The Mythology of the Gap in the Work of James K. Baxter
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i THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE GAP IN THE WORK OF JAMES K. BAXTER By Greg Martin A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in New Zealand Literature Victoria University of Wellington 2013 ii Abstract In 1967, New Zealand poet James K. Baxter reflected on his beginning as a poet with the statement that ‗what happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology‘ and that in his personal mythology ‗first there was the gap, the void‘. While the first of these comments has been frequently cited in connection to Baxter‘s work, few critics have taken its extreme implications seriously. This thesis also takes the second statement as crucial to understanding Baxter‘s creative process and the links his poetry makes between otherwise disparate experiences. These statements are a starting point for a study which maps out the consistencies and continuities underlying Baxter‘s vast literar output throughout his career as a poet. It considers Baxter‘s poetry alongside his published prose and unpublished papers in order to demonstrate the underlying patterns which characterise Baxter‘s output throughout his diverse career. The thesis first develops a framework for identifying the presence of gaps in Baxter‘s writing, tracing a network of symbolic and mythic relationships that comprise his evolving personal mythology of the gap. Having established this framework, I show how Baxter's engagement with ‗the gap‘ evolves throughout his work. The thesis demonstrates the significance of gaps not only as central motifs in Baxter‘s work, but as a crucial part of the poet‘s creative process. Baxter‘s purposeful approach to poetic mythologising relies on notions of absence, division and descent: the ‗gaps‘ out of which poems emerge. These gaps simultaneously create and are created by the temporary ‗mythologising self‘ at the centre of the creative process. This is the poet as creator, shaping ‗chaos‘ into ‗cosmos‘ through iii the use of ordering tools. In Baxter's case these include the consistent use of three main mythic paradigms which address the imperatives of desire created by these gaps. As well as this parallel with the pattern of creation myth, Baxter's creative process is suggestive of the mythic ‗journey to the centre‘ which is in turn recurrent throughout his poetry. In applying the ‗chaos-ordering-cosmos‘ framework to Baxter's mythology, I reveal the consistent elements of his work on the underlying level of myth, symbol, origins and method, thus opening up new possibilities in the critical response to his work. iv Acknowledgements Thanks to my supervisors Peter Whiteford and Geoff Miles for their support, guidance, and patience. I would also like to thank Peter and Geoff for the opportunity to work with each of them, which has helped this work in various ways. Thanks to Paul Millar for generously making resources available, for arranging access to the Baxter material at the Hocken Library, and for sharing his thoughts on chaos and the gap in Baxter's work. Thanks to John Baxter for granting permission to view the Baxter archive at the Hocken Library. Thanks to Victoria University of Wellington for financial support in the form of the Victoria University PhD and Submission Scholarships. I am also grateful to have received the Herbert Sutcliffe MA Scholarship. Thanks to my family, especially to my parents David and Elaine, for the many ways in which they have encouraged and assisted me throughout my studies. Finally, thanks to my partner Rachel Patrick for her unstinting support and vital assistance in proofreading, reference checking and project management. This thesis is dedicated to her, with gratitude and love. v Contents List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................... vi Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Part One: Chapter One: The Mythology of the Gap .............................................................. 31 Chapter Two: Chaos ............................................................................................. 59 Chapter Three: Ordering .................................................................................... 123 Chapter Four: Cosmos ........................................................................................ 182 Part Two: Chapter Five: ‘Why the Central Horror?’ ............................................................ 216 Chapter Six: ‘The time of turning darkness to sober light’ ................................. 257 Chapter Seven: ‘The Cold Hub’ .......................................................................... 288 Chapter Eight: ‘To go forward like a man in the dark’ ....................................... 331 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 374 Bibliography ........................................................................................................ 382 vi List of Abbreviations CP Collected Poems, James K. Baxter CW Collected Works, C. G. Jung FA The Fire and the Anvil FC The Flowering Cross MH The Man on the Horse Muse The Snake-Haired Muse N Baxter‘s manuscript notebooks, Hocken Library MS 704/1 to 704/28. ‗Notes‘ ‗Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet‘ (in MH) Plays Collected Plays, James K. Baxter Spark Spark to a Waiting Fuse, by Paul Millar i Introduction There are always moments in history when an artist can reach out towards his country, towards his own people, and feel an answer, a response, something quite separate from the rattling noise of the business or the bureaucratic machine. At that moment an artist no longer has to fight his people: he is carried, lifted, strengthened by their genuine subconscious identification with his themes, as a boxer or a bullfighter is helped and strengthened by being at one with his audience. This is the marriage ceremony by which a myth is born. The myth may kill the man … but one dies anyway. It is the secret hope of every artist to experience a moment of this kind. I cannot think it is likely to happen to any New Zealand artist – that is, to an artist in the narrow sense of the word. (‗Shots Around the Target‘ 2) Since the death of James K. Baxter in 1972, just six years after voicing this ‗secret hope‘, the mythology centred around this iconic poet has continued to flourish. As an artist Baxter, ‗reached out towards his own people‘ through his voluminous writings – dozens of plays, articles and prose pieces as well as over 800 published poems spanning more than thirty years until his death at the age of forty-six. He remains a prominent figure in New Zealand‘s cultural landscape as possibly its most famous – and most widely recognised – poet. Yet when Baxter's ‗own people‘ have reached back towards the artist it has tended to be firstly towards the poet as icon, seen through the lens of biographical narrative, rather than towards the mythopoeic art he created. It would seem that Baxter has become both more and 2 less than an ‗artist in the narrow sense of the word‘. This thesis addresses the critical problems surrounding his work by examining the two key components of Baxter's personal ‗mythology of the gap‘. This approach enables a sustained appraisal of Baxter's creative process, while also highlighting the consistent and continuous elements of his poetry that have been overlooked as a result of the problematic emphasis on the ‗myth‘ of Baxter. A rich array of popular myth has become attached to the word Baxter, as the creative and destructive chaos of his private and public lives, along with his early death, have – (as Baxter once wrote of Hart Crane) – provided ‗a whole generation of critics … with an opportunity for myth-making‘ (‗The Creative Mask‘, TFA 50). In the extended accounts found in the two major biographies, as well as in these abundant anecdotes, Baxter's life is generally divided into distinct phases based on his lifestyle as well as his literary output.1 Baxter's life-story is commonly read as an inevitable linear progression, starting with his upbringing as the son of a heroic conscientious objector and an academically accomplished and politically active mother. This leads into the distinct phases of his adult life: his literary beginnings as a precociously gifted ‗natural‘ poet, the deeply conflicted years of his twenties – mixing moralistic social commentary with literary skirmishes and ‗bohemian‘ bouts of drinking and sexual indiscretion – and then the seemingly settled years as Baxter gave up alcohol, became a Catholic and cemented his status with the literary achievements of the mid 1960s. The twist in this narrative comes in the startling transformation of his last three years into ‗Hemi‘ the bearded, barefoot founder of a commune at Jerusalem on the Whanganui River. In this phase, Baxter became a self-appointed spokesperson for those he perceived to be marginalised – especially 1 Frank McKay‘s The Life of James K. Baxter (1990) and W.H. Oliver‘s James K. Baxter: A Portrait (1983). 3 for the young and for Maori. This life-story has become central to the way that the poems are interpreted – very often these texts are simply taken to be a record of experience embedded with statements of belief. At the same time as he publicised his ‗secret hope‘ to be joined with his people, Baxter dismissed the likelihood of becoming a ‗kiwi hero‘. In ‗Shots Around the Target‘