by Janet Frame
Dear Bill,
Another letter from my supply, just to say hello as if you were not absent and to try to make news of no news except it may snow tonight and outside I hear the sound of dogs that sound like wolves and a wind snarling around the house. I’m up in my small room where I’ve moved everything as I’ve decided to work here instead of in the basement. The room looks out over the small backyard with a garden as big as a cemetery plot, and beyond that an alley, then a school with its high encircling fence of concrete topped with pieces of broken glass. Beside the house is another alley and across from that another school, similarly forbidding, with a high wire fence which, of course, the children manage to climb to play in the yard as they have nowhere else to play. The lights are bright in the alley and cast a white glare on the pavement as if snow had been falling.
Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe who lived in Baltimore collapsed in the street and was taken dying to one of the big hospitals, and that one of his stories about a howling dog is based on a legend of howling wolves from one of the Baltimore Cemeteries?
I have just written to May Sarton saying a few words about her book; hoping that I didn’t sound false, because I’m inclined to be so self-conscious about everything I say (less about what I write) that my words seem to turn to oatmeal and dust. I sent her a cat, and I’m sending you one too, though I didn’t know I would until I began this letter. It’s a beautiful cat.
The dogs howl again. In the daytime I never see them but at night they howl especially when the wind is whining and snarling.
It feels like a prison here. I find the day passes without my doing much work yet I cannot account for the hours. John Money usually goes off to his work at half-past eight and has been coming home at a quarter past one in the morning and though I need not stay up, I do, because there’s a heavy iron bar I put against the door and I have to be awake to remove it. I miss the outside world of MacDowell! Theoretically, I have all day and evening to work without interruption, entirely on my own; and yet the hours go by remote from me without my making any impression on them: it is most curious.
Some time during the day I play the pornograph, usually in the morning as soon as John M has gone to work, and then around six-thirty in the evening. One evening I read a medical journal in which Daudet, Heine, De Maupassant were diagnosed as having had syphilis (sp?) and the extracts from Daudet’s Diary and the Goncourt Journal were nightmarish. In his last days De Maupassant had a terrible sense that his thoughts were escaping from his head and abandoning him and he used to wander about the hospital where he was confined asking if anyone had seen his thoughts. And then he felt that his face was escaping from him, and his smile and frown—Have you seen my smile?
These are fit topics for Basil the Gloom . . .
Enough for now, on this grim note. Another instalment tomorrow. First, extempore,
A psychologist named John Money
once combed his tool with honey
when it erected
the bees objected
but the beekeeper thought it funny.
Goodnight.
THURSDAY.
Nice to get your letter today, Bill. I’ll hold off posting this for a few days otherwise you won’t know whether you’re going or coming with all my hellos. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve just sold three dozen deformed foetuses as Christmas hampers; and all I did was lift the iron bar from the door, unchain the chain, unlock the inner door, open it, unlock the outer door, and, foetuses in hand announce, Lovely Christmas hampers, lovely deformed foetuses seventy-five cents apiece. Truly, I didn’t know there was such a market for them; they went like hot cakes, and here I am having earned as much or twice as much as I get for a poem. On the other hand the Peedauntals are terribly slack. No-one in Baltimore is interested. I’m thinking maybe of Rental Peedauntals, though the drycleaning and wet-cleaning costs would be astronomous (anonymous and astronomical as they are always cleaned in secret).
Alas there is no record of the Schubert Sonata in B flat major but the music is here! I’ve managed by picking out a few chords to know which one it is—it’s magnificent; hearing even a few chords one feels as if one’s inside is being torn out. It’s a new experience for me to hear sounds like this so close to the source. In my brief term of learning the piano as a thirteen-year old (and we didn’t even have a piano at home) I learned ‘Puck’ (which sounds nice and dirty), ‘Robin Adair’, ‘Londonderry Air’, A Curious Story, The Waltz from the Opera of Faust, the Chopin Prelude which goes de/dee de de ??????? Wagner’s Star of Eve, Handel’s Largo, and a piece called The Shepherd Boy, which was prefaced by the lines, ‘Like some vision of far off times lonely shepherd boy/
What song art thou singing in thy youth and joy?’
That was the end of my private musical education. Music (i.e. singing only) was a big thing at school with a festival each year in which little-medium-sized-big-bigger girls sang ‘Oh have you seen my lady go down the garden singing’ and ‘Where’er you walk’ and played Moment Musical, Fantasy Impromptu, Marche Militaire, various lullabys, the Moonlight Sonata—all day.
Another instalment next week.
As I was saying it’s a new experience for me to hear music so close. The music of all the pieces I ever played had ‘safe’ sounds, though one or two phrases were a bit shattering; it was fairly safe and neat and self-contained; plaintive and poetic in parts; but each chord was not so clearly part of a tremendous whole. Oh My! (as Elizabeth Ames of Yaddo used to exclaim).
So you see how my MacDowell experience affected me! One of the ways, at least.
FOUR STARS NO TV IN ROOM
THREE STARS NO BATHROOM OR TV
Glad you liked the Y limericks. I sent them to Jo and Elnora too, and today had a brilliant letter from Jo, and I’ll go down in history as being driven to despair by her brilliance. It’s snowing in New Hampshire! Maybe it’s just as well I’m not there as I’d be writing verse about the snow. Yes, Elnora snored at the Y and thus will go down in history. She made a noise like a factory with all its machines working. I was in such a state of shock at having said au revoir to you that I didn’t mind but Jo kept whispering urgently to her, while outside the contractors decided to get to work in the middle of the night on the new parking lot they are building near the Y. We were all pretty much in a state of shock, I think, and the temperature in the room was eighty-five and the radiators hissed all night (they didn’t really, I’m just inventing this), and before we went to sleep we had one of those confessional chats that women have when they’re taking off their make-up and fixing their hair, their glass eyes, their false teeth; and washing their dildos.
NO MEALS, NO TV NO BATHROOM.
ROOM ONLY AND BOARD PINE OR WALNUT
GROAN BONUS INFLATABLE
PRESIDENT KENNEDY OR CHOICE WHICH MUST BE
MADE WHEN BOOKING
The moonlit evenings, the stars and the palms sound like Auckland New Zealand in the summer; with beach not far away. I had that impression too from the light in your paintings. The light in Dunedin is luminous, slightly blue like snow-light, clear and untouchable, sometimes hostile—what nonsense this is but this is what it seems to me. The light in the subtropical north is more invading, intimate, catastrophic; diffused yet the whole daylight is so brilliant one is constantly blinking and closing one’s eyes against it.
FRIDAY.
I’m sending you a New Zealand quarterly of five years ago. I have something in it—a part of a series N.Z. writers were doing called Beginnings.
I feel less homesick when I read your letters.
Blah
You will know this limerick?
Young man, said the countess at tea
Is it true you fart when you pee?
I replied with some wit
‘Do you fart when you shit?
If you do then you’re one up on me.’
I didn’t make this up, it’s in a book. I’m sure we should get our literary gems printed somewhere, even where you suggest, and you,
certainly, should make the illustrations.
Goodbye for now.
A parking lot near the Y?
I’m afraid that I’m much too shy.
A quarter a time
is a swindling shime
it’s far too cheap at the pri
That limerick shows how my battery has run out!
J
DECEMBER
8. Baltimore December 1
Dear Bee,
First, the business news.
We decided to adopt the conservative approach: to call for and print selected testimonials with photographs if possible, in a nation-wide advertising campaign. The response so far is fair-good although we expect a rise in sales towards the Christmas Season. We are glad that our clients on the West Coast are solidly behind us and we affix a sample of our advertising technique.
The paintings are beautiful. I can’t decide which is my favourite as my preference changes. I had Ride in the Desert and Pedestrian Crossing propped where I could see them. Ride in the Desert is so fluid, poetic and full of light that falls not, as in many paintings, where the artist chooses it shall fall but where the light itself decides and that means of course that the conspiracy of painter and light is total—one becomes the other; maybe this sounds silly.
I’m not a painter, mister, but I know what I like and what I feel. I remember I used to think that people’s thoughts came startlingly out of the back of their head and when I suggested this I was laughed at; but how pleased I was many years later to read in a Chekhov story that when a person has his back to you, if you know him, you know the thoughts from glancing at the back of his head—well, not thoughts, feelings. One knows the rider here as one knows the character in a good novel and one sees so much in the back view and shape. I like the way you treat people and their environment as equals, as beings with no barriers* [footnote: Without barriers natural digestion, with barriers, cannibalism.] between them. This painting is sad, I think, but it’s also full of the bliss of being in a world where man, rock, tree, sky spring from the same source and are untroubled by trying to separate themselves, rather feeding one from the other. This is in all the paintings in the catalogue (I mean for me) with sometimes a suggestion that plants, rocks, deserts were in the world first and have the right to change man more than he has the right to change them, and the form of change they impose is to make man become them.
The Pedestrian is quite a menacing story. From one angle the hills and slopes resemble benign capes that will protect the pedestrian where man and his machines never will. Yet in another light or view (I felt this after I had looked at the painting for some time) there is a grim suggestion—Look at the pedestrian taking such care in crossing the road and avoiding the traffic when the real terror is in the hills that seem to be following, to overtake and engulf.
There is this movement in all the paintings; nothing is still; nothing is now; it’s all a swirl of yesterday and tomorrow. For instance The White Dog makes one (me) feel that the woman was sitting quietly reading when her right breast suddenly became a little nipple-nosed white dog while she pretended not to notice, while the white dog in its suddenly being claims all the attention.
Well—I could go on and on in this way but I’ll give you a rest, and not mention the other paintings though I like them all and I love having them, or likenesses of them.
[in margin: take no notice of this crazy stuff]
Meanwhile back in Baltimore . . . I continue to use the pornograph as there is a small collection of records, and to sort my papers including one suitcase full of script from the novel I wrote this year and when I see it, so much of it, typed and retyped and reduced I am overpowered—now—with the amount of work I did then.
I’m hoping to go to New York at the end of December and will stay with Elnora some days before I go to Yaddo on the 5th January. I think Jo and Mark are coming to town then, also. I’d give anything for a quick trip to California to restore me before the Yaddo days begin; and with an advance coming up I could make myself afford it.??!!????
No limericks this time. They’re no fun on your own. Your Dunedin and Golden attempts were perfect—what talents we MacDowellites exhibit when there is no-one looking.
Blue Jay
9. Baltimore December
Dear literate live oak, to continue my story,
It’s half-past five in the evening and I’m in the sitting room sitting with my typewriter before me, the Steinway and the foetus on my left, the front door on my right, and I’ve just finished packing a tiny Care Parcel, emergency rations for you to use in the Earthquake or Tidal Wave; and outside it is snowing.
The flight was surprisingly calm considering that the plane’s engines failed on take-off and we were transferred to another plane and then chased by an eighty-five mile an hour wind all the way to Baltimore. The pilot who was old with white hair and probably with furlined arteries, made a marvellous job of flying and landing. I dozed, whiskey-soured, most of the way, with daydreams of my wonderful week in Santa Barbara, and though I’ve been in Baltimore nearly two days now I refuse to relinquish Pacific Time.
A letter from May Sarton was waiting for me. She’s had the ’flu and was feeling groggy, and maybe a bit ethereal: she said nice things about my writing. Elnora also has had a kind of ’flu—I phoned her yesterday to cheer her up by telling her I had a gift for her from you. Also I had a note from Charles Neider who is actually back home after his whirlwind visit to Antarctica.
Last night I played Funeral Music by Hindemith and the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, and today I bought a book to teach me the notes and I’m up to page 30, new broom sweeping clean, and it’s an interesting exercise in self-knowledge, a disillusionment to find that as usual I want everything for nothing and at once. There’s one of the ‘Cinq Doigts’ pieces by Stravinsky here.
Letter is now interrupted. John Money has a visitor from Sumatra and he has just phoned to say they are arriving.
It is now ten p.m. and I’ve ‘retired’ to my little room. I tried to call Jo at MacDowell this evening but they must have been so busily eating they heard nothing but their jaws. So I’m sitting here in my bed wishing I were in the world of the live oaks.
The East seems oxygen-starved and murky after California with the blue skies and the butterflies and beautiful Ned with his fur like feathers. Wherever you live, I think it is naturally a place of many blessings, just because you are there.
Forgive this disconnected (as usual) letter, I am tired, and the clock is ticking in my ear, the phone is ringing but everyone is asleep, everyone is tired, the boardinghouse is full tonight, for the visitor is staying a few days, ah how my battery is worn; it comes from not having had my Vitamins! And to make things worse all the people from the Peedauntal Factory have gone off for the holidays just when a big order has come in from both the White House and the MacDowell colony and I’m nearly crazy trying to decide priorities, whether it’s better for their work and their country for artists or for statesmen to have to pee down their leg. And worst of all, Nixon wants a Peedauntal in the shape of Santa Claus. I know it’s not very businesslike of me but I’ve never really studied how the stupid things are made, I’ve just let the foreman and the workers take over, and now I’m racking my brains to make a paper pattern and threading needles and even trying to knit purl and plain to turn out something. I do know a tailor in Boston who might help . . . except that his needles are apt to go astray.
More of this at the crack of dawn (so to speak) tomorrow before I post this and your Care Parcel.
Dawn has broken. I’m posting this immediately
Love to Paul & Ned & yourself—J
(‘to divide is not to take away’)
10. Baltimore December
Dear Bill,
Hello. It’s midday and I’ve just had a boiled egg for lunch. John M and his Sumatran(?) visitor who has spent the past five years studying at Michigan for his Physics Doctorate, have gone to Washington and from there to a round of Christmas cockta
il parties which I declined, as I remembered the boredom of the one and only medical staff party I went to—and of course there was the old problem of describing how long and wide is New Zealand . . . some blockage prevents me from remembering. It seems that when people are ‘in’ the world of an establishment some part of their mental territory becomes a waste land that unlike a normal wilderness that becomes a sanctuary for ideas and feelings ‘of passage’, can support no form of life.
I miss you.
I’m playing a Bach flute suite on the pornograph . . . and now I am playing Fugue in C Minor.
I’ve nothing to say in this letter except that my thoughts are in the little house in Hermosillo Drive and I’m permanently on Pacific Time.
No limericks today.
A small parody.
We are the front-end loaders
we are the movers of earth,
wheel-deep in drainage odours
assisting at bungalow’s birth.
We are the grim foreboders
of a treeless tasteless earth.
You will be having lunch now, sitting outside under the butterflies, and Paul will be there, and Ned will be lounging around with his fur sticking out—I’ve never seen a cat whose fur sticks out in so many directions at once, he looks like a black and white thistle-ball, the kind that we used to call ‘robbers’, and ‘one o’clocks’. I suddenly remember that in my little house in Dunedin I’m not entirely catless—there’s a neighbour’s cat comes to visit me, and when I am downstairs doing my washing in the oldfashioned washing-tubs the cat climbs on the edge of the tub and hits at the water with his paws. I thought at first it was a materialized dream-cat and I was disappointed when I discovered it belonged to a neighbour.
