A literary angel mourned

Herald Illustration / Rod Emmerson

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

No one doubted the literary community in New Zealand would deeply mourn the passing of Janet Frame, our most famous contemporary writer, but what has astonished us all is the widespread sense of national loss that followed the announcement of her death from leukaemia on Thursday.

The reverberations of sorrow from around the country came not so much from New Zealanders as readers - because she was never a racy, popular novelist - but from many thousands of people who understood that in a celebrity-spangled world, this retiring woman endured lifelong personal difficulties with unremitting courage.

To many Kiwis, Janet Frame's special triumph was her life, yet the 11 novels, short story collections and three volumes of autobiography written during the second half of the 20th century earned her an international reputation as one of the finest writers in English.

The legend of her young life happens to be true. In 1952, she was on the surgical list at Seacliff Hospital in Otago for a prefrontal leucotomy (more commonly known as lobotomy) to make her "normal", after she had been wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic. When told of the decision, made with the support of her confused mother, Frame later said her reaction was a "swamping wave of horror".

She was saved within days of an operation that would have destroyed her creativity by winning a literary prize for her first book, Lagoon and Other Stories. She had never heard of the Hubert Church Memorial Prize for prose but the announcement that she had won the award persuaded the hospital authorities not to proceed with the planned surgery.

Also, her life was marked by a dichotomy: she was at once famous and a recluse. Although a gentle, affable and humorous woman among her few close friends, she avoided contact with people, except on her own terms. In 1958, to distract attention, she changed her name by deed poll to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha. ("Nene" was after Tamati Waka Nene, a Maori leader whom she admired, and was close to her family nickname of "Nini". "Clutha" was after the river in Otago.)

In 1982, I discovered she was living in Wanganui and wrote to ask if she would allow me to interview her for the television arts programme Kaleidoscope. Her friendly reply said she was going overseas and would consider my proposition while she was away because she had liked the programme I did on Frank Sargeson. Six months later, she wrote and said no but I was welcome to call on her personally "on your way north or south, although there seems little point in that, now that I have decided about not being filmed". Next time I was going north or south, I decided to call on her but discovered she had moved on.

Over the years, she moved from town to town, making her whereabouts known to few people and always avoiding the limelight. She was easily distracted and upset by loud noise and, although she did accept occasional visitors, regarded a visit as "like a storm".