A new collection of Janet Frame’s non-fiction allows her to speak for herself, away from the “stubborn myths built up around her”.
I jumped at the chance to review this book, a collection of Janet Frame’s non-fiction – public and private. I relished the treat of reading this writing “in her own words”, as the subtitle promises.
It is in defence of Frame’s “own” writing that the preface and introduction are written by Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold, respectively. The overt agenda is to allow Frame to “speak for herself” about her life and work and, specifically, to challenge the “stubborn myths built up around her”. Indeed, it is the attempt to controvert these myths that clearly animates the editors, who give short shrift to academic critics (and Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table) whose “inaccuracies” they deplore and whose “approach of biographical speculation” they regard as deeply suspect.
The “myths” referred to, of course, are those of the writer as reclusive and socially uncomfortable, one whose genius has long been associated with the taint of madness via the sensationalised story of her younger years in psychiatric institutions (the result of misdiagnosis). And, indeed, the “voice” we hear is a far cry from this: self-deprecating, anxious and sometimes hurt by misunderstandings, yes, but also self-assured, passionate, driven and, most clearly, given to sly wit and generous humour.
If Frame has often eschewed publicity and attachment, she repeats again and again that this was a choice by one for whom love and children would have been a distraction from the passionate vocation of writing: “When I’m with people part of me is missing. That’s the important part of me when I sit down at my desk and it’s between me and my imagination”; “The ideal … is freedom to love as well as freedom from love.”
The volume opens with 11 of Frame’s previously published non-fiction works, written over three decades. Among these are book reviews, moving tributes to Charles Brasch and Frank Sargeson, and several substantial essays, including the well-known Beginnings. Parts of this essay were seized on by critics and contributed to the myths about Frame, but it was, nonetheless, for many years one of the only accessible autobiographical accounts available in the public arena.
In this volume, however, the essay is set among others that balance its rather deliberate self-dramatisation. The longer essays are sizeable pieces, often turning on a startling central metaphor that grounds Frame’s social and literary observations. Frame gave a surprisingly large number of interviews in her lifetime, and extracts from 30 of these are collected in the second part of this volume. Her editors, deploring what they regard as the narrow-mindedness and intrusiveness of some of the interviewers, have chosen to largely omit the questions to which Frame responded. This is unfortunate, not least because the effect is of a monologue that only shores up the idea of Frame’s isolation and withdrawal.
It is clear from the extensive notes Frame wrote in preparation for interviews (some reproduced here) and in comments made in letters to friends that she disliked interviews, and approached them with reluctance and even anxiety. “The whole experience has temporarily stopped [me] writing, corresponding, everything, and left me with [a] sort of shame … also with a revulsion [for] the printed word.”
The volume also collects Frame’s many “Letters to the Editor”, which articulate the clear public voice of an engaged citizen, often sharply satiric and, in the case of the last letters, sometimes written in verse. A further section includes various reports and speeches, or notes for speeches, that range from the formal to its opposite (one speech begins, “Well. Writers are not whales …”).
A very short section of selected correspondence includes extracts from letters to close friends and some witty draft letters to fans, publishers and proofreaders. If I have any regrets about this volume, it is to do with the brevity of this section and the sense it leaves of so much withheld. The penultimate section offers a collection of unpublished writings, in turn tongue-in check, slyly observant and deeply metaphysical: “Random notes on Sex and Creativity”; “On deciding what not to write about”; “The self”. A number of short fictions and two poems (all previously unpublished) complete the volume.
The choice to conclude with poetry is an apt one. Again and again, Frame names poetry as her “first love”, while also lamenting, “I never have been able to write a real poem.” This self-criticism is amply refuted, not only by the complete poems reproduced at the end but also by the many poems scattered throughout, and in the deeply lyrical and imagistic mode of so much of the prose.
It is impossible in a short review to do justice to the sheer force and power of Frame’s many writings, or her often incisive and insightful comments, particularly when she discusses her own work (she repeatedly describes being “haunted” by images and events that demand expression). But beware those who would take everything she writes as writ: “Writers tell lies, of course. The answers I would have given you yesterday or tomorrow are different from the ones I give today.”
JANET FRAME: IN HER OWN WORDS, selected and edited by Denis Harold and Pamela Gordon (Penguin, $40).
Kim Worthington teaches English literature at Massey University.