The road was deep in yellow dust, and as we bumped blindly round a corner we came upon an odd sight. It was the first curious happening of that strange day. We saw an old truck come whirling towards us, wrapped in its own individual dust cloud, from the centre of which came the unmistakable sound of bagpipes. I turned my head as it passed and saw a woman reclining against the back of the cab in a bathing costume, blowing furiously on a set of pipes. I couldn’t make out the tune she was playing in the instant before they had passed, but it sounded to me like the keening of a tormented soul.
‘Did you see it?’ I yelled in Anthony’s ear, and he shouted something rude against the wind, grinning widely, while his fair curly hair tossed above the handlebars. It seemed a dirge for our cooling friendship, and I hated its voluptuous reminder of the past.
We rode on, locked in a contentment which even that sad omen could not spoil, watching the river stream out beside the road like a silver flame in the sun. It flowed like a parched tongue between brown fields spattered with rushes and cabbage trees, poor land that grazed a few sheep and an occasional dry cow belonging to a syndicate in town, as decadent-looking with its limp wire fences and gorse-covered hillsides as the deserted farmhouse we could now see standing alone by the shore. It was only on the higher range of the Orongorongos, where the bush still stood secure, that we sensed the full grandeur of what the valley must have been a hundred years before.
Just after we came to the old homestead a second peculiar incident occurred when a man dressed in city clothes, his coat and tie in his hand and with dusty black shoes on his feet, came running down the hill across the river where a side road had once wound up to the ruined lighthouse on the cliff. He hopped across by the swing-bridge and proceeded to stride along the road in the direction we had come from, without so much as a glance at us as he walked on, lonely and eyeless behind his glittering spectacles. We wondered where he had come from, and where he hoped to get to that day, since there was no dwelling of any kind for miles around, and he had no car or even bicycle as far as we could see. But was it Anthony or myself I saw there? Again I was afraid.
We decided that I should fish the lower part of the river from the bridge up, and that Anthony should go back along the road for about a mile and fish upstream from there, leaving the motor-bike against a fence post so that I could ride on and catch him when I got that far. The water was deep and a light green colour, lovely to look at and promising even greater treasures to a careful angler, and a light southerly blowing up from the mouth put a ripple on the water at times, which was just what we had bargained for on this particular day. I started off with a small dry fly, working upstream and casting in all the likely places. I saw several medium-sized trout, but couldn’t get any to rise, and I soon began to wonder whether I shouldn’t try a different tackle. It was strange water to me, but it seemed a very promising river indeed, except that I wasn’t sure how to get the fish out of it.
Anthony had gone back up the road. I could see where he had left the bike shimmering in the sunlight, and with this promise of company before me I was beginning to get a little frustrated and lonely, when I came around a gorse bush and saw one of the biggest trout I think I have ever seen. He was swimming lazily up against the current, wiggling his fins idly as if he had no aim at all in life, until he darted suddenly forward, causing a great commotion in the water, and I realised that this monster was chasing the shoals of tiny mullet that came up into the mouth of the river from the sea. I quickly put on a matuku, the largest wet fly in the box, and began to go after him as if my existence depended on his being landed.
Although I didn’t disturb him or even attract his attention at first, I followed him stealthily up the river until I got out on a gravel spit that extended into the middle of the stream just below some old sheep yards. Here he was chasing a bunch of small fry in the shallows, and I saw him turn half out of the water with a devilish roll as he went after them. Then as I wound the line over my left hand I realised that he had lost the mullet and was following my lure. As he struck at it I lifted the tip of the rod high in the air before he shot away downstream. I shouted with excitement as the rod strained and bent like a whip beneath his power, and I fought him for fully fifteen minutes, standing there up to my ankles in the shallow water and feeling a deep pleasure such as I hadn’t known since the days we had flown our planes out over Rabaul during the war. The tension that built up in me from a fear that the light tackle I was using wouldn’t hold him found its relief when he did break it at last, snapping the cast off just above the hook in a final desperate attempt to get away. Somehow I was glad I had lost him, for he seemed too magnificent a fish to end his life in such a way.
I was trembling all over as I ran up the bank with my rod to find Anthony, but when I saw him coming and heard him say he hadn’t seen a thing except eels, I felt flat and disappointed in a moment and was even more glad that my own hands were empty. He was ready to pack up and go home then, and didn’t believe me at first when I told him of the enormous fish I had hooked and fought with. We sat down on the warm grass in the shelter of a bank and ate the sandwiches we had brought, while the sun struck down at us from the lip of the hills. I was a little sorry for him, as I hadn’t been since hearing the news, and he put his arm around me and we lay there in perfect tranquility while I told him about it again, feeling the pleasure of his comradeship like wine as he murmured how lucky I had been. Gradually he leant over as if he wanted to kiss me, so strong was the leaping of our blood to each other, and the steady softness of his stare transfixed me as he leant his body against mine and gripped my arm with his hand. A question shone in his eyes and with the golden sun behind his curls he seemed to take on the aura of a saint as that full inflexible lip drooped over me. I began languidly to yield to the force that was in him, and felt the shadow of something beyond my understanding cross my face for a moment, as the sun went down below the ridge and left us there with the first darkness of evening covering the grass and the river.
What had happened to us? I asked myself. I thought of Anthony’s nonchalant reminder that we would have to move smartly to get home before night made the climb out of the valley too hazardous. What did they really mean? I wondered, thinking over the events of the day: the woman with the bagpipes, the solitary man far from home, the big fish I had caught and lost in the river. What passions were contained in that moment when Anthony had leant over me with the smile of a lover on his face? In my mind I caught an echo of the renunciation that shone upon his brow, yet what use was a crown of thorns when life was taking from us the one consolation we had known?
The valley was like a desert and we seemed back in the wilderness as we travelled beneath the winnowing moonlight, empty, mindless, no longer linked as one upon that warm machine. What was this country to him now, with its spirits of old tangata haunting the tree-tops and its grey tombs of men who had already lost their heritage in a life more lonely than death, where sheep and land and home were valued more for the money and days of horse racing they could provide than for anything affecting a man’s soul? I was caught in a flux of emotion in which nothing had any significance any more but the fact that I was losing my closest friend. Why could we not roll up in our blankets by the roadside and sleep there before returning to the city that held his future so inexorably in its grasp? Why could we not talk all night about past triumphs and the glory of a youth that would soon be lost to us forever? The engine roared on as we mounted the hill to the summit and saw the Hutt lights beneath us like a bed of glowing rain. I had lost him at last. My shallow integrity had failed me, while the nub of his conviction carried him far from my grasp to a land from which he might never return; into the ecstatic presence of a God he had made part of him. And on this ominous shore it seemed the mists of Hades slowly descended, enveloping me but leaving him to ride majestically on into a radiance that was denied my sight and a warmth that would never touch my aching heart.
(1960)
Blast
> James K. Baxter, ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’
Elicited by the decision of the
Otago University authorities to
forbid this practice among students
Dunedin nights are often cold
(I notice it as I grow old);
The south wind scourging from the Pole
Drives every rat to his own hole,
Lashing the drunks who wear thin shirts
And little girls in mini-skirts.
Leander, that Greek lad, was bold
To swim the Hellespont raging cold
To visit Hero in her tower
Just for an amorous half-hour,
and lay his wet brine-tangled head
Upon her pillow—Hush! The dead
Can get good housing—Thomas Bracken,
Smellie, McLeod, McColl, McCracken,
A thousand founding fathers lie
Well roofed against the howling sky
In mixed accommodation—Hush!
It is the living make us blush
Because the young have wicked hearts
And blood to swell their private parts.
To think of corpses pleases me;
They keep such perfect chastity.
O Dr Williams, you were right
To shove the lovers out of sight;
Now they can wander half the night
Through coffee house and street and park
And fidget in the dripping dark,
While we play Mozart and applaud
The angel with the flaming sword!
King Calvin in his grave will smile
To know we know that man is vile;
But Robert Burns, that sad old rip
From whom I got my Fellowship
Will grunt upon his rain-washed stone
Above the empty Octagon,
And say—‘O that I had the strength
To slip yon lassie half a length!
Apollo! Venus! Bless my ballocks!
Where are the games, the hugs, the frolics?
Are all you bastards melancholics?
Have you forgotten that your city
Was founded well in bastardry
And half your elders (God be thankit)
Were born the wrong side of the blanket?
You scholars, throw away your books
And learn your songs from lasses’ looks
As I did once—’Ah, well; it’s grim;
But I will have to censor him.
He liked to call a spade a spade
And toss among the glum and staid
A poem like a hand grenade—
And I remember clearly how
(Truth is the only poet’s vow)
When my spare tyre was half this size,
With drumming veins and bloodshot eyes
I blundered through the rain and sleet
To dip my wick in Castle Street,
Not on the footpath—no, in a flat,
With a sofa where I often sat,
Smoked, drank, cursed, in the company
Of a female student who unwisely
Did not mind but would pull the curtain
Over the window—And did a certain
Act occur? It did. It did.
As Byron wrote of Sennacherib—
‘The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold’—
But now, at nearly forty-two,
An inmate of the social zoo,
Married, baptised, well heeled, well shod,
Almost on speaking terms with God,
I intend to save my moral bacon
By fencing the young from fornication!
Ah, Dr Williams, I agree
We need more walls at the Varsity;
The students who go double-flatting
With their she-catting and tom-catting
Won’t ever get a pass in Latin;
The moral mainstay of the nation
Is careful, private masturbation;
A vaseline jar or a candle
Will drive away the stink of scandal!
The Golden Age will come again—
Those tall asthenic bird-like men
With spectacles and lecture notes,
Those girls with wool around their throats
Studying till their eyes are yellow
A new corrupt text of Othello,
Vaguely agnostic, rationalist,
A green banana in each fist
To signify the purity
Of educational ecstasy—
And, if they marry, they will live
By the Clinical Imperative:
A car, a fridge, a radiogram,
A clean well-fitted diaphragm,
Two-and-a-half children per
Family; to keep out thunder
Insurance policies for each;
A sad glad fortnight at the beach
Each year, when Mum and Dad will bitch
From some old half-forgotten itch—
Turn on the lights!—or else the gas!
If I kneel down like a stone at Mass
And wake my good wife with bad dreams,
And scribble verse on sordid themes,
At least I know man was not made
On the style of a slot-machine arcade—
Almost, it seems, the other day,
When Francis threw his coat away
And stood under the palace light
Naked in the Bishop’s sight
To marry Lady Poverty
In folly and virginity,
The angels laughed—do they then weep
Tears of blood if two should sleep
Together and keep the cradle warm?
Each night of earth, though the wind storm,
Black land behind, white sea in front,
Leander swims the Hellespont;
To Hero’s bed he enters cold;
And he will drown; and she grow old—
But what they tell each other there
You’ll not find in a book anywhere.
(1967)
Alan Brunton, Manifesto to The Word Is Freed, 1
[See following pages.]
(1969)
Earthly: The Seventies
Curiously, in a decade when, in the public sphere, novel and decolonising forms of nationalism emerge which challenge nostalgic ties to Britain and argue that New Zealand’s geographical position in Asia and the Pacific be reflected in its sense of identity, writers here show less interest in the ‘New Zealand referent’ than former generations. Notions of identity fragment and, where there is a sense of the collective, it is framed in terms of ethnicity or gender.
This is the decade in which we see the confident concerted presence of Māori and of women writers. Māori writing emerges from protective places of publication and connects with a mainstream readership, gaining a sharpness and an energy from its association with political movements.
Women’s writing also changes tone from the internalised and personal registrations of the 1960s, to embrace with confidence a new tone, a new scope of subject matter, and a new readership. As with Māori writing, women’s writing in the 1970s has an association with an explicit political agenda and works for explicitly transformational purposes—many women in this period read in order that they might change their lives, and expect literature to reflect their changing roles and expectations.
With both Māori and women’s writing, this means not just the literature of polemic, but also an engagement with the everyday—the reality of life of the whānau and its negotiations with the Pākehā world; and the task of making the language of both poetry and prose malleable enough to reflect and accommodate the familial and the ordinary—the earthly.
Alongside this—perhaps in contrast—and following on from the manifestoes of the previous decade, there is the manufacture of a counter-culture dream world of lyrical surrealism and subjective intensity, working with fragmented forms and
exploiting the plasticity of language and sound. The everyday is conceived not as a grim and puritanical burden, or as a theatre for the enactment of an embattled identity, but as a cause for celebration and a ground of linguistic play and experimentation.
‘New Zealand literature’ is now a recognised subject in the university, and the construction of critical manifestoes and literary histories, often in opposition to the canon of the cultural nationalists of the 1930s and 1940s, establishes a new set of critical standards and practices.
Pipe Dreams
David Mitchell, ‘th oldest game’
below th house a rusty plateau
of ponsonby rooftops & chimneypots
like paris recalls other mountains
& other tents
& voyages. voyages.
here
above the fine & foreign flesh
of this strange SO familiar girl
he makes th signs …
&
her silken stomach rises
at the first & least touch
to his cold fingertips
&
her pale eyes close
against his lips …
& so intrudes th dream/th game/th trip
& yet she catches/still
beneath th felt breath turning
in th blue of memory
the tongues unspoken & unspelt
of how ‘it used to be’
&
once again he asks (in silence) the same
old question
‘what has this world done to us ?’
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 89