An Angel @ My Blog

Frame Family Graves

2012-01-29T20:05:00.001+13:00

Janet Frame requested that her ashes be buried in the Frame family grave on the South Hill in Oamaru with her parents George and Lottie and her two sisters Myrtle and Isabel.

The grave had remained unmarked for many years until Janet and her sister June Gordon were horrified - and embarrassed - to be told of its neglected state. They had both moved away from the small town of Oamaru as teenagers, but together they returned to their childhood home and paid for the grave to be concreted and a memorial stone to be erected for their parents and sisters. At that time Janet and June decided they want to be buried along with their parents and sisters. Janet agreed that June's husband Wilson Gordon should also have his ashes interred in the grave along with his wife's family, and so they have been (June and Wilson's ashes were mixed together before burial, in a post-death sign of their closeness in life).

So it's an overwhelming place to visit for any of their loved ones, with seven close family members in their 'eternal rest'.

Sometimes the grave looks to me like a Queen size bed with a comfortable pebble duvet, and I like to think of everyone sleeping peacefully and not jostling too much, as in the famous scene from the Jane Campion movie, where the sisters sleeping all together in a double bed all call out "Turn!" at the same time.

Janet was certainly the Queen of Death; she knew parting and mourning inside and out. Very often her own words comfort me in grieving, especially her long magnificent poem from The Pocket Mirror "Thoughts on Bereavement", and many other poems and passages besides that one.

In the photograph of the grave above, if you look in the right hand upper portion of the snapshot, you will see that a nearby grave has a rather grand tall obelisk. That is also a Frame family grave, that I have written about before. It is the resting place of Janet Frame's Scottish-born grandparents, Alexander and Mary Frame, and also their daughter Janet Allan Frame who died as an infant.

Janet Frame's full name at birth (although she changed it later to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha) was Janet Paterson Frame. She was named after the aunt Janet Allan Frame who died as a baby and who is buried beneath the obelisk, and Janet's middle name Paterson was taken from the maiden name of her grandmother Mary Frame, also buried there. Mary Paterson was born into extreme poverty on the 7th of September 1858 in Paisley, Scotland. I don't know any other details about her origins other than that she was set to work in a cotton mill at the age of 8, and that in 1874 at the age of 18 she sailed to New Zealand alone on the Mairi Bhan, destined to work as a domestic servant.

Mary Paterson married Alexander Frame in Oamaru in 1877, when she was 21 years old. I have written about her before here. Janet Frame wrote about her paternal grandmother in the first volume of her autobiography To the Is-Land, and Michael King also provides details of Janet Frame's ancestors in his biography Wrestling with the Angel.

Below is a photograph of the base of the obelisk that stands above the earlier Frame grave:

One of Janet Frame's three nieces is buried under this crumbling obelisk as it is eaten away by time. Little Zarene Rose Frame died as a baby, and was buried along with her great-grandparents Alexander and Mary, and with her great aunt Janet Allan (also an infant) who died at the age of 13 months.

Zarene Rose's parents were Janet Frame's brother George Frame (also known as Geordie) and his wife Zelda (nee Chalmers). Biographer Michael King reports Janet Frame's niece's death in 1966 as follows:

"Frame picked up hercopy of the Otago Daily Times toread that her brother’s daughter, Zarene Rose Frame, to whom she had written apoem the previous year, had died in her sleep aged ten months. The baby was infoster care, having been removed from Geordie and Zelda Frame’s charge on theground that they were unﬁt to look after her." (Wrestling with the Angel, by Michael King.)

George and Zelda had two more children (a girl named 'Janet' after her aunt, and a boy named 'Geordie' after his father, in line with family tradition); and those children have also had children of their own. Geordie senior (referred to as 'Bruddie' by Frame in her autobiography) died in 1989 and was buried at his request in the Mormon Church section of the Oamaru Cemetery. I don't know whether his family has erected a memorial stone for him, but Zarene Rose's grave remains unmarked.

In Memoriam

2012-01-29T00:20:00.000+13:00

In Memory Of

Nene Janet Paterson Clutha

(née Janet Paterson Frame)

28 August 1924 ~ 29 January 2004

Dearly Loved

Remembered Always

Three new Swedish translations

2012-01-28T23:57:00.003+13:00

Vid ugglors skri

(Owls Do Cry)

Doftande trädgårdar för de blinda
(Scented Gardens for the Blind)

I alfabetets utkant

(The Edge of the Alphabet)

These three Janet Frame novels will be published for the first time in Swedish translation

by Modernista Books

on the 30 of May 2012

A visit to the Janet Frame House

2012-01-28T17:13:00.000+13:00

Yellow dahlias in the antipodean dining room

The hearth in the living room: pinecones from the plannies strewn with rose petals from the summer garden

A window into the past: the wallpaper in the back bedroom

A front room 're-framed'

56 Eden Street Oamaru - Janet Frame's childhood home.

Open to the public in the summer months.

For more information contact the FRIENDS OF THE JANET FRAME HOUSE.

hung with light

2012-01-28T16:40:00.006+13:00

FRUIT

The pear tree in the back yard of Janet Frame's childhood home at 56 Eden Street, Oamaru.

"There’s still just a pear tree there, in a wilderness, hung with pears as a chandelier is hung with light" (Intensive Care)

GRAFT

The pear tree is the same one (with the two varieties grafted together) that was there when Janet Frame was a child.

"There were fruit trees in the back garden – a winter pear and a honey pear growing on one tree, a plum tree belonging to the neighbours but leaning into our place, an Irish Peach apple tree, a cooking apple tree, an apricot tree, and gooseberries and blackcurrants." (To the Is-Land)

Never to start again

2012-01-28T16:19:00.002+13:00

The chiming clock on the mantelpiece of the Janet Frame House at 56 Eden Street Oamaru was damaged during one of the awful series of aftershocks from the 2010 Canterbury earthquake. As can be seen on the face of the clock, it stopped as a result of a large jolt at just after ten to three on the afternoon of the 22nd February 2011. Curator of the house, Ralph Sherwood, says that the clock cannot be persuaded to start again.

The house is open to the public every day from 2 pm to 4 pm during the summer months.

I was at the house yesterday, paying my respects ahead of the eighth anniversary of Janet's death, and there was a constant stream of visitors enjoying the Oamaru sunshine. The comments in the visitors book were delightful to read as Frame fans are always very moved to at last spend time in the house where the great writer grew up and about which she has written so much. I noticed that a German tourist stated that she had come to New Zealand chiefly to see this place.

The Frames of Hampden

2012-01-28T15:26:00.000+13:00

Reasonably often, I hear of or meet somebody I had never heard of before who claims to be "related to Janet Frame".

Of course I'm very interested in this possible new family member, because if they are related to Janet Frame - who was my mother's sister - then they are also related to me.

So I enquire as to the details of the blood connection between them and Janet Frame, and more often than not it turns out that this person believes that the link between them and Janet Frame consists of their own family's past associations with "The Frames of Hampden' (who they understand to be somehow related to Janet Frame's Frames).

Hampden is a small locality in Coastal Otago on the road between Oamaru and Dunedin.

Just out of Hampden there is a 'Frame Road' (No Exit).

I haven't yet met someone who claims to be related to Janet Frame through the Frames of Hampden, who is actually themselves a blood relation of the Frames of Hampden.

As the story goes, apparently someone in their distant family tree, and they can never name them, had a brief run in with one of the Frames of Hampden, and they can never name that person either. Apparently the relationship ended disastrously and from what I can gather, there were no children involved. This is in the past, a few generations back.

They don't seem to know any more than that.

The story has all of the characteristics of an urban myth - the person is quite sure it is true because they were told it by somebody or other, but on closer enquiry the facts vanish like steam, and they can't even refer me to anyone who can verify it. They're all dead now.

More than once the person has even proudly claimed themselves to be "a little mad" (only a little) and that was because "that's only to be expected because I'm related to Janet Frame".

Well, there have been some crazy people in the wider Frame family, that is no secret, but Janet Paterson Frame was not one of them, so anyone who makes a statement like that one proves that they don't know anything at all about who Janet was as a person. All they are repeating is small town scuttlebutt.

The Frames of Hampden: No Relation

Anyway, I have no idea who the Frames of Hampden are, but they are no relation of Janet Frame's Frames.

Janet Frame's grandfather Frame came to New Zealand on his own. His siblings went to North America. He had a quiver full of sons and daughters, including Janet's father George Samuel Frame, but they are all accounted for, and there just isn't the time for one of them to have morphed into the lost tribe of Hampden.

There are other Frames in the Otago district who are also unrelated (in recent centuries in any case). The shoe shop Frames of Dunedin, for instance, are also not related to Janet Frame's Frames. If they were, I might be seeking a discount next time I buy my winter boots. Because I'm family they'd have to give me one surely?

Of course the name Frame is something for the holder to be proud of for its own historical origins and I suppose everyone who has it can trace themselves back to common ancestors long ago.

When Janet Frame was alive, as she got more and more famous, people did 'come out of the woodwork' claiming to be related to her. And often they were related, because they arrived with the connections already mapped out on a family tree.

Janet used to have a test for whether a distant family member who contacted her just wanted to be related to someone famous, or whether they really wanted to be part of the family. She referred them to her one remaining sister, my mother June, and if they wanted to be related to plain June as much as they wanted to be related to her illustrious sister Janet Frame, then they had passed the first hurdle.

Actually over the years Janet and the rest of her close family welcomed some wonderful new friends and family members who were only able to track down our branch of the family because there was that one who was high profile and easily traced, so please don't think that I am casting aspersions on the joy of reuniting with long-lost family members. We are a large family anyway but with an attitude that there is always room for more.

As always when meeting a stranger, even one with tenuous historical connections, there will be a relationship only if one "hits it off" in some way. Having a shared ancestor doesn't guarantee that you will be compatible. I have to say, brutally, that anyone who arrived at the door spouting culturally acquired poisonous myths about Janet Frame, either quickly realised they had been misinformed or got short shrift.

Janet once said to me:

"If somebody comes to you claiming to be related to me, ask them if they visited me when I was in hospital. If they didn't, then I'm not interested."

To be utterly Frank

2012-01-26T12:41:00.001+13:00

The Selected Letters of Frank Sargeson edited by Sarah Shieff (February 2012)

I'm looking forward to reading this volume to be published soon by Random House NZ.
As Frame's literary executor I have had quite a bit to do with this project as of course there was a very large correspondence between Janet Frame and her loving but difficult friend Frank Sargeson. And the book will undoubtedly be of some interest to Janet Frame scholars given that it will shed so much light on the attitudes towards Frame from the male-dominated NZ literary coterie that she encountered early in her career.

Because of the significance of Sarah Shieff's undertaking to the history of Zealand literature at a formative moment, given the various kinds of influence that Frank Sargeson has had over generations of writers and readers, the Janet Frame estate took the decision to let Sarah read all of Frank's many letters to Janet and to publish the ones she felt suited her project best. The Sargeson letters to Frame (except for those cases when Frank kept his carbon copies) are still held under the strong restrictions that Janet Frame placed over her personal and literary papers, so this book will provide a unique opportunity to read what Frank, the big fish in the small pond, had to say over the years as he addressed his increasingly world-famous friend (and to compare that to what he said about her behind her back!)

I'm expecting that there will be some unpleasant moments for Frame fans in reading these letters as Frank, despite being lovable and generous to a fault, was well known for his delight in spreading malicious gossip. He was perhaps not so well known for his mendaciousness, so my hope is that this volume does put his bewildering contradictions into a humanist perspective that does at last begin to unravel the ways in which Frank Sargeson at times undermined Janet Frame. He was of course also a benign and supportive influence on her, not at the beginning of her career (as the myth has it) because she was well launched as a significant writer before he even met her (that is why he tracked her down!), but at an important crossroads for her as she was making her attempt to flee New Zealand's narrowmindeness, something Frank understood all too well, and that he helped her achieve.

Later on, Frame was the mentor and the support for instance as she trudged around London attempting to interest editors in his manuscripts.

Frank's love was also tainted by envy, and I expect that these letters to all his correspondents may well show the insidious process by which Frank caused Janet's reputation much harm by his hysterical and highly coloured representations (and misrepresentations) of her.

In my cynical moments, I brace myself for a reception of this book in which the usual suspects in NZ literary commentary will take everything at face value that Frank (and others of his group) said (and say) about the Janet Frame who shot through their skies like a meteor for a brief time in the mid fifties.

At least one seemingly gullible reviewer of Speaking Frankly, the collected Waikato University 'Frank Sargeson Memorial Lectures (also edited by Sarah Shieff) apparently swallowed the 'Gospel According to Saint Frank' (as it concerns Janet Frame at least) whole. Frank Sargeson is referred to uncritically in the review as "patient friend to the seemingly impossible Janet Frame". This patronising information was transmitted in those lectures, as it has been over the years, by the Sargeson acolytes, as a series of increasingly embroidered and demeaning anecdotes about the "Janet" they remember, that bear little resemblance to the facts, which of course will in the fullness of time reveal Frame to be just as patient a friend to an equally if not more, impossible Frank.

But I do hope that the volume will provide overwhelming evidence that Frank had this quite dark side to his character, and that he is not at all a reliable witness when it comes to Janet Frame's state of mind or demeanour.

"We'll see", as Janet used to say philosophically.

In any case, the selected Sargeson letters will fruitfully be read as companion piece to Janet Frame In Her Own Words by any reader who is genuinely interested in a balanced perspective on New Zealand social and literary history.

Then they can compare for themselves the person we meet in Janet Frame in her own words with the second-hand Janet Frame that emerges from Shieff’s Selected Sargeson. And they can observe over Sargeson's long career, that he did mount propaganda campaigns against various people, and that Janet Frame was just one of many who were under fire for various reasons, and that perhaps many of the popular beliefs about Frame and her work that can be traced back to that brief Sargeson hut era of her life, may not be true.

As the letters themselves will undoubtedly show, Sargeson himself actually moved on with regard to his early misconceptions about who Frame was, but as (I predict) some of the reviews will show, a few of his followers have not.

An interesting thesis

2012-01-23T23:21:00.002+13:00

There's a brand new PhD thesis out in the ether, and it's a very interesting one:
The Politics of Security and the Art of Judgment in the Writings of Herman Melville and Janet Frame by Philip Loosemore of the University of Toronto.

The abstract, and a link to the thesis, can be found here: https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/31841

Here is the first paragraph of the introduction, which gives a good flavour of the author's approach:

"The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the idea of political judgment as it relates to the imperative of political security in the literary art of two major writers, Herman Melville and Janet Frame, who, though rarely if ever paired together in critical studies, shed a good deal of light on one another not only in terms of political insight, but also in terms of narrative and stylistic technique. In each of the chapters that follow, I explore, from one angle or another, how Melville and Frame question the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of the power of judgment as it relates to issues of violence and political security."

How refreshing it is to see Frame's heightened political awareness under consideration. In a later chapter, Loosemore observes:

"Of course, the idea that Frame's work marks a "poetic resistance" to conformity, to techno-bureaucratic domination, and so on, is well established, if it is not in fact the underlying assumption of most criticism on Frame. What has not been dwelt on, to my knowledge, is how Frame responded to the specific discourse of nuclear power and political security in the Pacific; what her insights into this discourse offer in terms of a concept of potentiality that pushes against the "exploitative, ordering attitude" that underpins technological domination; finally, what it is, specifically and in formalist terms, about her imaginative search that yields this concept of potentiality."

The greatest love story ever told

2012-01-22T11:09:00.000+13:00

A new radio documentary has been broadcast on Radio New Zealand this week to mark the tenth anniversary of the death of Jonathan Dennis, the first director of The New Zealand Film Archive.

24 Frames: The Greatest Love Story Ever Told (also available to listen to online) includes extracts from Janet Frame's short story 'The Pictures' read by Prue Langbein.

The Janet Frame Literary Trust was of course happy to cooperate with the producer Gareth Watkins by giving permission for the use of the Frame copyright for the purposes of this timely tribute to a much loved fellow New Zealander.

The recording of the Janet Frame story was originally made for Jonathan Dennis’s Centenary of Cinema programme in the late 1990s.

'The Pictures' was first published in The Lagoon and other Stories. It's a glorious and poignant observation of a mother and her young daughter being swept away from their daily life by the magic and romance of a trip to the movies. The story is also reproduced in several other 'best of' selections of Janet Frame's stories: You are Now Entering the Human Heart, Prizes, and The Daylight and the Dust.

"They stood outside the theatre, the woman in the blackcoat and the little girl in the red pixie-cap and they looked at theadvertisements.
    It was a wonderful picture. It was the greatest love storyever told. It was Life and Love and Laughter, and Tenderness and Tears."

“Seven thousand feet, the woman said to herself. She likedto remember the length of the picture, it was something to be sure of.
   She knew she could see the greatest love story in the worldtill after four o’clock. It was nice to come to the pictures like that and knowhow long the story would last.
    And to know that in the end he would take her out in themoonlight and a band would play and he would kiss her and everything would beall right again."

Make sure you read the small print

2012-01-21T18:42:00.000+13:00

Janet Frame In Her Own Words

Reviewed by John McCrystal, from Wellington

NZ Herald Saturday 10 December 2011

Excerpts:

"This book is a delight, because Frame herself is a delight"

"Janet Frame has been largely depicted as a recluse, an idea which this latest book dismantles"

"The volume is quite beautiful - small, printed on gorgeous stock in hard covers with a dust jacket featuring photographs depicting the young Frame in various moods, from stern and contemplative to whimsical and even clownish. But you have to question the decision to render the text in so piddly a font size."

"Highlights of the material presented here include her book reviews, a 1968 report on her tenure of the Burns Fellowship from Landfall, a 1987 draft report on her tenure as the inaugural Frank Sargeson Fellow, the spectacle of the diffident Frame dealing with the intrusions of interviewers, her valedictory notes to Sargeson and Brasch, and her reminiscences on the thrill of discovery when first she handled a copy of the stories by the Brothers Grimm."

Note: Most NZ Herald book reviews are accessible in an online archive but for some unknown reason this particular review has not been made available to the public.

Makers of Modern New Zealand

2012-01-19T17:32:00.000+13:00

I was in New Zealand's capital city recently and managed to see the exhibition Makers of Modern New Zealand 1930 - 1990 that is currently showing in a most picturesque setting at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery on Wellington's waterfront. I have discussed this exhibition in an earlier post, and even though all the images and also the captions are available online, nothing beats the atmosphere of walking around a gallery and enjoying the works in person. It adds enjoyment to note the intriguing juxtapositions of the images of some of these prominent Kiwis: in the snapshot above you can see that Janet Frame's portrait hangs next to that of the influential money-man, Ron Brierly. Janet would have been amused.

Portrait of Janet Frame by Robin Morrison

Towards Another Summer in Turkey

2012-01-18T15:12:00.000+13:00

The first of several new Janet Frame publications for 2012 is Bir Başka Yaza Doğru - the Turkish translation of Towards Another Summer. (Yapi Kredi, January 2012)

Yapi Kredi have already released Owls Do Cry in Turkish translation: Baykuşlar Öterken (2010):

"new sides to a beloved friend"

2012-01-17T11:54:00.001+13:00

There was an excellent little notice for Janet Frame in Her Own Words in last weekend's Herald on Sunday (in the 'Living' section, 'Sunday Books' page 16).

Ngaire Atmore of the book blog BookieMonster said that "reading the non-fiction, interviews, letters and speeches is like discovering new sides to a beloved friend. A very welcome addition to the Frame oeuvre."

Herald on Sunday (15 January 2011)

Postscript: Full text of the small review may be found here.

Jenny McLeod's Janet Frame Song Cycles

2012-01-10T22:47:00.000+13:00

Composer Jenny McLeod has released a CD of all three of the Janet Frame song cycles she has composed in recent years. In all Jenny McLeod has set 28 of Janet Frame's poems to music.

The three song cycles are:

FROM GARDEN TO GRAVE

PEAKS OF CLOUD

THE POET

The CD has been published by the Waiteata Music Press as part of the Waiteata Collection of New Zealand Music:

Volume XII. Jenny McLeod: Vocal and Choral Works.

Bloomsday or Doomsday

2012-01-08T20:58:00.000+13:00

The carrion vultures are croaking and crawing over the corpse of the James Joyce literary estate which emerged from its copyright protection on the 1st of January 2012.

Oh Happy New Year!

"We all own Joyce now" shrieks the twitter account of a sausage factory for ready-made writers. Oh dear, duck your heads for some tedious mash-ups of Joyce with the staple fare of middle class banalities about what to wear to the jazz club. Workshopped to within an ironic inch of any vitality.

The Wikipedia version of Phenergan's Wake will be a triumph of democracy.

The unbridled exultation on the part of those whose commodifications will be unfettered at last, has led to a bit of a vituperative slagging-off of literary estates in general. How dare they be so obstructive! There has been a little more than muttering, and there's apparently a lot of resentment to express about the supposed outrages done to truth and justice. As can be seen, for instance, in this article from todays' Independent: An End to Bad-Heir Days (by Gordon Bowker, 7 January 2012).

A lot of it is fiction, and betrays the natural hostility of manyacademics towards literary estates The scholars project their own greed andinappropriate sense of personal entitlement onto the estates. They use thesedemeaning anecdotes to stir up public opinion. Perhaps they even believe thismythmaking, as legend-building appears to be their natural territory in anycase. By demonising estates they attempt to take the attention off their ownoften unethical behaviour.

Note that Salinger is on the list of supposedly rudeand obstructive 'estates'. He had been so depersonalised - as are the othergreat authors - that they couldn't even wait for him to die, let alone for hiscopyright to expire.

Anyone who tries to prevent an author's private life andwork being exploited and miscontextualised is portrayed negatively, as in thisarticle. I bet the literary estates have their own horror stories to tell too,of theft and lies and misrepresentation and misquotation on the part ofunscrupulous career-builders.

Honestly your hair would stand on end at thelengths some of these people go to. Many of them do not respect an attitude ofcooperation either, as I discovered personally. Their peers sneer at themapparently, if they are believed to be cooperating with an estate. Standardpractice seems to be to attempt to manipulate or deceive, and some particularlyunpleasant people take it further, and have been seen to bait the estatesgratuitously, as is well known to have happened with the Plath Estate. In somecases, it becomes a kind of sport, and as for the obsessed scholar who has soidentified him or herself with 'their' author - then it becomes a kind ofmadness I think.

And if my negative portrait of some academics astonishes andalarms anyone who reads this, then you need to ask yourself whether you arejust as astonished and alarmed by their own attempt to assassinate the character ofthe major literary estates, or whether you are willing to just swallow their propagandawhole.

Woman's Weekly article now online

2011-12-23T09:10:00.003+13:00

NZWW photograph by Jane Dawber

For those who missed the feature article on Janet Frame in the NZ Woman's Weekly of 17 December 2011, it is now online at this link:

Janet Frame's Private Life

I was interviewed by journalist Amie Richardson about my life as Janet's niece, friend, and literary executor. Jane Dawber took the photo of me sitting below my favourite portrait of Janet Frame, a painting by Jerrold Davis, one of Janet's American friends.

The first of several rose garden postcards Janet sent me.

The photo on the other side of this one is of the rose garden at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs New York

Educating a Prime Minister

2011-12-22T11:23:00.001+13:00

To the Is-Land

The first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography

available in NZ as a Vintage paperback edition from Random House NZ

also available as an omnibus edition

in NZ and in the USA titled: An Autobiography

in Australia (Vintage) and the UK/Commonwealth (Virago)

under the title: An Angel at My Table

In the spirit of Christmas, New Zealand's union for Post Primary Teachers, the PPTA, is gifting our Prime Minister John Key a book a day for twelve days, accompanied by a public letter letting him know the enlightening social and economic lessons he might learn if he reads those books over his Christmas break.

The teachers have chosen To the Is-Land - the first volume of Janet Frame's autobiography as their gift for day nine of the twelve days of Christmas, and done a good job of explaining how important the educational reforms were than enabled a talented working class girl like Janet Frame to get a secondary school education when most others from her social class had formerly been denied that opportunity. Janet Frame went on to become a great and successful Kiwi icon world famous for her writing that never pulled its punches in criticising social injustices.

The lessons continue, and I know that Janet Frame would have applauded the message:

"This book is a reminder of our enlightened forebears for whom education was not only a right but a public good. Every New Zealander was guaranteed a world-class education at their local school, followed by low cost tertiary education or the opportunity to take up an apprenticeship nationally. Rather than being left to the whims of employers, apprenticeships were managed nationally and supported by a web of training through night classes and polytechnics."

Foreign Faces

2011-12-17T21:51:00.000+13:00

Polish edition of Faces in the Water - Twarze w wodzie Publisher: Poznań : Zysk i S-ka, 2000.

Faces in the Water by Janet Frame is a novel significant enough on the world stage to have been included in the work 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE, which describes Faces in the Water as "one of the most powerful descriptions of mental illness ever written":

"This book is a biting critique of the gross power differential between medical 'professional' and patient. While the skilful way in which the novel makes this point is enough to make it memorable, the prose's striking quality elevates it to a truly great novel."

As I said in an earlier post, 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Faces in the Water (1961).

Here are some more of the translations of this wonderful piece of writing:

French: Visages Noyes Joëlle Losfeld/Gallimard (cover above) also published in a Rivages Poche edition.

Swedish: Ansikten i vattnett

A new Swedish edition will be released from Modernista on the 30 May 2012

(No cover image yet)

Faces in the Water has also been translated into:

Spanish

and ~

Italian

First edition Volti Nell'Acqua

Later editions Dentro il Muro

and..

Ansikteri vannet

Norwegian

and ~

Dutch

Schimmen in het water

and ~

German

Gesichter im Wasser

FACES IN THE WATER: 50th Anniversary

2011-12-17T16:38:00.000+13:00

"Frame's best book" ~ Joyce Carol Oates

"A masterpiece" ~ Anita Brookner

Janet Frame published her influential novel Faces in the Water in 1961 - fifty years ago this year.

Time Magazine said:

"Janet Frame's evocation of madness is unforgettable... Faces in the Water is especially brilliant in its description of what happens inside the patient's mind"... "[Frame] writes with a cool eye, a detached sympathy, and a warm but unsloppy love of sane and insane alike."

In several parts of the newly released book Janet Frame In Her Own Words, Frame talks about Faces in the Water. She calls it an "exploration", then a "documentary" but also points out that "Faces in the Water was autobiographical in the sense that everything happened, but the central character was invented."

Frame drew from her experiences in New Zealand psychiatric hospitals of the 1940s, but she made it very clear that it wasn't until she wrote her autobiography An Angel at My Table (1984) that she had told "the true story". When she was writing Faces In The Water, she tells a confidant in a letter, she realised that her readers "would wonder what on earth a person thinking and observing so ordinarily and usually, was doing in a mental hospital". So Frame says she deliberately invented a fictional narrator and gave her what she "imagined might seem a 'madder' interior".

Even so, I have often times seen this baffled question expressed in reviews of Faces in the Water: How did we get this lucid view of such torment if this eyewitness is so disturbed herself?

In fact Frame's scorchingly critical picture of the mental institutions of the day, and some of the brutality and negligence of the staff, was one of the factors in NZ (and elsewhere) that led to a soul searching on the part of mental health professionals.

The immeasurable consequences of Frame's courage and honesty in her writings about her experiences as a misdiagnosed mental patient, is surely one of the reasons she is remembered, for instance, as one of the 60 Makers of Modern New Zealand (1930-1990) in an exhibition currently showing at New Zealand's Portrait Gallery in Wellington.

Faces in the Water has been used as a text for medical students and nurses, giving a salutary fly-on-the-wall view of life in an institution. Her empathy and ability to describe the intricate social interactions between patients, staff and family, give tremendous insights to the thoughtful reader.

In her autobiography Frame says that she wanted to speak for those who had no voice. That was one of the things that kept her going in the years she found herself with a label that seemed to mean there was no escape for her from an institutional fate.

(Anyone who tries to insist that Frame's New Zealand hospital admissions were 'voluntary' over the decade or so that she was mislabelled, is clearly ignorant of the power of the label over those who have been labelled, and of the coercive nature of hospital 'admissions' where the threat of being 'committed' into the care of the State, and its consequent loss of civil rights, was a weapon used to manipulate people into signing a 'voluntary' admission. Most if not all of Frame's multiple New Zealand hospital admissions were reluctant, as becomes clear on a careful reading of the evidence gathered by Michael King for his biography Wrestling with the Angel.)

Here is an earlier blog post about Janet Frame's groundbreaking novel Faces in the Water detailing some of its publication history and featuring a few of the covers:

"A shrewd and clever book" ~ Hilary Mantel

A strong independent influential woman

2011-12-16T16:39:00.001+13:00

Janet Frame appears as one of the 60 Makers of Modern New Zealand in a exhibtion at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington, curated by prominent economist and commentator Brian Easton.

The 1989 photograph of Janet Frame was taken by the superbly talented photographer the late Robin Morrison.

I've only just noticed that this exhibition is on - it certainly looks worth visiting Wellington just to catch up with it! (It will be on show until the 12th February 2012.)

It was a bit disappointing to notice some errors in the short biographical sketch of Janet Frame that has been composed for the exhibition. Unusually for Wellington, which it seems these days is pretty much the home of preferring fiction about Frame to fact, this short bio is not a particularly toxic summary of Frame's life and work - it really does seem to try to be fair to her and to avoid pathologising, unlike the egregious 'official' government biography on the Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand website.

But in spite of the obvious good will, Frame's middle name Paterson is misspelled and there is the usual condescending claim that Frame was in need of a string of male patrons who "supported her" (some of them are even named, causing guffaws to anyone who is aware of the real story behind some of those relationships).

The misogynistic characterisation of Frame as dependent on strong male guardians was propagated early in her career and it was used at times to justify a fair bit of behind-the-scenes meddling as well as some overt attempts to bully her. The thesis of the Frame who didn't really know what was best for herself, was unfortunately embraced by Frame's biographer Michael King who shaped his biography with that pervading attitude. Maria Wikse in her monograph on 'Janet Frame's biographical legend', identifies the conceit of "a woman writer who has her career (and life) taken over by several men, without protest" as "the dominant narrative" of the King biography, and I, along with many other commentators on Frame, agree with her analysis in that case. Michael King seems to have adopted this patronising attitude towards Frame uncritically from his idol Frank Sargeson, whose biography King wrote first. As just an example, wherever King refers to a friend of Frame's whom Frame first met while she was staying with Frank Sargeson, that person is later always referred to as "Frank's friend". So even though Janet developed strong independent friendships, for instance, with Elizabeth Dawson and Jess Whitworth, King will subsequently refer to Dawson or Whitworth as "Frank's friends'. Frame it seems, only has 'patrons' not 'friends', and if she has friends, they are really borrowed from someone else.

Ironically, the effect of Sargeson's successful legend building of Frame as hopeless and dependent on male patronage, and King's popularisation of it, is shown in the fact that in the 250 word portrait exhibition biography of Janet Frame, Michael King's own name has now appeared on the fantastical list of the men who "supported" the "peripatetic" Frame. (If Michael were here, he would surely protest himself, at seeing his name on the list - and he'd protest at some of the other names too, for instance Denis Glover, whose alcoholic incompetence led to a five year delay in the publication of Frame's first book!) If anyone benefited professionally and personally from their collaboration, it was Michael.

These are but minor quibbles of course. So what if it's so hard to eradicate the sexist agenda? Frame triumphed anyway, and in this exhibition she is given fitting recognition for her achievements and for her influence.

Brava!

Happy Birthday Michael

2011-12-15T20:01:00.001+13:00

Michael King, Opoutere

February 2004

Janet Frame's friend and biographer, and my friend and colleague, Michael King would have turned 66 today. I took the above snapshot at his bush clad Coromandel home just weeks before his untimely death.

Over the several years that Michael King was writing and researching Janet Frame's biography, he was accepted by her and the rest of her close family and friends, a regular visitor to her home and to our homes, becoming so familiar that the members of her circle treated him almost like "one of the family" and we were devastated when he and his wife Maria were killed in a horrific car crash only two months after Janet Frame's death.

Michael & Janet 1998

They shared a wicked sense of humour

Despite some public misconception about the status of Michael King's biography of Janet Frame, it was not strictly an 'authorised biography' and it was certainly not controlled or manipulated by her; it was more, as he admitted himself, 'tolerated'. She did agree to cooperate with his research and gave him unprecedented access to her inner circle and to her archives and her papers. She was exceedingly unstinting with her time, having almost daily contact with Michael for several years as he wrote the biography (either face to face, by phone, fax, email or snail mail). Then he curated and toured an exhibition based on her life and work, and he followed that by publishing An Inward Sun: The World of Janet Frame (2002) a book of photographs of the exhibition also drawing from the photo albums of Frame and her friends.

Over the years Michael was engaged in his biographical work on Frame (with her generous patronage and assistance), Michael held numerous prestigious well-funded fellowships and scholarships and major residencies (at Auckland University, Waikato University, Otago University and at Georgetown University, Washington DC) and he also received some major grants, and the Prime Minister's Award for Non-Fiction ($60,000) in 2003. His biography Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (2000) won the Wattie NZ Book of the Year Award. Perhaps for the first time in his career he was earning enough over those years (including advances and royalties from his prolific publishing, and his sizeable share of the NZ Library Fund) to keep his chronic severe anxiety about money (as he often mentioned) at bay. It was a terrible irony that it was right at the end of his life that his last book, A Penguin History of New Zealand, became a rampant bestseller and would have afforded him even more material comfort into his old age than he had ever enjoyed. And he had so many more plans. But as fate had it, among his last published works were the obituaries he wrote for Janet Frame.

A group of Michael's friends and associates have founded the Michael King Writer's Centre in Devonport Auckland as a very fitting memorial tribute to Michael King, that in his spirit will advocate for writers and provide the resources and the community for them to be able to do their work.

In Janet Frame In Her Own Words we have published for the first time the transcript of Janet Frame's opinions about the Michael King biography as given in a radio interview with Elizabeth Alley on the occasion of the Dunedin launch of the biography. At one stage Janet laughs and says:

"I believe that Michael King has done a wonderful job of work . . . if I forget that I’m the subject!"

Best Bookshops: vicbooks

2011-12-15T10:06:00.001+13:00

Another of my favourite bookshops is a must visit when I'm in Wellington. It's the bookshop at Victoria University, and the bonus is you get to ride the cable car up to the campus.

Like the magnificent Dunedin University Book Shop, vicbooks is that rare beast, an independent store, and they take care to stock a wide range of high quality NZ and overseas titles. Not just text books. It's always a delight to browse there and as with the other uni book shops you know that there has been great care taken in the selection and ordering of the volumes on offer. Or if they have run out they'll get it in for you.

Vicbooks have a blog, and they've recommended Janet Frame In Her Own Words as one of their 'Ideas for Christmas Reading':

"Can’t think of what to read over the break or in need of some gift inspiration?"

"very readable and entertaining"

2011-12-14T17:44:00.001+13:00

A new review of Janet Frame In Her Own Words calls it "very readable and entertaining".

The review is on the educational resource website Tomorrow's Schools Today.
The review states that this collection:

"gives great insight into the many different sides of Janet Frame and also challenges some long-standing myths about her. It is a great way to find out more about this extraordinary New Zealander. It reveals a woman who is sharp, affectionate, shy, mischievous, intelligent, and with a great sense of humour."

We're glad they feel that way. The book contains a varied mix of autobiography, memoir, essays, reviews, obituaries, interviews, letters to the editor, personal and work correspondence, meditations and jokes, and more, all in Janet Frame's own voice.

And of course from the point of view of a secondary school the hardback Penguin volume is also the authoritative collection of all of Janet Frame's published short non-fiction, a very useful resource.

"meticulously selected and edited"

2011-12-13T23:19:00.000+13:00

There's another very appreciative notice for Janet Frame In her Own Words in the University Book Shop Newsletter The Book Window (December 2011):

"This stunning collection has been meticulously selected and edited by Denis Harold and Pamela Gordon."

"Harold suggests in his introduction that the book may be seen as a writer's handbook and indeed there is a wealth of insight to be found in Frame's reflections on writing, language and the imagination."

"A volume of lasting pleasure, a must for your book shelf."

The lovely little hardback book, so beautifully designed and produced by Penguin NZ, has also charmed its way onto the UBS list of

Staff Picks for Christmas.

Janet Frame in the Woman's Weekly

2011-12-12T16:47:00.001+13:00

There's a feature article on 'Janet Frame's Private Life' in the New Zealand Woman's Weekly this week (December 19, 2011).

I spoke to journalist Amie Richardson about growing up with a famous aunty, and how Janet Frame's close family learnt to help protect her privacy, and about how the revealing new book Janet Frame In Her Own Words sheds new light on the author's life and work.

For instance, among the 35 interviews that we quote from in Janet Frame In Her Own Words, are two interviews Janet Frame herself did with the NZ Woman's Weekly. In 1963 she told the NZWW that she had taken a copy of Aunt Daisy's cookbook with her when she went to live in Europe:

"I am very interested in food, but don’t seem to have time to indulge my interest. I do like to think I can make a good Christmas cake, but if I had to I could exist cheerfully on just cheese and apples — New Zealand grown for preference."

And twenty years later in 1983, Janet Frame again spoke to the NZWW, saying that her mother had faithfully read the Woman's Weekly - a New Zealand institution - and so did she, making a point of collecting the hints: "They're very useful". By 1983 Frame was well aware of the errors of the 'Janet Frame Myth' and found it necessary to say:

"I really had quite an ordinary, quite happy childhood — certainly no worse than many others during those years."

An image of my aunt hovering over my shoulder

POSTSCRIPT: This article is now online:

'Janet Frame's Private Life'

"I want to send a special thought to all writers in New Zealand"

2011-12-09T22:57:00.001+13:00

Janet Frame shared a joke with the University Chancellor after she received the Massey University Medal, 1993 (Manawatu Standard, Photo Dionne Ward)

Janet Frame received one of Massey University’s most prestigious awards, the Massey Medal, in 1993 in recognition of her extraordinary and outstanding contribution to New Zealand literature. In her acceptance speech Janet Frame said:

"... In my mind I see the map of New Zealand and during the grim, rewarding and often lonely pursuit of words to match the vision, I am always inspired and encouraged by the inward view of the map of New Zealand (and the world too of course) and my being able to think — Ah, there, by that cape or mountain, so and so is writing poems, and there — by the snowgrass, so and so concludes a novel, and there, in the city of sails and fury, so and so begins a new novel. And these writers inspire by their very being and their act of writing, of beginning, continuing, and concluding their projected work..."

Janet Frame's speech notes are published for the first time in Janet Frame In Her Own Words (Penguin NZ, 2001) selected & edited by Denis Harold & Pamela Gordon.

Sunday Star-Times Review

2011-12-08T22:39:00.001+13:00

There was a very good notice in the Sunday Star-Times (Sunday 4 December 2011, page F16) finding the new collection of Janet Frame's short non-fiction 'welcome', as well as 'illuminating':

'Frame's intelligence and humour come through loud and clear. She is, particularly in personal letters, delightfully scathing of unintelligent questions, particularly around her autobiography ("narrow-minded people of the narrow-minded world".)'

Best Bookshops: Parsons

2011-12-07T18:51:00.001+13:00

There is the Parsons Bookshop on Wellesley Street in Auckland, specialising in Fine Art Books: Art, Photography, Architecture, Fashion, Design books and Exhibition catalogues - and also with a reliably excellent supply of NZ, Maori and Pacific books.

There is also the Parsons Bookshop on Lambton Quay in Wellington, specialising in Music - and again, with a great range of the best books available.

You'll always find a good selection of Janet Frame books at both these CBD independent bookshops, and many other worthy finds besides.

I am on the mailing list of the Auckland store and was delighted a few days ago to see in their latest newsletter that they were featuring Janet Frame in Her Own Words on their list of CHRISTMAS BOOKS. Yay!

The founder of the original Parsons Bookshop in Wellington, Roy Parsons, was a generous and influential advocate of Janet Frame's work. She was deeply grateful for his support and of course she wasn't alone in appreciating his enormous contribution to the literary and cultural life of New Zealand.

NZ's Bookman Graham Beattie recently blogged a heartwarming and informative post in memory of Roy Parsons, that tells his story well.

Graham mentions the periodical Parsons Packet (1947-1955) for which Roy and Nan Parsons commissioned reviews and articles from writers.

One of those writers was Janet Frame, who wrote a review of a William Faulkner novel for the Oct-Dec 1955 issue of Parsons Packet. Her review 'Choked with Characters' is reprinted for the first time in Janet Frame In Her Own Words!

Just in time for Christmas

2011-12-06T09:52:00.001+13:00

Something to ask Santa for.

Penguin NZ Christmas Catalogue.

NZ Listener Best Books 2011

2011-12-05T14:36:00.001+13:00

Delighted to see that the current NZ Listener (December 10-16 2011) has named Janet Frame in Her Own Words (edited by Denis Harold & Pamela Gordon) one of their The 100 Best Books of 2011 since our book has only been out for a few weeks.

We are thrilled to see that our audacious attempt at revisionism in the face of some very hardened - even institutionalised - attitudes, is already winning hearts, and JFIHOW is certainly in some wonderful company in this list of 100 books.

See the Listener review by academic Kim Worthington, published 23 November 2011, now archived online:

http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/janet-frame-in-her-own-words-review/

'The voice we hear in the non-fiction, interviews, speeches and letters of this collection is a far cry from the "stubborn myth" of a reclusive, socially uncomfortable genius tinged with madness: Frame is self-deprecating, anxious and sometimes hurt by misunderstandings, yes, but also self-assured, passionate, driven, and most clearly, given to sly wit and generous humour.'

Best Bookshops: The Women's Bookshop

2011-12-04T14:56:00.001+13:00

Another excellent New Zealand bookshop, found on the pleasantly strollable Ponsonby Road in gloriously subtropical Auckland (where I grew up):

The Women's Bookshop

Penguin Group NZ "Independent Bookseller of the Year 2011"

Their Christmas Catalogue is out now and it has a nice little notice for Janet Frame in Her Own Words:

"A lovely little hardback book to cherish. Included are essays, reviews, letters & speeches. Fittingly identified & carefully edited, they offer a new view of the intelligent, fascinating life & work of our most internationally acclaimed author."

Art Award for Mona Minim illustrator

2011-12-03T10:34:00.001+13:00

The Arts Foundation of New Zealand this week announced a new series of National Art Awards, and one of the first recipients was artist David Elliot, who illustrated the 2005 New Zealand edition of Janet Frame's Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun.

David Elliot received the Mallinson Rendel Illustrators Award.

In 2003 Janet Frame received an inaugural Arts Foundation New Zealand Icon Award.

David Elliot is also no stranger to prizes. The Random House New Zealand edition of Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun beautifully illustrated by him, won the title of 'Best Children's Book' in the 2006 Spectrum Print Book Design Awards, and was also named Runner-up to the 2006 Best Book overall.

See more of David Elliot's illustrations, publications and achievements at his website:

http://www.davidelliot.org

The other winners of New Zealand Arts Foundation awards and honours named in this week's announcement were: Whirimako Black, Ben Cauchi, Sam Hamilton, Eli Kent, Fiona Pardington, Neil Pardington, Emily Perkins, Lemi Ponifasio and Leanne Pooley.

Christ's right-hand woman

2011-12-02T16:57:00.001+13:00

"I went recently into Takapuna to see Frank and we had dinner at the

Chinese restaurant and he spent all dinnertime telling me what is

wrong with my writing. I was furious. He wouldn’t shut up. Perhaps

I invite that kind of treatment. I would never dream of trying to tell

him how to write. I guess I just have to be tolerant and do as my

mother taught me, find excuses for the behaviour of people. She used

to call it ‘charity’. Be charitable, she said. (She had the idea she was

Christ’s right-hand woman.)"

~ Janet Frame to Bill Brown, 1973

From Janet Frame in Her Own Words (Penguin 2011)

(In memory of Janet's mother Lottie C. Frame who died on the 2nd December 1955.)

A murderer in the family

2011-12-02T15:01:00.001+13:00

There's a report in today's Wellington daily paper the Dominion Post on the subject of mental illness among New Zealand cricketers:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/sport/cricket/6072698/Mental-health-help-there-for-NZ-cricketers

Apparently psychiatric problems among the cricket community are unfortunately too prevalent, although I don't see any evidence in the article that any particular malady occurs at a higher rate than in the general population. I suppose they looked into the relative stats before rushing into print? The author of the article certainly doesn't seem to have enquired as to whether there is a corresponding incidence of emotional imbalance among New Zealand cricket writers and commentators, which is surprising given the recent high profile suicide of a prominent cricket writer.

There is no comparison with the mental health of tiddlywinks players or of any particular vocation such as accounting or journalism, publishing, or teaching English. We do not enquire whether the overall suicide rate for New Zealand men is particularly high compared to other countries.

But let's follow the logic of the story we are told. What is so disturbing about cricket, one wonders? And what has this to do with Janet Frame? Well if you read the article you will see that in looking to provide a convincingly long list of New Zealand cricketers who have committed suicide, the journalist consulted a book written in 2001 that listed historical 'cricket' suicides as far back as 1950, including a tragic event in Christchurch in 1965 when a former first class Otago cricketer Bill Frame committed multiple murder - he shot dead his ex-girlfriend and her parents, and then turned the gun on himself.

The article notes that Bill Frame happened to be the first cousin of the famous novelist Janet Frame, and that she was distraught at this turn of events as her biographer Michael King noted in his biography Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame. Of course she was grief-stricken. She had attended her paternal cousin Bill's wedding, and now she also attended his funeral, and being a poet, she wrote a poem about it called 'Big Bill' (collected in her first book of poetry The Pocket Mirror):

Big Bill, Big Bill, High School Boy,Accountant,

Cricket star, hero of Plunket Shield play,
thirteen years ago I went to your wedding
at St Kilda on a cold dark winter’s day.

What happened between then and now, BigBill,

to bring madness, murder, suicide your way,
riding with us in triple nightmare to yourfuneral
at St Kilda on this cold dark winter’s day?

There's also a heartrending transformation of the terrible story into fiction in her novel Intensive Care, in which Frame clearly attempts to understand what can have happened inside the mind of someone so disordered.

Now that the Dominion Post has made this connection publicly, I'm given an opportunity to make a point I was tempted to make earlier this year when a nephew of Bill Frame was featured in a New Zealand magazine article. We didn't read about his uncle Bill Frame the psychotically jealous murderer (understandably it's a sensitive and sad issue for the whole family), we heard about a more distant relation: his mother's cousin Janet Frame, whose "psychiatric diagnosis" he incorrectly claimed had never been established (when it is a fact that Frame's doctors asserted that Frame had never suffered from a psychiatric illness). The article made a link between the man's son's diagnosis of autism and the spurious pseudo-diagnosis of Frame as autistic, as if the suggestion that a young child's grandmother's cousin might have been on the autism spectrum - and there is no authoritative evidence that she was, and a mountain of counter evidence - somehow indicated a 'family' tendency to autism.

Oh spurious selectivity! We don't hear about the grandmother's brother whose lack of empathy is a matter for police record.

It's a dangerous game, name-dropping a famous relation when there might be skeletons in the cupboard that are even closer to home.

"Delve in and enjoy"

2011-11-30T17:38:00.001+13:00

Another wonderful review of Janet Frame in her own words in today's Fairfax newspaper Dscene (Wednesday 30 November 2011, page 20):

"Delve in - and enjoy the insights"

"The joy of this volume is every reader will discover different points of interest."

One of the reviewer's personal highlights was "the inclusion of Frame's notes alongside some of her interviews, as well as letters that recount her impression of specific interviews. This reminds readers interviews are not a transparent source revealing the 'real' Janet Frame."

‎"Keep it by your bedside, allow its pages to fall open randomly, delve in and enjoy an artist of the written word".

You can read this newspaper online at http://fairfaxmedia.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

The review is on page 20.

"It's an utter gem"

2011-11-25T13:23:00.001+13:00

Radio NZ Afternoons With Jim Mora
Book Review with Vanda Symon
Tuesday 22 November 2011

"I loved this book."

Here's the review I've been waiting for, of Janet Frame in her own words - a review from the perspective of the general reader, an openhearted generous response to what is actually on offer in this book, without any of the professional agendas that can hamper the genuineness of the pontifications of some 'experts', especially if they have territory to defend or scores to settle.

"It's an utter gem."

This is the sort of overwhelming feedback we have been getting from readers - the book is wonderful, it is fascinating. It's readable, consisting of such a wide variety of short pieces, ranging from witty, mischievous, moving, thoughtful, that you can dip into it as you will, and always find something interesting.

It is not just for the pointy-heads, and it is certainly not just for the "Janet Frame completists" (unless you define 'Janet Frame completists' as the tens of thousands of readers in NZ alone who are eager to see new work by Janet Frame and to hear what she has to say for herself.)

As Vanda Symon says, you don't need to have even read any of Janet Frame to enjoy this book - anyone who likes reading biography will find "It's a fascinating insight into a person".

Among other things, "It gave a glimpse of her own personal frustration at the way she was portrayed in the media."

And of course 'It's a gorgeous little hardback and it's really tactile and nice to hold."

Tim Curnow on his father's centenary

2011-11-24T09:47:00.001+13:00

Lovely to hear Tim Curnow's voice on Radio New Zealand Arts on Sunday the other day (20 November 2011). The son of poet Allen Curnow, Tim was his father's literary agent for decades, and he was Janet Frame's friend and literary agent for over 25 years as well.

Tim gave a short interview with Lynn Freeman which you can listen to here, in which he talks about his input into gathering the tribute poems for Allen Curnow's centenary that have been published in Landfall 222. Tim says his favourite of the poems is the one by Janet Frame, which I had sent to him several years ago and he has always loved it, but it is only published for the first time in the Landfall centenary tribute.

Janet Frame, who had a great admiration for Curnow's poetry and also of course knew him socially, wrote the poem in 1987 and after Allen Curnow's death she decided to use it as her memorial to him. She recorded the poem in 2002 for the Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry Sound Archive which is lodged in Auckland University Library.

It's fascinating to hear Tim talk about his father the great poet, and also to hear his perspective as a New Zealander who has lived in Australia for many years, on his view of "the three most significant cultural figures" in the New Zealand landscape - judging by their substantive body of work and the influence they have had on so many people internationally - and they are: Allen Curnow for his poetry, Janet Frame for her fiction, and Colin McCahon for his art. Tim was lucky enough to have grown up among and known all three of those great creative New Zealanders.

A tribute to Allen Curnow

2011-11-22T20:54:00.001+13:00

LANDFALL 222 is out this week, and it contains a tribute section for New Zealand's greatest poet, Allen Curnow, on the year of his 100th birthday.

As part of this tribute to Curnow a new poem of Janet Frame's is published for the first time. Frame wrote the poem in 1987 while she was in Auckland living in Albert Park as the inaugural Frank Sargeson Fellow. The poem describes a party at Karl and Kay Stead's place, with Allen Curnow one of the other guests. Allen tosses off a comment: 'Auckland is wonderful in March', and with her typical wry humour and acute observation, Frame describes the ripples that this casual statement sent through the literary gathering:

The poet in his seventy-plus body
he's a great poet
long live his heartfelt asides
extracted wih precision and power
toned and tuned as the brilliant harmonious gift,

that in secret, away from the party, makes his poem.

As well as the section commemorating Allen Curnow, this issue of Landfall also devotes a section to work arising from the shock waves of the Christchurch earthquake.

Listener review

2011-11-22T18:40:00.001+13:00

There's a review of Janet Frame in her own words in the NZ Listener (26 November - December 2), on newsstands currently but it's not online yet.

The full text of the review will be archived on the NZ Listener website on the 5th Dcember2011.

Considering the literary and historical significance to New Zealand of a new work of non-fiction by arguably its greatest writer and certainly one of its most famous cultural 'icons' Janet Frame, the space given to the Listener review is fairly ungenerous. Reviewer academic Kim Worthington perhaps reflects a little frustration by saying:

It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the sheer force and power of Janet Frame's many writings, or her often incisive and insightful comments, especially when she discusses her own work

The issue of shrinking space allocation for literary features and reviews is of course one that breaks the hearts of book page editors and their readers in this day and age, not just the reviewers. But the watchful reader might note that the Listener has found plenty of room in the recent past to squander on squalid appropriations of Janet Frame, and in association with that, on critiques of the Frame estate that appeared quite unfair to many readers (as I have been told privately), so much so that a prominent literary figure was prompted to write a letter to the Editor in our and in Frame's defence.

Nevertheless, this is an excellent review and it lays out the relevant points, especially that in this groundbreaking collection Frame is allowed to "speak for herself" and to "challenge the stubborn myths" that have "built up around her". Worthington is simplistic in identifying what she understands those "myths" to be, confining them to the realm of the mad genius and the social recluse, and overlooking the many other common misconceptions about Janet Frame that this book disproves.

FYI these other 'myths' would include: that Frame didn't have a sense of humour, that she was depressing and depressive; that she never spoke in public; that she never spoke about her work; that she only did a handful of interviews with the success of those attributable only to the exceptional sensitivity of the interviewers, without whom Frame would have been unable to utter any coherent thoughts; that she was incapable of appearing at festivals and socialising with other author and industry personnel; that she consistently refused to and was unable to promote her work; that she was a weak, lost, passive person always under the care of some guardian or mentor; that her books didn't sell well in NZ, when in terms of literary fiction she was one of the highest earners in NZ; or that her books didn't sell well overseas when she was one of the few NZ authors who could even get published internationally, and her works were widely translated; that she wasn't well known here in NZ, or that she was little known 'overseas'; that she moved restlessly from place to place with no reason; that she only wrote about a limited range of subjects and that those were all concerned her own tragic life; that she was a 'primitive', uneducated, who stumbled upon the great themes of the twentieth century only through contemplating her own misery; that she had fled teaching because she was too afraid of the inspector, that she had 'fled' teaching because she was incapable of functioning in the real world; that she constructed reality only through language (a particularly toxic myth rampant currently); and I haven't scratched the surface of the myths, here are more: it is commonly said that Frame only came to prominence because a movie was made of her autobiography, when the genre of autobiography is the province of the already prominent person; that the reading public are more interested in her life than in her work; that she had an unhappy childhood; that she never had sexual or love relationships; that she was 'pathologically' or 'cripplingly' shy, when in fact she was just [no modifier] shy, and she wasn't always shy, she was 'shy' only when people were being jerks. And she was not, by her own declaration, 'fragile', but she was in fact of a strong and cheerful disposition, opinionated and didactic. Etc. These kinds of myths are even harder to fight because the public don't even know they are myths. The "mad genius" legend is easy enough to ridicule, but these others that derogate Frame's professionalism, belittle her career successes, call into question her vocation, her dedication and her ambition, are more insidious.

I guess time will tell whether this volume really manages to slay any of these myths - the response to Frame's own attempts to "set the record straight" through her three volumes of autobiography was for some Frame 'scholars', such as Patrick Evans, to claim that Frame was a liar and couldn't be taken at face value in her non-fiction, that you really need to look into her fiction to find the 'truth' about her (his truth, that is, his patronising biographical speculations that had Frame close to suing Evans: "I resent this myth", she says in this new book, and "I have even contemplated legal action to subdue it.").

But now of course, Evans would rather you eschew Frame's work altogether and instead read his novel about 'Janet' and become acquainted with a completely false Frame - a cuckoo of his own invention that he has laid in a nest he seems to have assumed was by now up for grabs.

As Worthington says, there's a lot in Janet Frame In Her Own Words, a lot to absorb; so I am predicting it will take a while for the aficionados to digest, and even to comprehend the ramifications of this massive amount of new information, and of the old information stripped of its cottonwool wrapping, for the future shape of the Frame Legend.

Meanwhile, please enjoy "the sheer force and power", the "sly wit and generous humour", and so much else.

Looking for Janet in all the wrong places

2011-11-21T17:11:00.001+13:00

The latest newsletter from the Victoria University writing academy IIML has this quirky little item:

A possible Janet Frame sighting?

Literary spies of our acquaintance recently visited the St James Station woolshed, a huge 1870s structure, pit-sawn timbers, on the banks of the Clarence River, North Canterbury. The interior is full of shearers' graffiti - names carved, stencilled and written, dating from 1877 to 2008. Writes our correspondent:

'Among the shearers' stencilled graffiti, by a ladder leading to the loft, I found "J. Frame. 1940 41". This was written in red sheep raddle in a cursive style, below it in capital letters was "J. FRAME. 1940" and below that also in the red sheep raddle which is unique in the graffiti, "Pte Adams 1940 OAMARU" and below that deeply carved in half inch letters was "J. FRAME. 1940". Could this be Janet Frame at 16?'

Our verdict? Could be.

This isn't the first time somebody has assumed Janet Frame is the only J. Frame in the known and unknown universe, despite the fact that Janet Frame had a sister J. Frame (my mother, who more than once found her work reproduced based on the misunderstanding that her poem signed "J. Frame" was actually written by her sister). Janet's father was one of twelve siblings and the aspiring poet JF likely had a brace of uncles and first cousins with the same first initial and surname, let alone second cousins, not to mention the pool of unrelated Frame families that also settled in the South Island.

Why anyone would even speculate that the teenage Frame would spend two years in a sheep shed in Northern Canterbury in the company of an Oamaru soldier beggars belief, especially when at the time she was busy being a prefect of her college, excelling at her school work and being a key member of the debating team.

Oh and by the way, what is "red sheep raddle"? According to Google it's a red pigment used for marking sheep.

This is the kind of "make-a-wild-guess based on the slimmest of coincidences, and that will be good enough" that has characterised the decades-long patronising biographical guesswork made by Patrick Evans in his obsessive search for "clues" to the "riddle" of Janet Frame.

The riddle, or the raddle?

I must say this 'sighting' is at about the level of accuracy that I have come to expect from much of the 'citing' emerging from English Departments of Universities.

This anecdote fits in nicely with the Evans-led current backlash against the historical Frame. Evans (along with, it seems, the Wellington School whose darling he now appears to be despite the fact that he has been their most acerbic critic in the past, deriding them for their churning out of mediocre Manhire-lite overly workshopped monotonous pap), rejects the fact that Frame was a sophisticated, highly educated, self-directed, well-read, intellectual, strong, independent, determined and ambitious author. Evans in his notoriously eccentric academic work and in his demeaningly sexist appropriation of Frame in his fan fiction, attempts to annihilate the real Janet and and replaces her with a monstrous cuckoo: a waif that comes from nowhere, knows nothing and nobody, and invents modern Western philosophy and cutting edge literary movements in her head. She dwells in an unreal world and constructs reality only through language. Accidentally she taps into the avant garde from a rural shed, or an urban one, because she's a bit 'gifted' (and a bit touched too, one infers).

Frame is no threat to the men then, because it all pours out of her without touching the sides, while the boys can pride themselves on their craft. What's more Frame's chief genius appears to consist of ridiculous word games and pathetic puzzles - and Evans really has hit a nerve with this misrepresentation. Because then Frame is no threat to anyone, least of all the kiddies young and old who are fantasising that they will be the next great thing. No wonder they've embraced the fake Frame, you don't even have to read her to claim to have an insight into her....

Let's just make a joke of her instead, and that has long been Evans's chief stance. As far as I know he's still compiling an album of the off-the-wall anecdotes that people tell about Frame ("no need for it to be true").

Do you detect a snide undertone in the IIML newsletter item? Maybe I'm being too sensitive? But you can look back over time and find that this newsletter (and the IIML Twitter account) do occasionally throw in a bit of a Janet Frame snigger. I've noticed from time to time they source something they can have a giggle at from my blog - it seems to interest them more than the serious literary news concerning her work. I can't remember the last time they had a positive spin. Meanwhile on the whole the Wellyterati social network has been furiously promoting the demeaning novelisation of Janet Frame by Patrick Evans that was published by their pet University Press, and the sneering subtext of that novel seems to have infected their attitude to Frame in general.

What a shame the literary spies of the IIML aren't alert enough to have noted the recent publication of a lifetime of Janet Frame's writings and speech about her life and her work. Instead of tweeting another of their bizarre snippets about Frame, they might like to as eagerly tweet about her new book Janet Frame in her own words. It's been disillusioning to observe the eagerness with which the IIML coterie has accepted and promoted a despicable distortion of Frame's theories of writing, but when the aspiring authors have a chance to celebrate the real thing they would rather indulge in a piece of pseudo-biographical trivia.

The Scottish Diaspora

2011-11-20T13:14:00.001+13:00

Janet Frame's father, son of 19thC Scottish immigrants to NZ

There's a Scottish Festival on currently in Janet Frame's city of birth Dunedin - 'the Edinburgh of the South'.

Dunedin New Zealand today still retains strong characteristics of its role as one of the settling places of "the Scottish Diaspora".

Festival events will include a Ceilidh, unveilings of memorials, St Andrew's Day celebrations, the crowning of a Queen O' The Heather, a Robert Burns Poetry Competition, Scottish Dancing, bagpiping, Scottish Highland Games (caber tossing etc), films showings and Scottish literature.

Scottish historian Tom Devine will give several addresses on such topics as : The "Death" and Reinvention of Scotland; The Lowland Clearances and the Scottish Exodus to New Zealand; and The Puzzle of Scottish Sectarianism. He will also promote his new book To The Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora.

Janet Frame was a typical product of the Scottish immigration to New Zealand. Janet Frame's grandparents Mary Paterson and Alexander Frame travelled to Dunedin, New Zealand, married here and had twelve children, one of whom was George Samuel Frame, Janet Frame's father, who was a dedicated player of the bagpipes (as you can see in the photograph above).

Mary Paterson had worked in a Paisley cotton mill from the age of eight and in 1874 she made the journey to New Zealand as a domestic servant on the Mairi Bhan. Three years later, at the age of twenty-one, she married Alexander Frame who originated from Hamilton in the Clyde valley in Scotland. (His four older brothers also left Scotland, but they all settled in North America, three in the US and the fourth in Canada.) Mary was illiterate when she arrived in New Zealand but by the end of her life she had learned to read and write and had worked as a midwife in Port Chalmers, Dunedin. Alexander worked as a blacksmith. (For more details see chapter 1 of Wrestling with the angel: a life of Janet Frame by Michael King.)

The Mairi Bhan (image courtesy National Library NZ)

Best Bookshops - Dunedin

2011-11-18T20:05:00.001+13:00

There's a marvellous bookshop in Dunedin, situated on the edge of the Otago University Campus: The University Book Shop (fondly known as 'The UBS'). It's one of the best bookshops in New Zealand actually, and frequently wins prizes for that. I'm a frequent visitor and frequent purchaser too. They always have some new release that is just too tempting. They generously host book launches for the many excellent authors who live in Dunedin. The staff are friendly and knowledgeable and love books, and if they don't have what you're after then they'll get it for you. They have a good stock of Janet Frame In Her Own Words located on NZ books new releases table near the front door!

But the Paper Plus in the heart of town, in the Golden Centre Mall also has an excellent selection of New Zealand books for sale, and with a strong fiction and poetry section. In fact they have all Janet Frame's New Zealand editions on their shelves. There are seventeen Janet Frame titles in print in New Zealand currently, so that's a remarkably well-stocked shelf, and Paper Plus Dunedin provides a much better turnout of Frame's books than many an independent bookshop that might normally think they were entitled to look down their noses on such a mainstream franchise store. Not this one though! Go Golden Centre Mall Paper Plus! I hope you have lots of literate and discerning customers who will appreciate the service you offer!

Paper Plus Dunedin (Golden Centre Mall) finds space on their NZ non-fiction new release table for Janet Frame In Her Own Words, among the cookbooks, earthquake mementos, and rugby albums. Bravo for a chain store to extend themselves beyond the blatantly commercial!

Writing advice from Janet Frame

2011-11-17T10:09:00.001+13:00

Ruth Dallas and Janet Frame, NZ delegates to the 42nd International PEN Congress

Photographed at the conference, Sydney Australia 1977

One of the many gems from Janet Frame in her own words:

I just would like to say that a writer can’t choose her characters. Someone says, ‘Why don’t you write about this, why don’t you write about that, why don’t you write about these people?’ A character chooses a writer, a writer doesn’t choose a character, and there must be, before the writing, a feeling of haunting by this character, a deep feeling of being haunted. I think that is the only basis for writing. It may not emerge worthwhile, but anyone who sits down and says, ‘I think I’ll write a poem’, is to my mind, well — I don’t think that’s a favourable beginning for a writer. ‘I must write a poem', yes, but not 'I think it would be a good idea to write a poem'.

(This quote is from a recorded interview with Janet Frame in Australia in 1977, made when Janet Frame was a NZ delegate to the 42nd International PEN Congress in Sydney. The transcript of the interview is published for the first time in Janet Frame in her own words.)

The ODT's 150th birthday

2011-11-15T23:54:00.003+13:00

Arts Philanthropist Fred Turnovsky and Janet Frame at a Wellington Award Ceremony, 1984

'The ODT' - The Otago Daily Times - is frequently referred to as "The Oddity" by those familiar with it.

New Zealand's oldest daily newspaper celebrates 150 years of publication this very day, and there have been festivities and commemorations in the weeks leading up to this milestone.

When she was a little girl my mother June misheard the name Otago Daily Times and thought it was the "Tiger Daily Times" (a linguistic phenomenon now referred to as a mondegreen).

The Otago Daily Times was an important part of the Frame family life - in fact as far as I know Janet Frame's first published writings appeared in the pages of that paper - by the time she was ten years old old she was regularly sending letters and poems to "Dot" of Dot's Page. Along with her four siblings, Janet was one of 'Dot's Little Folk' or DLF for short.

The Frame family also had a tradition of writing letters to the editors of newspapers and Janet's mother Lottie used to fire off stern letters whenever an occasion demanded it. Janet Frame herself took up this practice as is so well attested in the new book Janet Frame In Her Own Words which includes a selection of Janet Frame's letters to the editors of publications, written over fifty years of her life (from the age of 10 to the age of 60).

So Janet Frame, probably the greatest writer so far to emerge from New Zealand, who was born in Dunedin and died here too, had a long a fruitful relationship with the local newspaper the OTAGO DAILY TIMES, the first publication where she saw her name (as well as her pseudonym AMBER BUTTERFLY!) in print.

For the 150th anniversary the ODT has raked through the 150 years of issues of the paper to pick out some representative and notable news items and today the paper was bulging with a commemorative edition: a varied and rich smorgasbord of reprints of significant stories from throughout those 150 years.

News isn't just about war and sport and disasters and new buildings and commerce; arts and education and cultural pursuits must figure too, so I was curious to see what the journalists would choose to include from the many dozens of reports about Janet Frame over the years (if indeed they chose to recognise her at all - which was always a possibility - we all know the saying that "a prophet isn't recognised in their own hometown"!)

Reporters would have had to select a Janet Frame-related item from an awful lot of material: from her childhood correspondence to 'Dot's Page'; to her first notice in 1952 that her book THE LAGOON had won the Hubert Church Award for prose; to the notices about and reviews of her twelve novels and her five books of stories, her two books of poetry, her children's book and her three books of autobiography, as well as the film adaptation made of her autobiography. Then there were the conferences and books published about her writing, and the celebrated biography by Michael King, launched in Dunedin at a party attended by Janet Frame and by the Prime Minister Helen Clark. Also there were the documentaries made about Frame, and the prizewinning Vincent Ward film and the Globe Theatre dramatic production, both based on her novel A State of Siege. And many classical musical adaptations of her poetry and a couple of documentaries were made about her life and work, all rating notices and reviews.

Then there were the interviews and reports: her triumphant return to NZ in 1963 after 'becoming famous' overseas - or her return to live in Dunedin a couple of years later to take up the Burns Fellowship - or the various other literary and civil honours and prizes and awards and fellowships she picked up over the years. There was of course the CBE investiture and later the Order of New Zealand bestowed by the Queen. Each notable event in Janet Frame's stellar career merited a bit of a write-up in the ODT - as well as other NZ newspapers too of course. A highlight for Janet Frame - and Dunedin - would have been the bestowal of the honorary doctorate from Otago University in 1978. Frame later was awarded another doctorate and a medal from two other universities, but the prestigious honour must have been especially sweet coming from her home town university - the one where as a young woman she had studied English, Education, Philosophy and French.

There were overseas fellowships too, and the Commonwealth Literary Prize for Best Book in the late 1980s. Appearances at Festivals, and overseas honours as well as the constant stream of prizes for her books. All would have their notice, and often a photo, in the ODT.

And then in her later years Janet Frame returned to live in her home town of Dunedin and was frequently snapped around town for the pages of the ODT - attending a Mayor's reception, attending the ceremonies for writer's walk plaques of her old friends including Charles Brasch, Ruth Dallas and Hone Tuwhare. Then she attended the Burns Fellow reunion in the late 1990s and was snapped with all the other old Fellows - she was the esteemed elder of the tribe as one of the younger ones put it. And she attended book launches and art gallery openings in Dunedin, and in Gore, with her photo taken or a few words spoken to a reporter frequently making the pages of the ODT. And she was in the news again whenever it was rumoured she was on a "short list" for the Nobel Prize in Literature, there being a particular fuss about that in 2003.

And then she fell ill and died in the arms of her family, at Dunedin Hospital. Being widely accepted as one of the great writers of the 20th Century, the news of her death flashed around the world and obituaries appeared in every major paper from the New York Times to the Guardian to the Sydney Morning Herald. Then there was her state memorial in 2004 held at the Dunedin Town Hall, attended by the Dunedin mayor, the Prime Minister and the Governor General, and televised live for the rest of the nation with a live satellite feed overseas picked up by the BBC and other news organisations. That was big news locally, nationally, and internationally, but in the way of a great writer, whose words are their legacy and so they never really die, it wasn't the last the ODT had heard of Janet Frame, because there's been a steady stream of posthumous publishing, of news from the estate and from awards given by the charitable trust Janet Frame set up. Her significant archive of papers and correspondence was bequeathed to the Hocken Library. And in the town where she grew up, Oamaru, her childhood home has been rescued and has become a cultural tourist attraction visited by fans from all around the world, and news of which frequently features in the regional pages of the Otago Daily Times, its geographical reach still encompassing Oamaru as it did when Janet Frame was a child writing to its children's page.

The item chosen by the ODT to appear in their birthday edition today was suitably representative - it was a report from June 9, 1984, of Janet Frame winning a major prize for "Outstanding Achievement in the Arts", endowed by philanthropist Fred Turnovsky

In the ODT's quirky fashion the item referred to Janet Frame as "Miss Janet Frame" - an anachronism by 1984, and it seems a patronising way to refer to such a renowned author, but the conservative and fiercely provincial and independent ODT was the last newspaper in NZ to adopt the "Ms" usage and it was not their policy to attribute Janet Frame with the title "Dr" despite her several honorary doctorates.

(The photo above is from Wellington's Evening Post , taken at the award ceremony held later that year.)

"an indispensable book" ~ North & South

2011-11-14T20:23:00.010+13:00

North & South December 2011

More high praise for Janet Frame In Her own Words, this time from North & South magazine - the December 2011 issue (on sale now).

Quite rightly the painstaking care that Penguin NZ has put into the design and physical format of this exquisite little handbook is recognised and commended:

"Everything about this production is perfect, from the small format to the elegant dust jacket to the use of paper so creamy you want to pour it over strawberries."

And the content of this collection of Janet Frame's thoughts about her life and about writing is truthfully described as "a treasure trove of writing spanning her career", leading to the judgment that "this is an indispensable book".

The reviewer does find one fault: he appears to suffer from the misconception that all the material within the covers has been published before, and so therefore he would have preferred to splice it all together in one long chronological thread. But he fails to note that the "four more sections" that complement the first three sections of previously published material (published short non-fiction, interviews and letters to the editor) all consist of previously unseen work (speech notes and reports, private correspondence, and assorted unpublished writings), so that in the journey through the book one progresses from the most public to the least public of Janet Frame's thoughts about her life and her writing.

There are certainly many patterns and correspondences to be made among the various texts, but these connections and resonances are far more complex than can be arranged in a simple linear format.

It's a perennial problem, how to arrange material - this reviewer would have opted for a chronology, while the editors have chosen to group the material by where and how it first appeared. With a writer as major as Janet Frame, the posthumous divide is a more significant factor to take into account than when dealing with more minor historical figures. (Although interestingly, most of Frame's public texts reprinted here are pretty much unknown to the general public, and many of them have been unknown or overlooked even by so-called academic 'experts'.)

The reader is invited to develop their own hypertextual passage throughout the different genres, or read through the pages consecutively, or just to dip in and out, and the formal handbook structure allows for all these different ways of approaching the text, and for each reader to make their own discoveries. Where the dates are known they are clearly indicated so if one wanted to reconstruct the material chronologically that is possible too. The work will certainly sit happily next to Frame's autobiography of the first half of her life and give many insights into where she went, and what she said, after that.

Heart Felt

2011-11-14T11:25:00.002+13:00

http://nearteneparteweb.blogspot.com/2011/10/ancora-bambole-in-feltro.html

Found on the internet,
this felt doll named 'Janet',
made in Italy:

E lei è Janet in onore della scrittice neozelandese Janet Frame autrice del bellissima libro: "Un angelo alla mia tavola"

In honour of New Zealand writer Janet Frame,
author of the most beautiful book
An Angel at My Table.

The first review: "an essential book"

2011-11-12T10:25:00.000+13:00

Today's ODT has the first review of the newly published Janet Frame In Her Own Words:

"The editors have assembled an essential book to accompany and cast light on the rich literary heritage Janet Frame left us."

The Millicent Peapod School of Fiction

2011-11-10T23:59:00.000+13:00

One of my favourite pieces from the new book Janet Frame In Her Own Words is a satire on creative writing academies called 'News from the Millicent Peapod School of Fiction'.

Top Ten

2011-11-09T23:02:00.001+13:00

I found a new list of stats for this blog - for the past two years, these are the countries where the most visitors come from:

New Zealand

United States

Germany

Australia

United Kingdom

Japan

France

Canada

Russia

Slovenia

Janet Frame in Germany

2011-11-08T21:16:00.000+13:00

The German translator of Towards Another Summer recently featured in a news report in Badische Zeitung, involved in a women's literary event at Freiberg on the theme of Janet Frame. There's a lovely photo (if you click on the link) of some happy smart women gathered to celebrate books in their life. It's a universal language, the joy of the book-loving woman!

Wenn Bücherfrauen feiern, liegt es nahe, dass im Mittelpunkt eine von ihnen steht – auch wenn sie nie ein Vereinsmitglied war: Janet Frame, die in Deutschland vor allem durch die Verfilmung ihrer Autobiografie "Ein Engel an meiner Tafel" bekannt wurde, war ihr ganzes Leben lang besessen vom Lesen und Schreiben.

The news item seems to claim that Janet Frame's writing had become known in Germany only after the 1990 film adaptation of her autobiography, which is a shame because Germany was actually the first foreign country to discover and translate Janet Frame in the early 1960s and German editions of her work have been well received over the years. Certainly Janet Frame hit a much wider readership in Germany and elsewhere through the accessibility of her three-volumed autobiography written in the 1980s, but long before the film made her even more famous, Janet Frame's reputation had already been high among readers of quality literature and her work was also a well established topic for academic study.

The hauntingly poignant posthumous novel Towards Another Summer, with its themes of homesickness and exile has really touched a nerve since its publication last year in Germany, and it has received rave reviews, was reprinted, and sold so well a second edition of Dem Neuen Sommer Entgegen has been published this year in paperback.

New Zealand has been named as the guest of honour for next year's 2012 Frankfurt book Fair and so as the two countries enter their year of literary communication and exchange one hopes that both from the New Zealand and the German side of the encounter that the history of Janet Frame's reputation in Germany will be given its due recognition and that the wikipedia-lite myth-making will be kept to a minimum!

Crying out for annotation?

2011-11-08T18:29:00.009+13:00

Janet Frame wouldn't agree.

Her writing is rich with allusion and parody and parallel and intertextuality, a pleasure for those who recognise the references and engage with them. But she sometimes had to battle with her editors who tried to get her to be explicit about her ubiquitous quotes and echoes of the great writers of the past as well as snippets of popular culture, song, myth and history. She didn't want to have to spoil the flow and stop and say "as so-and-so said..." It would be as intrusive as if TS Eliot had included all the sources of the wonderful tapestry that is The Waste Land, in the actual poetic text itself.

I can predict - wryly - that the very people who may well cry out for more footnotes and for explanation and interpretation of Frame's non-fiction, are the ones who already know many of the little details anyway. One suspects that such a person would just want to make sure everyone else knows they know. And if their complaint is that the 'context' hasn't been set, then you can be sure that they will mean "the competing context", ie, the standard patronising version so prevalent in the New Zealand universities.

Having no context is a context. It asks you to take Frame at face value instead of second guessing her or challenging her agency.

In putting together In Her Own Words our policy was to explain Janet Frame as little as possible, and to give her the floor.

Annotation, in any case, is a great delight best left to the professionals who enjoy it so much, and there is a field day to be had with the new book. Please enjoy!

Michael King gave a talk at the 2000 Wellington International Festival of the Arts in which he tried to convey Janet's position on annotation and citation. I think he gives her too harsh an attitude in attributing her the belief that people "did not deserve" to be told, if they hadn't already noticed an allusion, because I think her feeling was more that the text shouldn't be dissected, it should be absorbed on a deeper level as a living thing; but I do remember her annoyance at her prose being divided up and categorised according to its influences and echoes, so from my own observations I can confirm that he has the basics correct:

Her view was that those who recognised the allusion found their own reward; those who did not, did not deserve to be told. Her wish was that readers and critics simply enjoy eating the pudding instead of putting in their thumb and pulling out a plum, and by so doing announcing what good boys they were. And it was this preference that had made her uncomfortable about the function of literary criticism in general, which she said, produced newly sprung essays "With my own books lying alongside them like shrivelled skins".

Page 30, 'The Road to Oamaru (pp18-33) in Tread Softly For You Tread On My Life: New & Collected Writings Michael King (Cape Catley 2001)

Choosing a title

2011-11-08T11:01:00.025+13:00

Regarding the title of Living in the Maniototo (1979), Janet Frame said:

"I wanted a Maori word to get into the American newspapers"

(From a 1985 feature interview with Stephanie Dowrick printed in the Sydney Morning Herald. Cited on page 132 in Janet Frame In Her Own Words, Penguin NZ, November 2011)

And so the Maori name Maniototo ('bloody plain') did get "into the American papers" - a more rare feat back in 1979 than it might be over thirty years later, in 2011. Amongst other US publications, there was a review - as always - of the internationally acclaimed New Zealand author Janet Frame's latest novel in Time magazine.

Margaret Atwood reviewed Living in the Maniototo for the New York Times Book Review. She called it ‘quirky, rich, eccentric, nervous and sometimes naive, like a cross between Patrick White’s novels and Stevie Smith’s poems." Janet Frame's scintillating new novel with the Maori word in the title was also reviewed in the New Yorker (‘a clever, high-spirited performance . . . her readers [are kept] happily alert to the cross-currents of her intellect, her imagination, and her memory’, as well as in the Los Angeles Times and the Kirkus Review and others.

Over thirty years later the New Zealand Maori language - once looking endangered after colonial onslaught - is flourishing, and so - arguably - is the literature of New Zealand, which will feature as the guest nation at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Hello global village!

2011-11-08T00:29:00.001+13:00

According to Sitemeter, the most recent 100 visitors to this blog (over a period of a couple of days) have come from:

Tunisia
Spain
Sweden
Austria
Colombia
Mexico

France x4
- several locations

Japan x7
- several locations

Canada- x3
Alberta, Ontario, NW Territories

USA x 24
- several locations including
New Orleans
California
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania

UK x11
- several locations including
Manchester
Stockport
London (several)
Birkbeck
Northampton
Edinburgh

Australia x7
- several locations including:
Melbourne
Brisbane
Adelaide
Sydney

NZ x18
- several locations including
Wellington
Porirua
Christchurch
Auckland
Te Kauwhata
Nelson
Dunedin

and 15 "unknowns" from who knows where - their isps cover their tracks...

Over a longer period the spread is a little wider.

(Other recent visits have been from Estonia, Belgium, Korea, Russia, Germany, Malaysia, Indonesia...)

Frame was not autistic says Michael King

2011-11-07T20:56:00.003+13:00

"The notion that she's some kind of perpetually frightened autistic creature that shrinks from all human contact just isn't true" ~ Janet Frame's biographer Michael King to Iain Sharp, quoted in 'In the Frame' Sunday Star-Times, 15 September 2002.

Was Janet Frame autistic?

It's a seductive theory and it has had two or three aggressive advocates whose passion for their fantasy about Frame to be correct, is strong to the point of virulent, and is not apparently subject to reason or evidence.

They will even invent support for their theory, as in the case of autism researcher Hilary Stace who has been quoted in the New Zealand Medical Journal no less, as saying this:

"I discussed the possibility with [the late] Michael King who indicated agreement, mentioned she had shown interest in autism since the diagnosis of her great niece, but suggested it was best not to publicise my research as it might upset members of her family."

(Hilary Stace, NZMJ 26 October 2007)

http://journal.nzma.org.nz/journal/120-1264/2791/content.pdf

Stace put those false words into Michael King's mouth not just in the medical journal, but also in a letter to the Star-Times, and elsewhere on the internet.

I wrote to her at the time saying that I had been close to both Janet Frame and Michael King and the suggestion was ludicrous that Michael might have bought into the idea that Janet had high-functioning autism or Asperger's syndrome. I knew him too well and he knew Janet too well, and I had spent a lot of time in their company and had discussed topics like this with them both, together and separately. But Stace continued to make this claim that [the late] Michael King had supported her, despite admitting she had no evidence for it.

(Just as there is no evidence for the conspiracy theory that somehow there was a diagnosis that for some reason the family or estate was or is "hushing up"... as if we care for anything but the truth!)

I still consider it an outrage that Stace has misused Michael King after his death to slander Janet Frame's family. What Stace has written is untrue and unfair and Michael was not there to contradict her. Her claim that there was a hush-up was basically an attempt to neutralise my objection to the offending Sarah Abrahamson opinion article and characterise me as merely having an emotional reaction rather than one based on fact and experience. I was cruelly accused of feeling "shame" at my daughter's autism and of being in denial of Janet's supposed autism, also apparently through disgust for the condition of autism in general. How can one counter such ad hominem and underhand tactics? I was advised to withdraw from such a toxic battlefield and so I did.

But, what about Janet Frame herself, who did not die until 2004, and so was one of the "family" and yet doesn't seem to figure as an important component of Stace's anecdote or of Michael's warning? It's instructive that Stace ignores Frame's possible reaction to her essay at the time she showed it to King. While Stace is claiming that Michael said that members of the Frame family will be "upset" if she makes her "discovery" public, Frame herself was still alive and well! And yet the "family" who will be "upset" doesn't seem to include the subject of the spurious diagnosis! Stace has so internalised her psychological projections onto Frame, it never even occurs to her that - if Michael ever made a warning - that the warning might have been that Frame herself would sue Stace if she were to make an unfounded public medical diagnosis. (Janet was ever ready to sue anyone who had public claims about her medical status - she was heartily sick of their unwarranted intrusions.)

Why would Frame's family be bothered? It also shows that Stace has a patronising view of Frame as incapable of having her own reaction - perhaps Stace believes the mythologised nonsense that Frame led a dependent and protected life and wasn't fully in control of her faculties? Is Stace's stereotype of Frame as isolated and passive, why Stace can so blithely label Frame against her will and without consulting her personally, and expect to publish her 'research' without inviting Frame's fury and possible litigation?

Or did Stace imagine Frame would be thrilled that at last someone has "understood" her? Little wonder she has had to invent an obstructive family to protect herself from the realisation that Frame would not in fact welcome being slapped with yet another misdiagnosis yet again made from misconceptions and without proper investigation.

Michael most likely pussy-footed around the subject to protect Stace's delicate ego. It wouldn't have been the silliest theory he had heard about Janet Frame and he had learnt to be tactful when he was regaled by someone with a fanciful anecdote or belief.

I've said it before - it's the Kerry Fox Janet (from the movie) these people count as their intimate pal who would be relieved - in their fantasy - to hear they (alone) truly understand her. It's a compliment to Fox's acting - and of course to the brilliance and immediacy of Frame's writing, that sensitive souls feel so close to their "Janet".

In real life, Frame was a strong self-directed person and none of her family would have dared to try to interfere in her affairs. Nobody 'guarded' her. She was top dog. It just shows how much these people think they know Frame as a person, and how little they attribute her any agency and self-direction. She's a puppet to them, and it surprises them that she had the intelligence and foresight to leave a legal structure in place after her death to prevent just their kinds of attempts to exploit Frame and misuse her copyright. They're annoyed by the opposition they encountered and they personalise it to me as person and mother and try to discredit me.

Well it's hard to refute a claim that has no basis in fact. Which is why most knowledgeable professionals have steered away from this 'debate'. They can see it has no validity. It is pretty hard to counter a scientist who invents their data, and that's pretty much what these people did in their campaign, including 'diagnosing' a cultural legend rather than investigating what the real person was actually like.

It's not the first time an autism debate has been found to be based on an untruth.

Anyway eventually "the truth will out": that is a firm belief and comfort of mine. And so early last year I came across evidence in the historical record that in 2002 Michael King had refuted the use of the word "autistic" to describe Janet. It may well be argued that Michael was not using the word 'autistic' in a scientific sense - and he clearly wasn't - but Hilary Stace has already told us that King had earlier read her research arguing that Janet Frame was on the autistic spectrum, so we must acknowledge that King was not ignorant; he had been presented with the theory in an academic context, including a technical definition of the autistic syndrome or disorder, so he knew what was at stake when he rejected the notion that Janet Frame was "autistic". And thanks to Stace's letter to the NZMJ, we know for sure that Michael was au fait with the syndrome, so when he is rejecting the notion that Janet is autistic, he is also rejecting Stace's theory!

In many respects I have a great admiration for Hilary Stace and her work in the community, but she has made a mistake here. I wonder if I will ever get an apology for the way she misrepresented Michael King as well as me and my family?

For further reading, please refer to my post of January 2010 for an earlier discussion of this proof that Michael King did not in fact believe the autism hypothesis was warranted, including my rejoinder to an 'anonymous' commenter who ignores all the subtlety of Michael's argument and evidence, and mine, and launches an irrelevant and self-contradictory attack on us both:

http://slightlyframous.blogspot.com/2010/01/michael-king-on-real-janet-frame.html

London's controversial research Centre in the news again

2011-11-06T18:35:00.001+13:00

I was very interested yesterday to see this news story on the stuff.co.nz website, originally published in Wellington's The Dominion Post newspaper:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/5913376/Centre-director-offered-hush-money

The 'Centre for New Zealand Studies' referred to has been in the news before. Two years ago, for instance, when it was suddenly closed down, causing an uproar among a certain section of New Zealand's creative and academic fraternity who had supported such a worthy-seeming and useful initiative. They even organised a petition. As with the current controversy it seemed hard to get the "real story" and efforts to save the centre were fruitless, despite the efforts of NZ Prime Minister John Key (his 'intervention' apparently falling short of actual financial support). Read more (from September 2009) here:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=408031

There's an even earlier chapter in the history of this Centre that begs to be retold. Two years before the closure, in 2007, the Janet Frame Estate criticised a fundraising effort being made on behalf of the Centre for NZ Studies. An associate of the Centre had donated an original Janet Frame manuscript to the Centre and the fundraisers behind the Centre decided to sell that manuscript rather than preserve it for posterity. We felt they rather had their priorities wrong. If they were ostensibly engaged in "research" on "NZ culture" then why endanger a rare and significant piece of it just for the sake of a few thousand dollars? What was the message here? The hand-annotated A State of Siege manuscript was subsequently lost at auction, into private hands. Its original owner Bob Cawley was gifted the manuscript by Janet Frame herself, and Bob had clearly intended his Janet Frame papers to be safely and respectfully lodged in an Archive for the benefit of future researchers (we have his letters to prove it). After his death the papers and manuscripts went under the control of his widow who unfortunately had other ideas including turning some of the Janet Frame material into cash in a misguided philanthropic effort. I suggested to her that the greater philanthropy would have been to honour her husband's wishes and donate the papers to a Library under appropriate conditions.

My protests fell upon deaf ears. I even tried to contact High Commission staff but I was gate-kept and the widow's actions were defended. Slanderous comments were circulated about me in order to try to neutralise my objections (not the first time the various vultures trying to cash in on Frame have tried that strategy in order to discredit me!) It was claimed that I had been "abusive" to the widow. Again not the first time the perpetrators of an abuse have made that accusation against me when I have fruitlessly appealed to their sense of ethics...

Fundraisers for the Centre had first offered the manuscript to the Hocken Library (the 2007 approach to the Hocken was made by the same Janet Wilson who has co-authored the 2011 review of the Centre) but when the fundraisers didn't receive a satisfactory offer they decided to put the manuscript up for auction in Wellington.

There were some news reports at the time - the first, before the auction, in the NZ Herald, came across as a promo for the sale, and didn't question the morals at all: "typed on yellow A4 paper, the manuscript is all the more precious and revealing for its hand-written editing notes, a hand-written title page and dedication. Its reserve is set at $14,000." The item notes especially that: "Proceeds will go to the Centre for New Zealand Studies, at Birkbeck, University of London."

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/arts-literature/news/article.cfm?c_id=18&objectid=10454513

I was interviewed for a news report after the auction, in the Dominion Post:

http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/15577/Janet-Frame-script-fetches-13-000

Bookmarks

2011-11-05T16:31:00.002+13:00

A lovely set of five book marks has been produced for the Janet Frame House at 56 Eden Street Oamaru, thanks to funding from the Real NZ Festival.

More information can be obtained from the Eden Street Trust's website here.

Each bookmark has a quote from Janet Frame and a photograph of the house or surroundings.

The quotes are:

In my family words were revered as instruments of magic
~ Landfall essay 'Beginnings' (1965)

Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination
~ The Envoy from Mirror City (1984)

Possibility was not a bag or box that could be closed and sealed, it was a vast open chute which received everything, everything; one could not choose or direct or destroy the powerful flow of possibility.
~ Towards Another Summer (written 1963; published 2007)

There is no past present or future. Using tenses to divide time is like making chalk marks on water.
~ Faces in the Water (1961)

I wanted an imagination that would inhabit a world of fact, descend like a shining light upon the ordinary life of Eden Street.
~ To the Is-land (1982)

This World and That World

2011-11-05T14:29:00.005+13:00

"This world and that world: When I talked of this world I was
referring to the world where one lived as one was expected to, that is,
a job of whatever kind, possibly marriage, children, the conventional
happenings of that time. That world referred to the world where I
might live as myself, doing what I had chosen to do, i.e. writing. My
reference to this and that world has been taken to be a reference to
this world as the so-called ‘real’ world and that world as an unreal
world. I have never lived in a so-called ‘unreal’ world. I hoped only,
with the help of elusive imagination, to transform ‘this’ world into
my ‘that’ world."

"I don’t think people [who’ve read my work or
have ‘heard’ of me] ever forgive me for the ordinary
practical reality of myself as opposed to the myth that some people
in New Zealand have created to represent me. I resent this myth. I’ve
even contemplated legal action to subdue it."

~ Janet Frame, 'Notes for Interviews' in Janet Frame In Her Own Words (Penguin 2011)

Dunedin maid made good*

2011-11-03T18:06:00.003+13:00

I was recently interviewed for Dunedin's TV Channel 9 and for a local audience I stressed how the new book Janet Frame in her own words would probably surprise some people who had been influenced by the myth of Janet Frame as a socially incapable person, given that it provides evidence for her nearly 80 years of vigorous engagement with the world.

http://www.ch9.co.nz/content/her-own-words

Of course there is so much more to the book than the biographical aspect of filling in a more rounded picure of the author, but that will be just one of the pleasures and surprises for old and new fans of Frame's writing.

[* As a young woman Janet Frame worked as a housemaid in a Dunedin hotel and as a nursemaid in a Dunedin rest home. In later years she returned to live in Dunedin as successful world-famous author. As she pointed out herself, it was like a fairy tale.]

An editor at her table

2011-10-30T22:12:00.000+13:00

Denis Harold and Janet Frame snapped in conversation at a Dunedin cafe (2003)

Denis Harold was a close friend of Janet Frame's and was named by her as an executor of her will. In 1999 she appointed him as one of the four founding trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust.

Denis was raised in Taranaki and has travelled extensively. He now lives on Dunedin's Otago Peninsula. He has worked as a journalist, English teacher, bookseller, researcher and editor. He has an MA (Distinction) in English. He co-edited two previous volumes for the Frame estate: The Goose Bath (Vintage 2006) and Dear Charles, Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence (Holloway Press 2010).

Notable among Denis Harold's other publications is Maori Prisoners of War in Dunedin 1869 - 1872: Deaths and Burials and Survivors (Hexagon 2000) recently name checked in Witi Ihimaera's new novel The Parihaka Woman.

Denis Harold (nearest the camera) appears on a panel

on the theme of Janet Frame's poetry

chaired by Jan Kemp (second from left)

at Auckland's Going West Literary Festival

in September 2004

Janet Frame Speaks For Herself

2011-10-30T13:10:00.005+13:00

Accept no imitations or inventions!

Listen to what Janet Frame had to say for herself!

Presenting Janet Frame's public writings and her speech made "on the record" from nearly 70 years of her life (from ten years old to shortly before her death at the age of 79)

Janet Frame In Her Own Words
Penguin NZ (November 2011)

Contents include:

All of her published short non-fiction
Nearly 80 pages of direct speech excerpts from 35 of her broadcast and press interviews
Letters to the Editor covering 50 years of her life (from 1935 to 1985)
Various speech notes
Reports on fellowships
A conference paper Frame gave at Hawaii
Her diary notes on a Toronto writers' festival (where she appeared along with Susan Sontag, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Homero Aridjis, John Wain, Margaret Atwood and others)
Speech given at a poetry reading in a prison
Speech given on receiving a Massey University Medal
Acceptance speech at the Chilean Embassy in Wellington
Transcript of a previously unknown oral history recording given while Frame was a NZ delegate at a PEN conference in Sydney
Eulogies for well-known writer friends - Baxter, Sargeson, Brasch
Reviews - Maurice Gee, William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad etc
Memoir
Reminiscences and reports on fellowships
Excerpts from correspondence on literary and publishing topics
Satire, poems and short stories
Interviews published in Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, USA, UK
Comments on her writing process and her reputation
Favourite writers
etc... etc...
Even a cartoon

Publication date: 31 October 2011

Available in shops early November.

It is a beautiful compact jacketed hardback, but there is nothing small about the more than 80,000 words inside the covers, which pack quite a punch.

There will also be an e-book version.

Selected and edited by Frame's executors Denis Harold and Pamela Gordon

Spreading the word

2011-10-27T22:02:00.004+13:00

The publicity for Janet Frame In Her Own Words has begun.

Graham Beattie of Beattie's Book Blog kicked off the day by posting the very first preview of the new book on his blog: he was given permission by the publisher to print the short but provocative preface to the book, and also to feature a (hopefully) tantalising excerpt from the collection, in the form of a letter Janet Frame wrote to the editor of the Wanganui Chronicle, protesting against the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour. The letter includes a poem which finishes with the lines:

So please don't give to me responsibility

give me only the rugby score.

Also today, I spoke to Kathryn Ryan of Radio New Zealand National's Nine to Noon programme. She is an intelligent and thoughtful interviewer and she did a wonderful job I felt (and I tried to do my duty, which is to spread the word about this beautiful book).

The interview was broadcast at 11.30 am on Thursday the 27th October 2011.
Here is the online archive:

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2501117/janet-frame's-work,-a-new-collection

Publication date for the book is next Monday the 31st of October.

(Halloween! Trick or Treat!)

UPDATE:

Copies should be available in shops in early November.

His-story or her-story?

2011-10-27T21:10:00.000+13:00

Whose word do we believe and why?

If we are to believe what we are told by Paul Millar in his biography of Bill Pearson (2010 AUP), when he makes public the long-whispered gossip that Jim Baxter had a sexual liaison with John Money, Millar having been told this by Bill Pearson who in turn was told it by Jim Baxter himself, then the interesting question arises, considering the fact that John Money - when he was asked about the rumour - denied that he ever had sex with Jim Baxter, then what else did John Money lie about?

John Money was of course the person who, along with the heads of the university psychology department where he was teaching, delivered an apparently suicidally-inclined Janet Frame to Dunedin Hospital, where she almost immediately was recorded as a "schizophrenic" - a label which seems very likely Money contributed to, and which was never challenged or properly investigated until many years later.

Money had reason to be worried about the damage to his future career that might result from the exposure of his tangled emotional affair with his friend and student Janet Frame. They were more or less the same age. He was a student himself, merely her tutor; and he was inexpertly experimenting with psychoanalysis on her. He had not yet begun his doctoral studies when he effected his fateful input into Frame's disastrous misdiagnosis.

I would tend to believe the story about Jim Baxter and John Money, given that my father Wilson Gordon was a close friend of Jim Baxter's and John Money's in the same era, and used to say that John had tried to seduce him too, although their friendship did not suffer from Dad's polite refusal; and that in those days John was well known for his eagerness to have casual sex with women as well as men. John was known to be "free and easy" with either sex, Dad said. Apparently even Dad's former fellow conchie Rodney Kennedy - himself openly gay amongst his own circle of friends - warned my father (this was before his marriage to my mother) against a planned weekend trip alone with John, because his "reputation" would suffer. (Those were narrow-minded days.)

Anyway. The question arises, just how reliable is hearsay? Do we trust the word of Paul Millar as he cites Bill Pearson quoting Jim Baxter? Or do we believe John Money when he denies that dalliance? And if we accept that John Money wasn't being honest about his relationship with Jim Baxter, should we not then be more dubious about his assertions concerning Janet Frame's so-called "mental state"?

After the literary historians have finished removing the motes from their historical peepshows, perhaps they might like to start dealing with some of the rotten planks shoring up their grand versions of the past.

And by that, I mean, of course, wouldn't it be refreshing if certain received theories about Janet Frame were interrogated rather than just blindly accepted because some generally reliable good old boy has sworn it were so?

Another NZ story goes global

2011-10-25T14:35:00.002+13:00

News from Janet Frame Literary Trust Award recipients:

Recipient of the 2009 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for fiction, Alison Wong, has picked up many honours for her first novel As the Earth Turns Silver. This historical novel giving insight into the experience of early Chinese New Zealanders won the New Zealand Post Book Awards Fiction prize in 2010 and was also shortlisted for the 2010 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and it was longlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. As the Earth Turns Silver has already been translated into several languages, and continues to feature on local bestseller lists and has been further distinguished by winning funds under Creative New Zealand's new Translation Grant Scheme for a Spanish translation Cuando la tierra se vuelve de plata - which is published by Ediciones Siruela.

‘Wong excels at exploring how prejudice and acceptance are passed down through generations, while her keen ear for accents invariably entertains. Wong’s prose is lean and muscular, and her chapters short, making this an easily engaging read.’ Daily Mail

‘Robust yet delicately told…Wong has a good story to tell, and releases the information slowly; the narrative is brilliantly plotted…there is an unusual intelligence about this subtle, crafted novel that forces one to stop and absorb the enormity of the smallest gesture.’ The Irish Times

How much 'Jane' is there in Campion's 'Janet'?

2011-10-17T12:50:00.002+13:00

Here's a well-researched, intelligent and grown-up view on this topic. How refreshing!

Jane Campion: Authorship and Personal Cinema
by Alistair Fox
Indiana University Press (2011)

Publisher's Blurb:

Alistair Fox explores the dynamics of the creative process involved in cinematic representation in the films of Jane Campion, one of the most highly regarded of contemporary filmmakers. Utilizing a wealth of new material—including interviews with Campion and her sister and personal writings of her mother—Fox traces the connections between the filmmaker’s complex background and the thematic preoccupations of her films, from her earliest short, Peel, to 2009’s Bright Star. He establishes how Campion’s deep investment in family relationships informs her aesthetic strategies, revealed in everything from the handling of shots and lighting, to the complex system of symbolic images repeated from one film to the next.

The chapter dedicated to discussing Jane Campion's adaptation of Janet Frame's autobiography is called:

"How painful it is to have a family member with a problem like that": Authorship as Creative Adaptation in An Angel at My Table.

I can highly recommend Alistair Fox's book for its analysis of the ways in which the Campion film diverges from the text it adapts - Frame's autobiography - in order to play out and project Jane's own preoccupations and personal themes onto Janet's story.

One of the issues Fox identifies is the fact that the father in the Angel movie appears to have been lifted out of somewhere other than Frame's life. Some of the scenes concerning the father and daughter have been fictionalised.

I can testify, having watched the videotape of the Campion movie with Janet Frame at her home, that when she saw scenes like the one where 'Janet' returns to her family home after her father's death, and tries on his boots, she exclaimed "I would never have done something like that!"

Consequently, the influence of Frame's mother Lottie in the movie, has been altered and downplayed.

Alistair Fox notes that Campion's depiction of Janet is consistent with

"a child who has suffered emotional deprivation because of some disturbance in the process of primordial psychic structuring that should have taken place through the infant-mother relationship. Campion appears to have constructed Janet as an embodiment, or emblem, of this condition of narcissistic fragility" (page 98).

Fox goes on to document that in interviews and elsewhere Campion herself has identified strongly with this condition: "We all feel vulnerable and unchosen, unlovable, uncared about in one way or another" she said in her director's commentary to the film. But by going back to Janet Frame's text Fox is able to ascertain that there is not in fact any evidence for this aspect to Frame's childhood:

'There is nothing in Frame's autobiography to suggest that Janet's parents neglected her or left her feeling unloved, nor that she felt a "desperate need for attention". These states of mind appear to be imputed as a result of Jane Campion's projections.'

All this creativity and transformation from the page to the screen is as one would expect of the work of a great artist like Jane Campion. Unfortunately over time the Campion movie has been read by many almost as a documentary or 'biopic' of Janet Frame's life, and has led from the sublime poetry of the film - which on one of its levels is an inspiring study in the struggle of a female artist to survive adversity and to triumph over it - to the absurd ridiculousness of posthumous speculations about Janet Frame's 'mental state' based on the behaviour of the actors in the Campion film.

Peter Olds - an update

2011-10-16T20:46:00.006+13:00

News from Janet Frame Literary Trust Award recipients.

In 2005 Peter Olds was the inaugural recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for Poetry.

Here are some of his latest publications:

Poetry Reading at Kaka Point (Steele Roberts, 2006)

In the Dragon Cafe (Kilmog Press, 2007)

Graffiti (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop, 2009)

Ballad of the Last Cold Pie (Cold Hub Press, 2010)

As well as keeping busy performing and publishing, Peter Olds has taken part in some artist/poet collaborations. He is pictured below with sculptor Peter Nicholls at their 2009 public installation at the former Tepid Baths in Dunedin.

Photo: Jane Dawber, Otago Daily Times, 13 June 2009

Peter Olds was the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellow in 1978 and he recently returned to the Otago campus to work with the 2011 Printer in Residence John Denny on the production of a fine hand printed edition of poems featuring images by well-known artist Kathryn Madill. The book is called Skew-Whiff and was recently published by Otakou Press.

Centrefold of Skew-Whiff, based on graffiti observed on Dunedin streets

Photo of Peter Olds: Channel 9

Rhian Gallagher's Shift

2011-10-15T12:10:00.000+13:00

News from Janet Frame Literary Trust Award recipients.

Rhian Gallagher was the recipient of the 2008 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for poetry. Auckland University Press (NZ) has recently published her second book of poetry Shift which is also forthcoming from Enitharmon Press (UK).

Shift was launched recently in Dunedin and is already receiving excellent reviews such as this one in the Otago Daily Times and here at the Booksellers NZ blog.

I had the great honour and pleasure to be asked to speak at the launch which was held at the University Book Shop.

Rhian Gallagher speaks at the launch of her new book Shift
at the University Book Shop in Dunedin

Alan Loney's new blog

2011-10-14T16:46:00.001+13:00

Anne of the Iron Door by Alan Loney

News from Janet Frame Literary Trust Award recipients:

Recipient of the 2011 Janet Frame Literary Trust Award for poetry, Alan Loney, has started a new blog: Electio Editions.

Alan Loney also has an Electio Editions website with extensive bibliographies of the books he has printed as well as his own writings.

The Books to Come by Alan Loney

Patrick Evans 'Gifted': Cultural Sabotage

2011-10-10T11:27:00.001+13:00

In the opinion of the Janet Frame estate, the novel 'Gifted' by Christchurch English lit lecturer Patrick Evans, is an act of cultural sabotage, a deliberate attempt to distort the documented facts of Frame's life and work on the part of an academic in order to promote his own theories. It is not a 'historical novel' because it does not, as a historical novel generally does, adhere to all known historical facts and make reasonable guesses to fill in what has not been documented, to make the history come alive for the reader.

Fair enough for a novelist to write speculative and satirical fiction, as in fact CK Stead did, covering the same era, in All Visitors Ashore. But Stead changed the names. Evans uses "Janet Frame" and "Frank Sargeson" as characters, and the publicity and promotion around his novel has exploited Frame's name and reputation - always a photo of her, rarely of the 'novelist' Evans - and patsy reviews have suggested that there is biographical validity to the novel. There is not. Many crucial facts have been changed or distorted or omitted.

Trustee Denis Harold reviewed the book earlier this year:

http://slightlyframous.blogspot.com/2011/02/gifted-by-patrick-evans-review.html

A whale of a tale

2011-10-05T11:56:00.008+13:00

Yesterday morning's Dominion Post (Wellington, NZ) featured a front page teaser for an inside story about a rare visit of a pod of orcas into Wellington harbour. Above the paper's banner was a picture of a killer whale superimposed with the words:

An orca at our table

Nice to see the old catchphrase an x at y's table (from Janet Frame's An Angel at My Table, adapted for the celebrated movie by Jane Campion) still at use in New Zealand idiom. (See my earlier blog posts 'A catchphrase on my candle' and 'A bro'Town at my table'.)

What made this particular showing of the expression especially noteworthy for me, is that the person who captured the mobile phone footage of the orcas in the harbour, was a close member of Janet Frame's family circle (namely my son Daniel). When the paper came out the next day and we saw the "An orca at our table" I asked Daniel, "Did they know that Janet was your great aunt?" and his answer was No - just a random coincidence.

Janet Frame wrote a delightful poem called 'Daniel' (it has been published in The Goose Bath), that starts:

Daniel

who was born manual
who longed to be electric
to go everywhere at the flick
of a switch

and finishes:

And wink-quick manual Daniel
became Why-electric.

She could have been prophesying the socially networked mobile phone generation!

Advance Copy

2011-10-01T12:00:00.004+13:00

The advance copy has arrived - one of the great pleasures of life!

The smell and the feel of a new book...

It's a small jacketed hardback, beautifully designed in a classic style, a handbook to be dipped into or read from cover to cover.

One month until the publication date of this wonderful book to be released on the first of November:

Janet Frame In Her Own Words

(Penguin NZ 2011)

Collected short non-fiction.

Essays, Reviews, Reports, Speeches, Eulogies.

Letters to the Editor.

Interview excerpts.

Etc.

Bound to cause a few tantrums from the predictable quarters.

Sure to be deeply appreciated by old and new fans of Janet Frame's work.

Certain to intrigue anyone interested in New Zealand literature.

Selected and edited by Frame trustees Denis Harold and Pamela Gordon.

Fixing the links

2011-09-30T23:34:00.002+13:00

Lots of work sat on the backburner while the non-fiction book was being researched, edited, proofread and sent off to the printer. My to-do list usually takes up at least 10 pages of a Spiral notebook, but the notebook has been full for quite some time.

Not long before she died, Janet said to me "You're going to be very busy. I'm sorry about that."

I had no idea, at the time, how right she was.

One non-urgent chore that has been neglected for a while was fixing the broken links on the Links page of the Janet Frame Literary Trust web site. It's had a pretty good tidy-up tonight with some new material added, and in the process I added more items to the to-do list for another day.

http://janetframe.org.nz/Links.htm

There's more to New Zealand than rugby

2011-09-08T13:18:00.000+12:00

The REAL NZ Festival invites visitors to New Zealand to check out the culture while they are here for the 2011 Rugby World Cup: food, wine, film, art, literature, heritage... etc...

And for anyone passing through OAMARU New Zealand, the Janet Frame House at 56 Eden Street is opening early this year, and for longer hours for the duration of the Real NZ festival.

http://www.nz2011.govt.nz/experiencerealnz/events/533-janet-frame-house

Opening date: Friday 9 September 2011
Hours: 1pm to 4 pm
Admission Fee: $5

"By the standards of most of their neighbours" says Frame biographer Michael King "family life at 56 Eden Street was austere and chaotic." The Frames were a working class family in a middle class milieu, and it's safe to say that then and now, much of the popular commentary in New Zealand about Janet Frame and her background has been filtered through a conservative middle class sensibility. Psychological judgements such as "chaotic" are made from a perspective on the "other side of the tracks". The daughters of the family all attended secondary school and three of them went on to study at University - an unusual achievement for a railway family.

Apart from its deep interest to fans of Janet Frame's writing, and to those who wish to learn more about New Zealand's greatest writer, Janet Frame's childhood home is of great interest because it has been preserved as an "authentic recreation of a New Zealand working class home during the Depression." A rare opportunity to step outside the grand mansions and museums and see how one ordinary small town family lived, and how from out of the protective cradle of the New Zealand social welfare system, that family gave rise to one very extraordinary New Zealand achiever.

Ghost words

2011-08-29T10:21:00.002+12:00

Jim Wilson of Phantom Billstickers did a Janet Frame poetry poster run in Christchurch yesterday to commemorate Janet Frame's birthday. He took this photo of a couple of the Janet Frame posters in front of an abandoned hotel in the part of the city devastated in the past year by a series of disastrous earthquakes. Here is the poem on the poster, and in the context of the Christchurch catastrophe - so many lost lives and so much lost heritage - it's very suitable:

THE END

At the end

I have to move my sight up or down.

The path stops here.

Up is heaven, down is ocean

or, more simply, sky and sea rivaling

in welcome, crying Fly (or Drown) in me.
I have always found it hard to resist an invitation
especially when I have come to a dead end
a
dead
end.

The trees that grow along cliff-faces,
having suffered much from weather, put out thorns
taste of salt
ignore leaf-perm and polish:
hags under matted white hair
parcels of salt with the string tangled;
underneath
thumping the earth with their rebellious root-foot
trying to knock up
peace
out of her deep sleep.

I suppose, here, at the end, if I put out a path upon the air
I could walk on it, continue my life;
a plastic carpet, tight-rope style
but I’ve nothing beyond the end to hitch it to,
I can’t see into the mist across the ocean;
I shall have to change to a bird or a fish.

I can’t camp here at the end.
I wouldn’t survive
unless returning to a mythical time

I became a tree

toothless with my eyes full of salt spray;

rooted, protesting on the edge of this cliff
- Let me stay!

(From The Goose Bath)

Recent academic books on Janet Frame

2011-08-29T09:52:00.000+12:00

Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame's The Lagoon and Other Stories

Vanessa Guignery (Publibook 2011)

Janet Frame: Short Fiction

edited by Marta Dvorak & Christine Lorre (Commonwealth Essays & Studies 33.2 Spring 2011)

The Frame Function: An inside-out Guide to the Novels of Janet Frame

Jan Cronin (Auckland University Press 2011)

Janet Frame (Writers and Their Work Series)

Claire Bazin (Northcote 2011)

Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction

Matthew St Pierre (Rowman & Littlefied 2011)

The Lagoon and Other Stories: Naissance d’une Œuvre

Claire Bazin & Alice Braun (Presses Universitaires de France 2010)

Janet Frame: The Lagoon and Other Stories

Ivane Mortelette (Atlande 2010)

Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame

edited by Jan Cronin & Simone Drichel (Rodopi 2009)

The Plot Thickens

2011-08-28T14:01:00.029+12:00

The cover of this excellent book tells its own story, foretelling the centrality that the location 'Esmonde Road' would play in the construction of New Zealand literary myths.

(The cover was designed by Kalee Jackson who also designed the cover of Jan Cronin's recently published monograph The Frame Function.)

The groundbreaking New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson located his influential salon at 14 Esmond Road, Takapuna. Over its history the street name has been 'officially' spelled alternately with and without and then again with the final 'e' - a naming as fluid and difficult to pin down as as the discourses that have emanated from the 'Sargeson mafia': a coterie of acolytes that for a long time has attempted to impose a party line on the telling of, for example, the Janet Frame 'story'. Some Frame scholars (eg Gina Mercer, Maria Wikse) have commented on the prominence of condescending representations of Frame as eternal handmaiden to the 'father of New Zealand literature', a judgement that competes with a perhaps more clear-eyed perception of Frame as trail blazer in her own right. But for many onlookers, Frame remains frozen in time in the little more than a year she spent boarding with Frank Sargeson, from early 1955 to mid-1956. The often misoygnist accounts of that era have favoured demeaning anecdote about Frame over objective report. One can detect many years of boozy hilarity and exaggeration in the retelling of the gossip, and eventually it has hardened into dogma. Meanwhile the hagiographical elevation of Frank to an untouchable sainthood is a little hard to take for those others of us - like me - who were also part of Frank's circle and weren't drunk at the time.

For examples of colourfully embroidered hearsay concerning Frame's brief stay at Esmond Road, see for instance the forthcoming Speaking Frankly - a soon to be published collection of the Frank Sargeson Memorial lectures delivered at Waikato University, edited by Sarah Shieff. It will be very useful to have all these lectures gathered between two covers.

Sarah Shieff is also editing a collection of Frank Sargeson's letters to be published next year by Random House NZ, and what a fascinating and revealing volume that promises to be. Frank and Janet had a long and rich correspondence and, considering the significance of the project, the Janet Frame Literary Trust has made Sargeson's letters to Frame available to Shieff as she makes her selection.

Frame takes her place

2011-08-28T12:01:00.077+12:00

The Settler's Plot: How Stories Take Place in New Zealand

by Alex Calder (Auckland University Press 2011)

ISBN 978 1 86940 488 8, paperback, 312pp $45

Publisher's blurb:

The Settler’s Plot is a fresh and engaging study of the relationship between literature and place in New Zealand. Drawing on an engrossing selection of documentary and literary sources, from F E Maning and Herbert Guthrie-Smith to Mansfield, Sargeson, Curnow and Frame, Alex Calder explores the places our writers have turned to most often: the beach, the farm, the bush, the suburb and ‘overseas’. He connects the history of Pākehā settlement to the way stories take shape in these settings through fascinating and unpredictable readings of some of our greatest works of literature.

Reviewer Nicholas Reid. calls A Settler's Plot "a book of outstandingly good socio-literary essays". I agree, and recommend the rest of Reid's review as well as the book, to anyone interested in New Zealand literature in general and of course in Janet Frame's place in the canon in particular.

The last chapter in the book is called 'Placing Frame' and appears to me as a refreshing and intelligent perspective on Janet Frame's work. It was satisfying to note that Calder has identified the posthumous autism 'diagnosis' of Frame by Hilary Stace and Sarah Abrahamson as "no more scientific than a diagnosis of witchcraft".

Highly recommended. And reading this book is a fine way for me to celebrate Janet Frame's birthday.

Happy Birthday Janet!

A Good Keen Kiwi

2011-08-27T17:53:00.000+12:00

The marvellous Chris Cole Catley was farewelled in Auckland today. She was a prominent New Zealander having contributed to the good of our society in so many ways, and she'll be sadly missed. She was a member of Frank Sargeson's 'inner circle' and as such she and Janet Frame knew each other quite well. Chris was also a very close friend of Michael King, who wrote the biographies of both Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame.

Chris has a quite astonishing list of achievements including being responsible for the renaming of the fruit known as a 'Kiwi' around the world! She was - among other things - a feminist, a Labour party activist, a journalist, an educator, a founder, an innovator, a lterary benefactor, a publisher, an author - and there's no doubt her tremendous energy and good nature charmed and overcame most of the obstacles she encountered in her drive to make the world a better place. Being such a lovely, fun-loving person, she'll be deeply missed by her family and friends and colleagues. She certainly has made the world a better place in so many ways and her legacy won't be forgotten.

I was privileged to know Chris and to cooperate with her on some literary and charitable projects and she was always a delight to work with and very supportive of my role as guardian of Janet Frame's estate.

One of the good guys. Farewell Chris, and may you rest in peace.

The Butterfly Effect

2011-08-24T16:52:00.000+12:00

Wow. I am finding it hard to keep up with all the publishing on Janet Frame in the past year or so! Here is another book that has recently been pointed out to me. This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at an international conference at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, in October 2010, as well as additional essays.

Janet Frame once called the process of writing stories 'more like chasing butterflies or mosquitoes than nettng a swarm of words ... I "capture" them by writing down their titles.' (Letter to Tim Curnow, 1989)

From this quotation comes the title for the latest scholarly volume on Janet Frame:

Chasing Butterflies: Janet Frame's The Lagoon and Other Stories ed. Vanessa Guignery (Publibook 2011)

See a preview on Amazon UK:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Chasing-Butterflies-Frames-Lagoon-Stories/dp/2748363906

Also on Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Chasing_Butterflies_Janet_Frame_s_The_La.html?id=e2WCudkfA-0C

Publisher's Blurb:

In 1951, Janet Frame published her first book The Lagoon and Other Stories, a collection which would win the most prestigious national literary award in New Zealand and launch her fascinating career. The essays collected in this volume examine the motifs at work in Frame’s short stories and unravel a unique literary world which revisits the realist tradition and grants prose a poetic dimension.
As much a reflexion about language, voice, modes of writing and narrative strategies as an analysis of Frame’s recurrent concerns with identity, childhood, relationships between mothers and daughters, secrecy, marginality, community or death, Chasing Butterflies is a great tribute to one of the most famous New Zealand writers.

Janet Frame's inspiring example

2011-08-18T12:49:00.001+12:00

It's always heartwarming to learn how many people from all around the world and from many walks of life have been inspired by Janet Frame's incredible but true story of survival and success. Her escape from the abuses of the provincial psychiatric institution that had misdiagnosed her, was a combination of her own strength of character and her determination to pursue her writing vocation no matter the trouble it got her into, with a touch of blind luck and even the gift of divine intervention courtesy of her guardian "angel".

Janet Frame's transformation into literary superstar was of course the result of no one magical event: as they say, it's amazing how much work over how many years goes into becoming an "overnight sensation".

It seems that the magnificent Spanish film maker Pedro Almodóvar is one of Janet Frame's many fans; according to a recent report in the Observer he recommended Janet Frame's autobiographies to his "new leading lady" Elena Anaya.

A previous Almodóvar leading lady was shown in one of his earlier films The Flower of my Secret to be a fan of Janet Frame's writing, along with the likes of Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Dorothy Parker. Almodóvar says of the women writers his character admires: "All these women are considered intellectuals, but what unites them most of all is the emotion in their work. They awaken feelings like a bolero, that Cuban feeling which endows the dancer of the bolero with such importance. For Leo [a former romance novelist, protagonist of The Flower of the Dance] it's the same. She is as moved reading a book by a woman as she is listening to a bolero. This is the subject of the essay she's writing - 'Pain and Life'. If she changes the tenor of her novels, her aim is not a greater intellectualism but a greater authenticity." (From Almodóvar on Almodóvar.)

A new collection of Frame scholarship

2011-08-03T22:47:00.003+12:00

The field of academic commentary on Janet Frame continues its dramatic expansion. The latest issue of the journal Commonwealth Essays and Studies has been devoted to a study of Janet Frame's short fiction. Some prominent names in international Frame studies are represented in it. We are always in safe hands when Belgian Marc Delrez - who, according to Peter Marsden, easily earns the status of "primus-inter-pares" of Frame scholars - is involved in the project, and there is much good research and analysis to recommend in this volume.

I feel the volume is blighted by the odd obsessive touch of biographical myth-making, but that is always going to happen when the subject is all things "Janet", which, let's face it (and I'm quoting here from her biographer Michael King in his more 'off-the-record' mode) "can be a bit of a nut-magnet"...

Even worse from my perspective, than the idiosyncrasies of pseudo-psychiatrists, is the fact that in two of the papers there are blatant examples of product placement - two academics from the same university both give astonishingly insupportable endorsements to a highly controversial fan fiction novel published by their own institution's academic Press. The novel exploits the publicity value of the myth of Janet Frame and stretches it beyond credibility for anyone who is actually familiar with her biography, as these 'experts' have proven themselves not to be, by their apparent swallowing of the deliberate and demeaning distortions their colleague has stitched together in order to "stitch up" Frame. The scholar-cum-novelist Patrick Evans has been "notoriously" plodding away at his campaign for decades, never letting the facts interfere with his speculation. He's finally realised that the truth is too much of a straight jacket, and has opted for outright fabrication. Both these commentators fondly quote his fanfic novel as if it contains valid insights into Frame's life or her attitude to language, and they seem to prefer the fictional caricature to the real Frame, and cite Evans's clumsy imitations rather than Frame's own texts. They even bypass Frame's posthumously published fiction (including a short story 'Silkworms' in which Frame herself fictionalised Sargeson, surely ripe material for synthesising!). For these parochial academics to favour an inferior copy of Frame as rendered by one of their cronies is a 'Framean' phenomenon indeed.

In context, the Commonwealth Essays and Studies volume offers gripping reading for the student of Frame, and makes a solid contribution to the burgeoning bookshelf. Don't forget to read Frame herself though guys! Many of the papers don't show any evidence that their authors were aware of or flexible enough to handle, the steady posthumous publishing of finished works that Frame either would not or could not get published in her lifetime. Where is the reaction to a delayed masterpiece such as Gorse is not people, crushingly rejected when Frame was at her most vulnerable? In her autobiography Frame even prepared her readers for the eventual release of her unpublished works such as Towards Another Summer and Gorse is not People, by telling the stories around them. As Maria Wikse recently pointed out in a review of another excellent volume of criticism, Frameworks (ed Cronin & Drichel), there does seem to be a peculiar reluctance on the part of some academics to go back to the drawing board and consider the 'new works'. (The argument that there hasn't been time to assess the posthumous works yet won't wash when one considers that the ripped-off novel Gifted written by an elderly male Professor, seems to have wormed its way into the discourse - thanks to the patsy recommendations, with no hint of a rigorous critique - after less than a year.)

Another sadly neglected work of Frame's is of course her autobiography, frequently relegated here to the status of warehouse to be plundered for real-life correspondences to fictional events, but not a text to be trusted where the author makes any claims that contradict the legend. This attitude is aptly illustrated by the footnote on page 98 (Oettli): "John Money is the person who inspired the character of John Forrest in Frame's autobiography". Inspired the character? There seems to have been precious little learned from Michael King's biography Wrestling with the Angel, either, and this distrust of the veracity of the non-fiction written by Frame as well as by her biographer has led to errors of fact that range from the merely sloppy to the scandalous.

If there was any overall process of editorial fact-checking in this volume of essays, it appears to have missed the extraordinary claim made by Simone Oettli in discussion of 'My Last Story' (written in 1946 along with most of the other Lagoon stories, while Frame was working as a housemaid-waitress-nurse in a rest home) that: "As far as we know, it will be ten years before Frame starts to write again"... The romantic belief that Frame and her fictional narrator in 'My Last Story' are one and the same, appears to take primacy over the historical facts. The facts are not hard to come by, and I am quite disillusioned to discover that even a Frame 'expert' can seem to be so unfamiliar with Frame's writing and publishing history. The facts are available to all via Frame's autobiography and the King biography, but the story of these "ten years" that seems to be quickly gaining traction, among the NZ academics at least, is the made-up one from the Evans novel (quoted at length in this volume by Lydia Wevers) in which an unknown and unpublished young woman arrives unannounced on to the great Frank Sargeson's door step. He is perplexed but takes her in. This is all lies, as is to be expected in fiction, but the reinvented story is treated by at least two papers here (written by Wevers and by Williams) as if it were an enlightening portrait of Frame and Sargeson.

In fact by 1955 Frame's reputation was striking awe into her countrymen. So much so that Frank Sargeson had sought her out and asked her to stay with him, and her presence there created a minor sensation, with the troops flocking by for a look at the "mad genius", as she had already been typecast. She had been publishing regularly, poetry (in The Listener in the early 1950s) and two book reviews, and had read a very well-received story on the radio, had of course won the prose fiction prize for The Lagoon. From the very first, she had been ambitious. Her first adult story had been published in The Listener without John Money's help, and there's an entirely valid argument available that it wasn't until Money started intercepting her stories (the legend says he "rescued" them from her), that she ran into the terrible five year delay between the acceptance of The Lagoon and its being published. Even while she was waiting for Denis Glover to publish her manuscript, Frame continued to send work to editors such as Charles Brasch. We now know, for instance, thanks to letters published in Dear Charles, Dear Janet (2010), that Frame sent Brasch a story for consideration in 1949. Brasch passed the story on to Glover without even replying to Frame. (Now there's something that deserves investigation! Why do we only hear how Frame was helped and mentored, when a cold hard look shows her being as often rejected, blocked, and being subject to delays despite her unfailing persistence in her vocation?) Now, much of this writing history between 1945 and 1955 is covered by Frame herself, and more is revealed by King, and some more has been uncovered by Frame's estate. If a 'Frame scholar' can be as wrong as to say "As far as we know it will be ten years before Frame starts to write again", about this period, what else are they getting wrong?

As a family member, of course I will be disconcerted when I discover that people are saying biographical things that I know to be incorrect. I know first hand how much it annoyed my aunt to be lied about, and misunderstood, and I know what some of the lies are and why they are so virulently defended. But my pleasure in reading the overall carefully argued and intelligent criticism in this collection is not diminished, and I do look forward to the continuing evolution of the arguments and the expositions.

As Jan Cronin says in Frameworks - "These are exciting times for Janet Frame studies."

33.2 (Spring 2011): Janet Frame: Short Fiction

CONTENTS

Marta DVORAK, Foreword

Marta DVORAK and Christine LORRE, Introduction

'The subject of words'

Marc DELREZ, The Literal and the Metaphoric: Paradoxes of Figuration in the Work of Janet Frame

Jean ANDERSON and Nadine RIBAULT, Why Two Heads are Sometimes Better than One: Collaborative Translation of Janet Frame's The Lagoon and Other Stories

W.H. New, S(words)tories

'External landscapes and geographies of the mind'

Allan WEISS, The Form and Function of the Modern Fable in Janet Frame's Short Stories

Lydia WEVERS, "A girl who is not me"

Mark WILLIAMS, "Tending the ovens": Janet Frame's Politics of Language

John THIEME, "Making chalk marks on water": Time and the Sea in Janet Frame's Faces in the Water and "The Lagoon"

The 'watching self'

Christine LORRE, Secrets in The Lagoon and Other Stories

Simone OETTLI, Janet Frame's Conceptualization of the Writing Process: From The Lagoon to Mirror City

Cindy GABRIELLE, Fences of Being: The Child in the World in Janet Frame's "A Note on the Russian War," "Prizes" and "Royal Icing,"

'(Inter/meta)textuality and the ontology of authorship

Janet WILSON, The Lagoon and Other Stories: Storytelling, Metafiction and the Framean Text
Marta DVORAK, Frame-breaking: "neither separate nor complete nor very important"

Reviews

Peter MARSDEN, Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame. Ed. Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel
Marc DELREZ, Dear Charles Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence. Ed. Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold

Christine LORRE, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Vol. 5, 1922-1923. Ed. Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott
Jean ANDERSON, Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand. By Christina Stachurski

Annex

The Writing of The Lagoon Stories, by Pamela Gordon, Literary Executor, Janet Frame Literary Trust

Enough already with the Chicks and Toby

2011-08-02T15:10:00.002+12:00

June Gordon pays a friendly visit to Oamaru to see her brother George Frame and his children

For my sins, I have been reading some contemporary Frame criticism, and I have been shocked to discover that there are still some people out there who obtusely equate members of Janet Frame's family with her fictional characters. Specifically, the Toby and Chicks of Owls Do Cry are conflated with Janet's brother George and her sister June. This despite the author's frequent protestations: for example, see the previous post where Janet Frame is quoted at the very moment of publication of her first novel - in 1957 - vehemently denying the suggestion that it is "autobiography". She even clarifies that her "Toby" is a much less bitter person than she believed her brother to be, and that her only surviving sister is completely unlike her "Chicks", which she explained elsewhere, was a deliberately drawn negative portrait of a vain and materialistic housewife. Anyone who knew my left wing, politically idealistic and rather other-wordly mother knew instantly that to insist on the comparison between her and "Chicks" was not just a slander, it was stupid.

The persistence of the belief reminds me of the well-known phenomenon of the naive viewer of a soap opera or film who mistakes the actor for the popular character they play (or vice versa!) and when the actor is seen out on the street, it is as if the celluloid image has taken on human form. Actors do get used to this. A young New Zealand actor who rose to prominence playing a Russian immigrant in the local drama Outrageous Fortune, is now playing a native-born Kiwi in a home-grown soap opera, and is apparently regularly complimented on how well she has managed to disguise her Russian accent! She has said in an interview that she has learnt not to bother insisting that it was the European accent that was the fake one.

My late mother June Gordon, Janet Frame's sister, continues to be misrepresented by similarly credulous soap-opera-brained "literary theorists" who even in 2011 are publishing academic papers claiming that the materialistic "Chicks" character in Owls Do Cry was a deliberately cruel - but accurate - portrait of the younger sister.

June Gordon, along with countless other candidates for the role of young married postwar woman with several children who left the provinces for life in the city, did share some but by no means all of the outward characteristics of the "Chicks" that Frame satirised.

One of the things that annoyed Janet Frame about the triumph with which certain literati trumpeted their so-called discovery of the "inspiration" for a particular character she had invented, was their patronising belief that they had any insight into her social circle and her experiences. Their assumptions that her circle was so narrow that they knew all the people she could possibly have drawn on, betrayed their condescending attitude towards her literary skills, and their likely swallowing of the myth that she was socially incapable.

Frame consistently denied that there was any correspondence between Chicks and June other than the kind of background detail that every novelist has to borrow from somewhere, which they do, perhaps unthinkingly at first, not expecting paparazzi to come snooping through armed with discarded toys and faded old family photos and half-remembered anecdotes, trying to fit them like cardboard jigsaw puzzle pieces into an Old Master. My mother and anyone close to her recognised and accepted that "Chicks" was not at all a portrait of her, and that any blame for the mistake was squarely to be placed at the feet of the hacks who were pushing the angle for their own reasons, not the least of which was an attitude of disbelief in the ability of the author to invent a fictional world. Because the insistence that her fiction is fact does usually tend to arise from the parallel insistence that Frame's mind was so disordered that she was incapable of making the distinction. These are the commentators who also usually proceed to claim that Frame "made up" her autobiography! They then have themselves a nice tidy package, worthy of a career of fruitless unwrapping, which is starting to look to me as though it is pretty much the way a lot of English literature academics spend their lives.

The original mistake was made early out of ignorance, and multiplied often, and the scholars are still quoting and footnoting each other's inventions as if they were gospel. The flakiest and the most mediocre shore each other up and rush to each other's defence if anyone (like a literary executor!) should be so importunate as to point out an occasional fact that gives the lie to their fantasy constructs.

What part of "the work is fiction" do they not understand?

2011-08-02T13:25:00.000+12:00

"It is of course pleasing to me to know that you like Owls Do Cry. [...] It is unfortunate that the book seems autobiographical, for except for occasional background and the portraits of the parents, the work is fiction. I do have a brother who is an epilectic; he would have to be much modified and sweetened to fit the character of Toby. The opposite process would have to take place in order to render my youngest sister anything like Chicks."

From a letter Janet Frame wrote to Pat Lawlor of Wellington, dated 17 June 1957, London. (Janet Frame's copy).

Over the transom

2011-07-26T14:09:00.002+12:00

Phrase of the day: "over the transom" = a publishing industry term for manuscripts that arrive unsolicited, deriving from the transom window above the door of a publishing firm, through which hopeful writers would thrust their efforts after hours. Most such manuscripts would of course end up unopened on the "slush pile".

I've always heard that publishers, editors (and literary agencies) are overwhelmed by the amount of literary submissions they receive unsolicited.

It is perhaps a lesser known fact that prominent authors also receive many unsolicited manuscripts from writing hopefuls. Janet Frame was often sent manuscripts by strangers, in the hope that she would read them and recommend them to her literary agents or to one of her publishers, or comment upon them and give advice.

What has surprised me, since becoming Janet Frame's literary executor, is that I too regularly receive unsolicited manuscripts and I am asked to read them and make comments or give advice, and it is hoped that I might forward the manuscripts on to Janet Frame's literary agents or publishers.

I'm sorry, but I really don't have time to read unsolicited manuscripts, and it is not appropriate to expect me to forward them to Janet Frame's literary agents and publishers.

Patrick Evans is "preposterous and wrong"

2011-07-26T13:12:00.000+12:00

"Preposterous and wrong" is how Frame biographer Michael King described a claim by English Department teacher Patrick Evans that in writing Frame's biography King had acted merely as a puppet for Janet Frame. (The presumption being the biography could not be taken seriously as a work of neutral scholarship.)

King made his retort during a speech delivered at the Tasmanian Readers' and Writers' Festival at Hobart in August 2001, but because of King's untimely death the Evans accusation is far better known than the King rejoinder. It's safe to say that the 'ventriloquist dummy' jibe has suited many a patronising Frame commentator for whom the King biography - based as it was on fact and not on the malicious gossip that had informed much of the previous public and private discourse about Frame - was an awkward document, presenting as it did a self-directed, clear-headed, robust and ambitious Janet Frame that challenged their own condescending portraits of her as ethereal, dependent, pathologically anti-social, and at best "fragile".

Preposterous and wrong are two words that in my opinion are two excellent words describing the pseudo-academic writings of that notorious Frame parasite Patrick Evans. 'Preposterous' because of his questionable moral stance culminating in the theft of her identity soon after her death, in order to reinvent her history in a turgidly written fan fiction novel; and his own lack of neutrality towards the great author, following Frame's spurning of him as a would-be biographer. And "wrong" because of the countless errors that have characterised Evans's deterministic proclamations about Frame, from the very first foolish bio-critical speculations in which he disseminated false facts about her real family, having assumed that a family she wrote about in a novel was her actual family, to those stubborn errors about her that he continues to make, on whom the ink is scarcely dry, including his apparent belief that by 1955 she was an "unknown" writer, when she was already a celebrated prizewinner, publishing regularly, and widely regarded as the "one to watch" in the New Zealand literary firmament, which is why Frank Sargeson - perhaps perceiving the threat to his own status as top dog - had pursued her tirelessly and persuaded her to join his campfire.

The paparazzi Evans - behaving more like a celebrity stalker than a level-headed man of letters - has repeatedly derided Frame's autobiography, and he has also mocked Michael King's authoritative biography of Frame, claiming that both were full of lies and omissions, and that there was more truth about Frame to be found in her fiction. And now, apparently, in his own fiction, a lacklustre rip-off called Gifted, which he has claimed is the "consummation" of everything Frame was not able to achieve in her work...!

Listen to his bizarre claim yourself in the last of these video clips:

http://keaandcattle.com/fiction/interview-patrick-evans

Patrick Evans's own 'truths' about Frame were apparently gained by guesswork and invention, yet he claims her own honestly told version of her life is the "myth". Snidely, he refers to Frame's autobiography and King's biography as "the authorised version". All this, perhaps, to obscure the fact of the ridiculous errors he made in his attempt at an unauthorised biography. In his continued campaign to discredit Frame and to reinvent her after his own image, he has felt it necessary to resort to writing a novel filled with gross distortions of almost every fact about Frame's brief stay in Takapuna. Perhaps Evans finally realised that his supposed 'insights' about Frame were not able to be supported by rigorous research and recourse to historical fact.

No wonder Evans has so consistently attacked the veracity of the King biography. If you read the King text next to almost any of Evans's vague and unsupported speculations, you start to notice how many errors pepper the Evans polemics. And the fanfic 'novel' can be recognised as the travesty that it is.

Here's Michael King hitting back at Evans for his sneering suggestion that King was merely a ventriloquist's dummy on Frame's lap:

"It is a biography written in consultation with its subject, because that is the only way in which it could have been written satisfactorily in her lifetime. The secondary literature was so riddled with error [20 errors of fact in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature] that only Frame herself could provide a clear foundation of reliable fact upon which narrative and analysis could be built. Only Frame could ensure that her family and friends would cooperate with a biographer. Only Frame could authorise access to her correspondence and permission to publish copyright material. Only Frame could release her own photographs for publication.

But the suggestion of one reviewer, one of Frame's would-be-biographers [Patrick Evans], that I have sat on her knee like a ventriloquist's dummy and voiced only those aspects of her life which she alone wanted to show the world, is preposterous and wrong. I wrote the text; I proposed what should or shouldn't be there; and I made final decisions about what would or would not be in the text. And sometimes I made those decisions in the face of Frame's opposition. It is very much to her credit that she not only consented to relive with me some of the most painful episodes in her life; but she also recognised my right, as a fellow professional, to make ultimate decisions about treatment and content."

You are now entering the (Dutch) human heart

2011-07-21T23:57:00.001+12:00

JE BETREEDT NU HET MENSELIJK HART

Janet Frame

http://www.degeus.nl/book/2142.html

new release:

July 2011

Dutch translation of Janet Frame's selected short stories

De Geus

Translated by Anneke Bok and Nen Lenders

ISBN 9789044514018

Wordstruck

2011-07-21T17:37:00.001+12:00

Every day is poetry day for some of us, but how good that there is a day set aside for the nationwide celebration of poetry. Tomorrow the winner of New Zealand's poetry book of the year will be announced, and from the top of the north to the bottom of the south there will be large and small gatherings and readings devoted to the art of poetry.

It's fitting this week that the poetry of one of New Zealand's best-loved bards, the late Hone Tuwhare, has been released as Small Holes in the Silence: Collected Works (Godwit 2011). Hone was based in Dunedin for many years and so he and Janet Frame were on kissing and cuddling terms (mind you Hone was on kissing and cuddling terms with a lot of people, he was a charming and outgoing person!)

As she did for her other literary friends and contemporaries, Janet made a point of attending Hone's launches and readings whenever she could. Janet and Hone had both been Burns Fellows at the University of Otago so they met up sometimes at Burns Fellow reunions. She also attended the unveiling of Hone's 'Writers' Walk' plaque in the Octagon just a couple of years before she died.

Last weekend I was browsing through the local newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, and I saw a photo of Hone Tuwhare giving a poetry reading at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Hone was standing at a podium in front of an installation of the wonderful work 'Black Phoenix' by another great New Zealander, the artist Ralph Hotere. The photo was taken from behind the audience, and I knew whose white frizzy mop of hair to look for, because I remembered that Janet Frame had attended that reading. Sure enough there she is, captured from the back, listening intently. Here's a link to the newspaper article about Ralph Hotere (who celebrates his 80th birthday this year) and if you were to click on the photograph of the poetry reading at Dunedin's Wordstruck! festival that took place in May 2000, you might be able to recognise the unobtrusive elderly lady merging into the crowd. Any strangers that recognised her respected her right to privacy; in the context, she was among friends and lovers of poetry and art. (Anyone who didn't recognise Janet Frame in public, may well still be under the impression that the "famous recluse" never left her house.)

The elephant in the room

2011-07-20T17:27:00.001+12:00

‘Why don’t you prune this tree?’ Peggy asked as a branch pinged at her face. ‘It must be the oldest pear tree I’ve ever seen. Look at its trunk, all gnarled like an elephant. And if you’re not careful it’ll grow right inside your kitchen door. Not to mention blocking your view and your light and the insects that will come in.’

Intensive Care (1970)

Intensive Care and Daughter Buffalo (Vintage, Random House NZ 2008)

Excellent of its kind

2011-07-19T23:53:00.000+12:00

Manifold Utopia: The Novels of Janet Frame by Marc Delrez (Rodopi 2002)

Here's a book I can recommend highly, if you're a student interested in exploring an academic perspective on Janet Frame.

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