Mike Minehan: James K. Baxter, An intimate memoir

Reviewed by JOHN ROUGHAN

In the summer of 1971, James K. Baxter, a well-established poet and Catholic essayist, appeared throughout New Zealand looking like Jesus Christ.

He would pop up unheralded at university campuses and student pubs, a small, frail man with long lank hair, scraggy beard, ragged clothes and bare feet in leather sandals.

That regalia was not unusual in 1971. What made Baxter instantly recognisable was the eyes.

His drooping eyes wore a permanently soulful expression that I, for one, instinctively distrusted but many did not. He was a magnet for the wild and wounded.

Mike Minehan, later a radio journalist, met him that summer in Vulcan Lane, Auckland. Aged 24, she had just lost a marriage and two children.

"Join us sister," he said and she did. She went to his commune at Jerusalem on the Wanganui River, stayed a few months and left pregnant with his child.

It has taken her a long time to put that experience on paper. This small book, published in time for this weekend's anniversary of Baxter's death, is a gem.

Partly in verse, mostly in prose, she has confronted memories that after 30 years are still confused, painful and exhilarating.

In poetry she tries to describe "the girl" who went to Jerusalem. In prose she writes better, and the story develops into a letter addressed to the "mystic" she loved.

This is not a bitter book, or a comfortable recollection from the safety of middle age. Minehan confronts ghosts that she had never laid to rest until this attempt.

One suspects it has succeeded. She has produced a work of honesty and acceptance. The girl has matured, but her writing retains the freshness of youth and the self-conscious excess of the flower child.

Describing her meeting with Baxter she writes: "The tall girl and the gnome-like man have arms about each other and the raw musk smell of him is the dusty scent of back roads and dark rooms lit with candles and incense and she feels the firm bones of his spine through the rough cloth of his jacket and she returns his hug and breathes him into her and does not feel out of place though she is out of time and the universe has shifted and stilled."

The life she describes at Jerusalem might surprise those who have believed the mythology of experiments in communal living.

Minehan doesn't disparage it, but writes honestly of the disorganisation, the tensions and most of all the hunger.

"Your stomach rumbles and there are turnips to be flogged from the farm, or a sheep maybe ... You'll eat anything after a while ... "

"You'll smoke anything too, including the roots of prickly lettuce and mint. You'll get high and fly down the hills and valleys like a dream ... "

As the idyll fades she writes of "unspoken rules, codes being built upon daily, the ways things are when large gatherings meet, live together. Stashing of food or tobacco is to risk the disgust of many but it is done nevertheless ... "


Of Baxter himself we hear little except the occasional aphorism. "To be poor is to know a certain freedom. That's what he said and I believed him."

She describes him "rattling his beads, talking the talk, praying the prayer, looking ridiculously holy and god knows what really. ... " She often escapes to the nearby pa, to talk and laugh with the no-nonsense mother of a Maori family.

"You had enough of that useless lot up there yet?" the Maori woman would ask.

Baxter practised self-flagellation and Minehan, to her dismay, once witnessed a session.

"You want witness. Ah Hemi! My heart is heavy with the thwack of leather on skin ... the sting of it hurts my soul."

In March, she leaves.

"Everything changes in a blink and the fuzz have come search for drugs again and parents looking for a child and escapees from the ward ... someone who's lost their mind for a time and acid dreams and tension snapping and too many bodies, too much anger, too little food ... "

Minehan went home to Auckland, pregnant and mentally ill, to her mother. Admitted to Oakley Hospital, she spent the next six months as a committed patient and the later part of the book deals with that.

Eventually she discharges herself, gives birth to Baxter's son, lives with a man he brings from Jerusalem to look after her.

Baxter visits when in Auckland on his sojourns and talks to the infant. But the guru is becoming ill and depressed himself. The newspapers are reporting that local Maori are concerned at the state of the Jerusalem commune and want it closed.

"Do you think I am a bad man?" Baxter asks on his visits. Minehan re-assures him endlessly he is not.

He died on the Sunday of Labour Weekend, 1972. The day before, he visited Minehan and their son. Social Welfare was pressing her to have the little boy taken into care and Baxter faced them down. Afterwards she took Baxter into the city, hugged him and left him on an Auckland street corner.

She was playing the piano next day when word came.

His funeral was big news, and his brief communal experiment has been the subject of endless mythology since.

This slim, sensitive and honest book is probably the truth of it.

* Hazard Press, $24.95.