by Janet Frame
But this is grim.
And it’s Christmas time.
I should send a rhyme,
a reasonable rhyme
to Bill and Paul far far away
in Santa Fe,
(New Mexico sun for cover)
and Ned
who doth bed
his furry sides
indeed his allover
at Dr Gilbride’s,
and I shall wish
the festive time may grant
most
joy
to people, piano, plant,
and to Santa Fe family or host.
How corny and trite my rhyme.
Fortunately I stopped in time.
Now Christmas is here, the trees are erect
with spangles decked.
The bees are humming
the jays are jaying
all the organs are playing.
Santa is coming!
And on that starry note I end this rhyme
Once more, just in time.
I’m so happy I shall see you all in a few weeks. More in a day or two. Christmas love
to B P N from Jay
129. Auckland December (handwritten)
Dear Ned,
Christmas is near and no doubt you are wondering how to keep the servant problem solved by giving your household servants a few extra thoughts.
May I help? Do let me. I’m enclosing a few things for you, Ned, to distribute as you think fit. I’ll be able to check up when I see you, i.e. brand the mouse and inscribe the books. Most of all, concealed and revealed, love is enclosed, with squalor, and other suitable accessories, from your Lucasless friend
Jay.
Look after your servants, Ned.
130. Auckland December
Dear B P N and (if it must be, it must be) Fred,
Almost Christmas Eve and Day and in the local shopping centre a sinister-looking Santa Claus is scaring the little kids out of their wits while Mama tries to assure them that the ‘nice bearded gentleman’ won’t bite; or perhaps tries to assure them that he will bite. The harm generation. I’m sitting here in my basement room while upstairs my niece (16) and her girlfriend giggle together; and my sister and her husband (who came out of the hospital yesterday) are out driving. Tinky, the cat, has disappeared since I bought her some Tibs pep tablets for Christmas and my niece Pamela gave her one which she relished.
Not much news from here. No thoughts from this hot enervating climate where all I do is loll around all day. Just thinking of you all in Santa Fe (here I have to provide my own imagery) and in Live Oak Inn and wishing I were at least in the offing; but it’s no time now. I’m thinking of your show, B, and all the feelings that must be going with it; and all your enjoyments in Santa Fe; just living and so on; delights and deserts; and desserts; rich mazes, gold threads; dreams; see how crazy I am in this basement room where the smoke of drifting fires, I mean the drifting smoke, comes in the door and goes out the window.
An ant (black) crawls along the wall beside me. It seems to have lost its way or else it’s exploring for new territory; the scout; I have a few Christmas cards littered around—including one from friends in England who now own a restaurant with a Spanish chef called Jesus.
On January 4th I’m going to Wellington again to stay with Jacquie Baxter for a week, and when I return on the 11th I’ll be making final preparations for my journey—robbing the banks of dollars and so on; and blackmailing Air New Zealand and the sad-eyed slightly built Vice-Consul who gets rotten eggs thrown at him when he appears in public.
Stars. A power mower is at work next door. Lawns must not be longhaired.
Page two, Auckland Document.
[in margin: Actually I’m not staying in Auckland proper.]
[in margin: missing portion lost forever in typewriter]
THURSDAY MORNING:
Woke, found cat waiting outside door, went upstairs with cat to make a breakfast, ate breakfast. Time five-thirty a.m.
Returned to room. Observed that the ants also had awakened. The scout I saw yesterday was indeed a scout and last evening he she or it brought the whole colony to inspect this room and I was forced, reluctantly, to do the thing which Mona Minim and her friends dreaded—put out tiny innocuous-looking dish of clear liquid which is poison.
‘I had to do it,’ she said, with narrowed eyes. ‘I had to do it.’
Too often have I had ants sharing my bed.
And why not? you may ask.
Well, they tickle and I am uneasy if I have an ant trail over my pillow.
The other evening I went to Frank S’s for dinner. He usually gets a Chinese meal sent on from the restaurant near his place. I gave him and Harry a little parcel of handkerchiefs and nuts and Harry was pleased. He sat up in bed and unwrapped his parcel. I also left the same for Jack, another old friend of Frank’s who lives over in the city, and who, Frank once said, would be happy to spend his life drinking sweet tea and eating white bread and butter. Frank always refers to him as ‘my simple friend Jack’.
In the morning I went to visit the elderly woman I have told you of—the one who has lost her mind completely except for her love of music. She does not go out walking now as she has begun to wander, and one day when she escaped from her husband Ernest’s supervision and walked about a mile before he went to bring her back, she said when she arrived home, addressing Ernest,
‘I’ve been for such a lovely walk. And such a nice gentleman brought me home.’
On my visit she kept telling me how lucky she was to have such a nice gentleman staying in the house with her.
She played a Mozart sonata for me. Beautifully. She spends her time reading the Life and Letters of Mozart and she now has no connection at all with the life around her. She seems to have received a gift rather than to have been the victim of theft. Or perhaps it’s an exchange of gifts. A death-gift?
‘On arrange and on compose
les mots de tant do facons.’
Now goodbye, goodbye
lay your cheek on a million-year yesterday.
Whatever is there is what you are singing for
are you singing are you speaking
the mind spinning the one coin of loss
which year’s dark foot was it now, D for death out walking
going our way
and we stupidly looking for change.
A spilled life what is it I am singing
the beasts of the fields and forest a million years gone
bodies the sides of ships sailing the golden grass
breathing to open the tiniest slit in the armoury
seeing to shuttle two commas across the view
continuation of a series that never continued
what is it
the half-life the going away
the D going our way.
Stars for and so on and on. The above an impromptu nonsense and sense verse.
I hope the angel visits your table at Christmas and that you are never alarmed.
Innocent and wicked learned love to B P N and (if it must be it must be) Fred,
from J
almost in the offing.
131. Auckland December 26
Dear B,
Many thanks for the Christmas Eve letter, and thank you, Dame M.M. for the memo, which has been noted, and filed and defiled. It was lovely timing—it tided me over, I’m not sure where to, but somewhere.
I’m glad the parcel arrived. I think the mouse is guaranteed indestructible. They are handmade by an elderly friend of Frank S who, Frank says, read a book on felt toys (probably mistaking the meaning of the title), made one mouse, and began to make more, and now it is his livelihood, supplementing his pension. They are for sale in Auckland’s Petticoat Lane—a poor shade of the original. I have one mouse for myself in case I turn into a cat.
The N.Z. stories are interesting and some are very good. I never forgave Frank S for choosing ‘The Day of the Sheep’. As for Karl Stead’s choice—at
first I refused to let him use ‘The Reservoir’ but he persuaded me. He is the only enemy I know that I have and his enmity springs from his reading himself into a story I wrote about a poet who went bald (among other things). I had a scene in the story of the poet and his wife in bed: a purely—impurely—imaginary scene which Karl took to be a description of his own marriage. When I knew Karl he had been married only six months, and the poet in the story had been married ten years.
O. E. Middleton is a fine writer. He’s the blind writer I’ve mentioned during the year—he had this year’s Burns Fellowship. He’s the only N.Z. writer who’s made me weep over a story—one called The Stone in a volume of that title. I told him this fact and it pleased him. He’s had a varied career working at all kinds of trades. He was in the navy during the war, stationed in the United States. He’s been deported from the United States for being a Communist or being accused of being such, and a few years ago he won a big libel suit against our weekly sensational newspaper, Truth. He was going blind then. He managed his own case and was very eloquent and what jury could resist ‘this poor blind writer who had been so viciously treated’. (I nearly wrote viscously.) He has a wife and family but as so often happens in the ‘middle years’ they have fallen away from him like used skins.
Fancy having snow. Just fancy! Here it’s humid and enervating. The family have migrated until January 11th and it would be peaceful were it not for the nonstop pop of my nephew from his giant speakers. He’s very good, and tones the sound down when I ask him but I get tired of asking and I feel like a nuisance and a nagger and the generation gap gets wider and wider. He has no other interest but sound—he works at it and plays at it. His only friends are his sister’s girl and boy friends who are six years younger than he (he’s twenty-one). He’s a nice kid, rather sad and troubled. He’s not very tall and he’s slight in build, and his room is littered with books on How To . . . Grow Tall, Build Muscles, Win Friends And . . .
God, the misery of being young.
The piece from your mother’s letter about the stars is haunting. Is it true? Are there really no stars any more in the Midwest (is that where she is?)
O give me a home where the buffalo roam . . .
with the light from the glittering stars . . .
No stars at all? It’s terrifying. Is this the result of pollution? It’s too terrible to contemplate a time when we are exiled from the sky and from the earth. Is the time now?
I hope you had a mishymashy Christmas and no hangovers.
It’s early Sunday morning now. I’m about to go for a walk down to the beach (Northcote Point) before the sun gets too hot. When I returned to N.Z. from England I stayed in many places over Auckland and I once had a flat by the water at Northcote Point. It was fine until I discovered a family of nine lived upstairs and spent the time walking up and down. The old ferries used to leave from the Point but now that the Harbour Bridge has been built these past ten years few of the old ferries cross the harbour. When my sister first came to live in this house the place was surrounded by native bush that looks very much like the Panamanian jungle. Now, except for a bush reserve near by, the place is littered with houses. Fortunately it’s still harder to disfigure the surface of water and there are wide clear sea views everywhere. The sky’s still here, too. And the stars.
Well, I’m in the offing and it won’t be long now before I emerge from the offing into the next phase of my journey. In view.
Hurry up please it’s time.
Now I shall mail this and walk upon the beach
and (likely) hear the power-mowers calling each to each.
I wonder how Ned enjoyed his stay away?
Offing love and love-in-view to B P N
from Jay
132. Auckland December (handwritten)
Dear Dame M. M.,
Thank you very much for your Angel on Yellow Paper which fluttered from W.T.B’s letter to please and flatter.
Do you notice I am doing my best writing? I think within the stink of ink. Do you faint in the unrestraint of paint? I believe it is a common complaint which causes both inner saint and outer sinner and outer saint and inner sinner either to become a quaint clouter and shouter or to faint and day by day grow thinner.
(The Auckland summer is all shimmer.)
At the moment I am preparing for the sly joy of being an air traveller oft in the offing (though I hope I shall stay aloft, unlike Icarus ‘the boy falling out of the sky’.)
Here is a poem I saw on an advertisement at the movies when the curtain moved across the screen.
En joy
ni cest
in
ice cream.
I hope you will print my poem on your page and that when I send you my problems under an assumed name you will deal with them on your page which I always read in a void mood of lived avidity.
Fondly,
Dame F. C.
JANUARY 1971
133. Auckland January Ant Arbor (handwritten)
My dears yes isn’t this a fat overfed letter! You might be interested in the writeup of Jim Baxter’s commune.
It was so lovely to get your Santa Fe letter. I felt rather bold writing to you away from your habitat, as if I were indecently exposing, & it was sweet of you to reply from the midst of your social whirl to one, Jay, just entering the offing.
which means we are all in a tangle made by the unravelling of Christmas, New Year, meals, turkeys, travel plans, anticipation of Art Show, forlorn musings on the emigration of stars
– a tangle
waiting to be knitted purl plain and fancy into a warm tomorrow.
Thank you for the E. Welty poem. I look on it as a special treat.
I had a card with a short excited note from Jo. Any notes or letters she writes are always written from a brilliant verge somewhere: her notes have the same snapping-up quality as her moves, in a flash, to spell out the word from the anagram.
Four stars for comfort from the hinterland of dim seeing.
Tomorrow starting at 8 a.m. I make the all-day journey by train to Wellington—426 miles, arriving at 9 p.m. I’ve never seen the North Island by daylight & I hope the journey is not too hair-raising. I think I told you I’m staying with Jacquie Baxter for about a week. Jim is coming home for a while so I shall catch up on his news before I leave the country. I might also see Charles Neider who’s around somewhere & had planned to do some research in Wellington’s Turnbull Library. Jacquie is enjoying her work as Head of the New Zealand Room of the Wellington Public Library—though at first she was suspicious of their appointing her, a Maori, to that position as they were inclined to regard her as a ‘show-piece’. In the capital city full of overseas diplomats etc. it’s good propaganda to have Jacquie in that job—near the Museum which makes her weep because her race is dealt with in the past tense.
You’ll note that I’m writing this from Ant Arbor. The ants have made a trail along the foot of the bed & following the floor, the length of the bed. I peer over the bedclothes and watch them purposefully trekking—where? So far they haven’t come into bed. They have taken over the kitchen upstairs, with the exception of the refrigerator, & my sister has given up trying to kill them. Only the refrigerator belongs to the family now. One is not aware of the smell of formic acid, here, but I remember when I was looking for a place to stay, once, in Auckland, how every little beach cottage & apartment reeked with the smell of ants.
Conclusion of Ant News.
For the past week I’ve been alone in the house with my 21 year-old nephew & we’ve both been living deep in the culture-generation gap. Actually it’s more a culture gap than a generation gap. It appalls me to think that this is the first time since before his birth that he has been alone, day to day, with another human being (if I may flatter myself). They are very much a family, each identifying intensely with the others & while the family is here Ian is an erratic schoolgirl, like his sister. He’s a timid boy & with no competition or dominance he’s been himself. He sits ther
e smoking his pipe, intent on his man-image & he talks about his friends & his hopes & fears. His life-dream is to own a ‘Jag’. . . .
134. Wellington January 7
Dear
Hi, Ho, Hum.
Here I am sitting in front of a blazing fire in the Baxter household in Wellington while outside it rains and rains the remains of a tropical storm called Rosie. Baby Stephanie has just been put to bed after feeding me cups of water from her rose-coloured toy tea-set.
I’ve been enjoying my stay in Wellington—the longest time I have ever stayed (or is it ‘stain’?) here except for once when, a schoolgirl, I came with the school to an educational exhibition when I and my sisters separated ourselves from the school and spent all the time riding the ghost train in the Fun Fair.
The people here are devoured by the surrounding mountains; everywhere is the trickle of streams in deep bush. The actual city area is small, with trains running from the hill suburbs to downtown. Buildings are immense, old, wooden & tatty with paint peeling from the walls.
But where else in New Zealand would someone come up to me in the street & kiss me, as an elderly man did today; because, he said, he liked my books so much . . .?a
This was the author and mountaineer John Pascoe, 1908-1972
Lunch today with an old university friend who lives a few yards from the sea, on a hill.b Her studio (she’s a writer who also draws) overlooks the water & her little boat rocks in the bay. Her husband is a geologist; and her cats are 2, and she, who was brought up in the bush wilderness of our southern most island, Stewart island (or Rakiura, Land of The Glowing Skies) looks something like a penguin . . .