Rex Fairburn – Poet, Polemicist and Art Critic by K R Bolton

Rex Fairburn
New Zealand Poet, Polemicist and Art Critic

by K R Bolton

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A R D (Rex) Fairburn was a central figure in the Golden Age of New Zealand culture. This was the period between the world wars, when an incipient nativist literary and artistic movement started to emerge that was part of the European cultural stream, but was inspired by the New Zealand landscape and the New Zealand people, and was overcoming colonial mimicking.

Fairburn was born in 1904 in modest though middle class circumstances. He was proud of being a fourth generation New Zealander related to the missionary Colenso.

REJECTION OF RATIONALISM

Although critical of the Church hierarchy and briefly involved with the Rationalist Association, Fairburn was for most of his life a spiritual person, believing that the individual attains to the most profound identity of who he is, by striving towards God. He believed in a basic Christian ethic minus any moralism.

Fairburn soon realised that rationalism by itself answers nothing and that it rejects the dream world that is the source of creativity. He was in agreement here with other poets such as W B Yeats, and identified with his friend Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, New Zealand claimant to the Polish Throne, who called poets a “spiritual aristocracy”. Fairburn at this time thought that socialism would “free artists of economic, worldly shackles.” He was yet to discover the economic and political alternatives that could achieve this whilst retaining the spiritual basis of culture that the dialectical materialism of Marxism, embraced by many of the New Zealand literati, such as his friend R A K Mason, rejected. At this time, Fairburn looked to an idealistic socialism, and in particular the definition written by another from the literati rather than from politics, Oscar Wilde. Wilde had explained his vision of socialism as the common ownership of property and co-operation instead of competition, which he believed would free all from economic servitude and daily drudgery, and allow the creative to pursue their creativity. The “socialism’ of Wilde would enhance rather than eliminate “Individualism,” and it should not be based on the State holding economic power, as it now has political power, otherwise “Industrial Tyrannies” would result, which would be worse than the present system. Wilde saw property ownership as a “burden” and a “bore” that intruded upon one’s pursuit of creativity, while lack of ownership under the present system conversely resulted in destitution, which of course was not conducive to creativity either, writing:

“The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is…. With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” (Oscar Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891.http://wilde.thefreelibrary.com/Soul-of-Man-under-Socialism).

Fairburn would find the answer to the economic question he was looking for in England.

ENGLAND

Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk had left New Zealand in disgust at what he saw as the cultural banality, and persuaded Fairburn to join him London, since New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born here for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilisation”, as Potocki stated it.

Fairburn arrived in London in 1930. Like Potocki he was not impressed with bohemian society and the Bloomsbury intellectuals. Potocki did at least fit in however, with his eccentric character, his waist length hair, medieval attire, cape and sandals. Unlike Potocki, who has been called in Nietzschean terms, “the good European, ” as a literary acquaintance, Chris Martin, was to recently write (Chris Martin, ‘“I’ve Spent My Life Being Me”: The Life and Singular Exploits of Count Potocki de Montalk’, http://freepages.pavilion.net/users/tartarus/potocki.html), Fairburn was in contrast, the quintessential New Zealander. To Potocki’s dismay, Fairburn was more interested in pub crawls than in the architecture of Cathedrals; who would look to New Zealand as his inspiration; the land that gave him roots and identity, and one in which he could in turn help to shape a genuine national identity.

Away from the bohemianism, the intellectualism and pretentiousness of the city, Fairburn came to appreciate the ancestral attachment with England that was still relevant to New Zealanders through a continuing “earth-memory”. Regarding a land and culture in such mystical terms gave Fairburn a deeper spirituality than he could find in religion, while early eschewing rationalism and godlessness.

SOCIAL CREDIT

Fairburn regarded attachment to the soil as a prerequisite for a healthy culture, and stated his intention of becoming “a tiller of the soil” when he returned to New Zealand. However, his concerns at the social and economic issues caused in the era of the Great Depression were to find an answer in England, where in 1931 Fairburn was introduced to A R Orage, who had published New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield and was editing the New English Weekly, which was bringing forth a new generation of talents to English literature, including Ezra Pound and T S Eliot. Orage had been a “guild socialist”, advocating a return to the medieval guilds that had upheld craftsmanship and represented interests according to one’s calling. Orage had discovered Social Credit economics and was promoting this with enthusiasm, and it is likely that Orage introduced Fairburn to Social Credit’s founder Major C H Douglas. (Denys Trussell, Fairburn, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1984, 115).

Fairburn was now reading Oswald Spengler, author of the then influential Decline of The West, which identified the cyclic and organic nature of history, and of the rise and fall of civilisations. Western Civilisation, said Spengler, had reached its cycle of decline during which the city, merchants and money are the focus, replacing the rural community, the knight, aristocrat, peasant and craftsman. Spengler, drawing on parallels with previous civilisations, held that each civilisation in its final or “Winter” cycle undergoes a last burst of vigour under the leadership of a great leader or “Caesar” type who overthrows the power of the plutocrat. In his last book the Hour of Decision, Spengler considered that Mussolini might represent such a Caesar figure, although he never succumbed to Hitlerism in his own country.

However, Fairburn felt that the vitality of the individual could be the answer for a reinvigorated culture, rather than the rise of new Caesars. This belief reflects two major influences on Fairburn, that of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and of the English novelist D H Lawrence, who looked to the heroic individual.

Whilst Fairburn agreed with Marx that capitalism causes dehumanisation, he rejected the Marxist interpretation of history as based on class war and economics; hence his earlier interest in Oscar Wilde’s more anarchistic vision of socialism as a means of liberating the individual – rather than the class – from economic drudgery. Materialistic interpretations of history were at odds with Fairburn’s belief that it is the Infinite that touches man.

Fairburn met the Soviet press attaché in England but concluded that the USSR had turned to the 19th century Western ideal of the machine; what Wilde would surely have considered an “Industrial Tyranny”. Fairburn did not want a Marxist industrial substitute for the capitalist one. Hence Fairburn’s answer amidst a decaying civilisation was the vital individual: not an alienated “individual” thrown up by capitalism, but the individual as part of the family and the soil, possessing an organic rootedness above the artificiality of both Marxism and capitalism. Culture was part of this sense of identity as a manifestation of the spiritual.

Not surprisingly, Fairburn was increasingly distanced from his communist friends such as R A K Mason. He was repelled by communist art based on the masses and on science, which he called “false”. He writes of this: “Communism kills the Self – cuts out religion and art, that is today. But religion and art ARE the only realities.”

Fairburn also repudiated a universal ideal, for man lived in the particular. New Zealand had to discover its own identity rather than copying foreign ideas. Another Communist friend, the New Zealand poet Clifton Firth, wrote that the “New Zealand penis was yet to be erect”. To this Fairburn replied: “True, but as a born New Zealander, why don’t you try to hoist it up, instead of tossing off Russia? Why steal Slav gods? Why not get some mud out of a creek and make your own?” (Fairburn to Clifton Firth, 23 December 1931).

The 18th century mystic, artist and poet William Blake appealed to Fairburn’s spiritual, anti-materialist sentiments, as a means of bringing English culture out of decadence. Fairburn also saw in D H Lawrence “a better rallying point than Lenin.” He was similarly impressed with Yeats. (Denys Trussell, op.cit., 113).

To R A K. Mason, the New Zealand poet and communist, he wrote: “our real life is PURELY spiritual. Man is not a machine.”

In 1932 Fairburn wrote an article for the New English Weekly attacking materialism. He feared that the prosperity that would be generated by Social Credit monetary reform would cause rampant materialism devoid of a spiritual basis. He saw the aim of monetary reform as being not simply one of increasing the amount of material possessions, but as a means of achieving a higher level of culture. It was still essentially what Oscar Wilde had sought through his individualised “socialism”. Fairburn wished for a post-industrial, craft and agricultural society. The policy of Social Credit would achieve greater production and increase leisure hours. This would create the climate in which culture could flourish, as it had in the Medieval era.

On his return to New Zealand Fairburn wholeheartedly campaigned for Social Credit, mainly through his position as assistant secretary of the Auckland Farmers’ Union, which had a social credit policy and as editor of its paper Farming First, a post he held until being drafted into the army in 1943.

TOWARDS A NATIONAL CULTURE

Fairburn now began to paint in earnest and made some money as a fabric designer. Some of his fabric prints were taken from Maori cave motifs in the South Island. He spurned abstract art and particularly Picasso, as falsifying life. Abstraction, like rationalism, was a form of intellectualism that took life apart. Fairburn believed in the total individual. In art this meant synthesis, of building up images, not breaking them down. One could consider this to be a cultural path to Jung’s “Individuation”. Fairburn wrote of this: “If art does anything it synthesises, not analyses, or it is dead art. Creative imagination is the thing, all faculties of man working together towards a synthesis of personal experience resulting in fresh creation.” (Fairburn to Mason, 22 December 1931).

Whilst Fairburn believed in innovation in the arts and had earlier adhered to the “Vorticist” movement founded in England by Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis et al. he also believed that art should maintain its traditional foundations. Art is a product of an organic community, not simply the egotistical product of the artist. He saw many artists however as not only separate from the community but as destructive, calling Picasso for instance, “a bearer of still-born children,” and referred to the “falseness of abstract art and its nihilism.” (Fairburn to Charles Brasch, 4 December 1947).

In a 1946 radio talk, “The Arts Are Acquired Tastes”, Fairburn elaborated:

“…Art is not the private property of artists. It belongs to the living tradition of society as a whole. And it can’t exist without its public. Conversely, I think it can be said that no society can live for long in a state of civilisation without a fairly widespread appreciation of the arts, that is to say, without well organised aesthetic sensibility.”

Hence there was a reciprocal interaction between the artist and the public. However, in the contemporary artistic milieu: “The artist has brought contempt upon himself by letting himself be used for ends that he knows to be destructive. By doing so he has brought art and his own type close to extinction.”(Fairburn, “Notes in the Margin,” Action, New Zealand, 1947). Further: “Form in art, geometrically, is fundamental. It is the primary responsibility of art schools to teach ‘traditional techniques’ then allow those who have genuine talent to flow from there.”

Fairburn lectured in art history at the Elam School, Auckland University, the most influential of New Zealand’s art schools which produced Colin McCahon and other icons of New Zealand art. Of McCahon, Fairburn was scathing, and considered his paintings devoid of form, “contrived” and “pretentious humbug”. “In design, in colour, in quality of line, in every normal attribute of good painting, they are completely lacking”. He also considered modern music sensationalist, without content, form or order. (Fairburn, “Art in Canterbury”, Landfall, Christchurch, New Zealand, March 1948, 49-50).

Fairburn advocated instead of this formlessness and universalism in the arts a New Zealand national culture arising from the New Zealand landscape. He believed that one’s connection with one’s place of birth is of a permanent quality, not just as a question of which place in the world one found the most pleasant to live.

Fairburn condemned the notion that a culture can be chosen and attached to “like a leech” without regard to one’s origins. This cosmopolitan influence Fairburn saw, was expressed as a debasing “international” or “world standard”. He wrote: “Is poetry shortly to he graded like export mutton?” The “racket” of modern art was related to economic motives, “the infection of the market place … the sooty hand of commerce”. The “modern art racket” has the aim of, “rapid turnover, a rate of change that induces a sort of vertigo, and the exploitation of novelty as a fetish – the encouragement of the exotic and the unusual.” Fairburn’s biographer Denys Trussell comments: “Rex feared that internationalism in cultural matters would reduce all depiction of human experience to a characterless gruel, relating to no real time or place because it attempted to relate to all times and places.”

Writing to the NZ Listener in June 1955 Fairburn decried the development of a “one world” cosmopolitan state, which would also mean a standardised world culture that would be reduced to an international commodity”:

“The aspiration towards ‘one world’ may have something to be said for it in a political sense (even here, with massive qualifications), but in the wider field of human affairs it is likely to prove ruinous. In every country today we see either a drive (as in Russia and the USA) or a drift (as in the British Commonwealth) towards the establishment of mass culture, and the imposition of herd standards. This applies not only in industry, but also in the literature and the arts generally. In the ant-hill community towards which we are moving, art and literature will be sponsored by the State, and produced by a highly specialised race of neuters. We have already gone some distance along this road. Literature tends more and more to be regarded as an internationally standardised commodity, like soap or benzine – something that has no particular social or geographical context. In the fully established international suburbia of the future it will be delivered by the grocer – or, more splendidly, be handled by a world-wide chain store Literary Trust…”

Fairburn opposed State patronage of the arts, believing that this cut the artist off from the cycle of life, of family and work, making art instead, contrived and forced. He also opposed the prostitution of the nation and culture to tourism, long the great panacea for New Zealand’s economy. In a letter to the NZ Herald written in February 1955 he states:

“May I suggest that there is no surer way in the long run to destroy Maori culture than to take the more colourful aspects of it and turn them into a ‘tourist attraction’. If the elements of Maori culture are genuine and have any place outside of a museum, they will be kept alive by the Maori people themselves for their own cultural (not commercial) needs. The use of Maori songs and dances to tickle the pockets of passing strangers, and the encouragement of this sort of cheapjackery by the pakeha are degrading to both races … And the official encouragement of Maori songs, dances and crafts as side-shows to amuse tourists is both vulgar and harmful”.

DOMINION OF USURY

In 1935 wrote his epic poem about New Zealand. The result was Dominion. It is an attack upon greed and usury, and is reminiscent of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos: With Usura. Fairburn was critical of the Government’s continuation of orthodox economics, apart from the iconic State Housing project, which was funded, as per Labour election promises on economic policy, by the use of state credit at 1% interest, issued by a nationalised Reserve Bank. Hence, under the orthodox economic system even the humblest worker saw the chase after money as the aim of life: “small greed, the travelling weed.” Dominion begins by describing the usurer as the lord of all:

“The house or the governors, guarded

by eunuchs,

and over the arch of the gate

these words engraved:

He who impugns the usurers

Imperils the State.”

Those who serve the governors are picked from the enslaved, well paid for their services to “keep the records of decay”, with “cold hands… computing our ruin on scented cuffs”. For the rest of the people there is the “treadmill… of the grindstone god”. The unemployed and those on relief work as, Fairburn had been when he returned to New Zealand, were “witnesses to the constriction of life” which was necessary to maintain the banking system. Nor did the countryside escape the ravages of the system. The farms are “mortgaged in bitterness…” to the banks. The city is,

“a paper city built on the rock of debt,

held fast against all winds by the paperweight of debt.

The living saddled with debt.

A load of debt for the foetus…

And all over the hand of the usurer,

Bland angel of darkness,

Mild and triumphant and much looked up to.”

Colonisation had bought here the ills of the Mother Country, England, and debt was the foundation of the whole system:

“They divided the land,

Some for their need,

And some for sinless, customary greed…”

Fairburn’s answer is a return to the land.”

“Fair earth, we have broken our idols:

and after the days of fire we shall come to you for the stones of a new temple.”

The destruction of the usurers’ economic system would result in the land freed of debt that would yield the foundation for “a new temple” other than that of the usurer.

ORGANIC FARMING

In 1940 Fairburn extended his economic and social advocacy to include organic fanning, and he became editor of Compost, the magazine of the New Zealand Humic Compost Club. He considered that the abuse of the land led to the destruction of civilisation. The type of civilisation that arises depends on its type of farming, he said. “Food remains the basis of civilisation, but industrial farming is spiritually barren.” The type of community Fairburn sought is based on farming, not industry which gives rise to fractured, contending economic classes. Industry reduces life to a matter of economics. In a lecture to the Auckland Fabian Society in 1944 Fairburn stated:

“It is natural for men to be in close contact with the earth; and it is natural for them to satisfy their creative instincts by using their hands and brains. Husbandry, ‘the mother of all crafts’, satisfies these two needs, and for that reason should be the basic activity in our social life – the one that gives colour and character to all the rest.”

In the same lecture he spells out his ideal society:

“The decentralisation of the towns, the establishment of rural communities with a balanced economic life, the co-operative organisation of marketing, of transport and of necessary drudgery, the controlled use of manufacturing processes…”

In 1946 Fairburn elaborated again on his ideal of decentralisation, regarding the corporation as soulless and the State as the biggest of corporations:

“The best status for men is that of independence. The small farmer, the small tradesman, the individual craftsman working on his own – these have been the mainstay of every stable civilisation in history. The tendency for large numbers of men to forsake, or to have taken from them, their independent status, and to become hangers-on of the state, has invariably been the prelude to decay.”

Fairburn, with others, especially the poets, such as Dennis Glover, Mason, Firth, Curnow, Potocki, represented the great blossoming of an embryonic New Zealand culture that was starting to come into its own from out of the cultural hegemony of British colonialism. World War II cut short what Fairburn and others had hoped to achieve; the creation of a nativist New Zealand culture. Maori culture became, as Fairburn wrote, a tourist curiosity, and the arts became as subject to international “market forces” as any commodity. Fairburn exposed, like none other of the New Zealand cultural milieu from out of that Gold Age, the forces that were bending and shaping the arts, and his polemics were a reflection of what he saw as his calling to help create a “New Zealand civilisation.” Fairburn died of cancer in 1957. He continues to be recognised as a founder of a New Zealand national literature; albeit one that in this writer’s opinion was an abortive process that waits fallow for refertilisation.

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© K R Bolton 2010

K R Bolton is a Contributing Writer to Foreign Policy Journal, and a member of the Board of Governors of a primary Indian educational and humanitarian NGO. He has been published by Primordial Traditions; The Initiate; World Affairs (India); India Quarterly; Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies; International Journal of Russian Studies, Intertradionale (Ukraine), etc.; and featured by websites such as Novosti; Radio Free Asia; phayul.com (Tibetan exiles); CKR, Sociology Dept., Moscow State University; Treehuggers (Discovery Channel), etc. His essays, specialising in cultural and social critique, geopolitics, news analysis and metaphysics, have been translated into French, Italian, Russian, Vietnamese, and Latvian.