Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  So goodbye now.

  How was Jerry’s show?

  And

  Love. Fragile. This Way Up.

  Open at Above Room Temperature.

  Do not Inhale Dispose of Wrappers Carefully.

  20. Yaddo January (handwritten)

  Dear Bill,

  Another letter on my now endless supply of novel writing paper, with 1,000,000,000 thanks for yours & your permission, Bob Battersby, Benedict Beehaven, Ben Beezknee, Brendan Budgeknot. My dedication will read, ‘To Sue Marquand & Bill Brown for the possible & impossible greeting & parting’. Does it sound too crazy? I was going to say, With thanks for the coming and going, but that might have been misinterpreted, or, should I say, interpreted correctly!

  How is Santa Barbara behaving at her sittings? I have decided that my muse is half-Pluto & half some God of Light—not that he’s any help to me, he just is & is there to be pondered on. I found May S’s book Mrs S hears the Mermaids Singing & I found it very moving and wise & brave—all emotional words that say nothing much. I like the way her mind works, I like to follow her explorations & insights. Jim Baxter (who wrote the Tom Cat poem) once asked me, Who does a woman use for a Muse? & we had an interesting discussion (I think at that time my mind was on Orpheus—maybe it’s still there). In JB’s poems his wife (a dear friend of mine) becomes the bad witch, the hag, the shrew etc. while his Muse is a mixture of Mary (he is a Roman Catholic convert) and Venus & various Maori goddesses (his wife is Maori).

  How did I come to this topic?

  Oh. Your portrait of Santa Barbara while your Muse hovers/lurks near to protect you. I wrote some verses about Santa Barbara and I’ll quote a little if you promise not to think it’s too bad which it is!

  Desert is near encroaching,

  habitual. Painters paint

  riders, naked, setting out to challenge

  the sun

  aware or unaware

  of the blade of light already

  deep in the back between

  the blades of bone.

  Painters paint men with

  their faces buried in darkness

  diving unobserved, alone, into

  baptismal darkness

  for food they trust is benevolent

  just as they believe in

  the benevolence of their skin,

  the membrane blessed

  to meet the onslaught of

  water, air, fire

  when reasoned evidence

  believes not.

  Pause for station identification.

  Later

  Contrast: The blue sky. Alarming fires leap.

  Butterflies drift from the broken

  windows of cathedrals,

  their lung-wings divining

  the light. A cat

  knowing, unknowing, following

  a dream in its mazed

  world collides occasionally

  with human concern. Shapes

  of cloth and skin descend

  to ignite the purr-spark,

  setting the engine going, but

  it’s fairly glad to escape

  from the medicinal downpour

  the human shovel-stroke

  the heavy word-chains of possession, to spring

  out, out through the hole in the world

  up like a black and white fountain into the tree

  to lie in the fork of the tree,

  eyes narrowed with sun,

  fur ruffled, looking down

  like a big black and white bean-blossom.

  Undisciplined writing

  Yaddo continues to feed luxuriously. With the arrival tomorrow of Dan Curley (where?) a writer who will have the painter’s studio adjacent to mine, we shall be full up no vacancies! Dinner at one table (eleven people, counting the secretary & the director & his wife) is too formal still, but there is quiet wit occasionally with Ned R. making dry observations about face-lifting, the Beatles and Helena Rubenstein. Ann Kazin is also witty. I say nothing but I laugh in the appropriate places my hollow laugh. I who have a dislike of all authority find the presence of authority crippling to the serene blossoming of my organic ego (an organic apple such as I tasted at Santa Barbara).

  Last evening, however, I achieved some recognition—nay, call it fame—because I have a sprained wrist which the doctor (in Saratoga) has said (dramatically) I must immobilize & my fingers won’t type until it is better; and thus I joined the ranks, I became an insider, for Ned R has arthritis in his back, Ann K has a sore toe & others have various ailments . . . all acceptable as long as there is no suggestion of ‘germs’.

  disused dentists’ drills

  or

  dentists’ disused drills

  ‘My Sad Captains’

  By Thom Gunn

  [quotation of first stanza]

  capillaries of disused dentists

  I liked the proboscis monkey very much. Everyone in the world—including the proboscis monkey—must miss you, and that, to me, seems natural.

  Fortunately before I hurt my tendons (!?) I had typed 75 poems, all bad, really, for a book: about 10 written since I came here. This is a preliminary as it always is for my short novel (Mortal Enemy style) which remains out of reach like a tame chickadee that’s decided it won’t settle on my hand after all although it can’t resist sunflower seeds.

  It goes over in my mind though (settles I mean) & becomes grimmer & grimmer & more like a hawk—nightingale—mocking-bird.

  I miss the music. Goodnight (it is really morning but goodnight sounds closer) & thoughts for everyone in your household & for you.

  21. Yaddo January (handwritten)

  Hello again, without restraint while it snows powdery snow & the trees appear to have been visited in the night by Old Age.

  I’m enjoying my big light studio very much and now that the missing link, Dan Curley, writer, has arrived I shall work here in the evening away from crowded West House which becomes (yes, Bee) a hive of activity with balls (ping-pong) knocking to & fro & pawns being surrendered or captured ‘en passant’ etc. The sitting-room-library reminds me, then, of Games Night in the looney bin—as the term was.

  Last evening when everyone had left the diningroom & the small adjoining ‘conversation’ room I stayed alone to hear Sonata 32 op 111 Beethoven played by Schnabel, on the repaired pornograph.

  Ned Rorem who leaves on Tuesday is giving us drinks in his Pink Room on Monday evening. I suspect that he finds Yaddo too formal. I find it even more formal than when Elizabeth Ames was Director, as the new Director & his wife are there among us, from the moment we leave our studios, & though, as I said, they are pleasant people their presence creates its own formality. They have a tendency to want to ‘inspect’ work & here the painters & sculptors, maybe composers, would be most inconvenienced. The young black painter (he’s 22) was disconcerted when the directors asked would he make an appointment for them to visit his studio to see his painting. ‘They mean well . . .’

  Tomorrow it has been arranged that we play ‘Charades’ in the evening.

  Good God.

  Good God.

  Good God.

  To be fair to the directors, they did say, ‘It must never be said that anyone at Yaddo was forced to play Charades’. The pressure is there, though.

  The ‘raving old man’, Kenneth Burke, talks often to me & I like to hear him because I have always respected his scholarship. He translated Death in Venice which is being re-issued. He translated it as a labour of love because he was so overcome by the story. His mind at 75 is agile, full of unusual & exciting analogies; he roves in a rich landscape of ideas.

  I can’t help thinking of poor old Harrison K[inney] who seemed to be so limited & struggling with only Thurber as his life-line.

  (I had a note from Jean Boudin—remember her frightful niece & the forced ‘poetry’ session?—Arnold Dobrin’s wife has left him. End of gossip transmitted by Steve (the subway fiend) to Jean B)

  I am just about to receive 3500
dollars in advance & royalties (this is after 2300 have been deducted in U.S. tax and agent’s commission—gross 5800!)—more than I’ve ever had.

  There’s an important Arts Conference in New Zealand in April. It’s part of a National Development Conference to plan the way the country should go & I feel very guilty because having received a special invitation (I’m not going) I’ve been given a chance to help to decide government policy in the Arts & I’m doing nothing about it. I have a remit form & on it I may suggest a place for N.Z. like Yaddo or MacDowell, unrestricted by nationality, where painters, composers, writers etc. can meet & write limericks together, play anagrams, drink rose hip tea and go to bed if they feel like it, AC & DC & all other currents switched on.

  I hope you & Paul are at peace with your work & Ned with his stones. Ned really does look more like a blossom than a cat; probably he harbours rubies black & white and Dr Gilbride (a Thomas Mann surname, surely) is an international jool thief, cultivating stones as oyster-farmers cultivate pearls.

  It’s strange not to be using my typewriter. I had forgotten that words arrive so quietly; their soundlessness has impressed me over the past 3 days; and yet I miss their shape; their shape in writing is too close to myself.

  How is Santa Barbara? How is everything, the sky & the live oaks & the hills & the people, the people & the animals? And the piano with its shiny bones? A worn shine as if it had been kissed by pilgrims.

  Goodbye; I mean Au Revoir.

  And love AC, DC, 12v (harmless as a torch battery).

  Cheese cake last night. Tonight strawberries and ice-cream.

  22. Yaddo January

  Hello, the trees are iced with Royal Icing, the snow is several inches deep and squeaks like new shoes and chickadees when you walk on it, and the air is filled with a white mist, and it is Monday morning and I have just written a poem called ‘The Dead’, of which the last two lines read, ‘I smile to see them now,/how contentedly they are clothed with sun’.

  After I had written my verse I collected your letter with its lovely dissolved illustrations—I hope there was no mistake in reassembly or rejelling. I’m glad you heard from Jo. Her brilliance makes me bow my head and grow as an irritation in my mind or heart a minute pearl of envy. No, jealousy. Her mind has an anagrammatic pounce.

  Meanwhile, at Yaddo, home of delicious desserts, we are quite a small family. Dan Curley writer. Ann Kazin, writer, who leaves tomorrow, and later in the week her husband Alfred Kazin arrives. Malcolm Bailey, painter, who is looking forward to the arrival of a young poet, female, described as a Viking with red hair; Kenneth Burke; and J.F. Also to arrive soon are Normon Podorovitz (?) the edirot of Commentary and Douglas Alanbrooke the composer.

  Now read on:

  J.F. no longer attends the cocktail sitting (complete with Director and wife—how much more acceptable she would feel them to be if they were not critics), nor does she stay for the after-dinner conversatione to spend the time discussing ‘who’s in, who’s out in the artistic world’. Her absence is described by Kenneth Burke as playing hookey.

  Dear Kenneth who gave me the impression of being a ‘raving old man’ proved true to form the other night after he had a little too much to drink and after he had written a poem about his lately dead wife. He went insane for several hours and our fear was that he would not emerge from it. The Director and his wife panicked and went home leaving Kenneth in charge of Dan who managed him very well; it was very sad; we all love Kenneth; he is miles above everyone else in intellectual gifts and dreaming power. Dan wrote a poem about the episode and gave us a copy: it’s very moving.

  Meanwhile I’m trying to work out how I can leave earlier than planned and go to Elnora’s apartment in New York where I hope Jo and Elnora will be able to visit me. I can’t think of any funerals to attend; the only other emergency is the act of claiming from the Inland Revenue the 3000 dollars or more they owe me; I could ask someone in New York to send me a cable Come at once, and leave it lying open in the snow when I’ve had breakfast.

  My Mortal Enemy remains absent. I fancied there had been some kind of connection but I must have been on the literary pill, and that has had the side effect of clotting my ideas into oldfashioned verse so I daresay I’ll just go on writing verse while I’m here. I hope you don’t suffer too much discomfort over Santa Barbara—you may even be painting her now as you paint Paul’s student. I keep adding to my verse about it/her.

  Feet walk here from time to time.

  Not often. The foot

  is apt to be caught deep

  in the carpeted swamp of the supermarket.

  In an easy way nobody cares

  that a smoky breath above the Deep Freeze

  is all that remains

  of the sunken walker.

  I love your decorated letters—could you not illustrate a book of Hours, of limericks, with fanciful L’s and O’s and so on? And how elaborate your bee is—I count at least four surcingles!

  I lived among great houses

  in the grey wastes of dread;

  laughter not time destroyed my voice;

  Droop droop no more, nor hang the head.

  I saw this day sweet flowers grow thick

  if as a flower doth spread and die.

  O blissful light, of which the bemes clere.

  Lord, the snowful sky.

  Hath sorrow ever a fitter place

  O Heart small urn,

  Drop drop slow tears

  Tears pouring from the face of stone.

  I lived among grey houses

  in the grey wastes of dread;

  laughter not time destroyed my voice;

  droop droop no more nor hang the head.

  How do you like my collage poem filched from first lines of the great? Rather too many tears.

  I love the photograph of the drawing; it’s immediate and complete. I think that in drawing one must have an awful lot of courage just to make a line and reject the temptation to hide it or blur it. In that way, maybe, drawings resemble poems where you can’t hide between the words, where everything shows.

  The trees outside look like those Christmas trees for sale in the Santa Barbara supermarket.

  Battery has run out.

  As I told you we’re trying desperately to save our Peedauntal business from ruin. For a time we ceased manufacturing. Then one of the shareholders suggested branching into Rays but this has not been the success the management hoped for. Next, the idea of Peedauntal Scholarships was put forward; this may help; so far, unfortunately, there have been few applications (we had hoped to have an article at least in Time or Life featuring interviews with the Fellows. We are now working day and night in the utmost secrecy on the Eternal Peedauntal which we hope to distribute to Morticians as well as to the breathing and peeing public. Also a contrapuntal peedauntal which opera singers may favour more than they have favoured the usual model. Other variations suggest themselves—the parental (3 sizes), the Continental, the Departmental, the Accidental, the Frontal, . . . battery expired

  Please recharge by return and a dessert of love to you 1st and 2nd helpings also Paul & Ned.

  J

  P.S. once more—I love the drawing photograph. It is like a poem because you have to start with belief in yourself when you make a mark on blank paper.

  23. Yaddo January 20

  Dear Bill,

  Hello, so nice to hear your voice on the phone. I wish it were time for me to ‘pass through’ Santa Barbara on my dread way to New Zealand. Hurry up please it’s time.

  I’m testing a Yaddo typewriter which has been lent to me as my own is being repaired while I have my strained/sprained wrist, and the Yaddo authorities and I want to find out if my wrist is better, as they are paying the bills for it (the wrist), as it was their nasty Yaddo door which inflicted it. This typewriter goes like a dream, so smoothly, it’s (I declare) granulated, velvetized, enzyme-coated, defatted, defrosted, globulized, saturated, irradiated . . .

  I’m glad you don�
�t mind, in fact approve of, having a dedication. I’ve enjoyed my own slight experience of this, or of being ‘mentioned’. Years ago when I was staying with Frank Sargeson there was a constant visitor, a young poet (Frank used to take young poets under his wing) who later wrote a book of verse in which there was a Letter to F.S. where one line read,

  ‘And walk in on you telling Janet lies.’

  I felt immortal!

  I’ve never had a poem written to me, though, as you have. Jim Baxter who dedicated a book of essays on poetry to me (Janet Clutha—and I had to keep explaining to people that it was me—though if it had been initials only I would have had heavenly competition!) once said that the only realities in New Zealand were Rugby football, masturbation, Wilderd (a murderer confined to the frightful Auckland Security Gaol, who is yet able to escape now and again and is viciously hunted, and who has taken up painting and with the help of local artists had a one-man show); and the other reality—yours truly . . .!

  George Wilder was not a murderer; he was a burglar.

  So you see Brendan Budgeknot, Barry Bracegirdle, how my ego blossoms . . . And I, too, feel for Velma Weeper and others. Most of my book dedications, if I’ve had any, have been to the kind psychiatrist in London, R.H.C. which some people have confused with Royal Holloway College!

  You asked about Ned Rorem. He seemed to me to be in not very good health, but that’s just my impression. At Yaddo he’s been rather subdued, withdrawn, I should say rather depressed. He’s witty and he doesn’t waste words; also he’s kind. He leaves today. I told him I knew a cat named indirectly after him. I got the impression that (maybe like us all) he is being gnawed from the inside out like the Spartan boy.

  Ann Kazin (Ann Bernstein) Alfred Kazin’s wife is nice. So is Dan Curley, a farmer-type from Illinois with a similar stance to Tom Frederickson—was that his name—the composer at MacDowell. As I said before, though, the formality of Yaddo makes it difficult for people to be themselves among one another—yet this is no great disadvantage for one’s work, and I think maybe it is an advantage; it means, though, that people get quickly ‘stir crazy’.