Feature
The gift of language
by C K Stead
Janet Frame’s “dangerous intelligence” allowed her to see, feel and express the mysteries we all experience. She’s gone, but her work will always enrich us.
When I try to focus as exactly as I can on Janet Frame as I knew her, what I always think of first is humour – her jokes, and her response to jokes. But these were not just any old “funnies”; they often had to do with language and with perception, and were full of dangerous intelligence. It was as if the whole of human existence was a joke – a black one perpetrated by the gods. Here we were “on earth”, destined to live (good), but also to die (bad), and with nothing certain “beyond” except extinction, and nothing that alleviated the starkness of this fact except our own inventions. That’s why the inventions – which we could make only because we had the gift of language – were the most important expressions of our humanity. There was truth and there was fiction; but in a way everything was a fiction, because it seemed we had no choice but to go on behaving as if everything was for ever. We had to pretend our social structures enshrined absolutes. We had to pretend that there were universal sanctions, not because we could see that there were “really” (as children say), but because there ought to be, otherwise we were inhabiting a universe without justice. Janet’s presence, when I first knew her, had the feel of a self-recognising fabrication. It was tentative, an offering, as if she were saying, “This is quite absurd but – under the circumstances – what else can one do?” Later that presence would become the voice of her fiction – equally tentative, but strange and brilliant, as if she and her readers were required to walk on water, and somehow, by the magic of her language, contrived to do it.
Apart from this darkly comic scepticism, there was, however, another aspect to her personality and her work, not a contradiction, but an addition, which came largely from her periods in mental hospitals and from her memories of childhood. She had no consistent “message”; but she had suffered and seen suffering, and she did not want it to be overlooked. She knew it continued everywhere, mostly unseen, mostly inside people’s heads, and she felt a moral respons-ibility to acknowledge that it was there. It was this sense of responsibility that produced some of the most vivid recollections and recreations in her writing; it gave purpose and authority to the uses she made of that part of her life-experience which was exceptional, and exceptionally dark. On the other hand, it could also sometimes trap her into characterisations that equated misfortune with virtue and luck with vice. Her novels tended to be uncomprehending and unforgiving of those who were comfortable and at home in the world, and this could at times undermine the quality of the fiction, making it seem programmatic.
Janet (by her own account) grew up with a sense of shame, of being unwashed, with bad teeth, badly clothed, poor. But it was a household rich in poetry and stories, and the sense of magic that went with them. Literature transformed reality, redeemed it, even superseded it. So there was a way out for her, an escape through books, first in reading, then in writing. But the shame of poverty remained. Many others from such backgrounds have simply asserted their talents and have been able to leave deprivation behind. She could not – she brought it with her – and the reason for that, I suppose, was something genetic, bio-chemical, a social incompetence springing from extreme, almost morbid shyness, made worse by incarceration in mental hospitals at the time when a young adult needs to be out in the world learning social skills. Janet never quite lost the look of someone who was socially “disadvantaged”. Her body language was seldom confident. In public she appeared to be either in retreat, or held against her will. When she faced an unexpected camera the head and torso seemed to be dragged to face it while the feet and legs were already turning, or tending, away. Yet (one of so many paradoxes) on the very few occasions when she consented to read in public the effect was sensational. Her voice was light, bell-clear, almost childlike, but compelling. It matched her writing perfectly – a kind of innocence, almost ominously clever.
In private, with family or a few trusted friends, she could be quick, witty, articulate, entertained and entertaining, capable of everything, not excluding malice. She had her bad days; but at her best she sparkled and shone like her own writing.
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