by Janet Frame
EDITING JAY TO BEE
Jay to Bee preserves the integrity, atmosphere and narrative drive of the first fourteen months of Frame’s correspondence with Brown by excluding only repetitious and inconsequential material from a total of 136 letters (including eight postcards) for this period.
The layout of the correspondence is chronological. Given that about half the items are undated, we rigorously scrutinised and cross-checked to establish the sequence, which is slightly different to the order in the catalogue at Penn State University Library in the USA where the originals are lodged.
Frame wrote to Brown an average of twice a week, with Brown writing about half as many times. Most of her letters include drawings and or collages, and many of his include drawings with the occasional collage. Most of hers are typewritten, although there are many hand-written inclusions. She wrote about one fifth completely by hand, usually when she was travelling and away from her typewriter. Almost all of Brown’s are handwritten on both sides of blank note paper (about A5 size). Frame also corresponded several times with Wonner: for example in late December 1970, just prior to her return to the USA, she wrote as Dame F.C. [Frame Clutha] to Dame M.M. [Mary Margaret].
Our primary aims with the layout of the letters have been to preserve their integrity and show the relationship of Frame’s images to her words by placing them as close as possible to their place in the original text—several facsimiles of this interplay are included. As the images vary considerably in scale, we have resized them so that, for the readers’ benefit, they relate more seamlessly to the text. This book, of course, can only be a reasonably faithful and coherent translation of the visceral materiality of the original letters that encompass many kinds and sizes of paper, writing methods and image production.
Frame generally wrote her letters in orthodox sentences with punctuation and spelling according to the standard of the time. We have formatted the paragraphs with regular indents in a way that was not possible with a typewriter, but otherwise we have made minimal edits. We have preserved the lines of asterisks that Frame and Brown jokingly called ‘stars’. Some collages that were less striking than the best, or that were somewhat obscure from a present-day perspective, have been omitted.
Frame variably dated and addressed her letters—fewer than half are dated with the day’s date. She sometimes wrote her full or partial current address and sometimes her forwarding address. We have standardised the heading to each letter so as to give the location, the exact date or month, and any comment she may have added. For clarity’s sake, Frame’s verse is rendered in italics while other verse is within quote marks. Footnotes are used sparingly. This is a reader’s edition. Jay to Bee is not an academic work but is the uncensored revelation of a great writer’s imagination at play.
Denis Harold
29 January 2016
USA
November 1969 to March 1970
1. MacDowell November 15 1969 (postcard)
The Management of Peedauntals Ltd thanks you for your visit to the East & reminds you that it wishes to keep close to its valued client. It moves shortly to lonely premises in Baltimore. Singing opera you need never be peedauntally underprivileged or under-achieved with our late model Peedauntals. You are missed greatly around the factory especially by the management who sends this postcard.
?
2. November 17
Dear Bill,
The day in Boston was strange and sad and vivid, from the drive in sunlight and clear air and the arrival over Mystic Bridge near Storrow (I thought it was Sorrow) Street to the bizarre farewell in the lounge of the Y.W.C.A. In my mind it is like a lived piece of fiction or film. I can see you in your black coat and black cap standing larger than life like a monument against the clear blue sky, as if I had been a child gazing upward; Elnora like a figure from a painting in her bright strong colours and dark face; the scarf-stripes gashing downwards; Jo with a kind of pearl-coloured vivacity; I, squirrel-bulky in my coat, clutching my sweater as a child away from home clutches its favourite toy; the smiling man with the brief-case; the city benevolent because we were there. And all day was a journey with the four of us performing some kind of ritual dance, person to person to person to person, a long long journey to say au revoir; it would have been impossible to say goodbye.
I have never known such a mysterious sad strange day. It was like waiting to be executed, with the execution taking place in a scene from a painting. The lounge. The sailors sprawled asleep in the chairs. The tight-lipped woman guarding the messages and keys in their brown boxes—the striped shadows the striped scarf the striped sailors. And then, after the time in the Museum, all the paintings that had accompanied us, the image of them in our minds, their after-image projected mysteriously in the lounge of the Y.W.C.A. Boston.
Well, it was a dream. Was it a dream?
In lighter vein I have uncovered from the secret manuscripts of Emily Dickinson a letter from a blue jay to a bee which reads as follows:
B you are gone away!
even au revoir only
was hard to say.
We are lonely.
Jo’s in New York this week.
We’re settled and at work—
the others are mostly back—
your sweater’s warm and thick.
You’ll get my letter, say,
Friday. Reply straightaway
or better, be with me—
Yours, blue J.
I don’t want to embarrass you with these notes; I don’t mean to.
J
3. MacDowell November 22
Dear Bill,
I’m relieved to know you’re alive and well and living in California.
I (and we) were beginning to think you were dead and to mournyia.
(and from there, with a swift turn of a phrase she steered into a limerick)
The pecker of Harrison Kinney
was so excessively skinny
that like a Greek statue
his balls stared back at you
a.(classical) Let’s unGreek our leak, go Roman with Pliny.
b.(classical) as if you were Pallas Athene.
c.(pseudo-contem porary) Like matics without their cine.
d.(vulgar) ‘twas a miracle he had had any.
e.( ’ ) so teeny so meeny so mini.
f.(novelistic) How mean is the thorn in our spinney!
g.(low) If you were a horse you’d whinny.
h.(anthropomorphic) with little eyes, nosy, and chinny.
How about that?
Now you are back on the city scene you might be interested in the model P[eedauntal] which carries with it a special testimonial from Al Bean, Moon-Man whose wife uses it. It is our Supermarket P designed for those who must spend time shopping in one supermarket without being able to get past the barrier. It’s an audio model. The user can select Snap-Crackle-Pop of breakfast food for Environmental Harmony; Mood Music for unexpected social encounters; and many other sounds which have to be heard to be believed. And remember, it carries a testimonial from Al Bean.
It is no mean accomplishment to serve those who now, their minds at peace, need never urinate in the Magic Flute, nor in the Frozen Foods.
There once was a fellow named Lionel
whose pecker was made of vynil
while trying to warm it
he did swiftly unform it
it melted—in fact—that was final.
Who finds himself beholden
to satisfy poor Eunice Golden
must measure his tool
with a thirty foot rule
The astronaut, Al Bean
said space is a lousy scene
once my orbit of fame
was from coming to came
but now I’m just Al has-been.
Completion of the last line wins a fabulous tour of the Eastern United States. Visit the MacDowell Colony. Play anagrams and other games with the famous
Elnora the Morer
Jo the pro
&nb
sp; Janet the never-ban-it.
Mingle with the MacDowell Elite! Journey inside the Biological Time Bomb! Experience James Thurber! Play Losing Sweaters with Simon! Pedal uphill with Jill!
The range of experience is unparalleled. Spend one free morning in Mrs Crocket’s pocket!
One evening in the Specially cooled Jaffrey cinema!
Taste Rose Hips, diluted or concentrated.
This brochure cannot describe the numerous attractions of the fabulous Eastern Seabored.
Take a trip to Baltimore, half a mile to a mile from the Maryland State Prison and the Baltimore Jail. Walk down East Madison Street to the broken-down Laundrette and the writing on the wall
City to city
state to state
boys this girl
don’t need no date.
And more! Get your teargas gun in Johns Bargain Store, the Monumental Five and Ten Cent. Return to the lonely house. Play Schubert on the unplayed Steinway!
Switch on the radiator
human beings must be kept warm.
Open the window on the attainable and the unattainable heaven
Schubert is home.
In Schubert despair sits yearning on a bed of roses
a child full of warm dreams and wishes
lies asleep on the rain-rotted boards of a prepared grave.
Play a Schubert Impromptu for me.
And a Beethoven Bagatelle.
and that musical gossip, Bach, writing an aural manual of erotic technique between man and silence/God.
My chickadee is alive and well. I read Jude the Obscure, a book of unrelieved gloom and power. May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep is a wise generous book. I saw her, briefly, in town and said I would write her a letter. I am now reading The Idiot (rereading).
Your absence is terrible.
The baby table is grim without you and—this week—without Jo. Basil has taken command of B.T. John Brooks also sits there. And Simon and/or Harrison who has discovered Eunice Golden who gives him a moon—(heartbeat). Elnora has been dieting & thus satisfying the maternal instincts of Sylvie (Who is, What is etc. After Shakespeare & Schubert) & of Jackie.
The Pornograph is back!
The library feels like a tomb. You gave so much, Bill! Look after yourself.
J
4. Baltimore November 26
Dear Bill,
Meanwhile, back in Baltimore . . .
It is half past five and I’m in the sitting-room in a rocking chair listening to the pornograph play the eight Schubert Impromptus. Beside me on one of the slabs of marble filched some years ago from an old cemetery being demolished in downtown Baltimore, are the complete piano works of Schubert which I’ve been reading as I listen. And thus I’ve spent my first day in Baltimore.
The house, once an old shop, is two floors and a basement with the old shop window made into a garden. The rooms are filled with paintings, sculptures, objets d’art. In this room there’s the black Steinway taking up much of the space, the pornograph with its speaker, chairs, daybed, a tree made of golden wire set in a tub of white river-stones, several paintings including a huge one of the X-Ray of a deformed foetus, an Abyssinian mural, African spears and shields, New Guinea carved heads, a ceiling-high cabinet of loot from Thailand, Mexico, Peru. There are musical instruments from the Pacific Islands; an Australian aboriginal pipe, a digiridoo, about three feet long from which it’s hard to get a sound. (‘Put in your digiridoo,’ my mother used to say to my brother when he was little and his thing was hanging out.) There’s also a fine sculpted head of a negro done by a negro sculptor; camel-bells; and odds and ends of various old houses including Scott Fitzgerald’s old mantelpiece. (When several old Baltimore homes were being demolished years ago John Money took out a demolition licence which enabled him to visit the sites and take away anything he cared to have.)
My own small room has three paintings done by one of John M’s former close friends; a Thai Buddha; a row of Peruvian fertility charms, little men with erect penises: seven.
The house has a characteristic smell which I can’t quite describe—it’s the smell of absence; nobody spends the day or much of the evening here and I suppose all the objects have their special kind of breath and sweat with no human smell to mask it. John M sometimes has people to stay, and sometimes throws a party but for the most part he spends his time in his hospital office trying to solve other people’s sex problems.
Now your ‘heartbreaker’ is being played. I am back in the Savidge Librarya.
library at MacDowell
My last hours at MacDowell were smooth and uneventful. I had turned in my pepper and salt and cutlery the previous day and thus severed my culinary cord. Jo, Elnora, Sylvie (who left after one game, her quota) and I spent the evening playing anagrams at Mansfield. We made a communal limerick about the Australian arrivalb (quote—‘the moratorium is a communistic plot’)
The writer, Joan Colebrook, who had been born in Australia, had just arrived at MacDowell
Now Colebrook came from down under
hoping to be rent asunder
but all she could do
was sit on the loo
and make wild Australian thunder.
Earlier in the day I had played the pornograph by myself in the library.
Harrison drove me to the bus stop, I went to Boston to find the Museum of Fine Arts is closed on Mondays, I repaired to the Y and enclose the fruits thereof and will not bore you with a recitation of my thoughts.
I was sitting on one of the pew-like seats in the Boston station when I looked up and saw Henry Chapin in cold blood and real life standing with a small hazel-nut of a woman, evidently his wife. It was a strange experience. His wife looked quite old, like a kind of permanent measurement of Henry. We stood talking a while and he carried my bags for me. What rule is it that says people must stop ‘being’ when they leave places like MacDowell where they have freedom to ‘be’? Henry said that he missed the life at MacDowell and he frowned as if he had changed lives, as if the one he wears now is cramping and doesn’t fit.
Enough of that but it was one of those interesting encounters that stay in mind and return later as fiction.
It is late in the evening now, half-past ten. John M and one of his research assistants, Paul, came home and had a small meal and a large drink and went back to the hospital and won’t be back until past midnight. While they are away I put an iron bar across the door as this is a wild neighbourhood with bottles being smashed around outside and a few street fights.
I wish you and Jack Daniels would walk in now to say hello.
I wonder how your work is going.
I’m wearing your sweater to shreds.
It is now Thanksgiving Day, half-past ten in the morning and I am back in the sitting-room. I have played the pornograph, softly, so as not to disturb my host who is working on a paper in the adjoining room. I have been sorting out my MacDowell writings ready for retyping and I come across lines such as
in the sour taste of morning
we shovel bran-bits into our mouths
and look out of the window at the trees
whose defeat is showing.
Doggerel.
It is hot, airless, quiet here. I wish I could say hello to you.
As stylistic relief I enclose a little clean pornography.
Now back to the heartbreakers.
J
5. Baltimore November
A marksman without comparison
was our midnight cowboy Harrison.
With his weapon uptight
he’d shoot all night
at Eunice Golden’s garrison.
Though the women desired to gorge
at the smithy of Andrew St. George
there wasn’t a doubt
his furnace was out
and he had no tools in his forge.
Though I’m painter rather than pieman
this menu is tempting, said Simon.
Balls cantaloupe,
/> crème de cunt soup
Crocket’s casseroled hymen.
A writer named Basil the Gloom
kept waiting and waiting for doom.
When it came, ‘It’s a boy!’
he cried with joy.
‘Now who’s been fucking whom?’
6. Baltimore November
From the factory to you untouched by human hand.
A frightened young tailor of Boston
whose needle had melted the frost in
a lady’s French seam
cried, This is extreme,
It’s haystacks that needles get lost in!
The lady who lay with the tailor
had read Roth and Norman Mailer
but could not catch on
where the needle had gone
while the tailor grew paler and paler.
This experience is bewitching,
My needle keeps poking and pitching,
I’d never have sewn
such a seam on my own
and how happily I am stitching!
At last as the light was growing
there dispersed the ‘cloud of unknowing’,
the dawn it is coming
the lady said humming,
I too said the tailor still sewing!
7. Baltimore November
