Michael King: New biography opens book on Janet Frame

By MARGIE THOMPSON

What most people "know" about Janet Frame, New Zealand's best-known novelist, is that she spent years in psychiatric hospitals and that she is painfully shy. So it may come as a surprise to learn that rather than sitting at a battered old typewriter in the lonely wilds of the South Island, Frame's life is one of movement, friendship and passion.

Oh, and forget the battered old typewriter. Frame, who turns 76 in three weeks, was an early convert to new technology. In 1985, years before computers became commonplace, she was buying her second, a Commodore 64, and she regularly upgrades to the most sophisticated option.

She even plays computer games, at one stage challenging her computer to three chess games a day. Winning, too.

All this can be gleaned from Michael King's biography Wrestling With The Angel.

For the first time King puts into the public domain the tale of Frame's great love. It was during her residency at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire in 1969 that Frame met the man she came to describe as "the chief experience of my life," painter and musician William Theophilus (Bill) Brown.

At the start of her stay at Mac-
Dowell, shyness kept her from taking to anyone. But within a month she had become part of a group of four with Brown and two other writers, Josephine Carson and Elnora Coleman. For some undisclosed reason they called themselves The Baby Group. They would joke and pun their way through dinner and later play scrabble, do anagrams, or compose "salty" limericks about fellow colonists.

King provides one example: The pecker of Harrison Kinney/ was so excessively skinny/ that like a Greek statue/ his balls stared back at you/ with little eyes, nosy and chinny.

Brown remembers that it was Frame who would invent the most outrageous words.

By the end of her stay Frame was, she told longtime friend and psychologist John Money, "hooked on Brown, you know, really hooked."

She told another friend that she had "given up on all my cold inaccessible men ... I'm on the warm side of life from now on."

Sure, she knew that Brown was "one of the boys" and was, she told Money, "like most people I give my heart to."

Brown lived with gay partner and
fellow artist Paul Wonner near Santa Barbara and Frame stayed with them for several weeks before returning to New Zealand.

King writes that Wonner accepted her presence and the two of them believed they were twin personalities. She loved Wonner "figuratively" and Brown "literally."

California was an idyll of blue skies, work and laughter and Frame was besotted, yet this is one of the several stories within the biography which is only partially told.

Just what was the extent of Frame's presence in their lives? The exact nature of the relationship is not spelled out. But some clues are offered, such as Brown spending a couple of days with Frame in Money's Baltimore flat in 1971.

"Detail of the visit are censored," Frame tells author Frank Sargeson.

Back in New Zealand, Frame, writing to Brown if not daily at least several times a week, uncharacteristically experienced the problem of "loneliness outweighing the benefits of aloneness."

She decided to live with Brown and Wonner in California. "We all get on very well together and love one another and the 'permissive society' is greatly to be commended," she wrote to another great friend, British psychiatrist Robert Hugh Cawley.

But the dream crumbled in August 1971 when the two men concluded they "were unable to offer her the degree of intimacy for which she hoped," King writes.

"Its inescapable conclusion was more than I could handle," Brown said later.

Frame wrote to the couple of her loneliness at not being able to "snuggle up to you both occasionally. I've already trained for death in that direction."

It sounds a terribly painful episode. Perhaps Frame, when working with King on the biography, chose not to dwell on it.

That this is frustrating may say more about the reader than the biography. Why should the sex life of a literary genius be any of our business when she has already offered so much of herself in her fine literature?

In an article titled Tread softly for you tread on my life, written for the Stout Research Centre at Victoria University, King acknowledges the universal interest in sex and that the relationship of sexuality to the rest of life is profound. Yet in the biography he refrains from any overt discussion of Frame's sexuality, only dropping occasional hints into the narrative, like little stones that sink almost without trace into the more everyday substance of Frame's life story.

Because of the amount of reading between the lines that is necessary — with the attendant sense of trying to grasp sand which simply runs out of the fingers because of King's not offering a subjective assessment — you are constantly made aware of this biography's subtext: here too is the biographer's story, with both the benefits and constraints of writing about a living person.

King has been very clear about his feelings of responsibility as Frame's biographer. In Tread softly for you tread on my life he wrote that constructing a biography of a living person involves "compassionate truth ... That is a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted embarrassment, loss of face, emotional or physical pain, or a nervous or psychiatric collapse.

"Clearly I am identifying a tradeoff in which the biographer gives away some rights but in doing so gains access to materials and opportunities that enrich and enhance the resulting book.

"It may also be the task of later writers to colonise the narrative and analytical spaces left vacant by the primary biographer. And in this manner 'compassionate truth' is, eventually, compatible with and complemented by the dispassionate and disinterested variety."

The first 40 years of Frame's life are well known, thanks to her own multi-award-winning and internationally acclaimed autobiography and the film made from it, An Angel at my Table. We are well acquainted with Frame's imaginatively intense yet socially dislocated upbringing in Oamaru; her "pash" on psychologist John Money, whose attention she sought by exaggerating her own behaviour so as to appear schizophrenic; her years in psychiatric hospitals; her sojourn in Frank Sargeson's army hut in Takapuna while she wrote Owls Do Cry; the years spent overseas during which she lost her virginity in Ibiza at the age of 33, a time when she began to garner her reputation as a writer to be respec-
ted.

When she returned home in 1963 she had accomplished Faces in the Water and The Edge of the Alphabet. Before her eyes was what she termed Mirror City, her "playhouse" of the imagination, and from that point she has published a further eight novels, three collections of stories, a volume of poetry and her autobiography.

All have been published in New Zealand, Britain and the United States. And after the autobiography threw her career into a new trajectory in the mid-1980s, much of her work has been translated.

She is certainly our most internationally acclaimed writer, revered by many as one of the great writers of the century, and the recipient of many international awards.

In May 1986, when the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters made her an honorary member, the citation praised her work as being "not just a series of extraordinary insights into suffering and thought, but a mighty exploration of human consciousness and its context in the natural world."

It was in 1958 that Frame was finally excused from her place at the "terrible feast" that is schizophrenia. That diagnosis, originally made in 1945 at Dunedin Hospital's psychiatric ward, led to years of psychiatric hospitals and electroconvulsive therapy. Since then it's been a struggle to have the world realise that a reputation for mental illness was never warranted.

The inaccurate diagnosis was never queried until Frame arrived at London's Maudsley Hospital in 1957. The first psychiatrist she saw told her, "You've never suffered from schizophrenia." Another resident psychiatrist was Cawley — later to become the friend RHC to whom she would gratefully dedicate seven books — who gave her some excellent advice: The "you should" days were over, he said. Frame needed to live alone and write while resisting, if she wished, the demands of others to join in.

What really did ail her seems to have been crippling shyness and social naivete — exacerbated, no doubt, by spending most of her 20s isolated in mental institutions — depression and, most of all, a condition that one Maudsley psychiatrist accurately saw as "lacking one layer of protective skin."

In the main, Frame has followed Cawley's advice. She has always lived alone, at the moment in Dunedin. But this is simply the most recent resting-place for a woman who has changed houses and cities with astonishing
frequency.

In her quest for the quiet necessary to think, write and simply "be," Frame has fled around the country to escape encroaching housing, roadworks, power-saws and lawnmowers.

She has touched down at Dunedin, Auckland (where she has lived in Northcote, Devonport, Takapuna, Waih-
eke Island, Whangaparaoa, Glenfield, Avondale, Brown's Bay, Mt Albert), Stratford (two homes), Wanganui, Levin, Palmerston North and Shannon, a pattern identified by one friend as "moving, loving, loathing, leaving." At the end of 1997 she returned to her origins in Dunedin, a move she felt sure would be "one of her last."

Within her overall aloneness, extraordinarily warm and generous friendships have been sustained in New Zealand (notably with Jacquie Baxter, wife of James K) and elsewhere, in support of which Frame has made many overseas trips.

She particularly loved the United States, which she first visited in 1964 and where her old friend John Money lived in Baltimore.

In the 1960s and 1970s she held residencies at artists' and writers' colonies. The first was at Yaddo, near Saratoga Springs, in 1965, where she became friends with writer John Marquand, then his wife, Sue.

The Marquands, wealthy New Yorkers, were among the many people over the years who became benefactors as well as friends.

As with his previous works — the biography of Frank Sargeson, for instance — King offers dazzling and
fastidious attention to detail.

Traversing the 550 pages is a smooth and hypnotically enjoyable drift through Frame's many journeys and along the pathways of New Zealand literature — the events both big and small that have set the stage for Frame's life.

Having peeled away the layers, perhaps that elusive centre holds the most private thing of all — something that isn't dramatic to write about but that for which, after all, Frame is most famous. We could depict it as a kind of still-life: the writer alone at a table, motionless other than her fingers roving over the keyboard, her head slightly bowed to the screen on which words, ordinary words, are being woven into something extraordinary.

* Wrestling With The Angel by Michael King (Viking, $49.95).

To buy the book online from FlyingPig

Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame