by Janet Frame
Stars in their courses.
It’s night now. I’ve just taken a walk as I’ve not been out today. There was one small star travelling along, all muffled in cloud; it was thin and pale, like the star outline in your sapphire. After a strange week of very warm weather, day and night, with the sky full of big troubled-looking clouds, we’ve returned to winter, and it was cold out.
Now for the heart-breaker story of the week. Out with the handkerchiefs. The Hungarian-American pianist (Professor of Piano at Washington State University), Istvan Nadas, who was here a couple of years ago for the winter, and spring, in the music department, and played all the Beethoven Sonatas, has returned this winter until about October (going on for summer).
Now read on:
Tomorrow night he gives the first concert on the new Steinway in one of the University Halls to an invited audience. I read this in the newspaper and I knew that of course I would not be invited to this as I have no connection with music in the city, but oh I would give part of my heart just to go and see the Steinway receiving its first blows in its first concert, to commiserate with it or congratulate it, to commune with it and say, a quiver in my voice, I knew a Steinway . . . I know a Steinway, or sing it after the manner of
‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
where oxlips and the nodding violet grows . . .’
So, instead, I am going to give part of my heart to writing a poem called ‘On Not Being There’. (This is how poems sneak in.)
My longing to go is so great that I’ve been having a wonderful time with all kinds of fantasies, such as imagining that a car pulled up outside my gate and a black-clad figure stepped out (the concert is due to begin in five minutes)—I’ve been asked to take you to hear the Steinway’s first concert. Or someone phones to ask me to go . . .
It’s no use.
The stars in their courses.
The Black-clad figure is probably Pluto. I’ve always had a hankering to go to the Underworld with Pluto, so any above-world character who includes among angelic attributes, the darkness of Pluto, is top of my list.
Froggied, re-enholed, basty, quixy, unscabed . . .
I need someone to police my lone attempts at Scrabble, for I could not resist giving myself marks for the above words. How low can one get!
My Intensive Cares arrived at last, ten of them, looking so battered and bloodied, with a scrawl on the outside which said, Received in Bad Condition in San Francisco. Were you similarly handled in S.F.? My parcel was re-wrapped but the marks are on it, of its San Franciscan experiences.
My battery is running out now so I’ll stop in the meantime. It’s Sunday now and I’ve built a wood fire in my sitting-room and I’ve refused an invitation to go out to lunch. The sky is cloudless, the sun is shining, and the wind has gone away to bed and the trees are so still it’s as if they’re scared to move.
A heap of angelic, devilish, impure love from on-world, at-world, underworld, above-world to the three live oaks hereinafter(?) portrayed:
66. Dunedin June (handwritten)
(What a peculiar Bee I have drawn!)
Reclining in my Landfall winged arm-chair upon my hand woven woollen rug, my feet deep in cushions, my record-player mid-Schubert (I got the complete sonatas from the library), my typewriter open and vulnerable upon my desk (note excessive use of personal pronoun; an ominous trait), my wall (of room not of flesh) decorated with numerous photos of Guess Whom, surrounded by books.
I (at last) take pen in hand to say hello to you because I’m lonely because I miss you so much.
Hows were the dinner-parties? And Paul’s party? Did the guests
mero
tinget pavimentum superbo
Billum et Paulum potiore cenis.
(Stolen, wrong tense, from Horace, translation cribbed ‘stain the floor with superb wine more powerful than any yet consumed at the dinner parties of Bill & Paul.’)
How wet can I get!
Just hello. It would be nice to say hello in person. I’m writing this on a page of my notebook which I use to record thoughts about my book, slowly begun & beginning to take shape but God! what self-deceivers the cr—ee—eee—eea—tive people are! And must be!
Nice crazy note from Frank S today. He’s having a wonderful time—it appears that U.S.A. Universities are keen on buying even his grocery lists—there was a note about it in the newspapers & advice to people to keep F.S.’s grocery lists if they have any! Living Vulture-culture.
(I have 16th Sonata, the A Minor with the anguished piece which you play better than this pianist.)
Will I ever see you again (weep weep) and Paul (weep weep) and Ned (weep weep) ever, ever?
A.M. 20 wax-eyes wait for food on the back stairs. Word is around—Free honey & water at J’s place.
67. Dunedin June
Dear B,
Your après-bain letter delighted me so much. Now, après-consommé (I mean soup—alas—of course, not any other activity) I take pen in hand or typing-key in finger to reply. If your programme is true to prediction, and I hope it’s not, today is your Headache and Hangover Day. I do hope it isn’t. I hope that Monday’s inspection of surcingles and all else found you ship-shape, in good trim, in the pink, in fine feather, sound as a roach, fresh as a daisy: in short, in rude health. And that the doctor wasn’t too jealous of your surcingles, as not many people have them, and they’re in great demand, in fact I’ve heard of people just walking along the street in broad daylight who’ve been robbed, their surcingles stolen, and they’re never recovered. From time to time, in pawnshops, an odd surcingle turns up but usually it hasn’t been well-kept and it’s impossible to clean, and it’s of use only as an ornament. So hold on to your surcingles! That’s my advice, willingly given, and free!
Oh yes I remember the Diebenkorns (‘I remember Rodin . . .’) and I remember the evening, the dinner, the visit (the huge inquisitive dog) and (especially) the silver flute and the story of the flute-makers which made a deep impression on me. And I remember the conversation at dinner* [footnote: *also the Alka-Seltzer Drama!] and so on and so on and I liked the passionate way Dick D spoke of the art they’d seen in Europe.
Well. I hope you had an enjoyable dinner and I expect, but there’s no obligation, or hope, you will tell me about it in your usual witty way, she said in her après-consommé voice (lentils only). And by now Paul’s party will be over and Ned will have emerged from wherever he hid himself or perhaps he didn’t hide but plunged in the middle of the crowd as a member of a pop-group; and perhaps Paul too has a headache and hangover? I hope not.
Your photo is very sweet—all these infant tongues on display. I love having it out here in my live-oakless world that yet has many twigs and branches and leaves of the live oaks. I’m wearing your shirt today—it’s very cosy, it has a special ingredient. I’m wearing your and Paul’s shirt alternately, and the sweater from whom by now you will have had an upstart letter is now dry, and whenever I take needle and thread in hand I see it look longingly my way and I know it’s thinking of the hole in its neck.
This is a crazy letter.
Your father’s life-span will probably have ended before the Parkinson’s disease makes much progress—it’s a very slow disease isn’t it? [in margin: It is sad though, everything is sad, the sadness just has degrees of visibility & we are a looking people??] The French professor who was lecturing on my work in New Zealand and who was in his mid-sixties, had Parkinson’s disease, and has had it for several years. I often think of your great grandfather and the letters he wrote which I read one evening when Ned and I were keeping each other company; where the event of his day was perhaps a new flower in bloom along the hedgerow, or a piece of music in the evening. Ah the old days, ah the simple times, pre-consommé.
There are glinting gunmetal clouds in the skies today and dark shadows on the hills. And it looks as if I’ll be very busy writing many poems about Not Being There, because the pianist’s series of concerts on the Steinway are all bo
oked out.
What prolific finches you have! All that visiting of nests by Carol and Ted and Alice and Bert and Henry and Myra and Carol and Ted and Bob and Jim and Jack . . . The wax-eyes around my garden are many but their behaviour is not so public. They arrive in a flock every day at twelve, on a tree next door, then move to my strawberry tree and my peppertree and the koromiko, chattering away noisily. Yesterday when I went down the garden to pick a cabbage I saw Black and Grey Tom curled under my apple tree in his nest in the long grass, waiting his chance with the wax-eyes. The astonished look came again to his face when I spoke to him. After a few moments he left his nest and hurried through the hedge. That was my social contact for the day. Also, I visited my aged aunt. She’s only about eighty-two but being moved from her home into a place where she can’t make herself a cup of tea, even if she had the strength to, and where she can’t see what’s going on outside in the world, has aged her like a blow. She’s just any old woman now, congealed in the mass of ‘old people’. I never knew her very well. She always struck me as a rather selfish disapproving kind of person, like one of the Dunedin ladies in the newspaper photo. Strangely enough, when I worked as a housemaid I looked after her old mother who was in a similar place for old people. Yet she’s on my mind often and I get gloomy thinking of Intensive Care and what will happen if we don’t remember that we must care for every life no matter how broken-down and useless it seems from the outside.
Dentists drills followed by huge sigh and turning to lighter things.
Stars.
Pause to adjust newly-manufactured desk peedauntal, my latest invention based on your original design. Royalties will accrue to you as wont. It literally ties me to my desk all day! My advertising campaign is well under way and features the slogan, Live it up with a Peedauntal.
There’s a rumour a rival company is manufacturing gilt surcingles (synthetic only) in boxes of three, attractively wrapped but I hope to be ahead of them as they haven’t yet begun their advertising campaign and we have a cut-price winter rate just now and you’d be amazed how many of the desk and house line I’m selling. (I repeat, your royalties will accrue. Prince Philip, by the way, has agreed to let us use the royal crest, by appointment to Prince Philip. This helps no end.)
My longing-lines for invitations to the Steinway’s inaugural concert must have crossed somewhere for I’ve received instead an invitation to the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Colin McCahon whom I’ve never met but who is one of our painters with a high reputation.
Pause for refreshment.
xxx . . . . . .
stars again
I was interested in the news about Ann.
Dear Paul,
Please see that you three live oaks look after each other and that Ned gets the following message. I can arrange immediate transport.
Kisses for all
fromJ
68. Dunedin June 10
Just a small letter with my usual indecent collage, and some thoughtwaves, and touchie-feelies going your way. It’s morning and I’m just settling down for my work which is going at a leisurely pace and getting complicated (this is what I like) with complications I never dreamed of. It’s pretty rotten writing. I wish I could deceive myself.
I loved the sketch of the three of you taking the sun in the patio. (Another of my favourites is the performing trio, particularly that bewitching look on Ned’s face as he tunes his cello.)
I’ve done nothing, been nowhere, seen nothing—except in phantasy. I went for a walk yesterday to the top of my street and then down into the valley, and then along, and up. There are some very ugly pretentious houses up my street, most built within the past few years as the old houses were pulled down. The street ends in fields and hills. (A Quaker refugee from California lives further up, with his wife and three or four young children. He lectures in the English Department of the University.)
I walked down into the valley (‘the valley so lonely’) where, on one side, the sun shines for only a few hours each day, and many of the old houses are empty or being used as places for scrap metal, engineering works, and so on. On the sunny side there was a garden with the jonquils already in bloom and finished, yet winter is scarcely begun ‘summer scarcely begun. The violets, a few picked, the rest dead . . .’ (I do listen to your poetry-readings, B, but not excessively and not trying consciously to remember them but they stay in my mind, they have stayed even if I had heard them only once. B plus R.M.R. achieve a perfect take-over of memory.)
I walked to the corner where the Gardens Post Office is (most of my letters find their way there), just beside the Public Gardens which extend up the hill not far from where I live. I went into the Gardens to see if the monkeys they had once were still there, and I could not find them. I wandered around the aviary, I looked at the scores of birds on the pond, and the dead hydrangeas which I’m beginning to understand more, after having read Rilke’s poem. I have always been rather impatient with hydrangeas (that’s a title—Impatient with Hydrangeas) because even when they are in full bloom they appear faded and withered. I am learning to understand anemones, too. It reminds me of what you were saying one day about paintings, how some exist for themselves and make no plea for you to go to them, it is you must make the
effort. My favourites are the yellows, golds, reds, all the auxiliary suns in the gardens. I think it takes courage to be a small sun.
At last I wrote to May Sarton; it had been on my mind that I was going to write to her, to answer her last letter. I owe Jo a letter, too. No ‘owe’ is not the right word. I’ll not have the commerce of correspondence, but letters are tyrannical things, they take on a life of their own. I don’t look on my letters to you as letters, not really, they’re just a way, for me, of being there from time to time with the three live and lively oaks.
Enough.
I bet Paul’s party was a great success. Was it at the house? How does Ned feel about parties? He probably has some ghastly interpretation of what’s going on, even imagining that his Masters have suddenly multiplied like amoebae or that the world has suddenly just flowed in like a tide and house isn’t house and Ned’s any more, it’s just beach from now on with the tide coming and going.
No, I haven’t got myself a kitten. I have casual communication, as I told you, with a grey and black cat that lives down the road and that once ventured to visit me and climb the stairs to the back door. He also, on sunny days, has a nest in my garden. He is usually sitting on the letter-box of his house down the street when I pass, and when I say hello kitty, there’s always such a startled look on his face that I can only describe, stealing from Edmund Wilson, as ‘The shock of recognition’. He almost falls off the letter-box in his surprise. Then he says, I never expect you to speak to me and you always do. I keep forgetting that you and I have an understanding.
Truly, that’s what he says.
I always forget, he continues, that you’re one of us and not one of them.
Grandiose phantasy or not, I enjoy it.
Now I’ll say goodbye. I’m thinking of you and Paul and Ned a lot and send kisses, some for the Steinway too, and a deadlier than deadly one for the carnivorous plant.
69. Dunedin June 24 Le Weekend
Dear Bee,
Your letter today
takes my sadness away.
Original poem by J, aged five, for our kiddies’ page:
‘Dear J,
Thank you for your little poem. It earns you a red mark this week, that is, five points. When you get twenty points you become eligible for a certificate (scrolled) saying you have won twenty points. I think, though, J, if you don’t mind my friendly criticism, that a five-year-old does not feel very much sadness. Wouldn’t you agree? Send me another little poem next week.’
I used to belong to a children’s page in a newspaper, and I was always sending in poems about flowers and trees either crying or being happy or dreaming, and each week ‘Dot’, the person who ran the page, used to write little notes beneath
my poems telling me that flowers, trees etc. didn’t weep or laugh or dream. I remember one of the criticisms (good memory for someone who doesn’t read her reviews!) ‘I do not think flowers, even poetically, would dream of the moon. You are inclined to let your fancy run away with you. Write again next week and do not mind my friendly criticism.’
Four years ago I met that ‘Dot’. I was walking along George Street in Dunedin and a woman stopped me and introduced herself.
‘I used to be Dot,’ she said. ‘And you were Amber Butterfly.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
It was a shock to meet her. I quoted her letter to me about the flowers and the moon and she laughed.
‘I was very young. Did I say that?’
To me she looked very ordinary, and dull with the ‘preserved’ look that ‘educated’ women get—here, in America too, everywhere—a sort of suntan as if they’d been basking in an educational light.
‘I enjoyed your poems anyway,’ she said.
I had nothing to say to her.
‘Well I must go,’ she said. ‘I’m going in here to buy some cheese.’ And off she went to buy her cheese.
And that was Dot, who could not imagine that flowers might dream of the moon and who certainly would never imagine that a five-year old could be sad.
End of interlude. Now, a happy five-year-old, I take pen or typewriter key to thank B for his letter and P for his magnificent drawing of the C plant of which more later.
I hope you’ve recovered from the parties. I like to hear about your world so that I can complete my Atlas of Santa Barbara and the Live Oaks. I’m not nearly as advanced as you seem to be with your map of J.F. I’ve got only as far as latitude and longitude and warm currents and volcanic peaks undersea. The explorations for my atlas are highly unscientific and intuitive as I do not have the wealth of written data. I have much else though. When I first heard you play the piano, B,
