Jay to Bee

by Janet Frame

  Stars to get me into more homely territory which is not a thing stars are renowned for doing.

  More stars.

  Lots of sun here, blue skies, twittering birds.

  The young French lecturer came to see me on Saturday afternoon—very twittery, fluttery, and delicately balanced; also beautiful. She offered some impressions of New Zealand: Auckland reminded her unpleasantly of the seedier parts of Morocco where she was born and brought up. The coloured houses here make her think she is in a setting for a Disney Film. She loves Dunedin and the people. She had been warned they would be reserved and cold; she has found them warm-hearted, generous, open! We decided it was because she herself was in another country, away from the home territory, in another language.

  On Sunday I accepted an invitation to lunch among people who resemble the sandal of the Great Gray Drayhorse of Hopkins—they’re ‘bright and battering’. It was a family lunch with a bright friend, her daughter and her new husband, her own new husband and new stepdaughter. The new husband and new stepdaughter are nice, quiet, sallow people whose faces don’t move around from expression to expression. And I still saw, in my mind, in the background of the scene, the first husband old, red-faced, sick, in his food-stained big-checked dressing-gown and checked slippers padding about the house while his wife and his two desperate daughters grew brighter and brighter and brighter in their efforts to turn away from their sadness. I think it is too late now for the daughters to retreat from the brittle country.

  Hope you’re not bored, bored, bored—I didn’t know I was going to go in this way! The perils of the pen . . .

  How I loved also the head tiger of the zoo! (This remark comes out of the blue.)

  In my letter to Paul I’ve discussed teaching. It would be a way of escape from here to places where there are souls of like-mind, which Rilke so approved of. My friends here in Dunedin (I’ve known them only since I came to live here a few years ago) survive, I suppose, because in some way they are within the structure of the place and its people, and have lived here many years. Well I won’t go on about the scary side of life here—for me, anyway. But it was sweet of Paul to make enquiries about an escape route.

  A hit, a hit, a palpable hit!

  Quote from Broadway.

  It will be nice to see Jo. I wonder if she has a suitcase full of anagrams. I’ll never forget the Anagram Experience . . .

  I’m coming to the end of my leak-proof battery. (Oh—Genius, by the way, is a dirty six-letter word. You and I know that it bears no relation to anything.?? It is part of the new pornography. Also there’s that twelve-letter word which corrupts all who see it in print—Intelligence.)

  Some day some day

  I’ll fly your way,

  you will look up in the sky and say,

  Look Paul (Ned will waken),

  Am I mistaken?

  Here comes Jay.

  ‘Ah then and there will be hurrying to and fro

  and gathering tears and trembling of distress

  and cheeks all pale . . .

  who could guess

  since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise?’

  I have my wires crossed in the Battle of Waterloo.

  Many thanks again for the treasured painting and music and letters all. Oops, I spilled the syrup again, you must excuse me!

  78. Dunedin July

  (written on the back of a nice crazy letter from the Editor of the student newspaper who has asked me for an interview)

  Another morning. Just about now, if it’s not too enticing a day, you will be setting off for the studio to commune with your greens, your blues, your reds, and so on.

  I’ve been doing some communing with bright colours because my friend, the poet’s wife, is coming for a few days’ stay at the end of the week and I’ve been putting everything gold and red and pink and so on into the spare room, as she is cheered by bright colours. This will be my first real guest and I expect to learn a lot about eccentricities I didn’t know I had. She’s coming chiefly to rest and sleep and sleep after hectic family life. Her daughter has just had a baby boy which my friend’s husband (also my friend) is taking to look after.

  Jacquie is Maori, and it is from her that I’ve learned much about white and brown in New Zealand, about secret arrogances and prejudices. Race relations are fairly good here, compared with the rest of the world, yet this seems to be as long as the Maori is looked on as ‘dead’. Dead and in his place. A visit to the Dominion Museum in Wellington with the family gave me the horrors because I could feel their horror—the place is full of Maori Art and history and the past tense, with children inquiring of their parents, ‘Is that what they did? Were they like that? What did they,’ and so on. Jacquie became more and more depressed. She’s a sensitive person, extra-sensitive, but that kind of person is desperately needed here to transmit feelings.

  Any reference to groups of people as ‘they’, also gives me the shudders. I had a phone call from someone who had been newly appointed to one of the local psychiatric hospitals, in charge of leisure activities, and she asked me what I thought ‘they’ would like.

  Stars to write off the world which is what stars do.

  Many stars for comfort.

  An oversight. I forgot to feed the wax-eyes—but oh they make their presence felt—there they are outside clamouring away. It’s a misty rainy morning, the hills are invisible—it looks like a grey S.B day.

  I will go to post this now.

  Have you finished your peanut butter sandwich?

  I hope you enjoyed it.

  You are all so far away.

  I send bulk love mixed with special harmless and special deadly ingredients; by Boeing and tramp steamer and feelie-touchie-wave. Got it? Good. An après peanut-butter desert (sp.?)

  79. Dunedin July 10

  and any and all other presences at Live Oak Inn,

  Sunset outside, noisy home-going traffic uphill changing gears, darkness falling soon after a dead calm day closed in by a lid of dark heavy cloud that promised, threatened and finally had the grace to blush when it had such a fine view of the sun going to bed. Oh how many times I pass the telephone and think, I just happened to be passing the telephone but conversations by phone are so unpredictably unrewarding and bungling (my conversations) therefore I turn sharply from the phone and ‘happen’ to pass my typewriter as I did just now and sit down and write to you from Wax-Eye City.

  Yesterday I took my courage in my hands (surprising how familiar it looked) and nobody seemed to notice I had it in my hands, or perhaps they were being polite—anyway I seized the opportunity I’ve longed for and wandered down to the University Music Department to go to a free concert at lunch hour and make the acquaintance of the new Steinway. The new Hall is just as I imagined it was in the verse I wrote about not being there, with high windows and blue curtains and the sunlight falling in the windows but Steinway looks decidedly undernourished with spindly legs (it hasn’t that fine turn of leg that your S has, B) so it’s probably a weak branch of the family. It spoke quite nicely when touched but then what or who doesn’t? I enjoyed the music but because I had taken my hands off my courage (it would have looked indecent had I kept them there) I didn’t go right up to the Steinway to give it any messages. I sat just inside the door and hurried away afterwards, not speaking to, indeed not knowing a soul—yes there was one soul whom I see around the town and who goes to concerts and who says, Hello Janet when I see her. I say hello and we do not stop to speak, just look with the sort of look the cats give me, a look full of experienced language—for she was many many years in hospital and in the days when I knew her no-one would ever have believed that she knew or remembered anyone’s name; but she knows me. As with the cats, there’s no reason to say anything. It is sad though and unnecessarily reminding of things I ordinarily do not think of.

  I am looking forward to going away from here.

  I must change my life.

  That ‘Torso of an Archaic Apollo’ is hau
nting isn’t it?

  So. I love your painting, B I happened to glance at it, I mean it happened to glance at me—and it’s full of language, colour-language and shape-language.

  stars for extrication.

  I haven’t laughed for a million years—except when I have your letters.

  Fun fun fun.

  More stars. This is such a small note.

  Any word of P’s job?

  You are dear angels.

  80. Dunedin July 12

  News from the Antipodes this quiet domestic-fire-filled Sunday morning of pale blue sky, pale cloud streaked with a pink shell-colour and a tidal estuary colour—sandy yellow, muddy grey and smooth—well, that’s the clouds which I see most because my house is really level with them. I’m looking out on the hills too. Earlier their rims were sharp, now they are blurred, misty—I guess it’s pollution from the domestic fires. I’m thinking of you a lot, you’re running like a thread through my mind, which is comforting and I almost phoned you yesterday but I knew it would be silly and I’d have nothing to say except hello and you may not even have been home. It’s nice you’re having sun again—well I hope you are—and that drive up the coast to the little place among the pines sounded lovely, and it sounded like a day that can be returned to, and your description of it before you went, B, and P’s description after you had been, reminded me of a day I had by myself on Ibiza when I hired a bicycle and went to the other side of the island to a little beach among the pines . . . well, pine trees send me, their sound up there near the sky generously takes what happens to be in one’s mind and returns it with all the notes arranged and the precise mournful effect.

  The National Orchestra, or rather, the N.Z.B.C. (Broadcasting company’s) orchestra has been in town this week, and this has been its last visit for the year. Dunedin still has a smaller Civic Orchestra, though, as do each of the main centres. Charles B has been performing what seems to me his self-adopted duties of escorting the Fellows in town. On Tuesday evening he took the Burns Fellow and me to a free concert of modern music given by the orchestra. And last evening he took the Frances Hodgkins Fellow and me to the final concert. The Burns Fellow is a pretty good writer but he’s been going blind over the years and now is almost totally blind or at least in a dim dim world where light doesn’t enter. The Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Art is also a composer, a rotund jolly type of man, busily composing and painting—I heard his Short Piano Sonata played on the Steinway the other day when I went to the lunch-hour concert. He has just finished writing a quartet and is about to do a song cycle of poems by Walter Raleigh and Emily Dickinson . . . I haven’t met the Mozart Fellow (Gus) . . . Rumour has it, and rumour is probably correct that it is Charles B or his family trusts that have given Dunedin these Fellows (his aunt recently left her thirty-four roomed mansion crammed with art treasures to the city and it is now a tourist show-place).

  The Concert’s chief item was Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony which was very excitingly and enthusiastically (over-enthusiastically?) played, and conducted by an American Alfred Wallenstein who was very demanding and exact. Or should I have said the American? The sweetness was not sweet enough and heavenly enough and so on but the orchestra put its whole heart into it and it was a treat to have it in Dunedin. Charles pointed out the ‘Nabobs’ of Dunedin, all in evening dress in the front row—the Mayor and his wife, the Head Brewer (The Beer Company and his wife), the Chief Breeder (Race-Horses) and his wife. These are the people upon whom the foundations of the city rest . . .

  It made me very happy to see the city (and hear it) full of music. I was glad, too, to meet the people who are working at their painting and their music and petry (misprint for poetry, but I’ll let it stand), and to clarify and deepen my understanding or realisation that I am a stranger here, that I should never have returned to New Zealand, that I must be exiled from it as surely as people from some of the communist countries are exiled. I miss the Live Oaks greatly—their brand of gentleness, and so on.

  Forgive me.

  In spite of the restrictions upon the sale of Peedauntals there continues to be quiet trading, the N.Z. director said today at her peedauntal-flooded home in Evans Street.

  Seventy, she said, had been sold during the weekend.

  The exact total, however, would be sixty-five as one client who had bought five changed his mind.

  When asked why the five had been returned the director, at first reluctant to answer, later said that all five had been faulty.

  The client had bought these intended chiefly for maids who spend many hours ironing so that the peedauntals themselves had not exactly been faulty. When questioned further the director refused to comment.

  It is known that the co-directors resting quietly at their home in Hermosillo Drive are ‘worried stiff’.

  All things connected with peedauntals, the N.Z. Director said, had been unnecessarily enlarged.

  In spite of setbacks the Company (now emerged from bankruptcy owing to the generosity of Ned Cat the two-toned tycoon) has the future well in hand and is confident of the pleasing shape of things to come.

  NEWS FLASH.

  The movements of potatoes around the country have been prohibited since it was discovered that the common potato is some distant relative of the Carnivorous Plant. Hotels have been asked to refuse accommodation to all potatoes of whatever skin or shape.

  Ha. Ha.

  This is a silly letter but it’s saying hello to you all which I like to do.

  The colours on your new painting are quite different today, B. There are rivers of light in the background. I think I’ve said this before (I’m old and fuddled . . . ) but your paintings are so much tomorrow and yesterday as well as now—this sounds pretentious from me—but one does have such a strong sense of complete time. Any people caught in a pose inevitably make one (me) think of the Grecian Urn, ‘bold lover never never can’st thou kiss and she be fair’

  or something like that,

  but here there’s no arrested quality—though it’s still it’s moving—I’m probably all out of focus and I don’t know about painting, I only know (as they say) what I feel. This man and this woman are already dead and yet they’re going to be born. It’s a happy picture though. The woman’s Y looks like a palm tree and the man’s P looks like Stonehenge!

  Near the end of the page.

  It’s grim here—I’m full of complaints—people write to me—people I don’t know—asking advice, giving details of their mental and emotional unhappiness. I shouldn’t have had the radio interview because this seems to have prompted quite a few letters from people who are certain I will ‘understand’.

  is Ned Cat the two-toned tycoon speaking, just a moment and I’ll call Bill and Paul from the geranium and finch patio. Well, they’re busy with peanut butter just now.

  81. Dunedin July 13

  Dear ‘Strange and freeing blades,’

  ‘What an extraordinary mode of address’, he said, between peanut-butters—or maybe you have some new patio food? I ask this because I know that the only certainty in this life is Change.

  Well, dear Strange and freeing blades human (2) feline (1) vegetable (?), it is early Monday morning and I’m writing this to catch the morning mail collection. It is still dark outside and I see from my study window the hills are black against the sky with a row of house-lights and streetlights almost near the top of the hill (‘sought-after view, desirable property, blushing toilets’) and the sky a Bill-painting sky (yesterday afternoon the sky was Paul-painting) with that wonderful blue-violet-grey, ever-changing, with one colour devouring another.

  And that is the morning. My guest, Jacquie, is asleep in her guest room on her guest bed with her guest dreams which could be nightmares. (When I phoned her the other evening to find the plane times her son (the talented boy who drew the flower picture I had—maybe you remember it) answered the phone and told me an amazing lot in three minutes—I suppose here I should say—My God! Or the guest dreams could be—hopefully—sweet,
for J’s lover visited her here last evening and I left them the house to themselves after giving them a dessert and a coffee. I went off to my Janet-home-alone bed and listened to the radio playing Stravinsky’s Mass and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony.

  And that is the news from Wax-Eye City. My friend has come here to sleep and rest and forget for a week before she returns to face things—I hate that expression facing things. Today a new wine shop is opening in town and there’s free tasting all day and we are going to drop in and out and by the evening we should have forgotten all. In the midst I shall visit my aunt who is now dying—two weeks ago I noticed the water was there and it only remains for the rather narrow-minded pathetic old swan to let herself go. I noticed that her eyes, overnight, suddenly moved in her head, seemed to have been set back as if on dark-lined shelves, as if someone had said of her eyes, ‘You won’t be needing these much longer, let us put them on this dark-lined shelf’, for indeed her eyes looked then as if they had been put away, stored, as things are which are no longer of any use.