by Janet Frame
Please skip this if it sounds too presumptuous which it is—it’s just that Live Oaks is ‘gentle on my mind’ and so I see in my mind’s eye (great place that) the things and people associated with Live Oaks. (I’ll not bore you with what I was going to say, after all. I broke off this letter to write a couple of paragraphs on your painting, and something on Paul’s—it developed into a miniature essay on envelopement; so I’ll spare you . . . )
Back to the minutiae of daily living, here, ‘in the large unconscious scenery of my land’d. ‘In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring and the farmers preparing their crops with DDT.’
phrase from Walt Whitman’s poem ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’
Poor Old Walt. D.H. Lawrence flays him in his Studies in American Literature and then Lawrence writes ‘pure Walt’—‘Have you built your ship of Death O have you?’—and maybe this is logical—all men kill and become the thing they love. And maybe that’s nonsense—it’s so much easier to feed on sayings already said.
Stars for what? The other evening—about six-thirty—I was wandering around town (it was late night shopping) and I saw the most beautiful blue evening sky, I’ve never seen anything so beautiful, a rich dark blue like a cloth, with the texture of cloth, as if you could reach up and touch it.
A schooner whose name was Janet
on course to another planet
once dropped her fin
at Live Oaks Inn
now her wheel has no-one to man it!
You will remember that the scene in the drama of the Carnivorous plant had moved to the sittingroom and that the piano, known also as Steinway, was about to speak. It is not known whether Steinway had spoken before, in words that is, though one of our characters, Bill had regular conversations with it and was able, with his special skill (he is known in Wales as Bill the Skill) to make it utter the most wonderful sounds, in code, while Paul (known in Wales for his inclusive qualities as Paul the All) and Ned (known in Wales as Ned the Fed, which speaks for itself) listened.
You may notice that the author’s battery is running low and the story of the Carnivorous plant is in danger of fading away but the onus is on the author to resolve the plot. Is the tender-leaved carnivorous plant really an offshoot (or vice-versa) of the black Steinway? What is the real family tree? What has
to say to this?
And many more intriguing questions not answered for you now because the author’s battery is running low and she is closing (her letter) and sending crazy but pure distilled also concentrated granulated genuine artificial desensitized homogenized crackle-finished vitamin-rich enzyme-loaded love to
60. Dunedin May 21
Hello Bill,
I’m thinking about you now. It’s night and I’ve just settled in my luxurious unelectric bed and I’ve just played the Serkin record—you see how deep my live-oaksia is, it’s incurable. I have put some of the paintings from you and Paul’s catalogues on to white board and they are hanging on the wall in my bedroom; and the idea of my work is swirling around like a current; and the street outside is quiet, the air cold, about forty-five degrees, and I in my luxury have adjusted my bedroom temperature to about sixty. And my thoughts are on the peanut butter patio where a large part of my self has taken up residence having signed a treaty with the carnivorous plant who can’t really be called Nixon if it is such a close relation of Steinway.
About every third or fourth evening I go to visit my old aunt who has led a barren kind of life and now she is old the barrenness shows. She has many of her relatives to visit her but she likes me to go because I look like her husband who died many years ago. I usually take her a date scone or slices of buttered bread I have made.
Obviously I got bogged down there in the date scone syndrome because it is now morning, clear, bright, new. I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed you and I went to visit a blind person who said, ‘I don’t mind being blind. When I walk out in the air my mouth becomes a village and my nose is my neighbour.’
Very Freudian.
From where I am sitting I can see a white-pawed cat walking delicately along a grey fence. The house opposite, at the corner, which was empty and had been claimed by a black cat who, I told you, (you don’t have to remember all the stupid things I write in my letters!) used to inspect the property regularly, now has a family living in it, with the inevitable cat. I think everybody in the street except me must have a cat. In the evening when I go to visit my aunt I walk down to the bottom of the hill (how strange it is to be walking alone and unafraid at night!) to catch a bus for a short walk to the private hospital, it is just about that time, not quite dark, when cats come into their own. I mean I see them everywhere, not wandering the street or moving about in the garden of their house (every house has a garden) but sitting sedately on front steps or just at the gateway as if to say, I own this place. I pass cat after cat sitting with their tail curled around their feet, paws together, face slightly smirking, each at the entrance to his or her or its ‘place’, staking a twilight claim. I swear I can read their thoughts—and perhaps they can read mine.
My bank manager called my friend Ruth to say I had a review in Time magazine (he was too shy to call me). He is in charge of the Savings Bank at the foot of the hill—a provincial bank which gives all its profits, or maybe some of them, to various charities and causes and societies. I certainly hope he doesn’t read I.C. if it ever comes here (I haven’t yet received my copies of it!) because he is something like the bank manager in the book. I do not know him or anything about his private and family life but when I used to go in there he would either tell me a dirty story (semi-dirty) or say his dream of leaving everything—wife, family, work, and going off to sea in a beautiful yacht.
I’m busy trying to answer the questions the radio interviewer is going to ask me. They are going to pay me for the interview so I suppose I have to do some kind of homework—it’s about ‘Artists Colonies’. There may be a rush of New Zealanders to apply to Yaddo and MacDowell. The writer who visited me some time ago and whose rather embarrassing letter I still haven’t answered, seemed eager to go to one of the colonies because he finds, as I do, that in New Zealand the loneliness outweighs the benefits of the aloneness—I don’t know if there is any ‘place’ where one can achieve the right balance but it’s more readily found among those doing the same kind of work and therefore having the same kind of need. I like that quote from Auden,
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
In solitude, for company.
Just received your lovely letter full of fun things. You are a good bee to write to me with your—whatever bees write with—feelers? It is my food for the week, and immediately to hell with Dunedin and its sour grim life that stops at the neck up and the belly-button down. I loved the picture of Long Ned (Ned the Fed) on the washer, and I think that what you say about his believing you hunt during the day (which you do) is correct. After meeting so many different cat faces and their different knowledgeable (should I say sapient or something like that) expressions I might say that perhaps he’s sophisticated enough to believe you hunt in your own special way, and then bring home the food so that he can continue as Ned the Fed.
Yes, I do believe all the bad reviews and I’m incredulous about any good ones—somehow the good ones don’t seem to relate to me or my work. This is why I do think (though I seldom put this into practice) that I shouldn’t read reviews at all. I’m vain enough to be pleased by the good ones but after a day of swollen-headedness they vanish. The bad ones persist—‘unreadable in the worst sense’. I remember the first review I ever read of my first book, The Lagoon, which I wrote before I went into hospital and which was not published for years and years. The review said, (something like this) ‘This sort of thing has been done before, again and again. J.F. has been reading (list of writers); most of the book is childish prattle.’ Not very encouraging for someone who was
determined to devote her life to writing!
I thought you must have had a very cannibalistic barbecue because when I read your letter with the sentence, ‘pathetic little chops consumed by the grille before we ate them,’ I misread ‘chops’ as ‘chaps’
This afternoon Charles B is coming up to ‘take tea’ with me. I hastily re-read his poems. They are very moving, particularly the ones in the small booklet he had printed for his elderly aunt. There’s one, ‘Home Ground’, which gives an accurate poetic description of Dunedin. I may send a copy of one of his books to May Sarton because they are in the same elegiac (?) vein. (What did one poet say to another when they met in an elegiac vein? . . . I don’t know the answer, I just invented that as a possible riddle. Blah blah.) Anyway, I’ve made a date scone to eat.
Hurrah, hurrah, I’ve at last got my tape-recorder attached to the electricity, and the difference in sound is amazing. Your piano playing is better than ever and there’s no risk now, as there was before, of its suddenly sounding very strange so that I had to turn it off quickly; and your voice is even in its natural beauty—ha ha I mean it—and—alas—does not go deeper deeper, slower, slower. I had my new batteries only two days before all the voices and the music sounded drunken. The Bagatelles, the Hérodiade and the Hugo Wolf songs are part of my regular listening now—I don’t have to wait until I can get new batteries. And of course the poems which I knew by heart, and the extract from Youth and Lord Jim. Is Dame Mary Margaret still interviewing celebrities?
Strangely, Virgil Thompson came to my mind the other day. I used to hear so much about him at Yaddo—from the maid, chiefly. ‘He always had the pink room. He’s such a nice gentleman.’ I never met him. After Philip Roth left Yaddo (he of course had the Pink Room—this is the room Katrina Trask died in, where the ghosts are), the Pink Room was occupied by a smashing blond composer whom we women called a ‘blond mariner’ who used to sun himself by the swimming-pool at noon . . .
Frank S in a letter mentions a review of my book and adds, ‘we all knew you had it in you, as the whole family said to the parlour-maid when she left unexpectedly.’
It’s quite late at night now. I couldn’t face visiting my aunt after Charles B’s visit which rather depressed me. He is so good and kind and he seemed so frail and old. I’d lit a fire, although my tenants told me there’s some kind of gap between the chimney and the wall or hole or something which could be dangerous. When I told him this in passing, he offered to climb up in the loft and investigate, and I had an image of this frail-looking white-haired man trapped up in my loft! I declined his help. He seemed so old and tired—he seemed to keep falling asleep or he gave that impression by closing his eyes a lot, yet he’s not really an old man, only in his late sixtiese.
Actually, Brasch was 61
I saw three live oaks growing in Santa Barbara. (Quote filched from Paul’s verse collage.)
I spent my earliest years with the above faces, and from the time I was very small I used to be teased because I was fascinated by the expressions on the faces of sheep. Horrible grownups used to corner me and say, Come on, tell us again about the look on the sheep’s face.
I must go to post this. I did enjoy and do enjoy your letters with their slices and crumbs of news. I forget where I am again with the Carnivorous Plant—it has that influence. I think that Steinway had acknowledged the plant was a close relation, that it had been constructed in part by members of the family, and while it was making this acknowledgement to a breathlessly listening Bill and Paul and Ned (tuned in from the washer-drier), it sat demurely on the sofa by the sittingroom fire, looking very elegant and carnivore, almost like a human being. Bill, hearing the Steinway’s confession, turned to the plant and his heart melted (melt melt), while Paul gazed at it, clearly touched (touched touched). ‘Why not have it here, inside with us?’ Paul suggested. ‘After all, it swallowed that lady from the Antipodes, you know, that lady writer Dame Mary Margaret spoke of, and it will remind us of her without being too much of a presence, and we can use it to swallow others who arrive, and when Jay comes to stay in that kennel we’re constructing, she can tend it, day by day, and we’ll never remember that things were different and that it once lived unsung and unknown in a secret corner of the garden. What do you say, Bill?’
Meanwhile the plant remained silently demure (demure demure) knowing it had a strong ally in Steinway. Bill was clearly torn (rip rip). Then with a hearty laugh issuing from his handsome face (issue issue) he said, ‘Why not?’
And thus it was, and shall be.
But this is not the end, oh no.
It’s love now for the three live oaks and au revoir.
Say hello to El for me.
And kisses.
61. Dunedin May
Dear Masters,
I’ve received forthwith (?) the diagram of my quarters and the list of duties which I am considering deeply deeply. The duties of caring and cleaning for the Masters sound a little ambiguous—does it mean the Old Masters of which you no doubt have a secret collection filched from Art Galleries throughout Europe, or the Masters according to C.P. Snow who writes all those lower-lower class Proustian imitation novels about quarrels within the College between master and master; or does it mean attending to Ned and his pals, of which he has many, secretly, but has never invited them home to meet Bill and Paul (Ned’s servants) because there has been no-one to be employed fulltime dawn-dark-dawn as there now will be with the advent (should she accept the widely-advertised post) of J who herself expects that she in the role of servant will look upon the three live oaks as ‘the masters’ and will accordingly care for them and clean them twice weekly as requested. The attending of the carnivorous plant is not exactly to her taste—she may delegate that role to someone more skilled. Wednesday, breakfast in bed, is very promising, or would be, if there were a bed to have breakfast in! It will be nice to have the Steinway, though, and the beautiful cushions, and the adaptable rooms, room-womb-tomb in a twinkling, also room-womb-tomb-perfume (inhale, inhale). Changing textures in rooms would be an enticement. The Thursday duty, with its slightly medical aspect involving Ned and Bill should prove an interesting imaginative extension of the humdrum day, while Saturday offers much work among old Beeth, Schu, and Moz . . .
Now I will meditate meditate meditate, and now that I have meditated I will shatter this fantasy because it is unendurably not true (who said fantasies ever were?) and the shattering becomes sediment or dust lying on the veldt, steppe, savannah, factory-floor of my mind/heart/soul/toenails; it looks like a sediment of despair.
It has snowed on the hills (I can see them from here) and the wind blowing across the valley is chilly. I too have moved my furniture—having heard by chance that my tenants had the Landfall desk and stored it, I dismantled it and moved it into my smaller back room which I’m now using as a studio. I can now look out over the hills and the clouds with no sign of street or people. In my other studio in the front room I was forever pulling down the blinds as I felt too exposed. The front room is now my spare bedroom with the single bed—it is the biggest room and the only room that the Landfall desk would go into, in one piece.
Thanks for sending the Time Review. Enough said. No comment. You talk of May Sarton who knew Virginia Woolf. I feel very superior because I know W.T.B in all his many aliases in including his basic alias of W.T.B. I also know P.W. and N.
Later: the most wonderful light today, changing every moment. The clouds now have a dark underside and an upper side of frothy white light beneath a higher ceiling of blue. The wind is wild and cold, making howling noises, and my studio is so snug—I had to draw the curtains during the day to keep out the blinding hot sunlight. This climate is not unlike the Ibicencan Mediterranean late autumn.
I wonder what the maid would put, in a drip-dry non-iron world, in place of ‘Ironing today’? It doesn’t necessarily mean ironing of clothes and linen, though, it could be people or ideas. Blah. I love the sketch of the trio, particularly Ned at his instrumen
t, it’s a masterpiece and the ladle is not unlike the ladle out of which I emptied my lunch to its plate—a leftover mixture of ground beefsteak, diced potatoes, carrots, onions, tomato soup, raisins, the leftover liquid from fish, saffron, and a cut-up quince which I’ve had since the first or second week in April and haven’t known what to do with. With a dash of this and that it was very tasty.
The clouds now are exactly like those in Paul’s Caravaggio painting. How it must (does it?) annoy to be told that in painting something is ‘exactly like something else’ as if it were a compliment either to the something or the something else. So I’ll say the clouds are not at all like those in Paul’s painting; they remind me of the painting and the clouds are Paul’s clouds and the world—see I’m learning my Rilke—you make a tree and ‘you have made the world’.
I’m getting into deep water and I always feel self-conscious about communicating when I’m in deep water.
I’m really a pure touchie-feelie. Verbalising (my own, not that of others) bores me.
Did you know that Samuel Pepys’ wife’s drawing master was a painter named Brown??
Now a quote from just over three hundred years ago:
‘Talked with Mr Kingston the organist. He says many of the music are ready to starve, they being five years behindhand for their wages; nay, Evans, the famous man upon the harp, having not his equal in the world, did the other day die for mere want, and was fain to be buried at the alms of the parish, and carried to his grave in the dark without a link, but that Mr Hingston met it by chance, and did give 12 pence to buy two or three links . . .’ (I gather that a link is a torch).