James K. Baxter was born in 1 926 so he and Bruce Mason were contemporaries, Mason being five years the senior. Baxter was born on a small fann at Kuri Bush, a small coastal settlement. When he was five the family moved north to the larger coastal settlement of Brighton (McKay, The Life 2 1 -23) which is twenty kilometres south of Dunedin. As a writer, Baxter, like Mason, was profoundly influenced by the local New Zealand landscape in which he spent his childhood and adolescence, though in his case it was that of South Otago. B axter, like Mason again, mythologizes this landscape in an oeuvre which is largely autobiographical. The New Shorter Oxford defines 'mythologize' as to ' [m]ake mythical; convert into myth or mythology. ' By usin:g this term I mean that James K. Baxter 'convert[ed] ' the South Otago landscape into a symbolic environment, which supported his own 'set of beliefs. , 1
Baxter made up his mind early in life that his vocation was to become a writer, though in his case his choice of genre was initially poetry. By his own account he began writing at about the same age as Mason and produced his first poem when he was seven ('Beginnings' 237). In 'Beginnings,' an autobiographical essay, Baxter described the creative process he used from the beginning:
The first poem I wrote was no doubt significant, if not in its form or content, at least in the way I approached the writing of it. I climbed up to a hole in a bank in a hill above the sea, and there fell into the attitude of listening out of which poems may rise - not to the sound of the sea, but to the unheard sound of which poems are translations . . . [ . . . ] I don't find that my methods of composition have changed much since that time (239).
This description identifies three important characteristics, which remained seminal in Baxter's writing throughout his literary career. The first is the significance of the 'hole in a bank in a hill above the sea' as the breeding ground for his inspiration. The second is the distinctive local landscape which acts as a springboard for creativity. The third is Baxter's concept of the aesthetic nature of that creativity: as the translation of 'unheard sound' into words.
Although Baxter's parents both came from the Otago area that triggered their son' s inspiration,2 they were from very different family backgrounds and very different value systems. Baxter's mother's side of the family was prestigious, intellectual and middle class. His maternal grandfather, John Macmillan Brown, had emigrated to New Zealand with an Oxford degree and become the foundation professor of Classics, English and History at Canterbury College. Baxter's maternal grandmother, who also had a degree, was Principal of Christchurch Girls' High School when her daughter (Baxter's mother) was born (Oliver 1 0).
Baxter's father's family, by way of contrast, had a long tradition of self-education. His ancestors were Highland Scots who emigrated to Otago at the time of the gold rush and earned a living by physical labour (McKay, The Life 12). Baxter's
father Archibald, known as Archie, was born in a sod cottage (5).3 In keeping with his family tradition, Archie left school before his teens to go out to work, and he and his six brothers were all casual farm labourers in their early working lives (6). Nevertheless, despite their relative lack of formal education, all of the Baxter brothers liked reading. Archie in particular was a literary-minded man, given to reciting romantic poetry (McKay, The Life 7; Oliver 7) and he also wrote poetry 2 In 'Letter to Noel Ginn 11,' written in 1948, Baxter writes that he mythologized the local landscape from an early age:
From the high window I can see the swells Roll in with their incessant cannonade
Upon that shore where once, a lonely child, I made My own mythology of weeds and shells
And dreamed I heard from the green water shade The pealing of sea drowned cathedral bells
Poems 72).
3 Archie's mother, Mary, was born in Glencrevan, Ballachulish in the Scottish Highlands in 1 858. She married Archie's father, John, in New Zealand in 1 879. After their marriage the couple settled in Brighton where their second son, Archie, was born in 1 88 1 (McKay, The Life 5).
as well as prose. An unpublished novel, written by Archie and based on the adventures of his Gaelic-speaking ancestors when they first arrived in New Zealand, still survives in the Hocken Library.4
In his biography of Baxter, Frank McKay makes a significant comment on Baxter's attitude towards the conflicting values in his family heritage:
James always felt closer to the rugged, uneducated, working-class Baxters. Macmillan Brown represented for him a system of education, a puritan devotion to hard work and material advancement, conformity, and respectability. Against these he was increasingly to rebel Life 32).
McKay also emphasizes that, as a descendant on both sides of his family from the earliest waves of white settlement in New Zealand, 'Baxter was more conscious than most of his ancestors' Life 1 ).5 An essential component of Baxter's mythologizing of his own history and landscape was the claim that his forebears had emigrated to New Zealand with the intention of building a New Jerusalem, which he called the 'Just City,' an ideal which he believed had never eventuated:
The pioneering dream was of a Just City. If we suppose that this dream has been realised we condemn ourselves to the ultimate nonentity of false prophets. It we state the truth (that we now live in an Unjust City) we thus purge ourselves of a lie commonly held to be truth and begin to speak meaningfully Trends in New Zealand
16).
A fundamental theme in Baxter's plays is the loss of the New Zealand dream, which he represents as the 'Unjust City.' In stating that ' [t]he pioneering dream' 4 The novel is an eighty-three page document in manuscript and is untitled (Novel by Archibald McColl Baxter. James K. Baxter Papers. Hocken Library). Baxter's father also published a memoir We Will Not Cease (1939) about his experiences as a conscientious objector in the First World War.
5 On Baxter's paternal side, his ancestor John Baxter came from the isle of Bute in the Western Highlands of Scotland and emigrated with his wife and three children on the Lady Egidia, which landed in Port Chalmers in 1 86 1 . On his maternal side, Baxter's great-grandfather Archibald McColl also came from the Western Highlands and emigrated with his wife and seven children on the Alpine, which landed in Port Chalmers in 1 859. This Archibald's mother tongue was Gaelic and he never became fluent in English. Both the Baxter and the McColl families settled in Brighton (McKay, The Life 1 -4).
had not been realized and that New Zealand society, had on the whole, become instead an 'Unjust City,' Baxter labels New Zealand as a place of failure rather than one of achievement,6 and sets out on a quest to restore the 'Just City' in his plays.
His first play, 'Jack Winter's Dream,' was written in 1 956, and first produced on New Zealand radio in 1 958. During the course of his literary career Baxter wrote twenty-two plays (McNaughton, 'Baxter as Dramatist' 1 84).7 In his Introduction to the published Collected the editor, Howard McNaughton, emphasizes Baxter's own view of himself as being primarily a poet: 'Baxter never stopped being a poet; he wrote poetry while he was working on plays,8 (xiii-xiv). Nevertheless, Baxter's plays form a substantial component of his oeuvre.9
To date these plays have been given scant critical attention. They are included in this thesis, however, because this playwright is one of the first New Zealand dramatists to reject the 'The Kiwi Cringe. ' Baxter also created a two-tiered portrait of 'the margin.' In relation to 'the margin' of New Zealand as a whole Baxter, like Mason, set his plays wherever possible in the country of his birth. Thirteen of the fifteen plays in Collected have New Zealand settings. I D Even when his subject matter does not allow this habitual practice, as in 'The
6 In this respect Baxter is a direct descendant of poets such as Cumow, Fairbum and Glover who were writing about New Zealand in a similar vein between 1 935 and 1945.
7 Baxter's unpublished plays are not available to the public. They are held for the most part in the Hocken Library, Dunedin. This analysis ofBaxter's plays will confine itself almost exclusively to the scripts included in Collected These scripts are 'Jack Winter's Dream,' 'The Wide Open Cage. ' 'The First Wife, ' 'Mr Brandywine Chooses a Gravestone,' 'Who Killed Sebastian,' 'Requiem for Sebastian,' 'The Hero,' 'The Sore-Footed Man,' 'The Bureaucrat,' 'The Devil and Mr Mulcahy,' 'The Starlight in Your Eyes,' 'The Temptations of Oedipus,' 'Mr O'Dwyer's Dancing Party' and 'The Day That Flanagan Died. '
8 Baxter's reputation was flrst established when he shot to fame with his flrst volume of poetry, the Palisade ( 1944), which was published when he was only eighteen. His second volume of poems, Wind of Fruitfulness ( 1 948), established him as one of the leading poets of his generation. From the beginning, Baxter allied himself with the national movement that had been j oined by other writers, such as the influential poet AlIen Cumow.
9 Baxter acknowledged that Cumow's play 'The Axe' inspired him to become a playwright. After attending the premiere in 1948 he wrote to his mother that he had begun to write his flrst play (McNaughton, Introduction Collected vii). This was the flrst reference to 'Jack Winter's Dream' which was produced on New Zealand radio eight years later.
10 'The Sore-Footed Man' and 'The Temptations of Oedipus' are both versions of Sophocles'
plays by Baxter. Accordingly, the former is set on the Greek island of Lernnos and the latter near the Greek city of Colonus.
Sore-Footed Man, ' Baxter still manipulates his material to impose a New Zealand 'voice' on a classical text.
Both Baxter and Mason challenge the hegemony of the Eurocentre by regarding 'the margin' of their homeland as being synonymous with 'the Frontier. ' I have already mentioned Margaret Atwood's use of this concept to encourage the development of a Canadian literary identity. In Atwood's interpretation 'the margin' then becomes not a place of limitation, but a place of 'new' possibility, where the 'hope [ . . . ] of Utopia, the perfect human society,' might be realized (3 1 -32). I have also remarked that there are similarities between Canada and New Zealand in their respective struggles to identify a national 'voice. ' Baxter's concept of the 'Just City' is another attempt to construct 'the perfect human society' that Atwood envisages in her interpretation of 'Utopia.'
Both Baxter and Mason focused their 'hope' of achieving 'the perfect human society' (or at least a better society) by promoting the merits of the doubly marginalized. The similarities in their respective aims led them to select similar subject matter in their dramatic explorations of 'the outer margin' of minority groups. There was, however, one significant difference. Baxter's conversion to Catholicism made him the first New Zealand playwright to articulate consistently a Catholic minority viewpoint, which placed him on another 'outer margin,' New Zealand being a predominantly Protestant society.
Baxter's oeuvre, like Mason's, is founded on autobiography as McKay confirms: 'The best account of Baxter's life is the one he gave himself [ . . . ] for his poetry was always autobiographical' Life 290). Differing autobiographical influences, however, caused some variation in their respective foci. Baxter's predilection for the values and traditions of his father's side of the family meant that his primary interest lay in male homosocial groups. I will argue that the reason for his misogyny is to be found in his Oedipal anxiety.