Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  Yes, Charles Brasch is a nice gentlemanly type. When he left us the other week, the day he visited, I said to Jacquie that I thought N.Z. would go to rack and ruin when Charles died. She was thinking the same thing! He has held the Arts on his shoulders for so long—little Antipodean Atlas. He was unpaid editor of Landfall for twenty years. Perhaps something of his rather Spartan nature is shown in a letter from him to a N.Z. scholar who had been away in Oxford and was returning to N.Z. This letter is quoted in a book about the scholar, Don Anderson. (My chief claim to fame is that in our French class at University Don Anderson and I were the only ones who used to get our dictation correct!) I never knew him. He had cerebral palsy and his mother used to bring him to lectures.

  Anyway, Charles wrote, as quoted,

  ‘My warmest congratulations on your coming marriage, and—yes—I can congratulate you on coming home too. You have to be prepared to make your own life here—nothing is made and ready, as in England, you need to be self-dependent; but, that granted, life can be quite rich. I suppose you will get the shock nearly everyone does, when you first land and look about you, but go into mental training at once, and you’ll be able to take it.’

  ‘Go into mental training.’ That strikes a chill to my heart! But it is pure C.B—a noble, upright old man, with discipline instead of marrow in his bones.

  Stars, snowflakes.

  I love the drawings in the letters.

  It is now Sunday evening and I have had a dose of Requiems (Hindemith and Mozart) and am floating on a serene wave of death. I have been thinking about the people you knew, in Palm Springs; and I have been thinking about the people I know, all in the great Chain Reaction.

  Enough then.

  I wanted to do a collage for you today but perhaps I’ll get one within the next few days. Nixon hasn’t been in the newspapers lately.

  I felt as if I had the ’flu today so I went to bed with W. H. Auden—his new book only—and enjoyed him—it.

  Silence. Footsteps in the street. The clock ticks.

  And now it is morning again and I go to post this. Kitty comes to see me early every morning now and I am troubled that I am making her into a ‘doublecrossing twotimer’. She has the same kind of markings that the horses of the ‘goodies’ used to have in the cowboy films.

  Therefore in this letter I’ll not have time to report fully on the NEWS FLASH which just came into my Factory Office. The Headline Reads:

  Visit to our shores recently was A. Carnivorous Plant, a member of the Nepenthes family (young and not respected), and a close relative of A. Certain Steinway.

  I’ll give more news of this another time. It seems that Carnie has been rewriting famous texts for Antipodean use, e.g. ‘April is the cruellest month breeding lilacs out of the dead land’ becomes, ‘September is the cruellest month’. When that Aprille with his showres’ etc. is also changed. But more of this another time.

  Meanwhile lots of unrestrained, restrained, satin, cedar, kisses and hugs to B (satin on ninon over nunon) and P (cedar-satin on satin-cedar) and N (fur on fur), and goodness knows what that means, from Cool Jay.

  90. Dunedin August (handwritten)

  Greetings & love to Bill, Paul, Ned,

  Pill, Naul, Bed,

  Nill, Baul, Ped,

  with apologies for moronity, from Baby Jay, in bed with ’flu & wishing she were next door, a wall away, a door away, a skin away from the Live Oaks & their joyous green utterings (their greens, their blues). However, next to beings in this longed-for state, is the imagination of it, & forthwith from her sick (sic!) bed, Jay gives a further instalment of Stranger Than Fact, or Social Jottings from The Peanut Butter Patio.

  But first, the promised extract from the daily newspaper about the recent visit of A. Carnivorous Plant.

  Quote:

  ‘Here to grace our fair, foul city recently was A. Carnivorous Plant. In an interview A. C. Plant declined to comment when questioned on his relationship with A. Certain Steinway. ‘Certie & I are just friends, good friends.’ He denied that he was visiting in order to change the literary record as it affects the Antipodes. ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I’m here partly on the Lilac Tour (economy) to supervise the breeding of the lilacs out of the Dead Land. Some prefer to call it ‘The Lilac Tour’ but I call it ‘The Cruellest Month Tour’.

  When questioned further A. C. Plant said he was also making a tour of ‘lilacs in dooryards, or their equivalent’, and ascertaining in each case on behalf of an overseas firm, ‘when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed’. He was also gathering, for the same firm, samples of lilac-scent in the air & ‘eleventh-month grass’. A. C. Plant has brought with him a small ‘musical shuttle’. ‘It makes me feel at home,’ he said. ‘I find the cities very much pent and the streets keep throbbing with their throbbings.’

  When questioned about his interest in travel, A. C. Plant said he would be exceedingly glad when his fearful trip was done.

  ‘And man I mean trip,’ he said. ‘Real trip, not L.S.D.’

  And when questioned about his home in America, he smiled secretively & his leaves uttered a ‘rude, unbending, lusty look’. ‘I saw in Santa Barbara three live oaks growing,’ he said, declining to comment further.

  His only direct reference to New Zealand and the Tourist Industry was,

  ‘Pretty large unconscious scenery you’ve got here, man.’

  Spokesplants however, close to official roots, insist that this reference was of a sexual nature only.

  This is a hasty sic(!) letter with rain of love on Live Oak Inn & its inhabitants B P N.

  91. Dunedin August (handwritten)

  The day repaired, our heroes climb up from the cold, the wet, the dark, to the bright day. ‘My greens!’ Paul cries. ‘Ah, my blues!’ Bill exclaims.

  All turn with looks of love and gratitude upon Carnie who, with now bandaged tendrils, glows with pride.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he mutters, fortunately out of earshot, ‘I remain carnivorous.’

  THE END.

  IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO JOIN OUR HEROES IN THEIR EXCITING DAILY ADVENTURES HIJACK A BOEING 707, 737, or 747, & FLY TO LOS ANGELES. DO NOT DELAY.

  LOVE FROM JAY.

  This is another moronic letter from my bed. My ’flu is improving, & will be O.K. tomorrow, I think.

  Jacquie is staying with me—last night & tonight—while she & the rest of the family, including her husband, Jim, who is with his mother, attend the funeral of Jim’s father.

  That is partly why I have sought shelter in bed.

  Goodbye for now & parcels, registered, unregistered, explosive, unexplosive, of love to

  92. Dunedin August 15 (handwritten)

  Hi, from my sick bed where today I finished Paul’s cap, knitting furiously since I was able to do little else. Old ’Flu, however, has almost departed, leaving me once again to face My Mortal E.

  This past week has been great weather for adventurous swans—first, last Monday, old grandad Baxter, and on Thursday evening my aunt Hannah Florence (I did not even know that was her second name) finally found the secluded pool she had been searching for, and slipped into the water & those tough old webs got working as she never dreamed they would & she was soon out of sight.

  What other news is there? Let me think . . . My guest went home on Thursday with the rest of her family (including her husband Jim). The previous week she had attended a Maori tangi (funeral) & was finding it difficult to move from culture to culture—from openly expressed grief—wailings & chanting followed by feasting, to a Pakeha funeral where, as she said, everyone talks about the weather & pretends the dead are still living!

  No other news flashes. Carnie has left our shores once again, kitty has not been seen in the vicinity, the grocer, a Mr Motion, came with supplies for me, & my friend Ruth passed by the house, knocked at the door, and gave me a magnolia petal.

  And I have been lying in bed planning my U.S. trip . . . I thought of a plan to have money—not from teaching but from doing what I most like to d
o—writing; and in this case something I’d like to write which could be lucrative: some children’s stories. I’m going to tell my publisher or agent & get some advice about this. Mona Minim has not been lucrative but what I have in mind is quite different.

  It will be so nice when the kennel is ready. Even before then, I’ll perhaps see you three, mes chênes vivants, for a short while? because time wears on and out and through and only Carnie has the green silk thread for mending it, & only you & Paul have the blues, the greens, the reds, to give life to the time.

  Well, I’m a dreamer—it’s the only thing to be: a feely dreamer in a precarious little satin ship on the sea of change.

  What a mouthful or foot-ful! Excuse me while I scrape the barnacles from my cedar bottom.

  Monday: Ah, that’s better. I’m sending Paul’s cap & this letter if I can possibly get out today to mail them. I’m still semi-live. And of course I’m thinking of you & all live oaks, from moment to moment & I’m sending a prim-rose in this letter and a koromiko blossom & leaf which the bees love—they are back, as expected by Fly, but I, Jay, did not discern the one with the repaired surcingle.

  No further news flashes. I listened a lot to the records yesterday. I chose the Hammerklavier again and again. It is magnificent and terrifying & dogged and I love it. I wanted to play something to furnish the week of deaths & I found I rejected the Requiems because—it’s hard to explain—they entered an open door—oh, that reminds me of the Rilke sonnet ending

  ‘then after terrible knocking

  entered the hopelessly open door.’

  In contrast, the Beethoven Sonata remained ‘out there’—I suppose in this case ‘out there’ was life & living. But I’m hopeless at writing these things, though I want to. Forgive.

  All kinds of pure, polluted

  love, sweet, sour,

  flowery, fruity

  93. Dunedin August

  Hi, Tena koutou,

  from the Antipodean waste of noise-polluted Evans Street where outside my gate an electric drill is working road-works. The day is grey, damp, chilly, and I sit snuggled in Santa Barbara sweater which retains 99 percent of its snuggle, and I think of my live oaks, demi-live, semi-live, wholly live, who will now be setting off to the studio—maybe not—I think it is washing-up time, sonata-time, vitamin-time, Petromalt-time. Here it is Tuesday. There it is Monday. I should be able to send you bulletins about the future, as I live in it.

  I am up out of bed now but the devastating ’flu has left me infantilly weak-kneed which is what I always have been. It has been a nasty epidemic here with many deaths, so many that I am tired of death for the moment. I’d like to come over to you and laugh, laugh—everything is so grim here—ah how long it is since I laughed pure, impure laughter! It is a million years ago. Everyone here is so serious and I feel myself becoming caught in the serious groove, grim, unsmiling, and it scares me. I have friends here, as you know, but none are—is close in the sense that it is possible to laugh with them. Now that is very strange. It means one is semi-live. But I’ve told you this over and over again, and bored you with it . . . I will arise and go now and go to Santa Barbara where I felt among the live oaks like a working zip—strange comparison, here it’s like being a stuck zip—with nothing and no-one to adjust it. I think zips have a wonderful time—you call them zippers? Up and down all their lives, in the grooves that are made for them.

  Enough of that now. My greeting at the beginning is a Maori greeting. Jacquie, my guest, brought me some Maori language records which I’ve been playing. A wonderful way to learn a language. The Baxter family are all now returned to Wellington and Jim has gone on to his haven in Jerusalem. Grandmother is selling their old house in Brighton—now that’s a place one would dream of—by the roaring sea, beside a brown river, with peach, apple and pear trees, and an alpine garden, and passionfruit. I have visited there only twice and each time, the old lady (about 86 now) has taken me to see her alpine garden, collected from plants she, as an active member of the Naturalist’s club, has gathered from her walks around Dunedin hills and elsewhere. Every plant is labelled, with English and Latin name, and she knows them all, and she talks of them as a mother talks of her children. I remember her saying proudly, ‘Now this is a little Hebe.’

  Her maiden name, by the way, was Millicent Brown.

  I dreamed last night I was with you and we all had a beautiful blue meal, I have never seen such a lovely blue. And there were two mountain lions sunning themselves on the roof. And the light was gold, drenching light.

  Goodbye for now to my much-missed L. O’s, and all kinds of mentionable, unmentionable, tangible, intangible, monostitched, laconic, desperate, deliberate, makeshift, conclusive, unanswerable, goatish, porcine, mulish, zoomorphic, dovelike, recoverable, conservative, waterproof, bloodsucking, unauthorized, fictitious, authentic

  LOVE.

  94. Dunedin August

  Ah, your warmth-giving letters—one from each of you (except Ned who has his own problems, see enclosed cutting) yesterday, give me courage, increase my snuggle-store. I love hearing at the other side of the Pacific, and try to get my book done, after the interruption of deaths and ’flu. Frank S always said one must work on in spite of every interruption, and I know he’s right, because even to breathe is an interruption—living itself—and one would get nowhere if one started measuring the magnitude and deciding, here’s where I stop. I can say that now, but stricken with ’flu . . . well, I had other ideas. It is the same ’flu, I think, that struck New York the Christmas before last, and I remember when I was then on the Island in the Bahamas, how people arrived to recuperate, all looking as if they had come from a city stricken with the plague. I had so many impressions during the year that they seem to have trampled on those Christmas ones, among the beautiful face-lifted people.

  Oh my heart bleeds for you among the barking dogs! Here, the Council has suddenly decided it wants to tear up Evans Street, lift the footpath and put it down again, unearth drains, and so on, and stinks are floating around outside, from tar and gas and sewers, and an electric drill is throbbing with its throbbing, and sources close to the city tell me it is alarmingly pent. But all the blossoms are out, and all my lilac cuttings are getting their green heart-shaped leaves, and I am so grateful; and moved by their apparent eagerness to grow; and the big overhanging fuchsia, like God, ‘has not said a word’.

  The journey up the coast sounded very pleasant. I suppose there are lots of Steinway’s relatives tucked away, some old, some young and, as Whitman would say, growing with their growth. The Unicorn tapestry is breathtakingly pure, and the card will be another of my treasures.

  Did Hildy get her job teaching?

  I bleed for you, also, in the visit of the Museum Director to the studio, and his lack of awareness. Perhaps it is better if the painter is not there when his work is looked at? Writers can escape this kind of face-to-face judgment of their work. One would have thought that the Director, as a professional looker, would have known how to be alone with the paintings, in company; but it sounds as if he either has no filter or it wasn’t working; or else he was afraid to look so he stopped up the filter with fatuous remarks. The older I get (my grey hairs fall on the paper as I write) the more I realise that it takes so much courage or something like it, to practise even the usual habit of looking, without polluting it. (Title of my new book—The Snowflake Senses.)

  Stars, after that mouthful.

  I hope you had a wonderful time at the Fiesta Parade? I suppose you saw Ned, lone demonstrator, carrying his banner? No doubt he kept out of your way, though. I happened to be there, in my brown-bread shoes, and I glimpsed him looking very determined and yet I don’t think his campaign was successful because few knew the story behind it, and I heard someone remark as he passed, ‘Another demonstrator! Dressed as a cat this time! A bearded hippie underneath, that’s for sure. What will they think of next?’

  Meanwhile, back in Dunedin, I live my solitary life, in my homesickness. I ha
ven’t seen anyone in the house since Jacquie called the doctor to me the day she left. He was a Dr Moody, dark, with short back and sides haircut, and pale skin stretched over his face and gone thin in parts, kind of like chewing-gum.

  Kitty has vanished, but the shyer, fluffier kitty comes to sit on the stairs. I suppose I’m not being fair to the district cat population by not having a cat, for I have such wonderful stairs, and a little balcony (I mean wonderful from a cat’s point of view) and the neighbouring cats like to sit there, but not being sure which cat owns it, they get nasty with each other, and fight for the territory, whereas if one cat owned it, the matter catter-matter (ugh) would be settled. I’m sure if cats were invited to studios to look at paintings they would appreciate and understand them. I marvel at their power of looking.

  Away now for lentil soup of which I made a huge potful to last me the week.

  Return after lentil soup. Fuller, fatter, more furiously futile. Thesaurus and I are having a love affair. He says, Toss in a blanket, come to the gallows, drink the hemlock, tickle the palate, commit a debauch, titivate, scintillate, repatriate, ransack, snaffle, let the cat out of the bag, throw light on, overpaint, paint out, and put up the shutters. Well. What am I to do? I smell of the lamp, I am unpolished, impromptu, enhanced, strategically worn to a frazzle while he handles the ribbons in a nutshell, hangs together, dematerializes under the sun, and has logic on his side in some galactic latitude where farness spreads like wildfire and dishevelment adds fuel to the flame . . .