Sometimes I browsed in Modern Books (the old Cooperative Book Society) where I hoped to glimpse one of the literary figures of Dunedin or one visiting from up north. I now knew by heart most of the stories from Speaking For Ourselves, as well as the biographical notes on the writers and the introductory chapter which, like the introduction to the Book of New Zealand Verse, became my primer of New Zealand literature. I accepted every judgement without question: if a poem or story was said to be the ‘best’, then I believed it to be so, and searching it for proof, I always found proof. These two books were among my few links with 1945.
I bought a copy of Landfall and read it with awe – there was avant garde Maurice Duggan writing sentences without verbs, even one-noun sentences; and using italics; and painting New Zealand scenes unfamiliar to me, mostly from up north, with the subtropical heat crackling on the pages, and the old jetties rotting and the mangroves deep in grey mud; he seemed to relish writing about the mangroves; and about long-haired women in bedrooms; and everything that glistened – leaves and skin and water: that was up north.
The poems of Landfall were obscure, scholarly, very carefully written with formal stanzas and intricate rhyme and rhythm; occasionally there was a rogue free verse of half-a-dozen lines. I sensed that if you didn’t appear in Landfall then you could scarcely call yourself a writer.
Then one day I saw Charles Brasch standing behind the counter selling books. Charles Brasch, the poet! I thought,
Speak for us, great sea.
Speak in the night, compelling
The frozen heart to hear.
The memoried to forget.
O speak, until your voice
Possess the night, and bless
The separate and fearful.
I bought a book of Allen Curnow’s poems. I noted that Mr Brasch looked approvingly as he wrapped it for me. Then he said, as if startled, ‘Oh. You’re Janet Frame? Do you live in Dunedin now?’
‘I’ve been here a few months. I live and work at the Grand Hotel.’
He looked uneasy, and said again, ‘Oh.’
He then asked if I would like to come to his place for tea one afternoon. I looked shy.
‘What about this Thursday? At half-past three?’
‘Yes, that will be alright.’
He gave me his address in Royal Terrace. He had a poet’s eyes, a soft voice, and thick black hair. I remembered his poems in the Book of New Zealand Verse: they were mysterious poems, questions addressed to the mountains, the sea, and the dead, with the sad certainty that here would be no answer.
‘I’ll see you on Thursday, then. And remember, if you have anything to contribute to Landfall, you can always leave it at the bookshop.’
‘Yes,’ I said smiling shyly.
That evening I told Pat and Doreen that I was going to afternoon tea on Thursday at the house of a poet.
‘He’s one of our best poets,’ I said
‘What will you wear?’ they asked.
I was saving to buy a green coat I’d seen in the window of Mademoiselle Modes but I hadn’t yet saved its price of ten pounds.
‘I haven’t a coat,’ I said.
‘Wear your jersey and skirt. And something to take away that bare look from your neck. Beads? Pearls would be better. You need pearls.’
‘Where do you think I would get pearls?’
‘Is the poet rich?’ they asked.
‘Well, you have nothing to worry about. Wear a brassiere though.’
The next day I went to the Fashion Centre in Moray Place where a heavily built woman in black with a black strip of velvet around her throat and pearl earrings like Aunty Isy’s, ushered me into the fitting-room.
‘Will you have plunging neckline or petal cups?’
The attention of the others and their interest in the afternoon tea embarrassed me. Soon everyone knew I was going. Even the liftman mentioned it. He too was one of the sad misfits for whom a working and living-place like a hotel became a shelter and who, in the hotel surroundings, appeared strong and confident, yet who glimpsed in the street displayed like a banner the frailty and difference.
Thursday arrived, promising rain.
‘Perhaps he will give you a coat,’ someone said, ‘if he knows you don’t have one.’
I walked up the hill towards Royal Terrace. I was far too early. I loitered, looking down over the harbour and peninsula, picking out the landmarks of University, the Museum, half-glimpsed through trees, the Normal School, and scarcely visible at the foot of Union Street, the Training College. I looked towards the Oval with its puddles and seagulls, and I thought of Number Four Garden Terrace and Aunty Isy who no longer lived there. Separated at last from the chocolate trophies of her dancing, she had turned to the source of her skill, her former dancing master, and after a brief courtship they were married and I had seen her with him, both laughing and happy, ‘passing through’ on the Limited, on their way to live in Mangakino, in a house without trees in the garden.
I looked towards Caversham. I thought of the house in Playfair Street, blocked from view by the grim shape of Parkside Home for the Aged. And I thought of the Carisbrook football ground and Whang McKenzie announcing the teams at the ‘Railway end’ or the ‘Cargill Road end’ and Whang, it’s a goal!
At last I found courage to knock on the door in Royal Terrace. Mr Brasch greeted me, then showed me to a large book-lined room where he served tea and seed cake while a white cat known as Whizz-Bang looked on. I told Mr Brasch that my mother had worked for old Mrs Beauchamp, Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother, and for ‘old Mr Fels’, his own grandfather.
‘She remembers you and your sister,’ I said.
Mr Brasch looked stern, I felt that he disliked personal reminiscences and references, but what else could I say? I knew so little. He began to talk of New Zealand literature. I remained silent. I thought, He must know where I have been for the past eight years. I suddenly felt like crying. I was awkward and there were crumbs of seed cake all over my plate and on the white carpet at my feet. Then, remembering the introduction to Speaking For Ourselves, I murmured one or two opinions on the stories, quoting directly from the text.
‘I agree with you,’ Mr Brasch said.
Our conversation died away. Mr Brasch poured more tea from an attractive pot with a wicker handle arched above it.
‘I’m fond of this teapot,’ he said, noticing my glance at it.
‘I’d better be going,’ I said.
‘Don’t forget that if you have any stories or poems you can leave them at Modern Books.’
‘Yes,’ I said in a shy whisper.
When Mr Brasch opened the door, he said in a startled voice, ‘Oh its raining, and you haven’t a coat. Would you like a coat?’
‘No thank you, I haven’t far to go.’
When I returned to the Grand Hotel and my fellow workers asked about my visit, I said slyly, ‘He offered me a coat.’
They were impressed.
‘You should have worn pearls, though,’ they said.
That week I typed a story and two poems for Landfall. The story, ‘Gorse is Not People’, dealt with a visit to Dunedin by another patient and myself in the company of a nurse. After many years in hospital, I had almost no clothes, possibly because my family’s image of people in hospital was that of patients in bed wearing nightgowns; and in any case, my family could not afford to give me clothes; and I was reluctant to ask them; therefore the hospital authorities were sending me to Dunedin with a nurse who would buy me some underclothing and deal with the affairs of the other patient, a woman celebrating her twenty-first birthday, known as her ‘majority’. She was Linda, a small wizened person who had been in hospital since her early childhood and whose explanation for her dwarf-like size was that she was ‘illegitimate’ and her mother had not wanted her to grow. Only the staff knew the reason for her being in hospital. The patients, myself among them, saw her as a small person, shrewd, tenacious of will, who was able to control many of the patients in the day room, either in the ‘clean’ day room or what was known as the ‘dirty’ day room. Linda also controlled the wireless with the choice of programme. For months she had been looking forward to her ‘twenty-first’ seeing in it the fulfilment of all her dreams, certain that when she became twenty-one she would be engaged, perhaps married, and allowed to ‘get out of this dump’. In preparation for her engagement she had bought a pretty blue ring from the hospital store where we made our weekly visit to spend the five shillings personal allowance from the government. Linda was sure that her day in Dunedin was related to her coming engagement and freedom.
Her excitement was infectious. It was to be a wonderful day. Cakes, ice cream, perhaps the pictures with us sitting in a ‘real audience’. And Linda, also with no-one to provide her with clothes, was to be fitted with a skirt and underwear.
My story tried to convey the reality of the visit. The nurse had explained to me that Linda was unaware of the reason for her being in Dunedin – she was to see a magistrate who would formally, now that she was twenty-one and adult, commit her to hospital ‘for life’.
Even after our return from the city, Linda talked of the ‘nice man’ who had spoken to her ‘specially’ and who might have been her ‘future husband ’cept that he was too old. He knew I was grown up, though, that I’d had my twenty-first. I showed him my ’gagement ring, saffirs.’
The two poems I offered Landfall are best not remembered, their hand was so heavy. ‘The Slaughter-House’ began
The mind entering the slaughter-house must remain calm, never calmer,
must be washed clean, showered on where the corned hide
holds fast to bits of bacterial thought, must await the stunning hammer
in silence, knowing nothing of any future load.
Electric shock treatment may turn many grim memories out of house and home; what is certain is that it invites as permanent tenants the grim memories of itself, of receiving shock treatment.
I left the story and poems at the Modern Bookshop, in an envelope addressed to Charles Brasch, and I returned to the Grand Hotel to await the response. I sat in my room inventing all possible judgements, imagining Charles Brasch in his book-lined room, opening the envelope, taking out the pages, unfolding them, reading them, and thinking, ‘At last! Here’s another writer of stories. We are indeed Speaking for Ourselves. What sensitivity! What subtle hints, never outright statements. The reference to the gorse is good – that chance remark of the nurse as the car leaves the Kilmog … What experiences this woman must have had (what tragic experiences!) to write in this way. A born writer.’
But – suppose he didn’t think the work was good? Perhaps, like a school report, he would say, ‘Can be improved. Not up to standard.’
I had made no copy of my story, to re-read it. What had I done?
Before the end of the week I received at the Grand Hotel a long bulky envelope containing my story and two poems. Mr Brasch’s comments were that the work was interesting, but the poems were not quite suitable while the story, ‘Gorse is Not People’ was ‘too painful to print’.
When I had read the note on its official Landfall paper, I began to realise how much I had invested in my Landfall contributions and their acceptance for publication. I seemed to have included my whole life and future in that envelope. I felt myself sinking into empty despair. What could I do if I couldn’t write? Writing was to be my rescue. I felt as if my hands had been uncurled from their clinging-place on the rim of the lifeboat. My unhappiness was eased, however, by the knowledge that at least the Listener had printed my poems and stories. I destroyed my story and the two poems. I comforted myself by remembering that in my years in hospital, when I clung to my copy of Shakespeare, hiding it under straw mattresses, having it seized and scheming for its return, not often reading it but turning the tissue-paper-thin pages which somehow conveyed the words to me, I had absorbed the spirit of The Tempest. Even Prospero in his book-lined cell had suffered shipwreck and selfwreck; his island was unreachable except through storm.
That year I was declared officially ‘sane’, and in a burst of freedom following my newly acquired sanity, I accepted the invitation to stay with my sister and her husband in Northcote, Auckland. I left the Grand Hotel (‘pleasant to the guests at all times’) and returned to Willowglen to prepare for my Auckland journey.
From An Angel at my Table.