Janet Frame Colloquium in London

There is to be a Janet Frame Colloquium in London on the 2nd of November 2013.

Keynote speaker will be highly regarded Frame scholar Marc Delrez, author of Manifold Utopia: the Novels of Janet Frame, who teaches English literature at the University of Liege, Belgium.

The Colloquium is entitled Janet Frame: Ten Years On and is organised by the New Zealand Studies Network.

Schlupflöcher für Träume

Published today in Germany
a new edition of Auf dem Maniototo
(Living in the Maniototo)
by Janet Frame
Translated by Lilian Faschinger
C.H.Beck Verlag, München
16 September 2013
304 Seiten, 19.95 Euro

Reviewed by Deutschlandradio Kultur 13 September 2013:

Schlupflöcher für Träume
Das ist alles so böse und komisch geschrieben, dass man sich freut und sich gruselt und wonnevoll meint, man selber sei ja ganz anders als diese Romanfiguren. Während man tatsächlich enttarnt wird. Janet Frame kennt sich aus in den Labyrinthen der menschlichen Hirne und Seelen. Kennt die Schlupflöcher für Träume und die Wüste der Wirklichkeit.

Es ist ein Buch über das Sein und das Schreiben. Und Frame eine Schriftstellerin, die hellsichtig das Leben durchschaut und mit dichterischen Flügeln aus ihm flieht.

Deciding Day

A passage from Intensive Care (1970) by Janet Frame:

Now let me tell you more about this Act of Parliament called the Human Delineation Act. On my birthday, the Deciding Day, everyone will be counted and tested and with all the information gathered the computer with all our history inside it will look at each one and say sharply like a soldier, Human, Animal, Human, Animal, depending on what you are, and if you are human everyone will smile at you and say 'Fine weather we’re having, congratulations,' and you will go free and be able to live in the world as a human being; on the other hand if the computer decides you are animal, how different it will be for you in your future life, for at once they will kidnap you, capture you, and put you in a cage and take you to a factory if you are suitable and they will experiment on you or keep you locked up and stare at you day and night, study you until the situation is more than you can bear. Your legs will wither from not walking and you will be forced to screw up your eyes to see in the dark, blindness will come eventually and death, and if you think I paint a grim picture of what will happen, then I can only say that you who are reading this are lucky not to be living in the time I write of. Do not be deceived — you may be living in it and not know, because two times can live together and the one doesn’t know that the other time is living because if you’re in one time whatever would make you want to think there is another there going on through the light of day and the dark of night? Is your world my world? Do you still have seasons in the year, Christmas followed by autumn when the leaves turn gold and float from the trees until the trees are bare and winter has come with frosts and cold mornings, and then before you know it spring has come round again with the flowering currant. If you have seasons like this then you are living in our part of the world and you will know about our Act of Parliament which sets an example to all other people who love freedom and democracy. Are you preparing for the Deciding? Are you afraid?

Intensive Care (paperback edition, 1990s)

Janet Frame's first words

"I was told that my first words were 'Pick walnut up, Mummy'."

 

~ Janet Frame, from To the Is-Land

(Autobiography Volume 1)

 

Janet Frame as a baby on her mother's lap

under the walnut tree at Railway Lane, Outram near Dunedin.

The Frame family lived at Outram until Janet was 2 and a half years old.

 

Late in her life Janet Frame revisited the walnut tree in Railway Lane

(detail from a photograph by Reg Graham)

 

There is still a walnut tree in Railway Lane.

Is it the same one?

A sneak peek

 

The third Penguin Janet Frame Book arrives.

 

Advance copy time!

Introducing The Mijo Tree:

a fable written by Janet Frame in 1957

on the island of Ibiza.

 

Janet Frame lodged the manuscript

at the Hocken Library in 1970

to be looked at only after her death.

 

To be published for the first time

in late October 2013

by Penguin New Zealand.

 

Beautifully illustrated

by Deidre Copeland.

 

 

 

Another lovely production from the Penguin Books NZ team!

 

 

 

True or False?

I was recently reading some commentary on the sad case of the death of David Hockney's assistant, a young man who had a shock of  ginger curls, and I was interested to see that a contributor to the discussion mentioned that the assistant "looked like Janet Frame".

It is widely known - in educated circles at least - that Janet Frame had a wild mane of reddish hair, and people with similar untameable red hair can find themselves being compared to her. I know that some are even given (or give themselves) the nickname 'Janet Frame'.

And apparently almost all a Janet Frame impersonator has to do is don a curly orange wig in order to seem 'authentic'. Everybody 'knows' it's 'Janet'.

But what shade of red was Janet Frame's hair? Was it orange? True or False?

FALSE. Janet Frame did not have the 'orange' shade of red hair, she had the kind of dark red hair sometimes referred to as 'auburn' hair, as noted on the passport pictured above.

(The passport is signed N.J.P. Clutha which was her legal signature after she changed her surname from Frame to Clutha by deed poll in 1958).

'Poets' by Janet Frame

This poem by Janet Frame is posted today as a tribute to the great Seamus Heaney, whose death this week indeed makes us feel with Janet Frame that 'for a time it seems there will be no more stars'.

Poets

If poets die young

they bequeath two thirds of their life to the critics
to graze and grow fat in
visionary grass.

If poets die in old age
they live their own lives
they write their own poems
they are their own might-have-been.

Young dead poets are prized comets.
The critics queue with their empty wagons ready for hitching.

Old living poets
stay faithfully camouflaged in their own sky.
It may even be forgotten they have been shining for so long.
The reminder comes upon their falling
extinguished into the earth.
The sky is empty, the sun and moon have gone away,
there are not enough street bulbs, glow-worms, fireflies to give light

and for a time it seems there will be no more stars.

This poem was one of many that Janet Frame (1924-2004) never published in her lifetime. The only book of poems she released, The Pocket Mirror, appeared in the late 1960s in the UK, America and New Zealand and has never been out of print. Many of its poems have become classics, such as 'The Suicides', 'The Place', 'Rain on the Roof'.

'Poets' was first published posthumously in The Goose Bath (Random House NZ 2006; Wilkins Farago Australia 2008) and in Storms Will Tell (Bloodaxe Books UK, USA 2008).

 

Janet Frame showed this poem to her friend Landfall editor Charles Brasch on one of his visits to her house in Dunedin, but she refused to let him publish it. After Charles died in 1973, Janet sent a copy of the poem to another grieving friend of his, Margaret Scott. Janet described showing Charles the poem:

 

That afternoon he asked me what I’d been writing and I was bold enough to say I had written a poem and then bold enough to get it when he asked me to show it to him. This was so unlike me, for I never show things if I can help it.

The poem was about the deaths of two poets, one in youth, the other in age. Charles liked it and suggested I send it to Landfall, which I never did, in fact I've never sent it anywhere. He liked it but he did not think it ‘wonderful’ or anything like that, nor did I, for it’s full of stupidities. We talked then about death in youth and in age, and Charles again suggested I send the poem to Landfall. He wanted people to read it and think about it. I'm sending it to you. I knew it would find its home one day.

The whole of the letter to Margaret Scott appears in Dear Charles, Dear Janet: Frame and Brasch in Correspondence which is a hand printed fine edition published in 2010 by the University of Auckland's Holloway Press.

Since its first publication 'Poets' has struck a chord with many readers, and I know that it has been read out at many funerals. The self-effacing Janet Frame may well have identified 'stupidities' in the composition of the poem, according to her own impossibly high standards, but she was correct in her belief that her words might also bring comfort to those facing the realities of death.

The poem has also been set to music by Jenny McLeod and the song based on it was first performed at the Wellington Festival of the Arts in 2008.