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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 3

[Reply to a Review of The Rock Woman]

page 369

[Reply to a Review of The Rock Woman]

Sir: It would be absurd if I were to quarrel with Owen Leeming’s just and perceptive review of my uneven verse selection, The Rock Woman. Very rarely does a critic so exactly measure one’s actual weaknesses and one’s actual successes, as writer. If I am led to comment on certain points of his review, it is solely because he raises issues of a theological and hominist kind, which seem to require some response for the sake of dialogue.

Mr Leeming makes mention of my adherence to Roman Catholic belief as a possible source of cloudiness and false notes in some of my poems. He may be right. But he would be wrong to suppose that I am unaware of the three dangers he lists – attachment to one’s own believing personality, a desire to proselytise, and the restrictive vocabulary of belief – whether or not I have been successful in steering my boat between these Clashing Rocks. So many bad poems are written by believers because they lack Mr Leeming’s insights. Nevertheless I would hold that every poem is primarily a dramatic statement, and that in the nutshell drama of the poem ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ the Calvinist Protestant dead may as suitably cry Miserere! from the dramatic flames of Purgatory, as the Jansenist Catholic dead might do, if my ancestor figures had happened to be Catholic. Should they shout in Gaelic? They are being purified from their faults of Pharisaism. It is narrow of Mr Leeming to suppose I may be a bigot. I grant that the poem is (in Mr Leeming’s own just phrase) a not very good one. It is of course difficult material to handle well, and it may be mythologically top-heavy. In ‘Easter Testament’, a poem included in Pig Island Letters, I think I handled equally ‘religious’ material much better.

In regard to Rimbaud, it is possible that Mr Leeming has not considered enough the problem that haunts, or should haunt every translator – whether to make a workmanlike rendering of the foreign poet into his own language, image by image, phrase by phrase – or to develop his own metaphors from the non-verbal guts of the other poet’s work, by discovering this matrix, or its equivalent, somewhere in the depths of his own subjectivity. By the second road he may make a real poem. By the first road he will infallibly descend into translationese.

I did not translate from Rimbaud. I wrote two poems ‘after Rimbaud’; and indeed my imperfect grasp of French idiom would have made a wholly accurate translation impossible. I truncated one section of ‘The First Communions’ because it seemed to me that the French poem degenerated at this point into tub-thumping rhetoric, and I wanted to keep it good. Mr Leeming is kind to my Rimbaud poems. But the core he finds in Rimbaud is different from the one I find there. I see Rimbaud’s anti-God and anti-clerical attitudes as profound ambivalence under the lash of the Church Jansenistic, not as a detached point of balance. Perhaps I read into Rimbaud what lies page 370 buried in my mind. Alternatively, it could be that Mr Leeming has done the same.

I have read Mr Leeming’s own masterly poem, ‘The Priests of Serrabonne’, in which he trounces with a just passion the Church Pharisaic – or equally, the Church Jansenistic, the Church Monolithic, the Church Diffident – in which he was reared. That poem is one of the documents to which I turn for reassurance in my private clumsy labours to undo the harm the Catholic Church does to her young, and to support and initiate a heart-centred Catholic humanism. I respect to the hilt Mr Leeming’s honest atheistic humanism, with no queasy concern, but rather with a sense of comradeship among equals. But there are some indications in his review that Mr Leeming, troubled for the integrity of a fellow craftsman, fears I may be being brainwashed by the Church Pharisaic.

I trust this is not happening. My loathing for Pharisaism increases in proportion to my sorrow on behalf of those who deform themselves and the Church as they struggle in the Pharisaic trap. If I ever came to believe that the Church Pharisaic was truly the Catholic Church in her essence and subjectivity, I might indeed remain an undenominational Christian, but I could not remain a Catholic. As a loyal member of the Catholic Church, I am obliged to mention and oppose her cultural deformities. I hope these comments are of value to your readers. And I am grateful to Mr Leeming for his honest and generous review of a book of mine.

1971 (654)