by Janet Frame
Cat-talk again. Forgive. I visited my friend Ruth the other day and her talk was plant-talk. She was nursing tiny cabbages in beds of stone and pointing out how the cruel wind had bruised them. Her place is something like yours, inside and out. Charles B has lent her paintings from his collection to hang on her walls. She has made a lovely garden.
As today is the 15th November and I leave here on the 4th December I haven’t much time left. The dramatisation of A State of Siege is being performed this week and I’m trying to think of excuses for not going. My sister is graduating from college on 10th December and she is anxious for me to be there, and I shall go as it means a lot to her to have at last ‘come into her own’ after raising a family of brilliant kids and getting to feel inferiorer and inferiorer and inferiorer. She has done very well in her exams and theses and I think it’s brave of her as she’s spent the last two years studying with 18-22 year olds. She’s four years younger than I—no, three and a half.
My address in Auckland is or will be c/o Gordon, 61 Gladstone Road, Northcote, Auckland 9, New Zealand.
And of course, in Auckland, I shall be busy getting fingerprinted, I suppose, by the U.S. State Department. I ought to have a clean letter from a few friends to show that I do know people in the U.S. and that I’m not a monster and that my pleasures are simple—writing, reading, and playing the pornograph.
I’m getting excited about seeing your paintings. (The excitement of dropping in, briefly (Ha ha), at Hermosillo Drive, is always with me.) Now I go on cedar feet to mail this.
Reasonless seasoned love
from Jay
121. Dunedin November
Evans Street, you know where, Saturday morning, sunny day, a mist over the hills.
Dear Burning newly realistic helixes (Helices), Bee the See, Pee the Free, En the Wren,
That’s now crazy I am. What a nice warm letter full of enclosures and with a lovely picture of Jay yearning after Lucas. (See upper left corner.)
I’m so glad that Paul has given up the University teaching. I hope you both sell lots and lots of your paintings at the forthcoming exhibitions so that you’ll be able to go to the place of your choice and do the things of your choice: among the mountain lions—which could be allies—what does that mean? I wonder what Felix will do. My brother-in-law has just given up the job he’s had most of his married life, because it’s been wearing his soul out.
About the clipping of J.C. Oates’ play—I like the message from P. Anderson. And I feel only sympathy for J.C. Oates. She’s a fine writer and the review is the kind of nasty thing that I’ve often had, and that always left me terribly depressed and wondering why I kept on writing. Maybe her nasty streak will save her. I’ve got my own nasty streak but I don’t seem to be able to translate it into direct action: I guess I’m too lazy.
Stars in the night sky.
I’m flying into L.A. on Air New Zealand Flight 556A on Friday January 29, at 6.10 p.m. What a long time away it is. Meanwhile, as I say in every letter, I’m shortly going north to haggle with the U.S. Embassy. My beak is in good order, my feathers have been cleaned, oiled, (and picked free of lice), my webbed feet (in case I need to drop in the Pacific) have been fitted with cedar shoes (the satin ones I normally wear have been given to the local museum). I shall enjoy my short time in Auckland. I’ll call on Frank and Harry who is bedridden and many years older than Frank; I think Harry is about eighty. And Frank will be seventy this coming year.
Except for my journeys into town to consult the U.S. Embassy and be fingerprinted etc. I’ll try to work, and laze around on the many beaches.
Stars for pause in which I cruelly demolished Freddie Fly.
I’m so impatient to go. I pack and unpack and weigh and unweigh every hour.
The other evening I went to the dress rehearsal of A State of Siege. Being there wasn’t half as bad as I imagined it would be; in fact I enjoyed it very much. It was fascinating to see everyone so concerned about concrete details—door locks, whether windows were open or shut, which newspaper the character held to kill the moth; as if the play were reality. And to see the characters that I know only in my head, being composed beyond me. I really found it fun; it was like being a child and playing—and it was a play. I had forgotten that so much of my life is spent just in play. If I had made the adaptation myself I would have made it different, of course, but it has been done very well; necessarily diluted although the development comes through. It is being produced by a keen tv producer and it’s pretty sure that the N.Z. Broadcasting Corporation will buy it for both radio and tv. I share profits 50-50 with the adaptor.
Eva Marie is playing in town, in Loving. I went to see it yesterday afternoon. I think it’s beautifully done from a very corny story. Eva Marie Saint is so tender and poetic and subtle.
What else on the Dunedin scene?
Nothing
nothing
nothing.
Lucas is over the hill and far away and sometimes he slips into the corner of my vision. At the theatre the other night there was an old female white cat who came and sat in my lap and gave me the feeling of delight which people get when they are chosen by animals; a delight mixed with gratitude.
I wonder how Jo will like Yaddo. It will be under a new directorship now and I think there were to be many changes. And then the island off Georgia where the rattlesnakes walk in the streets of a night and giant technicolor spiders drop from branches overhead and the air is steaming and warm as in a version of Suddenly Last Summer. The news of Henry Chapin and his wife brought him so vividly to mind—at MacDowell, and when I met them on the Boston railway station. She really looked like a wornout fruit, then. And last evening when I turned on the radio and heard ‘My name is Randy Stone. I cover the night beat for the Daily’ I was reminded vividly of Steve Rothwell, that bright-eyed lad, with his hankering to play the detective. His eyes seemed to come right out of his head. Perhaps he was a crayfish.
Words, words words. I’m wasting them and mixing them up. Do you not find it peace to be painting, with words put to sleep and out of sight?
I’m getting ready my patent genetic code-cracker, D.N.A. molecules a specialty.
Excuse me while I attend to my invention.
Love and cheers
abate all fears
double double
forgo trouble
naught to play
but holiday
naught to shirk
but work
naught to utter
but peanut butter
naught to paint
but golden saint
love, anyway, all way.
to the See, the Free, the Wren.
from
122. Dunedin November (handwritten)
Dear B P N,
So nice to get your letter this morning, and I’m writing this not, as you wrote, to the sound of Mozart but to the sound of all the lawn-mowers in the neighbourhood mowing. It’s five-thirty in the evening, the sun is still high & ablaze in the sky and shining in my sittingroom on to your paintings and Paul’s painting.
Lucas—ah, yes—his coming and going in my mind is painful and sad. I feel as if he believes I will come and fetch him home to his castle, but that is a delusion, for cats even more than people are haunted by the persistence (is that tautological?) of the present. Oh my dear wicked Lucas—I think I loved his wickedness most of all.
View of State Street. A good title isn’t it? I wonder what you will paint now, after the portraits & the street. I keep thinking that I feel myself approaching something in writing where I, too, can use past work-experience, as if that was all it was, but I keep deceiving myself, the feeling remains a feeling. [in margin: Excuse my drivel!]
(The motormowers hum & buzz.)
It’s sad & wise about Paul’s decision. What does the future hold now? (We all had to write an essay ‘What the Future holds for me’.)
I had a visit the other evening from a friend of Jacquie & Jim Baxter. He has been a dental p
rofessor all his working life, has a beautiful talented wife, has eight children, & has decided to remove himself from the academic world taking his beautiful wife & 8 children to a more ‘human’ existence. Because the reasons for his resignation are inexplicable to most of the community he lives in he is now the target of rumour, prejudice, hostility. He could be a character in an Ibsen play. He’s a good man.
… But when I (hoping for sympathy) told him I was going next day to the dentist & was scared he confessed that he, a professor of dentistry, had been rather like the cobbler who had no shoes & was soon to make a dreaded visit to his dentist.
The lilac trees everywhere are in full blossom. I have some deep purple lilac in a vase on the windowsill.
Today our friend Dominique flew away on her journey home. She arrived last evening at my place, rushed from a taxi, looked very lovely & suntanned, & gave me her newly-bound thesis to read. I, mouth-clobbered that day by Perry whose drilling’s more killing than thrilling, grabbed the thesis & muttered thank you out of the corner of my mouth. Like James Cagney or Bond or somebody. The thesis ‘New Zealand in Owls Do Cry’ is not particularly original but it is painstaking, illuminating and written in a fresh clear English style. I thought I’d be embarrassed to read it but I enjoyed it. And this morning I delivered it to her at the little cottage near the French Department where she lived. It was a pleasant walk down through the Gardens to the University.
I have let my house to a young couple (friends of Dominique) who will move in here on December 4th, when I am flying north to Auckland and will be with my sister for several weeks until I fly to L.A. & New York . . .
I’ll stop overnight in Wellington with Jacquie who’s full of anxiety as the young boy (you remember his painting & letter) has been picked up by the police in Auckland on a drug charge. I don’t know what will happen. I hope to see him in Auckland & if he’s in prison as Jacquie thinks he may be I’ll visit him (if he wants it). The kid’s a genius. His sensibility & suffering show so clearly not so much his predicament as that of everything & everybody around him. The same with the dental professor & his struggles.
This letter is a tired-battery one. I enjoyed hearing about what’s going on in electrically-operated Santa Barbara. How clearly you put Paul’s case for resignation. I’m thinking he’ll be happier not teaching. I will take in washing & scrub the patios of Hollywood to let you & Paul work uninterrupted with crust in the mouth, brush in the hand, roof above the head. Ned & I will wear our furs and go walking on the beach.
What a shame you can’t send Ned to Auckland where I’ll be at Christmas so I can look after him. And how traitorous of Dr Gilbride to be an absentee doctor. I don’t believe she ever existed. She was a front, a cover.
Received special Brand love & return Brand X love to all at H. Oak Inn including Carnie & Steinway.
Jaybird
Before I leave here I’m going to photograph the building with the Stone Bees.J
123. Dunedin November as from, well, almost as from c/o W. Gordon, (Auckland)
Hi feathered friends with thy well-oiled and pleasing plumage, it is dawn here, the lark (well, the blackbird or thrush singeth and trampeth around heavy-footed on my iron roof) . . . singeth. It is about 6 a.m., the day is warm-grey, I’m in my study typing this in my négligée, I mean on paper, and the rest of the world except the birds is asleep.
Yesterday I hired two strapping youths who would have looked well serving in the Steak House to clear my garden a little and make some kind of a lawn for the incoming tenants. I did not realise that a motor-mower is merely a giant shaver. I am horrified at what they have done to all my lovely green curly grass where each blade grew as it wanted to and waved about knocking into its neighbours without any hesitation or guilt; it was like fur on the earth. Now, suddenly, it is gone, the earth has had a close shave and all the hundreds of blue forget-me-nots have gone too. ‘Please,’ I said, ‘don’t behave like barbers. The last people who trimmed my garden behaved like barbers.’ With a little supervision from me they did not (as I’m sure they would have liked to do) cut down any bushes; and I don’t suppose I can blame them for the behaviour of the motor-mower. Lucas would have been so sad! I found a little den he had made in grass where he put his outside collection—little scraps of coloured cellophane paper which he adored. He loved their rustle, and he liked to carry them around in his mouth depositing them in the toes of my shoes and in his basket and anywhere else where he had his den. First thing in the morning, just as a child would do, as soon as he woke, he rushed to get his favourite piece of paper or wool. I’ve bored you with Lucas? No . . . You wait till I get on the other side of the counter from you, Paul, and you’ll be putting your hands to your ears in protest. ‘Not Lucas again.’ And what will you say, Bill, when I get Lucas-launched?
Maybe I enjoyed him so much because I’m a child, too. I’ve never grown up, not really. And how clearly I remember longing for morning to come so that I could rush to enjoy my latest craze. I remember when I was staying at Martha’s Vineyard, Edgartown, with the Marquands and I and the little boy were always up early and one morning the boy said to me as he was showing me his new rack of carpenter’s tools. ‘You know I just haven’t been able to wait for the night to go, I’ve been thinking of these tools all night and as soon as I woke up I was thinking of them.’
Now I’ve gone into another province.
Tools or tools.
But how like a child! And how like adults who haven’t yet lost the sense of wonder and enthusiasm about things.
The other afternoon I went to visit Ruth, my friend, who had also invited Raymond [Ward] and his wife Joyce, whom I haven’t seen since I’ve been back here. How like people they looked! I felt very sad.
Raymond spends most of his time teaching, and Joyce teaches art to the student teachers, and both looked tired, and I had a terrible feeling they were letting go of the Dream, and soon if I met them in the street I would not know them, they would be indistinguishable from all the people.
This Saturday the Director of Broadcasting and tv is flying down from Wellington to see the production of A State of Siege. There is great pressure on me to go to the performance and I’m trying to find excuses not to go, because I’m just too plain scared and alone here.
All is in readiness for me to leave. Yesterday I got up early and played my Santa Barbara recordings, interviews, books, pieces of music, including the anguished piece from Schubert.
Otherwise day to day is a dream. I’ve packed together the tiny scrap of ms that I’ve done this year. I’ve been writing two poems at once, which is what I’ve done lately; and many poems that I think are better than my last year’s poems because they’re not so clearly defined. They’re just feelings and images. What a grim time it has been. (‘How long my road has been.’) No laughs except with Lucas—and of course, which goes without saying, I’ve been sustained all the time by those airmail pages from across the Pacific.
Goodbye to all that.
I’m off to mail this.
May you be working furiously, satisfyingly among your your paintings—
that sounds crazy.
Your helixes burning.
Goodbye. My small energy has gone and I’m just another of the tired people of the earth.
I had a very moving note from George Braziller yesterday. If I find it hard to believe Marsha is dead, I can’t even dream of how he must feel. I remember a weekend spent with them both on Long Island, away at the end by Montaulk (sp?), and I went with George while he searched and searched along the roadways for a bouquet of Marsha’s favourite flower—Queen Anne’s Lace.
Factory-fresh Iron & Steel love to B P & N from J
Apply Peedauntals Ltd. (N.Z.)
Your last chance to be waterproofed
before your Christmas carol-singing!
(We are moving our factory from Evans St
to the Northern Hemisphere.)
BUY NOW. HUGE REDUCTIONS.
EVERY PEEDAUNTAL M
UST BE
SOLD.
DECEMBER
124. Dunedin December (handwritten)
Dear Bee (defined by the dictionary as a ‘social insect with a sting’), Pee (or Plosive), En (or nasal) & others in the household including the gopher,
Hello on a calm overcast day with Jay fully recovered from the enclosed little drama; & at the stage of hanging around wanting to fly.
I loved your up-to-date analysis of the Nixon-Eisenhower blockage & your suggestions for correction of same.
Stars for interval during which Charles B came by on his way to a dinner party to farewell the English professor who is going overseas on sabbatical leave. Charles says he is going away for Christmas & is looking forward to being out of Dunedin ‘where everyone knows your business’. I did not tell him this knowing covers the whole country. Your remarks in your letter about someone who said ‘I know’ chilled my chill bones. Everyone knows my sister lives in Auckland & my sister (unhappily) is the ‘I’m her sister’ type, though maybe now she is graduating from College she may be different (‘you must change your life’).
Charles is having me to/for dinner on Wednesday—a thoughtful gesture. He is inviting Ted Middleton also, with whom he has become ‘fast friends’.
