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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Dry Apples

Dry Apples

Perhaps I am a Durrell fan, for anything new from the pen of this particular poet is welcomed by me. This is mainly because he taught me my trade. About ten years ago, when I was in the doldrums and well aware that nearly all the verse I had written was bad, inflated rhetoric, Saint Lawrence Durrell came to me from his hedonistic Grecian gridiron and told me silently by a perfect example how to spread the net wide and give one’s stupidity a chance. A creative stupidity is the keynote: the mellow all-accepting trance, a state like sleep, the antennae somewhere behind the brain rising to register the good and bad dreams of the human race, or in particular one’s local community. The trouble is it can’t be done by a Puritan. The Puritan critics say that Durrell’s poems are like chocolate with soft centres. Perhaps their own poems have no centres at all.

This new edition contains, to my joy, thirty-four new poems. I must grant that frequently they are versions of types of experience that Durrell may already have handled as well or better in his heyday. But even these autumnal echoes are full of resonance; these dry apples have their own sharp clear juice. Thus, in the poem ‘Io’:

In the museums you can find her,
Io the contemporary street-walker all alive
In bronze and leather, spear in hand.
Her hair packed in some slender helm
Like a tall golden hive . . .

page 34

After forty years I know the Puritans well enough to hear their subliminal comments: ‘Not quite in good taste; there’s something’ – ‘After all it’s been done twenty times before’ – ‘Too gooey . . .’. In fact they could never imagine themselves seeing a street-walker as a young Amazon or as the girl whom Zeus wisely changed into a heifer. They miss the steel-sharp humour behind Durrell’s pathos. They suspect an orgy hidden at the core of the poem. Their objection in plain words is not literary. And Durrell knows this. A sun-pursuer, following in the wake of Byron, his insatiable creative curiosity leads him continually to take off the woollen shroud modern man (and woman) is born to die in. At heart he is a wrecker, brought up to be an intelligent Englishman in the cells of boredom we call a culture, who broke out, ran amok, and discovered the reservoir of his own natural stupidity; that sex and death are two sad human hitching-posts, and beyond that the inaccessible paradise of the natural world and a night sky full of Unknowing. It is not enough to get along with; but it is enough to write great poems from; and the man who says he knows more is either divinely illuminated or mistaken.

1969 (573)