by Janet Frame
(space for portrait of formally surcingled bee
applying antennae to key)
I was vividly aware of a sanctuary something like the one you describe in your map: not wholly unexplored, but very personal and full of treasure; and forests where even the slightest breath of an intruder would be enough to wither the bloom. That is honestly what I felt and saw as I sat, sunglassed, in the library, in the deep armchair, facing Arnold Dobrin who was also listening.
So if I were to think of making a map I would be at a loss to know where or how to begin. Captain Cook when he set out to explore and map the Southern Hemisphere, took a crew of experts and did a little murdering and shady bargaining here and there, and nobody—they tell me—has ever improved upon his charting of the South Pacific coasts. But how will I map a spirit land? The winds that blow there are probably not south, east, west, north. What are their names then? And where do they blow. I shall end up with some Rilkean conclusion that the trees I saw in the forest have ‘their roots in the air’.
As for my land, I’m glad that large areas of me are declared bird and game sanctuaries—all types of bird and all types of game(s). And I don’t mind human beings exploring the headwaters (both these and those) as long as they are silent ancient men wearing skins and paddling in their silent ancient canoes through the reeds . . .
A little Freudian fantasy a day
keeps a five-year-old’s sadness away.
Dear Five-year-old, Thank you for your little verse which earns only three points this week, as you have not heeded my remark that five-year-olds are happy little children who certainly have never heard of the person you mention in your little verse. Write again next week and do not mind my friendly criticism.
So Jo is going solo. She mentioned it in a letter which I haven’t yet answered and she asked with her usual perception if anyone, ever, did anything else but go solo. It’s a help, though, to have the facts, like high voltage lines, sheathed with the insulation of daily deception. It can be pretty horrible if the cable wears thin.
Stars, spokes, teddybears, little Frankensteins on the march.
The Debussy titles are nice, particularly ‘Et La Lune Descend Sur Le Temple Qui Fut’. (I’ve just discovered I read it as Qui Fuit, which makes it even nicer. I was thinking about Debussy the other day when I came across a book I used when I was a student and inside the front page I had written:
Remember me.
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking out of the mocking-bird’s
throat the musical shuttle.
Will the water always run.
Remember this book is entirely for the benefit of those who
are willing to know Debussy’s exquisite music.
I’ve no idea what I meant but evidently Debussy was my love at the time.
I fear my tape has not reached you. Perhaps the airmail sticker came off. Or perhaps the customs men misread the word Phonopost as Pornopost and confiscated it. Fortunately it was pure phono. It should have reached you long ago. (Space for cartoon of Tape reaching Live Oaks Inn and being welcomed by the C Plant.)—Of course—that’s what happened. The Carnivorous Plant, naturally curious, put an ear to it, and, as you know, when carnivorous plants listen they devour what they are listening to, and that’s the end of it. Are you sure it was not hovering around the letter-box, lingering, disguised maybe as a piano tuner? Only Steinway will know, and will be reluctant to tell. You will have to play S for years and years until one day an undreamed-of group of notes will sound and you will know instantly that the truth is out. Ah! But there’s the problem. Which truth? And you and Paul and Ned and the petal-in-cheek C plant will sit long hours around the marble-topped table and in an exercise more laborious (and I might add, more rewarding) than sticking in Blue Chip Stamps in the Blue Chip Stamp Book, you will try to identify the truth Steinway has given you. And then when you have identified it you will have to test it with the litmus test. It turns the litmus life red.
Dear Five-year-old, You are inclined to let your fancy run away with you. No marks this week.
–Well I must go, she said. –I have to buy some cheese.
I think I will write a story called Buying Cheese. I’ll never forget that meeting with ‘Dot’ of the Otago Daily Times. Poem after poem I sent her, and again and again she bludgeoned my fantasy and all the time I believed she knew better, that she had superior knowledge to prove that flowers didn’t dream of moons and crocuses did not sit terrified in their beds in case they were mistaken for gold and stolen. And then to meet her and find an ordinary person buying cheese!
Now I will quote Auden.
‘Run until you hear the ocean’s
Everlasting cry;
Deep though it be and bitter
You must drink it dry.’
asterisks.
I’m glad your canvases (four!) are progressing, B. My Mortal Enemy is most peculiar and intractable because Life seriously disrupts Art (I don’t know if disrupts is the right word)—Life in the shape of Death, for I have to visit my old aunt, no excuse that I make to myself will work, and I have this habit, which should be reserved for fiction-writing, of identifying myself with people—a habit guaranteed to provide three meals of torture a day. When I come from visiting I’m an old woman of eighty-seven (I think). I’ve led a limited life, I’ve never read or thought much, my imagination is non-existent—and so on and so on.
Philip Roth said one day that every book should be called Writing and Fucking because that was all it amounted to. It sounded ideal to me. And I asked him, What about the people from Porlock?
I did!
You can’t always go to bed with the people from Porlock!
We were talking about the way life interrupts art. I suppose one gets a kind of balance. Writing and Fucking balance chiefly, I suppose because they’ve no need to balance, they’re interchangeable. What about writing and dying? Same thing? Painting and dying? My old aunt’s a spectre. She doesn’t know that a story I wrote about an old woman who couldn’t get out of the bath (it happened to her) is appearing in an anthology on the problems of Old Age!
So I don’t know what my Mortal Enemy will become. My character is a ten-year-old boy! I do know that I won’t be finished the first draft (Sp?) until the end of July. (In the midst of my story of a ten-year-old boy my old aunt starts speaking.)
More stars in their courses.
It’s good news, isn’t it, that Paul’s permanent job is confirmed? Myself, I sometimes wish that some outside authority would help me to decide where to be. I wish someone would declare me a prohibited citizen in New Zealand, or that I were told to leave the country or be put in prison. I think I shall leave here eventually, anyway. New Zealand chills me right through my marrow, if there is a place beyond it: no, not the climate of course; these wintry days are full of brilliant light with the white clouds and blue sky very much out of Paul’s painting, and colours are so sharp and clear, as if there were a world of snow somewhere emitting its dazzle. It’s snowing in the mountains but not here. In most places, except the mountains and foothills it snows only once or twice a winter and the snow doesn’t stay on the ground. You as a painter will know what has been manipulating the light to make the blues in particular very vivid. Even the shadowy places on the hills—I see them from this window—are blue. But it is not light and its seasonal practices that chills me. It’s just being here among people with whom I have no communication, and I have to live encased, shrouded in polite conversation, on surface-le[dges] that is, whenever I venture into the world of people, which is rare here.
But I won’t continue to bore you with this. Living in the depths is perhaps just as much a bore as living on the surface. And the Depths are so allied to art (I hate this word but can’t find another) that like Beauty and Truth in Emily’s poem, they share the same tomb, at least they provide the same tomb for those who sacrifice for them.
Stars for relief.
Today is really Antipodean Christmas Day, the shortest da
y. Happy solstice, Bill and Paul and Ned. I have just eaten my lunch which I sometimes bother to cook as a main meal on Sunday. Casserole of groper (do you have that fish; probably it has another name). And I baked a pie filled with apricot, black currant, little oranges and coconut. I gave the wax-eyes their honey and water also—there are twenty to thirty of them. They made a sound like chickadees and they call out for their meal and some of them have formed the embarrassing habit of following me along the street—I don’t know what I’ve started!—the ugliness of their natures comes out—only a few of the twenty ever get a peck in, for the big fat baddies stand quivering their feathers and threatening the hungry skinny ones, even pecking them. They are such a beautiful colour—bush colours, strange greens and rusts with a tinge of dull red and a smudge of dull yellow—autumn toning. Sometime in July when the bush flowers start to come out they will fly back to the bush for their honey.
More stars.
No more shivering, and my house installed with heating panels . . .
Battery has run out.
Dear Carney, (per Paul)
You lovely bit of vegetation, you! That was a nice portrait of you by Paul esquire, in fact a magnificent portrait which laid bare your soul and your distinguished trade mark of Steinway and Sons. (One of the sons is out here at the University and has just been inaugured and teardrops come to my eyes when I remember that I was not a witness to it.
But my real object in writing to you, Carney dear, is to enquire how ever you escaped the Salad Incident—or are you resurrected? In future you must keep a stricter—calyx?—on your three guardians, and there’s no harm in getting Steinway to help you, you could take turns to keep Perpetual Watch with both watching at crucial meal-times and never, never allow Paul or Bill to put you among other greenery on that counter in the kitchen, even if they make the excuse that they’re giving you a change of air, or a chance to be among your own kind, or even be as company for them as the meal is prepared, for one false move, one moment’s inattention and it is you who will be prepared.
Now to more serious matters. About that habit of yours, that ineradicable habit of being what you are, I say congratulations, Carni voration is You, nothing would look so well on your life, but (to refer to your message) as for my coming to lunch as your lunch, are you aware of the sacrifices I would be making? If you are, good; because I’m not. What sacrifice would it be for me to arrive on the Peanut Butter Patio, in time for lunch, say a quick, eager, shy, happy, hello to B and P and N, and then resign myself to my fate, I, who have trembled so long in my life between Active and Passive, the Doer and the Thing Done To, the Seer and the Seen, the Beer and the Been, to join the company of the Devoured.
There’s only one drawback, Carney dear. Think it over. We created you. Think it Over.
Yours, J
Dear J,
What a tired old argument. You created me, indeed! Who cares who created me? I am. I keep my ineradicable habit. I devour. Are you coming to the sacrifice? Think it over.
Yours,
Carney
Correspondence closed.
Correspondence cannot be opened as the key is lost.
Why is the key lost?
‘The moss has covered up our lips.’
All kinds of love & sad missings, to B apis mellifica buccaneer of buzz (?) & P official draughtsman to the Carn. Plant & Ned Washer-Inhabitor Extr (W.D.I.E.)
from crazy J pining (pine, pine) in the Antipodes.
Dear Bill
Sweater was ill
But reading your letter
sweater felt better
(twas only a chill)
Dear Paul,
My aunt wears a shawl
I wish the carnivorous plant
would visit my aunt.
That’s all.
Dear Ned
Out of your head
you created a purr
especially for her
(Dr Gilbride said).
70. Dunedin June (Wax-Eye City)
Dear B, P, and N,
Hello. I’m thinking about you and so put key to paper. I wish I were there, unobtrusively, and you were going about your daily activities—just your presences are enough for me.
Meanwhile back in Wax-Eye City I’ve just had my mutton broth but its flavour could not take away the flavour of the horrible review my publisher sent me yesterday, nor could the nice review they sent today remove the flavour. ‘Brilliant etc.’ Who would believe that? Not I.
I now have thirty wax-eyes to feed, and some of them are getting so fat that when they perch at the top of the stairs their paunch hangs down, but there are still the thin ones who never get a chance to eat the honey. I think all the wax-eyes of Dunedin are concentrated here. There are scores of them in my trees but they are invisible, as their colour is leaf-colour, and all their moving and fluttering makes it seem as if a wind were blowing the trees until with that extra vision that you get when you persist in looking closely, suddenly you see the trees are alive with birds. There’s something Biblical about it—I feel as if I should be reporting a miracle and inviting people who study and classify miracles to stand beneath the trees, notebooks in hand, to record and judge. (If I were able to paint I would make a Giotto-type painting and the people would have those narrowed suspicious sideways-glancing eyes of the people in Giotto.)
Life continues very much a La Emily D with little of her courage and none of her talent. I need the presence of the ‘like-minded’. Eternity was her like-minded company—Eternity, Beauty, Truth, Time, all flitting and buccaneering around her garden. One glimpse of eternity terrifies me (whatever it is). I could not transform it into wax-eyes and feed it daily, for I already do that without wanting to know about it. How at home she was with it! Even for Vaughan—or was it Herbert, a glimpse was enough for him to write a solemn poem for the occasion, ‘I saw eternity the other night like a great ring of pure and endless light.’
Well I’m getting involved!
You did ask me what I said in my radio interview (which I did not hear) as my radio, an old-fashioned huge cabinet-type with valves, condenser etc. suddenly became ‘live’ and I’m waiting for it to be fixed. The questions were: Why were such things as artists colonies set up? Did the colonies help you? How common is this sort of thing in the States? What were the criteria for entering the colonies? When you are concerned about writing and representing the realities of life did you find the colony an artificial situation? Did you feel the violence of the American society? . . . I won’t continue with the questions, they were so stupid, but quite usual. I gave a factual account of how the colonies work. Questions like ‘Did they help you?’ I didn’t answer. About violence, I said it was too big a question to answer but that if you visit U.S.A. you must equip yourself with a watchfulness that you don’t need in little old Dunedin. I said that where one used to learn that cities and highways were the life-lines of a continent, one now knows they are the death-lines.
Ghastly answer. I did mention the beautiful woodlands and wildernesses and the interviewer was surprised (as I was when I made my first visit to the States!) that there were trees left.
I didn’t speak about my work, saying I preferred not to, but that I was interested in the problems of people working in the other arts. I mentioned sculptors who couldn’t pay their foundry bills, or hadn’t homes and so had nowhere to store their sculpture, and of the difficulty women painters seemed to have: a. in being aggressive enough to interest gallery directors; b. in being strong enough to cart paintings from gallery to gallery. I shouldn’t have spoken in the plural—there was only one of each that had this problem but I thought the audience would be interested.
There was one question which began, ‘Do you see life as . . .’ which I answered by saying I didn’t see life at all, I lived largely in a state of unconsciousness. Which I do.
Enough of that tripe. I tried to emphasise that if you are a writer or painter or sculptor, it is not an artificial situation if you practise your wo
rk all day. But my insistence fell on deaf ears. I know. Yesterday I met a woman in town who said she used to sit beside me at school (that type!) and that she had enjoyed my radio interview very much, that it was interesting to know about the arts. Then she said, What are you doing these days? Have you got a job somewhere?
The first plum blossom will be out soon. These days there is an absence of cats except for the golden one that stalks in the garden across the road where the new people have moved in. It is golden with blackish small stripes as if its fur were feathers.
I will arise and go now and go to Santa Barbara
and a kennel live in there that Bill and Paul have made,
nine mountain lions will I have there, and a place for my typewriter,
and live alone with Bill and Paul and Ned.
And I shall have some peace there for peace comes dropping slow
dropping from the olive tree where the finch-family sings;
there lunch is brownbread sandwich on a peanut patio,
and evening full of music, collages and things.
I will arise and go now . . .
End of inspiration. Don’t mind my dreams. They’re only dreams.
So goodbye for now. Enjoy yourselves in the sun.
71. Dunedin June 27
Glad you got my silly tape.
Hello dear Bill and Paul and Ned and plant and piano,
I’m sitting at my desk, my heater is heating, the wax-eyes or silver-eyes (I learn they came from Australia in 1856 [in margin: this makes them 114 years old]) are twittering and fighting over their breakfast, the world outside is a subdued Saturday morning world, the day, after a week of blue sky and sun, is faintly blue, with smoke from fires misting the air in the valley, and the hills starkly outlined like the exposed backbones of huge beasts. The smoke does not reach them and they are sunlit.
