Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  (I quoted the above because I can’t find the quote about Brown which was amusing.)

  I’ve learned all kinds of things about carnivorous plants from my encyclopaedia.

  Au revoir. See you ______________________

  Love (scale ⅛” to 1,000 miles)

  62. Dunedin May 30

  Dear B,

  A most unusual thing happened to me on my way to my typewriter (you will be the first to admit it was unusual!)—I thought of you, and the company of live oaks, and I thought I’d write you a letter. I really can’t imagine how such an unusual idea came to me.

  At last I’ve finished the tape and I’ll post it on Tuesday (Monday is the Queen’s Birthday, when all postal services stop). It’s a dismal tape, mostly snippets of poetry from The Pocket Mirror, a story, and a few poems from elsewhere. Just near the end I did a collage on Rivers which could have developed into something more interesting—it just happened that I was recording an interview with Glenn Gould talking about Mozart in his unbearably chatty way—I think, though, this may be the form the interview takes in Canada—it all sounds too jolly. Here, the interviews are very serious, with little backslapping. The BBC is the same. Well, he said Mozart was like a river, and I happened to pick up a book and open it at something about a river, and I happened to have heard a BBC Reith Lecture on Pollution where the underground rivers were mentioned and I happened to have been reading my usual addictive reading of Myths and Legends—this time the same old fascinating story of Proserpina or PercyPhone—and I wondered how King Pluto would feel if he knew about what is happening to his underground streams and coal supplies and so on . . .

  Well. I hope, when you can bring yourself to send me another tape (you can wipe this one out)—and I’ll allow it’s difficult to make a tape, though you’ll have no problem—you can just let me have the voices of the three live oaks, any poetry, and lots of your own piano music which sounds very well now the recorder is operated electrically. Also the recorded music sounded well. And that tortured piece at the beginning (in spite of your disclaimers) sounds as anguished as it ever will.

  It’s very early Sunday morning—(perhaps it’s May 31). The world is in bed. I’m in my study looking out across the valley at the opposite hill which is covered with sunshine, and the sky is blue without a cloud. In the valley there’s a lower mist of frost, slowly dispersing.

  I’ve begun (at last) my new work. How I hate working! How I hate the misery of it! The one consolation is the occasional wonder of discovery, an image or idea brought on a silver platter. When I’m not working I forget about this but when I start I find it balances the sheer misery of everything—I suppose because the misery is really a kind of poverty balanced by the riches of discovery. La misère.

  Has Elnora arrived to stay with you? I hope you all have a wonderful time in the fun and the sun and that the peanut butter patio will reverberate with your laughter, drowning the muttering tones of the carnivorous plant which, though it has chosen to live in the house, still suns itself on the peanut butter patio camouflaged, in a place unknown to you or Paul or Ned.

  Here it’s winter now, temperatures in the forties at night and the fifties during the day and I’m sweaterized with your lovely cuddly sweater, and I’m shirtized with Paul’s lovely cosy shirt and your painting shirt—I’m really J.F. in Live Oaks clothing.

  I have my radio interview on Tuesday morning and as they are going to pay me for it (eighteen dollars for eight minutes) I’ve had to work at it a little, though some questions—‘Did you feel the violence of the American society’ are really too much. I shall spend most of the time pointing out to the interviewer that the questions she has chosen—well I don’t suppose I can be bold enough to say they are ignorant but they are. Enough.

  I heard from the young black (chiefly Shakespearian, so far) actor [Darryl Croxton] I knew in New York that he and an English actress have leased an off-Broadway theatre for one night early in June and the two are putting on a performance called ‘The Best of Both Worlds’—an evening of poetry and drama from Shakespeare to Charles Gordone (who, he tells me—I didn’t know—is the Pulitzer prize-winning black playwright author of No Place to Be Somebody.) He’s going to read five of my poems.

  Oh blah blah let me get down to kiddie-size and get out on the peanut butter patio eating my peanut butter sandwich (very fattening) and drinking my banana apple milkshake and smashing my coffee-cup Frame-style. I’ve thought long and long with my architect’s eye (my eye is a thinking piece of machinery but not as much as yours which is highly trained and agile) that there’s no room for a kennel or small hovel—not above ground, at Live Oaks Inn. I’ll have to wait until you move house somewhere and then I’ll write to you, Dear Sir in answer to your advertisement of the inst, ult. etc. and you will write to answer, ‘There are separate quarters here for three (trois) and one other, the maid. Each, including Ned the cat has facilities for complete privacy, aloneness, withdrawal or whatever you may term it, and also facilities for company, that is, being together. Your duties will be sent to you forthwith . . .’

  Or something like that.

  Being in a small place, however, is a great protection against the arrival of invading people like me!

  I’ll say goodbye now because I’m lonely. Who isn’t, on this planet? I’m enclosing a photo of Westbeth that appeared in yesterday’s

  newspaper. On the opposite side—some Dunedin faces—women looking at the Miss New Zealand contestants!

  I still haven’t got myself a piano though I’ve room for one in my spare bedroom. Any advice on the kind, make, characteristics etc. that are part of a nice piano? I just couldn’t bear to get one that made the wrong sound—I didn’t realise how individual each one is—when I looked in the shop at the secondhand ones (Just looking, thanks) there was a roomful of them and a woman went around trying out each one, but they all looked to me as a roomful of orphans might look were someone thinking of adopting them. Each said, Take me, take me. It was incredible the strong case each one put, even without having a sound made on its keys.

  I felt guilty after a while and hurried out—Yes, just looking thanks.

  Love, pure, tested, chemical-free, except laden with cyclamates

  JUNE

  63. Dunedin June (handwritten)

  Dear Bee & Pee & the black & white Ned,

  I eavesdropped on your phone conversation. I was very hurt that you didn’t ask after me but no doubt you thought I was still in that Melbourne gaol. Did I thank you, P for the Care Parcel, the cake with the file in it? Yes I did.

  Since coming back to N.Z. I have been ailing—last week I was sunburned—imagine your Carnie sunburned. Here is the extract from the newspaper (everything, I, Carnie, do, is news).

  ‘A Carnivorous Plant was admitted to hospital last weekend suffering from sunburn of the tendrils. He has now been discharged. He was interviewed by the press on this important occasion.

  He is reported as saying that his lower leaves have healed more readily than his upper leaves. He spoke with some bitterness, adding in his well-known philosophical way,

  He is known to have been consorting lately with several members of the marrow family.

  He is now looking for work. He is also studying the carnivorous plant species & plans to write a novel.

  Of his personal life he spoke reluctantly. He did admit, however, that he was

  Lots of tender tendrilled embraces to all from your c plant

  Carnie

  Dear Ned,

  I am copying for your interest and pleasure a poem written by a New Zealand poet who with his wife and family are very good friends of mine. Here is the poem:

  ‘Tomcat’*

  by James K. Baxter Wellington, New Zealand

  [The full text of the poem was enclosed]

  How do you like that poem, Ned? Does it stir your blood? I thought I’d tell you something of the lives of your distant relatives.

  * from The Rock Woman selected poems, Oxford Uni
versity Press 1969

  Dear Paul,

  Alarm, alarm! The following newspaper clipping with the above headline has arrived for me from Australia. It needed deciphering so I have written it out for you & Bill & Ned, if he can [take] his eyes off the snow long enough to be interested.

  A character, identity given as A. Carnivorous Plant, purporting to be half man, half herb, was gaoled here today for breaking & entering a private garden & for failing to exercise proper control of his tendrils. It is believed he has relatives in U.S.A. and N.Z. & an Auckland woman offered bail which was refused. ‘Herb people are rare,’ the magistrate commented, ‘therefore your crime is doubly or triply reprehensible’. A. Carnivorous Plant made some remark about being ‘triply tendrilled’. He has been confined for 3 months in a garden cell, with the notorious criminals, Convolvulous & Deadly Nightshade, the Pick-Plant.

  Well, isn’t that sad/ But it’s all experience.

  Much love & kisses to all

  from Jay

  64. Dunedin June 4 (handwritten)

  Dear B

  Hello You silent majority. I hope you and other Live Oaks non-furred & furred are enjoying your summer. This is just a brief letter to say, it’s too late now but when you read ‘Ironing Today’ in the maid’s diary, how much much more, if only you’d known, it may have concealed! Believe it or not, I came across a diary of mine the other day, written at a time that was far from uneventful & on two entries I have ‘Laundry today’. It was when I came out of hospital & had to work somewhere & for two days had a night job in a laundry.

  Quiet smoothly-running life here (or death). I had my radio interview. Ghastly.

  Therefore, how well qualified I am to take the position (?) in the Grecian Kennel!

  The leaves on the tree visible from my window shine in the sun. Many trees are deciduous but our native bush is evergreen.

  My strawberry tree is Japanese. The tree next to it is a pepper tree, a native. Enough of the Botanical Binge.

  So much love I send, but light, airy love, not the kind that weighs heavily on the recipient,

  65. Dunedin June 7

  Dear Bill,

  Janet’s just washed me and I’m hanging out to dry in the downstairs patio where the sun shines in the afternoon, and I’m swinging to and fro in the wind that’s blowing down the valley. I haven’t seen your checked shirt or Paul’s checked shirt for ages, I guess it’s just not shirt weather—last time I saw them we were hanging together in a dark wardrobe and none of us thought we’d ever see the light of day again, but early last week J came to the wardrobe, opened the door, swung us back and forth and before we could be pleased or disappointed, she had chosen me to wear. She slammed the door shut. Fast. So I haven’t heard a word from Shirt I or Shirt II—they were always boasting, anyway, about being worn day in day out.

  I couldn’t tell you all the things I’ve seen J do around the house. Being in a position of intimacy I have to respect her trust in me but oh my if only my surname were Portnoy! (Instead of A. Malibu Sweater Esquire.) And now I’m all washed out, hanging limp. I’ve been to town shopping once or twice this week, and I’ve been worn to visit J’s old aunt in a private hospital where she sits by a fire all day and hopes someone will come to visit her; and I went to see Midnight Cowboy one afternoon. Somebody called Charles went with J because he didn’t want to go alone and find himself among all the young bloods, and as J was—is one of his less formidable acquaintances (having as much intelligence as dishwater) he evidently felt he could ask her, comfortably, to go with him and he could have a rest from being intelligent and scholarly. I enjoyed the film, myself. J’s been working, or trying to do. She’s writing something about a fountain—pinched from Rilke, I’ll be bound.

  Bill, I’ve still got that hole in my neck where you cut off my label. That was a mean trick. I’m all unnecessarily ventilated. And how were you to know I was once getting on so well, so close to that golden sweater of Paul’s—the one he lent J to wear when she stayed with you? How can you know anything if you don’t study the language, is what I say and what I’ve always said, synthetic or no synthetic.

  Ah, the sun’s out. I’m snoozing. I’ll say goodbye now and let J write her own letter, and in the meantime, love from me and the shirts and the striped sweater and the handkerchiefs and the old man (little figure) and the ring and the cross, to you and Paul and Ned and Steinway (who carelessly brushed my cheek many a time) and all and all,

  I remain

  your loving skin-kin,

  A. Malibu Sweater Esq.

  and hello,

  and it’s so happy I am to have a letter this morning from you, and here I am, light of foot and heart and eye and finger, answering.

  I’m very happy to add the baking of date scones to my list of duties. I can now do them with a flick of the hand, eyes closed, mouth open and except for a slight problem in judging the amount of liquid I have them to a fine art. Wholemeal loaves are also my speciality. What with scones and loaves and truck-driver cookies it does look as if the culinary future is assured. And I must include those wonderful mushrooms that are grown ‘around the corner’, from Santa Barbara manure.

  Nice to know you saw Elnora and she looked well (wow!). I hope she’s been able to get to the end of her book and it’s being published. It appears to me like a kind of prolonged pregnancy—think she’ll be free when it’s over. Maybe.

  Nostalgia. ‘A form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s country or home.’

  You’re certainly all things to your friends, B, to generate nostalgia—you’re a whole country, a native land, a home. How’s that! But if you are a whole country I can understand there might be a certain panic in seeing so many of your friends wanting to put in to harbour, to the tune of ‘Sweet and Low’. There could be a question of pollution while they’re in port; and there’s the vexing problem of setting up bases for trade when one might not want to trade. It’s hell to be a human being—why not be a cat and go softfooted on earth-surfaces in early morning and twilight, and curl up asleep at noon. Well, not being cats, if only we could fold ourselves like cats, turn back our wrists into our arm and lie with our face snuggled in our genitals and our haunches over our ears! Makes me nostalgic for cat-country.

  I like the design of the kennel. There must be a place for everyone to express love and hate and all the other inexpressibles that words take one look at and flee from. And how did you know that my new vice is Scrabble-playing? Sometimes I play before I go to sleep, and I’m an awful cheater, I really am, I try to be honest but I have no resistance against, say, a word like interluce which I had the other night and which used up all my letters and so gave me a wonderful score. Even when there’s no such word. Peedauntally speaking . . .

  My granny was not African. That is fact but fact has little to do with childhood or with my life which is run on the lines of a child’s life, as it was run in childhood. I believed my granny was African. (Owls Do Cry is not autobiography, by the way.) She was big and dark with frizzy hair, as I described her, and she wore a long black dress and she used to sing all the time and I used to sit, at her feet, I suppose, and listen, and believe that what she sang was real and as her songs were mostly spirituals and ones like ‘Carry me back to Ole Virginny’ I thought she was African and had worked in the cotton fields. I suppose I reasoned, Why would you sing a song about working in the cotton fields and longing to go back to Virginny, if you hadn’t worked there and lived there. But I don’t think reason came into it. I believed it. I just used to sit there and cry because she obviously wanted so much to go back there that her heart was breaking, and even when I was at school and people asked me where my ‘ancestors’ came from I said, Virginny, because I believed it was so and therefore it was so. And as a child, with my frizzy hair, I was called Topsy, therefore I thought I was Topsy. I learned to say, when people asked me,

  ‘I’m the girl that never was born

  pras I growed up among the corn.

  Go
lly ain’t I wicked!’

  Strange happenings in the Antipodes.

  Hope you’re not dead of boredom with this letter. Owls Do Cry, as a first novel, has a bit of autobiographical stuff in it but when I read a review which said that I had a sister who was burned in a rubbish fire, and so on, I was rather embarrassed, annoyed. I was anticipating the death of my mother at the time, and so wrote about it but when I had written the book she had not died. Enough of this, enough, enough. Bastante. (For Paul who is learning Spanish.)

  I hope the party is fun, it’s sure to be. I’m finding such good use in Paul’s skillet recipe book that I feel guilty and hope he got another one for himself. Did I tell you I swigged my home-made cider one evening, and that’s that. And did I tell you that when my sister’s family doctor was visiting with his family and I went to dinner with them he insisted on my drinking three glasses of whiskey, and I had no hangover.

  My Maori friend (whose poet husband comes home from time to time but has gone to find his soul among the Maoris) is coming to stay for a few days in a week or so. Her daughter has just had another baby (a short-lived liason this time, not a Christmas party as before), and Jacquie is taking a rest from being family provider and counsellor, at least for a few days.