FAIRBURN'S BIBLIOGRAPHY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1049, 2 October 1959, Page 26

FAIRBURN'S BIBLIOGRAPHY

_ $ir,-I seldom enter into controversy, -and indeed until right now I have never written a letter to a newspaper, or a literary journal, saving on those happy occasions when I have been paid for my efforts. As my own literary efforts are mostly all published in the United | States under a pseudonym, my only New | Zealand writings which are readily available for criticism being radio scripts, I feel that I can happily enter this embryonic saga now apparently developing around Olive Johnson’s bibliography of Rex Fairburn in the status of an old friend of Rex’s who over the years got to know him better than most. We were neighbours in youth and later. We went to school, to college, and even to church together; we accompanied one another on pubcrawls, investigated the fields and puriri groves of Remuera and Orakei Basin, of Titirangi, New Lynn and Green Bay, sometimes just the two of us and sometimes along with suitable female friends. Together we went yachting on the Waitemata and flat fishing with spear and acetylene lamp along the shores and mud flats of the Manukau, during the depression years we often sat under huge sun umbrellas on the sidewalks of New Lynn, to our great pleasure and the equally great annoyance of the harassed ratepayers. Under those umbrellas Rex would hold forth mightily on the advantages of Social Credit, whilst I just as strongly opposed his views, fortified in my arguments with an enormous sheaf of antiSocial Credit papers which the late Gordon Coates had sent me. As Rex had no idea where my arguments originated it is probable that he, credited me with rather more political intelligence than was my due. In any event I knew Rex for 30 to 38 years, saving seven years when I was at University overseas, and feel that I knew him better than most. It seems to me that Anton Vogt has come nearest to describing Rex and his poetry with reasonable accuracy. He was, as Vogt says, fun loving and ribald, but even though a poet, yet remained an amateur in the literary field, not perhaps as casual an amateur as Vogt would think, but certainly not a professional with half an eye on style and*one and a half eyes on boiling up the financial pot. Professor Gordon’s judgment seems to my innocent mind to be that of a scholar, perhaps just a little bit entangled in Halls of Ivy, who has read into Fairburn’s works, particularly his later works, something that can maybe be interpolated into them, but yet something that Fairburn never intentionally put there, for Rex was ever the rebel, the ideal eccentric, and just a little erratic-all, I hasten to add, in the most pleasant connotations of those terms. His poetry, as I read it, and as Rex has often read it, and sometimes improvised it, to me over a handle of beer or a glass of Asti, was indeed as Anton Vogt has written, invariably deadly, deadline stuff, right up to the minute and giving true expression to his strong feelings about the latest fad, folly or inhumanity. His views, and his personal fads (believe me they were many) changed and maybe mellowed a little, but his poetry invariably highlighted those changes. But come change, come ripeness, the basis was ever the same, and that was his strong hatred of injustice of any sort, be it injustice to friend or foe, to peasant, poet, prostitue or prelate.

CHAS J.

CUTLER

(Wellington).