Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

Your letters came just as I was taking time off to make a honey-and-water mix for the wax eyes that are feeding in my strawberry tree—my downunder chickadees, so to speak. Their appearance is a sign of winter for they leave the bush and all its honey-bearing plants and look for honey where they can get it in civilization. They are in flocks in my garden—little green birds with a white ring around their eyes; sometimes we call them ring-eyes. The bellbirds, too, come out of the bush—all the native birds do, in winter.

  I haven’t read The Secret-Sharer yet—it vanished and I can’t find it, I must have left it at my sister’s. On the plane I did not even do the puzzles you gave me because your sleeping pill was so effective and it was only the other evening that I opened the puzzle book and found myself trying to decide, logically, which out of Horatio, Harvey, Henry and Hugh, was the aerialist, clown, lion-tamer and equestrian . . .

  Paul, I love the drawing of the muttonbird—of course it is really like that—the newsphoto did not show the birds very clearly. They are sheep, old sheep—you don’t qualify for wings when you’re a lamb—who grow wings and take to the trees and you hear them baa-ing and bleating at night. Wherever they fly they leave a woolmark, pure virgin wool: they are above earthly things. Their wings are curly, too, as you have pictured them—like angels’ wings.

  About the carnivorous plant and its critical condition—don’t believe it, it is only waiting its chance to extend its appetite and menu so you both must be very careful where you set foot in the peanut butter patio, and never, never, even for an instant must you wear those brown bread shoes!

  I’d like to be there to sample the truck-driver cookies. I’m glad you’re keeping your hand in, Bill! That’s what hands are for. Here we are all the time trying to assign complicated functions to various parts of the body when each, after all, is so simple.

  I hope your new sitter is not struck down like the Young Edward, gatherer of wild roses . . . You might be interested to know I had a brief visit the other day from the rather brilliant friend I mentioned—her husband, meanwhile, was at a funeral. She saw your painting on my wall, Bill, and exclaimed how beautiful it was, and I agreed. And then she began to tell me of a friend of her daughter’s who has been composing a lot of music. I asked her, curiously, why she had begun talking of music and she (to whom I had said nothing) said, ‘Oh I suppose it was that painting which reminded me. It’s full of music. The figures grouped there remind me of notes of music.’

  I hadn’t thought of it myself, but they do look like a grouping of notes. Dorothy stayed only for a date scone and then went home.

  Life is pretty barren here for me, socially, because everyone is so bloody staid and straight-laced. I’m getting to rely more on the under-population I meet when I go out walking—the numerous cats sitting on fences, absorbing everything with their uncensored gaze; and the dogs that wander around in the early morning. I look at them and they look at me and say, Well we know, we know, how do you think we put up with it day after day, night after night. It’s a grim life all right but we get by. Why not join us?

  I am having my house painted, to seal me in, and make me more waterproof and dripdry, and one of the two husky gentlemen has just told me that the ‘lady of the house’ provides a morning cup of tea and something to eat, so why not come this way by mutton-bird on the cheap rate and make me some truck-driver cookies, or painter cookies which, I suppose, will have a subtle variation in flavour. And my neighbour has just phoned me to say did I know there was a hole in my wall and would I like him to fix it for me? So there he is, fixing the hole in my wall. He’s probably sat at his window (he’s a retired something) day after day staring at my hole in the wall and longing to fix it . . .

  Oh I do miss you, both of you, and Ned, so much, and I know I say it again and again and I get depressed because I think what if you die suddenly and I never see you again?

  Enough of that. ‘As we get older we do not get any younger.’c

  From Henry Reed’s parody of T.S. Eliot.

  Here’s a heart-warming quote:

  ‘He who beholds in work no-work, and in no-work work, is the man of understanding among mortals; he is in the Rule, a doer of perfect work.’ (Bhagavadgita)

  Last page; the next day.

  Last evening after I had cooked a shoulder of mutton, fooling myself in apparent ease I made House-Painters’ Cookies for the use of the two men working here—oh what a mess they turned out to be, they hardened suddenly (!), and now they’re like slabs of concrete. I put in all I could think of—bran flakes, wheat germ, wholemeal and so on but I forgot to turn the oven on . . .

  Au revoir

  49. Dunedin April

  Dear B,

  Another hailstone in my storm of correspondence—dodge it if you wish . . . My battery (tape) has run out and so today I have not been able to hear you reading the poems and being interviewed and playing the Bagatelles and the Hindemith, and Hugo Wolf. You see, I am housebound, for the house-painter is here. He’s a scruffy-looking character, the sort people would hesitate before hiring, and he works on his own, with a friend sometimes, and so has not the latest equipment. All this appeals to me. It doesn’t necessarily make him a nicer person but it makes him more of an individual, and I dare say from time to time he’s faced with bankruptcy, as most of the little business and tradesmen are, so I couldn’t feel angry when one day he demanded some money and I wrote a large cheque, and then he disappeared for a few days. I tried to be angry but I couldn’t be. He reappeared this morning and worked hard all day and when a man from the Electricity Department came to fix the wires and needed some space at the front of the house he stood like a little terrier dog defending the house as if it belonged to him and it was about to be attacked. He thinks I’m a typist. I give him a cup of tea morning and afternoon and sometimes he reminisces about spinsters he has worked for, and when he says the word spinster he glances at me and says, Nothing personal mind you.

  I think you have helped me break the Conrad barrier. I count it among your long list of achievements. I have been reading The Mirror of the Sea and I find myself addicted to his writing, wanting to return to it in the same way that one wants to return to passages of music. The book was given to me by a Polish poetd whom I knew when I first went to London years ago: a strange lonely man, a Hippy in pre-Hippie days who used to get his bed and board where he could from pickings about Soho. He was one of the numerous poets and painters who haunted London in the late nineteen-fifties, talking and talking about the poems they were going to write and the paintings they were going to paint but because the balance of their need was always so heavily in favour of human company rather than solitude, they completed very little work. They were like a huge packet of assorted artistic seeds scattered over the city, and only one or two managed to thrive . . . well, I never read Conrad, until now.

  David Kozubei

  I had a letter from Jo yesterday, brilliant as usual, high-pitched with a lovely rhyme which went,

  ‘Twas a sad Frame returned to Dunedin

  to find folks not even bleedin’

  but at least her garden

  grown rampant past pardon

  in her absence had often been peed on.’

  By cats only, though, as far as I can tell . . .

  And I had a letter from Elnora where she describes her plan to visit the West Coast . . .

  The empty house across the road from me has been taken over by a black cat. Perhaps the owners left it there when they moved, I don’t know. It’s a very handsome black fluffy cat and each day it makes an inspection of the garden and its roses and geraniums and then it sits on the front lawn and washes its face.

  Also I have to report another Antipodean phenomenon. Very mysterious. Each day when I take a little sun on my balcony, a Red Admiral Butterfly arrives to drink the nectar from the koromiko blossom. There are only one or two blossoms as it is not supposed to be in bloom, not really, and certainly the butterfly is the only butterfly around at this time of year—it
is not unusual—red and velvet black, slightly smaller than the Santa Barbara butterflies. Perhaps it has arrived from Santa Barbara? An Early Inspection Unit? An Early Warning System?????

  I heard from Charles Neider who is planning to visit Ross Island in the fall (U.S. fall). The sun has set now in the Antarctic and does not rise until some time in late August. You will have to rescue me.

  Goodbye now. And pure love to you and Paul and Ned, though if you test it in your peanut butter laboratory you will find just a trace of impurity for which you will not, I trow, blame me.

  50. Dunedin April

  Dear Apis Mellifica,

  Bee I’m expecting you

  to fly my way

  some day . . .

  My new novel is going to be called, as you suggest, ‘Critical Condition’. Or ‘Multiple Injuries’. Or ‘Deeply Unconscious’. Or why not ‘Intensive Care’? Why does one have to have a new title each time? One could write all one’s life and use the same title.

  Sunday morning. The light-green curly leaves of the hedge outside my study window are all aquiver, not because it’s Sunday morning but because there’s a light breeze and it’s a clear blue day with the night chill not quite gone; and the shadows are long. This is a country of long shadows and the first thing you notice if you travel away down south is that your shadow can walk across a wheat-field and touch the sky.

  I found The Secret Sharer. It had been hiding from me. I think that those possessions which vanish for a time do so for some reason of their own and when they are ready to be found they make sure they are found. I have books which periodically vanish and cannot be found no matter how hard I search, until, suddenly, in their own time, they are there. I read The Secret Sharer and I’m still feeling the impact of it, it is so mysterious and lonely and full of Rilke’s ‘die Schwere’e.

  German word for heavy—Frame was particularly fond of Rilke’s Autumnal poems—in ‘Herbst’ (Autumn) there is the phrase ‘die schwere Erde’ (the heavy earth)

  Having just listened to the Kathleen Ferrier record of ‘The Song of the Earth’, borrowed from the Public Library, I am effectively silenced. Ewig.

  When I am reading Conrad I find myself resenting descriptions of the ship and the duties of the sailors and feeling uncomfortable and bare-boarded but all resentment dissolves when Conrad describes the sea itself. I think the resentment arises from my being a woman in a world that clearly manages better without women; but all that vanishes when Conrad turns to the sea because he uses a special tenderness to describe the sea, and one feels included, then. One is included also, and shares marvellously, the described intimacy of the two men, because here, I think, it is outside the narrow framework of he’s and she’s: I found it very moving. I don’t know whether I’m a hopeful person myself, but I liked the youthful hopefulness of the story. One feels that the ‘other self’ will survive, simply because it is a young man’s story. It’s interesting to imagine what the story would be like if the narrator were an old salt near the end of his career. Or is it that one only meets one’s other self when one is young? Perhaps if one is older and meets the other self one might fight it, for one’s own survival? I’ve said enough. Ewig.

  I have put a blue hydrangea in a vase beneath your painting. The painting gives me such delight, it is so rich, and the colour varies with the time of day, and when the colour of the twilight sky comes into the room the painting has a special sound—if I were (ah me!) near your piano I would show you the notes.

  In my garden shall I plant Paul’s Betony (a kind of veronica with

  magical and medicinal properties) and Sweet William?

  Take a spoonful of golden syrup and swallow . . . You too, Paul.

  I am alone here, which is good for my work. I am also lonely which is not good and leads along dark avenues where there is no light to write by. I feel like a visitor from outer space. Where before I had only mildly transgressed by writing a book of poetry which my poet acquaintances in Dunedin disapproved of and thought (this is an actual quote) ‘should never have been published’; as if to say, perhaps, ‘your field if you have one, is prose, so graze in it’, now I have transgressed because I have been ‘flitting overseas’, especially in evil America while everybody else stayed home and grew good. I really feel that Dunedin (and New Zealand) are so much ‘home’ to me that I might decide it would be better for me to leave it, to keep my sanity. It would be different if there were a group of babies like my MacDowell friends so I could enjoy my prolonged infancy. Ah me!

  Love toPaulNedB

  still have not received my ‘Vergers’. It should arrive this week.

  Magical, mysterious, medicinal! Your tape has just arrived! Oh what a superb interview! You are both intended for the stage—the third stage where, cumbersome rockets discarded, you orbit the moon!

  The poems are, of course, beautifully read. Many thanks. And you may not believe it but the Hérodiade recording and the Hugo Wolf songs, not to mention the Bagatelles (and the first passage, out of Schubert, that I had been terribly homesick for, as you must have guessed) all sound well when plugged into the record-player and relayed through the stereo speakers. There’s a slightly flattened effect and I have to keep adjusting the volume but they do sound well, whereas through the tape machine alone the musical sound is pretty awful. I’ve learned that this is because the tape speed is a speech speed and music speed is another speed. Ah but it is good to hear the voices of Mary Margaret and William Theo in their interminable argument about who really translated Rilke’s French poems. I may just eavesdrop on Antipodean opinion about this, also what the public believes in relation to the fictional J.F. last seen on the peanut butter patio.

  Meanwhile I’ll post this and give you a rest.

  51. Dunedin April

  Dear Bill, B apis mellifica, and Paul, Dame M.M., and Ned C of whom more on another page . . .

  Long hot brilliant days, clear cold nights: winter. The sun is almost too hot to stay out in. I am reminded of one of the New Yorker’s interminable queries when I had a character sitting ‘outside in the sun in winter’. ‘Surely,’ the editor wrote, ‘he wouldn’t be sitting outside in winter?’ I assured the edirot that he would be.

  Your letter came on Saturday, it was like heaven. I loved it, and I loved the drawings and the cockle-warming collage; and all the news. I’m still waiting for my Intensive Cares! I’m happy that you like it. I put a lot of myself into it, I think, I don’t mean me, as a person, but me and how I feel about many issues. I was very frightened when I was writing the third section because it seemed so real to me and the characters were drawn chiefly from people around near where I live in Dunedin and about whom I know nothing. I used neighbours etc. who might have merely said Hello to me, but my fantasies about them were numerous. I am amazed not only that art makes life happen but that life makes art happen. What a New York Times reviewer called my ‘symbolic gardener’, the father of Milly G, implied that I had made him a gardener to fit in with my symbols. He is a gardener. I know nothing about him and have not spoken to him but it was he, as a gardener, who made the so-called symbol happen. But I won’t go on about this. The book, I think, is what I wanted to do, and I did it the way I wanted it but perhaps I had too many aims and did not succeed in most of them. In writing of Leonard I simply wanted in some way to ensure that he existed, even if I just recorded his existence, because he was based on my non-conforming unclef whom I never knew but whose life in New Zealand was probably a hell—I knew him only for a few weeks before he died. John Leonard of The New York Times wrote such an understanding review that he probably could have written the book far better than I.

  Charles Frame

  My house-painter is still here, and when he is having his morning or afternoon cup of tea he tells me of his life when he was a sailor on board a boat trading in China clay between U.K. and U.S.A., and of his pet monkey which he took with him wherever he was sailing. He should be finished this week.

  A piano? My problem is I d
on’t know what kind is good and what isn’t. There are many around for sale, second-hand ones, and there’s usually a classified section, Pianos, in the morning or evening paper.

  I play your tapes a lot and the battery starts to wear out and your voice gets deeper and deeper and slower and slower. I’m completing a tape for you and on Monday next I’ll record the story Swans which is being broadcast; not a very good story. My new novel wavers (it is my mortal enemy) chiefly because the parcel I posted has not yet arrived, and it had the beginning chapters—I can’t even remember the names of the characters . . . yes I can. I’m sure you get the same way—cold feet

  at the thought of another voyage into the unknown; excitement, too, as the characters appear, as landfall, and an awful lot of sadness, which is all as it should be.

  TUESDAY.

  Away to mail this before the box is emptied. I too visited an auntg—no blood relation (as they say)—in a home for old people, and on my first visit I found her desolation quite terrible but on my visit last evening she looked amazingly well and cheerful. She was feeling ‘forgotten’—she has only one other relative here, a nieceh (a blood relation—as they say) whom she (and I) find rather fierce, though good-hearted. She is the wife of the economics professor and is a community, coffee-morning kind of woman, but my chief feeling about her arises from the envy my sisters and I had of her when we were young—she learned music and singing and was a well-known performer. She has a deep voice—deeper, deeper . . .

  Hannah, wife of Frame’s uncle Bob Frame

  Iona Livingston

  But this is boring?

  Some time this week I’m going to pay a visit to Charles B whom I told you about, in his little house on the hill overlooking the harbour, with a peach tree in the middle of the front lawn. He is now, at aged 67 [61], in his third year of studying Russian at the University. He is also an honorary Doctor of Literature. And a poet, as I told you, and as you know from the poems I read on the tape. He is difficult to be with because he is so formal, though less so than he used to be, I’m told, and everytime he does relax he has the air of being so primly horrified at himself. His own generation look on him with deep respect, sometimes awe, for his gifts and his reputation as an art patron and collector, and his wealth, too (I mean financial), but the respect is perhaps alloyed with amused tolerance. He’s most at home now, I think, with younger men and women.