Acquisitions (99): James K. Baxter

James K. Baxter: The Complete Poems (2022)

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James Keir Baxter (1926-1972)

James K. Baxter: Complete Poems (2022)
[Whitcoulls, Westfield Mall, Albany - 6/11/2023]:

James K. Baxter. Complete Poems. Ed. John Weir. 4 vols. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022.

1. Dunedin and Christchurch: The Early Years, 1943-1948
2. The Wellington Years, 1949-1965
3. Return to Dunedin, 1966-1968 / The Jerusalem Years, 1969-1972
4. Appendices - Introduction; Chronology; Abbreviations; Notes and References; Glossary of Māori Words and Phrases; Bibliography; Index

James K. Baxter: The Complete Prose (2015)

James K. Baxter. Complete Prose. Ed. John Weir. 4 vols. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015.

1. Dunedin and Christchurch: The Early Years, 1943-1948 / The Wellington Years, 1949-1965
2. Return to Dunedin, 1966-1968
3. The Jerusalem Years, 1969-1972
4. Notes on Complete Prose, edited and introduced by John Weir

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Si monumentum requiris circumspice
[If you need a monument, look around ...]

So says Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's. It's tempting to say the same about James K. Baxter. If you do want to know anything in particular about him, it's hard to imagine that it won't be mentioned somewhere in all the thousands of pages of these two four-volume sets of - respectively - his complete poetry and prose, both sedulously edited by his long-time friend and commentator John Weir.

James K. Baxter: Letters of a Poet (2019)

James K. Baxter. Letters of a Poet. Ed. John Weir. 2 vols. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2019.

1. 1939-1961
2. 1962-1972

So far so good. But of course the trouble really started with the publication of the two volumes above, the poet's collected letters. Perhaps the best introduction to the controversy that ensued is John Newton's article "James K. Baxter, rapist," which appeared in The Spinoff on February 14, 2019.

Newton approaches the subject as delicately as he can:

Among the oddities of [Baxter's] treatment by literary critics is that his representation of women has, to this point, gone virtually unchallenged. With the appearance of the Letters this is surely about to change. The poet’s candour, and the corresponding openness of his executors and editor, put the problem front and centre. Baxter’s reputation may or may not be diminished, but inevitably it is going to be affected.

Eventually, though, he is forced to reveal his smoking gun:

It’s to Phyl Ferrabee in 1960 that Baxter makes these letters’ most appalling disclosure. On the strength of a “very sober & perhaps truly considerate knowledge”, he has dealt with his sexual frustration by force: “Sex relations with wife resumed. This at least gives some common ground to stand on to clear up difficulties. Achieved by rape. From a very clear knowledge no other way could break down J’s reservations & that she was gradually shoving herself round the bend. She seems ten times happier in herself. But it looks as if each new act will have to repeat the rape pattern.”

Newton's analysis of this revelation is quite appropriate to its gravity:

With the letter reading more as a boast rather than a confession, it’s difficult to be be certain that Baxter understands the horror of what he has done. What we do know, however, is that the betrayal of trust and the violence that have taken place are repeated when he shares them with Ferrabee; not only that, but repeated again when the letter appears now in the official Baxter corpus.

He admits, too, that "it won’t be a surprise if, for many potential readers, this statement comes to drown out everything else that Baxter wrote."

James K. Baxter: Collected Poems (1979)

Which leaves us, now, with the problem of what precisely to do with the work of one of New Zealand's most eminent poets, taught in so many school and university courses, enshrined in so many literary histories, loved by so many people up and down the land.

I remember one of my tramper friends used to keep a copy of Baxter's Collected Poems in the boot of his car, as a sure-fire source of entertainment and solace if he got stuck anywhere in the backblocks (which he often did). It sounded like a good idea to me, so I took to doing the same thing myself - though I can't claim to have cracked its covers that often recently.

It's not that these revelations about his less savoury habits came as any great surprise. I'd already heard from various people - an ex-flatmate of Baxter's in Grafton, a survivor of the Jerusalem commune - about the way he behaved at times. Both of them hinted that if a less selective account than Frank McKay's Life of James K. Baxter were ever to appear, that the poet's reputation would be sure to suffer. And so, indeed, it has.

Frank McKay: The Life of James K. Baxter (1990)

I was interested a couple of months ago to walk into a bookshop in the Albany mall and find there a massive, four-volume edition of Baxter's Complete Poems. The book had, it seemed, been published some months earlier, but I hadn't heard even a whisper of its existence.

Of course, that could easily be my fault. I don't exactly go out of my way to stay in the swim with the latest moves in New Zealand letters. But I do recall a great deal of noise about the appearance of the Complete Prose, in 2015. There was no missing that immense set of tomes. Why had I not noticed the same thing with the Complete Poems?

When I googled "Baxter Complete Poems reviews", it was with a slight sense of shock that I realised that the only two notices of the book I could find came from its publisher, Te Herenga Waka University Press (reprinted more or less intact on a few other sites), and from Radio NZ, by Harry Ricketts. But the radio review, recorded on 21st March earlier this year, is only four minutes long, and is interrupted before it really gets going, with a promise to 'return to the subject' in a future edition. That future, it would appear, never came.

Compare that to the positive blizzard of notices for the Prose, some seven years before!

It seems that rather than examine, or even mention, this 'before-and-after' effect for Baxter's work - the loving attention it received before those letters were published, and the mostly unbroken silence which has followed them - most of our critics and review pages have decided just to stick with silence.

Peter Whiteford & Geoffrey Miles, ed.: Quarrels with Himself (2017)

And of course I do understand why. It's very tempting to do the same thing myself: just shut up and hope that the whole thing blows over at some stage so normal service can resume. And I suppose if I'd ever been a fervent admirer of Baxter's work - or his posthumous reputation, for that matter - I too might be running for cover right now.

James K. Baxter: Collected Plays (1982)

I like quite a few of his poems, and he seems to me to have had a considerable dramatic gift also: witness Jack Winter's Dream and its numerous successors. But I agree with Harry Ricketts' assessment that the first volume of the Complete Poems can be virtually written off as adolescent bombast. He suggests that one should start to read midway through volume 2, which sounds about right to me. It's really volume 3 where he comes into his own, and we start to see why it's still possible to regard him as a major poet. There's some extraordinary work in there.

Don't get me wrong. I find a good deal of what I've heard (and read) about his private life quite loathsome, but it's hard for me to write off completely such symbolic acts as the decision to drop out and go to Jerusalem in the first place. It was certainly a complex act, but one which required a good deal of courage.

John Newton: The Double Rainbow (2009)

It's interesting to see that John Newton's earlier book on the subject, The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune is now listed as "out of stock" on the Te Herenga Waka website. It's an extremely sympathetic account of the whole experiment - together with details of what became of them all after Baxter's untimely death in 1972.

It's easy to use phrases such as "Cancel Culture" when it comes to such matters. Has James K. Baxter been cancelled? I don't think you can easily disappear so large a footprint on our literary history. But perhaps it's right that we pause and take a deep breath and start to wonder just how thoroughly we've been bamboozled by all that religiose nonsense about Saint Jim.

I wrote a poem about Baxter once, some years ago, "Stone Pine Lavender", after a visit to his grave in Hiruharama. At the time people found it a bit harsh, I suspect, but now it sounds rather prescient. I won't reprint it here, but you can find it at the link above.

James K. Baxter: The Selected Poems, ed. John Weir (2023)

The matter is revisited interestingly in Steve Braunias' article "James K. Baxter, Uncancelled," a review of the latest version of Baxter's Selected Poems, published jointly by Cold Hub Press and Te Herenga Waka University Press. Fergus Barrowman, one of the two publishers, is quoted as follows:

The way Baxter outing himself as a rapist played out was unfortunate. I thought we’d done the right thing by neither suppressing it nor advertising it, but once it was out it stopped all other conversation, which is a real shame because the Letters is a treasure trove.

Roger Hickin, the other publisher, is a bit more defiant:

Baxter was as deeply flawed as he was deeply humane. In terms of his misogyny, a man of his times. I think even many of his surviving friends have realised only recently just how flawed he was. Perhaps it was his own recognition of his failings that made him so open to others. As long as humanity isn't totally corrected by the paragons of cancel culture I reckon the best of Baxter has a chance of surviving.

John Weir, his longtime editor, comments on the controversy:

I discovered the letters to Phyl Ferrabee in a library collection. I was about two-thirds of the way through some years of research. I thought, 'Well, where we are. I've found them, and I now don’t want to be the one who publishes them to the world', and I had to make a choice. I thought, 'One thing I can't do is publish the letters but not include this particular letter referring to the rape of his wife. I can't do that.'

Therefore I had to either continue to publish the letters and include it and face up to it, or I have to resign from everything. I consulted with some people about it, and was convinced to continue with the project. Over time it would have become public knowledge anyhow, somehow, sometime.

Braunias himself contributes the following thoughts:

to be #metoo'd is to be banished. The appearance of the new Selected brings forth once more the Baxter voice, his nature poems, his satires, his sonnets, his stupid asides ...

It's hard to know what else to say. If we do continue to read the poetry of James K. Baxter, it will have to be as the work of a profoundly gifted but also profoundly erring man. His stupid skiting has caught up with him at last. But that insufferable, bombastic side of him is not the whole of the man. There remain poems like "East Coast Journey":

Lucy Dodsworth: East Cape (2020)

Lying awake in the veranda bedroom

In great dryness of mind I heard the voice of the sea
Reverberating, and thought: As a man

Grows older he does not want beer, bread, or the prancing flesh,
But the arms of the eater of life, Hine-nui-te-po,

With teeth of obsidian and hair like kelp
Flashing and glimmering at the edge of the horizon.

Te Araroa and East Cape

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James K. Baxter (1965)

James Keir Baxter
(1926-1972)

Poetry:


1. Cold Spring: Baxter's Early Unpublished Collection. Ed. Paul Millar. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1996.
2. In Fires of No Return: Poems. 1958. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
3. Pig Island Letters. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
4. The Rock Woman: Selected Poems. 1969. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.
5. Jerusalem Daybook. Wellington: Price Milburn, 1971.
6. Autumn Testament. 1972. Wellington: Price Milburn, 1973.
7. Autumn Testament. 1972. Ed. Paul Millar. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997.
8. Runes. 1973. London: Oxford University Press, 1974.
9. The Tree House and Other Poems for Children. Wellington: Price Milburn, 1974.
10. The Labyrinth: Some Uncollected Poems 1944-72. Ed. J. E. Weir. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1974.
11. The Bone Chanter: Unpublished Poems 1945-72. Chosen and Introduced by J. E. Weir. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1976.
12. The Holy Life and Death of Concrete Grady: Various Uncollected and Unpublished Poems. Chosen and Introduced by J. E. Weir. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1976.
13. Collected Poems. Ed. J. E. Weir. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1979.
14. Selected Poems. Ed. J. E. Weir. 1982. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1988.
15. Collected Poems. Ed. J. E. Weir. 1980. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1995.
16. James K. Baxter: Poems. Ed. Sam Hunt. 2009. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010.
17. Selected Poems of James K. Baxter. Ed. Paul Millar. Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd., 2010 / Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2010.
18. Complete Poems. Ed. John Weir. 4 vols. Wellington: Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022.
    • Volume 1: Dunedin and Christchurch: The Early Years, 1943-1948
    • Volume 2: The Wellington Years, 1949-1965
    • Volume 3: Return to Dunedin, 1966-1968 / The Jerusalem Years, 1969-1972
    • Volume 4: Appendices - Introduction; Chronology; Abbreviations; Notes and References; Glossary of Māori Words and Phrases; Bibliography; Index

Plays:


19. The Devil and Mr Mulcahy / The Band Rotunda. New Zealand Playwrights. Ed. Michael Noonan. Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971.
20. The Sore-footed Man / The Temptations of Oedipus. New Zealand Playwrights. Ed. Michael Noonan. Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1971.
21. Collected Plays. Ed. Howard McNaughton. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Prose:


22. The Fire and The Anvil: Notes on Modern Poetry. 1955. Wellington: New Zealand University Press, 1957.
23. The Coaster. Illustrated by William Jones. A Primary School Bulletin. Department of Education, Wellington: School Publications Branch, n.d.
24. New Zealand in Colour. Photographs by Kenneth & Jean Bigwood. 1961. Wellington: A. H. & A. W. Reed, 1977.
25. Aspects of Poetry in New Zealand. Christchurch: The Caxton Press, 1967.
26. The Flowering Cross. Dunedin: New Zealand Tablet Co. Ltd., 1969.
27. James K. Baxter as Critic: A Selection from His Literary Criticism. Ed. Frank McKay. Auckland: Heinemann Educational Books, 1978.
28. Horse. New Zealand Classic. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1985.
29. Complete Prose. Ed. John Weir. 4 vols. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2015.
    • Volume 1: Dunedin and Christchurch: The Early Years, 1943-1948 / The Wellington Years, 1949-1965
    • Volume 2: Return to Dunedin, 1966-1968
    • Volume 3: The Jerusalem Years, 1969-1972
    • Volume 4: Complete Prose, edited and introduced by John Weir

Letters:


30. Spark to a Waiting Fuse: James K. Baxter’s Correspondence with Noel Ginn, 1942-46. Ed. Paul Millar. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001.
31. Letters of a Poet. Ed. John Weir. 2 vols. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2019.
    • Volume 1: 1939-1961
    • Volume 2: 1962-1972

Secondary:


32. O’Sullivan, Vincent. James K. Baxter. New Zealand Writers and their Work. Ed. James Bertram. Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1976.
33. Weir, Father J. E. & Barbara A. Lyon. A Preliminary Bibliography of Works by and Works about James K. Baxter. Christchurch: University of Canterbury, 1979.
34. Oliver, W. H. James K. Baxter: A Portrait. Auckland: Godwit Press, 1983.
35. McKay, Frank. The Life of James K. Baxter. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1990.
36. Newton, John. The Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune. 2009. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2010.

Ans Westra: Hone Tuwhare at Baxter's Grave (1972)

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• category - New Zealand Poetry: Authors

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