Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  Having just had a letter from H Drive, I feel my inner warmth matches the outer warmth, and after I’ve written this letter I shall probably work, bake, eat, and try to get my fuschia off my conscience: I must explain: my small fuschia hedge at the front of the house is sick. I know it, and I have done nothing for it, and I hope this weekend to feed it at least.

  News flash: I have a primrose out. [in margin: As this is not (yet) a maid’s diary, the word primrose is not code.]

  I was interested in what you were saying about isolation and stimulation. Whether we like it or not I think maybe we have become machines for over-stimulation, and over-stimulation is ‘normal’, and even in places where it doesn’t exist the urge is there to be subjected to it. When I was staying in London or New York I’d go out for a wander around the streets, looking at the people, the traffic, just watching what was going on, and I’d come home full of impressions, maybe ready to write a story. If I go walking in the street here the only time I receive impressions that move me enough to write is when I walk where people no longer go but where they used to be (The Place of the Stone Bees [in margin: my next title?]) and their presence remains. I do miss the people-stimulation. The only or about the only stimulant people serve to me here is fear or a feeling (possibly ineradicable for me now, in this country) that I’m some kind of freak. Some of the people I know in Dunedin live the kind of life your great grandaddy lived. I do, not through choice, but because here in New Zealand I am even more of a social cripple than I am when I’m in other countries. Being here frightens me.

  But I don’t want to write a serious letter, because I’m sitting warm and cosy, out and in, at my desk putting finger to key to say hello to the Live Oaks growing in Santa Barbara—live oaks that are so famously famous that Walt Whitman knew of them*. [footnote: *see ‘I found (knew?) a live oak growing in Santa Barbara’—official Whitman adaptation by Paul Wonner]

  Here is a story Ned will like: There was an art show opening recently. I did not go to it but the other day in off-peak hours I went to see the paintings. The gallery is run by an acquaintance whose husband keeps the manuscripts at the University Library; it’s something like the place in Montecito but more elaborate—even something like Felix’s place. When I asked after their cat (they live near here and when they go away I look after their cat) Maureen said it was very well. She then told me how about eleven months ago it seemed to be ill, and was shedding its fur, and one evening she and Michael sat discussing it, and decided they should take it to the vet the next day. Ngeru was listening to this discussion about him. The next day he had vanished. They searched and searched, put advertisements in the paper and so on but he had vanished completely, and at last they thought he must be dead. He was away for seven months. About four months ago Michael was in the bath when xxx (I typed Ned) Ngeru appeared at the window (he uses the bathroom window which they leave permanently open, as a door) jumped in (to the floor) as usual and went to his usual feeding-place. He was fine and healthy and behaved as if he’d never gone away. They never found out where he had been, and he isn’t telling, but they know he left home because he heard them planning to take him to the vet. Like your Ned (and all cats I suppose) he doesn’t have to be told with words or deeds, he can divine things. I suppose here he knew the word vet.

  Isn’t that a nice story, Ned? (don’t let it give you ideas)

  P.S. I liked the paintings very much. Two in particular were shapes in two colours which were moving, I don’t know why. They had the physical effect that paintings sometimes have of pulling your heart away from your body towards the painting—or the mass of colour.

  Thank you for your lovely letter and its enclosures. Do you know W.H. Auden’s long letter to Lord Byron?

  Quote: ‘Every exciting letter has enclosures,

  and so shall this—a bunch of photographs,

  some out of focus, some with wrong exposures,

  press cuttings, gossip, maps, statistics, graphs;

  I don’t intend to do the thing by halves.

  I’m going to be very up-to-date indeed.

  It is a collage that you’re going to read.’

  Send Eva and Jeff my love (sacred).

  Twice a week, as I told you, I visit my aunt to watch with detachment the slow withering of a statistic, and the slow blossoming of the truth, What is not used, dies.

  My pop song.

  Down Serious Alley

  Where ghosts get pally,

  la-de-da, dum-de.

  Does Ned’s Petromalt have petrol in it? For his engine? In all seriousness I ask . . .

  The Live Oaks Page. Air, water, sun your problems. Smog them too, with abandon. Nothing too small or large.

  Dear Live Oaks,

  Every week without fail I read your page and it thrills me very much to see what good work you are doing to help those with problems. I used to write with mine to Aunty Glossy of the Sunday Surprise but now I turn to you. I think, though, that your answer to Overfed Wax-Eye in last week’s page did not have your usual wisdom; on the other hand I approve heartily of your advice to Eleven Months Old and Proud of it. I too think he should wait.* [footnote: *Temptations abound when the very young leave home to rent their own apartment.] You are to be commended also on your restraining advice to Go-Ahead Ned. We are fortunate indeed to have watch-cats like you in our society, such as it is, this present day, all things being equal. Also your reply to the arrogant yet heart-felt letter by C Plant on resisting temptation even when the temptation is present twenty-five hours of the day, is worth far more than the fifty dollars you charge each week for your paper. And how true your dictum rings, We all have to start at the bottom!

  My problem is this: Someone I know (I will mention no names) has discovered an old grocery list belonging to F Sargeson of Auckland. It was sent to me in a letter but it was originally discovered in a supermarket in Auckland. Should I hang on to it? Your usual advice has been to hang on to things as closely as possible. I also have a framed original of a famous Californian cat, and would like advice about this. Is it likely to appreciate? (either me or itself). Returning to the grocery list. It is in manuscript, resembling verse-form, with one word-change which could be the subject of research. Should I fly at once to the United States to offer this grocery list to the Universities? Should I return the list to Frank S as some of its items are intimate (e.g. toilet tissue) or should I philanthropically donate the list to the local University to be on display in the foyer of the Home Science Department?

  About the framed original of the famous Californian Cat. Should I perhaps just hang on to it? I should prefer to hang on to it. Should I go to California to hang on to it?

  I look forward eagerly to your page next week and send my best wishes for years of problem-solving ahead.

  Hanger-On, The Antipodean Room.

  Hello. Here I am again. Sunday, but no sun, pearl-coloured sky, the hills a blue haze, birds flying by as big as planes. I’ve spent some of the morning checking my electric plugs—in the house, that is. I discovered my tenants had confused phase and earth wires on my electric stove and one desk lamp and I myself had done one or two foolish things in attaching plugs. So I’ve been screwing and unscrewing all morning!

  How boring can I make a letter!

  I didn’t feed the fuchsia. I just went and looked at it and felt guilty and then stirred up the earth around it. I pruned the black currants and the gooseberries and freed their roots from strangling weeds, and that was enough. I’m not an energetic gardener—I prefer to read about it, though the gardening book is so full of details of pests and diseases.

  I am busy eating the fruit garden you sent me; saving some for hungry days.

  Dear Live Oaks (you can ask Aunty Glossy to help with this one),

  Someone whom I’ve met only once (for about twenty minutes) has written confessing that he is in love with me and can he dedicate his next book to me. How can I gratify my vanity by agreeing to the dedication and at the same time gently but firml
y let him know that his declarations embarrass me and his feeling is not reciprocated? I’m sure you will be able to give me some good advice in your weekly page.

  I’ve been rereading Yeats and each time I do I feel he’s the greatest because he is so free, he may go anywhere.

  And now my battery (as you may have noticed) is running out so I’ll say au revoir (I hope it is this?), and where did you get that picture of the C Plant eating???? how amazing! and I send so many thoughts and feelings and fantasies that if they were visible I’d have to hire a fleet of ships or a squadron of planes to transport them.

  Drivel.

  Love to B P N

  Separate & collective love.from homesick Jay

  JULY

  72. Dunedin July

  Bill and Paul, you two dears, what a warm letter I had from you yesterday, and my cockles are bubbling and steaming with enough inner fuel to feed me through the internal winter. Your journey, and the long lonely beach-walks, and the mountains and desert sounded ideal, Paul. I love such solitude, myself, but as part or season of the human year, not as an everlasting winter. I do think that people don’t give themselves enough autumns and winters, and we need these seasons as much as the feverish growth and bloom of spring and summer . . .

  But this is going into deep water and I’d prefer to just laze around in the sun and not dive today. My typewriter sends greetings to your typewriter—was it born in the Blue Chip Shop? How distinguished it must be.

  I must tell you both that I’m working hard to retain my insanity! It’s not really very hard to do but I agree that you have to watch yourself or you slip over the edge into sanity and the problem then is you have lost the power to realise that you’re sane. Carnie too has ‘eaten of the insane root’.

  I’m afraid I have been complaining about my loneliness here. It’s an autumn. The separation is the leaf-fall (‘something real has gone’) and this is a barren country for souls, at least for the living; and the dead make sure they retain their deadness and operate in a fertile country. I see people here and talk occasionally to them but it is the like-mindedness that is absent and has always been absent here, for me. One becomes, quite successfully, a half-person. The other half, that matters too, becomes a tangled growth, and is eventually killed by frost. Again, it is the continued working of the seasons that matters, it is the cycle, going on past death and before birth, with no beginning and no ending. Frost is good for the soil only if there is a spring to follow.

  End of deep water.

  Stars.

  Seeing you again will be springtime.

  And if you find a place in the mountains and I come to stay (on twenty-one days appro.) the first thing I shall do (after feeding the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes) will be to quaff a toast to the continuity of the human seasons.

  Stars again.

  Garden News:

  None—not really. I have partly cleared the vegetable garden, and, worried about the fuchsia, thinking that perhaps it needs more food, for it is near the roots of the olearia hedge which are hungry roots, I went into one of the many plant shops in Dunedin, and of course I panicked when the assistant said, ‘Can I help you?’ I mumbled, ‘Well . . . I . . . I think . . . some food . . .’

  She looked at me as if I were crazy.

  ‘I mean, something for the earth. I think the earth needs some food.’

  Then I got so tangled up that I said, ‘Well I’m in rather a hurry, I’ll come in again when I’ve got more time.’

  That was my expedition to help the fuchsia.

  Next time I shall walk boldly in, and remembering Carnie, I shall say menacingly, ‘Give me some blood and bone!’

  Fan News: All my letters are fan letters.

  Work News: Working.

  Misc: It is a sad spectacle to watch the degeneration of the wax-eyes. Once they used to take their honey and water and fly away. Now they are too busy worrying whether some other wax-eye will get what they think is their fair share that they spend more time quivering their wings at each other, threatening and pecking and screaming. At least, while the burly ones are fighting the more timid ones are able to sneak in and have their taste of honey. This morning when I opened the curtains I saw the big dark grey tom-cat sleeping at the top of the stairs as if he owned the place. I said hello to him and he put that surprised look on his face. He is so incredulous that I should speak to him. He gave me a long long stare, full of language, then got up, twisted his heavy bull-shoulders and walked down the stairs into the garden. I haven’t seen him since. He hasn’t appeared to bother the wax-eyes. (This should really be in Garden News.)

  Misc. Continued.

  Tonight I am going to Charles B’s place for dinner after which we are going to see/hear the Opera Company’s The Impresario and Il Pagliacci. It will be a very good opportunity for me (as co-director of the Peedauntal Company N.Z. Ltd.) to see how the product actually works. I know one can have dreams about one’s product but the proof of the peedauntal is in the peeing (aren’t I rude?). I also wish I had kept one of the original audience models for personal use. They are incorporated with a distinguishing device which will enable me (once I have a quick look over the designs) to know immediately which members of the audience are wearing peedauntals. I daren’t ask Charles if he wears them! I shall know at once, of course. I shall pretend to pick up something from the floor and while I am there I’ll cast a quick glance crotchward . . . from under the table.

  Anyway when the evening is over I shall write a director’s report. It’s quite likely that our factory has bungled terribly and the peedauntal conditions have some unknown factor here that we never dreamed of. It should be corrected, (if this proves to be so) by the Christmas buying season.

  Apart from its being very much a working evening I hope to enjoy both the dinner (Charles is not an enthusiastic cook) and the opera.

  To offset, balance, my rather depressed state when I think of the old people in the home where my aunt is (I usually speak to several of the old people), I was delighted to have a letter from the elderly woman (going on 76—not terribly elderly . . . still) whom I know in Norfolk, England. Quote: ‘The past week has been idyllic and I’m off for an all-day cycle ride northwestward to the sea . . .’ Also: ‘Having recently read Strachey’s life of Cardinal Manning I’ve been fired to read New-man’s Apologie . . .’ And hearing about your Aunt Amy is another balancing factor. It is the barrenness of my aunt that appalls me, but then it has always appalled me, for though I never knew her well, whenever I met her I was aware of her confined inner life—it’s the exposure of it now for all to see that is sad. Yet maybe all don’t see it, maybe she’s just another old woman, and I’m so used to reading people or trying to (‘pages where to read pathetic histories’).

  Enough of that. Stars.

  Tomorrow I am having a visit from a young French woman who sounded very twittery and fluttery over the phone. It sounds incredible and crazy (the wrong kind of craziness) but she is here from the University of Toulouse, is on the staff of the French Department, and is completing a thesis for Professor Du Pont (the Toulouse professor) on J.F. in her New Zealand setting !!! Natural habitat, I suppose! I’ve invited her (after she phoned me) because I’ve been rather annoyed that she’s been paying visits to people who know me. Touchy, aren’t I? Apparently, though, she’s rather nice and hasn’t been asking personal questions; I want to ask her about Vergers. She was rather amusing. She said,

  ‘Oh I don’t want to interrupt your gardening.’

  I said, ‘But I won’t be gardening, I’m very lazy.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But everybody in Dunedin is gardening, gardening, gardening all the time.’

  So I’ll make a report on the visit in my next instalment.

  More Stars.

  I can’t help making stars. I just can’t wait to collect my mountain lions and rattlesnakes and come to California!

  The other evening I heard a 1938 recording of Fischer (?) playing the Schubert Impromptus 142
(my daily accompaniment, along with my other records including the lilacs and the Schumann and the Peter Serkin. My other record is Glenn Gould with his first four Mozart Sonatas). It was so beautiful, so warm, not so warm that it became cloudy, though there was just a faint suggestion of haze, but it was different from the record I have which is slightly metallic (though that may be the pornograph which is the cheapest I could get and may not have too many refinements but it is a good phonograph and the Clara Haskil Schubert Sonatas sound warm and quite dizzy on it. What a happy inner experience to hear that the other evening.

  I’ll go to post this now. I think your new paintings sound very exciting as if you’re both at the peak. Mention of the ‘lovely colours’ makes me hungry. Looking at paintings is very much a consuming process? I’m enclosing a strange card sent to me from a strange address asking me to send it to you. No doubt Carnie left a little note for you tucked away somewhere.

  Look after one another and each other and all & hardy perennial love from me too.

  73. Dunedin July

  Dear Live Oaks, (‘Oh my dears, my dears!’),

  You will see from the enclosed report that something is rotten in the Peedauntal Industry. I’m beginning to think I’m not cut out to be a manufacturer. You ought to have been at the theatre last evening when all those Peedauntals burst! Charles B, who was with me, and who has what is supposed to be the English trait of disregarding anything the slightest bit unseemly at all times, behaved as if nothing had happened, while streams flowed back and froth! from stage to audience. I wasn’t wearing mine and I was unable to discover whether Charles was wearing one for it’s not the sort of subject one brings up with him.