Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  I’ve had to be thinking more and more about my return to New Zealand, readjusting myself so to speak, and I’ve been trying to imagine what my life will be like. I’m going to miss you terribly—I can’t explain why (internal thinking)—there’ll be a kind of loss around as there is now and as there used to be at MacDowell when B was absent (fan-confession). I see myself in my little house and am cheered by the thought that I like my study and it’s a good place to work and the changing light is magnificent to watch (but only butterflies are nourished on the changing light); and I have my solitude and my books, I mean books, and I’ll have to get some kind of music. Dunedin is a beautiful place of sky and light. I live there chiefly by the sky and the light!

  My contact with people will be pretty meagre. The chief problem will be where to get my necessary supply of laughter: Dunedin is a prim place and my friends are on the sedate side. Limericks, frustrated sex—good heavens no. I remember I was very daring to make up a riddle about the English Professor whose name is Alan Horsman and the Psychology Professor whose name was Stephen Grew.

  Q: Why was Alan Horsman?

  A: Because Stephen Grew.

  But I had no-one to tell it to!

  I have a friendb, a poet, whom I shall see about once in ten days. She lives with her niece about fifteen minutes walk from where I live, a walk through the Botanical Gardens. She lives a very retired life (she rather resembles early photos of May Sarton, though she’s approaching her mid-fifties, a decade older than I). She has leanings to Buddhism and she speaks Japanese (having recently learned it) and lives entirely for her garden, poetry, music, art. She exudes such purity that whenever I visit her I feel positively as if I’m unclean. For many years she was the Secretary to the Editorc of Landfall who retired, and their association was very close. I shall see him too. He is a pure earnest bachelor in his early sixties; also a poet, a scholar, Doctor of Literature, Advisor to the Art Museums and the Queen Elizabeth Arts Council. Until his mid-fifties he led a shatteringly lonely life, as far as his relationships with people went, but suddenly around his mid-fifties people were saying they had seen him smile! Someone even made a joke with him! Most people were naturally frightened of him. I remember very vividly when I was a waitress at the Grand Hotel (!) accepting an invitation to afternoon tea—this would be fifteen years ago—it was a dull day and I had no coat to wear and one of the waitresses, when she knew I was going to a grand place on the hill, said, –Perhaps he will give you a coat.

  Ruth Dallas

  Charles Brasch

  I arrived in fear and trembling, and was greeted by a beautiful white cat. I remember the afternoon and the conversation but I won’t bother to recount it. We had slices of seed-cake. When I was leaving and C saw it was raining he said innocently, –Would you like a coat? I can give you a coat!

  (I don’t mean that the beautiful white cat and I had slices of seed cake!)

  At that time of his life he was not known to laugh . . .

  During my year as Burns Fellow he welcomed me to the city by taking me to various concerts and plays until Dunedin hostesses began (embarrassingly to me and no doubt to him) to include us as partners in small select dinners. I would arrive to find him as the only other guest.

  I gave up going to dinner parties—as a Burns Fellow I had felt obliged. About once in six or seven weeks C invites me to dinner and after a suitable interval I invite him to my place and cook a meal or make tea with my specialties of cookies and hot date scones and freshly baked bread . . .

  The other people I may see are my aunt’s nieced who lives near and whose husband is Economics Professor at the University. She, by the way, would be a perfect Peedauntal wearer should I try to promote the product in Dunedin. She was a source of much envy to us when we were children because she and her cousin used to sing in public and win Rose-bowls (secret pedauntals) for performing arias. Her mother was an old horse, sharp-lipped, and she didn’t seem to have any father around; perhaps he died or never was.

  Iona Livingston

  (I hope this letter’s not too boring.)

  I also have another friende upon whom I rely to feel the pulse of the city. She is an immensely talented woman who in her youth (she’s in her mid-fifties) studied in America on a Carnegie Fellowship. She has raised two children and buried one husband (always an old old man who seemed to be living in the Victorian era) and now has acquired another husband. I should think she is the most verbally literary woman in New Zealand. She lives conventionally completely within the society of the city. She goes to church regularly, she keeps abreast of local politics, she knows what’s going on, particularly in Arts, ‘in Wellington’—the equivalent of what’s going on ‘in Washington’; and she’s very exhausting to spend time with.

  Dorothy Ballantyne

  Can’t think of anyone else I know in Dunedin.

  O there’s Rf, whom I don’t know at all and have seen rarely. He used to live with Cg. He’s a dwarf, very bright, a university lecturer whose impulses keep getting him in trouble with the police and everyone (his friends) in Dunedin sees to it that he isn’t put in prison. He gives allnight dinners and parties but at the only one I’ve been to I was kept in a corner all night by the wife of a psychiatrist who was confiding that she’d ‘done a little writing herself’. R was living at this time with a surgeon who had just returned from being in Tibet with Edmund Hillary and who wore a magnificent Tibetan robe . . .

  Rodney Kennedy

  Charles Brasch

  And then there’s my former landladyh, a grand old lady living in the house built for her by her father, the first Professor of Education. I stayed in an apartment above her house. She is eighty-seven, she is rereading Henry James, she was once a teacher of piano and singing, and every day she plays her piano. All her old friends (mostly unmarried like herself) are in local homes for old people, or dead; and she visits both the hospital and the cemetery to commune with them. She has lace covers on all her furniture.

  Ida White

  Well Bill I think I’ll stop boring you with this letter because I may be dropping into a story. I guess I’m trying to prepare myself for the return to N.Z.

  I won’t be able to have any letters from you until 23rd Feb, when I have to be in Baltimore. I want to stay in Baltimore as short-short a time as possible.

  Are you really alive and well and living out west—Bill the Brave and Paul the Proud and Ned the Nebulous.

  Forgive me, I’m dotty.

  feely love from Inner-thinkie-outer-feelieJ

  THE ILLUSTRATED PEEDAUNTAL

  [Brown to Frame, February]

  [Frame to Brown, April]

  28. Yaddo February (postcard)

  Bee small letter large thought-space

  peedauntally apace the day drains away

  the sun is warm with multicoloured spring alarm

  how much simpler to be (bee) nothing-shadow

  on the blank page of snow; dig that crazy

  urine and sun running down the sky into well and

  stream, dig sun sun yellow sun and its saying

  its pronominal simplicity; I think I will shut

  the door fast keep rainbows and such out retain

  the wide white screen for the heart’s reeling Kodak,

  attend the ceremony some day soon of the final

  utter amputation of leaves fatally bloodshot in wars

  peedauntally yours, jay.

  29. Yaddo Pigeon Barn West, with Blue Jay in Residence February

  Dear Bill,

  A small square letter, probably my last from Yaddo, though who knows what impulse may seize me within the next few days to say another Hello. Sun, and the snow old and speckled like ageing skin, not the brand-new snow I thought I would find here. The sun’s shining through a mist this morning and the trees are silver.

  Our composer, Douglas Alanbrooke, has arrived. He arrived so secretly that we did not realise it and last evening, glancing around the dinner table, I thought,—What ho, here’s a
bank manager, and it turned out to be Alanbrooke who is nice, I think, rather like our MacDowell composer Tom but his skin has the peculiar shine that teachers get who teach all day and every day of their lives, as he does, at a girls’ College.

  Such wild generalisations.

  Our mid-West writer went home yesterday, much to Kenneth’s dismay, for K has relied quite a lot on his patience and support, and so the day was rather a turmoil with Kenneth drinking from the early hours and then falling into a depression about his wife, then drinking some more, then mourning the loss of his companions ‘just as everything was getting normal again’. By his companions he means the Midwestern writer and myself who walked him to the gate each evening. I think the composer will be kind to him. How people tear at one’s heart—that’s the disadvantage of being a pure feelie as I am; I don’t know how people exist if they’re feelies and have no way of making art out of it, or trying to. One feels K Burke’s greatness and it is appalling to me to think that when next I hear of him it will be through reading his death notice, most likely in a New Zealand newspaper. That is not strictly so, however, for he will write me a letter from time to time.

  I have mentally packed up from here ages ago, and am anxious to leave. Norman Podhoretz and Granville Hicks are trying to make me ‘read something’ before I leave but I insist that if I do it shall be the work of others. I would not dare read my own work—particularly as there is a collection here of writers reading their work on record; Faulkner reading Light in August, poets reading their work; and a marvellous recording of Eudora Welty reading two beautiful stories—‘A Memory’, and ‘A Worn Path’, in a rich Southern accent. My own work seems of no substance yet I am inspired to improve it.

  Liquor here is good these days—everyone seems to have a bottle of something rare and recommended and people appear in the evening clutching their special ‘bottle’. I went to the predinner cocktail gathering last evening (I go every second or third evening and omit every evening the after-dinner conversation gathering in the small room off the diningroom) and I quite enjoyed it because Kenneth’s unhappy state took a humorous turn as he plunged into sexual reminiscences in front of the usually prim gathering. A couple of evenings ago it was very serious and searching with Dorothy Hicks enquiring conversationally of Alfred Kazin (conversationally and innocently) –Do you often come here? Last evening Kenneth described in detail his visits to the movies when he was from 15-22 and his enjoyment in the girl sitting next to him. ‘I used to come,’ he shouted, looking positively joyous. And then went on to describe it, while Dorothy Hicks murmured, Oh Kenneth; and I saw or thought I saw Alfred Kazin glancing at me because I’m the shy one and might not know about these things!

  Both Alfred and Ann Kazin had been to MacDowell and prefer it to Yaddo, chiefly because of its lack of formality.

  How’s Santa Barbara? Still with the sailors? She will appear when you least expect her.

  The day is too blue and green for me to stay inside. Perhaps I will walk around the lake. This winter that I hoped for here with deep deep snow is a fraudulent season.

  Follows my J.F. one-track pornography:J.

  30. New York February

  Dear Bill,

  Hello from Elnora’s quiet womblike apartment where I lazed most of yesterday recovering from a hangover which hasn’t quite gone, or maybe it’s the foul New York air.

  First, I loved your letter and the translations and the illustration of the angel descending upon the meal table and you and Paul and Ned hastily rearranging the tablecloth and getting out your usual fare—ninetynine and seventy ninety-ninths pure champagne. I’m interested to see these poems and to try to translate them, with you the teacher.

  The time at Las Vegas sounds like fun; reminds me of the old poem of Louis MacNeice about the movies, ‘Enter the dream-house, brothers and sisters, Leaving your debts asleep, your history at the door.’i

  The quote is from ‘Newsreel’ by Cecil Day-Lewis (1904–1972).

  A N.Z. trip? You say that if you made the trip it wouldn’t mean that I’d have to ‘put you up’ or ‘put up with’ you. I’d be very sad if you didn’t visit and stay but of course you must do what your Muse dictates (portrait of B with brush (?) poised with Muse nearby dictating). It is always nice to be free to come and go . . . You are going to put up with me at Santa Barbara.

  How pleasant it is to be out of Yaddo. I had a martini at ten o’clock in the morning of my departure, so did Kenneth B and Freya had nothing (but finished my half-finished martini), and Douglas Allanbrooke just sat and looked silver-haired which he is, and Alfred Kazin had a martini because he had decided overnight to leave also—I’ve not known people leave early at Yaddo before—their stay is usually extended at their request; Kenneth was persuaded not to drive us to the bus stop (he had planned a royal farewell, taking everyone with him). It was nice to be met, if only inadvertently (I can’t think of the word) at New York, for Ann had come to meet Alfred who was also on the bus, and they asked me to dinner so I rushed my bags to Elnora’s apartment and returned twenty blocks down West End Avenue to have a very pleasant family evening (they have a daughter of fourteen) but I had rather too much to drink. Another martini to celebrate being out of Yaddo, then wine at dinner, then chocolate liqueur, and I’m afraid I still have the hangover. I was glad to see the Kazin’s in ‘real life’ because at Yaddo Ann was very-too-brilliant and witty, and Alfred seemed shyly disapproving, but in their home they were warm and happy—it’s marvellous not to be conscious all the time that one’s a ‘writer’ . . .

  Elnora’s phone seems to be out of order or perhaps ‘cut off’. This is the third letter I’ve written you since I posted my last one but it will be the first I send as I must exercise restraint, old bean.

  I must get out now to a phone, will drop this in the box, am dying to see the blue skies of California and what lies beneath them, in the small concentration of 131 H. Drive and the hills—oh my hangover, oh the foul air. Enough.

  Yet it was a pleasant welcome to New York and my faith in humankind, in New York humankind, has been restored a little, for yesterday when I had to get a taxi from downtown to up here the taxi-man stopped to buy him and me a hotdog and he almost refused my meagre tip, and at first I was suspicious of his friendliness as one gets in N.Y.C.

  Goodbye.Love

  (Hasty—tasty)J

  31. Elnora’s Boutique February

  Dear Bill,

  You mean real butterflies and real humming-birds and real jonquils? And a real

  I don’t know where my time in New York has gone. I rushed north in a blizzard to Springfield, I was met by Mark and Jo, we dined at Holyoke in a small restaurant which had Bear Steak on the menu (we had sandwiches), we came to South Hadley Mass, a lovely place deep in snow, full of scarred birches (this is part fiction) and then to Jo’s house, painted inside a raw colour as if the wood were being returned to its tree state (and this is precious, a literary whimsy). Only yes, it was newly raw with a strong smell (and here I could delve into childhood when we moved into five different houses before I was five years old but I shan’t delve because New York is not a place for delving (not now when I’ve been rushing uptown and downtown—in one place, though, there was a big empty paint-smelling house surrounded by silver birches). Food again, talk, anagrams and guess who won although Mark and I had surprising resurgences of battery power.

  MacDowell was almost unrecognizable under snow. Elnora waited, her eyes fox-bright. And it was nice to be there and say hello. Elnora seemed well and much happier and we laughed a lot but the scene was new and you were not there, so except for Elnora and Jo and the Eaves [women’s dormitory at MacDowell] colour against the snow and the whiter than white Colony Hall and the rumour that the tenant of Omicron is being visited by a monstrously fat chickadee, the place seemed far away and strange and when the ‘new people’ returned to the Eaves from their studios and wandered in and out sharing our rose hip tea and peppermint tea I thought Ugh Ugh as the novelists sa
y and was glad I’d been sprung from MacDowell. The birches though, like salt-washed stone, and the snow!

  I’m caught in my own narrative, another state which New York city does not allow.

  It was all fun and happy. I slept in Elnora’s studio which has a Steinway and if pianos were to appear in Before and After Advertisements it would be the neglected waif side by side with your shining cared-for piano. I’m sorry that Elnora didn’t play as she was going to. I had been describing to her how Douglas Allanbrook invited me to his room one evening at Yaddo to play for me and ply me with drinks and hearing he was a good pianist I went to listen (and to drink a little) but when he began his playing was nothing, nothing, nothing. Notes, yes. (I think I told you this.) Notes and gloss and feeling but not feeling for the music, at least it revealed itself as feeling for D.A. playing the music. To make a long repetitive story short it was just not Bill playing and Bill’s presence; it was a cardboard half-hour.

  Embarrassing aren’t I?

  It’s breakfast time. O to join the Inner-thinkies, feelies in Santa Barbara! I’ll let you know when. I had booked for March 2nd but I may be able to get away a few days earlier.

  I’ve done nothing in New York except travel hundreds of blocks by bus and recover from pollution of the air while submitting to pollution of the intelligence and spirit—states which I couldn’t define and mention only because I’m sure they exist. Bee, you’re right

  the bomb has fallen

  ...............................

  ......................pollen