by Janet Frame
A family has camped for the holidays two sections away from me. I hear them in the evening standing on their sundeck as they look out at the sea and the volcanic island and call to one another, with their high-pitched city voices like excited released birds, Oh look, Arthur. Oh just look, Dorothy. The moon is full. The crickets chirp and warble. The air is mild, faintly perfumed by the opening flowers of the orange trees and the escaping gases from the holiday-filled septic tanks and holes-in-the-ground. As I hear the names, Arthur, Dorothy, a nerve within me is touched, the path of which leads to a story hide-out, a possie. The obvious, honest names delight me, ask to be reckoned with, ask for commitment, offer themselves as prey to the predator in me. There is no shyness in them, no reliance on a capital letter and full stop or capital letter and dash that are part of fearful and mysterious stories which begin, say, ‘I was living in Z—, on the banks of the S—, when I first met M—.’
Arthur, Dorothy. I learn they plan to hold a barbecue that evening. They will gather cockles from the beach at low tide, eat them in the open, and drink their beer with friends from town who arrive later in the evening. They too stand on the sundeck, look out at the sea and the volcanic island and call one another shamelessly, loudly, by their names, Albert, Annie, Shona, Shirley, Ted, Bob . . .
All the names, queuing with remembered names of other people, names of imagined people, those listed in the Births, Deaths columns of the newspapers.
I turn away the clamouring names. I seal the nerve-path. What boring lives, I think. What ugly useless boring empty soulless lives. Loud voices, loud radios, ugly baches, uglier pretentious homes so-called ‘permanent’ with their ranchsliders, exposed beams, rumpus rooms garage under — the words of the real estate agents come to mind. Ranch house, long, low and lovely.
I leave Arthur and Dorothy and their guests. I have no love left for the human race. The crickets continue to sing. I do not love the crickets.
I do not love the crickets.
I see this written as part of a first course in a foreign language, a tourist phrasebook, and everyone knows that such books are filled with complaints.
The perfectly shaped dead volcano on R— Island stands against the horizon. I remember poems by D— G— who lives in W— and C— B— who lives in D—; our best poets have something to say about R— Island.
The mystery of the initials is replaced by absurdity. A story flows on a deep deep stream of feeling, bearing all with it, names, initials, people, their absurdities, faces, trivialities no longer trivial. D— G— W— D—. How absurd to write thus in shallow waters on the Wh— Peninsula!
Is there nothing in the lives of the people around me that will cause me to exclaim, How terrible, how wonderful, that will haunt me day and night? How can I ever love if a tragedy arouses only a fleeting, How sad? The people, I think, are all tragedies and their tragedy is that they do not realise it and my tragedy is that I have the arrogance to suppose that I do and that I am right, which also gives me, I suppose, a rebirth into adolescence and adolescent impatience which, in me, does not have the virtue of being transformed into fertile hate, known as hate only because its conversion to love cannot be contemplated without terror at the prospect of the surrender which is part of love.
The solution is to separate art from life, and, entering art, supposing it were the gateway of a kingdom, even the eye of a needle, to discard the ‘I’ and carry it as common clothing for all. I do not love the cricket. I am interested in the stick insect though I do not love it. That is outside the kingdom. Within, as a stick insect, I am almost impossibly frail as I lie close to an almost identical blade of grass. I am alive, I have legs and a breathing body, and eyes on stalks, exposed, vulnerable. The blade of grass moves only when the wind moves, and is not — to my body, my eyes, my colour — endowed with life, nor my kin, yet I imitate it, I lie next to it, the image of it is my protection and salvation. With the blade of grass near me I may trust myself now and again to move, to feed. I like to come out at noon. What does noon mean but the sun on the grass and on the walls of the buildings and my tiny insect prey perhaps dizzy and drugged with sunlight.
You see? I, within the body of the stick insect, care for it, love it because it is myself and excess anthropomorphism means only that I am in the wrong kingdom, with the wrong ‘I’.
Next, shall I be Dorothy, shall I be Arthur? I can no longer shudder with horror at the boredom of the life, for I am Dorothy, I am Arthur, and how can I live if I admit boredom with my own life and self? I naturally love myself. A mishap observed by the life-I becomes a tragedy to the art-I. We gathered cockles for the barbecue, we spent ages digging in the muddy sand, we were slightly drunk, excited with the sea air, and though we are Arthur and Dorothy there is also Shirley, Shona, Doreen — perhaps I thought I was putting my life-savings into it, both I and Dorothy, the way we prepared for it — after all, it was only a barbecue, such as you see in American pictures and on TV with all the couples laughing and drinking and being witty.
How could I help it if, to begin with, half the cockles were filled with black sand instead of fish? What did it mean? From the start, everything was against us.
The night of the barbecue I looked up at the house where Dorothy and Arthur had called out from the sundeck in their high city voices.
‘I bet half their cockles are filled with sand,’ I said to myself.
I never found out if they were — one doesn’t have to find out these things. I was too busy thinking about Thyra and Cedric who live next door in the big house with the plaster penguin at the gate. Let me tell you. It is very sad . . .
Notes
‘Between My Father and the King’ Previously unpublished. This story has its origins in the £25 rehabilitation loan that Janet Frame’s father received from the government after he returned from the First World War. The factual basis of the story is given no more than a paragraph in chapter 2 of To the Is-Land (An Autobiography Volume 1, 1982).
‘The Plum Tree and the Hammock’ Previously unpublished.
‘Gavin Highly’ Posthumously published in The New Yorker (5 April 2010).
‘The Birds of the Air’ Published in Harper’s Bazaar (June 1969). Written Dunedin 1965–66. Chapter 13 of To the Is-Land is also called ‘The Birds of the Air’ and describes the visit of Frame’s maternal grandmother.
‘In Alco Hall’ Published in Harper’s Bazaar (November 1966). Written Dunedin, 1965–66.
‘University Entrance’ Published New Zealand Listener (23 March 1946). Written August 1945. Frame notes in her autobiography that she earned 2 guineas for this, her first published adult story, which was about needing 2 guineas for a school exam fee: ‘confirming for me once again the closeness, the harmony, and not the separation of literature (well, a simple story!) and life’ (To the Is-Land, chapter 28).
‘Dot’ Posthumously published in A Public Space 7 (2008). Frame reminisces about ‘Dot’s Little Folk’ — the real-life inspiration for this story — in To the Is-Land (chapter 17). The second half of ‘Dot’ is easily identifiable as fiction, so this story can act as a useful indicator of the dangers of assuming any of Frame’s fiction has a one-to-one correspondence with her life experiences.
‘The Gravy Boat’ Broadcast on Dunedin radio station 4YC in 1953. Unpublished otherwise. Reviewer ‘Loquax’ found the story the ‘most memorable listening’ experience of the year: ‘Janet Frame, who read the story herself, has a voice of unusual charm, and her delighted savouring of the phrases, each one dropped with reluctant irony, added the final measure of enjoyment.’ New Zealand Listener (18 December 1953).
‘I Got a Shoes’ Published New Zealand Listener (2 November 1956). Written while boarding with author Frank Sargeson at Takapuna between April 1955 and July 1956.
‘A Night at the Opera’ Posthumously published in The New Yorker (2 June 2008). This story was written by 1957, and thus pre-dates the different treatment of similar material in chapter 16 of Faces in the Water (1961).
; ‘Gorse is Not People’ Posthumously published in The New Yorker (1 September 2008). This story, written in 1954, was turned down for Landfall by editor Charles Brasch as he considered it ‘too painful to print’. Frame describes the background to the story and its rejection in chapter 17 of An Angel at My Table (An Autobiography Volume 2, 1984). A character with experiences somewhat similar to Naida’s, called Carol, appears in Faces in the Water (1961).
‘The Wind Brother’ Published in the New Zealand School Journal 51.1 (1957) Part 3. Written 1955–56 while based at Takapuna.
‘The Friday Night World’ Published in the New Zealand School Journal 52.1 (1958) Part 3. Written 1955–56 while based at Takapuna.
‘The Silkworms’ Posthumously published in Granta 105 (2009). ‘The Silkworms’ spotlights a complex character obviously based on Frank Sargeson. Frame at one time submitted this story for publication, but had second thoughts and withdrew it. It is not difficult to see why she suppressed this story, as it contains a sharp portrait of the manipulative Sargeson who, at the time she stayed with him for sixteen months, was suffering from writer’s block — described here with a touch of schadenfreude. An Angel at My Table (chapter 18) retells a more restrained version of the time Frame and Sargeson raised silkworms, by which stage the pair were getting on each other’s nerves.
‘An Electric Blanket’ Previously unpublished. This story ‘exploring ways of giving warmth’ (An Angel at My Table, chapter 20) has its roots in an event in Frame’s life when she bought her parents an electric blanket before leaving for Auckland in 1955, where she was sought out by Sargeson and invited to stay at his place so she could work in peace. Having a ‘secret pride’ in her latest story, she showed it to her would-be mentor. She was stung by his condescending criticisms, and resolved never to show him her work again.
‘A Bone in the Throat’ Previously unpublished. The seaside setting of the hotel may have been inspired by the Masonic Hotel in Devonport, where Frame briefly took a job as a chambermaid in late 1955 before resuming her occupancy of the army hut in Sargeson’s backyard.
‘My Tailor is Not Rich’ Previously unpublished. The setting for this story arises from the time Frame spent living in Andorra in 1957. See chapter 12 of The Envoy from Mirror City (An Autobiography Volume 3, 1985).
‘The Big Money’ Previously unpublished. This substantial story was written on the Spanish island of Ibiza in 1957 and a copy was sent to John Money with the following comment: ‘The writing of it interrupted my work. I wrote it after I got your Xmas Card; in some way it is concerned with you — even the title!!’ (Janet Frame to John Money, 3 March 1957). Like one of the two main characters in the story, Money had also gone ‘up north’ from a provincial to an urban setting (in his case, from New Zealand to the United States). There is a deliberate allusion to the third novel of the John Dos Passos trilogy U.S.A, entitled The Big Money.
‘A Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle’ Previously unpublished. The reference to Queen and Bath streets, which are in the town of Levin where Frame lived in the mid-1980s, dates the story to this time.
‘Caring for the Flame’ Previously unpublished. The background to this story likely derives from Frame’s father’s job as a boiler attendant in his later years (The Envoy from Mirror City, chapter 21).
‘Letter from Mrs John Edward Harroway’ Previously unpublished. Written 1965–66. This ‘letter’ from a fictional character outraged at being patronised by the author forms a short coda to Frame’s well known story ‘The Bath’, which was first published in Landfall 19 (1965) and first collected in You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983). ‘The Bath’ was inspired by an incident in which a widowed aunt of Frame’s became trapped in her bath and was fortuitously rescued by a neighbour.
‘Sew My Hood, Cut My Hair’ Previously unpublished.
‘The Atomiser’ Previously unpublished. Written 1965–66. The allusions buried in this story show Frame’s concern with the threat of chemical and atomic warfare, a theme she developed in some of her poems written around the same time.
‘The Painter’ Published in the New Zealand Listener (6 September 1975). Anthologised in New Zealand Short Stories: Fourth Series edited by Lydia Wevers, Oxford University Press (1984). Written in 1975 in Glenfield, after being bothered by a do-it-yourselfer neighbour scraping the paint off his house.
‘The People of the Summer Valley’ Previously unpublished.
‘The Spider’ Previously unpublished. Probably inspired by the literary parties Frame attended in the United States.
‘A Night Visitor’ Previously unpublished. In 1967 Frame spent several weeks in Middlesex Hospital recuperating from a severe bout of meningitis, an experience that possibly gave her the material for this story.
‘I Do Not Love the Crickets’ Previously unpublished. Frame lived among holiday homeowners on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula north of Auckland from 1972 to 1975, and that setting is recognisable here. This story shares with ‘The Painter’ a background of irritation at neighbours who are incessantly busy with noisy home improvements.