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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

Letter to a Catholic Poet

page 206

Letter to a Catholic Poet

Dear Kevin,

It gave me considerable joy to get your letter and the wad of poems; first, because your mind and heart are wide awake and the poems are good; then, peculiar as it may sound, because you are at one and the same time a Catholic. Most Catholic writers, here or abroad, are strangled in the womb by an almost insane pressure of moralism, and become either jog-trotting journalists or irritable sentimentalisers. The ones who survive are rogue elephants like old George Barker and Brendan Behan. It gives the Church a very bad name among writers of course. I see no reason myself why a man should not be at one and the same time a truthful writer and a Catholic. But it can be uphill work, brother, and that is why your communications made me happy for a day at least.

The two poems I liked best were – ‘To a Fat-butted priest’ – and ‘My love, my sweet Hiroshima’ – one for its punching satire and remarkably relevant use of four-letter words, the other for its surrealist quality and simple erotic truth.

A few points I must make while the thoughts provoked by your letter are still fresh in my head. The hatred you have felt for Gerard Manley Hopkins is natural enough. He is of course the blue-ribbon winner in the Catholic dog show – a poet of international status, a pure-minded priest, and unquestionably dead. This saintly and somewhat androgynous Jesuit is served up as cottage pie for pupils in the Catholic schools for several obvious reasons:

(a) Blocked on the level of exploration of subconscious material (his early masterpiece ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ got a very cold reception from his clerical colleagues) he turned his invention to an elaboration of verse technique, producing a brilliant strained language which constitutes a convenient rack and thumbscrew for the Catholic educator. He can produce Hopkins and listen to his pupils groan. But poor Hopkins can hardly be blamed for this. He was a shy man who published little in his lifetime and was horribly crucified by neurasthenia while marking endless examination papers in Dublin. He was a racehorse whom the Church turned into a saint by regarding him as a donkey and giving him rubbish to carry. Ah well – he cannot be entirely happy in Heaven to look down and see his original steel wire constructions, designed for the pleasure of himself, God and a few readers who like conundrums, used as instruments of torture throughout the world by Catholic teachers.
(b) Hopkins’s language and images are not erotic, with the exception of a few extravagances mildly and sentimentally homosexual in tone, as when he grows eloquent about the physical beauty of ploughmen and dead sailors. There is of course his central, passionate and wholly sincere attachment of page 207 the Divine Lover, Christ. I find nothing to distress me in any of this, except that it is no model for any poet outside the clerical stable and heterosexual in temperament. Hopkins was a very honest writer. It is his honesty I would prefer to imitate. His extreme decorum is essentially Victorian. The Victorian Age was one of the few times when the standards of the middle class actually dominated literature, with deplorable results, as in Russia at the present day. Our Catholic educators then are glad of Hopkins because he will never make them sweat in front of their pupils, as practically any good contemporary poet would. Well, let them construct their artificial garden, Kevin, and call it a model of the true world! They will turn out a ton of university cretins whose very veins run green with boredom; but you and I will be digging quietly on the other side of the fence.
(c)The appearance of total rationality in Hopkins’s work makes him susceptible to the philosophic approach. No time bombs planted in the subconscious mind; no shouting from the cellar; no bashing of one’s head against the wall of the great den we live in! – just a quiet man looking at rocks and trees and people through the lens kindly provided by Duns Scotus. In fact, of course, the tensions underlying Hopkins’s work are enormous; he is always close to despair and singing to keep his courage up in a desert perhaps more social than theological. I suggest that you look again (briefly) at ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and consider the possibility that the lanky heroic nun shouting as the ship goes down may be Hopkins in disguise. And her fellow-passengers who are dying by drowning – Hopkins fears they may all be damned – are perhaps the hedonistic college friends of his youth whom the poor man loved from the bottom of his heart and had to leave behind to follow his crucified God. Hopkins’s rationality is a steel jacket built to contain enough high explosive to blow him and his suave interpreters to smithereens.

There it is, Kevin. I have dug into the life and character of Hopkins. (God knows I have some love for that sad trampled priest) in order to show how any Brother in the classroom can make a good poet boring and unintelligible by throwing away the keys of the safe. Those skeleton keys are always one’s own subconscious property. But you will know by now that the aim of nearly all education is to annihilate the subconscious mind.

I take it that your satirical poem is a verbal bomb shoved under the man who first threatened you with expulsion and then caned you savagely for handing a copy of ‘Eskimo Nell’ round the dormitory. Well, in the writing trade we have to put up with such attacks. ‘Eskimo Nell’, as far as I know, was composed by Noel Coward for navy consumption, and rapidly became an underground classic of folk literature. You were no doubt trying to show your fellow-pupils that not all verse is a dead weight in the gut. The poor stupid man who attacked you may have a monument erected to him by the Church when he dies. But in Purgatory he will have the ribald company of page 208 twelve hundred Catholic writers who were during their earthly days detained and brow-beaten and dragged in the mud by teachers as stupid as he. I have this on the unanswerable testimony of an angel who visited me once when I was coming off a three months’ bout of Australian whisky – a poisonous beverage which I hope you have the sense to stay away from. You can imagine what these martyred writers will say and do with him. So do not harbour unnecessary thoughts of revenge; and do not leave the Church, however many you may meet like him. The Church is you and I, dear brother, as well as he. And in the long run your pen is stronger than his cane. We writers grow fat on calamities but tend to get nervy and anaemic in polite company. Indirectly you can be grateful to him. He provided you with the occasion of a first-rate poem.

Thank you for your vivid account of your love affair with the girl from the neighbouring school – ‘the most beautiful bird’, you say, ‘from here to Zanzibar’ – I imagine that the abandoned gunpit would be one of the very few places where you could meet her without intervention by the educational authorities. I may be prejudiced, Kevin, but I feel I must congratulate you most heartily on a heterosexual choice in your movement away from the ignominies of masturbation. The intellectual fruits of the relationship are clearly apparent in the Hiroshima poem.

You mention the moral issue. Yes, at your age I was less adventurous. People grow up more quickly nowadays. Probably at fifteen you already have the tenacity and balance I did not lay hold on till I was nearly nineteen. But I am glad the girl is older than you. Our society is peculiarly cruel to women.

I must try to give you my view of the situation in a nutshell. Otherwise this letter will become an amateur theological treatise.

We cannot both practise our difficult Faith and ignore the wishes of God in our regard. The radical tension of our lives will always come, however obscurely, from our relation to God. Love affairs, works of art, come and go, but God stays put. I imagine God understands your nature, and mine, better than you or I can, and certainly better than any intermediary adviser. In so personal a matter nobody has a real right to tell you what to do. I can only say that I think it would be highly stupid of you to stay away from the Sacraments indefinitely. But when you approach them again, do not do it out of fear of Hell, but as an act of friendship towards Christ, the girl concerned, and your other fellow beings. I don’t think He ever intended us to lose our self-respect and become his slaves. He wanted to have free and loving friends. This means, too, despite our educators, that not all the answers are to be found in the books. Being Himself real, he meets us quite often in the thickets of our own nature. I suspect He inhabits the gunpit as well as the tabernacle. To believe this is to recognise His reality.

The theological situation is not merely as simple as either your educators or her parents or your parents would regard it. The explicit will of God in page 209 regard to human sexuality is expressed positively in the Church’s doctrines of marriage and more negatively in the Sixth and Ninth Commandments. God’s implicit will, however, is shown by the developing pattern of our own natures. In any culture where they are not artificially retarded, young adults are ready for sexual union not long after puberty. In such cultures there have invariably been initiation ceremonies for both sexes to signify their change from the status of children to that of adults. Our own culture has bungled the whole business most painfully and set up an apparent contradiction between the explicit and implicit will of God. No doubt in every culture there have been celibate groups and individuals. But a pattern of celibacy imposed by fiat on a whole population of teenagers is and has always been socially and psychologically and even spiritually unworkable. There is not much point in the Church shouting for the fire brigade at this juncture, when she has herself stacked the wood and lit the match.

Well, you are nearly sixteen, and already an adult, whatever our self-defeating society may say about it. If you were in a Hindu village, you would be already married and your sexual life might well be remarkably harmonious. As it is, you live in Pig Island, and for some years to come you will have three choices only – masturbation, fornication or celibacy – and I wish you luck of them! The priests would say that celibacy is the hero’s choice; but I am not wholly sure of this.

Au revoir, Kevin. Send me some more verse when you feel like it. I say what I think is right; though I may be wrong. Convey, if it is possible, some words of encouragement from me to your girlfriend. The girls often find it hard to survive. But I imagine you show her as much love as you can.

Yours till the roofs tumble,

James K. Baxter

1970 (628)