‘They think
I’m going to be a schoolteacher, but I’m going to be a poet’ wrote eminent New
Zealand author Janet Frame in her adolescent diary. And this book of her
selected poems in Italian translation resting in your hands now, shows that she achieved her goal. It might not seem in this day and
age that the ambition to become a poet would be an audacious one, but the odds
were stacked against Janet Frame. Born in 1924 in the provincial city of
Dunedin, Frame grew up in the Great Depression in a financially stressed
working class family for whom even the profession of teacher represented a
distant pinnacle of success. In such an era the most a woman could hope for by
way of literary achievement might be in the form of a hobby subsidised by the
income of her middle-class husband. But on the maternal side of Frame’s family
there was a history of faded gentility: the 19th Century migration of her
forebears from the ‘Mother Country’ of England to the British colony had not
entirely wiped out a memory of cultured ancestors (a doctor, a clergyman, an
Oxford don). Frame’s mother Lottie was herself a prolific writer of verse who
published her optimistic and charming rhymes in as many magazines and
newspapers as would accept them. She also sold her verse from door to door and
had dreams of earning a name as a songwriter. Mrs Frame recited favourite poems
by Longfellow and other renowned poets in front of her children with a fervour
that was infectious. As a child Lottie had met the young Katherine
Mansfield who later became New Zealand’s first great writer. Lottie had worked
as a domestic servant in the home of Mansfield’s grandmother where Mansfield
and her family came for summer holidays. In relating the story of her tenuous
but exciting brush with literary fame, Mrs Frame was, perhaps unconsciously,
presenting her daughter with a model to aspire to.
The young Janet Frame was an
exceptional and outspoken student who excelled at academic endeavours and also
garnered prizes for her poems and essays. Her schoolgirl poems were frequently
published in newspapers and broadcast on children’s radio programmes. She was,
therefore, an obvious candidate to be sent to teacher training college
regardless of her secret desire to devote her life to writing. She qualified as
a teacher with no trouble but by late September 1945, during her first year of
teaching, her urge to be spending her time writing was overpowering. The
educational authorities refused to release her from her obligations until the
end of that year, so eventually Frame just walked out of the classroom. “It was
the most wonderful moment of my life,” she said later in an interview. From then
on her goal was unshakeable. The following year she completed her first book The Lagoon and Other Stories while
working as a nurse-aid in a rest home. The stories were accepted immediately
for publication by a publisher who unfortunately let the manuscript sit on his
desk for five years before printing it. When the volume of stories was finally
released in 1952 it won New Zealand’s most prestigious literary prize and from
then on Janet Frame’s standing as a brilliant and original prose writer was
assured. After completing her first novel Owls
Do Cry Frame travelled to Europe in 1956 where she acquired British and
American publishers and went on to forge an international reputation for her
novels and stories. When she returned to her homeland at the age of 39 she was
feted as a world famous novelist.
Frame continued her stellar career,
publishing steadily, travelling widely, winning prizes and holding fellowships
around the globe. Among the many other honours she earned, in 1986 she was made
an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The
citation described her work as 'a mighty exploration of human consciousness and
its context in the natural world'. In 1993 Janet Frame was also awarded the
Italian Premi Brancati Prize. In spite of her fame she preferred to enjoy a
private existence with her family and friends. She did not court publicity and
the resulting vacuum allowed gossip and speculation to grow. Frustrated by the often
patronising and sometimes bizarre rumours about the relationship of her life to
her work, in the 1980s she released a three volume autobiography in an attempt
to ‘set the record straight’. The highly acclaimed trilogy now known as An Angel at My Table was a world-wide
bestseller and was hailed as ‘one of the greatest autobiographies’ of the 20th
century.
In 1990 An Angel at My Table was adapted for the screen by Jane Campion and
the story of Janet Frame’s early life (her autobiography covered only the first
half of her life) attracted an even wider international audience than her
celebrated books of prose had commanded. In New Zealand Frame became a beloved
icon even for those who would never read the literary fiction that had made her
a celebrity in the first place. Her books, which had been translated into
several European languages since the early 1960s (Dutch, French, German,
Italian and Spanish) were translated into many more languages.
But where was the poetry? What had
happened to the poet? One answer is that Frame’s poetry was ‘hidden in plain
sight’ in her prose works, as academic Gina Mercer points out:
‘One of the most fixed and impassable borders
in literature is that between poetry and prose, yet Janet Frame repeatedly
traverses this border, writing poetic prose and including whole chapters of
poetry in her fictional explorations.’
As well as
the poems scattered throughout her novels, some of Frame’s short stories could
be defined as ‘prose poems’ as was recognised by Bill Manhire when he included
her story ‘A Note on the Russian War’ from The
Lagoon and Other Stories in his 2005 anthology 121 New Zealand Poems. Possibly this kind of focus on the poetic
nature of Frame’s prose helped to overshadow the fact that Frame was always
producing poems as well. She did occasionally publish individual poems in
magazines, but compared to the reputation she was gaining as a novelist, these
sporadic publications appear to have been overlooked. Whenever Frame spoke in
public, which she did far more than uninformed commentaries on her life might
suggest, she almost always recited several of her own poems, to the delight of
her audiences.
Although Janet Frame published only
one volume of poems in her lifetime it was substantial, containing 170 poems. The Pocket Mirror, first published in
New York in 1967, went on to win the New Zealand Award for Literary Achievement
when it was published in her homeland in 1968. The Pocket Mirror was published in multiple editions and reprints,
selling tens of thousands of copies which made it a bestseller by New Zealand
standards. It is notable that permissions have been issued for well over one
hundred of the Pocket Mirror poems. For fifty years its wide range of eminently
quotable poems encompassing numerous styles and touching on a broad range of
topics has been extensively mined for anthologies, for quotations, and for
musical and other adaptations.
Notwithstanding this commercial
success Frame never published another poetry book. Why not? I believe the
reasons are complex and that there is no one answer. The many factors include
her own need to make a living which meant indulging the desire of her agents
and publishers for the more saleable prose work. I experienced this pressure
myself as Frame’s literary executor in possession of her unpublished poetry and
prose manuscripts. I had to be steadfast in my resolve to see the posthumous
poetry volume The Goose Bath
published first, as I had been urged to do by my aunt. She had also been
reluctant to expose herself to too much scrutiny or even adulation while she
was alive, leading her to envisage posthumous publishing as part of her career
as it had been for some of the poets she revered, for instance Emily Dickinson.
When I tried to encourage her to publish her volume of poetry before her death,
so that she might receive the due appreciation for it, she said to me ‘I don’t
need anybody to tell me my work is good. Do it after I’m dead.’ It also has to
be suggested that male envy is one of the reasons for the attempted suppression
of Frame’s vocation as a poet. She emerged at the height of the influence of
the so-called ‘mid-century misogynists’ and New Zealand had more than its share
of sexist gatekeepers eager to dish out excoriating critiques of anyone who
wasn’t a member of the old boy’s club. Several Frame scholars have identified
patriarchal disapproval as a factor hampering Frame’s professional trajectory
but that explanation has yet to become accepted in the mainstream narratives
about Frame.
Frame’s own diffidence about her
poetry is often mentioned as a first reason for her self-censorship but I
believe this is over-emphasised. She was, like most New Zealanders of her
generation, self-effacing. She could be self-deprecating concerning her
writing, her cooking and her various handcraft hobbies. But she was very good
at all these. Frame came from a culture where humility was expected but not
taken too seriously. “This old thing!” in the New Zealand idiom is a code for a
beautifully homemade garment for which the wearer and the maker (one and the
same) might appear to deflect admiration but is in context understood as an
invitation for praise.
As it turned out, The Goose Bath was an instant bestseller
and it also scooped the prize for the best New Zealand poetry book of 2006. Frame’s
poetry volumes reached well beyond the usual readership for poetry. Despite the
popularity of her poetry and the fact of Frame’s inclusion in every major New
Zealand poetry anthology in the late 20th Century, her status as a poet in her
own right has been downplayed in New Zealand poetry circles. For instance a
2014 entry on New Zealand poetry written for the official government online Te
Ara Encyclopedia omitted to mention Frame as one of the nation’s prominent
poets. When challenged about this, historian Jock Phillips replied that Janet
Frame was considered by the author of the article, John Newton, and by the entire
Te Ara editorial team to be ‘not of huge influence or significance as a poet
(as distinct from a novelist)’ and therefore did not rate mention in the
article. The facts do not support their judgement. Frame’s two highly regarded
poetry volumes were both prize-winners and bestsellers. The large corpus of
poems appearing within her novels, when added to her many other published but
uncollected poems, plus the hundreds in her two poetry collections, yield a
sum total of published poems to rival the oeuvre of most well known poets who
pursue their careers the conventional way by releasing a series of slim volumes
and, dare I say it, drinking with the ‘in’ crowd. Over the years Frame read her
work in public, was recorded for poetry archives, sent political poems as
letters to the editor, circulated memorial poems for reading at the funerals of
friends and colleagues, and she continued to supply individual poems for
publication in books and magazines until the year before her death in 2004.
Ten years after Frame’s death doctoral student
Iolanda Cozzone noted that Janet Frame’s poetry had been ‘completely neglected
by the Italian and international translation market.’ At that time there had
been no volumes of Frame’s poetry translated into any language although many
individual poems had been translated into languages such as Czech, French,
German, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish etc. for anthologies and blogs.
In her thesis ‘Perspectives on the Translation of Janet Frame’s Verse into
Italian’ (2014) Cozzone linked the early biographical fallacies and myth-driven
perspectives of Frame’s work to what she identified in 2014 as ‘the current lack of
interest in Frame’s poetry’:
‘Perhaps partly due to this tendency
to approach her and her work in an uninformed way, critics and scholars have
denied Frame her role of poet.’
Luckily, the story does not end
there. Cozzone was not the only one to identify and address the neglect of
Frame’s poetry in translation. At the same time as Frame was being discounted
as a poet by certain New Zealand literary bureaucrats, several translations of
her selected poetry were in preparation elsewhere. This Italian
edition Parleranno le Tempeste is the
third selected poems in translation to appear in three years. Hungrig Bland Orden was published in
2015 in Sweden, followed by Huesos de
Jilguero in Mexican Spanish the same year.
We must be grateful to the
translators and publishers who value the poetic imagination of Janet Frame and
who make the effort to render her unique voice, her keen insights and
observations, her empathy and wisdom, her fluent use of words and rhythms, her
puns and allusions, her startling metaphors, her humour and mischief, into a new
language for the delight of new readers. Enjoy!
Pamela
Gordon
Janet Frame
Literary Trust
Dunedin, New
Zealand
8 March 2017
