Janet, 100

On Saturday I travelled to Ōamaru, Janet Frame’s ‘Kingdom by the Sea’, to take part in readings and a panel discussion with novelist Pip Adam, poet Kate Camp, novelist and memoirist Penelope Todd, and graphic novelist Rachel Fenton. We gathered with an audience to celebrate the centenary of Janet Frame, born 100 years ago today.
Our celebrations of Frame’s exceptional creative gifts felt as if they began as soon as we arrived at 56 Eden Street, her childhood home from 1931 to 1943. That house, as the Eden Street Trust tourist brochure says, has been less restored than “re-framed”, in a “combination of known facts and recollections”. Some memories are held, suspended on the surface: her poems and words are pinned to the walls, and her voice, reading an extract from her autobiography, can be summonsed on a recording in the sitting room.
We stood in the strikingly small rooms of the  Frame family home, eating birthday scones with cream and jam (provided by the trustees for this public open day). I tried to take in the immense gap between the ordinary, inanimate, domestic furniture, the echoey, empty chambers — and the magic instruments of language, alongside the electric current of family that Frame’s reading testified to.
Frame’s thin, almost papery voice on the recording recalled her mother Lottie Frame standing in front of the Singer sewing machine and the sitting room window, “placing her feelings, like trophies, to be revealed and illuminated”. The passage holds a subtle yet taut, silver thread of clarity and honesty about underlying tensions as we grow and age and try to separate our identities, yet accommodate the family influence, too.
Onstage that night at Waitaki Girls’ High School – Frame’s alma mater, where her name is still on the prefect’s honour board — Kate Camp was an informed, generous, relaxed and energetic MC. Her dazzling pantsuit (was it covered in lightening zig-zags?) predicted exactly her style: she was ready to dart in and rescue any one of us from fumble and panic.
First up we were treated to remarkably poised, full-voiced readings from three senior pupils of Waitaki Girls. Next, Pip Adam read a chilling, prescient extract from Intensive Care, where in a futuristic, post-nuclear holocaust New Zealand, the Human Delineation Act divides people into humans and animals, and the weakest citizens are eliminated in a fascistic dystopia of cold-blooded economising.
Although the intellectual concerns of that novel clearly grew both out of World War Two and Frame’s own experience in institutions, the links to the current Government’s lack of consultation with the disabled community, over issues like respite care and equipment funding, seem all too clear.
Pip talks about how frightening it is to re-read Intensive Care in the current climate, and she speaks briefly about Frame as a science fiction writer, whose postmodern and often surreal work unleashed all kinds of possibilities in the novel form for Pip’s own structurally experimental novels. Pip also mentioned how crucial Frame’s biographical example of a working class woman who pulled through mental health struggles and managed to sustain a writing practice was for her, when she too faced similar health issues and first began writing.
Rachel Fenton read from Frame’s early essay, “Beginnings”, and expressed how the motifs Frame uses “make us think we’re thinking Frame’s thoughts”. Rachel also spoke of how, after having lived in poverty for her first 30 years, she, like Pip, found in Frame a vital precedent of a working-class woman who insisted on placing her artistic career first. She also sees in Frame the triumph of someone who deservedly carries the status of a genius; a word that historically—for reasons of prejudice—was rarely granted either to women, or indeed to anyone with working-class roots.
Kate Camp expanded on this: “I’ve always thought that  Frame’s knight in shining armour was her own genius, given her creative talents in a sense were what rescued her from the operating table.”
At her line, there’s the first audible ripple in the audience. It’s a collective recognition of the fact that in the early 1950s, Frame, who had been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic, was scheduled for a prefrontal leucotomy. The reprieve came at the proverbial eleventh hour: when the superintendent of Seacliff Hospital, where she was institutionalised, read a newspaper article announcing that her book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, had won the Hubert Church Memorial Prize for Prose in 1952. I’ve known that fact for decades: but today, even writing that paragraph chills me again. When we add Frame’s last minute reprieve to the two family tragedies of her sisters dying, in separate incidents, when still very young, it seems to make a dark kind of sense that her fictional worlds often bear the twin faces of sudden, devastating disappearances, and equally inexplicable interventions into, or contortions of accepted, surface normality.
Frame herself as a kind of rescuing genius was a figure that glimmered behind several of the speeches at her ‘birthday party’. Penelope Todd read a gorgeous extract from To the Is-Land, and went on to confide that during a stage when she was struggling with what felt like a conventional, linear, conservative life — wanting to write and not having full courage to take the leap — she dreamed one night of Janet Frame, who appeared crouched down near the family hen house, comfortably knitting and smiling. The apparition emanated an atmosphere of generosity and invitation and became a quiet, subterranean influence, offering Penelope the confidence to take the risk with her own craft, and, as she said, accept that invitation into a community of writers.
Kate Camp’s quick response to this — “I’m a little jealous! I would love to have a Janet Frame dream!” —  conveyed both a genuine longing and a dry, humorous note: her original intentions for our panel were that we’d discuss the way dreams and myths carried a potent double, if not triple-edged, status for Frame.
I first encountered Frame’s writing, in 1986, when I was 17. That year, for Christmas, my father gave me her ninth novel, Daughter Buffalo. This book opens with the words, “I am Talbot Edelman, medical graduate, a student of death.”
Years later, when I fully twigged that the book wasn’t a new release when Dad gave it to me — it was originally published in 1973 — the gift seemed all the stranger and more pointed. Perhaps my father, a kidney physician, stood in the bookstore, read those opening words, saw himself, and thought, this is what my daughter needs to know.
I can’t really remember my initial reaction to the novel, but find it hard to believe that teenage me would have understood much of it at all. The narrative is full of enigmatic, lyrical prose poetry; one of the characters performs bizarre medical experiments on his own beloved pet dog, Sally; both main characters form an emotional attachment to a six-month-old female buffalo calf, and they both either study death, or at least, try to integrate it into their world views.
While I’m sure most of Daughter Buffalo escaped me back then, what I did understand was the sober insistence with which Dad impressed upon me that Frame was a writer I simply had to know about, if I valued education in any shape or form. About eight years after this, I went on to study Frame’s work as part of my PhD thesis at University College, London.  And in what you might call a savage, Frameian irony, if you think about the dramatic endings, sudden ruptures to the fabric of reality, and cataclysmic losses in some of her novels, my father died just as I embarked on that degree.
Frame’s work in particular became both solace, and enormously confronting artistic and psychological territory to venture through, during the early stages of mourning. Her focus on the ways we avoid acknowledging death as a central fact of our existence was heavy stuff to process, while 18,000 kilometres from home, half-looking for my father’s ghost, in places he’d only fleetingly visited: for grief briefly revived some of the magical thinking of childhood. As Frame says in Daughter Buffalo: “I too spent my time on false consolations.” 
As a result, I think one thing I tended not to give its full due when reading Frame back then, was her own subversive, cunning, impish sense of humour. Partly to acknowledge this side of Frame on Saturday night, I decided to read the mischievous, lightly satirical poem: “The Landfall Desk”. (The title refers to the desk that Charles Brasch gave Frame in 1966, when he retired from editing the journal Landfall.) I enjoy the way the poem both celebrates, and cocks a cheeky snook at, literary tradition: I get a real sense of Frame having fun, un-cricking her spine from the deep metaphysical and philosophical questions of her intricate, complex fiction.
Yet I’d say that Frame’s comedic poem didn’t get the most open and ebullient response on the night. That prize would go to the second, big audience-wide reaction – which was to a point Kate made about the representation of Janet’s mother, Lottie Frame, in the biopic An Angel at My Table.
After Kate praised Campion’s film, she pointed out that whereas in the autobiography, Lottie is a deeply keen reader and passionate writer, steeped in poetry, in the film, her depiction leans far more towards steady, stalwart home-maker. There was a genuine chorus of agreement from the audience over this discrepancy: it was almost on the level of a congregational kia ora or amen.
I got the palpable sense, then, that we were there not only with ardent readers but also a community who still knew and intimately remembered the Frame family. They, too, must have known a passage from To the Is-Land that brings me fresh comfort every time I read it. It brims with the loving memory of Lottie Frame’s own poetic vision, and the notion that any stranger might be an angel, or a visitation from the numinous.
I’m always moved by the way the passage records a warm, maternal nurturing, and by the trust and optimism in its perception that anyone we encounter might bring the possibility of transcendence, and that our own inner vision can infuse and transform the world: “When Mother talked of the present […] bring her sense of wondrous contemplation to the ordinary world we knew, we listened, feeling the mystery and the magic. She had only to say of any commonplace object, ‘Look, kiddies, a stone,’ to fill that stone with wonder as if it were a holy object. She was able to imbue every insect, blade, grass, flower, the dangers and grandeurs of weather and the seasons, with a memorable importance along with a kind of uncertainty and humility that led us to ponder and try to discover the heart of everything. Mother, fond of poetry and reading, writing, and reciting it, communicated to us that same feeling about the world of the written and spoken word.”
Yet would it really have been a night in genuine recognition of Frame’s perceptions without the presence of some strange and icy undercurrent of conformism, some note of the bullying and small-minded?
It arrived. After the event, the writers on the panel, some Janet Frame Eden Street Trust trustees and I, all gathered for a drink at the Brydone Hotel on Thames Street. As I started to follow Pip and Penelope inside, at the same time, a scraggle-haired, straggly-bearded, keg-stout man tried to leave. I stood back for him, holding the door open, so he could step onto the street. I thought I was a human performing a kindness for another human, but he visibly bristled and snarled, “Ladies don’t hold the door for blokes!” His boozy anger and offended conformity were like a nudge from Bob Withers of Owls do Cry: the father that Chicks calls “a little hopping man of cruelty, tyranny”. A walking, dog-eared Post-it note from the patriarchy, the punter seemed to stick and flap on the night air, to remind me the power structure is still out there, pushing its misogynist, monolithic, monocultural, monotonous version of reality.
Back in Dunedin, the next day, as I mulled over the night, I realised that maybe that, too, was the kind of thing Frame so often pinpoints about human psychology. For I vaguely remembered something I wrote once for the launch of Janet Frame’s Gorse is Not People. I found it again on my now very inactive blog: what I said there was: “At one point, when reading that collection, I had made a note about how closely Frame must have observed every possible walk of life she had come across — from housewives to spivs to waiters — and then I read the story ‘I Do Not Love the Crickets’. As I wrote then, it is judiciously placed last by the editors of the book – as it helps us to glean some small part of the enormous psychological investment that Frame must have put in to each work of fiction.
“Writing about the difficulty in entering the lives of some potential subjects, the narrator says she can’t love them enough to investigate their ‘human essence: that ambrosial stink’. That oxymoronic phrase itself is wonderfully Frameian – the way it weds transcendent and abject is typical of her style. The narrator of the story touches on the intense act of empathy and union with the subject that the impulse and sustained drive to write demand. There’s a sense of psychic exhaustion in the story, and we witness a kind of sheer force of will as the speaker makes herself enter the world of other living things and people observed – which in turn, I think (and the story is difficult — my reading may be wrong) effects a kind of recovery from exasperation and despair at the soulless materialism around her.
“Yet the story is also knowingly critical of a writerly arrogance, too: the assumption that there is a greater degree of awareness in the artist. It’s a layered, yet frank and critical examination, both of the position of the artist and the social world around her: Frame doesn’t let anyone off, not even herself.”