Baxter and rape: now what?
Philip Matthews asks if James K Baxter’s poetry and reputation can survive the revelations about rape.
Sixteen hundred pages of letters were published in two thick volumes in January but one short word stood out: rape. The first reviewer on the scene was Wellington poet and literary historian John Newton who covered James K
Baxter: Letters of a Poet for The Spinoff. It was impossible to get past the awful revelation that Baxter had written at length about raping his wife, Jacquie, in a letter to another woman in 1960.
This is how it goes. Baxter complained that Jacquie had become uninterested in sex with him. Baxter decided he would have to force the situation. ‘‘Achieved by rape,’’ he reported, as ‘‘no other way could break down J’s reservations’’. Afterwards, he thought ‘‘she seems 10 times happier in herself’’, but ‘‘it looks as if each new act will have to repeat the rape pattern’’.
Newton wrote that ‘‘it won’t be a surprise if, for many potential readers, this statement comes to drown out everything else that Baxter wrote’’. But the sentences after the ones quoted in the review were possibly even worse. ‘‘In the act she can and does co-operate once it has begun,’’ Baxter confirmed. He wondered if men are trying too hard to be civilised, ‘‘whereas our wives secretly equate love & violence’’.
Some have pointed out that rape within marriage was not a crime in 1960. In response, others refer to an earlier letter, from 1958, in which Baxter talked about his ‘‘total inability to keep my fly buttoned’’ and ‘‘a tendency to rape most hostesses at most parties I went to’’. These problems ‘‘made life at home impossible’’, he said.
Was Newton surprised to see these lines in Baxter’s letters? ‘‘Even though the specific revelations in the letters did surprise me, the idea that Baxter’s attitudes to women were problematic shouldn’t have surprised anyone who’s read the poetry,’’ Newton says. ‘‘The poetry is riddled with dodgy, misogynistic attitudes.’’
For example, there is a 1966 poem titled ‘‘A Question of Rape’’, in which Baxter remembers seeing ‘‘a trim white she-cat’’ mounted by a gigantic ‘‘coal-black’’ tomcat. He wondered why the female cat didn’t resist and concluded that ‘‘I think some ladies like to ride the whirlwind’’.
As for Jerusalem, there has been no shortage of stories about Baxter sleeping with young women at the commune. North Canterbury poet Mike Minehan wrote a short book, O Jerusalem, about having a son with Baxter after a brief relationship. Addressing Baxter 30 years after his death, she wrote that: ‘‘You said yourself that the Catholic Church had ‘banned the orgasm for 2000 years’. Many of us were just discovering for ourselves a sexual liberation and this [made] for very odd pairings and situations, especially at Jerusalem.’’
There was a fine line in the 1960s and 70s counter-culture between helping women to ‘‘own their own sexual appetites’’, as one expert puts it, and creating predatory and abusive situations.
Newton stayed away from the subject of sex when he wrote his account of the Jerusalem years, The Double Rainbow. It was made clear during his preparatory research that people did not want Jacquie to be further embarrassed or humiliated (she died in 2009, months after the book was published). Also, the local Ma¯ ori community wanted to avoid the lurid stories about ‘‘depravity and drugtaking’’ that fed the popular press in the 1970s.
Newton felt that those stories about Jerusalem could be told later. ‘‘Sex has a way of shouldering everything else off the page,’’ he says. ‘‘I’m very pleased I wrote the book when I did because I think now you couldn’t write that book. If you were to write about Jerusalem now, there would be only one question on everybody’s minds. The bicultural dimension, the collaboration between the pa¯ and the hippies, would be lost.’’
We live in a time when careers are ended and reputations destroyed by sexual allegations. As one academic said in private: ‘‘If I were a prospective graduate student now, I wouldn’t go near [Baxter]. There are many other good writers to study who aren’t tainted in this way.’’
Newton agrees. ‘‘I don’t think too many people will be studying him. As a teacher you would be wondering, are people going to be able to read this stuff or will they be too distracted and preoccupied?’’
But a figure like Baxter cannot be removed from our libraries, universities and collective cultural history as easily as Michael Jackson has been taken off the radio or Kevin Spacey has been deleted from screens.
Fergus Barrowman, publisher of Victoria University Press, which produced the Baxter letters, sees him as a complicated figure because he’s such a good writer. Katherine Mansfield, Janet Frame and Baxter are ‘‘so deeply woven into New Zealand’s cultural self-understanding that they’re present even to people who’ve never read them. It’s really important we have as full a knowledge as possible of them.’’
Barrowman says that the damage to Baxter’s reputation since the Letters appeared – ‘‘Admissions of violence tarnish poet’s legacy,’’ is how the Otago Daily Times put it – does not affect plans to publish more Baxter, including the Complete Poems. The manuscript is said to be even bigger than the four volumes of Complete Prose that appeared in 2015.
All of this work has been edited by Baxter’s old friend John Weir. Weir, a retired Catholic priest and English lecturer, chose not to comment for this story but grappled with the ‘‘shocking’’ nature of the rape confession and Baxter’s sometimes ‘‘obscene’’ frankness in his introduction to the book.
Professor Janet Wilson, who previously taught at the University of Otago and now teaches at the University of Nottingham, thinks we can still read and teach Baxter, who she sees as ‘‘a very powerful though uneven poet’’ who ‘‘had much to say of intrinsic value about New Zealand’’. But we need to open our eyes to the facets of his personality – ‘‘his candour, his perfervid unchanneled sexual/ psychological energies and insights’’ – that fed his confessional writing.
She thinks of British poet Philip Larkin. ‘‘Some of the revelations [about him] have been problematic, especially to women readers, but that probably won’t change his place in the canon.’’ In the case of Baxter, we can see the rape confessions as illuminating the buttoned-up New Zealand of the 1950s and 60s, which ‘‘tended to ignore or dismiss rape as so much hot air. In some ways Baxter is speaking against himself in this revelation – which is why it is so unique as a document.’’
Newton intends to tackle the issue more deeply in his next book, a history of New Zealand literature from 1946 to 1958. There will be a chapter on masculinity. Like Wilson, he sees the value of the Baxter confession as one way of telling us what the 1950s were really like.
‘‘The problem is the historical distance between now and then,’’ he says. ‘‘We need a more subtle awareness of the historical gap we’re negotiating across. I think our current political and ethical conversations could benefit from a more subtle understanding of where we are historically.’’
But he recognises the problem, too. It’s hard to talk about the context without looking like you’re making excuses for bad behaviour. ‘‘To contextualise it is easily misconstrued as an attempt to explain it away.’’