Praises for Prizes

"Janet Frame ranks as one of the great writers of our time"

(The L Magazine, New York)

The L Magazine reviewer notes "Frame's enormous range in voice and subject matter" and concludes that the collection Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame (Counterpoint, USA 2009) presents "a full and vibrant picture of Frame's tremendous gifts".

Denver Books Examiner rates Prizes at 5 Stars, saying the comprehensive selection of Frame's classic short stories (with the addition of some previously uncollected stories) succeeds in"showcasing her as a groundbreaking writer".

"Frame's graciously excoriating stories are iridescently alive"

(A rave review from the American Library Association's Booklist)

"Frame locates loneliness, fear and judgement... This is a fine look at Frame's life through her immortalizing fiction"

Publisher's Weekly

Michael King on the real Janet Frame

In 2002 Janet Frame's biographer Michael King followed up his substantial biography released 2 years earlier, by releasing a companion volume of photographs he referred to as a "shorter Janet Frame". This pictorial essay of her life is called An Inward Sun: the world of Janet Frame (Penguin 2002, ISBN 14 301838 8). Janet and her friends called the book the "family photo album" or "the coffee table biography".

Iain Sharp of the Sunday Star-Times reviewed the book and interviewed Michael King for a feature article which was published in the newspaper on Sunday September 15 2002 under the heading "In the Frame":

"In his new book, Michael King discusses the mystique surrounding New Zealand's most famous living writer and the way she differs from how most people imagine her."

Sharp starts:

"Some of the photos in Michael King's new pictorial biography are startling. There are shots of Frame tap-dancing, grinning on a family picnic, larking around with friends on a beach, whizzing around the North Island on her motor scooter and pausing thoughtfully with a pool cue while working out how best to demolish the opposition. This isn't how much of us think of Frame. The dominant image is of the painfully shy recluse haunted by memories of her harsh early years... There ought to be no photos at all, or at best, just a shot of Frame's famous red hair as she ducks for cover from hated paparazzi."

Sharp then quotes Michael King:

"Janet has a smile that comes from deep within. She's capable, at any time, of this sudden transforming radiance, which I also regard as a kind of inward sun."

Of the cover image showing Janet and her sister Myrtle, who drowned when Janet was 12 years old, Michael says:

"It's a heartbreaking image because it makes clear at a glance what a traumatic loss Myrtle's early demise must have been for Janet. But it's beautiful too. Poor as they were, the Frame sisters possessed an inner joy that nothing could take away."
"I think Kerry Fox did a marvellous job in the film of capturing the delicate vulnerability that Janet undoubtedly had as a young woman. Of course, it also contributed to the mystique of the mad genius who emerges from years of ill treatment."

"Janet has a strongly developed sense of what's public and what's private and she certainly likes to protect her privacy. But the notion that she's some kind of perpetually frightened, autistic creature who shrinks from all human contact just isn't true."

POSTSCRIPT: See also the post Frame was not autistic says Michael King

Now for the good news

The mail today brought some lovely hardback copies hot off the press, of the Swedish translation of Towards Another Summer, Mot Annu en Sommar published by Albert Bonniers Forlag.

It's a beautiful novel that has led some people to believe is a delicate and sensitive portrayal of an autist's inner life. Others think of it as a crystalline insight into the complexity of the brilliant artist's inner life as she struggles to adapt in an unfeeling world. Others take the novel as a simple meditation on homesickness and the loneliness of the expatriate. Frame uses a weekend spent with near-strangers as a metaphor for living in a foreign country. In both cases one doesn't yet know the acceptable cultural norms and despite all goodwill, can never settle and feel at home as one does with one's own close family and in one's homeland. Other readers have adopted a social class analysis for the discomfort of the protagonist - by pointing out the wry and humorous descriptions Frame works into the text, of a working class fish out of water who finds herself at odds with the upper middle class environment her literary fame has propelled her into. Yet others just enjoy the exquisite writing for its incisive and deep portrayal of human nature, of the minutiae of social interaction, and for its sometimes virtuoso descriptions of the natural environment.

Tangi

J.C. Sturm

1927-2009

Sadly we greeted the New Year with the news that one of Janet Frame's closest friends had died in Wellington the day before New Year's Eve.

Janet and Jacquie were "bff" until the day of Janet's death, when Jacquie urgently flew to be by Janet's bedside at the very end, and beyond - with Jacquie and other Baxter whanau singing traditional Maori laments at Janet's funeral, at her memorial service, and at her graveside.

Jacquie and Janet were typical close women friends, both mischievous, wicked, both poets, sharing jokes and secrets and telling each other everything. They were once described, while they were on a tour of France together, as behaving like "a couple of peasant women who communicated non-verbally in a series of nudges, changes of expression and giggles" (as reported by Anton Vogt, who drove the pair from Menton to Monte Carlo).

Their decades of friendship extended back to university days in Dunedin. They both received "vocational guidance" counselling from their psychology tutor John Money. (My parents were also part of the wider social circle in those days and Dad and Jacquie both told me separately that Jacquie had "dated" Dad before she took up with his friend the poet James K Baxter from the well-known pacifist family - this was before my father met Mum!)

The friendship between Janet and both the Baxters evolved into a close companionship with the whole Baxter family when Janet moved to Dunedin in the 1960s. She socialised, had meals, visited their relatives at Brighton near Dunedin, and went on tramping holidays with Jacquie and Jim and the kids.

Jacquie was one of Janet's most faithful friends and always preserved her privacy in the way you'd hope your real friends would. And the feeling was mutual.

Farewell beautiful woman, my mentor and my friend too. I'll miss you.

.

"Life is hell, but at least there are prizes."

"Or so one thought."

Those are the opening two sentences of the short story "Prizes" by Janet Frame.

A new selection of her short stories was released in New Zealand earlier this year. The American edition was released just last week:

Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame

Counterpoint Press USA December 2009

EXCERPTS FROM A RECENT REVIEW

"There are no prizes that Janet Frame did not receive or deserve, but, it seems, it is only in posthumous publication that her unerring eye and and startling prescience is so fully apparent."

"Entering the human heart? In the magnificent stories of Janet Frame, we are never out of it."

"...the title story is not about simple triumph, but a sharply satiric account of a young girl whose excellence is clawed away from her by the steady efforts of mediocre and conformist rivals."

"Time only highlights how much, in giving strong voice to her own apparent diffidence, Frame described the unjust invisibility of other women..."

~ Murray Bramwell, NZ Books Spring 2009

New Zealand Edition

Vintage, Random House NZ (2009)

Random House Australia will release an Australian edition in 2010.

The UK/Canada edition will also be published next year, by Virago Press.

Landfall 218: Islands

Landfall 218 has been guest edited by poet and critic David Eggleton.

The title for this issue is "Islands" and it's a clever name for many reasons. A part of the volume has been most appropriately set aside for a tribute in honour of the 100th birthday of Landfall's founding editor Charles Brasch. The tribute section includes interesting reminiscences of Charles Brasch the person from some of his friends (Peter Entwistle, Alan Roddick, and Margaret Scott) and features several sterling poems dedicated to his memory by Peter Olds, Peter Bland, Sue Wootton and -- Janet Frame!

There's also a nice illustration of Brasch's poem Islands by Greg O'Brien. Of course this is the poem from which Janet Frame derived the title Towards Another Summer for the novel written in 1963 that remained unpublished during her lifetime.

To commemorate the friendship between Charles Brasch and Janet Frame, I approved the printing of the full text of a letter Janet Frame wrote to Margaret Scott in 1973, not long after Charles Brasch died. Janet was preparing to leave for her year as Katherine Mansfield fellow at Menton in the South of France, and she had asked Margaret Scott (a former fellow) for some tips about what to expect, and what to pack. Margaret, in her turn, had asked Janet whether she and Charles had ever talked about their own deaths, as this was a topic he had resisted discussing. Janet's letter, with its response to the hints about Menton and the further description of one particular memorable encounter with Charles, seems very timely not just because this is the Brasch centenary year, but because 2009 also marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship (now known as the Mansfield Prize).

Janet Frame also sent a poem to Margaret, which has been reprinted with the letter, called "Poets", comparing the death of a young and an old poet. The poem had never been shown to anyone else, except Charles, and Janet now dedicated it to his memory. The poem was first published in The Goose Bath (2006) and it has already become somewhat of a classic statement for the death of an artist, having been read out at several prominent funerals either at the request of the mourners and even in a couple of cases to my knowledge, because of a death-bed request.

Landfall 218 also contains a wide range of other literary and artistic delights, including fresh work from contemporary authors, an outstanding winning essay of the Landfall essay competition, and much other interesting non-fiction as well as reviews.

A Brazilian Edition

Rumo ao outro verão

Janet FRAME

São Paulo: Planeta do Brasil, 2009

288p

Título original: Towards another summer