Saner than sane
Jane Gardam
THE COMPLETE AUTOBIGRAPHY by Janet Frame Women's Press, £20.00, pp.435 When Janet Frame returned to New Zealand aged 40, in 1964, after seven years in Europe, she went back to Takapuna to the writer Frank Sargeson to whom, it must be obvious to any reader of this biography, she owes as much as to any of her psychiatrists.
Ten years earlier she had been able to leave the hospital where she had spent most of the seven years since her breakdown at university. She had been cut off there from her family, friends and all intellectual contact, scarcely seen by a consultant and the nurses had been forbidden to talk to her. The only treatment suggested, just before her release, had been a leucotomy. `You'll be as normal as anyone then. We had a patient who's selling hats in a hat shop now.' She believes she was only one or two away from the top of the list for this dreadful operation when the critical acclaim for the books she had written and managed to get published during her incar- ceration eventually seeped through to the medical authorities and she was allowed to leave. It was her one happily-married `bourgeois' sister who took her to Frank Sargeson's door. He was 59, a well-known writer and intellectual, an 'old man', and he came round the corner of his `bach' with his trousers held up with string. He offered her his army but in the garden to write in.
`But I must get a job.'
`Why? You're a writer.'
For a reluctantly-accepted pound a week, Sargeson cooked and cared for her, for about three years. When her novel was finished, with a grant and help from friends all organised by Sargeson — and realising she was becoming a bit of a strain on everyone — she sailed to Europe alone and became ill for the whole voyage. In England she turned for help to the marvellous National Health Service of the 1950s when hospitals were clean and nurses had time to talk. She never stopped writing, went off on her travels, acquired and despatched a lover in Ibiza, got through a melancholy, secret miscarriage, passed a strange, healing time in the midwinter snows of Andorra and became engaged to an Italian whom she quickly seems to have forgotten. She took odd jobs back in England and made unlikely, rather boring-sounding friends in a shabby, shifting, post-war London. Her London publisher provided her with a Kensington address. She took tea with him in his Knightsbridge apartment and listened to Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe from the North' discussing the servant problem.
But her return to New Zealand after the death of her father was inevitable and right, and when Sargeson came round the corner of the Takapuna `bach' once more and said, 'I'm afraid I had to pull down the hut. I know it will upset you,' she found it didn't. More dangerously, he said — the new, young New Zealand writers were not now on a small, separate bookshop shelf labelled 'New Zealand writing' — 'You may have an international reputation now, Janet, but you and I are passé.' She said that she felt he was probably right. But 30 years on, Janet Frame's Complete Autobiography is reprinted 'with new photographs', for the third time in ten years after publication in New Zealand in 1989, and has been reprinted as three separate volumes many times since the early Eighties. The central volume and the most famous, An Angel At My Table, about what she calls 'my hospital years' has been made into a film. The feminists, although this is published by the Woman's Press, are not responsible for it all, for although she was a struggling woman in the 1950s, feminism doesn't seem to have interested her much. At first, as a child, she says she didn't even know she was a person, let alone a female. `I didn't know I was looking out at the world. I was the world.' She was taken up with metaphysics — 'What is the world, where is the world?' not 'What am I? Who am I?' The sky wasn't her limit. She was part of it. She lay as a child in the fields behind her house in Wyndham, 'the southland town of rivers' in a street called Ferry Street which she thought was 'Fairy Street', feeling 'homesickness and longing for the sky'. She 'listened to the wind and its sad song,' and knew she was listening to a sadness that had no relation to me, which belonged to the world'. Yet at the time she looked a rather robust and merry Shirley Temple child with dimples and a lovely open smile, someone she says who was to grow the legs of a footballer and wrists that broke bracelets, and hair that grew up instead of down, in a solid frizz; not the figure of a child Who heard the sorrow of the universe in the wind.
It isn't surprising that she did. The Frames were a beleaguered, tragic family, most of them trapped in bodies that disguised their soul. The one son was epileptic from the age of four. For years his father tried to beat the fits out of him (`He does it on Purpose') while the mother went pathetically searching for cures among the neighbours. Two daughters, handsome as Rhinemaidens or rustic Marilyn Monroes, collapsed and died of heart-failure in swimming-baths. Their heart conditions were known, and they 'could have gone at any time' but this had not discouraged more paternal beatings — innocent Myrtle screaming, doctors being called — for alleged sexual precocity.
They were proud and poor — 'We are railway people.' There is a photograph of mighty George, the father, on the footplate of a steam engine much sleeker than its driver. At one time their railway workers' house was dismantled and put up in another town while they were re-housed in three huts with earth floors and no sanitation. The children, in their but apart, cried all night. Their mother, Lottie, was loved by her children, a willing slave to her husband, even stirring his sugar into his tea, but lived in a state of total family immersion symbolised by her clothes always being wet down the front from the sink and scrubbing. She had once been housemaid in the lavish house of the Beauchamps, parents of Katherine Mansfield. She looks a bold, hard woman — what wonderful photographs — rather forbidding, in a poor dress and tired veined legs, standing in a field with cows; but in fact she read, wrote and published poetry, recited and sang and looked at the physical world with mystical intensity. She would pick up a coloured pebble and cry, 'Oh look kiddies! A stone!'
It was years before her daughter could acknowledge her parents sacrifices or believe that they hadn't been the most deprived people in the town, the most terrified by unpaid bills and never a new school uniform. The intensity and cruelty at home was not the result of grinding poverty and tragic ill-fortune, but part of the Scottish determination to survive, and get an education. Brilliant Janet, with her gift for languages and mathematics, who'd been publishing poems in the papers since she was small, always top, shy and good, must have been their greatest pride. The horror of what happened to'her at university is such a shock that you want to slap down your hand on the page and deny it, and go back through the book looking for clues to it; and there are none. What could it have been like for her parents?
The drama in all three volumes is as intense as this and always as controlled. There's no over-writing — or not in the narrative: the musings in volume three on the nature and sources of fiction are a bit repetitive and mazy — and no event seems to have been arranged and is never reflected upon. Passions are not relived. There's not a trace of self-pity. 'You are saner than sane', her English analyst tells her at last. `You are not schizophrenic and you never were. You should never have gone to a mental hospital.' She tells it as if it's someone else's story and the only thing that seems abnormal about her, like Robinson Crusoe, is her prevailing sanity over so many awful years. She can't have been an easy patient. Sargeson, other writers, understood that she was bound, betrothed, married to literature — she said it threaded her life like bright ribbons threaded in a tree but this natural summons must have been hard to impart to an outsider. It seems to have been inborn. As a tiny child she would gather her siblings together to tell them tales (`Mum, tell them to stop wiggling while I tell my 'tory'.) and her early memories seem to comprehend romance without having read it — the great floods of the Leith River, the god-like visitation of `the wonderful Prince of Wales'. Literature was the fact of her. There is a lovely, winning moment — at the end of her analysis when her long-suffering consultant, whom she had at first disliked because he had an 'English voice' and crisp manner says shyly, 'like a character out of Somerset Maugham,"You see, I'm afraid I'm not a very literary chap.'
It's the realm of anecdote, the vivacity about the most 'ordinary' things, like her dreary admirer who eats a whole turkey `because there wasn't anything else to do' and is obsessed with Peek Frean biscuits (`You ought to get yourself a proper job at Peek Frean's') that proves good Frank Sargeson wrong. She is not passé nor ever will be. One leaves her book regretfully and with huge respect.
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