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Clerks and Cops
I don’t see the world as a place where a man can rest. There is always some kind of battle going on. People talk about wartime and peacetime. I think the difference is less than they suppose. Many men found it a relief to go and fight in Korea, for example, to escape from a different kind of battle – the struggle to keep alive in a society devoted to the pursuit of money and status and gentility. I had this everlasting secret war in mind, a short while ago, when I wrote a poem called ‘The Soldier’:
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The battle tales I hear on old men’s lips
Won’t wear with me – I saw no arrow fly
At the berserkers’ rush from the dragon ships,
Or at Dunkirk, Thermopylae,
But in this life, this iron thrashing-mill,
I have given shelter to defeated kings,
I have fought with devils at One Tree Hill
And walked among the dead at Hanmer Springs.
These battles did not come from a book –
The scabs don’t heal well. In a pub at Puhoi
I saw the small grim face of Helen look
Back like a ghost at the ashes of great Troy –
And this is no more, outside Adam’s gate,
Than one man’s ordinary fate. (Uncollected)
I find that certain happenings illuminate the meaning of this battle. Up to a point one has to take sides. Roughly I feel that on one side you find the clerks and the cops. No doubt there are good clerks and good cops. But what I object to in them is their use of the blueprint and the rifle to express a point of view that they didn’t ever work out for themselves. A clerk or a cop is always a bought man. It was not an anarchist with a bomb, or a boy swinging a bike chain, but respectable clerks and highly efficient cops, who engineered and carried out the gigantic massacres of this century. I find it important to remember that.
On the other side of the fence are the beats, the people who value human beings for what they are – some loud, some quiet – the people who play it by ear, the people who want to belong to a tribe, not to a system, the people who look at the face, not at the book. And there’s an endless, hidden battle between them and the clerks and the cops. Because they value most what is just beginning, what has not yet occurred – call it love, call it maturity, call it, if you like the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
I remember an occasion, a little over twenty years ago, when I decided to blow my brains out. The brains were there all right, inside my head, and the gun was there as well, a sawn-off ˑ22 I kept on a ledge above the door of the coal house. I think I got it from my cousin. I used it for shooting rabbits. Well, on this occasion I went into the coal house and took hold of the gun and loaded it and put it inside my mouth. I’d learnt from the story books that that was the best way to go about it. But the hard, cold metal resting on my tongue was a bit too real. And I thought it would upset my father and my mother a great deal if they found me with a hole in my head. And therepage 604 was something even deeper – a feeling that I would be destroying something sacred, that my body and mind did not belong to me, but to another Power I did not then believe in. So I put the gun back on the ledge and went on living.
Of course a great many young people feel that way. Partly the discovery that life can be very painful, and partly self-dramatisation. Looking back, I can see that my feeling of hopelessness was not necessary. The education I’d been given, at home and at school, had fuddled my thinking to such a degree that I thought whatever was wrong with me must be entirely my own fault. And even a lot that was right with me – physical energy, adolescent curiosity – looked wrong when I saw it from other people’s points of view. Right at the beginning of the battle, I’d got trapped on the wrong side of the fence. To stay alive, I needed a point of view of my own, and I had to travel quite a distance in order to get one.
I had to find out who I was. That sounds peculiar. In a sense I already knew who I was – James Keir Baxter, born on the 29th of June, 1926, a boy who wrote poems in his upstairs bedroom and blushed all over in the company of women. From what people say, I believe I was a very good-mannered boy. But somewhere inside me there was a man, not yet grown up – a man groaning and swearing and singing in the dark – a man full of anger and love. I did not yet know him properly. I was conscious of this man inside me, my actual self, as a pressure, a hunger, and at times an agony. I had to find out who he was, or else remain deaf and blind and dumb.
Of course nobody who had the job of telling me what to do – parents, teachers, lecturers, parsons, official and unofficial cops – could tell me who I was. Usually they didn’t know who they were, or else they had forgotten. I had to find it out for myself. And this is more or less the way it happened:
Lying awake on a bench in the town belt,
Alone, eighteen, more or less alive,
Lying awake to the sound of clocks,
The railway clock, the Town Hall clock,
And the Varsity clock, genteel, exact
As a Presbyterian conscience,
I heard the hedgehogs chugging round my bench,
Colder than an ice-axe, colder than a bone,
Sweating the booze out, a spiritual Houdini
Inside the padlocked box of winter, time and craving.
Sometimes I rolled my coat and put it under my head,
And when my back got frozen, I put it on again.
I thought of my father and mother snoring at home
While the fire burnt out in feathery embers.
I thought of my friends each in their own house
Lying under blankets, tidy as dogs or mice.
I thought of my Med. Student girlfriend
Dreaming of horses, cantering brown-eyed horses,
In her unreachable bed, wrapped in a yellow quilt.
And something bust inside me, like a winter clod
Cracked open by the frost. A sense of being at
The absolute unmoving hub
From which, to which, the intricate roads went.
Like Hemingway, I call it Nada:
Nada, the Spanish word for nothing.
Nada; the belly of the whale; Nada;
Nada; the little hub of the great wheel;
Nada; the house on Cold Mountain
Where the east and the west wall bang together;
Nada; the drink inside the empty bottle.
You can’t get there unless you are there.
The hole in my pants where the money falls out,
That’s the beginning of knowledge; Nada.
It didn’t last for long; it never left me.
I knew that I was Nada. Almost happy,
Stiff as a giraffe, I called in later
At an early grill, had coffee, chatted with the boss.
That night, drunk again, I slept much better
At the bus station, in a broom cupboard. (‘The Cold Hub’, CP 256)
For a pakeha New Zealander, growing up is a very painful and a very solitary business. I think it may be different for some Maoris. I was talking recently to a Maori man in his fifties or sixties. At a certain point in the conversation, he rested his hands on his knees and said – ‘I have one leg in Taranaki and another on the East Coast.’
I may have the places wrong, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter anyway. The point was that this old man identified himself with the soil of the country. As my wife explained to me later, the word ‘iwi’ means both tribe and bone. The old man was saying that he came from two tribes – but he was also saying that his bones and the bones of his ancestors were like a single sacred tree, and he, as their descendant, straddled the country. This old man was respected among his own people – nobody would ever be able to bundle him out of the way. It would take more than a few bulldozers. He hadpage 606 the appearance of somebody sunk knee-deep in the ground. He had also the great advantage of not having been educated.
When I have clear evidence that our bureaucrats have spent a year or so in the company of such men, not in order to instruct but in order to learn what a man is, I might begin to listen to those bureaucrats. And again I might not. The leopard can’t ever change its spots, or so they say.
I remember also a trip I made from Wellington to Lyttelton. Somehow or other I’d been given a bunk in the big cabin at the stern that houses thirty or forty people. And I was lying awake reading, feeling the movement of the boat. All round me there was the giggle and chatter of a squad of schoolboys going to some athletic function in the South Island. It was harmless chatter, the bubbling of a pot, or the conversation of a flock of birds in a tree at sundown. But the man in the bunk below me stuck his head out and grizzled up at me – ‘Listen! Just listen! I’d tan their backsides for them!’
‘That’s right, mate,’ I said.
‘They’re smoking,’ he said. ‘My word, I’d like to teach the young b—s a lesson.’
‘That’s right, mate,’ I said again. I’d just given the boy nearest to me a cigarillo, and he was making heavy weather of it. I knew from twenty years of lost battles that it was no good arguing with the red-faced Kiwi. He knew what was wrong with the world. The young b—s were poisoning his guts. The thing to do was to agree with him and wait for him to shut up.
After a time he did shut up, and I felt the need of somebody to talk to. I’d already noticed an old drunk who’d come in late from the ship’s bar. He was lying down and groaning to himself a couple of bunks along from me. So I climbed out and sat down cross-legged on the deck beside him with a big bottle of Coca-Cola. He sat up in his bunk. A gaunt, oldish man with a stubble.
It took a few minutes for him to lose his suspicion of me. He thought I was a do-gooder come to tell him that he ought to lay off the grog. He offered me a drink, and when I said I had to stay off the grog myself because it made me crook, he said there was nothing worse than a reformed grog-artist. But after a while he opened out.
He was travelling down from Rotoiti, the drunks’ island, to see if he could get a job at the freezing works at Invercargill. He’d fought in the ring, and his friends called him Hurricane Harry.
‘But I’m only a breeze now,’ he said.
He’d had a sailor’s ticket on the coastal boats, but handed it in, and got a ticket on the Wellington wharves instead. When the big dispute blew up in the Fifties, he lost his ticket. After that he spent a lot of time in the pubs.
‘They didn’t manage to buy you anyway,’ I said.
His face lit up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I can sleep easy at night.’ And he explainedpage 607 to me very carefully the difference between a bought man and one who has not been bought. I realised that when the clerks and the cops broke the back of the Old Wharf Union, they were killing a tribe. I hadn’t understood this properly before. It wasn’t so much the words he used as where they came from. I realised I was talking to a man who could not be bought, an unbuyable man, like one of the rebel slaves that were crucified along with Spartacus. He had a wound in his guts as big as a house, in the place where the union had been broken, and he knew what had caused it, and he knew which side of the fence he was on.
Our society won’t learn anything from men like the old Maori, or even from men like Harry. Probably he will end up in an Old Man’s Home. That is bad luck for our society.
Don’t imagine I’m talking about something that only concerns writers. The battle of which I speak includes everybody. Simply to keep on moving is not enough. One has to wear a gun; one has to avoid becoming, after twenty- five, a bundle of reflexes. Recently I shifted from an office job to a job where I have to use my hands. It was a difficult change, and I wrote a poem about it. The word ‘whins’ in the poem means ‘gorse-bushes’. And my father’s mother’s name was McColl:
The Dream
For seven years I drudged in Caesar’s boneyard,
The pay was good, the work was not too hard,
I picked no fight and did not greatly care
Whether the wind outside blew foul or fair,
Till in a dream an old fat kilted man
Said, ‘I admit the breaking of the clan
‘Is now complete. For certain sins
On the moor of Rannoch I have to gather whins
‘Until time’s end. I used my dirk
On a cousin, cursed God, kept the whores at work,
‘But this I’ll swear on the word of a McColl,
The pen-and-ink men never bought my soul.’
I have done penance on a grub hoe since then
And have not had that evil dream again. (Uncollected)
It is important for me that my forefathers were clansmen in the Scottish Highlands. As the Maoris fought in this country, so they fought to preserve their tribes. They lost that war, but the habit of fighting remains. The battle nowadays is a battle to keep one’s own point of view – to preserve the salt in the porridge. For those who can’t see there is a battle, it is as useless to talk about it as it would be to tell a blind man the difference between green and purple. But if I did not know the difference between a bought man and an unbought man, I too would be blind, and I would never be able to write another poem – or think straight, which is more important.
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