THE JANET FRAME QUESTION.(Review)

IN THE CENTURY of materialisms and externality which have yet to escape, Janet Frame became one of the w major writers of the inner life. Born in Dunedin 1924, after much travel she now lives there quietly near her sister Her twenty-first book and probably last novel, The Carpathians, dates from 1988. A life-threatening illness halted by surgery helped her confront the motivating terror of death (datable to the early deaths of first one then a second sister, both while swimming) and surmount it. This has relieved her of the urgent need to write, according to this new and first biography, Wrestling with the Angel.

We can be grateful that the biography is by Michael King, New Zealand's premier biographer--particularly of Frank Sargeson, Frame's crucial mentor. King has written a biography that is all circumstances, but a befitting one, as Frame herself in her three memoirs, eleven novels and numerous poems and stories, has attended to the inner story. Thorough interpretation of her imaginative achievement lies outside King's scope. Enough that her art is not plundered reductively to invent a suppositious private life, the besetting sin of so much literary biography. (See David Ellis's recent Literary Lives, an entertaining study of "biography and the search for understanding".) How autobiographical are her fictions? Frame's sensitivity on this score is symbolised by her decision that The Edge o[ the Alphabet (1962) be not reprinted in her brother's lifetime. How fictional are her autobiographies? She says, "I am always in fictional mode, and autobiography is found fiction."

You may think that the inner life is beyond mere place, beyond society, in the way in which the poetry of Rilke, for example, for all the fascination of b/s life story, seems to float in the spiritual air. Frame's books, however, are grounded in the ordinary life of her own living and the living of her countrymen and women (along with renderings of her British and American experience). Frame's New Zealandness is not what you expect to discuss first or foremost, and Frame's "criticism of society" is not expected to dominate exploration of her work, any more than that of Patrick White's. But like White, as their biographers confirm what pervades their fictions, she has been a lifelong social observer of great independence and radical originality.

Her novels may not imply a politics, or point to social policies and programs of amelioration, but they carry on their surfaces a brilliant series of penetrating social-psychological analyses, and they are underpinned by a never-articulated grounding in a social philosophy which an historian of ideas might well link to Simone Weil or de Beauvoir or the social psycho-analytics of Alice Miller.

None of these names figure in King's biography, nor did I expect them to. Frame's reading seems to have been in the literary classics almost exclusively. As for ideas, Frazer, Freud and Jung she read for herself in the Dunedin Public Library around 1944. Religion has not involved her--King recounts a flirtation in her late fifties with Roman Catholicism, which flopped. More importantly, over the years Frame spent countless hours discussing mental disorder and schizophrenia with her two extraordinary therapist-mentors.

The first, John Money (remade as "Forrest" in the autobiographies and the Jane Campion movie, Angel at My Table), in excited mutual fascination let her talk her way into institutional care as a schizoid patient, but never quite lost touch with her and became a steadfast friend and helper whose long-time home in Baltimore (where he'd become a professor of sexual psychology at Johns Hopkins) was always open to her

The second--encountered in London in 1957, at the enlightened Maudsley Hospital--R.H.C., the dedicated of Faces in the Water (1961) and later books, was Robert Cawley, a soon-to-be distinguished psychiatrist whose career centred on Birmingham. Cawley rescued Frame from the faulty diagnosis; he encouraged her writing and her struggle with fear and the stigma of her past.