Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

quotation from Rilke’s poem ‘Autumn Day’

  41. Dunedin April 7

  Dear Bill, or Bee (as described by Emily D)

  I don’t want to enslave you with correspondence and I swear I will limit my letters, but yours came today and I was so overjoyed to hear from you, and strangely enough I went immediately and found the Rilke you gave me (the translation) for it was unfindable until now and I mourned its loss.

  My book hasn’t arrived either—I think I’ll have to write to those dilatory publishers or phone them collect!

  I’m sitting here at my table by the window which has a panoramic view of Dunedin hills, and I’ve lit a fire of small logs because flames are a beautiful colour and, incidentally, warm on a day when the wind is rather cold, and I’m wearing Paul’s shirt which is very comforting to wear.

  Yesterday my neighbour brought in a tray of apples, the remainder from my trees after the birds had eaten most of them. The little tree I planted and which gardening books advised me was suffering from an incurable disease, again yielded one blossom and one apple, as it had the year before I left home. I think it must be a special tree: there is now no trace of disease. Rilke would have something wise to say about this smallest tree and its one blossom.

  I’m glad Ned liked the postcard. If he desires a similar visitor to the carnivorously planted garden I’m sure we can find him a happier specimen, though there’s no zoo here in Dunedin. I think I told you there’s an albatross colony nearby, also a seal colony where the seals behave very much like the more poetically favoured swans in their ‘awkward walking’, and when they slip into the water they are even more at home than the swan for they submerge and their drab colour makes them indistinguishable from the water.

  I’ve been enquiring about record-players and a piano so that I can learn more about the music. Record players with good sound are about 100 dollars, and a piano about 130 (secondhand—sold by a piano firm here which, though they have forgotten it or do not know it, used to publish my mother’s songs. During the Depression she used to sell their music from door to door.)

  I’m going today to get your painting framed. It’s so precious I’m scared they’ll damage it but I suppose I’ll have to trust them. I’m always wondering what is happening at 131 Hermosillo Drive, where you are, what you are painting, doing, what Paul is doing, and I miss the breakfasts together, but I could go on and on like this about everything, for I miss everything and as soon as you get that small servant-kennel built on to the kitchen let me know and in the wink of an eye (the aeronautical eye takes about twenty hours to wink) I’ll be there. I’m going to send Paul some recipes out of the daily newspaper: the day I returned there was a whole page of passion-fruit recipes but as you don’t have passion-fruit, well, what could I do.

  Oh that I could be redeemed. I know that my redeemer liveth. Blue-chip wise I don’t know how many tape recorders make up the fare between here and there, but I do know that I am hoarding untouched one thousand dollars in travellers cheques; just in case you get that kennel built.

  42. Dunedin April 8

  Hello Bill,

  How are you? How are Paul and Ned? What are you painting? (forbidden question). What are you eating? How long and wide is the United States of America? Are there any artists in America? Do people speak English there?

  The day has just gone—it disappeared as I wrote my first paragraph and now as I look out I see the dark purple clouds of night with just a faint corridor of light over the hills. The city lights are on and twinkling yellow and red.

  (Miss miss miss miss you.)

  Since I’ve been home my time has been spent mostly in doing domestic chores, unpacking stored books and clothes and washing linen and trying to get organized for writing. The other day I set out to pay a small overdue cartage bill and I had a pleasant walk around the industrial and wharf area of Dunedin where many old buildings and early houses still stand—along by the railway yards where I would never dare to walk in any other city, by grain stores and fruit stores and one old building labeled—yes—Bee Supplies which had on each side of its front wall, a stone carving of a bee. It was about half-past ten in the morning and I passed workmen sitting in a row on the footpath drinking their morning tea out of big cups and eating thick sandwiches that my father used to call doorsteps, and everywhere I walked and there were people they were eating. I do enjoy exploring and inspecting the out-of-the way places in Dunedin; and in the oldest street I’m very much aware of the enormity of the past and the land and the pathos of the people, and in the newest streets the people seem like plaster gnomes. Possibly I prefer the older streets because the people who walked there are dead, and though it may be a fallacy, at least the living have some control over the dead.

  Now the sky is violet-coloured like the sky in your painting. I took the painting to be framed and I dread what they will have done to it, I really do; but soon it will be on my wall.

  I have been asked to give a radio interview on ‘Artists’ Colonies in America’. Shall I type out all the limericks and present them over the air and be banished from New Zealand for ever?

  A colonist new on the scene

  said, excitedly landing at Keene,

  ‘They wrote me to say

  I could come this way—

  will they mind if I’ve already been?’

  Remember that one?

  It might help the cause of the Arts if I referred to Granville Hicks’ multiple pricks.

  THURSDAY.

  Hello again. Winter is setting in. It is cold and wet today with the temperature about fifty-five, with a south-westerly wind making it seem colder. I’m fairly organized for work now. Apart from shop assistants and so on, I’ve spoken to only one person I know, and that was my friend Ruth [Dallas] who lives with her niece at the other end of the Public Gardens. I lunched with her on Sunday and came away with copies of two children’s books which she wrote the year she was Burns Fellow. One in particular is beautifully written and printed. She is also a gifted poet—I mentioned her to you. She had some rather good pictures on her walls and when I asked where she got them she told me that her friend Charles had lent them to her. I told you about him, too. He is adviser to the National Art Gallery or Art Foundation or something like that and buys pictures and it was he who was interested in having a portrait of me, just as one of the writers of the country, and he did not care for the postcard of Hyde Solomon’s portrait, which he described as ‘sad and heavy’. Maybe I am sad and heavy. I’m sad now because I miss you so much and I wish you had a dog-kennel attached to your house where I would come and stay until you got the local sheriff to throw me out. And I’m heavy because I’ve just eaten a date scone which I made and now give the recipe for. This quantity makes eight date scones, just enough to fit into a small electric frying pan. Set the pan in advance at 375 degrees. Sift together: (Let’s!)

  •one cup of wholemeal flour

  •one half-cup of white flour

  •(or one and a half of wholemeal)

  •a tablespoon or two of wheat germ

  •a few pinches of salt (two)

  •1 heaped teaspoon of brown sugar

  •2 heaped teaspoons of baking powder (or one heaped and one level)

  Cut one dessert spoon of butter into small pieces and rub into the dry mixture—delicately but surely.

  Add three quarters of a cup of chopped dates.

  Add at once half to a cup of milk, preferably sour. Mix quickly with knife . . . . Turn on lightly-floured board (much better than turning in an electric bed!), cut quickly into eight, lightly flour frying pan, put in scones, put on lid, and leave for six minutes, then quickly turn scones, replace lid and leave for another six or seven minutes or until cooked, I mean until they not you are cooked. Remove, place on wire rack to cool. Delicious eaten warm with butter only or butter and honey or home-made jam, raspberry or strawberry.

  I’ve been looking through my recipe books. They mostly belong to an age before accurate temperatures and quantit
ies were recorded and they have delightful instructions like, ‘Take a peck of primroses’, ‘Put over a sharp (or ‘good’ or bright) fire. Take a handful, a few, some . . .’ All pleasantly vague. And not, ‘Bake one hour’ but ‘Bake until cooked’.

  Stars for comfort.

  This will be a birthday letter to you as I think it is your birthday soon.

  I’m enclosing the photos I took the other day of the garden, such as it is. The geraniums ran wild in the front of the house and at the back there was a rose tree trying to get inside and when I admonished it, a thorn pierced my finger and I fell into a swound and when I woke I was at Muzot, being tended by a white swan . . . who murmured ‘This misery . . .’

  Goodbye now. Unadulterated love, dust-free, germ-free, specially tested to you

  and Paul

  and Ned

  from

  P.S. This is a p.s. from me, Ned, whose photo is on the mantelpiece and little does Jay know that part of my spirit is contained in that photo, and so it is I, Ned, writing to you, Bill and Paul in far-off California. I’m standing beside a plasticine model of Thoth, the Egyptian God of the Arts and wisdom who has the head of an ibis and the body of a man while at his feet sit two baboons wearing small suns. An extraordinary companion for your Ned, don’t you think? There’s a fire burning in the room because I suspect that baby Jay is hooked on it and won’t let it go out: it’s of manuka wood. I just can’t wait until your painting is framed, Bill Brown, my master I mean my servant (how is Dr Gilbride???), so that I can gaze at it.

  43. Dunedin Saturday installment April 11

  Dear Apis mellifica,

  Notes to accumulate and post later in the week, if I can restrain myself as long.

  I was so happy to have news of you all at Hermosillo or Live Oaks Inn and fortunately your letter, which came this morning, did not blow away in the gale that’s been raging all night though the temperature is a fair into-winter one—58 degrees—we seldom have more than a few days of low temperature—low being in the forties—but the nights can get chilly, with slight frost. So much for the meterological report. My house has been rocking and shaking as it has only done in an earthquake and sometimes I wonder if there’s some moment when an eighty-eight year old house may decide to surrender to the gales that must have buffeted it over long periods on this hill, and in the dead of night it occurs to me that the moment of surrender may arrive, then, poof, collapse—no bodies were found in the rubble—this is clearly the earth (tender) alternative to visions of headlines in a plane flight. It is hard to learn to accept oneself as one is, but one must, absolutely; and if there’s an area of apprehension staked out it has to [be] visited now and again, and cultivated.

  Strangely enough I had a fan letter the other day from an elderly man in California who has been reading Owls Do Cry. He himself is writing a book about America. You should receive I.C. surely soon, as I’ve written to G.B about it, and to Carl Brandt, for I have not even had the airmail copy they promise me. My mind is steering towards my new novel—obviously the steering wheel has been in motion for quite a while. Word from the much-missed corner of Hermosillo Drive helps amazingly. You’re a wizard.

  Sorry to hear that Jo is rather unhappy. I sent a Dunedin card to both her and El and will write to them. One does hesitate to make judgments about other people’s feelings, particularly if one happens to live almost entirely by feeling and if one tends to roam in and out of other people’s minds so much in the practice of writing. There seemed to me to be a promise—or threat—of desolation for Jo in South Hadley. She needs lots of like-minded people to flourish among. Perhaps she’d better open her Maison D’absurde and we’ll all go there—for periods. One hesitates, too, to say what people ‘need’. It’s a dangerous presumption but everyone suffers from it at the hands of others, all in good faith.

  I’m afraid I rather go on sermonising about this but if I’ve learned one lesson early in life it is that the essence of each person is sacred, no matter what its flavour—I’m getting into deep water or syrup and will stop . . . or climb out.

  And talking of syrup or ‘honey poured over old regrets’ as you describe your reading of Rilke. You do have a mellifluous voice as one would expect of apis mellifica and Rilke has many regrets . . . but the readings are beautiful though in the recording I have, the ‘s’ sound fizzes like Alka-Seltzer because you may have held the microphone too close—no—the recording meter was probably too high. Last night I felt very sad because I excitedly bought a Penguin Modern European poets series—Rilke, Selected poems—and when I opened it (I had thought I would send you one, and that maybe here was a good translation, and I was in a hurry when I bought it, and lured by the haunting-eyed face on the cover)—I found the poem Autumn Day reading as follows,

  ‘Lord, it is time. The summer was so great.

  Impose upon the sundials now your shadows

  and round the meadows let the winds rotate.’

  I think it is a shocking translation—it’s by J B Leishman, as are all of them, and all are pretty bad, I think, so I’m going down to my basement to prepare some bombs for the day when the Great Translation Revolution is at hand, or, rather, at tongue or pen. Meanwhile, for all his ‘ever more mature’ McIntyre wins my praise. When my parcel arrives with Vergers in it we’ll remedy this, I hope.

  So nice and warm to hear from you.

  Sunday.

  Ironing today . . .

  Not really. I swear I’m completely drip-dry, well almost. I’ve been living in Paul’s shirt since

  I came home—it gives me the feeling I’m still in Santa Barbara or nearby.

  I hope your new portrait goes well and is full of discovery. Where is Paul’s portrait of the giant with butterflies at his lips and a forest or/and savannah on his chest? I missed it when it went from the wall but I still see the three heads under the Italian blue sky and the billowing cloud and I wish I’d had more time to look at it. I don’t think I’m able consciously to look at things and absorb their detail and yet afterwards these ‘flash upon the inward eye’ in detail, and remind me that one is always seeing and taking in whether or not one is aware of it.

  Platitude number n.

  I’ve had a letter which pleases me very much. Someone on the staff of the music department of the University has been commissioned by the Broadcasting Company (N.Z.B.C.) to compose a (quote) ‘work for chamber ensemble for the new television music programme. The new programme will trace the preparation of the work from its first rehearsal to final performance by the N.Z.B.C. Symphony orchestra.’

  He says he’s started work on a setting for tenor voice and chamber ensemble using some poems from The Pocket Mirror, and wants my permission to use the poems. I love the idea of being allied to music. Also, I feel as if I now have a foot or ear inside the music department which has a wonderful collection of records. We can borrow records from the Public Library also, and there’s a listening room which charges ten cents a listen. I think the library (whose books are free) charges twenty-five to fifty cents for the loan of a record. The Music Dept now has a Mozart Fellowship for a composer.

  MONDAY.

  I had a visit today, no, yesterday, sorry, from a friendb (I told you of her in a letter) who has her finger, metaphorically, on the pulse of Dunedin while her husband has his finger literally on the pulse, as he’s a general medical practitioner; and goodness knows where the other idle fingers are, probably in the same place as the dial-hand of time . . . I declined the invitation to spend the day at their seaside bach or crib which is a few miles up the coast (7 or 8) in magnificent setting of hills and sea.

  Dorothy Ballantyne

  Dorothy is a kind of Antipodean* [footnote: *except that in N.Z. we acknowledge only loin of mutton below the belly button] Jo Rider—brilliant, witty, with allusive literary conversation—she can produce a quote from everyone who’s ever written, to put her point across: consequently she’s rather exhausting. Her husband is a quiet thoughtful type, inclined, I imagine, t
o be in amused retreat much of the time. I have a vivid sad image of her first husband who was ill for many years and wandered about the house in his dressing-gown, quite isolated among his two growing daughters and his wife whose work as Children’s Librarian had to keep the house going and the children at school and her husband provided for. I remember his death too, a few years ago, and the funeral party, my first funeral party, and how I sat in a small ante-room and drank sherry and people came to talk to me one by one because I would not join the others.

  Well. Excuse me for being a bore. How I love the continuity of life and death and how the past eats up the present and the present the future, and I like the way death, seen from a distance, fits into the pattern.

  I sermonise again. But when Dorothy and Robert were sitting in my sitting-room yesterday eating (yes!) date scones, Dick’s ghost was there too, I’m sure, though he never visited my home. He was a florid military-looking man, and I did not like him, but his isolation in his last years was terrible to feel and see.

  Now for a little light relief . . . I tried to make some cider from the tray of apples off my tree; and today I’m making lentil soup; and my study is now ready to work in; and today the electrician comes to tell me how much the plug for the record-player is going to cost (my electrical switch-board has to be altered).

  Oh to be in Santa Barbara now that April’s there.

  I wonder what April’s doing in the Hermosillo lair?

  101% pure love to B + P + Ned

  from Jay

  [in margin: Nice of Eva M to read me!! I read here of the N.Y.C. bombing.]

  44. Dunedin April 14

  Dear Bill, or Apis Mellifica,

  I just happened to be passing my typewriter on the route between my new record player and my electric jug which has burned out its element as I was so absorbed in listening to music; and I thought I’d write one of my interminable number of notes to Hermosillo Drive or Live Oaks Inn or Paradise Flower Nook among the Fern Feelies. I do get very very homesick for my Californian friends. A current of loneliness sometimes flows around me and I get pretty sad. The people here all seem so cold and harsh—I suppose I can never really dismiss my past N.Z. experiences while I’m in New Zealand.