by Janet Frame
Hence home, and this morning as usual, after the style of Pepys, ‘up betimes’. A cold frosty night, a blue blue sunny day.
Crazy infantilia from Jay recovering from Merry Perry’s final thrilling killing drilling. With excess baggage love to Bee the Pee, Paul the Pill, Ned the Fed, & Fred the Ted—from Jay the Alway
57. Dunedin May 15
Hi Bill,
I’m rude aren’t I?
Vergers has arrived, and your translations which read even better in the clear Antipodean light—they seem so right and make me wonder—are you Rilke? They follow on from the dreams which I read—forgive me or not—and seem so much a part of them. For a long time I had the idea—I don’t know where I found it—that Rilke died on my birthday or a few days before and so he must have been around when I was born; but there can’t be two of him—of course there can—he possesses the mirror. I have a fairly good French dictionary as well as an excellent book of French idioms and figurative phrases full of interesting things, goodies, and I’m going to work in between other work on a translation or two but don’t tell Dame Mary Margaret who has such a wonderful scream that I daren’t play it for fear the neighbours come running.
I hope you’re all well and enjoying yourselves and happy . . . strange that one wishes this for others although one knows (quoting Bertrand Russell), ‘the centre of one is always and eternally a terrible pain’.
Just had your letter, nice nice nice, with its goodies of news and drawings and the photo. I loved the tale of the dinner party. I went out to dinner the other evening, with my sister’s doctor and his wife and family who were visiting their son, a student in his first year at University. It was just a warm family gathering. I liked the son who has just spent a year as a volunteer worker in Malaysia and is dreadfully homesick for the life there and the friends he made. Coming to University and a ‘civilised’ community he finds he has to jettison so much that had meaning and value in human terms, at least he is being invited to jettison this but I think he may refuse, I hope so.
And that has been my social experience lately. Oh, I had an interesting visit one evening from a writerc I’ve never met before but whose writing I sometimes found difficult to read because it was all sports and outdoor life, huntin’ fishin’ shootin’. I was surprised to find he is a rather slender clerkish-looking person—no not clerkish; rather, though, he is middle-aged, like a poet’s picture on the back (or front) of a book. He stayed about ten minutes and I gave him the addresses of Yaddo and MacDowell and now he has written me a long embarrassingly intimate letter which I don’t know how to answer!
Philip Wilson
I’ve been playing the records often. I agree the Hindemith one is uneven but it’s wonderful in parts and its measurement of gloom is level and beautiful. And I love the Schumann.
I’m getting to know each one. The Schubert is exquisite (soon I shall run out of adjectives, I mean, after I have used brilliant, overwhelming, heart-piercing and so on). Listening to this sonata and then the B Flat I feel each, and the spaces between, acting on the other, it’s like some tragic Before and After where the Before contained the After—but I’m carried away and I don’t know anything about music. (Space for drawing of J being carried away) with quote from the ‘Grammarian’s Funeral’—‘Let us begin and carry up this corpse singing together . . .’
You write of being ‘drained’. Well, I have drainage problems also in my work, my emotional plumbing being what it is; maybe I’m not drained but a drain. My batteries consistently go dead. When I was looking through some of my published manuscripts to give on long-term loan to the University Library I felt terribly oppressed as I seemed to re-experience the sheer weight of all that work. And then I came across snatches of half-poems, a few words here and there. I’m enclosing a piece of paper (with the usual coffee-stain—I swear it’s coffee, albeit instant) to show what I mean. It all seems so sad and private and it makes one wonder how one keeps going.
Pause for refreshment . . . This library says it has a locked room where no-one, not even the librarian has access, and they will store any documents I want stored there. I haven’t gone into the pros and cons of this. The move about loaning was prompted partly by my alarm at my growing number of scripts and the rage I feel when I catch sight of them in their awful vulnerability, and partly as a gesture of ‘gratitude’ to the city in return for what the ‘anonymous business-men of Dunedin’ will be doing when they provide a small income for me—but it’s not started yet and won’t start until I ask for it and I don’t think I would ask for it! I have been told ‘to let them know’ when I need money and they will start paying in. It would be much simpler to be a cat.
I had forgotten that winter here is partly summer, I keep saying this don’t I? But today is beautifully sunny, clear blue sky, warm air, and as soon as the sun leaves the chill comes.
So you have built your kennel, have you, O have you? Poor Steinway to be so crippled. I’ll not have it thus, nor will Steinway, and to show that neither I nor Steinway will have it thus I will put S in my next instalment of the Kiddies’ Page. So there! Send me a drawing or sketch of the kennel and show what it contains and where I will sleep and my list of duties on the wall. I wish it were true! How about up in the olive tree where I could act as lookout for Ned? I am working in my basement laboratory upon a secret Mix which will solve everything including, not least, distances by water between the birds and the bees and other insects. As the distance is concerned with water I’ve been able to apply the Peedauntal principle where, you may remember, my enterprise was fruitless in these Antipodean wastes. And of course I never forget, Ace Bee, that you, no doubt inspired by Ace P and Ace N, were the originator of the Peedauntal Principal, and any day royalties (kings and queens) may arrive in payment, but that is only if I go ahead with my secret Mix in my basement laboratory.
I dreamt about a piano last night! I really do listen a lot to the records I have; they really inhabit me; in a strange way the music is on the same level as the cats I meet in the street or that sun themselves in gardens as I pass; like ‘secret sharers’! When I look at the grey cat on the low white wall down the road it says to me as surely as if it were speaking aloud, ‘I know and you know don’t we?’ And the music says that too—at least it is in channels of knowing where speech isn’t but I’m carried away again . . .
The house-painter is still here and finishes (I hope) tomorrow. He is shifty, slightly dishonest I think and I feel sorry for him because his friends and acquaintances keep calling here to ask him for money and I hear him outside saying in his ‘cornered’ voice—the same voice he used when I asked him why he kept leaving the work and going away, and not coming back—‘I’ll have the money for you, you trust me don’t you, it’s just that I’ve got things to attend to’. And so on. I think it is very sad and degrading when people have to make excuses to other people.
The photo of the angels is nice. I knew that angels visited Live Oaks Inn, crumbs or no crumbs on the table. You are doing a prodigious amount of work with the portraits. I still see them, in my mind’s eye, and I see the one Paul was working on. We have the Stuyvesant exhibition here at the Gallery and I’ll go down this weekend to see it. I’ll be interested to see how Homage to the Square etc. looks, transplanted or transhung in Dunedin. The Art Gallery is a pleasant walk from here, down past the cemetery and the ‘Lookout’ over the harbour and peninsula, then a bush walk that comes out just in front of the Gallery.
Oh I’m homesick, said Miss Nostalgia Tarantula Piecemeal as swinging herself out of her legirons and handcuffs she hobbled down the garden to sit at ease among the stout-hearted cabbages . . . something fishy or Freudian there . . .
I’ve forgotten where I was with the Carnivorous Plant. I seem to remember there was a general confrontation in the diningroom. Had I got as far as where the carnivorous plant insists on its right to dine at the table with Bill and Paul who, it reminds them, are also carnivorous??? And that B and P (ignoring dark flashing glances
from Ned) relented or concurred or whatever the right word is? And that after the meal (taken without a mishap) the plant insisted that it join B, P and N in the sittingroom where they played a record and when the record was finished they asked each other riddles because the carnivorous plant suggested this and the carn. plant’s riddle was,
Sisters and brothers have I none
but in this room is my dear relation.
What am I?
Now turn to the kiddies’ page or, in serialese,
NOW READ ON.
58. Dunedin May
Bonus letter today with a pome, too, by P, illustrated which so warmed my cockles* [footnote: Cold outcrops or barnacles on the human heart. Sometimes edible.] that the steam they gave off caused condensation in one of the rooms and the painter came to me, livid, the house-painter I mean, and said, –What’s the meaning of this condensation without apparent cause? I made no reply. I turned on my heel (it’s quite easy if you know ballet) and made off.
I do wish the painting was finished. He’s painting the outside cream and the roof is red—the same old colour it’s always been. I didn’t realise that houses had walls of their own until the painter said, What colour do you want it?, and not I but the house spoke and said I want it to be as it’s always been because it’s getting too old, nearly a hundred, I mean I’m getting too old. So I had no choice. The inside is not being ‘done’.
Do you recall Van Gogh’s description of his bedroom?
‘The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles. The wood of the bed and chairs is the yellow of fresh butter, the sheet and pillows very light lemon-green. The coverlet scarlet. The window green. The toilet table orange, the basin blue. The doors lilac.’
(I’m quoting from the letters that are here beside me. I have a postcard of the bedroom painting which I love.)
I have had difficulty in restraining the painter. He behaves like a Marx brother in that once he starts with a paintbrush in his hand he goes on and on and when he has finished what he sets out to do he begins to paint everything in sight whether he’s been asked to or not—if you happened to come into the room while he had his paintbrush in his hand he would paint your face and body while his eyes, as the novelists say, ‘stared unseeingly before him’. Is that what happens when people get paintbrushes in their hands? In truth, my nerves are very much frayed because while he’s here I have to be on my best behaviour and therefore I daren’t write a sentence because writing demands the banishing of decorum. Alas.
I feel very low about the Cambodian move. The students in Auckland burned an effigy of President Nixon outside the U.S. Embassy. Our sneaky Prime Minister ‘refuses to comment’. Meanwhile in the temple of the Pentagon . . .
Where did you get the horse’s skull you used in your painting? If you came to New Zealand you would find more animal skulls than alive people. There was a painter at Yaddo who liked to invite fellow guests to his studio to see, not his etchings, but his collection of skulls. The Triumph of Death?? I just read last evening that the appearance of a butterfly, particularly a Red Admiral, was thought to be a sign of triumph over Death. In the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Saint Vincent is surrounded by butterflies. (Saint Barbara is interesting—‘dressed as befits the daughter of a satrap’. ‘Satrap’ is a word whose meaning always eluded me. We used to say a poem,
‘The King was on his throne,
the satraps thronged the hall’
It had something of the strangeness of that part in St. Agnes Eve where—something—what was it—threw ‘warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast’. Gules or ghouls? Or the lines where the Assyrian came down etc. and his ‘cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold’. It is just interesting to know that Santa Barbara was the daughter of a satrap. She probably had warm gules thrown on her as well, and multicoloured gleaming cohorts.)
. . . .
To continue my aside from Catherine of Cleves’ Book of Hours, there’s the mouth of Hell with three souls sitting at a table within (teeth descending like icicles above them) and an angel flies down to the table with a cloth containing loaves of bread . . .
I’ll continue this letter tomorrow.
TOMORROW:
With this letter I’m sending another instalment of the exciting serial. Meanwhile back in Lower Omicron I’m gradually prodding the painter to get finished. It’s awful—I really have no defenses at all. Although he is not doing ‘inside’ work he has taken over the place as if he owns it—something like a sailor taking over a ship—and he will stride into the room where I work and glance around and remark, My, that’s a fine ceiling you’ve got there! If I were identifying myself with the place I live in I would feel reflected glory, I suppose, but I don’t. I must admit, though, that once when a plumber looked up at my roof and said warmly, –Your roof has a beautiful pitch, a fine pitch, I basked, proud of my pitch . . .
Yesterday afternoon I went up to visit Charles B, for a cup of tea and seed cake. He is looking frail and his hair is very white and shaggy. He had just come from his Russian lecture and he says he has been reading Turgenev and Dostoievsky in Russian and has discovered how much has been lost in the translation. He gave me a copy of his new book of poems, and one copy of a small book of poems he had printed (25 copies) for his aunt’s eightieth birthday! What a marvellous tribute for someone’s birthday! I think it must only be men who have such wonderful aunts. As an aunt myself I know that I take more interest in my nephews than in my nieces!
I always feel rather constrained in Charles’ company and so I was glad when it was ‘over’, though he is very sweet and gentle and when I was leaving he gave me a little bag of fresh ripe walnuts.
And now au revoir and a big big love
59. Dunedin May 19
Dear
Here I am again with news or non-news of the Antipodes, writing with a faded typewriter ribbon as I sit in my study with all electric fires going and the taperecorder just switched off because, as I said, though the description holds admirable promise in some sense, the voices get deeper and deeper. This week I should get the fitting for the electrical switch (in a country, an agricultural country, there are usually difficulties about getting spare parts, so if you come to visit me bring two of everything, or even three of anything which is subject to extra wear and tear. I’m more likely to leave this country and live on the moon or one of the outer planets or anywhere—I don’t know—I enjoy my little sanctuary here but as soon as I venture out I feel a chill wind of nothingness and desolation, except if I go to the Place of the Stone Bees, or to the library or among the trees in the gardens or to the Art Gallery or the Museum. I think it is like this everywhere, though. Dunedin, trying to be like Santa Barbara, boasts that it has just opened its ‘first carpeted supermarket’. And the first high-rise apartment house has just been built on the hill overlooking the harbour; I see it from my window. Fortunately we’re still the ‘most backward’ city and people are still being lured to the north, but, alas both our newspapers are full of insidious prejudices with continuous persecution of any minority—I mean our city newspapers; New Zealand does not have a national paper like The Australian which I’m told is good. I forgot to say, when I talked of the frozen faces in the street, that they melt if a little warmth is applied—there’s no working of a spontaneous mechanism from within.
So much for the non-news.
My house-painter has finally gone, leaving me in peace. The day he left he told me what I had known (intuition) all along—he’d been in prison. He told me something of his life there. In his two weeks working for me, besides painting the outside of my house, he gave me a remarkably transparent view of himself and his life from the time he was a child until now when he has a wife and six children. I gave him cups of tea three times a day, and a meal sometimes, and it was then that he liked to talk. Most times when he gave an opinion he sounded like someone out of the third part of Intensive Care—so many people do, and this horrifies me—he suggested one day, out of the blue, that all peopl
e who were not healthy and intelligent should be killed; and all who did not ‘conform’.
Oh it’s depressing.
On a more cheerful note, I’ll tell you that the day after the house painter left I celebrated by making myself breast of chicken with cider (out of your skillet book, Paul, which finally arrived) and casserole of cabbage, apples and dates (also out of the skillet book—should be eaten with pork but I had chicken); lemon jelly with cream; and a glass of cider—this is the homemade cider I brewed early in the month.
Although prices have risen in some cases up to forty percent and my rates on my property have risen from forty-four dollars a year to forty-eight, I can still manage on my 1000 dollars a year. I caught the milkman when he was delivering my milk at 6 a.m. to find out if milk was really still four cents a pint—and it is. Wheat germ is fifteen cents a pound. But I shan’t bore you with a recital of prices, I hear enough of them. A recital of colours (your greens, your blues) or of words (our adjectives, our nouns) would be more interesting.
Back to work. You’re right. I’m drained. Drained, drained. Not so much drained as weary. It’s been hard having Care published because it ‘brings it all back’ as they say, and I don’t feel like returning to the gloom and doom where my ‘Mortal Enemy’ dwells. One starts with a feeling, a vague but painful feeling, a rheumatism of the spirit (who am I kidding?) before the rain, and when the rain comes everything is so dreadfully clear—it’s too much to have it so clear—having the words to describe it would be the end, so maybe it’s just as well I have only a small limited supply of words. I can see it in your paintings and, in a different way, in Paul’s. I wish I’d had the chance to spend more time looking at the portraits you’ve been doing.
