Snake-Haired Muse James K Baxter and Classical Myth

This is an extract from The Snake-Haired Muse: James K Baxter and Classical Myth by John Davidson,Geoff Miles and Paul Millar.

In 1960 the literary quarterly Landfall circulated a questionnaire to a number of New Zealand writers. It asked about their economic circumstances: how much do you earn by writing, what outside work do you do, what kinds of state assistance would help you? Most of the respondents reported back in the same matter-of-fact terms. James K. Baxter’s response came from a different universe of discourse. The problems raised by the questionnaire, he suggested, "are chips off a single granite block, possibly from that remarkable boulder which Sisyphus, streaming with sweat, shoves uphill every day and night in the not-so-imaginary Greek underworld. [. . .] The real problem raised concerns the weight, size, shape, geological or theological formation of this boulder, and what handholds (if any) can be found on its surface." After describing his own hardscrabble literary existence, in which the time and energy for writing must be found by ‘robbery’ from his employers and his family, he concluded that this way of life was nevertheless the necessary condition of his writing: "If my economic or social or domestic condition were alleviated in such a way that I had more leisure to write, and possibly more stimulus to write, I would be a Sisyphus divided from his boulder. The gritty touch of its huge surfaces, the grinding weight, the black shadow which it casts, are the strongest intimations of reality which I possess, and the source of whatever strength exists in my sporadic literary productions." (‘Writers in New Zealand: A Questionnaire’ 41–42) In the following year, writing to his friend Bill Oliver (21 Feb 1961; FM 27/1/11) about Bohemia and respectability, Baxter returned to the image of Sisyphus. ‘I think I agree fundamentally with the kind of thing the Boulder is likely to say to Sisyphus,’ he declared, and improvised a Goonish dialogue between them. ‘You bloody great heap of the fossilized dung of a dinosaur!’ curses Sisyphus. ‘Ssh! Ssh!’ responds the boulder primly. ‘You mustn’t swear.’ The dinosaur which excreted Sisyphus’s stone is presumably the same beast which appears in Baxter’s famous description of New Zealand morality: ‘the Calvinist ethos which underlies our determinedly secular culture like the bones of a dinosaur buried in a suburban garden plot’ (‘Notes on the Education of a New Zealand Poet’, MH 125). What Sisyphus is pushing uphill is the Calvinist work ethic, a system of values Baxter loathes but knows he must remain in touch with—shoulder to the rock—if his writing is to remain relevant to the lives of his fellow New Zealanders.

Featured in the 20 June 2011 New Zealand newsletter.
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