Rediscovering Janet Frame: her lyricism, her brilliant images, her unflinching and loving view of New Zealand.
Oh the human heart does not take kindly to difference,” Malfred Signal reflects as the longest night of her life seems to be building towards dawn. She has lived through a night of fearsome knocking, “the swishing of footsteps in the grass”, through her painterly vision that is to fail and that involves the occupancy of “the room two inches behind the eyes” where shading is to be abolished for sight; she has dealt with her ghosts: father, mother, sister, lover. But the ghost that lives in her to the end is the land. “Some may regard me as promiscuous, even an adulterous woman, to lie so with the landscape of my country.”
Re-reading Janet Frame’s A State of Siege (1966) in this handsome new edition, with its green – the favourite colour of Malfred – cover, its scholarly, concise introduction by Lawrence Jones and its fascinating biographical sketch by Pamela Gordon (Frame’s niece), is to be reminded that the Frame of the three-volume autobiography is the icing on the cake and underneath lies this great and accurate, clear, unflinching but loving view of New Zealand.
For Malfred Signal, dutiful mother-nursing daughter of an explorer and mountaineer, whose fame is marked by statues in her home town of Matuatangi has come “north” to the island of Karemoana, seeking, for the remainder of her life, to paint beyond the shading at which she excelled and which she endeavoured to teach, particularly the shading of fire shovels, which cast “magnificent shadows”.
But like any true “southerner”, she finds that the landscape of her early paintings is not easily relinquished; the Waiheke-like island has no Waitaki, no plains, no mountain spine. Established in her shabby bach on a hilltop overlooking the sea, open to all weathers, she hardly has time to begin before the shadows return.
A State of Siege is a masterly, at times almost clinical, study of heroism and frailty, of the shadows cast by art and the imagination. No lesser writer could build so absorbing a work on so thin a structure, so precarious a plot. Frame’s prose is underpinned by abundant thought, and its similes and metaphors lie upon it, as light as dew. “The sharply pointed nostrils like pen nibs” (of a law clerk), “railway lines that had surely been cut on the bias” or “a giggling schoolgirl, as collapsed as a paper bag”.
The conversations conducted during the hours of the knocking, with constable, doctor, priest, on an unconnected tele-phone, so the intruder or intruders may overhear, are sublime theatre. If Malfred doesn’t ultimately penetrate the “room two inches behind the eyes” – which to me conjures the long verandah room in which I once talked with Janet Frame – she remains a true artist, aware that her work could arise to accuse her, that shading – though that, too, returns in the end, proclaiming its necessity – is insufficient.
In The Rainbirds (1968), Godfrey Rainbird wakes in a hospital morgue from an accident in which he has been pronounced dead. His family, Beatrice from Matuatangi, his children, in-laws, sister en route from London, are already advanced in preparations for his burial service. Wreaths fill the sitting room and his best suit (trousers and jacket) has been given to collectors. The faces that peer at Godfrey express both curiosity and horror as if they are declaiming, “Tell us, tell us everything you know that we may be able to face it.”
Henceforth “going to bed each night he would climb into the dream of his coffin, sleep against its white satin, and waking in the morning, climb from it a resurrected corpse pursued by the nightmarish comfort of his satin world”. As the terror of burial alive comes to Godfrey, so does the necessity of maintaining “a uniform smile”.
Frame, like Beckett, asserts that “only a trained and constantly used imagination has hope of ‘facing’ the terrors of being and not being”. For “facing” read “facing down”, for among the facts to be faced by Godfrey Rainbird, Englishman, is “in New Zealand the equivalent of a ‘wicked weekend in Paris’ was spent in the company of motor-mower or with hammer, nails and paint”. Re-reading Frame in this stiff-paged new edition is to rediscover our most lyrical and clear-sighted writer.