Janet Frame's first novel Owls Do Cry was published 50 years ago this month. In an exclusive essay, PATRICK EVANS remembers its impact on his life and considers its continuing importance.
The cover was what stayed in my mind long before I was mature enough to read Owls Do Cry with any certainty. My mother, an avid believer in the Great Tradition that had kept her going through a soli-tary southern Indian childhood, showed me the novel soon after its publication in 1957: “Here’s a good book by a New Zealander” is what I remember her telling me. A good book by a New Zealander? – any book by a New Zealander? It was the first time the thought had occurred to me.
“Literature” was what she had read to us at night – Kipling, Stevenson and the stirring yarns of Colonel Corbett, indefatigable slaughterer of tigers, followed by almost anything else from her substantial collection of bazaar-purchased volumes. Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Wells, Shaw: each volume showing tracks of the insect life that had feasted on their pages beneath the broiling sun of Empah.
And now my mother was presenting me with something completely different, an atmospheric cover-image of a small New Zealand town at that time of day when, according to Katherine Mansfield, the savage spirit of the country walked abroad and sneered at what it saw. Early evening in a community at the edge of a raw, untrustworthy rural environment, in autumn, perhaps, or winter (“Winter’s hanging on”, a minor character observes, inanely, in the novel), the entire image shot through with that peculiar emptiness distinctive to small-town New Zealand. Living in a small rural community on the edge of Christchurch, I knew that feeling, and understood the man caught forever, Grecian-urn-style, at the bottom of the cover picture. Where’s he off to, with his suitcase? – anywhere will do. All roads lead to the small New Zealand town, because writers need them to leave on.
Many years later, a friend of mine picked up a second-hand copy of the US edition of Owls Do Cry that had been published by George Braziller in 1960. Miraculously, it had been Janet’s, and was signed for her father: “This is for you as head of the family. I haven’t another copy.” At Mr Frame’s death in 1963 it had been reinscribed by Janet’s terrible, unforgettable brother George and stamped with his newly claimed oedipal authority: “I now take posesion of this book as I am now head of the Frame Clan.” His remarkable gift for phonetic respelling continued to the final entry of the journal he kept: “have to take aspirin to releive the Headaces I have had since Being glanced on the Head with the Ambulance Door”, he wrote, clearly feeling sic.
His gift for making money lasted, too, as evident in his canny selling of his sister’s copy of Owls Do Cry to a Dunedin dealer as in his gradual conversion to cash of all the metal in Oamaru’s metropolitan rubbish dump and himself to successful scrap-metal dealer and, eventually, landlord. In the novel, as Toby, Daphne’s epileptic brother, he is shown as having betrayed the childhood magic of the dump for the “sick yellow treasure” of money.
In life, George – a reliable oddball given to wearing highland regalia in public – brought his work home at night, till the moment when, in July 1976, I was able to break through the gorse above the family’s second home, Willow Glen, and look down on a house surrounded by a glittering, wintry sea of garbage. It was an extraordinary experience, as if I had passed through a portal into Janet’s imaginary world. Dangerous territory, it seemed: Trespassers will be shot, promised an enormous notice at George’s gate.
He was part of the world Janet escaped, with difficulty, in March 1955, first to her remaining sister in Auckland and thence to Frank Sargeson’s Takapuna army hut. There she wrote Owls Do Cry at white heat, finishing it on August 14, 1955, possibly the most precisely known completion date in our tradition.
Sargeson, living in his cottage a few yards away from the hut, was at the end of his successful “public” career as writer of what was thought to be an unflinching social realism. In sheltering and caring for a damaged young woman he had never met before, and in enabling her to begin her remarkable career, he made one of the great sacrifices in our cultural history.
Exchanging letters with me 20 years later, he made clear how difficult she had been to deal with, particularly in winter, while more recently Kevin Ireland, once Sargeson’s paper-boy, has spoken publicly of the physical and mental strain on the older man of living with his guest’s mood-swings, games and – when he found out more about her recent past – the fear of her alleged schizophrenia, code for any unexplained behaviour at a time when one of her sisters was thought odd (“mental”) for having a skirt with embroidered giraffes.
The greatest achievement of Michael King’s biography is to make clear what had reduced her to this state of terror and mistrust: both the horror of eight years spent in and out of hospitals while receiving over 200 bouts of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) amid (according to a visiting psychiatrist in the 80s) barbaric institutional conditions, and (as bad, in my view) the horror of her return to her Oamaru family between each hospitalisation, to be caught up again in the oedipal vortex that had driven her to hospital in the first place. Her autobiography makes clear that it was this deep family dysfunction that her illness uncannily acted out, like a psychodrama.
And what did Frame make of this, in the 60,000 words of what she insisted was not a novel, and which isn’t anything else, either? The truth of it Sargeson saw, with dazzling insight, straight away: for him, Frame was the 20th-century subject personified, stripped of all the certitudes and continuities of tradition and belief by the chaotic fragmentations caused by western industrial modernity, and making it all up – her sense of self, her sense of meaning, the purpose of life – as she went along.
In a very real sense, she faced Adorno’s famous dictum about the inappropriateness of writing after Auschwitz – hence the novel that isn’t a novel, a narrator who is both dead and alive at the same time (“Sings Daphne from the dead room” is a recurrent phrase) and an idiosyncratic use of a typography whose italics mark off private, poetic thoughts from the more prosaic sections in Roman type. You can never tell who might be listening in …
And hence, on the other hand, since we are what we repress, the extraordinary patterning of Owls Do Cry, the almost over-determined care with which its echoes and images are arranged. Part One, “Talk of Treasure” (the original title of the book: Albion Wright, her publisher at Pegasus, chose the published one from The Tempest), has the same shape as the unassuming little parables of her first volume, The Lagoon: Stories (1951): we glimpse the timeless idyll of childhood, something nasty unexpectedly happens, and Time and Death enter the picture.
In the stories it can be a cloud passing in front of the sun; in the novel it is the misstep that pitches pre-adolescent Daphne’s adolescent sister into the rubbish fire at the town dump the Withers children visit in search of “treasure” one boring Satur-day afternoon. Francie’s death-by-fire inverts the deaths-by-drowning that took away Frame’s older sister Myrtle in March 1937 and, almost exactly 10 years later, her younger sister Isabel, and it activates the symbology and imagery by which Frame set out to “correct” and order and control her world.
What an extraordinary pattern she made from the thread she took, like Theseus’s, into the labyrinth of her past in quest of her personal Minotaur. Linked by imagery, the rubbish fire of Part One, dealer of literal death, “becomes” the fire of Daphne’s ECT in Part Two, dealer of the figurative death of imposed “normality”. Theseus’ thread ties up lives at the woollen mill that represents all institutionalised “normal” labour, while in the mental hospital that represents the only alternative, patients make ugly things from thread for therapy and surgeons use it to stitch up the wound they leave after prefrontal lobotomies – like the one that has taken away Daphne’s poetic imagination by the end of the novel.
Real wounds leave figurative marks, like those that poor, galumphing Toby spots on Fay Crudge, the “normal” young ex-mill-worker he is too “abnormal” to marry. He is thinking, presumably, of the children sent down 19th-century mines to pull carts with straps, exactly the quality of figurative, “truthful” thinking that Frame urges in the novel and would convert us to in her art. The bravura display she gives in Owls Do Cry reaches its apotheosis in the great artistic achievement that is her autobiography, but in between is the series of masterclasses in symbolic thinking and seeing that is the bulk of her fiction.
The institution and “normalisation” of a sensitive, gifted outsider by a society operating through its faceless institutions is the theme of the 20th century, as Sargeson could see. But of everyone who has told us this, only Frame, to my know-ledge, has tried to make the reader know and feel what it is that, in the end, society is taking away.
The ideal reader of Owls Do Cry learns what it is like to possess its author’s symbolic imagination, not just by seeing from Daphne’s point of view but also by learning to think the way she thinks. Hence the intensity of the novel’s imagery and symbology, complained of by some earlier critics: simply, Frame is telling us, that is how someone like Daphne responds to the world. When we fail to understand why she watches a flower grow out of the seed-cake she and her brother are given after Francie dies in the rubbish fire, we are confessing that through getting and spending we have lost our transforming imaginative powers, our ability to see and think the way children do.
And when we begin to understand, a little later, that Daphne mistakes her psychiatric nurses for giant insects because that is how terrifying they are to her, and thinks the hospital is on the Remarkable mountain range because that is how strange it is, we are learning to get them back. By the time Daphne, told of her mother’s death, responds by dancing, we are caught up in the novel’s logic. In the world, it makes no sense. On the page, it does. Of course we should dance when someone dies!
This potential to convert the way we think is the great distinction of Owls Do Cry, the reason why we still need the novel. Over the past 20 years, it has been interesting to observe what has fallen off the truck as “ENGL105 New Zealand Literature” has twisted and turned its way through the shameful, mindless commodifications of education that have been built up in secondary and tertiary institutions.
First the minor cultural nationalists, Fairburn and Brasch, then more important ones like Mason and Mulgan, then, alas, even Curnow, his miracles of thought and expression far too much for the lumpen mind of NCEA Man. Other reputations slide around the tray as the truck labours on, grimly Achieving.
Amid all this, miraculously, Frame’s first novel holds firm, as indispensable and inevitable as Shakespeare in the larger canon of Eng Lit and speaking as clearly to the times it lives in. Lifting up those it deems failures, pushing down the unchallengingly normalised, it pleasingly inverts our current educational world – the final revenge of all those fat, spotty odd kids whose mothers gave them over-determined lunches and far too many interesting books to read.
OWLS DO CRY has just been reprinted with a new introduction by Lawrence Jones (Random House, $29.99).