by Janet Frame
And so on. I have Mallarmé’s poems from the library and a collection of modern French poetry—some beautiful things in it. I do want to read the Hérodiade. I know that Oscar Wilde wrote a ballad, ‘The daughters of Herodias, they danced before the king’. And Julian Symons, ‘They dance, the daughters of Herodias’. And of course Wilde also wrote Salome. There was a long complicated but passionately written analysis of Mallarmé’s poem in a book I had at Yaddo, but alas, it’s not here—though it’s probably in the University Library where I’m too shy to go.
Have you built your kennel-with Steinway. O have you? . . . I can’t find the original, to parody it.
All kinds of love, in the first flush of morning waking, each to his or its choice, to
BPN
P.S. A cat has just arrived, dark grey & light grey & black & is washing itself on my back steps.
MAY
52. Dunedin May
B, Dear
You are an angel; yet I, a mortal, find it impossible to feel the guilt I ‘should’ feel because you’ve sent me The Requiem and the Schubert and Schumann recording. Thank you so much. The Requiem is so beautiful, I think, and now is the time for me to listen to it when my thoughts are so much in U.S. and when I’m feeling depressed over the Cambodian affair. Will any poet, ever again, write a song of love and praise for an American President? Whitman’s words are a large part of the beauty of The Requiem but I love the music too, the words are embedded there as if they were growing. The singing in some of the choruses is messy sometimes—it seems—because I can’t hear the words but when the words are audible they and the music are so immediate and poignant. Phrases like ‘the large unconscious scenery of my land’a—but I won’t go on thus. The Schubert and Schumann recording is beautiful too, breath-taking in places. Perhaps I am being fanciful when I say that music can take away one’s breath because it behaves like breath: it is like one of those cells, but a cell of sound and movement, that enters and takes over the life it inhabits.
quotation from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed’
Blah blah blah?
You are an angel then. Let me know if a ‘longing as if for sin haunts your dream!’b * [footnote: *Come at once] I know those poems by heart now, simply because I’ve heard you reading them.
quotation from Rilke’s poem ‘The Angels’
Meanwhile back in my Antipodean Omicron I’m experiencing (between Requiems and Sonatas) the first winter day, unexpected, with a snow-sky and rain from the south, and hail and sleet. Sometimes the grey in the sky divides and shows a patch of satin blue which is quickly recovered. My friend Dorothy came on her monthly visit. Before she comes she always phones to find out what the clouds are like because she visits partly to see the sky. She and her family have just farewelled ‘grandsire’—her husband’s father-in-law—who is eighty six, at the start of a lone voyage he is making to Europe.
Some of my luggage with your sweater in it arrived and I can only explain my delight by saying that I must have a cat mentality. I think I’ll invite Ned to come and stay here while I go to Live Oaks Inn and snuggle down on the washer, and eat cut liver, and stalk the house and garden, and sit between the two geraniums (after sniffing each one), and even wangle a visit to Dr Gilbride! Talking of cats—I’ve been exchanging glances lately with a grey and black tom which came—I mentioned it—and sat to wash himself on the steps. The other day when I went down the garden I found him sitting curled in a little nest under the strawberry tree. Waiting for the birds, I suppose. When he saw me he sprang up, looked guilty and was about to fly off through the tangled grass
when I said, Hello. I swear he looked astonished. People just don’t
say hello to strange cats wandering in their garden . . . do they, Ned? It’s this grey and black tom who’s been beating up the lady cats at night. And it’s the same cat who lives about a hundred yards down the road and on fine days sits on the white stone wall and snoozes and on wet days lies curled up on a fancy bedspread in the front bedroom.
I made myself French toast for breakfast this morning . . . My work is going now, I mean moving. I’m afraid I miss you terribly. I try not to be Miss Nostalgia all the time, but I am.
Meanwhile back at Live Oaks Inn, there is a state of confrontation in the dining room between our characters Bill, Paul, Ned, and the carnivorous plant. Pandemonium, you may remember, reigned. Now read on.
My battery has run out & I must too, to post this.
53. Dunedin May
Once again I take typewriter key beneath finger to say hello in the midst of my work which stopped abruptly when I received some reviews of my book and stupidly read them. Some were good but one (which of course I take notice of) suggested I’d be better off doing anything else but writing and (of course) I immediately, stricken, agree . . . What trials. Hello then, to everyone at Live Oaks Inn for which I get even more homesick when anything nasty happens—like running to mother!
Are you looking for a maid? So that you and Paul will be able to recline on the patio without lifting a finger? If you are then there’s an Antipodean maid, with references (written by the alcoholic manager of the hotel where she worked (this smacks of prejudice) describing her as neat, punctual, of tidy appearance, courteous, conscientious and a very promising maid . . . ) She also has a nursing reference which commends her patience and kindly care of the sick . . .
It sounds unlikely that you will be wanting that sort of maid but this one could always adopt a personality to suit. She guarantees to keep to her own quarters, pursue her work of caring for and cleaning house and masters, with quiet efficiency, but warns that her intelligence can cope only with the menial tasks—cleaning, washing, bedmaking, shopping, and the preparation once or twice a week of meals (that is, of dinners) which are better left to more imaginative practitioners. She is able to prepare breakfasts and lunches and will cook dinner as required, though her masters may be more competent and knowledgeable about their diet. She is trained to wait at table. She is also house-trained, inoculated, and comes with pedigree certificate, lately forged. She has a Mountain Lion, Rattlesnake and Carnivorous plant as pets and knows that her masters would accommodate these in their little house in Hermosillo Drive—odd corners can always be found. You are advised that she is also rather silent and does not speak more than a sentence at a time, and guarantees to speak a minimum number of words a day. She also has a pet typewriter which has been thoroughly inoculated and neutered (by recent critics) and has few objectionable habits. Surely it, too, could be accommodated, perhaps permanently in the washing machine where it will accompany the whirling clothes from fabrics delicate to robust. So if the masters hear an odd clacking sound coming from the washer they need not be alarmed.
This information, coming to you this bitter day (inwardly not outwardly) is free of charge and brings you all a store of love from your wellwisher (wish wish) in the Antipodes. Hurry hurry. Accept this Free Offer. Don’t delay.* [footnote: Warning. Always read small print.]
I’m enclosing an autobiographical story which was printed a couple of years ago in U.S.
The hills show
they have tasted today
a platter of snow.
Their meal half-done
they invite the sun
to clear away.
Soon
on the stroke of noon
the green leaf-blade-patterned porcelain
is polished clean.
See?
Emily today
has left her grave
to teach me
syllables of the south.
The news of Bee
amazed her. ‘I hope*
his gilt surcingles
have been cleaned
with common soap
and not the new detergents
which deterge ineffably.
And how are Fly and Blue Jay?’
Her spirit only visited.
Her flesh has done its cope
&
nbsp; with weather. Flakes of snow
were drifting through her eyes
and gave us no surprise. Her hand
a shaft of moonlight lay
easily across the hill and valley
yet restricted in the beam
of one surcingle’s brightness
which both did Bee and Seem.
I had no time to question her.
I did not hear her go.
A noise-abating traveller
her transport was the flow
of nothingness from world to urn
driven by sun and snow,
its wheels the stars’ rotation
sparking a planet-burn
kindled an age ago
before the mechanic time
of Am and Be and Die.
Yet I, Blue Jay
(substitute for Fly)
writing to Bee,
know that quite soon
to give me another lesson,
Emily will return
to this small southern room
(though she dearly loves her Tomb).
* I told her a surcingle was being cleaned & repaired.
54. Dunedin May 12
Dear
Just been reading a nasty review of my book in the New York Sunday Times. Some fool sent it. You know how it feels. Hell several times several Sunday Times. Not understood etc. And the terrible thing is that whoever wrote it is probably right.
Therefore I’m going to run away to sea this instant as I haven’t the energy to dig worms out of the garden and eat them!
Cold still day with after-winter light and pale blue sky; the grey pavements greyer, the white stone walls whiter, a shadow of a shaft of ice somewhere, an ice reflection from the Antarctic. Bodies and hearts all in ice.
Stars for comfort.
Michael H[itchings], the librarian of the Hocken Library has just called to collect several manuscripts (of some of my published works) that I’m giving them on long-term loan so as to get rid of clutter. He lives not far away but I do not see them often and do not know them very well, though when they go away for holidays I sometimes look after their cat, Ngeru (Maori for cat, I think), a sleek black independent tom who sleeps in the bath.
Stars for comfort.
I miss you, Bill and I miss Paul—I miss you both terribly. And proud Ned. I’ve been trying to make a new tape for you but the sound keeps changing to very high or very low (deeper deeper), so I’m going to get an electrical adaptor—I don’t think the batteries are very good here. Last evening when I went to record ‘Swans’ I found they had changed the radio programme, and this morning when I decided to read it myself my voice came out very high or very deep.
Sing on, sing on.
You will be having summer and wandering around naked in the patio except for your peanut butter sandwich and your banana milkshake . . .
Consolation is that Kenneth Burke wrote such a lovely note about my book which does not really deserve what he said. He was so sweet.
Turn over the page for a glimpse of icy realism.
Crazy warm comfortable love from
Blue Jay
55. Dunedin May 13
Dear Bill, Paul, Ned, my trinity most loved, inseparable, Hello.
Have you built the first plank into the Steinway-occupied kennel yet? Or the second, or the third? Time is short in this life, only a few inches or centimetres in length and the material it’s made of is fragile. Our friend Emily D may tell us that satin ships are impossible, that ships ‘require cedar feet’, but don’t believe her—so many carriages and appliances and appendages built to withstand storms are made of silk.
Baby J is lonely for the people of Live Oaks.
Meanwhile, back in my Omicron of the Antipodes, I’m still smarting (now and again when it comes to my mind) over my ‘unreadable in the worst sense’ review in the Sunday Times; but it will sink down to my unconscious and befoul it in befouled company. My house painter has still not finished his work and has proved himself a liar and a cheat and still I can’t be angry with him—if I ever had any moral indignation I must have lost it early in life. Yet I have it strongly against organisations like ‘The Pentagon’; yet if I met one of the stupid generals I would feel pity for him.
I spent last evening at Charles B’s place. Charles invited Ruth D (a poet, his former secretary, and friend) and me to meet some Scholar from Canada who is here studying Commonwealth Literature. Oh where have all the babies and the touchie-feelies gone? An Icelandic Scholar (I mean a student of Icelandic) on the eve of his departure for Scandinavia was also there, and we sat around the electric fire and made polite remarks and though they didn’t ask me how long and wide the United States was (you see, I can’t escape) they expected me to speak very wisely about ‘Life in the United States’. It was quite pleasant but it began to grow boring. The Canadian Scholar was a golden-curled clean-limbed handsome lad with a flashing smile. I preferred the Icelandic Scholar who was rather sullen and silent. His name was Bill Manhire. Ruth was witty and persistent, Charles was suave and in good humour, and I was dreadfully silent and couldn’t manage a sentence without faltering, though Ruth kindly said afterwards that though I didn’t say anything I gave the impression that if I wanted to I could have spoken volumes . . .
And yesterday afternoon I took a wander not quite to Bee-Supplies territory (The Place of the Stone Bees) but to a huge old warehouse full of old furniture, including old pianos, and as I walked by the old pianos I tried each one with my cinq doigts and a variety of sounds came out. There was one that had been sold for 250 dollars which had a pleasant sound; and others resented being touched and squealed; and others had sunk so low in pianistic despondency, not having been played or tuned for many years, that their sound was desolate, if they could produce any; and some were golden pianos, more carvings than keys, and some of the keys had their skin worn off their knuckles; and then I left the pianos and came to more furniture, a golden velvet sofa and I stood by it a long time and I kept returning to it and when I arrived home I realised why—it was the furniture out of the front room of my aunt’s house, which is being sold and demolished to make way for the University.
Another instalment later.
My mail today has a list of questions for a radio interview, and all are impossibly dumb questions, most of them clearly arising from ignorance of the ordinary common and garden pursuit of making—whether it’s a poem or a painting or a piece of music. The tape recorder will be useful here. When I get it attached to electricity I will record what I want to say and so will not need to speak ‘live’. (I told you that I’m having trouble with my batteries, so that voices are inclined to go ‘deeper, deeper’, a facility that while it may be welcomed in other parts of the anatomy is not what one would ask of one’s recorded voice. You should also hear the ‘higher higher’ sounds, too. I tried to record something for you and when I played it back you would have sworn I was a little finch (Alice or Ted or Carol or Bob or Mary) the way I twittered and twittered.
Has Elnora been to visit you? Is she coming to stay? (I am green green Jay!)
I’m not really a ‘writer of long letters’.
I haven’t really much to say; it’s just that my thoughts turn so often to you and the music and the shared baby-days and the parcel of days is tied by a short satin thread.
Tra-la-la.
56. Dunedin May
Dear
Hello. Sunning yourself in the patio? Swimming in the shark-infested ocean? Playing a duet with the c. plant and Steinway? Ah how I wish etc.
I’ve been trying to finish the tape I started but my ssssssss hisses and I don’t know how to stop it. Do any of you live oaks have similar difficulties with your ssssssss?
Yesterday I took a walk through the non-peopled places of Dunedin—along to the Northern Cemetery (not to be confused with the sea cemetery at Anderson’s Bay where the yellow flowers grow in the Antipodean room), past the cemetery (I ducked in and used the ladies, something I never expect
ed to find in a cemetery but I suppose the dead have their quirks of non-behaviour. This was the most non-peopled place I saw during my walk) down through the bush road (the founding city fathers set aside five hundred acres of native bush encircling the city, to be the property of the city) where creeks gurgled on either side and bellbirds belled, down towards the sea where the Art Gallery is. I spent some time in the Gallery but the usual display had been taken down to house the two exhibitions—they’re short of room and are building an extra wing which I enjoyed, particularly Art of the Space Age, a misleading title with misleading generalisations in the introduction—talk of the painter today, as if there were such a being as the painter. I loved the Sunflower of Jean Tinguely and the Sonix of Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, an Australian.
From there I did my waterfront walk along past the factories and the timber-yard smelling of fresh timber and the chocolate factory where I was joined by a man of about sixty who’d been in the Art Gallery when I was there and who had murmured to me, ‘Some beautiful things here’. We walked along to the railway station and up towards the Octagon where he branched off (branch branch) to visit the Income Tax Department, while I went towards home, not before I learned that the fellow-walker played an instrument or conducted a brass band and was colour-blind.