Edited by Frank R. Shaw, FSA Scot, Dawsonville, GA, USA
Email: jurascot@earthlink.net

Liam McIlvanney is a writer I have wanted an article from for the pages of Robert Burns Lives! for quite some time now. My dream has come true, and today I present the following piece by Professor McIlvanney. I have had it in my possession for several months but was asked to hold off on printing since it had first been promised to the Journal of New Zealand Literature. Our time has come, and it is an honor to welcome Liam to our pages and hopefully look forward to another editorial in the future.

After I purchased the book Burns the Radical written in 2002 by Professor McIlvanney, it became an oft-referenced publication for me when the subject of Burns and his radical nature was on the table. It is a book that I recommend any student of Burns should have and, yes, it is still available on the market and is most worthy of your money and time.

In response to an invitation for him to speak to our Burns Club of Atlanta when he next visits the States, he brought up another Burns connection: “I'll always be grateful to the Burns Club of Atlanta for helping me to stay on in Columbia to do some research in the Thomas Cooper Library following the Burns conference at USC in 1996. (Indeed, I'm pretty sure I credit the Burns Club of Atlanta in my acknowledgments to Burns the Radical.).” And in checking, he did indeed, beginning with the second sentence of the Acknowledgements page of his book.

He goes on to say, “I've attached a copy of my most recent piece on Burns. Let me know if this fits the bill. It's on the Burnsian echoes and allusions in a poem by the twentieth-century NZ poet, James K. Baxter. It touches on the bawdy side of things (both with Baxter and Burns) and does contain a fairly robust bawdy poem at the end, so you may be looking for something a little less heady! Anyway, if you do think this would suit your website, could I ask you to hold off putting it online until the forthcoming issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature is published?”

Liam is also a novelist with several books to his credit.

Below is some biographical information about Professor McIlvanney from the website of the University of Otago, New Zealand, that I took the liberty of borrowing for this article. (FRS: 5.29.13)

Professor Liam McIlvanney

Scottish literature and culture since 1707, including: Robert Burns; Scottish vernacular poetry; the Glasgow Novel; Ulster-Scots poetry; contemporary Scottish writing; Irish-Scottish literary connections; literature of the Scottish Diaspora.

Professor McIlvanney is Director of the University’s Scottish Studies Programme.

ENGL 241 Irish-Scots Gothic and the Gothic as Genre

ENGL 260 Tartan Noir: Scottish Crime Fiction

ENGL 341 Irish-Scots Gothic and the Gothic as Genre

ENGL 350 Contemporary Irish and Scottish Poetry

ENGL 472 Imagining Scotland

Research Supervision

I am happy to supervise in any of the areas listed above. Prospective postgraduate students should visit the Postgraduate Pages on the Scottish Studies website.

I recently co-edited (with Ray I recently co Ryan) a collection of essays on The Good of the Novel (Faber, 2011), co-edited (with Gerard Carruthers) The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature (CUP, 2012), and co-edited (with Dougal McNeill) a special ‘Baxter and Burns’ number of the Journal of New Zealand Literature (2012). I am currently completing two articles on Scottish poetry in colonial New Zealand. My second novel, Where the Dead Men Go, will be published by Faber in September 2013.

Books

Where the Dead Men Go (London: Faber, 2013)

The Cambridge Companion to Scottish Literature, ed. by Gerard Carruthers and Liam McIlvanney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)

The Good of the Novel, ed. by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (London: Faber, 2011)

All the Colours of the Town (London: Faber, 2009).

Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1700-2000, ed. by Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005)

Burns the Radical: Poetry and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press

Poems Like Hand Grenades: Baxter, Burns and Bawdry[1]
By Liam McIlvanney

Liam McIlvanney

In 1966, after twenty years wandering, James K. Baxter came home to Dunedin to take up the Robert Burns Fellowship at the University of Otago. The man who depicted Odysseus’s homecoming as ‘both a humiliating failure and a triumphant completion of his quest,’ was similarly ambivalent about his own return to Ithaca.[2] From one point of view, Baxter had reached his ‘home base’ in triumph.[3] The young man who flunked out of Otago in 1945, having failed to propitiate the ‘goddess of good manners and examination passes’, was returning as the University’s writer-in-residence.[4] The award of the Burns Fellowship – previously held by Duggan, Mason, Shadbolt and Frame – was a significant accolade, a recognition of Baxter’s standing as a leading New Zealand writer.[5] It was also a practical boon. Baxter would enjoy leisure to read and write – no longer having to ‘steal’ time from his wife and kids in order to write his poems – and would avail himself of such unaccustomed luxuries as ‘fresh percolated coffee’, a flat with a ‘flash red kitchen table’ and a Varsity office.[6]

But Baxter’s return was also, in some sense, a ‘humiliating failure’, at least in his own eyes. In accepting the Fellowship, Baxter was making his peace with academia, with the ‘puritanism’ of New Zealand bureaucracy and the accidie of respectable domesticity – in short, with the gorgons he’d slain in order to become a poet in the first place. Throughout his career, Baxter held, with an almost superstitious intensity, to the belief that a poet’s power comes from his readiness to articulate scandalous and socially dangerous truths, and that the acceptance of ‘posts and pensions’ would compromise this vital function.[7] If Baxter came to regard the Fellowship ‘more as a hair shirt than a sinecure’,[8] it was because he saw it as a devil’s bargain, offering ‘money and status’ at the cost of compromising his art: ‘the Muse...does not smile on Fellowship holders. Our good morals seem to bore her’.[9] And though the Muse did smile on Baxter during his Fellowship years – by the end of the second varsity term of 1966 he had written thirty-five poems, as he acknowledged when applying for an extension of his tenure – Baxter remained peculiarly alive to the danger of being ‘bought’, of becoming a kind of poetic functionary, like those American poets-in-residence who ‘wander round the campuses like tame bespectacled sheep’.[10]

For a poet who held that the ‘greatest check to good writing’ was not poverty or lack of leisure but rather ‘a too complete surrender to the local climate of opinion’, the award of a prestigious, well-remunerated fellowship posed a potential threat to his hard-won integrity.[11] Baxter’s response to this threat was threefold. First, he determined to conduct himself, as Burns Fellow, in the spirit of the poet for whom his fellowship was named, the ‘ranting rhymer bawdy in a tavern’: Robert Burns.[12] More than any other holder, before or since, Baxter actively honoured the Burns connection, accepting the Fellowship as a gift ‘from the ironic ghost of Burns’, and exploring his own relationship with the Scottish poet in a series of lectures and poems, some of them published in The Man on the Horse (1967).[13]

Baxter’s second line of defence against encroaching respectability was a decidedly Burnsian one: the practice of bawdry. Indeed, even before he took up the Burns Fellowship, Baxter had decided that bawdry was the weapon to wield against Otago’s emasculating academics.  He wrote to Kevin Ireland in 1965: ‘The only way to stuff them is to speak bawdy on all occasions, on and off the stage…’.[14] As W. H. Oliver observes, Baxter ‘quite seriously believed in the magical effect of obscene words’, and wrote a ‘great quantity’ of bawdry – not least during his tenure of the Burns Fellowship – though few of these works have seen the light of day.[15] There may therefore have been a talismanic significance to the copy of The Merry Muses of Caledonia that was among the few books Baxter kept on the shelves of his Varsity office.[16] A collection of bawdy poems and songs, some of them written or collected by Robert Burns, the Merry Muses led a kind of underground existence, circulating in manuscript, until an edition was published in 1799.[17] The edition Baxter kept on his shelves was presumably the one published by W. H. Allen in 1965, edited by James Barke and the great New Zealand-Scottish poet, Sydney Goodsir Smith. For Baxter, bawdry is in some sense synonymous with Burns, who stands as the only modern exponent of authentic bawdy verse: ‘Burns is alone among the post-Reformation poets in his capacity for genuine bawdry’. Baxter even speculates that it is Burns’s ‘unfractured view of sex’ – forming a welcome antidote to the repressive Calvinism of the Kirk – that explains ‘the exceptional love that many Scotsmen have felt towards Burns’.[18]

The third means by which the 1966 and 1967 Burns Fellow vindicated his independence of mind was via polemical interventions on matters of public controversy. There is something almost touching in Baxter’s earnest desire to provoke and offend by his public pronouncements. In the latter part of 1966, a somewhat nervous Baxter mounted a ‘mild endorsement of sexual freedom and soft drugs’ at a student arts festival in Palmerston North.[19] He also joined a Vietnam ‘teach-in’ at Invercargill, and addressed an anti-war rally in Dunedin’s Otagon, assuring the crowds that Robert Burns would have supported their cause.[20] He became, in his own words, an ‘addict’ of the correspondence pages of the New Zealand Listener where he intervened in debates on teenage pregnancy and homosexual law reform.[21] In a newspaper article written towards the end of his first year as Burns Fellow, Baxter declares that he has ‘made a particular point’ of expressing his ‘strong opinions’ about social and political issues, so as to ensure that he ‘had in no way been bought’ by the award of the Fellowship. Airing provocative views was a means of publicly flouting the standards of decorum expected of a Fellowship holder: ‘If this direct expression of opinion happened to be incongruous with the view which this person or that might have of the way a Burns Fellow should conduct himself, so much the better’.[22]

Burns, bawdry and belligerence: these were to be Baxter’s watchwords during his tenure of the Burns Fellowship. He would model himself on the riotous Robert Burns; he would read, write and speak bawdy; he would vent his contentious opinions at every turn. In the winter of 1967 a controversy at the University of Otago gave Baxter the chance to combine all three strategies in the writing and dissemination of the ‘poem for which his tenure of the Burns Fellowship is still best remembered’, namely, ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting, Elicited by the decision of the Otago University authorities to forbid this practice among students’.[23]

Although Baxter would invoke the shade of Robert Burns in his poetic vindication of the mixed flatters, the controversy itself owed more to the legacy of the Scottish poet’s nephew. A Free Kirk minister and co-founder of the Otago settlement, the Reverend Thomas Burns was an orthodox Scottish Calvinist and a towering figure in the new colony where he served as minister of Dunedin’s First Church and (from 1869) foundation Chancellor of the University of Otago. If Burns’s brand of Free Kirk Presbyterianism ‘dominated the settlement’s social and moral life’, it proved similarly influential on the life of the University.[24] Burns was by no means the last Presbyterian cleric to hold a senior management position at Otago. The Free Kirk endowed a number of professorships at the University and these ‘Presbyterian’ chairs were ‘not relinquished until 1945’. From 1909, Knox College, a residential college of the University, housed New Zealand’s principal Presbyterian seminary. One of the key providers of student accommodation from the 1940s onwards – the Stuart Halls Council – maintained strong informal connections to the Presbyterian church, while some of the University’s Presbyterian halls of residence attempted to enforce student attendance at chapel into the late 1940s. This ‘considerable Presbyterian influence’ inevitably shaped the University’s approach to student accommodation. A paternalistic University management saw it as its duty to ‘protect’ the sizeable contingent of female students by segregating the sexes in lectures until the late 1930s and, of course, by insisting on segregated accommodation.[25]

Predictably, this ‘Presbyterian’ approach to student accommodation provoked strong opposition in the 1960s, when protest against established authority swept the campuses of the Western world, and when a doubling of Otago’s student numbers (from 2,666 to 5,235 over the course of the decade) impugned the prohibition on mixed flatting from a practical as well as a moral standpoint.[26] When controversy erupted in July 1967, the catalyst was a letter from a member of the public to the University’s accommodation officer, identifying a mixed student flat in the city’s Union Street and demanding to know whether the University authorities approved of this arrangement. While University regulations did not expressly forbid mixed flatting (students were simply banned from residing in premises ‘of which the Council upon such grounds as it thinks fit disapproves’), and though the domicile in question was hardly the first or only mixed flat at Otago, the letter required an official response.[27] The recently appointed Vice-Chancellor, Dr Robert Williams, with the support of the University Council, took a firm stand. He ordered a final-year male psychology student – described by Baxter as an ‘innocent and hard-working young man’ – to leave the Union St flat he shared with three women, two of them students.[28] Then, when the student’s plight was revealed in a campus paper, the Vice-Chancellor issued a statement declaring that mixed flatting was ‘not acceptable’, since the practice brought ‘discredit’ on the university and tended to impose unhelpful peer pressure on those students who ‘want to lead a decent and well-ordered life’.[29] A prohibition that had previously been ‘unofficial, enforced by public opinion’ had now become explicit University policy.[30]

The response from the student body was energetic and immediate. Students staged a mixed ‘sleep-in’ at the Student Union, and in a welter of press releases and pamphlets – with titles like Belt Up, Muse and Falus – they pilloried, protested and satirized the University’s position.[31] However, contrary to the insinuations of their opponents, the students’ campaign was not an endorsement of free love – or even, necessarily, of mixed flatting. Rather, it was an assertion of moral agency and autonomy, a protest against the intrusive paternalism of the University authorities. An editorial in the student newspaper Critic declares that ‘t]he issue at stake is not free love’ but the University’s attempt at ‘moral regulation’.[32] A pamphlet distributed in the Student Union on 5 July asserts that the students are demanding, not special privileges but simply the rights enjoyed by all other citizens, while reiterating that this is an issue of moral agency rather than sexual mores: ‘In registering your protest on thursday you are not expressing an opinion on the desirability of mixed flats. You will be emphasising that if a particular man and woman choose to live together, it is not your concern, and it is not the Vice-Chancellors (sic) either’.[33] As Baxter puts it, ‘the students felt that they were not being treated as adults’.[34] At a time when a change to age of majority was being widely debated, the University’s insistence on acting in loco parentis was particularly irksome to students.[35]

Having been ‘tumultuously received’ when Baxter read it at a meeting in the University Union, ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’ was published in July 1967 in the short-lived student publication, Falus.[36] Conceived as a counterblast to Critic (the official Otago University Students Association paper), Falus had first appeared around 1965 and proved controversial, the University authorities banning it from the Student Union.[37] It was then ‘resurrected’ in July 1967 around the time of the mixed flatting controversy, when it ran for seven numbers, winning instant notoriety when its first issue was publicly burnt by the Lady Vice-President of the Students Association. Announcing itself as the organ of ‘Hippies, weirdies, Anarchists, Nihilists, Pot-smokers and THE PRESBYTERIAN LAYMAN’S ASSN!’, Falus was sedulously scurrilous. [38] ‘We all thought we were being terribly progressive,’ recalls one of the magazine’s founders, ‘and would churn out lengthy doggerel in rhyming couplets about the Vietnam war and other matters of moment. Bad (and sexually explicit) language abounded: that being the progressive thing to do in those days’.

Despite its edgy, outsider image, the magazine was not above seeking ‘respectable’ allies. As the mixed flatting controversy developed, one of the editors mooted the idea of soliciting a contribution from the current Burns Fellow. As John Robson remembers it, 

The rest of us were dubious but to our astonishment (and joy) he agreed on the spot and in a very short space of time, handed over the ‘Ode to Mixed Flatting’. I don’t think Baxter would have had any high opinions of the literary merit of ‘Fallus’ (sic.) but I seem to recall that he had been shocked at the treatment meted out to the first edition. I have no idea whether Baxter had already written the poem, or was in the throes of starting something anyway, but I’m fairly sure that the ‘Ode’ appeared in the mixed flatting issue of ‘Falus’ and have always entertained the personal myth that the poem was, in effect, a commissioned work for our funny wee publication.[39]

If the staff of Falus wanted Baxter on board to demonstrate their ‘respectability’, Baxter was eager to contribute for the opposite reason. In endorsing this ‘underground’ paper – as well as the ‘Small Ode’, Baxter contributed an otherwise unpublished (and fairly undistinguished) piece of bawdry entitled ‘Treasure Song’ and a short essay on ‘The Puritan Devil’ – Baxter was not only supporting the students against the University authorities; he was supporting the more radical elements of the student body against a staid and conformist Students Association. And above all he was atoning for the life of guilty sufficiency he was leading as Burns Fellow: ‘And I thought – “Mate, you’ve had a long enough holiday, resting in the shade of the university english department; it’s time you started telling the truth again” – so I wrote the following poem, a small ode on mixed flatting...’.[40] ‘A Small Ode’ took up the entire first two pages of the ‘mixed flatting’ issue of Falus.[41]

The context and provenance of the poem may explain why ‘A Small Ode’ has received only cursory notice in the monographs on Baxter. It is easy to dismiss the ode as a minor occasional work (McKay calls it a ‘squib’), a disposable intervention in a parochial dispute.[42] And yet, as the kirk satires of Burns attest, ephemeral disputes can occasion poems of lasting significance. Richly and complexly allusive, masterful in tone and technique, ‘A Small Ode’ serves as a test case for Baxter’s poetics of bawdry, and conducts a deep and subtle dialogue with the work of a poet who preoccupied Baxter throughout his career and not just throughout his tenure of the Fellowship that bears his name.[43]

The Burnsian influence is evident in the poem’s very metre. ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’ is written in octosyllabic couplets, a form Baxter had deployed to notable effect in his 1963 ‘Letter to Robert Burns’. It is, indeed, a Burnsian signature. It is the metre of Baxter’s favourite Burns poem, ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, that superlative verse narrative in which a stolid family man becomes enamoured of a young, short-skirted witch, a poem Baxter knew by heart from the age of five.[44] It is also the metre of some of Burns’s most pointed and mordant satires, poems like the ‘Address of Beelzebub’ or ‘A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton Esq.’, in which Burns slyly burlesques the viewpoint of his targets. Baxter had both of these models – ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and the satires – in his eye while composing his ‘Small Ode’.

Like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, and like many Scottish vernacular poems, ‘A Small Ode’ opens on a stormy winter scene: 

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.

These relentless rhymes – the long ‘o’ sustained over four successive lines – and the violent trochaic openings of lines four and five drive home the vision of a bleak, inhospitable city. If the passage evokes Antarctic barrenness – ‘scourge’ can mean not simply to beat or punish but to ‘exhaust the fertility of’ – it also recalls Dunedin’s cultural vacancy as posited in these lines from a poem of the previous year:

                    If there is any culture here
                    It comes from the black south wind
                    Howling above the factories
                    A handsbreadth from Antarctica...[45]

Baxter establishes Dunedin as a city of polar bleakness. But these opening lines are also in sly dialogue with ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. When Burns counterpoints the stormy Ayrshire night (‘The storm without might rair and rustle’) with the warm and friendly pub (‘Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely’), he is drawing on the convention in Scottish vernacular poetry whereby a poem’s opening sets up a contrast between a wild, wintry scene and a cozy, firelit interior.[46] The locus classicus here is Robert Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid, but Burns employs this device in ‘Love and Liberty’ and ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ as well as in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Baxter’s innovation in ‘A Small Ode’, by which he indicts the inhumanity of the University authorities, is to offer only the stormy exterior. There is no cozy interior because the authorities have forbidden the young lovers to share accommodation, leaving them to suffer the violence of the storm. 

Indeed, it is perhaps Henryson more than Burns that Baxter has in his eye at this stage of the poem. In the opening stanzas of The Testament of Cresseid, the aging speaker seeks refuge from polar winds (‘the blastis bitterly / Fra Pole Artick come quhisling loud and schill’) in his comfortable study. Having been prevented by the intense cold from praying to ‘Venus, luifis quene’ (a Goddess invoked in Baxter’s poem), the speaker stokes his fire and seeks to recruit his waning vigour by reading a love story.[47] In a similar gambit, Baxter’s aging speaker turns, not, as in Henryson’s poem, to Troilus and Cressida, but to the stirring tale of Hero and Leander:

                    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...

However, just as the speaker begins to get caught up in his vignette of Hero and Leander, relishing the sensual details (‘his wet brine-tangled head’) and zooming in for a close-up of the bed, he pulls back, censors himself, and turns for moral support to thoughts of the city’s stolid puritan pioneers:

                                                   – 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...                        

Five early Dunedin settlers are mentioned – two Irishmen and three Scots. Thomas Bracken (1843-1898) was a newspaper proprietor, Member of Parliament and author of the national anthem, ‘God Defend New Zealand’.[48] John Horne Smellie (1854-1908) was the Scots-born co-founder of the Otago Iron Rolling Mills Co. and came from Lanarkshire Covenanting stock.[49] The Dunedin firm of McLeod Bros was, for a century from 1869, a leading New Zealand manufacturer of soap and candles.[50] Sam McCracken (1864-1937), an Irishman and a ‘staunch Methodist’, ran a prominent general store in the South Dunedin suburb of Caversham.[51] I have not identified a plausible candidate for ‘McColl’, but Baxter may be referring here to the Argyllshire branch of his own Scottish forbears.[52] In any case, the tenor of this couplet is clear: these men are stalwart establishment figures, God-fearing local businessmen and politicians. They are the respectable counterparts of the outlaw forefathers whose graves Baxter venerates in ‘Conversation with an Ancestor’.[53]

But the speaker’s appeal to pioneer virtue backfires. His train of thought leads him once more onto dangerous ground when he reflects that the dead are ‘Well roofed’ in their graves and mausoleums and, unlike the Heros and Leanders on Dunedin’s stormy streets, possess the advantage of ‘mixed accommodation’. Far from spinning in their graves at the behaviour of young Dunedinites, the city’s puritan pioneers enjoy the freedoms denied by their successors to the students of Otago. Once again, the speaker is obliged to change tack and hurriedly censors himself – ‘Hush!’ – before his train of thought can lead him further into trouble.

This dynamic – the mock moralizing speaker who unwittingly gets caught up in the action only to pull up short and recover his propriety – is taken from ‘Tam o’ Shanter, where Burns’s narrator identifies with drunken Tam’s voyeurism (‘Now, Tam, O Tam! had thae been queans, / A’ plump and strapping in their teens’), before catching himself up and wagging his finger at his errant hero (Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin! / In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin!), swinging between breathless empathy and harrumphing remonstration.[54] It is here that ‘A Small Ode’ shows its indebtedness to Burns’s satires as well as to ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. Instead of earnestly inveighing against the soulless, bureaucratic Puritanism of the authorities – as he does at wearisome length in his expository prose – Baxter spryly ventriloquizes his opponents (‘Ah, Dr Williams, I agree / We need more walls at the Varsity’) and travesties their viewpoint: ‘The moral mainstay of the nation / Is careful, private masturbation’.

The central action of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ takes place in a disused churchyard, and something of a graveyard ambience pervades ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’, with its evocation of dead forefathers, chaste corpses and well-roofed graves. It’s worth recalling here Baxter’s contention that ‘To accept a fellowship is to enter a graveyard’.[55] Universities themselves often seem like cemeteries to Baxter: in his ‘Essay on the Higher Learning’, he compares the ‘peculiar schizoid calm’ of University life to ‘the calm of a populous graveyard’.[56] But graveyards are not merely the resort of the dead, whether buried or not. They are, as F. Marian McNeill argues in The Silver Bough, and as Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ confirms, important sites of folk festivity and carnivalesque resistance to the powers-that-be.[57] It is in Alloway kirkyard – the spot where Burns’s own father is buried – that Tam spies on the dancing, half-naked witches, ogling the nubile Nanny while Auld Nick plays the pipes. It’s fitting, therefore, that the war between strictness and sensuality in ‘A Small Ode’ is waged by two dead men: John Calvin in his grave and Robert Burns on his stony plinth:

                    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.

The French theologian and the Scottish Bard seem to contend for the soul of a city described by Baxter both as ‘Calvin’s town’ and ‘the home town of Burns’.[58] Baxter’s thumb, of course, is on the scale: while Calvin is permitted a silent smile, Burns gets a dozen lines in which to expose the carnal appetites of the city’s pious founders, and extol the sexual impulse as the fount of his own explosive poetry.

‘A poem like a hand grenade’: this metaphor of detonation is a favourite of Baxter’s. He writes of ‘ideas like bombs’ (‘Pig Island Letters, 1’), and jokes that the Mayor of Palmerston North and the Chancellor of Massey University had ‘taken a bomb into their hands’ by inviting him to deliver a public address.[59] In The Fire and the Anvil (1955), Baxter cites approvingly Allen Curnow’s contention that a true poem should ‘change the imagination’ of its reader, adding that this can best happen if the poem has a ‘detonator’ – some element that can jolt readers out of their complacency. Sometimes that detonator is a shocking, anti-social sentiment, as when Louis MacNeice expresses his glee at the wartime blitzing of London’s buildings in ‘Brother Fire’. At other times the detonator could be an obscene word or a sexual image, which is why Baxter places such a premium on Robert Burns’s bawdry, and why he believes that the ‘greatest latitude should be allowed a poet in the use of coarse language and sexual imagery’. [60]

What is most surprising, in relation to ‘A Small Ode’, is how gentle are its detonators, in terms both of ‘coarse language’ (‘sad old rip’, ‘ballocks’, ‘bastardry’, ‘dip my wick’) and, even more, of ‘sexual imagery’. In its treatment of sex, ‘A Small Ode’ is curiously decorous, even prim. There is a reference to the paraphernalia of masturbation (‘A vaseline jar or a candle’); there is a reference to swollen ‘private parts’; and there is Burns’s unfulfilled desire to ‘slip yon lassie half a length’. And while this was enough to alarm some of Baxter’s Catholic coreligionists, it is rather weak beer when set against the strenuously frank and graphic bawdry of The Merry Muses.[61] Of course, the comparative tameness of ‘A Small Ode’ stems in part from the fact that, like Burns in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, Baxter constructs an ironically moralizing speaker who not only cuts short the Scottish Bard’s lascivious reminiscence (‘Ah well; it’s grim; / But I will have to censor him’), but carefully censors himself (‘Hush!...Hush!’) when he looks like straying onto dangerous ground. And even when Baxter speaks in his ‘own’ voice (‘But now, at nearly forty-two, / An inmate of the social zoo’), he plays up his respectable credentials (‘Married, baptized, well heeled, well shod, / Almost on speaking terms with God’), ranging himself ironically on the side of the repressors: ‘I intend to save my moral bacon / By fencing the young from fornication!’

However, there is also the possibility that Baxter – in this poem as elsewhere – is less of a libertine than he liked to pretend or than he is sometimes made to appear. Bill Manhire, recalling Baxter’s tenure as Burns Fellow, reflects that ‘even at the time there was an obvious contradiction between his preaching of free love and his views on the evils of contraception’.[62] But perhaps the contradiction is illusory and the problem lies in the perception of Baxter as an enthusiastic advocate of free love. Towards the end of ‘A Small Ode’, Baxter invokes the apparently incongruous figure of St Francis of Assisi:

                    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?

What connects these two images? What unites the nakedness of Saint Francis with the nakedness of the mixed flatters, the saint’s celibacy with the flatters’ fornication? As Baxter explains, these lines refer to the incident in which Francis ‘appeared naked before his Bishop when he decided that he was going to obey God rather than his merchant father who wanted him to live a life of security’.[63] Francis was making an act of commitment, placing the love of God ahead of personal advancement and material success. By implication, the lovers in Baxter’s poem are making a similar commitment, placing love for each other, and perhaps also for their unborn child (‘keep the cradle warm’), ahead of worldly concerns for exams and careers and the ‘climate of local opinion’. In so doing, the lovers – like Saint Francis – win the laughing approval of the angels.

While the tenor of these lines may be open to debate, it would seem somewhat willful to detect a ‘preaching of free love’ here. As W. H. Oliver remarks of ‘A Small Ode’, the poem’s ‘moral standpoint is obscure, but it is never libertarian’.[64] Instead, Baxter’s position in the poem – insofar as one can infer a position in a work of art – seems congruous with his Landfall response to the 1954 Mazengarb Report into juvenile delinquency, where Baxter endorses ‘mild promiscuity’ while noting that he has ‘observed (and who has not?) the disfigurement of personality which accompanies sexual activity divorced from tenderness, care, and mutual trust’.[65] It is these qualities of tenderness, care and mutual trust – not so much free love as aroha – that Baxter chooses to celebrate in ‘A Small Ode’.

Baxter did write at least one other poetic response to the mixed flatting row, one that aspires rather more overtly to the status of ‘poem like a hand grenade’. ‘The Horse’ is from Baxter’s Notebook XXVIII in the Hocken archive: 

This prodigy at 41 –
Coming out of the Student Union Building,
I saw above the wet leaves, the puddled streets,
A fiery cunt in the sky

Rose-red and bushlike, gyrating – and I thought –
‘Blessed be whatever is! It will not be
Death by burning, death by drowning,
Death by a dull meticulous old age,

‘But death by fucking!’ Then one great erection
Stood up like a [illegible], then turned itself into a horse
That dug its black hooves into the asphalt;
Sprouted wings, and carried me towards the stars.[66]

The references to the Student Union (scene of the mixed ‘sleep-in’) and to the speaker’s age (at ‘forty-one’, congruent with the ‘nearly forty-two’ of ‘A Small Ode’) suggest that the poem is another response to the mixed flatting row. The title aligns the poem not merely with Horse (1985), Baxter’s bawdy, posthumously-published campus novel, but with ‘The Man on the Horse’, Baxter’s meditation on Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. In that essay, Baxter proposes that Nannie, the young witch in the short dress, is Burns’s ‘only real muse’.[67] ‘The Horse’ is another poem about the Muse, one in which various elements from ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ – the gyrating ‘tail’ exposed by Nannie’s short shift, the horse that becomes a kind of Pegasus – are combined. The giant erection that transforms into a horse is perhaps a reversal of the passage at the end of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ when Maggie loses her tail, an incident that Baxter reads as a symbolic ‘mock-castration’.[68] For all that, ‘The Horse’ is hardly the most significant addition to the Baxter corpus. Its vision of a cosmic, apocalyptic bout of sexual congress is purely conceptual and carries no emotional or imaginative conviction. The final stanza seems constructed principally so that Baxter may burlesque the University of Otago’s motto, Per ardua as astra, and the whole poem recalls Bill Manhire’s description of the bawdy Baxter as ‘a bit embarrassing, trying very hard to shock the world in which he came to consciousness’. [69]

In ‘The Man on the Horse’, Baxter observes that the element of bawdry ‘lies just under the surface of much of Burns’s poetry, and comes into the open in some of his ballads’.[70] In Baxter’s own case, bawdry functions best when it ‘lies just under the surface of his poetry’ and is subdued to the wider economy of a poem, as in ‘A Small Ode on Mixed Flatting’. When Baxter’s bawdry ‘comes into the open’, becoming an end in itself, the results – as in ‘The Horse’ – can seem laboured and programmatic. While Baxter articulates a coherent poetics of bawdry, his own practice lacks the ‘free and broad’ handling that Whitman praised in Burns’s erotic verse.[71] Baxter, for all his defiance of ‘the Puritan devil’, remained deeply in thrall to his Calvinist heritage, so that the writing of bawdy verse was never the easy indulgence of a natural impulse, but always the anxious infraction of a feared and hated creed. Twenty years before he took up the Burns Fellowship, Baxter decided that ‘Burns was a rebel, his rebellion undermined by his own unresolved guilt’.[72] As was usually the case when discussing the Scottish bard, Baxter was really talking about himself.