Happy Birthday Frank

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

An indispensable collection of Janet Frame's short non-fiction, in which - among the multitude of other topics raised - you gain a range of fascinating insights about Frame's complex and conflicted elderly friend Frank Sargeson, and about the long relationship between those two influential literary figures. Everyone who claims an interest in New Zealand social and literary history needs to read this book in which Frame speaks frankly on and off the record about her love-hate relationships with her home country with its judgmental and prescriptive attitudes.

Today marks the 109th birthday of Frank Sargeson, Janet Frame's gossipy old friend who ran a literary salon from out of a shack on Auckland's North Shore, and who searched Frame out when she came to his notice because her reputation for brilliance was steadily growing after having won a prestigious literary prize for her first book. Frame wrote her second book, the novel Owls Do Cry, while boarding with Sargeson for a little under 18 months before she left to live in Europe.

A ponderously heavy 600 page selection of Sargeson's letters has recently been published which includes dozens of Sargeson's surprisingly tender and transparent missives to Frame - who evolved as one of his most trusted confidantes - as well as to many other literary figures. A good review of this selection of Sargeson's letters was written by Peter Simpson and is archived online in the NZ Herald.

Frame completists will need to read these letters, and will find Sargeson's backstage whispers concerning Frame fascinating and at times appalling. The old saying "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" springs to mind, although Frame herself was very forgiving of the old man's foibles and like many of his other closest friends she was happy to tolerate his bitchiness and malice because of his extraordinary generosity, his wit and his gift for warm hospitality, and his genuine desire to promote good literature and to support other writers.

Open Day at Frank Sargeson's Cottage - Sunday March 25th 2012 2-4 pm
14a Esmonde Road, Takapuna, Auckland

A Dutch Angel

Joining the new foreign releases of Janet Frame's work is a new Dutch paperback reprint of Janet Frame's popular second volume of autobiography in Dutch translation:

Een Engel Aan Mijn Tafel

(An Angel at My Table)

The Dutch publisher De Geus has given this new mass paperback edition a fresh cover (as in the photo above), and a new isbn number:

ISBN 978 90 445 2390 4

Historical Fictions at Oamaru

The Friends of the Janet Frame House at Oamaru are running another of their much-appreciated writing workshops later this week. The guest writer on Saturday March 24th will be the celebrated South Island short story writer and novelist Owen Marshall.

On Friday night (the 23rd March) at 6 pm in the Oamaru Library there will be "a free public lecture on historical fiction with reference to Marshall's new novel The Larnachs."

Owen Marshall will be addressing this topic of historical fiction together with Dr Paul Baker, the former Rector of the local Waitaki Boys' High School.

Here's a link to more information, in a recent report by the Otago Daily Times: (3 March 2012).

A Cuckoo in the Nest

I have returned from a refreshing jaunt overseas to a narrowly provincial New Zealand that appears as abusive towards Janet Frame's right to her own agency (as a self directed and ambitious and successful woman author) as it ever was.

It's not just Janet Frame that is being misrepresented now of course, it's also her estate, as I was reminded on reading a twitter exchange dominated by Helen Heath, the "publicity maven" employed by Victoria University Press, who uses Crosby-Textor-like strategies to great effect in her manipulation of social networks to publicise the works she is paid to promote. Heath is charged with promoting the fan fiction novel 'Gifted' by Professor Evans, that utilises Janet Frame's real name for a character ostensibly based on Frame but for which many important facts of Frame's life have been distorted and suppressed deliberately - in order to present a blow-up Janet Frame doll built for Patrick Evans's ideological convenience.

Heath was 'live-blogging' a talk by Evans who reveals his own academic agenda and his aims, by claiming that Frame herself is "unread" and "unreadable" (unless you're paid to do it, as he, an elderly English lit professor, is) and that his own novel is a climax of all Frame actually didn't ever manage to achieve because of her imperfections which he has managed to surpass by his self-proclaimed innate talent.

No really. He said all that. Perhaps we should reframe him as a stand-up comedian. But is he just a harmless buffoon as so many of his fellow academics have long treated him, with his dogged determination to entrap Frame within her own fiction, and his derogatory insistence that her non-fiction is a mere fable?

Here are some of the tweets:

Craig_Ranapia @helen__heath "I'm reminded that Frame was somewhat bemused by folks who took exception to 'All Visitors Ashore' on her behalf."

(a) This assertion is a total fabrication. To maintain a dignified silence in the face of a vindictive act of revenge is not to be "somewhat bemused".

(b) 'All Visitors Ashore' (by CK Stead) was at least a novel, with fictional names and characters. It cannot be compared to 'Gifted' which appropriates the real name of a recently dead writer, and deliberately falsifies important facts about her life in order to make fake claims about her personality and her literary theories. Claims that she abhorred in her lifetime and strongly disagreed with. Evans was not able to stick to historical fact in his novel because those facts contradict his puppet 'Janet Frame'. Claiming you can get insights about the real Janet Frame from his fictional 'Janet Frame' when he has bowdlerised her, is just plain dumb.

Craig Ranapia @Helen__Heath "I can understand why Janet's neice [sic] is very protective of her aunt's rep - but too much so perhaps?"

Helen Heath @CMRanapia "in some ways it more damaging to be over protective if you know what I mean?"

Craig_Ranapia @Helen__Heath "Nobody is honoured by being turned into delicate porcelain dolls locked in the glass front case of reputation"

Ironically is it Patrick Evans who is constructing the "doll" (although his is more of a blow-up doll given that the motivation to 'play' with Frame is not benign; it approaches the abusive).

I, who fight for Janet's right to be seen as the self-directed complex autonomous and ambitious author that she was, hardly condone the false doll in the cabinet. That sentimentalising reductionism is what I have consistently and coherently opposed. 

Read "Janet Frame in her Own Words" if you want to learn about the real Janet Frame herself and not just a pale bloodless travesty!! Evans treats Frame like an academic plaything - his is the 'porcelain doll'.

To accuse me of presenting Frame in a "glass cabinet" really shows that particular tweeter's rank ignorance of the real issues... and does give an insight into the kind of scuttlebutt about the Frame estate that is being circulated by a certain coterie.

But we knew that already.

‎Helen__Heath: "Even though her literary trust wasn't happy and she wanted to restrict public discussion, Gifted is a loving portrait."

Who is the 'she' who wants to restrict public discussion? Surely not the Frame who (we have just heard) was allegedly "bemused" by being defended? Which is it? Was Frame happy to be slandered and misrepresented and made an object of sniggering and belittling mockery or not?

Or is Helen Heath claiming that it's the Frame literary trust that wants to restrict public discussion? Gosh, how would we manage to do that?

Do the occasional blog posts by Frame trustees in defence of Frame's agency as a feminist writer mistreated by medical institutions and by sexist male literati, constitute a "whitewash" in Heath's opinion? And how precisely has this restricted public discussion?

Patrick Evans has made a last ditch play to replace the real Frame with his Cuckoo, and I will never understand why any intelligent educated person would delight in enabling that misogynist agenda which has been on the record as a fact of New Zealand literary criticism for decades (see Denis Harold's review of Gifted for some details of a feminist critique of Evans).

Learning to Swivel

Radio New Zealand has archived a recording of 'Learning to Swivel: The Changing Face of New Zealand Literature", the Janet Frame Memorial Lecture 2012, delivered by novelist Marilyn Duckworth on the 1st March 2012 on the Marae at the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, on the Wellington waterfront, and which by all accounts drew a large and appreciative audience.

A Book to Handle and Love

Just received a copy of a beautiful new poetry anthology: Dear Heart: 150 New Zealand Love Poems edited by Paula Green for Godwit Press (an imprint of Random House New Zealand).

The volume is due to be published shortly and is already attracting rave reviews, for instance this one by Graham Beattie on his influential BEATTIE'S BOOK BLOG (you can read Paula Green's introduction to her book in Graham's post).

After leafing through the book for a pleasant half an hour I can see why everyone so far has had such a positive response. A book to cherish. There are a couple of poems there by Janet Frame, and by most of the other big names, old and new, in New Zealand poetry.

Janet Frame reading five poems

Please visit the UK Poetry Archive to hear Janet Frame reading five of her poems:

'Flowering Cherry' from The Pocket Mirror (recorded in 1974 when Janet Frame was 50 years old)

Then you can listen to several more poems that Janet Frame recorded not long before her death at nearly 80 years of age:

'The Icicles' (from The Goose Bath)

'The Old Bull' (from The Goose Bath)

'Daniel' (from The Goose Bath)

'Scarlet Tanager, Saratoga Springs' (From Living in the Maniototo)