Janet Frame

Janet Frame, a chronicler of mental turmoil, died on January 29th 2004, aged 79

“THIS book ... is a work of fiction. None of the characters, including Istina Movet, portrays a living person.” The disclaimer to Janet Frame’s second novel, “Faces in the Water”, published in 1961, fooled no one. Istina Movet was herself in the thinnest disguise, enduring the full barbarities of the treatment of mental illness in New Zealand in the mid-20th century.

Miss Frame was first institutionalised in 1945, when she was 21. The doctors diagnosed incipient schizophrenia. As she explained it, a great gap had opened up between herself and the world, “drifting away through a violet-coloured sea where hammer-nosed sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears.” No comforting god appeared to remove “the foreign ideas, the glass beads of fantasy, the bent hair-pins of unreason” embedded in her mind. She needed “treatment” – electro-convulsive therapy at the Seacliff hospital in Dunedin.

Every part of this therapy was horrific to her. The sleek, cream-painted machine with its knobs and lights; the smell of methylated spirits, rubbed on her temples so that the shock would take; the grey woollen socks she would compulsively wear on treatment days, “to ward off death”; the stifled, choking cries of other patients; and the shock itself, a trap-door dropping open on darkness. As she came round afterwards, her tears kept falling “in a grief that you cannot name”.

For almost a decade, Miss Frame moved in and out of institutions. Since electric-shock treatment did little for her, it was decided in 1952 that she needed a lobotomy. She had often seen such patients returning from the hospital, “with plaster over their shaven heads ... and the pupils of their eyes large and dark as if filled with ink.” Now she, too, was to be “changed” into someone biddable and quiet.

But she had also been writing while in hospital. In the nick of time, “The Lagoon”, a collection of short stories, was published and won New Zealand’s highest literary prize. “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed,” said Seacliff’s chief surgeon. As Miss Frame later agreed, “My writing saved me.”

It was to go on doing so. “Faces in the Water” was written as a therapeutic exercise on the advice of her psychiatrist at London’s Maudsley hospital, where she admitted herself as an outpatient in 1957. To the end of her life she used writing as therapy, not caring whether she was published. Her autobiography (which was made into the film “An Angel at My Table” in 1990) was meant to set the record straight and show that she was not disturbed. She loathed being labelled a “mad genius”.

Yet as her fame spread abroad, leading last October to her nomination for the Nobel prize for literature, she admitted that madness was a mantle for her. When her Maudsley doctors had told her that she was not schizophrenic, she remembered wistfully

how ... I had accepted [my schizophrenia], how in the midst of the agony and terror of the acceptance I found the unexpected warmth, comfort, protection: how I had longed to be rid of the opinion but was unwilling to part with it. And even when I did not wear it openly I always had it by for emergency, to put on quickly, for shelter from the cruel world. And now it was gone ...

If she was not mad, perhaps her strangeness, shyness and social ineptitude sprang from her background. She was born in Dunedin, in New Zealand’s far south. Her father worked on the railways,and the family moved constantly from small town to small town: Outram, Glenham, Wyndham, Oamaru. They were poor but artistic; her mother, a poet and Christadelphian, encouraged her children to “wondrous contemplation” of stones, stars and words.

At four, Janet made up her first story. At around that age, too, she had what she described as “my first conscious feeling of an outside sadness”, as she stood on the long white road that ran past the Outram swamp and heard the wind sighing in the telephone wires. Already, “Outside” and “Inside” were in strong conflict in her life. At school, red-haired and gawky, she found her inner world of books taking over the “real” world, “the literature streaming through it like an array of beautiful ribbons through the branches of a green, growing tree.”

As she grew older, having lost two sisters by drowning, she sought the Inside more and more: in imaginary diaries, in the huts where she hid to write, or in the linen cupboard at Seacliff, with its little dusty window looking over lawns to the sea:

... the prospect of the world terrified me: a morass of despair, violence, death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere.

Miss Frame came to terms with the world eventually, but never needed its approval. Nor did she lose her restlessness. When she was nominated for the Nobel prize, an honour that did not excite her, she was asked how she would spend the prize money. She said she would use it to buy back New Zealand’s now-privatised railways, the fabric of her tortured past.