I have started keeping a
dream journal. In the middle of an intriguing dream I was having about experimenting with making small sculpted letters of the alphabet out of leaves, plants, paint, yellow, red, green etc. Which spelled LGBTQI, and were to be held up by people scattered throughout the seats of an outdoor stadium. My mate from
Brians an unusual name for a girl blog appears in my dream rather randomly and says "Don't you think if there is a Janet Frame award it should go to a crazy person".
What!? Which has got me thinking about the wonderful
Janet Frame (28 August 1924 - 29 January 2004). One of Aotearoa/New Zealand's most famous authors. In her lifetime she
published a book of poetry, a children's book, eleven novels, four short story collections, and three volumes of autobiography, which have been translated into many languages. Since her death, a novel, a book of poetry, and a collection of short stories have been published.
Janet Frame, as a child suffered the loss of two of her sisters by drowning ten years apart, grew up in poverty, infused in storytelling, spent 12 years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, narrowly avoided a frontal lobotomy in 1951, when the doctor had a change of mind after her first book of short stories,
The lagoon and other stories won a literary award.
I think to myself well there probably is a Janet Frame Award, Google will provide the answer! Yep, since 2005
The Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, has been granted to 4 authors to write fiction or poetry, and to 2 Authors Advocacy Organizations. The 2008 recipient, poet
Rhian Gallagher (1961- ) who moved to London in 1987, returned to Aotearoa in 2003, and as it turns out happens to be a lesbian.
After completing her first novel in 1956,
Owls do cry, Janet Frame moved to London, not returning to Aotearoa for 7 years. When she was in the looney bin in Aotearoa in the 1940's her writing plans and aspirations were noted as symptoms of her mental illness, perhaps 'delusions of grandeur'. In her novel
Towards another summer, written in 1963 and published posthumously in 2007, the main character Grace Cleave, expatriate novelist living in London, is holidaying in the north of England. Her host asks why she has abandoned her homeland: 'Don't you ever want to go back?''I was a certified lunatic in New Zealand. Go back? I was advised to sell hats for my salvation.'
Two previously unpublished stories she wrote were published in the New Yorker in 2008. Janet Frame did submit them for publication in 1954 to Charles Brasch of Landfall magazine, but he returned them to her with a note saying the stories were 'too painful to publish', which begs the question, too painful for who?
A night at the Opera, portrays the screening of a movie in the looney bin and
'Gorse is not people reflects Frame’s determination to view reality from alternative perspectives, in this case that of a dwarf celebrating her 21st birthday. The story also makes disturbing use of Frame’s still fresh memories of life as a resident at Seacliff mental hospital.' (
The Arts Fuse 2008)
Janet Frame published 3 volumes of autobiography,
To The Is-Land (1982) about her childhood,
An Angel at My Table (1984) about her years as a student and in a psychiatric hospital,
The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)about her travels and life as a writer. All three came out as a collected Autobiography in 1989, and were made in to a dramatic
film An Angel at My Table in 1990 by Jane Campion.
Like many people I read her autobiographical books in 1985. They were gripping, written in a way like no other, and to me chilling. Her writing was so important to so many of us, including close friends who had been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions, often as a result of being lesbian, or the effects of family abuse. Through her writing we knew you could survive: grinding poverty, unbearable loss and grief, torturous mistreatment, soul destroying ignorance, and misunderstanding. That somehow the will, the creative impulse does prevail. That not compromising your own creative vision was possible. That making your own way, on your own terms, was a viable option. Her books left a lasting impression on me, of what my country did to those considered a little different, it's writers and artists. For many years I kept my writing to myself, difference is defined by others and so that I could not keep to myself. I followed the example of those who had gone before me in finding an antidote to the strictures of the society they find themselves in, and left the country (some 15 years later). Like painters Margaret Stoddart, Frances Hodgkins, writers Katherine Mansfield, Witi Ihimaera, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, musicians Kiri Te Kanawa, Gareth Farr. Some for a few years, some for good, to survive, to follow creative, employment or academic opportunities.
When Janet Frame died in 2004 I happened to be in Aotearoa on Waiheke Island. I bought the Listener with the 4 page tribute by
C. K Stead. Janet Frame wrote in a truly unique way, eschewing literary conventions to be true to her own inner monologue, and that of her characters. Said to possess a
'dangerous intelligence', her books won many literary awards, making her the subject of some professional jealousy. Despite her at time autobiographical writing, she guarded her privacy, wanting to lead an already life, far more interested in writing than succumbing to the cult of personality which surrounded her. I also bought at this time the more conventional weighty tome (nearly 600 pages) of a biography she had collaborated on with Michael King,
Wrestling with the angel, (2000) with it's photos and dates and letters and references. We mourned the passing of a great soul. I returned home to my small collection of her books, the only collection I have of anyones work. I was fond of picking up old hardback copies of her work I came across in secondhand bookstores.
Scented gardens for the blind, Faces in the water, The Edge of the alphabet....
Perhaps my friend appearing in my dream was to tell me, Janet's contemporary, close friend, and fellow poet,
J.C. Sturm had just died (1927 - 2009).
Jacquie Sturm whose poetry I also have thanks to my friend N (she of the write a poem a day discipline), who often sent me a book by a NZ woman poet for my birthday these past years in exile. J.C. Sturm was the wife of 'preeminent NZ poet' James K. Baxter, who I am not much of a fan of. This opinion did not improve when I discovered although she submitted poetry to a literary magazine he edited for several years he never published a single one! He went off to 'find himself' leaving her a solo parent. Had her collection of short stories
The House of the Talking Cat : Stories been published when they were ready in 1966, instead of in 1983, they would have been the first collection by a Maori person, man or woman, instead this honor went to Witi Ihimaera with his novel Whanau in 1977. She was one of the first Maori women to get a university degree, in 1949.
Through the reach of the web I stumbled upon a debate raging since 2007 about
whether Janet Frame was autistic. New Zealand doctor and rehabilitation researcher working in Australia, Sarah Abrahamson proposed that Janet Frame had high-functioning autism (HFA), in an article in the NZ Medical Journal October 12 2007. She based this on her reading of Janet Frame's writing, particularly the posthumously published novel,
Towards another summer. Which portrays a weekend in which Grace Cleave, stays with a family she does not know well, and the painfulness of this and other social interactions for her, the divide between her inner life and outer world. There is the point of view that her artistic gift does not need to be pathologized with a diagnosis, or alternately that she can posthumously act as a positive role model for autism.
It has been suggested that her biographer Michael King and she herself did not find the autism label such a foreign idea. But as someone who fought for years to escape the the label of crazy and schizophrenia - she was later determined by doctors to not have schizophrenia, to have never had schizophrenia, but she was likely affected by post traumatic stress; she may have been reluctant to take on any label. She was leery of the 'mad-genius' mythology which surrounded her and her work. If the label of autism would have fit with her during her lifetime; or now that she has passed, we will never know.
David Cohen, journalist, father of an autistic son and author of a book about autism,
A Perfect World, in an article in the NZ Listener,
Autistic Licence seemed to be hedging his bets. Yet on his website about autism,
humans.org.nz in a a
discussion from 2007 he seems pretty convinced she was.
Pamela Gordon, niece of Janet Frame, appointed by Janet as her Literary Executor, and representative of The Trustees of the Janet Frame Literary Trust; and who has a daughter who is autistic, is adamant that Janet Frame was not autistic. This has resulted in much debate, some of it ill-willed, as evident by a January 5 2010 entry on Pamela's blog about Janet's work entitled
Janet on the planet: Poison Pen letters. The entry has since been removed from the blog, but the title is visible if you Google search it.
What I was able to glean by a quick scan of the entry before it was removed, was that there are those affected by autism who are angry at the denial of Janet's possible autism. But also that Literary Executor, Pamela Gordon receives an inordinate amount of correspondence on this and other matters, personally attacking her for how she deals with her aunt's legacy. This is both to be expected given the attachment of so many to the mythology surrounding Janet Frame; as well as being completely unreasonable.
It reminds me that art historians and the media have brought us such startling revelations (not) in the past few years just by looking at the painting of
Mona Lisa, that she is a) pregnant b)flushed from recent sexual activity, and most recently c) her lips reveal she was suffering from high cholesterol. A then partner of mine, upon viewing the painting of the Mona Lisa in person excitedly informed me some years ago, that I have the exact same hands as Mona Lisa. So I do know, what we see, can be, in the mind or eye of the beholder
Towards another summer, Janet Frame's novel published in 2007, based on a weekend spent with a journalist in England, and his wife, a fellow New Zealander. Widely considered to be about homesickness, Grace Cleave becomes a migratory bird. It is, but for a romanticized version of the country of origin she had left behind, as she left it and remembered it. She knew this, it is there in the damp woolly portrayal of her compatriots relative's room.
In 2008 I read from cover to cover her book of poetry published posthumously.
The Goose Bath also titled
Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems (2006) and then passed it on to my art collaborator of 20 years T, at a bus station, as is our wont.
Towards another summer rests on my bookshelf along with her other novels. For now Janet's biography
Wrestling with the angel sleeps peacefully under my pillow.
