by Janet Frame
32. Down Baltimore Way February
Dear special Amazing real Bill,
I miss you and I’m writing a hasty letter to say so. Baltimore is now blue sky, snow sometimes, cold with a mistral blowing the pieces of glass and torn cartons and wrappers up and down the street—yesterday was Trash Day in East Madison Street. The plants in the small backyard garden are still grey with no sign of green yet.
So much for local colour. John Money is less crabby than when I was last here—I think he is pleased with his series of lectures to the Medical students on Pornography. I find him much much too serious about everything and even in ordinary conversation he lectures, which is an occupational hazard, I suppose, of lecturers.
In New York I spent a frantic last couple of days rushing around and doing nothing and not going where I wanted to and missing out people I’d promised to say au revoir to. I went to Ann’s apartment for a quick dinner (the L.A. Ann) and it was good to see her again, also to have a link with the west coast and to have real messenger news of the live oaks*. [footnote: * species found in Santa Barbara known as Bill, Paul & Ned (a mutant oak, furred)] She had two friends with her, one a young sculptor; the other had recently spent time in New Zealand: both bright. From there I went to the Marquands and spent time with Sue and John and returned to Elnora’s apartment in the early morning, slept about three hours, then caught the train to Baltimore and here I am missing while I listen to the pornograph and write this letter.
I searched and found the Rilke poems. I’m looking forward to trying to translate them (you will be doing most of the work) (and Paul too). George Braziller will publish my book of poems next year—it frightens me that he has not yet refused to publish my work.
This is not the kind of letter I dream of writing you. It is what we used to call, in our family, an ‘On the Monday’ letter, derived from my father’s habit when he was away from home of recording almost every move in sentences which began, On the Monday . . . . On the Tuesday . . . .
I should know on Wednesday or Thursday when I’ll be flying to L.A. Could be the weekend sometime. No later than Monday 2nd March. In the meantime au revoir.
Basic love
J
33.
Your letter today is so nice and comforting to me in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. This letter will be the last I write to you before I fly on Saturday, American Airlines F.045 leaving Baltimore noon, arriving L.A. at 2.18 Pacific Time—I’ll be phoning you tonight to tell you. I wanted it to be Friday but the medical checkup has turned out more complicated than I thought and I’m sitting here in downtown Baltimore Maryland with all kinds of wild apprehensions flying through my mind. I shall have to spend the next two days being radioisotoped, for five hours tomorrow and about three hours the next day and then on Friday hearing the results which I’ve no reason to expect will not be O.K. but you know what Authors Imagination Inc. does to one. I also have to submit again to one of those immodest internal examinations where one has no control over one’s secretions and therefore makes oneself apparently ready to receive the smoothie doctor with all his goods. What shame. For ‘one’ read ‘I’.
It will be good to leave Baltimore and I truly can’t wait to land in L.A. It’s like a dream. Perhaps it is.
Elnora phoned last evening and she will be finished her book this weekend—very wonderful news, I think, and I’m sure it will help her. I’m glad you like The Adaptable Man. I did try to reread it but I found it rather boring from time to time. I did enjoy the way the characters (for me, anyway) became people, especially the dentist whom I built up from that one visit to the dentist. My characters are not really people to the reader—to the critic, I mean.
I’m excited about flying west and I see myself on the patio hogging that chair while the hummingbirds hum near by and Ned blossoms in Op Art colours, and you and Paul munch p.b. sandwiches.
Here, in downtown Baltimore, my consolation has been the music, and though I can’t play the big Steinway it’s been something wonderful for me to be alone with a black Steinway most of the day. I’ve been listening to the pronograph also.
Hasty finish to post →
Love x Love J
MARCH
34. Santa Barbara March 6 (postcard)
By the time you read this I shall have been swallowed by a carnivorous plant which you have been sheltering unbeknownst in your otherwise paradisal garden. I have strength only to write this card which I gave to Ned to post (mail) & pray that he does so. I’ve not even space to tell the location of the plant. Farewell.
Your loving Janet.
NEW ZEALAND
March 1970 to January 1971
35. New Zealand March 23 (postcard)
Dear Ned,
I often think of you & wonder when you, my distant cousin, will come to visit me. I’ve quite a nice apartment here at the Zoo but there’s nothing much to do all day. I hope you like my hippie-style hair-do. How’s life in Santa Barbara these days! I hear you’re sweet on Dr Gilbride?
Love—Felis?
36. Auckland March
Dear Bill,
I miss you and Paul and Ned and the piano (your playing) very much and I wish you were here in this fresh blue world of sea and sky and sun. How clear and sparkling the light is! Ah, but the spaces! Sadly, though, so much of the human furniture of living—the buildings etc.—reminds me of the Blue Chipa Shop and forces me to the conclusion that we are a Blue Chip people. And yet there is such an expanse of sky and sea and light that our Blue Chipness seems irrelevant.
Blue Chip was an American system of redeemable stamps issued by shops
It has been a long hot summer and the temperature is about or above that of Santa Barbara sunny days. I am sitting in the small caravan-room which my sister hired for a few days to accommodate me. It is noon and I have eaten my peanut butter lunch, with apples and coffee. I have played the tape of the poems—you recite or read them beautifully, Bill. I am alone—my sister is at college, my nephew (who looks like someone from the Steak House) is at University, the other nephew (who also looks like a waiter, smaller version, at the Steak House) is at his job at the radio station where he is technician, recording etc—I’d forgotten this—he will advise me about a phonograph—my brother-in-law is at his job at the newspaper, and my niece is at school; and I am partially and ever in Santa Barbara.
The flight was very rough for six hours and felt very much like a ship at sea in a storm, which meant that my internal headlines read—Plane buffeted. Engine drops from Plane. Plane Disappears in Pacific. Shortly before the disappearance the pilot radioed that severe turbulence was being encountered. There were no survivors . . . Frogmen are expected to scour the bed of the Pacific to recover a valuable tape recording which may give some clue to life in ancient California among the live oaks.
A red butterfly has just flown into the room. This is very much an On-the Monday letter as I shan’t be writing a real letter until I get back to Dunedin which will be on the 1st April; and this note is to keep in touch, to remind myself of much happiness found at Hermosillo Drive: when I fall asleep I dream of it.
Is the mail strike over? Have you received the book? I think often of the Prisoner and the Frog Prince who are clear in my mind and when I look at the Prisoner I read into the colouring of the figure and the background some crisis of identity and camouflage.
When I get to Dunedin I will ‘wake and read and write long letters’b.
quotation from an English translation of Rilke’s poem ‘Autumn Day’
Much love, antipodean style—Green Jay.
37. Auckland March 27 Good Friday (handwritten)
Don’t be disconcerted by my daily letters—I’ll reduce them to weekly when I get to Dunedin. I’m missing you terribly & I hope that when you send me a tape cassette to Dunedin you will have recorded on it as many Rilke poems as you can (from the McIntyre translations). The three that I have sound so beautiful & your voice cheers me in this foreign land where my only real relatives ar
e and always have been the earth, the sky, the sea & the rivers, the trees and the flowers, and the ‘breezes and the spaces’, and as these are still in abundance I can speak of myself as having some kind of kin here—oh, I’ll not forget the birds too. The air is still so clear and sparkling.
In this letter I’m enclosing a couple of photos & a cutting of typical radio programmes here. I’d forgotten that we do get a variety of music from different countries. The record shops, though providing chiefly for the pop music buyer, have an interesting range (one can buy John Cage’s work, for example) from modern composers to the warhorses. As an emotional & musical comforter I have bought myself the Schubert Impromptus played by William Klemperer but on first listening I think it’s not a very good record, being rather faint in sound. He plays interestingly at almost half the speed of Schnabel & Richter.
At the local shopping centre I met the husband of the elderly womanc I told you of—her life in senility restricted marvellously to music, especially Mozart. Ernest (her husband) began immediately to talk of music which is his passion & before I fly to Wellington on Monday I shall visit them & perhaps listen to some of the 150 Schubert songs they have on record.
Ernest and Jess Whitworth
Last evening I went with my sister & her husband to a performance of Earth and Sky, a combination of choir, ballet, poetry, composed by a Wellington musician, depicting ambitiously the creation in Maori Mythology & using a combination of Maori chants and poetry for the vocal parts. I found it very exciting, beautiful in parts & moving although there was the tendency of the composer to leave nothing to the imagination so that the work became, in a way, an empty treasure-house. I missed you terribly as I sat among the foreign audience & I wished/wish I were still in Santa Barbara or that you were here. When?????
The day is clear & full of singing crickets, as the night is full of singing cicadas. I am impatient to get to my home in Dunedin but there was no seat to be had on any plane before Monday (to Wellington) and Wednesday (to Dunedin). In New Zealand people book seats for many months ahead; & in Easter Week the planes & trains are usually full.
Life at my sister’s is too hectic for my taste although this is partly my fault—after their first day’s shyness & strangeness (and mine, too) the young people are eager to show me their accomplishments & treasures & so Ian, one nephew, switches on his handmade stereo equipment to play pop songs (which could be worse) & Neil tries to explain computers & remarks (a hopeful remark, I think) that there is little or no scope for creativity in what he is doing. He is now studying German, also. Pamela, the youngest, fifteen, is a Latin & French & mathematics scholar with long blonde hair.
I miss you, Billy. And I miss Paul & Ned & the peanut-butter patio. And—very much—the meditation before meals.
The other evening I had dinner—a Chinese meal—at Frank Sargeson’s. He is now 67 & is looked on as the grand old man of N.Z. letters. He is writing more & more fluently than at any time in his life, enjoying an Indian summer. I gave him the proof copy of that book published by—Bernard Geis. He told me several bawdy stories & read to me from his latest work & showed me the new Landfall (not yet printed) on the cover of which he appears in 4 photographs: himself as a child, as a young man, an older man, & now as a bearded elderly man. Harry (his friend for 37 years) who now has a room in his house, is ill, as thin as a shadow, & Frank looks after him. Frank talked of his death, too, & he read me his tentative will. He has lived most of his adult life in this small cottage near the sea & he is now surrounded by apartments, a motorway passes his door, & he periodically turns down fantastic offers for his now valuable land. When he dies, he says, he does not want his toothbrush & underpants enshrined for posterity (someone has recently sold a few of his letters to a museum for 500 dollars), so everything will be sold & disposed of & if his residual beneficiaries want to keep and use his house & possessions, rather than having the proceeds of the sale they will have to buy the place themselves. There are 2 residual beneficiaries—and I am one. He may change this of course. I would much rather see the place as he has it—minus, of course, his toothbrushes & underpants! It is unique with its many many books & pictures—also its slightly Spanish smell. And there’s the huge paw-paw tree in the garden, the lemon tree at the back door & the Chinese gooseberries by the hedge.
Goodbye now. Will you come to N.Z. to see me???
Love x love to you & Paul & Ned x the carnivorous plants.
J
38. Wellington March 31 (handwritten)
Dear Bill & Paul & Ned & all carnivorous plants everywhere,
Morning, the wind rustles the many leaves of native bush outside, 18-month old Stephanie is being bathed next door, I hear John (16) coughing, & another gust of wind shakes the green world outside. I’m sitting on my bed writing this. John has given me his room for a couple of nights so I am surrounded by paintings and painting equipment. On one wall is a huge mural of 3 naked gurus (plural sp?), one yellow, one blue, one red. In another corner is a meditation centre with 3 small Buddhas; in another corner is the childhood teddy bear; also many books. Hilary the daughter & Jacquie the mother are here, also a friend of Jim’s (Jim is not here). All except Jacquie have been to a Maori Hui, a huge gathering of elders, youngers all tribes & I feel ashamed that I know so little Maori, for everyone speaks it fluently.
End of letter. Most important part is this—that I’m missing you very very much, come & rescue me with you & music & poetry
Green Jay
Kisses + Love + love
APRIL
39. Dunedin April 3 (postcard)
Greetings, love & kisses from Janet-home-alone, who misses “ “ “ you.
40. Dunedin April 4
Dear Bill,
I’m just about to have a grandstand view of a storm and to find how waterproof my house is. Now the rain is flowing down the windows, the house is shaking, there’s a wild gale; lightning streaks across the sky, the stormwater drain outside in the street is like a fountain . . . and so much for the storm, after a day of hot hot sun and clear blue skies. Since I’ve been back home I can’t make up my mind whether I live in a tropical or continental climate—the days have been brilliantly blue and hot and the nights clear and cold and this is the first almost tropical storm that has passed.
Thus writes Janet-home-alone in absence and isolation on the notepaper which her tenants must have had printed for themselves: I found it in one of the drawers of my desk. Would you believe it that day to day I am sustained by playing your recording, especially the poems you read—‘The Swan’, ‘Autumn Day’, ‘A Lament’; and I get some laughter from the crazy conversations about neglected poems by May Sarton and the tender-leaved carnivorous plant and how long it takes water to become urine. I miss you terribly. Paul was right when he said the pain of separation would be eased by daily chores—I’ve been going mindlessly up and down the back stairs retrieving my books that I had stored in the basement, rearranging the furniture (an old Frame ploy), unpacking stored linen and clothes. I feel happy to have my books with me and I have distributed them in each room—but how tiny the house seems, so much like a toy house with its squares and long corridor; but it is still a house up in the clouds: at night I like to sit in the dark and look out at the city lights and the dark hills and the traces of sunset. I would like you to come and visit me, if you were so inclined, she said shyly.
I wonder how your Easter week was spent, after your untying following three weeks of being tied up. I passed through Wellington at Easter and stayed two nights with the Baxters, that is all except Jim who is living in a small religious community in the centre of the North Island and who visits Jacquie, his wife, maybe once in five months. Also staying there was a dentistry professor who described himself as ‘a professor of false teeth’, father of eight children who had spent Easter, first of all hitch-hiking with young John (the seventeen year-old boy who’s a talented artist), then attending a Maori gathering of tribes (Jacquie is Maori), then hitch-hiking again to Welli
ngton; and all the time amazed at the experiences he’d had, hitch-hiking for the first time with a young man who dresses in Buddhist robes and wears shoulder-length hair!
When the plane landed in Dunedin I felt I had come to a lonely wilderness and yet I was happy to see the sheep and cows and horses and all the green hills and the trees. My tenants left my house in good condition, with vegetables still in the garden—fat cabbages and spinach and rhubarb, but they have cut down the beautiful young Australian fir tree that had grey leaves like the leaves of the olive tree that on winter days used to look as if snowflakes instead of leaves were pinned to the tree. Also, for some curious reason, my tenants removed the electric light bulbs and a few electric plugs—perhaps there was a shortage of them when they were leaving.
It is dark now and the lights are shining and twinkling through the mist, and I wish I could be in Hermosillo Drive listening to you play the piano while I turn the pages: without music and dear friends what is left of life could be mostly death, I think.
I’m sending you a collage of Prince Charlie and his ma or mom.
Goodbye now and love to yourself and Paul and Ned and all that make up the life at H Drive, including the tender-leaved carnivorous plant. As soon as I hear that you are still alive and well I will flex my poetic, peedauntal, sub-Rilkean muscles and ‘waken, read and write long letters’, rather more, I hope, than ‘restlessly wander up and down where dead leaves are blown’a.
