Abstract
James K. Baxter’s biographer, Frank McKay, didn’t have much information about one of the more tantalising mysteries of the poet’s younger years, so he skirted around it in three sentences tacked to the end of a discussion of Baxter’s failings as a student and incipient success as an alcoholic: ‘About July or August of 1945 he had an affair with a young married woman, “intelligent and good looking”. When her husband found out he took a tolerant view of the affair, but insisted that it stop. Psychologically Baxter felt it did him a lot of good, though he did not say how.’
The source of McKay’s sketchy account is a letter from Baxter to his Caxton Press editor Lawrence Baigent penned in October 1945. While richer in detail than McKay’s summary, the letter deepens the mystery by revealing that even after the affair was discovered Baxter remained friends with both the woman and her husband:
A month or two ago, before I left Dunedin, I had an affair with a married woman; which did me a lot of good from the psychological point of view. I know you haven't got the shopkeeper attitude to these things. She was young, intelligent, and good-looking, and I was and still am rather fond of her. Her husband became aware of the situation, and took it in good part, on condition of non continuance. He is a very pleasant chap, Polish, rather a cynic, quite friendly to me. From a platonic viewpoint I prefer him to his wife.3
Forty-five years later the woman, Dorothy Freed, learned from McKay’s biography that her relationship with Baxter had mattered more to the young poet than she understood at the time. She contacted McKay with a tale to tell and a letter and two poems from Baxter to substantiate it. The letter, which was sent 5 shortly after the affair had ended, gives some sense of the significance of the relationship for Baxter both personally and for his poetry. ‘As for yourself,’ he wrote, ‘you know my feelings, which are strong, physical with an injection of romantic emotion. As I more or less predicted in my poem, you are an established dream-image.’4
But Dorothy Freed’s story is about more than Baxter beginning to forge his own path as a poet, for Freed herself would become a trailblazing woman composer, renowned for setting to music texts by New Zealand poets. She and Baxter shared similar struggles as young artists striving to be authentic in a conventional and puritanical New Zealand emerging from years of war. Although the relationship only lasted for two months, it helped Baxter at a critical time in his life, and resulted in a friendship with Freed and her husband that endured for some years. The insights provided into Baxter’s writing change the way aspects of his life and work can be understood. Freed’s story matters equally, not just for what she achieved as a composer, but for her early and ongoing struggles to breach the additional barriers to women’s achievement that cast even those with ‘progressive husbands’ as wives and mothers first, and artists second, if at all.