‘We were to be real town dwellers with electric lights and a pull-the-chain lavatory instead of a dumpy hole, and at first the rush of water frightened us, and the brightly lit rooms with the furniture deprived of its big enveloping shadows seemed harsh and too public.”
The recording of Janet Frame, reading from page 54 of the first book of her autobiography To the Is-land, floats eerily from the old valve radio in the small living room at 56 Eden St, a railway house on a quarter-acre section in Ōamaru described by Frame as her “kingdom of the sea”.
This was her childhood home from the age of six to when she left Waitaki Girls’ High School for tertiary study in Dunedin. It is where she played with her sisters, hid messages in brass bed knobs, made up stories, explored the “plannies” (the pine reserve behind the house) and, as quoted by her biographer, Michael King, “ran wild”.
When heritage expert Bill Tramposch, then chief executive of the Historic Places Trust, visited the town in 2000, he found the house derelict, windows broken, garden overgrown. “It was like if you came to Massachusetts and you walked past the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson and noticed that it was derelict with windows broken,” he says on the phone from his home in California. While Ōamaru celebrated its whitestone architectural heritage, “there was a kind of amnesia as to who Janet Frame was and where she came from”.
In 2002, he and his wife, Peggy, bought the house for $35,000. They painted walls, mowed lawns, gathered a team of committed Ōamaruvians, established the Janet Frame Eden Street Trust, which now owns the house museum (not to be confused with the Janet Frame Literary Trust, which is responsible for copyright and administers the Literary Trust Awards), and contacted a rather bemused Janet Frame, then living in Dunedin.
“I told her I wanted to restore it to exactly the way it was when she lived here,” Tramposch recalls. “She said, ‘Why on earth would you do that? There were filled chamber pots and broken windows and cats jumping in and out of the house.’”
By this time, too, the sash windows had been replaced, the weatherboards roughcast, the panelling and match lining covered over. In discussion with Frame and her younger sister, June Gordon, the trust decided the house should be “re-framed”.
Tramposch quotes the first sentence of Frame’s autobiography: “I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths.” That line, he says, “was almost a guiding principle”.
Except for the linoleum, a glimpse of wallpaper and a typewriter once belonging to Frame, the other artefacts – the crocheted chair covers, the framed photograph of Michael Joseph Savage, the Zane Grey books – serve as a reflection of the times, interwoven with those “truths and memories of truths”.
“I think Janet wanted it to look how she would have liked her place to look,” says former trustee Alison Albiston.
When a replica dresser was built from doors found under the house, she says, Frame asked that the cups on their hooks “be close enough to rattle during an earthquake”.
Frame wanted a place to sit beside the coal range, “because that is where she had her adventures, reading her books”.
As Tramposch says, it is not necessarily about the things in the house “as much as being about the imagination that was spawned in that house”.
As the country marks the anniversary of Frame’s birth on August 28, 1924 (she died in 2004, aged 79), the Janet Frame House epitomises that unbordered space between reality, imagination and interpretation that seems to define her work, and readings of her work.
Frustratingly, certainly for fans of her fiction, it is her life story that is most well known: the financial hardship, the poetry-writing mother, the anxious adolescence (that unruly hair, that ill-fitting school uniform), the loss of first one, then another sister by drowning, the rages and confusion of her brother Geordie, prescribed bromide for his epilepsy, her first foray into adult short stories (the first, University Entrance, was published in the Listener in 1946), her years as an inpatient and outpatient at psychiatric institutions, the last-minute cancellation of a planned lobotomy.
Then to Auckland, writing her first novel, Owls Do Cry, in Frank Sargeson’s army hut. Then London, Ibiza, Andorra and back to London, where the psychiatric team at Maudsley Hospital revoked the weighty diagnosis of schizophrenia.
She related this personal story in her contribution to Landfall’s “Beginnings” series in 1965. She described a childhood steeped in reading – “In my family, words were revered as instruments of magic” – and tragedy. “With a background of poverty, drunkenness, attempted murder and near-madness,” she wrote, “it was inevitable that we should feel close to the Brontës.”
She recounted the day she walked out of the classroom and a teaching career, moving “from ‘this’ world to ‘that’ world where I have stayed”.
She later backtracked on the essay. “‘That’ world,” she told the New Zealand Herald, “is not the dangerous area of dream, disturbance, or insanity.” Rather, it was the life of “an imaginative writer”. Yes, she was shy, but “I’m a great lover of fun and laughter. I wish you would all believe me.”
Just a small-fry citizen
Her story was picked up again in 1977 in an unauthorised biography/literary critique by young University of Canterbury English lecturer Patrick Evans. Frame, apparently, was infuriated. “She was pissed off, which was fair enough,” Evans says now. “I was young and foolish and I apologised.”
To set the record straight, and to dispel the idea that her fiction was the expression of a disordered mind, in the early 1980s Frame wrote her three-volume autobiography: To the Is-land, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City.
“I think the way I am writing the story of my life might at least show that I’m not – well, that I am a human being. I’m just a small-fry citizen in a big shiny world,” she told the Herald. “I have never, never been in the world of insanity. I have observed insanity and I know what it is like. Something definite like measles. I can recognise it and I can prove that it never had anything to do with me.”
All three volumes were widely acclaimed and won awards. But they did not divert attention away from Frame’s personal story. The books were followed by Jane Campion’s equally admired 1990 film An Angel at My Table, described by Frame’s niece Pamela Gordon, her literary executor and chair of the Janet Frame Literary Trust, as a “semi-fictionalised version” of Frame’s autobiography. A decade later, Michael King released his authorised biography, Wrestling with the Angel (he abided by Frame’s request that the biography not include an analysis of her writing). Then came an opera – “reprehensible in my opinion”, says Gordon. Then a film of the opera.
As the late literature professor Lawrence Jones wrote, “The story of her coming to write has been more important to the general public than the fiction itself.”
Which is a problem, says University of Canterbury lecturer Nicholas Wright. “It means you don’t read the books and pay attention to all the amazing things she is able to do with language and ideas.”
And her books do do amazing things. In novel after novel, story after story, she ducks and dives through different voices, different forms, different literary tropes, ravelling stories through drifts of words, lyrical, allegoric and brilliantly timeworn: “the great red-flagged sale of trivialities,” says Erlene in Scented Gardens for the Blind. There are tongue-tied or silent women, like Grace Cleave in Towards Another Summer, published posthumously in 2007, epileptic sons, lonely women, isolated writers, narrators building worlds within worlds.
The subject matter can be difficult – at least one generation of secondary school pupils sent home with Owls Do Cry or The Edge of the Alphabet would have contended with suicide, sibling death, social isolation and, like Ōamaru’s house museum, that layering of mannered conformity and imaginative freedom.
This is what Massey University’s Jennifer Lawn touched on in 2010 when she described the “recurring, bleak dialectic” in many of Frame’s works, “where the mad look into the eyes of the sane for confirmation of their humanity, only to find blank pools … while conversely the sane look to the mad for confirmation of difference, and find instead an uncanny similarity”.
“But she is also difficult formally,” says Wright. “What is a novel? What is form? All her texts ask those sort of questions.”
Particularly after her first three novels, he says, “her writing gets richer, stranger, more challenging. She pulls all sorts of stunts and tricks to the point where you realise at the end of a novel that the three characters you thought were real and independent are all just in the head of a narrator – she plays with that authorial role all the time.”
On the edge of things
At a time when New Zealand literature was dominated by an older generation of cultural nationalists – Charles Brasch, Allen Curnow, Denis Glover, Sargeson – Frame, says Wright, “is writing something so different. It is not like anything that New Zealanders have ever read before. There is that sense of being on the edge of things.”
She was an outsider, in terms of gender, class, form and the seemingly uncrackable lens of psychological instability through which she was seen.
Wright acknowledges Evans as one of the earliest critics to draw attention to Frame’s work. “He apologised [for the unauthorised biography] and for the rest of his career has written essays and books of increasing sophistication, culminating in novels that I think are the most respectful response to Frame. All of his work has been to say, look at how amazing this is.”
Since then, Frame has been critiqued as an impressionist, feminist, social realist and post-colonialist. As Gordon says in an email interview, “She studied and read widely in literature and criticism and was extremely well aware of literary movements.” She was a fan of the French New Wave, a proponent of the “modernist method”, and later included magical realism as well as post-modernism in her work.
While Wright is wary about assigning a single label to Frame’s work, she was, he agrees, drawing on an international tradition. “If she’d been born in America, she would have been talked about in the same context as metafictionalists like Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme; if she was in England, she would be described as like Iris Murdoch, Sylvia Plath. [JM] Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello could be a Frame character.”
Local and international literary prizes piled up. She was an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize (twice), was made a CBE and a member of the Order of New Zealand. Her work was admired by Patrick White and Hilary Mantel. As Mantel wrote in her introduction to the 2009 Virago edition of Frame’s 1961 novel Faces in the Water, “Frame’s inner geography is complex, her psyche contains elaborate structures. She had the artist’s ability to make strange associations and imaginative leaps; along with this ability goes, not infrequently, a certain social awkwardness, a deep reserve and a tendency to withdraw from small talk.”
A genius? “Oh yes, absolutely, off the planet,” says Evans. “The two people who should have got Nobel prizes in New Zealand were her and Allen Curnow. But she would have hated that.”
Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages – the most recent being Catalan. Since her death in 2004, the literary trust has overseen the posthumous publication of two novels, a novella, a volume of poetry, a collection of stories, a miscellany of non-fiction and two books of letters.
Frame’s papers, held at the Hocken Collections library, have been approved for inclusion in Unesco’s Memory of the World designation for significant documentary heritage, there’s a new edition from London publisher Fitzcarraldo of The Edge of the Alphabet, and next year an entire issue of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature will be dedicated to Frame.
Her writing has also inspired a number of New Zealand writers (see Kirsty Gunn’s testament to Frame, opposite).
Evans’ 2010 novel, Gifted, a remarkable retelling of the 16 months Frame spent in an army hut on Sargeson’s property in 1955-56, was the first of several based on Frame’s life – he is now working on his fourth. Emily Perkins, Anna Smaill, Shayne Carter and Pip Adam have all acknowledged the influence of Frame’s work on their writing. As Adam told the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2022, “What took me back to Frame’s stories was this awareness that there was another direction to take my work in … I could lean into the discomfort, the strangeness.”
Rescued from demolition
Back in Ōamaru, plans are now under way to replace the garage at 56 Eden St with a new visitors’ centre, so allowing the front room of the house to be returned to its original purpose.
“So as much as possible we can strip out everything else and the house can be the house and the visitors’ centre can be the visitors’ centre,” says Eden Street Trust chair Chloe Searle. “The best house museums are the ones where you step through the door and you feel you have stepped back into that moment.”
Tramposch hopes the house he and his wife rescued from almost certain demolition more than 20 years ago will inspire more attention to her books. “What a historic house or museum should do is open up questions and get people intrigued, goad them into learning more, reading more.”
Wright is wary of efforts to canonise or simplify the writer, but when he visited the Janet Frame House, he experienced a moment that could be straight from a Janet Frame novel. “I went out to the back lawn and beneath an old rotary washing line, there was a cat tearing apart a bird. I thought, that’s Frame, a little bit of death behind the facade.
“I was sorry for the bird, but that detail, that moment of strangeness – that is what she would have been looking at. So I was glad I came.”
To read An Angel at My Table: The creation of a Kiwi classic, go here.