by Janet Frame
Voice:
Hi!
J:
It’s wonderful to hear your voice. Is it Bill or Paul?
Voice:
It’s Ned speaking. Here’s Paul.
Paul:
Hi.
J:
It’s wonderful to hear your voice.
(Sounds in background: What about that liver, Paul?)
Paul:
Here’s Bill.
Bill:
Hi.
J:
I just happened to be passing the telephone and I thought I’d call you.
Bill:
Hi.
J:
It’s wonderful to hear your voice.
(Sounds in background: I want a new sweater put out on the washer, Bill. The old one has lost all its snuggle.)
Bill:
Be right there. Here’s Paul.
Paul:
Hi.
J:
It’s wonderful to hear your voice.
(Sounds in background: I said, the liver! And get off that phone, I’ve an evening free and I want to call Dr Gilbride.)
Paul:
Here’s Bill.
J:
I just happened to be passing by the telephone and I thought I’d call you. It’s wonderful to hear your voice.
Bill:
Watch out, you’ll be cut off!
J:
Oh is my three minutes up?
Bill:
No, I was talking to Carnie, he’s dipped his tendril in the juice extractor.
(Sounds in background: Bill will you see to Steinway, it’s started a sonata again.)
B:
Be right there. Here’s Paul.
Paul:
Hi.
J:
It’s wonderful to hear your voice. You all seem pretty busy.
Paul:
Busy! I’ve just cooked a month’s supply of liver. We do things in bulk around here now.
Ned’s idea.
(Voice in background: I said get off that phone, I want to call Dr Gilbride. And this doesn’t look like a month’s supply of liver to me! And where’s my petunia?)
Paul:
Be right there.
Operator: Your three minutes is up.
Click, click, click.
Everything goes dead, including J.
More stars.
Furnished Antique Love to
85. Dunedin July Wednesday (your Tuesday)
Dear B,
Sad and lovely to speak to you on the ‘phone—I couldn’t resist it—it felt like being a visitor to a prison, speaking through the bars. It was nice, though. I had a tax refund of fifteen dollars and I wondered what it would be like to say hello from Dunedin. ‘It was wonderful to hear your voice.’ Quote from script of phone-call in previous letter—everything I do seems to have to be fiction before it is fact and vice versa.
It was a golden kind of day here—raining, but the blossoms are out and the hills have a golden glow and spring is irrevocably here, and my third primrose is out. The wax-eyes remain. Soon, I believe they disband as a flock and go to live in pairs, in the bush. The flock here has been consistently thirty-five to forty, with some acting as lookouts, some as prime eaters, others as the poor old lookers-on at the feast. As most of the bush here is evergreen, winter has a different appearance from that in a land of deciduous trees (though we have many deciduous trees, introduced from Britain and the East) with the landscape always green and the trees in the bush (the hill opposite me has much native bush) showing a smoky grey-green under the grey sky.
Here ends the lesson on Nature Study! My ten mountain lions wait in the cellar and I will do as you say and keep them happy with steak—lion steak!
Thursday. Today you are in L.A. with Felix. Is Ann there too? How is the painting? Are you painting out or in at the moment?
I’m using you today. I’m trying to finish this letter so I may say, later, when I have a visitor and want the visitor to go, ‘I must go to mail a letter’. I’m afraid I’m being bothered by students quite a lot—using me as a kind of psychotherapist, with not only letters but also phone calls. This morning someone who described herself as ‘very depressed’ phoned to ask if she could come and see me. I don’t know her—she’s a student at the University—but I’ve asked her up for a cup of tea and a chat. I may feel bothered but I do feel sympathetic towards such people because I think being young is a nightmare. I’d almost think that being young in New Zealand (described so often as ‘a great place to bring up children’) is worse than in some other countries—I don’t know—forget it.
Back to the Live Oaks. I might sail to L.A. in a ship—it takes nine days—a seasick heaven compared to my other two experiences of thirty-two days each.
If the cap fits wear it. Did it? Will you? I’d like to make one for Paul but I’m too shy to ask (a refusal will not cause offence). If he’d like one (with a scarf or without) could he paint his colour on a little square in your next letter?
I have a feeling that men should beware of women who knit for them. I promise I’ll never knit anything again unless asked.
Inspired by Emily D, through you, B, I’ve at last attacked my Mortal Enemy. My mistake was that I was doing it head-on, forgetting that ‘success in circuit lies’ so now I’m ‘telling it slant,’ and it’s a great relief.
More stars. It’s evening now & (obviously) I still haven’t posted this letter. I’m worn out after my visitor. She was beautiful with long glossy black hair (no I’m not describing my newly acquired mountain lion or kitty), beautifully dressed in a maxi-skirt patterned outasightly. Her manner tended towards the studied-dramatic and many of her remarks began with ‘Sensitive people like you & me . . .’ She is a widow (once), a divorcee (once), has 3 children & expects a fourth in six months & how have I managed to survive? I could have asked her a similar question.
No, I’m not being cynical for she was a sensitive soul & I felt very happy when she described some of her experiences during meditations—I felt happy because I thought of Live Oak Inn. Do you still meditate? I miss the meditation—I more often forget it here & I can’t quite discover what it did (or maybe I haven’t tried to but it did something important—though maybe I’m using the wrong verb in ‘do’—it is more undo, undid.
Unfortunately I was not equipped to give my visitor the kind of advice she wanted, e.g. what to ‘do’ (kittens are much less demanding). She kindly brought me some newly-baked bread and a bunch of yellow flowers for my Antipodean room, and when she left I gave her a bottle of cider.
And that was that.
Every day I look at the lilac cuttings I planted because whether or not this is so, I feel that they will be more likely to grow if they know they haven’t just been abandoned in the cold cold soil—which they have been! But they can’t really be deceived and I try to communicate my desire for them to grow. ‘September is the cruellest month.’
Do you still have to wear ear-plugs, B? I hope not. I’ve moved into my guest room which has a fire-place & five windows, against no fireplace & three windows of the other bedroom, & hence it tends to be noisier—mostly gear-changing coming up the hill from the Gardens Corner & so now & again I wear wax plugs. We could make a fortune with ear-plugs, issuing them as a bonus with peedauntals, only I’m going out of the business, resigning, handing in my badge, my knife & fork, my pepper and salt etc.
As you see my battery is very low.
Friday: Morning again, ‘a golden morning’. As I look out of the window I see the golden cat in the corner house opposite taking a morning walk around its ‘territory’—sniffing the geraniums growing all along the front of the house. There’s a pink blossom tree out & a crab-apple tree hung with rosy apples.
I dreamt last night I was living in a cotton wool factory, training to live as a mouse—in Italy! (don’t tell Ned!).
When I have finished my book I’d love to come back across the Pacific.
rosy apples of love to
AUGUST
86. Dunedin August 1
Dear B,
Your letters have the miraculous effect of unclouding me.
It was nice to get a letter today, for the weekend—and where do you get all those nice pictures of hesitant swans?
It’s Saturday and people are hammering, hammering, which is what you do on Saturday if you live in Dunedin you climb on your roof with a hammer (not necessarily with nails) and hammer so that the sound echoes through the wooden bones of other people’s houses. Soon, on Saturdays, if you live in Dunedin, you will mow your lawn with a power mower (moa) on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
I like to think of you taking your after-supper walk again by the sea, along Butterfly Lane, getting the sea breezes and the Down Under stink—I have a Pacific here, too, and perhaps I should send my three live oaks a letter in a bottle? I’m glad you liked the cap: I thought it was very bold of me to make it but I did have the leftover wool, from the long fringed scarf, and I still have some only it won’t make anything unless it’s a tendril-cosy for Carnie.
Ursula Bethell and D’Arcy Cresswell are separate writers, both very interesting—and dead. I should think that Ursula Bethell had something of the spirit of a May Sarton. She emigrated to New Zealand (Christchurch) in the ‘early days’ and established a wonderful garden which she wrote about in perhaps the most original poetry we’ve had—she was a kind of Marianne Moore of the garden. She wrote long poems about flowers, using their longest names, rich rhythms and unusual words. D’Arcy Cresswell who died some years ago in London (where for many years he worked as a nightwatchman in the British Museum—his death was by suicide) wrote long archaic poems. He was a friend of Frank S’s, a contemporary or a couple of years older.
I was much alarmed to read that someone is preparing me. Another reason to flee the country. I have never heard of the person in question and it’s the first I heard of the project . . .
I’m glad you were interested in Frank’s interview! He and I have a kind of arrangement—it wasn’t really planned, but when he makes a statement in public he says something about me (not always) and I have a little fun by doing the same.
I confess I didn’t read the review or discussion I sent you! I thought it might be useful if I do need any sort of reference—if I do happen to be in the unfortunate position of doing a few weeks’ hard labour for hard cash—as it’s written by a University Professor. I started to read it but became weary when she made the usual mistake of supposing that a story I had written was a true story of my childhood. And that I had watched my art mistress die, or some such, when of course I never did.
Enough of that, enough of J.F.
I’m expecting Ned any time with his black and white airline bag, his blue woolly sweater (with plenty of snuggle in it) and his medications. His room is ready.
Strange that just after you mention my friend’s son who did the flower painting, you mention Rimbaud. When the boy’s father was young Rimbaud was his God—I suppose he is every young tortured poet’s God? Jim has some fine translations from R in some of his books. The uncanny thing about what has happened is that the father (this is just something I sense) has in some way willed his son and daughter to be and do what they are and have done. I don’t suppose this is so unusual after all—it’s just that what he has willed for them is something of the same suffering that he has undergone, through his own nature and that of his father and his own father’s experiences. And this is not unusual either, is it? The only thing unusual is that they are a gifted, sensitive family going from nightmare to nightmare. And then maybe this is not unusual either—so I’ve demolished what I set out to say. I’ve phoned my friend since she returned home and things are not so bad. The boy is in the care of a doctor and hasn’t been, as they say, ‘busted’ by the police, though a friend of his, who lives in Dunedin, has been, and is on probation. I met him one day along the street. He’s about seventeen—no sixteen—a beautiful boy with long fair hair and fragile feminine face and slim body. It’s really as if he were a young lamb being bred for the Dunedin wolves because one shudders to think of all the misunderstandings and persecutions he will suffer here.
But enough of that, also. Aunt Swan continues to dip only her big web in the water and then withdraw it but it should not be long now.
That sounded like a nice birthday party for Eugene Anderson! Here is a recipe for something that is sometimes known as N.Z.’s national sweet. You are not a New Zealander, it seems, until you have made a Pavlova cake, called a ‘Pav’. Shudder and horror of horrors.
Here it is:
•4 egg whites
•salt
•¼ teaspoon cream of tartar
•cup of sugar
•1 teaspoon vanilla essence
•2 teaspoons vinegar
•1 dessertspoon cornflower
Add salt and cream of tartar to the egg whites and BEAT UNTIL STIFF. (The Marquis De Sade’s favourite recipe.)
Add sugar, a little at a time. Add vanilla and vinegar and fold in cornflower (beating all the time).
Then wet a large piece of greaseproof paper, place wet side down on oven tray. Pour mixture on paper. Put tray in oven at 350 degrees and turn off oven. Leave for 45 minutes to an hour. Remove. Invert on plate and spread with whipped cream and fruit if liked, especially passion fruit.
That is a party dessert.
Stars.
It’s wonderful that you have finished your lover paintings. Both you and Paul sound as if you are doing your ‘best yet’.
You may do your portrait of Santa Barbara?
I like the idea of a self-portrait appearing through apertures in the clouds, as if one’s other self, in the heavens, may see oneself clearly in parts but never whole—blah blah, I could go on fantasying about such things but it gets pretentious-sounding. It’s a nice idea and it reminds me ‘all dreams lead back to the nightmare garden’a—that is an Auden quote, I told my publishers so) of Rilke again with the roots of the tree in heaven. I wish I were a painter.
Apparently not a quote from Auden, the phrase ‘all dreams lead back to the nightmare garden’ is increasingly attributed to Frame herself
[Enclosed] a translation of Rimbaud ‘Seven year Old Poet’ by J.K. Baxter.
Just references.
Hemet, where Aunt Amy lives—is it any relation to the old word for ant—emmet? Anyway, it reminds me of that lovely poem by Blake about an ant that lost its way—
‘Once a dream did weave a shade
o’er my Angel-guarded bed,
that an emmet lost its way
where on grass methought I lay.
Troubled, ’wildered, and forlorn,
dark, benighted, travel-worn,
over many a tangled spray,
all heart-broke . . .’
Eva Marie Saint is playing in Dunedin!
Trivia, continued.
By the way I have a prize scoop in my next tape—which is taking ages and ages—and this scoop is pretty well all I have so far—it is Virgil Thomson speaking . . . !
Sunday morning. I dreamt last night I was a cow grazing in the fields and in conversation with another cow we decided that it was good to have our noses to the earth and the grass all day, that people just didn’t know what they missed! (Before I went to sleep I listened over the radio to a delightful dramatisation of the Saki story, ‘Tobomory’, about the cat which began to speak and embarrassed everyone with his remarks and quotes of other people’s remarks. Do you know it?)
A wild screaming wind raged all night, rocking my house as if it were a ship, and this morning it is dead, the sky is sullen with two gaps, over the western hills, of egg-shell blue, the temperature almost sixty degrees, and the hills dark and close, rain-warning. The mornings are now light enough for me to make garden-inspections before the world is awake, and in the morning now when I go to fetch my milk and paper at about six-thirty to seven, the sky is no longer full of bright stars being ‘steadfast’—the light has arrived.
I have a japonica bush which grows just outside the door of the cellar, in the earth-covered sort of patio where I hang my washing. This bush, with the bathroom floor above it, never gets wet and lives on the drips from my washing, yet it blooms, and now has a number of tight red buds, with one opening.
If only I could transport myself and the japonica to some place that is not here where I am not afraid, as I am here, and where my friends are! I am very homesick for my live oaks, and I know I go ‘on and on’ about this. Do you really mean that there will be a little place for me with you? I can try it, anyway, and leave it very open as all living is, like cheese that Dot buys, or used to buy.
My work is going well just now, I think, with continued inspiration from you and with the help of all that strength-giving home-made love that Paul sent in his letter. I have got to the stage where I just can’t leave my work alone.
When I finish my book . . . ah. California etc. Or before . . .
Now, all kinds and varieties (same thing) of love, remote, near, oblique, direct, voiced, unvoiced, manufactured, home-made, releasing, binding, from heaven and hell and devils and angels to same. (Do you think Ned can take all this? After that alarming phone conversation (I think the fantasy one was perhaps the real one) where Ned seems to be in control, living in bulk, eating in bulk, I’m not sure what he can or can’t take.)
Anyway, love to BP.N. of whatever variety each desires (may be refunded after seven days, or before).