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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Escape from Fear

Escape from Fear

For nearly forty years Frank Sargeson has been holding a gun at our heads. ‘Can you be both free and secure?’ he asks. ‘What are the political connotations? Do you have to be cannibals who eat your young? Why are your marriages so often death houses? Can the Maoris help us to be human?’ In the process of asking such questions, Sargeson has been engaged in a work of private spiritual discovery, rummaging through the cellars and attics of the unstable late-colonial edifice which we call New Zealand society. There have been changes, though, in the style of his approach.

Sargeson’s early writings carried with them a controlled anger and strong undertones of existential dread. The earlier Sargeson knew, as we all knew – we who had decided that deadness of spirit is the worst human ailment and that truthful words would help us to get rid of it – that the homes and the small towns that had been our cradle could also be our lifelong prison and graveyard. Like John A. Lee, Sargeson was a good hater.

Perhaps every functional artist is a person who has by some miracle of grace or nature escaped the branding iron and the instruments of castration wielded by the guardians of the middle-class norm. Otherwise creativity itself would not survive. Yet there are contradictions. Creativity finds its material in the very traumas that menaced its survival. And the dread and the hatred are always ambivalent. The guardians are beloved enemies. To survive one has to fight one’s own tribal house. Secretly there is a wish to yield, to be reconciled, even at the cost of one’s creativity and independence and perhaps especially the survival of one’s sexual powers. Older men are often impelled to sign a damaging truce with the God of their childhood.

There is a third road, neither revolt nor capitulation, which may enable the preservation of creativity along with a loss of dread and hatred. I can best describe it as compassion toward the guardians. That is the road that Sargeson seems now to walk on.

The heroine of the finest novelette in the present volume is an unmarried teacher in a girl’s school who has been able to keep her intellect and her sensitivity relatively undamaged in what would seem a wholly unpropitious environment. The mother whom she loves and supports by her labours is undoubtedly shown equally as jailor and victim. In ‘I for One’, Sargeson’s humane delicacy is beyond praise, as he uncovers layer by layer the page 555 contradictions of the human spirit, and indicates how the self-condemned, making every mistake in the calendar, may still come to understand life.

The central figure of the title story, ‘Man of England Now’, loses one by one his youth, his financial hopes, his independence, his wife as sexual partner, his only son, even, it would seem, his very identity. As in the work of certain great Yiddish writers, the tragedy is particular and universal. The North Country immigrant hopes for release by socialism, yet one knows that this is life from which there is no release: the agents of his dismemberment are themselves shown as victims.

The third story, ‘A Game of Hide and Seek’, comes nearer to a picaresque vein. Perhaps Sargeson is doing what Samuel Butler announced his intention not to do when he told us that he had uncovered the hypocrisies of money but would leave to another hand the uncovering of the hypocrisies of Victorian sex. The story is contemporary. It is a measure of Sargeson’s courage that he uses the device of a homosexual narrator.

The style of these stories is mannered, exact, philosophical, even Edwardian in kind. It is an excellent and suitable instrument. There is, I think, some incongruity when a visitor uses a modern electric torch to explore the dilapidated late-colonial house which our ancestors built for us and in which we eat, sleep, live, dream and die. Best to use a hurricane lamp. The ghosts who want their stories to be told may appreciate that delicate courtesy.

1972 (702)