We conclude our week-long examination of the poet James K Baxter, and a new book of his letters, with an essay by the poet’s great-grandson Jack McDonald about his Nana, Baxter’s wife, the author and Māori leader Jacquie Sturm.

“I was minding a four-year-old great-grandson, and we went down to the beach. We made a castle and we made a cave in the castle and we had banners, gates and tunnels – I’m making it sound better than it was. But I’m saying this is what we were doing in our heads. The reality was much smaller, simpler arrangement. But at the end it was finished, and it was time to go home and he said, ‘Nana, will this be here tomorrow? If we come back tomorrow, will it be here?’ Because he asked me, I think he knew it wasn’t going to be. I said, ‘No, it won’t be’. ‘Why won’t it be Nana?’ I said, ‘Well, someone might knock it down, the wind might blow it away, or the sea will come and wash it away.’ He said, ‘No, Nana, no! I know the sea won’t come and wash it away.’ I said, ‘But the tide’s coming in, and then the tide will go out.’ He said, ‘No, Nana. The tide is not coming in today, I heard it on the news.'” Jacqueline Cecelia Sturm, 1997.

I am that mokopuna.

When I was young my dad worked full time as a librarian and my mum studied te reo Māori as an adult student at high school, and later university. While I have memories of being with my dad in his office, and of sitting in one of my mum’s te reo Māori lectures fascinated by what was going on, I was often left in the care of my grandmothers, both Nana and also my dearly loved Granny, my dad’s mother, Patricia McDonald.

When I found this quote in the transcript of an interview with Heeni Collins in 1997, during research I’ve been doing on my Nana in recent months, I was vividly shot back to my childhood with her; it felt like I could actually remember that conversation.

What I definitely do remember, was always being at the beach with Nana. She taught me to swim, and sternly told me “never swim out to sea, only swim across in line with the beach.” I paid the price for not heeding her advice when I was older (and not with her), when I swam out too far, got caught in a rip, and nearly drowned.

From the earliest of ages, I received my most valuable education from her. Without me realising at the time, she instilled in me huge amounts of knowledge. My family and friends have always called me an old soul, but how could I not be when I grew up around my grandmothers and their friends talking about literature, art, classical music, politics, and their exotic travels around the world? I mean, my comfort blanket as a toddler, affectionately known as “woolly”, was knitted by Janet Frame. She and Nana were best friends from when they first met in Dunedin in the 1950s.

I always knew my whakapapa, and was proud to be a descendant of people who had shaped New Zealand history. Growing up, everyone above a certain age would tell me their individual story or opinion of my great-grandfather, James K Baxter.

In recent years when I worked as an advisor at Parliament, I met Chris Finlayson in a meeting that was supposed to be about a particular issue the Greens had with Treaty settlements. A great deal of our precious time with the Minister was spent with him fondly recalling his memories of Baxter running down Lambton Quay barefoot, and my Nana in the New Zealand Room at the Wellington Public Library, where she worked for many years.

I grew up during the time when Nana’s literary career was at its peak; and she was fully liberated to write. Earlier in 1983 the Spiral Collective had published her seminal House of the Talking Cat collection of short stories. She followed that with two collections of poems, Dedications and Postscripts and a collection of both short stories and poems, The Glass House.

I was so proud to attend her capping ceremony when she was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University. And I was honoured to be asked by Nana to read a poem at the launch of the The Glass House at Paraparaumu Library in 2006.

She helped inspire my politics, when as a whānau in 2004 we marched through Wellington on the foreshore and seabed hīkoi in opposition to a Government she would usually support. It was probably one of the only demonstrations she ever went on.

Jacquie Baxter wasn’t just a renowned writer and academic, a historical figure I’d never met, she was my Nana.

She was one of the most defining influences on my early life. And there is no one I look up to more than her.

This week James K Baxter: Letters of a Poet was released by Victoria University Press, a huge two-volume collection covering 1939-1972. It’s edited by John Weir, who compiled the earlier Collected Poems and Complete Prose.

Our whānau have always had to deal with some of our family history being out in the public domain. But there’s something very different about this – the publication of Baxter’s letters gives considerable insight into his private life and therefore our whānau.

The Letters cast light on the deeply patriarchal and misogynistic reality that Nana lived, and give more context to her work, particularly her early short stories in The House of the Talking Cat.

I first started learning about just how hard my Nana’s life was when she went into hospital for heart problems while I was teenager. Her elder sister Evadne was down to visit, and as her and I walked around the hospital gardens I remember she told me how Nana would find out about Baxter’s illegitimate children in the press.

But it wasn’t until late last year, with the publication of the Letters imminent, that I had any clue of just how hard it really was. Any idea of the pain she lived through.

His first-hand accounts of his behaviour as a rapist in his marriage are sickening and have deeply affected me on an emotional level. As I was flicking through the Letters this week I couldn’t get far without having to put the book down again. I believe that Nana would never have wanted these brutal details made public.

There’s no doubt they were different times. As Weir notes, there was “a social pattern of patriarchal society and a convention of ‘rights and duties’ in marriage”, and many women of the time suffered similarly and worse, and some still do. It will shock many, as it did me, that marital rape was not criminalised in this country until 1985.

But rape is rape. It wasn’t acceptable then, or now. The Letters confirm Baxter as a deeply sexist and patriarchal figure, which can now no longer be ignored or brushed off in deference to his reputation or his literature. As well as that, they contribute to a one-sided portrayal of his relationship with Nana. Her voice remains silent, as others attempt to define her and their marriage.

In the years since his death in 1972, there have been numerous biographies, poetry and prose collections, eulogies and tributes to Baxter, many of them written by his close friends and associates.

Nana’s life story has not been comprehensively told.

Some of these Baxter scholars, have portrayed Nana subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, as the bitter grieving widow, or a biased literary executor, or that their initial separation was her fault because she couldn’t accept his conversion to Catholicism.

This has distorted the truth.

She never revealed his worst qualities or sought to damage his reputation, and after his death she painstakingly worked over decades to publish all of his work, including the love poems about other women – all of it. Their first separation was due to a loss of trust, which was only in part a result of his secretly taking instruction as a Catholic.

In his introduction to Letters of a Poet John Weir suggests that Nana may have destroyed some letters from her husband. There is no evidence for this and I very much doubt it is correct. She kept his letters from after he left for Jerusalem, so why would she dispose of earlier ones? It’s far more likely that Baxter saw no need to write to someone in the same house.

While in recent times she has received a lot more credit for her own work, she is very rarely credited for what she gave him.

People have often seen Baxter as our whānau connection to Te Ao Māori.

Weir also states “Hemi was Pākehā-Māori”. While this claim is not without merit, in my view it doesn’t really hold up. His community at Jerusalem among the Ngāti Hau people was a genuine, and one of the earliest, attempt at Pākehā living in Te Ao Māori in modern New Zealand.

He was a radical, was good friends with Syd and Hana Jackson and was with them at the first Waitangi protest in 1971, one of the only Pākehā. They and Ngā Tamatoa would later honour him by transporting his tūpāpaku, Nana, and our whānau to his tangihanga in Hiruharama from Auckland.

Rev Māori Marsden once said that “only a few foreigners alien to a culture, men like James K Baxter with the soul of a poet, can enter the existential dimension of Maori life”. But he also was only active in Māori communities for a relatively short time, his use of te reo and tikanga Māori was often wrong and terribly appropriative, and his letters prove he claimed far greater knowledge than he had.

What is usually lost is that it was Nana who was his connection to the Māori world.

As Paul Millar, the best of the Baxter scholars, succinctly puts it, “perhaps the greatest irony of Jim’s final years is that to many he came to represent Māoritanga more strongly than Jacquie”. The reality is that Nana had introduced Baxter to everything he knew about Māoritanga. She was “the Māori heart at the centre of the Baxter household that had been beating strongly since the 1950s”.

In the 1950s Nana joined Ngāti Pōneke cultural club in its early years. In her words she “just wanted to learn the action songs”, an early and pivotal point in her embrace of her Māoritanga.

She was soon more heavily involved, and also joined the Māori Women’s Welfare League. As a university-educated Māori woman, she was asked to be Secretary of the Wellington branch. When Mira Szászy was due to retire as the League’s representative on the Māori Education Foundation she asked Nana to replace her. She held this role for many years.

Nana would occasionally take Baxter along to Ngāti Pōneke practices and it was his first real exposure to Māoritanga. But as Nana would tell Heeni Collins years later “he wasn’t ready for it yet”.

“Jim getting involved in Māori things later on at Jerusalem? I felt quite bitter about that because he didn’t try like that when he was with me. And I thought for all those years he lived with a Māori, if he wanted to become more involved, he could have.”

Nana’s literary career was not only overshadowed by Baxter, so was her Māoritanga.

Nana was born Te Kare Jack Papuni on 17 May 1927 at Ōpunake in Taranaki. She was a descendant of rangatira lines; on her father’s side, Te Whakatōhea from Ōpōtiki Mai Tawhiti, and on her mother’s side, Taranaki Iwi, Te Pakakohi and Te Ātiawa.

Her mother died as result of her birth, and it was agreed her elder sister Evadne would go with their father back to Ōpotiki, while their Taranaki grandmother Moewaka Tautokai would keep Te Kare. Four or five years later her kuia fell ill and fearing that she would die, arranged for the local Sturm whānau to adopt her, and she took the name Jacqueline Cecilia Sturm.

She was identified at Napier Girls High School by Bishop Manuhia Bennett as a future Māori leader. She would go on to medical school in Otago in 1945, later shifting to anthropology which she completed her undergraduate degree in.

On her first day of anthropology, she went and sat at a desk at the back of the lecture theatre. “Whose initials should I see carved into the desk, whose name, Te Rangihiroa, Sir Peter Buck! So that spurred me on a bit. To think someone Māori had been there before me and how well he had done! … it turned out to be my best subject.”

When I found this quote I imagined Nana’s pride and her youthful excited face as she looked down and saw the name of a Taranaki Māori trailblazer who had been there before her.

But it also gave some small insight into what the loneliness of being one of the only Māori students on campus must have been like. Inspiration was to be found not in what was taught, or what was happening on campus, but in the desk graffiti of the first cohort of Māori students who had been there more than 50 years before.

She would go on to complete a dissertation on the national character of literature which was commended with exceptional merit and she was awarded an MA in Philosophy with first-class honours. She is thought to be one of the first Māori women to have graduated with a master’s degree, following earlier wāhine such as Bessie Te Wenerau Grace.

From her early years at Otago she had work published, and she was one of the first Māori women to have literature in English published.

Last week I spoke before Te Whare Rūnanga at Waitangi on behalf of the Green Party about how in 1940, on the 100th anniversary of the signing of Te Tiriti, Sir Apirana Ngata spoke in the same place on behalf of te iwi Māori, about how “the power of the chiefs has been humbled in the dust” and that “Māori culture” was “scattered, broke”.

There had been some demographic recovery, but the prospects for the survival of Te Ao Māori was still not assured.

In 1949, he famously wrote in a young student’s autograph book:

Ko tō ringa ki ngā rākau ā te Pakeha

Hei ara mō tō tinana

Ko tō ngākau ki ngā tāonga a ō tīpuna Māori

Hei tikitiki mō tō māhuna

Your hands to the tools of the Pakeha to provide physical sustenance

Your heart to the treasures of your Māori ancestors as a diadem for your brow

The kōrero encapsulates the essence of a generation of tangata whenua.

While she hadn’t heard Ngata’s kōrero at the time, my grandmother was of that generation of humble and fiercely resilient Māori, often wāhine Māori, leaders who bridged the gap between the first and second Māori renaissance.

Following the leadership of pioneers such as Ngata and her idol Buck, they enabled the extraordinary revival of her children and grandchildren’s generations.

She directly contributed to that through her literature, academic work and service to urban Māori organisations. But for much of her life she was very private about her Māoritanga, and perhaps her greatest contribution was keeping Māoritanga alive in her whānau and mokopuna.

In 1968, the year before Baxter left for Jerusalem, she adopted her new-born granddaughter, my mum Stephanie, and got a job to provide for her and the rest of the whānau.

She remained a pillar of strength, held our whānau together, and was there to support any of us with whatever it was we needed. In our urban setting she grounded us in our whakapapa and culture. We knew who we were. It didn’t matter if others didn’t.

She was, and still is, our matriarch. As she said in her own words:  “It is probably a bit unorthodox to say this, but my whānau, in a way, is my iwi. My whānau is my iwi. So my friends are my mokopuna. Yes, there is one place where I will try to meet the expectations of others – I did it yesterday and I will do it again tomorrow. And that is from my mokopuna.”

Without her generation our culture and communities wouldn’t have survived. Without her, our whānau, Te Whānau o Te Kare, would not have survived. And like so many of that generation, her story still needs to be told.

I intend to tell it.

James K Baxter: Letters of a Poet edited by John Weir (Victoria University Press, $100) is available at Unity Books.

All week this week the Spinoff Review of Books revisits the great poet James K Baxter. Today: John Newton reviews a new book of Baxter’s letters, in which he calmly reveals he raped his wife.

For the rival heavyweights of New Zealand poetry, recent years have brought a boxed-set bonanza. James K Baxter’s Complete Prose (VUP, 2015) runs to four volumes and 2662 pages. The slip case packaging of Allen Curnow’s Collected Poems together with Terry Sturm’s Curnow biography (AUP, 2017) adds up to just over 1100 pages. And now James K Baxter: Letters of Poet, edited like its predecessor by the poet’s friend John Weir, comes in at 1616 pages (two volumes). All told, that’s something approaching half a metre of shelf space. If there’s such a thing as canonical New Zealand writing then this is what it feels like.

As always the pair present a study in contrasts: Baxter as our great Romantic, Curnow our most distinguished modernist; Baxter pitching for a broad-church audience, Curnow unapologetically mandarin; Baxter sprawling untidily where Curnow’s work is obsessively controlled. When Curnow’s Collected Poems arrived it was no great surprise to find very few discoveries; the same austere corpus had been published and re-published, groomed and perfected throughout the poet’s long career. Baxter, on the other hand, seems to scatter his verses to the four winds: at a rough count, more than 140 poems, mailed in manuscript to friends, appear in these volumes for the first time. If Sturm’s account of Curnow’s life felt to some readers frustratingly ‘official’, it’s without doubt the book the poet himself would have wanted: an unrevealing biography of a deeply defended literary personality. And similarly, I think, with this edition of Baxter’s letters: candid – sometimes hair-raisingly so – but that’s the kind of writer Baxter is.

This contrast of tone and temperature offers one way of thinking about a potentially vexing question: the small matter of an audience. These editions may be built as if to outlast bronze, but what are their chances of finding a new readership? It’s hard not to feel that Baxter’s breadth, his humanism, his far-sighted biculturalism, all help to make him a more plausible sell (to, say, millennial readers) than do Curnow’s severity and prickliness. Eli Kent’s warmly received play The Intricate Art of Actually Caring (2009) is about a pair of millennials on a pilgrimage to Baxter’s Jerusalem. An equivalent homage to the magus of Tohunga Crescent is not so easily imagined.

And yet Baxter is not for everyone. Among the oddities of his treatment by literary critics is that his representation of women has, to this point, gone virtually unchallenged. With the appearance of the Letters this is surely about to change. The poet’s candour, and the corresponding openness of his executors and editor, put the problem front and centre. Baxter’s reputation may or may not be diminished, but inevitably it is going to be affected. With these volumes we enter a moment where it’s no longer possible to talk about him without addressing the ways that he thinks and writes about women.

The first thing to say is that this massive publication is a credit once again to the dedication of John Weir. From his early bibliography and critical study (almost 50 years ago), through the 1979 Collected Poems, the Complete Prose and now the correspondence, no one has laboured harder in the Baxter archive, and the poet and his readers alike owe him a huge debt of gratitude. Weir is also one of Baxter’s key correspondents. Along with the Dominican priest Eugene O’Sullivan, he is the chief private audience for the poet’s ruminations on doctrine, morality and Christian activism. In this respect no one knows Baxter’s thought better, and the highlight of his introduction is an elegant reconstruction of the spiritual process that led Baxter to Jerusalem.

In terms of sheer consistency, the most abiding of the poet’s correspondents is his mother, Millicent. It’s a clammy and sometimes disconcerting relationship that plainly had its pains on both sides. But it gives up moments of Freudian comedy: “Though I’m quite capable of infatuation, I think I could do without women. Excepting you and one or two others they do not attract me as persons though I am over my earlier shyness. And it is intolerably humiliating to be attracted by someone you don’t like…”

That’s the poet at 19. In the middle years of his life he successfully draws his parents into the Catholic church, which later comes in handy when he’s trying to explain away the poem “At Serrières” with its teenage masturbation and Oedipal voyeurism: “I can hardly be sorry I wrote it… But I’m definitely sorry I let it be published. And I ask your pardon for any hurt or offence it gave to you. To clinch that, say 3 Hail Marys quietly for me, that I may have a clearer mind and a purer heart – and I will say 3 for you.” (Phew!)

True to the shape of Baxter’s life, the more strictly ‘literary’ correspondence tends to come earlier, while social and religious concerns dominate increasingly from the mid-60s. Putting aside the early correspondence with Noel Ginn (familiar to Baxter readers from Paul Millar’s Spark to a Waiting Fuse), the most significant dialogue about poetry is with Charles Brasch.

As Baxter explains, they are a distance apart: “I have often felt between us, along with a very genuine mutual regard, a clash between two different views of life and art… I think you regard a work of art as a much holier thing than I do: to me a work of art is an interesting and very temporary construction, but I do not, for example, regard the mass-produced hideous quality of much Catholic church statuary as a matter of great negative importance – in fact I distrust somewhat any implication that good or bad taste are closely bound to good or bad living. More personally, I cannot feel that you or I are better people for producing good poems – it all depends on how we regard these products.”

In Baxter’s rejection of Brasch’s aestheticism we can see how far away he is, not just from the refined and somewhat snobbish editor of Landfall, but from the modernist assumptions of the nationalist mainstream – elders like Curnow and Sargeson, but also his key contemporaries (Frame, Duggan, Smithyman et al). To Baxter as a humanist, a Christian and activist there are always more important things to worry about than poetry. As Weir observes, then, we don’t learn much about the “circumstantial scaffolding” of particular works. Here and there we pick up the odd clue about Baxter’s reading (it comes as a surprise to hear him, aged 16, championing Pound). And with Brasch he shares some interesting remarks about his own poetic weaknesses: “My liking for rhetoric often leads me to swollen phrases and begging the question…”; “My fault has always been the emotional cliché, and I have to rely on intensity to carry me”; “[I]t is necessary to correct my long tendency to the easy and echoing statement . . .”

To what extent Baxter overcomes these habits in his later work is open to dispute. It’s instructive, though, to come across these often expressed criticisms spelled out so frankly by the poet himself.

In the literary struggles of the 1950s and 60s, Baxter is of course the younger generation’s champion. And yet it’s interesting how little he corresponds with his immediate cohort. There are 12 letters to Bill Oliver, seven to Keith Sinclair, four to Maurice Shadbolt; there’s just one to Hone Tuwhare; and nothing at all to Alistair Campbell, Kendrick Smithyman or Albert Wendt. Even Louis Johnson, so often thought of as Baxter’s chief confederate in the ‘poetry wars’ with Curnow, receives only 10. For all the bulk of Weir’s edition, he observes that it’s still well short of complete. Some material has proved so far untraceable; some may have been destroyed; more, he hopes, may be “flush[ed] out” by the appearance of these two volumes. But the overall picture, which is not going to change, is of a poet conducting struggles on many fronts, only some of which are ‘literary’.

However, there’s one select group among his contemporaries who Baxter does engage with – intimately, and at length. Fleur Adcock is the most accomplished female poet of their generation; Phyl Ferrabee is writer of short fiction who submits work to Numbers where Baxter is an editor; Grace Adams is an aspiring poet who sends him verses for critique. So all three are writers. But none of these correspondences remains “on message”.

Baxter isn’t naïve about this. By the time he starts writing to Adams, in 1963, he can recognise the pattern: “Neither of us are poem-writing machines. You are a woman (married); I am a man (married). We will get friendly; have already begun to get friendly. Without some carrying-wave of friendship, I don’t see how we could make sense of one another. But I know, or should know, my own subconscious mind by now – it will want to make you number 19 of the women with whom I have committed adultery. My conscious intention is to be of help to you as a writer and fellow-creature. But remember I am an old bag of shit, a psychopathic ex-drunk – and don’t think too well of your own subconscious, either.”

The attention of women writers excites Baxter’s imagination in way that sets these correspondences apart. As a story within the story they yield a vivid account of his psycho-sexual landscape. More unsettlingly, however, they also provide a distressing insight into his marriage to Jacquie Sturm.

Sturm, who married Baxter in 1948 (she was 21, he was 22), was one of the first Māori women to gain a university degree (a BA from Canterbury, an MA from Victoria). If the collection of short stories that she had ready by 1966 had found the publisher it deserved, it would have been the first book of fiction by a Māori writer, male or female. (As it was the honour went to Witi Ihimaera; Sturm’s book would finally appear as The House of the Talking Cat in 1983.) After Baxter’s death she would shift her attention to poetry, and take her rightful place among the elders of Māori writing.

But you wouldn’t guess much of this from Baxter’s letters, where his wife features chiefly as a scold, a task-mistress, and above all as the partner who refuses him sex. As he puts it to his mother only six months into their marriage, “I used to think marriage had a lot to do with sex, find it has practically nothing.” It’s a dissatisfaction he rehearses ad nauseam: Jacquie is “that sour little girl”, “my prune-faced old woman”, “the Puritanical bitch”; and so on. But more painful, even, that what he actually says is whom he chooses to say it to. His favourite audience for complaints about his sex-life is that revolving cast of other women. As he puts it to Grace Adams, “Maybe I shouldn’t say anything of how things go with me at home here; because one is inclined to adopt the whinging tone, which is in me alas a version of the mating call!”

It’s to Phyl Ferrabee in 1960 that Baxter makes these letters’ most appalling disclosure. On the strength of a “very sober & perhaps truly considerate knowledge”, he has dealt with his sexual frustration by force: “Sex relations with wife resumed. This at least gives some common ground to stand on to clear up difficulties. Achieved by rape. From a very clear knowledge no other way could break down J’s reservations & that she was gradually shoving herself round the bend. She seems ten times happier in herself. But it looks as if each new act will have to repeat the rape pattern.”

What Ferrabee made (or was intended to make) of such a jaw-dropping confidence, we can only guess. But it won’t be a surprise if, for many potential readers, this statement comes to drown out everything else that Baxter wrote.

With the letter reading more as a boast rather than a confession, it’s difficult to be be certain that Baxter understands the horror of what he has done. What we do know, however, is that the betrayal of trust and the violence that have taken place are repeated when he shares them with Ferrabee; not only that, but repeated again when the letter appears now in the official Baxter corpus. However appallingly it might reflect on him, history is being narrated, if not by the ‘victor’, then (in literary terms, at least) by the dominant partner. His wife’s humiliation becomes his intellectual property, her pain more grist to his self-display. I can’t avoid the feeling that a cruelty is being compounded in these letters. Having lost her voice in an unequal literary marriage, Jacquie Sturm loses it again as the marriage is laid out for analysis.

Baxter is nothing if not contradictory (like his prototype, Whitman, he is “vast” and “contain[s] multitudes”). His treatment of women is no exception. Yes, he can write like a dreadful misogynist, but he remainsinterested in women, in female creativity, and he seeks out and tries to encourage women writers (if not necessarily his own wife). He’s a staunch supporter of Janet Frame, an active advocate for Mary Stanley (whose work he seems to prefer to her husband Kendrick Smithyman’s). And he’s keenly aware of the plight of women enmeshed in what he likes to call “the N.Z. social pattern”. Baxter’s sociology, however, is inclined to run aground on his mythicism: ‘What happens is either meaningless to me, or else it is mythology.’ The credo certainly illuminates his method, and for Baxter qua verse-maker it works well enough. But for the Baxter who would “rather be a good man than a good poet” it creates trouble.

Close to the core of his understanding of women is the psychoanalysis of Carl Jung. Before he turns 20 he reports to Lawrence Baigent that “Jung… has been leading me in the paths of righteousness.” The following year he enters therapy with the Zurich-trained Grete Christeller. As Kai Jensen was the first to argue, the threatening female figures in Baxter’s poetry often respond to reading as spectres of the Jungian unconscious. But when these figures are projected on to ordinary human relationships, things get ugly. Just three weeks before the rape announcement, Baxter mails Ferrabee a book called Loathesome Women, a cranky study in female psychopathology by Jungian analyst Leopold Stein.

“This book woke me up,” he tells her. “The thing is that my beloved spouse has in her psyche some pretty powerful strands of the DORA and JUDITH personalities…” And in the same letter: “She has settled into a good-woman frame, with occasional outbreaks of the hag. The interesting whore whom I have once or twice caught a glimpse of in our marriage is walled away in a cellar in a box of triple brass…”

This investment in types and archetypes underwrites the murkiest of presumptions: “Curious that rape should win the battle where kindness, gifts, poems or persuasion never could. Perhaps it is the Maori way of doing things: to every Hinemoa her Tutanekai… I had thought at times that J.’s sexuality might be much more in line with the down-to-earth Maori subconscious; but then in other ways she could be prim as a steel ruler and bamboozle me. I remember a dream she had, a kind of Jungian revelation, in which she stands in a Maori meeting-house and sees a religious ritual in which a bird devours a snake… perhaps in line with the Indian culture she liked so whole-heartedly, where their religious symbol is a huge joined phallus and vulva. I mean that she is not actually European-romantic at all, and sweet words and bright ideas can only irritate her… Well, we live and learn. At least I can feel that I have begun to solve this tangle of my own volition, using my rule-of-thumb intuition, against all appearances.”

Pressing the marriage through this home-made sieve of bush psychology and mythopoetics obliterates the (real) other person at a cost that is difficult to exaggerate.

Spare a thought for John Weir. Not simply Baxter’s tireless editor, but equally his loyal friend, assembling this book he can’t but be fearful of the damage to the poet’s reputation. Much of the material I have just described he front-foots in his introduction – in the tone of one who knows that he’s giving up his friend to be “punished” (as Auden put it) “under a foreign code of conscience”’.

Despite the significant revelations that I’ve described, I still can’t regret the appearance of these volumes. They constitute an extraordinary resource, and nowhere more, in fact, than in what they reveal about Baxter and women. How much do we really know about masculine sexuality in the 1950s and 60s? Where can we turn to discover how men – privately – thought about women, about sex, and about relationships? By and large, not to our local literature. Like the generation before them, the writers of the 50s remain a stoical and inexpressive bunch. You won’t find many love-poets or journal writers. But among Baxter’s virtues is a willingness to self-scrutinise. He’s familiar with psychotherapy, he acknowledges the unconscious, and he seems to want to accurately describe his own desires, his flaws and the awful places they took him. Baxter is the most ‘confessional’ of New Zealand poets (both historically and temperamentally he belongs with Lowell and Plath). Publishing these letters is consistent with the way Baxter worked. He was never too shy to offer up his internal life as a kind of case history, and in the form of his correspondence it yields a complex wealth of material.

Baxter stands (ironically enough) with Robin Hyde in refusing to bend the knee to the restraint and decorum of mid-century nationalism; like Hyde he writes “too much”, too variously, and with more regard for his human subject matter than for literary form. For this, like Hyde, he earns the censure of his nationalist critics (first and foremost, Curnow), but the loyalty of a wider audience.

He is the nearest thing we have to a genuine folk poet. He is our foremost activist writer. He is also, in his final years, our foremost Pākehā writer, by which I mean a writer who actively investigates what it means to identify as the ‘other’ of Māori.

If the Letters provoke an overdue critique of Baxter’s behaviour, so much the better. There’s little point, surely, in curating these textual monuments if we’re not willing to read them without fear or favour. The same kind of reading, in my view, is due in relation to Curnow. But where Curnow is always drawing the shutters, sealing the exits, defending like grim death, Baxter makes himself, as he liked to say, “available”: a self-involved, deeply flawed man, unafraid of his own feelings and willing to share them, regardless of the ultimate consequences for his own reputation.

James K Baxter: Letters of a Poet edited by John Weir (Victoria University Press, $100) is available at Unity Books.