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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

James K. Baxter: In their Words

James K. Baxter: In their Words

[The interview began with a reading by JKB of his poem ‘The Advantages of Not Being Educated’. Then the interviewer gave a brief introduction.]

INT. James K. Baxter wrote that poem, ‘The Advantages of Not Being Educated’ – perhaps a rather strange choice for a man who’s a trained teacher. But some time ago he forsook the classroom for a postal run. James Baxter is known as ‘our postie poet’, a less demanding occupation that leaves him much more time to write. He says he’s never had enough time to write and for a man of his energy and imagination he probably never will. But he’s been writing a long time now, long enough to reminisce about his early work.

JKB. It seemed to me that I was in a bit of a straitjacket and trying to get out of it. It’s idealistic and in the higher registers, you know, as in music, up among the high notes, that kind of thing. I think that’s quite natural because I started young. I think I was writing good stuff in the middle teens. It’s not so common, but I had started very young.

INT. How young?

JKB. Oh, about seven or so, with stuff that, of course, was childhood stuff. And coming on, I got some formal control about the middle teens and had something to say, and that fell away again – it comes in fits and starts at any time, I think.

INT. But there have been some fits and starts that have meant more to him than others – certain basic but important things that have affected his writing.

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JKB. Oh, I’d say being born was one, but that was before I started. Getting married was another.

INT. Do you notice a change in your writing from the time that you married?

JKB. No, no, not really; but it could be a ready influence. It would be a position where, because one is married, one has a centre of a certain type of tranquillity – I don’t mean something obviously tranquil, but a certain type of tranquillity that you can write from; you’re not thrown to pieces by things. And becoming a Catholic would be another one, I think; and in a lesser degree, say when I was about twenty-one, becoming a Christian at all.

INT. Looking back at these things, particularly the religious changes, can you see a change in your writing?

JKB. No, not so much. I can see a change in getting off the grog – I was on it pretty solidly and then getting off it I can see a change – it became worse, the writing did, at that point, perhaps because I lost confidence a bit. Later on it picked up again.

INT. Today James Baxter’s writing is to some extent concerned with social problems, like those of the criminal, the drug addict and the alcoholic.

JKB. I think so much in this society, most Western society, is on a rather high abstract level, the bureaucracy, the various media and communications. Things are a bit abstract. You have to get down nearer the ground. Often the person has fallen off something – a ladder, or a bus, or something. You see, he’s down nearer the ground. He gets the worm’s eye view, you might say. For myself, well, I spent a lot of time in the pubs when I was young. I had some problems with the grog, and so on. This gave me a sort of open door. One makes use of one’s liabilities from time to time.

INT. Does that give you a rather confusing outlook/attitude in your writing?

JKB. I think not, because someone, say, who’s sleeping in me, spoke, and that because they’re on the grog too much, or he’s in a mental hospital; well, they’re inclined to see society a bit from the outside. It’s as if they came from another country; they see things that the other person doesn’t. You get that stereoscopic vision which is very useful to the poet. If you write just about the things you’re entirely used to your writing’s [bound] to be a bit flat. But if you see the old things in a new way – that’s what’s needed.

INT. Is there not a danger of cutting yourself off from the sort of ordinarypage 648 issues of life, or do you, in fact, call these the ordinary issues?

JKB. Well, I think they’re at the cellar of the mind, if you can put it that way. Everyone has a cellar to their mind; for quite a number the trapdoor doesn’t open; it doesn’t have to. But some crisis comes and then it does open, and then you’ve got the whole mind instead of just the upper storey. I think, too, for a poem to have full power, it has to use all the levels of the mind, at least be inquisitive. I think that’s it.

INT. Much of your writing seems to point to a sort of isolation of yourself, particularly in writing like Jack Winter’s Dream, The Wide Open Cage, ‘Evidence at the Witch Trials’, to a certain extent. Do you, in fact, feel this isolation?

JKB. Well, there’s two ways of looking at that. One would be Freud’s way, sort of, that Art proceeds from neurosis – the person who’s neurotic is isolated from his fellow beings, and so on. To some degree he has blockages in his thinking. I think that’s probably true of just about every civilised person. And so, if one writes about this, one is probably sharing problems of isolation that are common with other people. They may not have looked at them so hard. One may have had periods when this was pretty tough. Often a person decides to become a writer in an illness or something like that. It didn’t happen to me, but it does happen to some. And then, how far is this ‘isolation’? I think that I would see the art not as proceeding from a state of sickness, but as a means of healing it – that’s pretty much the way of healing the intellect.

INT. He sees Art as therapy and finds people who absorb it better off for doing so. He thinks people pretty good on the whole and prefers those who aren’t much concerned with the promotional ladder, and likes to write quite a bit about personal relationships.

JKB. It’s rather picking up on what one might have missed out. The mind is not symmetrical. Relationships between people are not symmetrical. If you just sort of bore straight ahead as in some works on how to have a successful marriage, or something like that – well, I remember I was once in Ardmore [Training College] where you had to do such. It was a refresher course for teachers and you were putting together lumps of colour and seeing what picture you made out of them. Well, someone had a bull and a cow in a field, and someone had a waterfall, and I had a man coming home at 4 in the morning and his wife comes from under the stairs swinging a cannon ball around her head. And there’s a pelican sitting up by the light who’s reading a book on the psychology of marriage, and also a bat flying around. Well, they thought I was trying to get at them, but it happens to be the way my mindpage 649 works – a rather dramatic sort of way. Quite naturally I don’t have to make it work like that. And it would seem to me it is a form of humour that quite often comes out.

INT. Is it something you’ve had all your life, or something that’s developed through your writing as you learned to know yourself?

JKB. Well, I think when I opened the cellar and went down into it there were loud explosions all round – for some people it’s quite a quiet place, but I’ve never found life uninteresting.

INT. Life could never be uninteresting for a man that has the sort of ideas that prompted him to write a poem like ‘Regret at Being a Pakeha’.

JKB. I’d say that I’d felt for a long time that there was something missing, like an essential element, cobalt, in the soil, or something like that – something missing in Western society. I had felt that it was the tribal situation where, say, fifty people would care whether you were living or dying, instead of just one or two or none at all. I have a nostalgia for this, a longing to belong to some such thing. One doesn’t, of course, because one is brought up differently, but no one regrets being a pakeha. You could say I regret not being an Eskimo even, you see, it doesn’t have to be a pakeha man. [At this point JKB read ‘Regret at Being a Pakeha’.]

INT. Like his contemporaries, James Baxter finds there are several difficulties attached to the business of writing.

JKB. I think the difficulties are that, in a sense, life is too easy. On the surface, it’s too easy. The conflict – one can’t say, ‘Look, God, help me! I was born in a slum and I hope the workers win the strike’, or something like that, because one wasn’t born in a slum. One might hope the workers win a strike, but not in the way a person would in, say, some countries in Europe, and you can’t say . . . In many ways things are smooth, they’re smooth economically in a greater degree. All the things are there that are in the other countries, but very deep. They’re probably more often psychological than economic. Perhaps all problems are in the long run.

INT. Do you feel imprisoned by a sort of tradition at all.

JKB. Imprisoned by the tradition of the Western world, yes; not by New Zealand tradition, in particular.

INT. Could you earn your living as a writer if you wanted to do so?

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JKB. Yes, I could. But I would have to be producing junk as I see it; quite good junk, maybe, but stuff that didn’t touch me at all.

INT. It’s an economic necessity.

JKB. Yes, that’s right. I could do it [by] writing – it would be difficult. It would mean being a free-lance journalist, and couldn’t be by writing verse. I don’t think I have a talent for writing novels of the kind that would go over. I have tried but I don’t think I have. I think if they have a sort of germinal power the very best critics are really writing creatively themselves, Trilling in America, or Edmund Wilson – they’ve often written some good things other than their critical writing. Allen Tate would be another. Again quite a good poet – more than quite good – and he, I feel that his criticism is germinal; in this way this can help a writer. The type that sort of puts you upon a certain scale or tries to pigeon-hole your work (it only tells you what you’ve done; it doesn’t give you any ideas what to do next) – I would call it broadly academic. Some think that [kind of ] thing unfair. But I don’t mean by that belonging to the universities. A person can be academic in that sense who’s never been to university, but a person in the universities could conceivably not be academic – by ‘academic’ I mean a tendency to be ungenerous.

INT. A few years ago James K. Baxter said most New Zealand poetry was ‘anaemic and lightweight’ and he doesn’t feel very differently now.

JKB. I think it still tends that way; there’s a touch of greyness; there’s a touch of the lightweight often. It’s as if they have [travelled] quite a long way to get to what they really need to know. The social attitudes don’t seem to help much – they have to ignore them to a fair extent. It’s the voice of the lecture god, as it were, who’s not interested in literature though he has this importance. It’s no good talking to him about literature; you just have to ignore him and carry on.

INT. Which is exactly what James K. Baxter will do. [JKB reads ‘Wilderness is wilderness’.]

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