more we bounced in bed the more our hearts collided” – it does show the pain of the flesh at ease and the spirit at odds.’

SIJ: ‘Well, your intention does seem to have been above board; although I couldn’t have written those lines myself without feeling I was smuggling in the Devil’s wares. But what about the possible effect on the reader?’

SCP: ‘I’m always up against the problem of scandal. But various priests (and they should be our guides in the matter) have told me that a writer should have in mind the possible effect on an ordinary, balanced reader. Not a smut-hound. Not a girl of fourteen who blushes when she hears her brother swear. But an ordinary, balanced reader – maybe there’s no such creature.

‘I don’t suggest you’re not balanced, Pat – but you do lean by nature to the fastidious side in these matters – most Catholics since the Reformation (good Catholics, I mean) have done so.

‘Take Chaucer as a test case – “The Reeve’s Tale” – now, if I had written that magnificent poem, I’d have half the Catholics in Wellington on my back, saying that I was poisoning the family wells.

‘The atheists and agnostics have taken over the rough side of life – why shouldn’t we take it back from them and put it in the setting of Catholic thought, where it always belonged?’

SIJ: ‘Aren’t there better jobs to do, James? I’m not too happy about this notion of the “ordinary, balanced reader” – it leaves a whale of a lot of leeway for the voluptuary writing for voluptuaries.

‘But what about an unstable youngster? You are responsible before God for your effect on his or her soul. Remember, a writer carries a lot of authority these days.’

SCP: ‘Surely that’s where the censorship of the priest and the parent should come in. There’s a great deal I’ve written, and a great deal more I read, which Ipage 377 wouldn’t put holus-bolus in the hands of my nine-year-old daughter. She likes reading; she’s intelligent; but she just couldn’t cope with it. I grant you, some adults are no better off than she is. But one can’t help running some risk by putting pen to paper. . . .’

1959? (184)