by Joe Moran
There was nothing timid about Frame’s two-fingered typing. The New Zealand writer Frank Sargeson, who lent her his garden hut to write in and overheard her typewriter keys yattering away like a Kalashnikov, called it “typing for dear life.” Typing gave her a sense of industry, as if she were actually making writing, as tangibly as someone at a loom was weaving cloth. Bashing out a draft of Towards Another Summer in the spring of 1963, she wrote to a friend that “my typewriter is wearing out; the keys have become quite vicious—they are biting into the paper . . . I have tiny stencilled o’s and a’s and n’s lying on my table.”30
The tongue-tied are always eloquent in their daydreams. In Towards Another Summer, Grace imagines a Mirror City in her head in which her hosts “flush with pleasure” at her free-flowing sentences and sparkling aperçus. But her rich interior life never finds an outlet. In one tour-de-force passage Philip and Grace take a trip into town, and he points out the Winchley Viaduct, presumably the real-life Stockport Viaduct, that megalith of the railway age, made from ten million bricks, which so fascinated Lowry and which appears often in his paintings. As Grace clears her throat for Philip’s benefit and stares meaningfully at the viaduct as if taking in the effect, she goes off on a long thought-riff about buildings as “outcrops of human flesh and spirit, corns, cancers, stone prayers . . . sighs, statements, denials,” and marvels at the bravery of mortals who, buffeted by time and the elements, can still create these edifices that are more than walls and a roof. But what comes out of her mouth is, “Yes. I see what you mean, that it is best in this light.”31
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued that the entire tradition of Western thought, all the way back to Plato’s Republic, suffers from an intellectual bias that he calls “phonocentrism”—the idea that speech, which we learn instinctively, is a more natural form of expression than writing, which we learn tortuously. Frame’s fictional alter egos are shy, inarticulate people stuck in a phonocentric world. There, writing is insistently seen as the poor, impure relation of speech, when they all believe the opposite, that the babble and prattle of the spoken word can never equal the depth and nuance of writing. In Frame’s 1963 novel, Scented Gardens for the Blind, Vera Glace has a daughter, Erlene, who has willed herself mute and sits alone in silence and darkness. “What is the use of speech?” Erlene reflects. “On and on, saying nothing, the tattered bargain-price words, the great red-flagged sale of trivialities, the shutdown sellout of the mind?” People dread her silence, she thinks, because “it is transparent; like clear water, which reveals every obstacle . . . the cast-off words and thoughts dropped in to obscure its clear stream.”32
Ever since she was a little girl, Frame had loved lighthouses. Her father would drive them south in their Tin Lizzie Ford to the beach at Waipapa Point, and while he got out his fishing rod, the rest of his family would picnic in sight of the lighthouse. In Scented Gardens for the Blind the young Vera Glace also holidays with her family at Waipapa, where the lighthouse keeper lives alone, and in the winter the boat that supplies him with fuel and food is often delayed for weeks, so the only contact he has with the world is a stray flashing signal from a passing ship. One day Vera is picnicking on the beach when she spots a small boat being rowed away from the lighthouse. Two men are holding down the screaming keeper, who has gone mad.
In Frame’s novel the lighthouse and its keeper stand for the fragility of all human attempts to connect with others. Like a beam sweeping the horizon for the benefit of passing ships, we must reach out to others even when the language meant to link us together is so elusive and inadequate to the task. “Nothing must be allowed to silence our voices,” Vera reflects. “We must call out to one another . . . across seas and deserts flashing words instead of mirrors and lights.” Erlene agrees that words are like lighthouses, “with their beacons roaming the seas to rescue the thoughts or warn them against perilous tides, cross-currents, approaching storms.”33 But, as we learn at the novel’s end, Erlene does not exist except in the mind of Vera, a sixty-year-old spinster who has not spoken for thirty years. She is as remote and unreachable as the Waipapa lighthouse keeper.
When Frame’s autobiography brought her a new level of fame in the 1980s, she began appearing, unwillingly, at New Zealand arts festivals. Everyone who saw her said the same thing: she was, despite her obvious unease, her small stature, and ordinary appearance—her teeth now straight and false, her hair white and becalmed—an electric presence. When she gave a reading at the Wellington International Festival of the Arts in March 1986, all two thousand seats were taken, and seatless latecomers lined the walls and aisles. Oddly, for someone who had spent her life being tongue-tied, it was her voice that captivated: child-like and bell-clear, somehow conveying both strength and helplessness. She seemed sincerely mystified by the standing ovation she received.
After this brief sortie into superstardom Frame retired from public life with the aid of a new piece of technology she was uncharacteristically effusive about: the answering machine. Her attempts to shut out reality became more zealous. She moved house often to escape other people’s noise, driven mad by the sound of revving motorcycles, weekend do-it-yourself fanatics and the “penis-motormowers” of suburban Dunedin. She draped her windows with blankets to dampen the noise. Although she now received visitors vanishingly rarely, the New Zealand dance artist Douglas Wright did manage to befriend her in the late 1980s. Her frequent house moves made him think of her as “the star witness in a never-ending criminal trial whose testimony is so valuable and damning she must be moved from refuge to refuge under complete protection.” She spoke in a series of short little whispering gasps, but with “the ringing clarity of a great diva who is resting her voice.” She listened intently, with tiny murmurs of encouragement, a rare gift for attentiveness that he felt could only have been acquired by someone who knew what it felt like to be entirely ignored.34
As ever, her keyboard was her flimsy connection to the world. She continued to write her books on her trusty typewriter, being used to the feel of the keys. But for the last years of her life she became an early adopter of all the latest laptops, her face radiant in the monitor glare as she browsed the embryonic Internet and sent some of the earliest e-mails to the thousands of people who still wanted to call this unsociable woman their friend.
Perhaps something about lighthouses appeals to introverts, who need to make regular withdrawals from the social world but still retain a link with it. For lighthouses are a concrete expression of our common humanity. Their beacons turn and blink eternally because we accept that people we may never meet, whom we may do no more than flash our lights at in the dark, are also our concern. The Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson was as fascinated as Janet Frame by this facet of lighthouses. In her work they become a symbol for the solitary artist, isolated by choice from individual people but grabbing hold of that slender thread that links us to unknown others.
In the summer of 1947, aged thirty-three, she built a log cabin on Bredskär, one of the Pellinki islands off the Gulf of Finland, where she and her family had summered since she was a girl. Although she built it on the farthest rocks out to sea, it was still too near civilization for her taste. So she hatched a plan to emigrate with her brother Lasse to the Polynesian island of Tonga, and yet another to found an artists’ colony in Guipúzcoa in the Basque country or in an empty villa with hanging gardens near Tangier. In 1964 she simply moved farther out to sea, building a hut on Klovharun, a tiny, barren island in the Pellinki archipelago, where she lived with her partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, for half the year. And still it was not far-flung enough. She longed to live on Kummelskär, a rocky landmass in the outermost chain of skerries with no harbor or fresh water.
As a young girl, she had been fascinated by the two small lighthouses on Kummelskär, and her dream had been to build a giant lighthouse there that would cast its beam over the whole of the gulf. But as an adult, she found she couldn’t live on the island without timber to bu
ild a hut, and she couldn’t buy timber without a building license, which the local Fishermen’s Guild vetoed because they feared her presence there would disturb the fish. It was only late in life, when she was getting too frail to stay even on Klovharun, that she gave up on Kummelskär.
Jansson’s dream of being on an out-of-the-way island looking after a lighthouse inspired the most somber of her Moomin books, Moominpappa at Sea. Suffering from an inexplicable weltschmerz, Moominpappa takes his family on a sea journey to a lighthouse on a skerry so small and remote that it looks like a speck of dirt on the map. On arrival, they find it occupied only by a catatonic fisherman who responds to their questions with grunts. The Moomins retreat into themselves. Moominpappa sulks and hides himself in the fog. Moominmamma works out her longing for Moominvalley by painting its flora on the white walls of the lighthouse. Their son, Moomintroll, longs to commune with the mute sea horses. The silent fisherman turns out to be the ex–lighthouse keeper driven mad by loneliness.
Jansson was a great admirer of the book Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realization, by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, translated into Swedish in 1953. According to Horney, there are three kinds of neurotic “solution” to feeling unsafe or unloved: the expansive, the resigned, and the self-effacing. The expansive neurotics pursue mastery over others; the resigned neurotics strive for independence and self-sufficiency; and the self-effacing neurotics are conflict-phobic, criticizing themselves before others have the chance.
The Moomin books are full of self-effacing neurotics who rely on others to shore up their own feelings of inadequacy, but who retain a sort of perverted pride in their self-contempt. Jansson’s scraperboard illustrations scratch her characters out of a background of black India ink as if they are emerging warily out of the gloom. With only the thinnest line of ink—a tiny widening of the eye pupil, perhaps, a downturned eyebrow or the sole of a foot treading charily through snow—she conveys their shyness and fear. They hug themselves self-protectively, look wide-eyed with fright or sideways with unease. Shrewish characters hide under sinks or tables or wander the world in search of the horizon, never saying a word. A little girl is frightened into invisibility by the woman who looked after her and becomes slowly visible again under the care of the Moomins, her face finally appearing when she sinks her teeth into Moominpappa’s tail. You cannot truly exist, Jansson warns, until you let others know you exist.
Jansson said she had once had a letter from a small boy who said he felt unnoticed by others and fearful of everything. In reply she wrote Who Will Comfort Toffle? (1960), about a shy, scared little troll who feels alone until he finds a frightened girl, Miffle, who needs consoling. Child psychotherapists often use this book as a teaching aid to encourage shy children to make friends. “If my stories are addressed to any particular kind of reader,” Jansson told an interviewer, “then it’s probably a Miffle. I mean those who have trouble fitting in anywhere, those who are on the outside, on the margins.” She received many letters from Miffles, she said, children who were “timid, anxious and lonely.”35
But if this story makes Jansson sound like a touchier-feelier version of Dr. Seuss, nothing could be less true. Her work is tough-minded and bracingly averse to sentiment. The Moomins, whose forebears lived behind stoves, are deep introverts, fond of wandering aimlessly in the forest on their own, enjoying its silence and stillness, disturbed only by the distant sound of an echoing axe blow or the odd lump of snow thudding down from the branch of a tree. They love hibernating in winter, feeling safe as they burrow into warm, private spaces. And in the last Moomin book, Moominvalley in November, they move away without saying a word to anyone, leaving their needy and neurotic hangers-on—the orphan Toft, the obsessive-compulsive Fillyjonk, the anal-retentive Hemulen—to pine after them.
Jansson’s lesson is not that shy people should come out of their shells; it is that they should learn to become unneurotic introverts. For Moomins may sulk and skulk fleetingly, but most of the time they are neither needy nor neurotic. Their response to a problem is to think deeply and then make something—a hut, a painting, a poem, a boat carved out of bark—as a way of whittling meaning out of a terrifying world.
Jansson had taught herself, in Horney’s classification, to be a resigned neurotic, channeling her talent for solitude into creative work. But all her life she remained shy in the company of other artists, lacking confidence about her paintings since her writing had taken over. She was an ingrained introvert, liable to take to bed with psychosomatic stomach pains at the thought of having to speak in public. Her need to retreat regularly to Klovharun before reentering the world was classic introvert’s behavior. Islands, she wrote, are “a symbol of constructive solitude . . . Sometimes one has to escape so as to be able to return out of pleasure and not out of compulsion.” She became more stubbornly solitary as she got older, saying she’d had enough of the Moomins and wanted to shut herself away and paint still lifes. “I could vomit over Moomintroll,” she wrote.36
Jansson’s later stories, written for adults, have this same sense that all communication is finally destined to fail and that solitude can be joyous and life-affirming. In “Travelling Light” the unnamed narrator gives up his ordinary life and boards a ship, feeling relieved when the ship has moved too far from the quay for anyone to call out to him. He wants to be alone and to ignore “any disposition to encourage in the slightest degree the surrounding world’s irresistible need to start talking about its troubles.”37 In “The Squirrel” a woman lives alone on an island; her only human contact is to listen on her walkie-talkie to the conversations between passing ships. She develops a strange, wordless rapport with a squirrel, which eventually sails away in the woman’s boat, leaving her happily alone again.
In “The Listener” Aunt Gerda is a diligent letter-writer and rememberer of birthdays with a reputation for being an attentive listener, partly because she finds it hard to express herself. She listens “with her whole large, flat face, unmoving, leaning slightly forward,” and is in essence “not much more than silence.”38 Then she suddenly becomes tardy with her letters, which grow impersonal. She forgets names and faces and stops listening to people altogether, listening only to the rain or the sound of the elevator in her apartment building going up and down. She now devotes her life to making a map of the people she knows and the links between them—romantic liaisons in pink, divorces in violet, hate in crimson—creating and destroying relationships with a few strokes of her pen. But the task is impossible: the relationships keep changing, and even the largest piece of shelf paper is not big enough to accommodate all the revisions. If this story is a parable, its lesson is unclear. Is it that relationships cannot subsist entirely on paper but must thrive in the messiness of real life? Or is it that real-life relationships can be more enervating than nourishing, and someone who listens too well may be crushed under the weight of others’ needs?
What is clear, however, is that in all these stories Jansson was writing out her own wish to keep the world at arm’s length. In her Helsinki studio she sorted her mail into piles on the stairs, in categories like “wants something,” “begs an answer,” and “can wait.” She reserved a special loathing for letters with the presumptuous sign-off “Thanks in advance.” She collated some of this clingy, semi-hostile correspondence in her late piece “Messages”: “My cat’s died.” “Write at once.” “We look forward to your valued reply soonest concerning Moomin motifs on toilet paper in pastel shades.” “I will come and sit at your feet to understand.”39
She proposed an authors’ law similar to the laws protecting nesting birds, specifying a closed season in which they would be left alone. After a schoolteacher got her entire class of forty pupils to write to her, Jansson told an interviewer: “I do hate those children, and I wish I could strangle them with a rubber band.” In fact, she was a dutiful correspondent and answered her thousands of letters without resort to secretaries, often peppering the margins with elegant drawings. Sh
e did, though, learn to finesse how to bring a cloying correspondence to an end: by signing off in her last letter “with worried greetings.”40
It seems apt that so many of these shy writers and artists spent their last years piling up unread mail and answering it with varying degrees of diligence. The shy person who sends art or writing out into the world is, after all, consenting to embark on a similar exercise in asymmetrical communication, with no guarantee they will ever receive an answer. One of the impulses underlying art is our sense that other kinds of dialogue have failed and that we need to absent ourselves and communicate at one remove if we are to communicate at all. Art and shyness both draw on l’esprit de l’escalier, that conversation we carry on in our heads after the other person has gone.
This form of communication is a gamble. It may require years of self-imposed solitude, so that something intended as a cure or coping mechanism for shyness only ends up aggravating it. Shy artists, unable to bear the risk of potentially awkward communication in the present, take an even bigger risk, betting on a vicarious exchange that might, if they are lucky, pay off in some long-deferred future. Even if they succeed, they can end up like Lowry, walking alone on a beach, drawing on the sand with his stick and looking out to sea, wondering if spending his life in the solitary service of art had been a life well lived or was just a way, as he put it, of “getting rid of the days.”41
But if it were easy to make ourselves understood, if we could commune like Saint Augustine’s angels or Star Trek’s mind-melding Vulcans and simply tip the contents of our brains into other people’s brains, there would be no need to paint pictures, make music, or write words. Some of the most triumphant human associations are those achieved at a distance when all other attempts have miscarried. We are most touchingly human when we have failed to get something across and have to reach someone else by stealth or subterfuge instead. The shy artist knows how to make use of these failures to connect—the doubts and hesitations we all feel in the presence of others.