I think I was in third form when we read Owls Do Cry. There it was. This hectic, wretched, wonderful and completely new kind of novel I’d never come across before, all criss-crossed sentences, interrupted dialogue and digressionary hallucinatory rants that took paragraphs off to goodness knows where. And set in amongst the steady, equally wonderful but reliable, somehow, slabs of prose that constituted most of our English syllabus, full of explanation and description, with reams of logical, rational discussion and thought. How shockingly different this book was from those.
Our English mistress had a glint in her eye as she’d handed out the copies. Am I imagining it, or were they the Pegasus Press original editions with the blue gothic-looking cover and scare-caps typeface? I like to think so. They sat on our desks, humming. The uncanny title, ripped out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, had been used to describe, well, what kind of story? This was only the start of it.
There was already the knowledge that this was a book by a New Zealand writer who had been institutionalised for “mental illness” – a phrase in the 70s that struck chill through the suburbs and coffee mornings of that time, causing panic and terror for housewives and schoolgirls alike. Mental illness! It could end in only one place and that was equally terrifying – the “Loony Bin” or “Nut House”, named as if it were a joke. And Frame had been in and out of such places all her life; she was “ill” in that kind of way.
Yet here was a novel she’d written about that experience, and our teacher was telling us it was one of the most important works of contemporary New Zealand literature, canonical in its contribution to international modernist letters. Crikey! All at once the goalposts had shifted.
Cracking the veneer
Owls Do Cry was the first piece of fiction I read that showed me books no longer had to arrive, fully and intelligently, out of some study or book-lined room. They no longer had to be “reliable” that way. They could come out of the experience of being in a place like the one in Wellington we referred to simply as “Porirua” – for that was where our nearest institution designed to “lock up the insane” (another phrase of ours) was located. Phrases like “Duh. Dummy. You should be in Porirua” carried the same dread as words like “insanity”, “depression”, “Valium”, “manic”, “suicidal” that flitted like little black bats at the edge of conversations at the beach or on the side of the tennis court in third-form lunch break.
Was there anything more terrifying, when things were supposed to be going so well, than having something wrong with your brain? Life was supposed to be fun, wasn’t it? This was the 70s. Despite the fact it was a time of great liberation in so many ways, everybody was also supposed to be happy and basically the same. Cars were parked smugly in carports up and down the country and little children were at kindy playing in Wendy houses. There were nice things to buy in the shops: barbecues, bikinis, groovy music to listen to.
So, just imagine. Mental illness would tear a strip through all that, wouldn’t it? It would send mothers with their labour-saving dishwashers and Saturday night dinner parties straight out of their kitchens and jobs and into a straitjacket. Or transform ordinary-looking fathers who might really be contemplating suicide into medicated zombies in some lock-up ward, the ghastliness of which we children could only imagine. And now, here we were, in the sunny classroom in Thorndon, being plunged into exactly that world. The normal gone all wrong.
So far, so Frame. In general, all the books of hers I’ve read have that crazed, paranoid sensibility underpinning their stories about families and small-town communities and people’s ordinary lives.
The feeling runs rampant through her texts: a fear of change, of what will be; that it will all come undone while events play out and do their thing. Frame’s third novel, 1962′s The Edge of the Alphabet, was published at the end of August in the UK by Fitzcarraldo Editions and is a welcome addition to the provision of the author’s work outside New Zealand. Owls Do Cry has been available for some time through Virago, and Deborah Treisman at the New Yorker did readers on both sides of the Atlantic a great service when she reintroduced them in recent years to Frame’s particular and highly idiosyncratic fiction through two previously unpublished short stories. Frame had last featured in the magazine back in the 60s. As Treisman says, “I think of Janet Frame’s work as having a kind of brutal sweetness, unstinting with honesty, all-seeing, grim, with the occasional shard of jubilation slicing through it all.”
The Edge of the Alphabet, like most of Frame’s others, has the terror, the surge and the potential of something vast and unnameable coming for you, without you even thinking you were susceptible to that sort of thing. Pat, a young, lonely Irishman between jobs, “confessed one evening that he did not know what he would do without the swans” that he visits daily on Clapham Common. They are the stuff of fairy tales and of his hopes and dreams and he is devastated when they are killed. “Outside, the stoned swans with blood pouring from them staining their feathers, beat at the windowpane to get in” is a motif that comes to dominate the end of this novel – and yet poor Pat is supposed to be a sensible fellow.
But only supposed to be, of course. He trembles in his bed at night. We meet him after first being introduced to Toby (Frame’s readers will recognise him from Owls Do Cry and Faces in the Water), who has decided to leave the South Island on a ship bound for “overseas”. On board is also a spinster, Zoe, who has been kissed once by a steward as she lay ill in the infirmary, a kiss like “a bloom which had parted from the stem and which I found lying unidentified and picked up”, as well as a person called Thora Pattern, whose found papers, Frame purports, make up this story, and whose voice intervenes to comment on and guide the words of her characters throughout.
So, you might say, the ship’s cargo is already somewhat unstable. Toby is an epileptic, and right from the beginning, the prose fits and starts to keep up. “His feet had finished bleeding”, we read, meeting him as he starts tipping into a blackout. “They were withered now … Toby walked carefully, a saint or politician between the layers of knives. He walked on the sea too … His arm was shaking, not a human arm but a branch with twigs for fingers … He dived now and swam deep in the curving waves … where all forms were of shadowy dreams and ribboned sleep and the sun was only a green inkling, an intuition of light in the brain.” And that’s just the first page. We’re off. Anything could happen now.
“Janet Frame is, to me, one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century,” says Tamara Sampey-Jawad, associate publisher at Fitzcarraldo. “Her work tests the limits of language and of the form in a way that feels as original now as when her books were first published. The Edge of the Alphabet is the ideal publication with which to mark her centenary.”
Publicity director at the publisher Clare Bogen championed Frame as an author to publish. “I’m half-Kiwi,” she says, “and did my undergraduate dissertation on Janet Frame here in the UK, and at the time was really surprised by how few of her novels were available. My grandmother loved Frame, and she was always giving me books, both old from her library and when there were New Zealand reissues.”
It is exciting to know Frame’s work is reaching the review pages and newspapers in London. I’ve always been shocked how few people have heard of her books here. Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel describing Frame as “a unique and troubled soul” can hardly have helped matters. Has she been too “other”, too far away in mind and body from the generally calm and largely consensual communities of Britain’s so-called “chattering classes”?
Power to get inside you
For me, the first experience of being overtaken by her early novel in that “other” life of my own – childhood – was transformatory. I learnt, I realise now, what sentences could really do from Frame: about how they could be used like paint – one colour, then another. A stroke here. A wash there. How they didn’t have to blend and form an overall shape in order to make a picture. And I learnt, too, about how those same sentences had the power to get right inside you, changing the way you might think about the world, not from a story told about it, but from how the words had been put together in the first place.
In his book Metaphor, literary critic Denis Donoghue wrote that metaphors give a jump-start in thinking, “a jolt from a singular idea into another concept that enlarges and changes the way we think about a thing”. This, said Donoghue, underpins the meaning we make of the world around us.
In Owls Do Cry, there’s a moment when Daphne, in hospital, is offered a slice of bread and butter covered in honey and immediately swipes it up to place it under her armpit, scurrying off to eat it later in private, tasting the salt of her own sweat amongst the sweetness. So, a patient’s disorienting behaviour being described from, as it were, the inside – all sense and taste and metaphor.
What happens as a result in the text is way more than a dense literary description of a single incident. It goes on to affect the sentence after that, and after that, and all the way through the story. It’s unbelievably powerful, this way of writing, one thing overlaid by another, and another, and another. “Now I, Thora Pattern” we read in the newly republished novel, “(who live at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning …) walk day and night among the leavings of people …” Frame is utterly at home in the medium. She was born to metaphor. It’s the way she writes.
Breaking the taboo
Not that I was beginning to think about any of this when I opened the blue paper cover and began to read Owls Do Cry. Back in the third form, it was the subject itself that had me and my classmates utterly in its thrall, the terrifying and marvellous portrait of someone who had been “in” Seacliff [the Otago asylum], which, by comparison everybody said, made “Porirua” seem like Disneyland. At the time, it was true, everyone knew Seacliff was the worst.
Yet, here was a novel based on that experience by someone who had come out of being “in” and was now at large and happily writing fiction and poetry and winning awards.
I continued to read Frame and other works that showed the subject was no longer so strange or taboo. Marilyn Duckworth came after, in the fourth form I think, with her heroines’ swinging, moody and depression-riven unpredictability. Then there was Jean Rhys, followed by the inevitable Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. And I could see that Frame’s themes were not only her subject, but also her means. To paraphrase Katherine Mansfield in another context altogether, “these things would not die down”.
Jump and shock
I’ve never loved Frame’s work the way I love Mansfield’s. I’ve never even liked reading it. Every time I come out of one of Frame’s books – Faces in the Water, The Rainbirds, Scented Gardens for the Blind, Living in the Maniototo – they can be funny and always surprising and the people in them are awful and gorgeous and real, but there’s also a feeling of terrible ennui, of a malaise. The air has turned miasma yellow; this is a sickness I can’t shift. It’s as though the jump and shock of those same sentences have readjusted my brain; literary work gone right inside and infected me.
None of it makes me want to go back to her novels and short stories, though I do. Because, oh, how I admire these books, and understand now – rereading At the Edge of the Alphabet in Fitzcarraldo’s beautiful new edition and having recently read Donoghue’s Metaphor – that it’s the mighty power of metaphor that this writer introduced me to first.
Metaphor as a way of thinking about the world in the first place. A way of thinking about what writing can do before you even pick up a pen and start, and then continuing to think about it as you go on. Making every sentence an act of transformation is what Frame does. Demonstrating, word by word, as sentences turn into those great curling, spinning paragraphs of hers, that prose need not be there simply to serve the thing it describes, but can be a force of its own to reckon with.
Donoghue reminds us that tenor and vehicle, ordinary and extraordinary, the thing and its other, belong together – unsettling as it is. They become a force capable of great change and will to unsettle and alter, as well as lending energy and beauty and largeness to a thing.
No wonder Frame’s work threatens me with the feeling that my own mind might not be quite as steady as I’d hoped. Her sentences remind me that it’s all shifting in there, adjusting reality and changing perception, as it should, minute by minute, thought by thought; that that is what imagination is.