Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  How is the new portrait? Today was a day of excitement for me because I collected your framed painting and they’ve done it very nicely and now it’s hanging on my wall as a much-needed Santa Barbara infiltration and the colour is so beautiful and it’s full of poetry, of the ‘poetry of motion’—I daresay I shall write a verse about it and I only write verse when I am moved to.

  Well, again, how are you all, peedauntal-wise? No market for them here, though there may be a market among the ladies. Here the streets are lined with Gents lavatories, a relic from the days when the gents rushed out of the pub at six o’clock after filling up since five. I’ll have to enlist your help to invent a new product to keep me solvent in the Antipodes. A prick posy or something like that for the massive football players who are beginning to appear for the winter season.

  And talking of them, maybe I owe an apology to the triple-pricked Granville Hicks for he has written a review* [in margin: *enclosed] of my book for a Chicago paper—the book isn’t published yet but there are one or two reviews being prepared for 27th April (3 days after your birthday, Paul. How did I know? It’s in your catalogue.) I misremembered your birthday Bill—I was thinking it was the seventeenth of April. What can I send you both from N.Z.? A sheep?

  Oh how can I lure you to New Zealand to see me? If you are a furriner you are allowed to buy up to five acres of land here . . . If you visit me you can have a bath in the afternoon in full sunlight, as then my bathroom is flooded with sunlight . . . Your short evening walk will take you among trees and gardens or, if you prefer, a cemetery where Dunedin’s most honoured poet, dead of course, or I hope, is buried. He lived in the last century and wrote, ‘Not understood how many hearts are aching . . .’ and so on. You can watch the procession of clouds at a 180 degree angle across the Dunedin sky . . . and you can be so chilled by the frozen-faced people in the streets that you will want to fly at once back to U.S.A. . . . but you will have a certain uncomplication here, as yet, though I do not know how long it will last; it is a favoured place which may be mind-confining unless one remembers to think World, whole world and all peoples and conditions—and one can’t avoid that and remain or be a so-called ‘artist’.

  Here we have almost everything which people in over-populated countries regard now as luxuries—silence, space, gardens, comparatively clear air; all this, and stunted imaginative growth. I feel it but I can’t prove it. Yet it can’t be all that stunted if anonymous business men (I wonder who they are?) have decided to pay my way each year—they haven’t begun depositing anything yet because I haven’t said I’m here . . . confidential information, as you know.

  I know I say it over and over but I do miss you and the household so much—every moment of the day I miss—the getting-up and my good morning kiss from you and Paul (if I was good or you were both bold enough), and the breakfast, and the vitamins and the morning piano and Paul in the garden and then your going off to the studio and your return and the lunch and so on and so on and so on—but I won’t go on, but I will; and while you were at the studio, the way Ned took possession of the place, knowing you were gone and he was in charge, the way he came to life and began exploring the garden, just to make sure of things, and usually he would give me a greeting before he sprawled out between the geraniums or on the washer.

  And after a morning’s dozing, how business-like he appeared suddenly, when you returned from the studio! Briefly. Then he would retire again, having handed over responsibility to you and Paul. I got to know quite a lot about his character . . . the same goes for the rest of the household. And I, of course, am not unknown also, as the Antipodean guest of Perception and Wisdom personified . . .

  To my record player. It sounds very nicely, is stereophonic with two speakers and it has a plug by which I can connect it to the tape recorder and thus play stereophonically any tape you send of your playing the piano . . . also of your reading poems, and giving interviews and so on . . . My player cost 90 dollars . . . and was paid for out of my Pocket Mirror Award.

  The other day I sent you a tape—pretty awful because I couldn’t really think of anything to say. The thirteen stories I recorded from the Lagoon are now being read (I read them) over the radio, one a week, but I haven’t had the courage to listen to them or I would have recorded them. I missed, though, what I thought would be a better story than the others. There’s one which I think I read and which I’ll try to record—it’s called ‘Swans’, and as Swans are on the menu it might be an idea for me to send it. It’s a very simple story.

  I’ll ‘close’ now (for the moment). That’s a time-honoured way of ending a letter, isn’t it, saying that you will ‘close’ . . .

  Au revoir with 102 percent pure peedauntal-free, germ-free, dust-free love which sounds so antiseptic I’ll mix with it a lusty virus, Type X, for

  Bee & P & N from Jay

  45. Dunedin April 17

  Dear Apis Mellifica,

  It warmed my heart (the cockles of) to get a letter from you this morning, and to know that all is fairly fine with you and Paul and Ned and you’re having some social fun, whatever that means. I hope you wore your nice ties when Wright L[uddington] came to lunch—you both looked very smart that day when you set off rather like two people, two K’s, in Kafka, to lunch on the hill. What did you get for your birthday?

  I enjoy hearing about what’s happening at Hermosillo Drive and environs.

  Meanwhile back in my Dunedin Omicron I’ve advanced to my studio typewriter, so work is nearer and nearer, and starts, indeed, next week. I wish sometimes that I did not have my studio where I live—only because I accumulate in the whole house so much clutter of papers and manuscripts and writing materials the disorder of which drives me crazy. I have two trunksful of manuscripts in the basement and I’m determined not to unpack them. Did I tell you that Frank Sargeson is selling his papers to the National Library, chiefly to rid himself of clutter; and I’m thinking of giving mine to the local University Hocken Library which has a special collection of N.Z. manuscripts. My operative verb is ‘giving’ only because if these anonymous people start paying into my bank account my conscience will be salved if I, too, do some giving. I’ll see about that. Frank, the old devil, is selling my letters to him! They’re quite innocuous and there are not many and they’re not personal—he swears he’ll split the proceeds!

  I’m so glad the book arrived. You shouldn’t have to pay for it, either. I still haven’t seen it, and I don’t think it’s fair. George Braziller is away so often in Europe these days that I’ve taken to communicating with Ed Seaver, the chief editor. I still haven’t recovered from the fact that triple-pricked Granville Hicks wrote such a nice review after the nasty remark he made to me when he saw the catalogue—admittedly the catalogue was nth lower grade.

  Also I’m pleased you like the dedication. I can’t remember now what I said! R.H.C. (my old psychiatrist in London) is my only other dedicatee, except for Mona Minim which is for my niece Pamela and little James Marquand, and Snowman Snowman is a manuscript (the story only) which John Money ‘bought’ from me for 100 dollars, so he necessarily is mentioned in it. I had meant it to be a ballet.

  Enough of me me me and my work, socalled. We had a wet day last week and as I walked along the street I saw that all the cats in all the households were curled up in each front room on the bed, snoozing, and though that sounds peculiar numerically you know what I mean. It was a day for cats to snooze all day and not venture out at all. How in tune with the weather and its moods they are!

  Today is very warm, a warm wind blowing, and the sun coming into my room—bedroom—and kitchen is very hot—I’m thinking of growing tomatoes in my bedroom or in my back passage . . . I’m reading Albert Camus’ Carnets (in English though they are here in French also); and I’m beginning at last to get the domestic concerns off my mind, having reduced my Janet-home-alone diet to lentil soup with lots of vegetables (from my garden), and if I want bread or cookies badly enough I make them. I have bought myself a sma
ll refrigerator and I find the organization of food so much simpler: a record-player to preserve my sanity (?) a refrigerator to preserve my food, and now where does the prospective piano fit in? I’ve not bought it yet, mostly because I can’t afford it, also because I am so cluttered up with stationery cupboards and filing cabinets and bookshelves that there’s nowhere to put a piano and this problem forces me to make one of those curious equations—does a piano equal a stationery cabinet? I decided after a while that a piano equals a bed and so I phoned Brown’s and Mr Brown who is very shrewd came up in his car to look at my bed and mattress and I could tell by the look in his eye that he wasn’t going to bargain so I sold it to him for nine dollars. He promptly took it away leaving me with only two beds in my house, with room for a piano, and with money to buy a record for my record-player. If I were a mathematician I would construct a fascinating equation from this but I’m not so I won’t.

  I get very lonely at night.

  I owe May Sarton a letter. I promised myself I would write to her when I got home but my parcel with her letter in it hasn’t arrived yet.

  I cannot write here the Leishman translation of ‘The Swan’—it is so unforgivably bad, I think.

  I get very lonely at night.

  Do you know that parody of Eliot by Henry Reed which begins,

  ‘As we get older we do not get any younger.

  Pray for me under the draughty stair.

  As we get older we do not get any younger.’

  I was aware, as I’ve said, that it was your birthday recently and that it will be Paul’s soon. Do painters paint pictures for their birthday as poets write poems? ‘On this day I complete my . . . year’. When I was at Yaddo last year and Philip Roth was there he had his thirty-sixth birthday and I reminded him that Byron had written ‘On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year’. When I reread the poem I was startled to discover that in those days thirty-six was old—Byron talks of himself as an old man, which he was, I suppose. And so have you painted a birthday picture—in your birthday clothes? I have a private quirk in connection with my writing—I like to finish a novel before my birthday, as if perhaps the birthday were only another day for deathday.

  I have seen no people this week, I have lived in quietness, I have talked to no-one, I have said nothing but, Will you mend my meter, please? to an electrician who promptly came, complaining that my walls had dwangs in them. My dwangs offended him but what could I do? And then of course there was the Mr Brown who bought my bed and mattress. He is tall and lean and looks like a cattleman. These people are people from far countries who visit my island home and solitude—a solitude that is the best climate for writing but it is tainted too much by the loneliness that comes from not being near like-minded people. I put too much salt in the soup today and I can’t take it out. I tried mixing other varieties of flavour, even a spoonful of sugar to drown the salt with sweetness but it didn’t work, it only increased the salt taste and when I taste the soup I shall have to comfort myself by reminding myself I am savouring the chiefest (if there’s such a word) taste of life. So with my climate.

  Enough of the depths. I wrote a letter to Jo and to Elnora the other day.

  Au revoir for now. Kisses (that is, syllogistic kisses which encompass the undistributed middle). With wings beating against the walls of antipodean room.

  46. Dunedin April 19

  Hello Bill,

  Would that I were on the patio and you and Paul had just come out, after a thriving morning at the studio, bearing the peanut-butter sandwiches . . .

  This Sunday I was determined to plant the daffodil bulbs I bought ten days ago but there’s been another wild wind, though the sun is shining, and when I went down the garden to empty my waste-paper basket in the place where I burn it, I was nearly blown away. The wind is making a terrible crying noise, like an animal that’s trapped somewhere, and hurt. I’m writing this in my study or studio which is at the front of the house and looks out over the street and the house opposite (the setting of my story Winter Garden) where the roses and geraniums are in full bloom, and a red japonica bush. The house is empty, and being redecorated for, I suppose, new owners who arrive now and again to inspect the handiwork. Beyond the house, to the south, I can see the row of dark green firs which border the Northern Cemetery where the poet is buried.

  So much for my eye and its seeing. This morning I listened to Schubert’s Sonata in B flat played by Clara Haskil—starting with the known and familiar. I got it and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, twenty cents each record for a week, from the public library, and I’ve been playing them and playing them until they’ve come into my sleep. My musical experience is slight but I wonder if I shall ever hear a movement of a sonata that is as full of forgiveness as the second part of the second movement of the B flat Sonata—Schubert seems to be forgiving everything and everyone, including himself.

  So much for my ear and its quasi-listening. My heart and its feeling? I’m lonely. It’s a new experience for me to miss people.

  Oh—my book arrived at last! I’m pleased with the dedication as long as it doesn’t make John Marquand wonder suspiciously if Sue is Bill Brown’s mistress! The next dedication you can have all to yourself, if you won’t feel it too much of a burden, or bad taste on my part.

  I’m going to reread the old masters, starting with The Idiot which I reread half-way at MacDowell and then had to return it to the library. Here, I’ve an Idiot of my own, and a Crime and Punishment for each room, and a To the Lighthouse for each room—not deliberately, I just happen to have more than one copy of some books.

  I’m having to reorientate myself with the weather—I shouldn’t use the word reorientate, it’s a Rilke-translation kind of word used by the terrible translators. I had thought I would find winter already here but it is not, and it seems more like summer, and then I remember that the winter here is short and the cold consists chiefly of a few days together when it’s wet and miserable and cold, followed by some days of ordinary sunshine, with darker mornings and earlier evenings, followed by a few frosty days, and so on; and then it’s over and the crocuses are in bloom. I miss the sense of doom that comes over one in the northern hemisphere at the approach of winter: here the weather might get just plain nasty without being attended by the dignity of doom and tragedy. I think your Californian winter might be something this way too? I remember a letter you wrote me while I was at Yaddo. You were writing on a rainy day and you gave such a vivid feeling of the wetness and dreariness of leaky weather.

  Maybe like my nephew Neil I should have been a meteorologist. Excuse me for going on about the weather but what else is there alive around here where I am?

  Work next week—tomorrow; and I shall be (or should be) finished my new novel by September, with the first draft finished maybe in June. Or maybe I’ll take years and years. That’s if I can bear living here; I’ve never been at home in this country, but I’m at home in my little house among the books and the clouds. Will you visit me?

  Now for my feet and their walking, my wings and their flying, I’m off down the road to post this; so here I am buckling on my peedauntal ready for the journey, and away I go, blue Jay

  to mail a letter to Rainer Maria Bee with love to him & to Paul & to Ned

  47. Dunedin April 21 (handwritten)

  Hello Bill & Paul (Ned can get a share at the end)—

  What are you two doing these days? What are you eating? What are you drinking? ‘Something light, please, if you’re making a drink for me.’ Do you have lilacs now in the door-yard?

  Morning here. The rest of the Antipodean world is asleep, the city lights are still gleaming & twinkling through last night’s rain & the sky is a dark mass. It’s been cold, cold in the bones & the heart yet not cold according to the temperature & by northern standards but what influence do standards have over human functions? Ah it’s cold. All my thermostatically controlled electric heaters can’t generate me an ounce—or is it therm—of warmth.

  I have a blue
hydrangea at my door but Rilke has already written of it—so accurately I daren’t say anything. Look after each other & Ned—& love. 100% pure from Jay.

  48. Dunedin April 23 Shakespeare’s Day

  Bee,

  Oh, yesterday; bonus letters from Bill and Paul which both made my hour, my day, my world and now I’m getting all smugly and happily down to work and at the same time wearing out the 20 cent record I borrowed from the Public Library—I just can’t help listening to it again and again and its grooves are aching and arthritic with record fatigue; it has got under my skin.

  So the tape arrived! The Swan commentary is from Plato—Phaedo. I thought most of the tape was rather stupid because I didn’t know what to say (being non-verbal) and I ended up by trying to show how smart I was with my reading and so on, which is always fatal—I’m an exhibitionist, secretly, I think. I too loved the cat’s purr—I’m beginning to realise that a cat’s purr is as personal as fingerprints. I know it makes for security to see likenesses between things, people, animals, and to want there to be likenesses, but I love the adventure of differences. I’m sermonising again!