A violent act of colonisation

The play GIFTED by Patrick Evans currently playing at Circa Theatre, Wellington, is a violent act of colonisation of Janet Frame's life and work.

GIFTED is no 'love letter' from an admirer, as the publicity from its 2013 season proclaimed. It is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters of myth and malicious gossip that already swirled about Frame's reputation. GIFTED exaggerates the popular caricatures of 'Janet' and makes her the butt of the same kind of sniggering jokes that the misogynist bully boys of New Zealand literature have always guffawed at behind their hands in smoky alcohol-sodden back rooms.

Nobody learns anything about the real Janet Frame from GIFTED: it distorts the historical facts, omits characters and invents others all in order to present a fraudulent impression.

Worst of all is the disgraceful misrepresentation of Frame's intellect and wit and genius. Unworthy thoughts are attributed to her, puerile adolescent puns are put into her mouth as if they even remotely approach her own facility with language.

The first season of GIFTED was characterised by a shockingly dishonest and hostile publicity campaign in which the valid criticisms of Frame's family and estate were met with ad hominem attacks, slander and public vilification from the producer of the play Conrad Newport and others invested in and associated with the play and the Christchurch Festival where it premiered.

The scam of the 'love letter' has been dialled back somewhat for the promotion of the Wellington season, as has the fraudulent fake Janet Frame quote that appeared on posters. Unfortunately, it appears that the Wellington audiences are still being deceived about the motives and the content of the play.

However I was absolutely delighted to see the first review from the Circa opening night has been written with integrity and intelligence, and actually makes the clear distinctions that the Frame family and estate have been asking for. This is fiction. It is NOT 'literary history'.

That is all we asked for - an admission that the play is an invention and not based on historical fact, so that audiences would understand that they are NOT receiving the benefit of a wise professor who "has studied Frame for decades", they are witnessing a garbled and confused fantasy about Frame that the elderly academic himself does not even seem to recognise, judging by his interviews, is not true.

Evans has been content in his long parasitic career to just make things up about Frame, relying on a clearly appalling memory and a naïve belief that he could make biographical speculations based only on the 'evidence' of her fiction. This was one of the reasons she despised him.

Unlike Janet Frame who was able to make clear distinctions, Evans doesn't know 'this world' from 'that world'. He has become trapped in his own fantasy.

'Play suffers from significant ethical problem' (Otago Daily Times)

 'A pot calls the kettle bleak'

'Reverse Hagiography'

'Pansy Sandwiches and Tall Poppies'

'A dog returns to his vomit'

Gifted by Patrick Evans: A Review

Disturbingly sexually suggestive poster for the 2013 tour of GIFTED to the provinces and backwater festivals.

The image shows us looking up the dress of some girl - but Janet Frame was in her early 30s - and already a well-known highly acclaimed prizewinning author of her first book THE LAGOON - when she met Frank Sargeson.

Note the fraudulent 'Janet Frame' quote. In fact one of Frame's mottos in real life was the line  'You must change your life' from a Rilke poem.

A pot calls the kettle bleak

Here is Emeritus Professor Patrick Evans showing his true colours in an essay entitled:

“We Liked Janet Frame Til We Read Her” – An Essay on Why a New Zealand Writer Has Never Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

Link: Spinoff (6 October 2015)

 

Reverse Hagiography

 'Reverse hagiography' is the term used in Possession: A Romance (1990) by AS Byatt* to describe the character of the sinister and obsessed biographer Mortimer Cropper:

“He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography; the desire to cut his subject down to size.” 

Screenshot:  Page 36 of Possession: A Reader's Guide by Catherine Burgass (Google Books)


*hat tip Kerryn Goldsworthy (per Facebook discussion)

 

Celebrating a Great Pacifist

On September 21st last year I attended the launch in Dunedin of the Archibald Baxter Memorial Trust. Archibald Baxter is New Zealand's best known conscientious objector and author of We Will Not Cease which is a classic account of his experiences as a military defaulter in the First World War, during which he was sent to Europe and subjected to brutal field punishment.

In just over a year the Archibald Baxter Trust has achieved splendid progress in the planning for a memorial to Archie Baxter to be erected in Dunedin's Otago Museum reserve. Visit this link to see the three finalists in the sculpture competition:

'Baxter Memorial Step Closer' (Otago Daily Times 4 October 2015)

Archibald Baxter and his wife Millicent Baxter were the parents of Janet Frame's friend the famous New Zealand poet James K Baxter. The Baxters (senior) lived in Brighton near Dunedin and were part of the social group Janet mixed with when she lived in Dunedin during the 1960s.

Janet Frame had other connections with the Baxter family beside her friendship with Jim Baxter and his wife Jacquie (JC Sturm). Janet's childhood friend and neighbour Marguerite from Oamaru had married Jim Baxter's cousin Jack Baxter after the war. Jack had been a conscientious objector during the war and was imprisoned along with Frame's brother-in-law (my father) Wilson Gordon. Jack Baxter was best man at my parents' wedding. Jack and Marguerite lived in Brighton and Janet used to go out there to visit them when she lived in Dunedin. So the Frames, the Baxters and the Gordons have been well connected for many years.

Not long before Dad's death in 2007 he discovered that somebody in the extended Gordon family had married a Baxter. When I told Jacquie, who was my friend and mentor (and who had been Jim's wife and one of Janet's closest friends) she said: "I always knew we were whānau!"

* Whānau = 'family' (Māori)
 

Do Mention The War

The Penguin Book of New Zealand War Writing

2015

Edited by Harry Ricketts & Gavin McLean

 

Hot off the press and well-timed to coincide with the proliferation of commemorations of the First World War Centenary, this is a solid - but not too solid - volume, with an excellent coverage of relevant material.

 

As the daughter of a second world war conscientious objector, and the grand niece of a first world war pacifist, I was pleased to see that Kiwi pacifist and protest writing is also included under the banner 'War Writing'. We hear about Parihaka, and we hear from the conchie classics written by Archibald Baxter, Ormond Burton and Walter Lawry. Bravo!

 

There is a poem in there by Janet Frame: 'Instructions for Bombing With Napalm',  a satirical poem that consists of rearranging the letters of the words 'napalm', 'naphthalene' and 'coconut oil' into anagrams and near-anagrams, stringing the whole together impressionistically but unmistakably as a protest at the atrocities of the Vietnam era military strategies.

 

Conventionally all reviews or notices concerning anthologies must discuss absences.

 

For me the most unfortunate albeit understandable omission here is of any excerpt from the Charles Brasch wartime diaries, published in 2013, perhaps too late to be included in the Ricketts & McLean table of contents.

 

 

One would hope some passage[s] from the Brasch journals, most notably about his experiences of working at Bletchley Park, would find their way into any future edition of an anthology of New Zealand War Writing.

Anzac Poppies and Tall Poppies

 

Speaking as Janet Frame's executor, I was also disappointed that the editors have clearly not discovered her small masterpiece 'Between My Father and the King', a posthumously published short short story that has already been hailed internationally as a classic of literary commentary on the fate of the returned colonial soldier.

 

You can read 'Between My Father and the King' by Janet Frame for yourself here in The Manchester Review. (770 words)

 

Some pettiness can be identified in the 'bio' of Janet Frame that appears with her poem, where one reads that Frame was "an accomplished, if patchy, poet." Strange words to say about an author whose two substantial books of poetry both won New Zealand's supreme literary award for their year, and whose two poetry books have together sold tens of thousands of copies.

 

Not to mention all the poetry that appears in Frame's 13 novels, enough for a career's worth of slim volumes, and with the verse at a higher strike rate of fine quality too, than in the oeuvre of many a plodding local poet who doesn't rate Janet Frame as a 'poet' at all despite her poetry having gained a world-wide reputation, prizes, strong sales, presence in international anthologies and educational curricula, and, this year, volumes translated into Spanish and Swedish.

 

'Patchy' is a cheap dig to make, and there is hardly a poet in the world who wouldn't qualify for the term, should one be small-minded enough to want to put someone's work down without any actual evidence for the snipe. In any case surely you must judge a poet by their best work, not by their lesser pieces?

'Patchy' - really? What does it mean? It's a word that means nothing except the connotation it carries, and the intention to cut someone (a tall poppy perhaps) down to size.

 

The poem by Janet Frame that is included here is clever, and chilling, but it is not one of her greatest pieces by any means. It makes a fine protest poem,  but it is a squib, and not typical of her poetry at all. To choose a minor poem and then belittle the poet as a poet is in my opinion mean-spirited but not surprising given the current posthumous backlash against Frame in her native land. The editors were happy to include one of our greatest writers and mention her in their publicity, but they couldn't resist this trolling little shot across the parapets.

Cat Lover

 

The Cat of Habit

 

The cat of habit

knows the place by heart
or at least by space, scent, direction, bulk,
by shadow and light
moonlight starlight sunlight
and where to nest in each
with a three-focussed shut eye
on who or what’s coming and going
on the earth and in the sky
and distantly, not present, the rays of inkling
shining within the furred skull.
 
The cat of habit curls her spine
in the most windless the most warm place
shivering a little with, ‘It’s mine’,
an ear-twitch, tail-flip
of permanent ownership.
 
The cat of habit
has the place marked,
the joint cased.
 
Feed and sleep and feed
and half-heartedly catch
moths and mice and mostly watch
hourlong for the passing witch
for many, unseen, pass
through the rooms of the house and outside,
under the trees and in the grass.
 
Janet Frame

Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems by Janet Frame is published by Bloodaxe Books

The myth of the 'male mentors'

Janet Frame enjoying a joke at the launch of Michael King's biography

From left: June Gordon (sister), Pamela Gordon (niece), Janet Frame, Ruth Dallas (friend), Joan Dutton (Ruth's niece)

Photograph: Reg Graham

While we are on the subject of sexist misrepresentations of Janet Frame, I thought I might mention that the common claim that Frame had mostly male 'supporters' and 'mentors' is another of the myths...

There are probably several reasons why the mostly male commentators who have propagated this claim over the years thought that Frame was some sort of dependent person who was incapable of making her way in the world without a strong male to guide her: one is their own male bias towards men as being more important or influential; the other is of course the privacy with which Frame guarded her closest relationships; the other is the report of some of the men themselves, who sometimes had higher opinions of their own influence than a clear-eyed and objective historical account would reveal.

And while we are confronting patronising Frame myths, another is the constant resort to the word 'mentor' in discussions of Frame's life, when the 'mentor' was actually her 'friend'. I have come to identify this over-use of 'mentor' at the expense of the more accurate 'friend' as a pretty accurate gauge of the degree of condescension a particular commentator has towards Frame, as though they believe she was incapable of actual friendship and only had guardians and sponsors and mentors. A careful reading of the King biography (reading the facts rather than the spin they are sometimes presented with) makes it clear that Frame had a very wide variety of friends and patrons and supporters and advocates of more than one gender.

Professor Patrick Evans, known to Frame's inner circle as spectacularly gifted in his ability to get so much about her life and her work wrong, refers to "the trail of male mentors which went through Frame’s strongly patriarchal life".

This is one-eyed and stubbornly ignorant. But it suits this type of commentator to portray Frame as incapable of anything other than a dependent relationship to strong male authority figures. (Evans has in recent years had to resort to fiction in order to sell his distortions of Frame, because that pesky nuisance the historical record contradicts him at every turn.)

I have been perplexed to find my own relationship with Janet distorted in the media and in public discourse. Increasingly I find myself referred to as having been her 'minder' in her last years. It's a demeaning insult both to her and to me, but it does fit with the derogatory attitude long held towards her, and it suits the agenda of those who feel they need to belittle me because they want to discredit me and silence my criticisms.

Just a handful of the women who were influential in Janet Frame's life and arguably more beneficial to her career that the usual suspects who are credited with her successes, are:

Librarian Dorothy White (later Ballantyne) of Dunedin, for instance was an early advocate and later friend at a crucial time in Frame's career, reviewing her work and giving Frame feedback and encouragement.

Patience Ross, Literary Agent - found by Frame herself in London and responsible for the early successes in publishing that made Frame an international name (the male New Zealand publishers and 'mentors' (Money and Sargeson) did not manage to find publishers outside New Zealand - it was Frame herself, working with her agent, who achieved this).

Jacquie Baxter, close friend from the mid 1960s.

Elizabeth (Peter) Dawson - the narrative about this close friendship was that because Dawson was actually Sargeson's friend first - he introduced them - that she was never Frame's own friend. Biographer Michael King even refers to Dawson as "Sargeson's friend" years after Frame and Dawson have developed their own strong bond

Publisher Stephanie Dowrick (former head of UK publishing house Women's Press) had an extremely beneficial effect on Frame's career in the 1980s and 1990s but would never have dreamed of calling herself a 'mentor' or taking the credit for the successes they achieved together.

Some of the other women who played important roles in Janet's life, and she in theirs - because her relationships were always rich and reciprocal - do appear in Michael King's biography but the friendship, support and love of the women is played down compared to the attributions given to certain male members of her circle (many of whom, as I mentioned earlier, were themselves convinced that Janet would be lost without them. That was not her opinion.)

Other female friends and colleagues were either not discovered by Michael King or he wasn't interested in recording their role in her life, or he noted their presence but underplayed their role in her life and career.

Several Frame scholars have noticed this tendency of several commentators to negate Frame's personal agency and subordinate Frame to her male associates. An example is Maria Wikse, who in her Materialisations of a Woman Writer: Investigating Janet Frame's Biographical Legend (Peter Lang, 2006), identifies many of the narrative strategies that achieve this skewed and sexist portrait of Frame. So does Gina Mercer in her work Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions (University of Queensland Press, 1995).