Janet Frame.(Biography)

Publication: The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Review of Contemporary Fiction

When considering the late Janet Frame's oeuvre, critics often focus on the autobiographical aspects of her writing. Frame was, after all, widely known for her life, particularly her movement in and out of mental institutions during a twelve-year period. Yet Frame's creative enterprise was not autobiography; her writing is first and foremost the rendering of the imagination. In fact, Frame's three-volume autobiography, which appeared as the penultimate project of her literary career, attempts to elucidate, not to justify, her creative project. To borrow the title from her third novel, Frame's project was sharing her imagination--to capture what is at the edge of the alphabet in writing.

Frame's autobiography is a type of bildungsroman. From childhood she was a voracious reader, particularly after winning a grammar-school award that gave her a membership to the local (membership only) library. As she sketches her artistic development, Frame considers the distinction between her life and her art, specifically the time she spent in mental asylums. Reducing Frame or her work to the equation asylum = Frame = writing = Frame is extremely problematic. Yet it is impossible to dismiss the importance of life experiences, as Frame herself freely admitted. She readily accepted that writers do not exist in a vacuum, and she believed life experiences are acutely intertwined within the workings of the imagination, be they childhood experiences in rural New Zealand or incidents within mental institutions. However, at each creative moment, at each imaginative moment, Frame was aware that writing is a construction. This awareness is made inextricably clear both by the manner and the mode of her writing.

Much of her writing, in fact, is metafictional--metafictional in the sense that the process of writing and the constructedness of writing appear within the narrative. In her autobiography Frame defines the constructedness of autobiography: "Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as looking back, can just as well be looking across or through" (191). Writing, for Frame, regardless of whether it is autobiography or fiction, is always a construction. In one of the most useful critical readings of Frame's work, Judith Dell Panny argues that Frame's work is allegorical where "the work's moral purpose will be achieved through contrasting examples and highly equivocal situations.... The reader is impelled to think and judge ... leaving space for each reader to connect images and ideas and to draw individual conclusions" (7). By examining the allegorical nature of Frame's works, Panny establishes a discourse that considers Frame's playfulness as well as the ethical dimension of her writing. Yet for Frame, the ethical is always entwined within the creative; she is never didactic. Some critics, like Gina Mercer, fail to do Frame justice when they establish arguments that are solely political. When Mercer defines Frame as "other," she conveniently ignores that Frame participates without reservation in literary discourse, specifically high modernist discourse. When Frame read works by William Faulkner or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, she felt her creative project wholly justified and unabashedly situated within literary discourse.

Frame valued literary experimentation as a means to more fully explore the imagination, which she considerd, to use one of her favorite metaphors, a mirror city, the metaphor at the core of her third volume of autobiography. In that volume Frame writes that the "self must be the container of the treasures of Mirror City, the Envoy as it were, and when the time comes to arrange and list those treasures for shaping into words, the self must be the worker, the bearer of the burden, the chooser, the placer and polisher" (405, italics added). The craft of writing is a craft of manipulation. The craft of writing is the craft of shaping into words the imagination. And in line with the Coleridgean notion of the artist, it is the Envoy who is able to imagine most fully. Yet to live life in the imagination carries burdens: "Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border on an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning the unique functioning of Mirror City, its skies and space, its own planetary system, without stopping to think that one may become homeless in the world, and bankrupt" (Autobiography 406). Having grown up poor and having chosen a profession that provides at best an erratic income, Frame was often concerned with her material well being. Her pattern of checking into the hospital, in fact, usually corresponded to her anxiety of managing worldly logistics.

Janet Paterson Frame, born in August 1924, changed her legal name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha: "Nene because of her admiration for the Maori chief Tamati Waka Nene, and the fact that she had been called 'Nini' as a child; Paterson, her Scottish grandmother's surname, had previously been her second name; and Clutha was a tribute to the river that had so impressed her on her fruit-picking summer in Central Otago in 1944, as well as being the Gaelic name for Clyde, in whose valley her father's parents had been born" (King 191-92). In her later years, after giving up publishing, she lived contentedly in New Zealand, the home of her imagination. Even as she lived and traveled extensively, Frame's heart was never far from New Zealand, largely because the physical landscape captured her so completely.

When exploring Frame, we cannot escape contradictions. Even as she lives in her imagination, she recognizes her surroundings. Even as she insists that Owls Do Cry is not autobiography, she argues that moments of the novel are factual. Even as she writes autobiography, she admits it is a construction. At each moment Frame forces her readers to pay attention to the specific and particular constructedness of each work; each work operates within an assembled framework. Yet the dualities do not work in opposition, but rather in dialogue, a dialogue that occurs within the imagination. When readers read her work, be it her fiction or her autobiography or her poetry, Frame empowers their minds. Frame allows readers to participate in the imaginative process.

One of Frame's narrative trademarks is the use of radical jumps within narratives. Yet Frame never asks readers to traverse spans that are not unmanageable. From her perspective, narrative and social constructions exist because of language; they are entwined. And neither construction is seamless. As Frame imagines the world, she is bombarded with remembrances of her sisters who drowned, Myrtle in 1937 at age sixteen and Isabel in 1947 at age twenty-one; of her mother, a struggling housewife who vastly preferred scribbling poems at the kitchen table to managing the household; of her father, who left New Zealand to fight in Europe only days after getting married, who worked for the railroad on returning to New Zealand, who enjoyed embroidery and playing bagpipes; of her brother Gordon, who as an epileptic had seizures and problems with alcohol and stable employment. Her memory also contains remembrances of a shy adolescent with poorly fitting clothes and frizzy red hair; of being forced to stand in front of her classmates until she admitted she had stolen money from her father; of feeling an outcast at the teachers' college; of spending the better part of twelve years moving in and out of mental institutions; of having a miscarriage while in Andorra; of being erroneously diagnosed a schizophrenic.

Within days of entering Colquhoun Ward, the psychiatric ward of Dunedin Public hospital, on 18 October 1945 at the age of twenty-one, Frame was diagnosed a schizophrenic, and within two weeks, she was sent to Seacliff Hospital, the most notorious mental institution in New Zealand. While she spent only six weeks at Seacliff during her initial period of hospitalization, she would readmit herself to the hospital periodically over the next twelve years. During one stretch, she spent four-and-a-half years out of six in the hospital, and by her count, Frame, "received over two hundred applications of unmodified E.C.T. [electroshock therapy], each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution, and in the process having my memory shredded" (Autobiography 223-24). Frame left Seacliff for the last time in 1955 though she was still legally a schizophrenic until October 1957 when, after voluntarily entering Maudsley Hospital in London, she was told that she was not nor ever had been a schizophrenic: "Finally I was summoned to the interview room where the medical team sat at a long table with Sir Aubrey Lewis at the head. The team had already had its meeting and formed its conclusion, after a few minutes' conversation with me, Sir Aubrey gave the verdict. I had never suffered from schizophrenia, he said. I should never have been admitted to a mental hospital. Any problems I now experienced were mostly a direct result of my stay in hospital" (Autobiography 374-75). In the years that followed, Frame would visit and keep in touch with her Maudsley psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Hugh Cawley, who unfailingly recognized and supported her literary aspirations.

Frame would probably never have made it to England nor broken the cycle of hospitalization had it not been for Frank Sargeson, a preeminent New Zealand writer with whom she lived while writing her first novel, Owls Do Cry. Sargeson not only provided her with the opportunity to live her life as a writer, he also convinced her to travel. Once leaving New Zealand in July 1956, Frame would remain abroad until 1963. When she returned to New Zealand, given her publishing success in England and the United States, she was an eminent author. Though she would make subsequent trips overseas, often to the United States, Frame always considered New Zealand home.

Once Frame returned to New Zealand, she would again have to deal with her earlier diagnosis. As late as 1974 Frame asked Cawley for a letter, explicating her mental state: "Miss Janet F. Clutha has told me that a number of literary scholars and editors of anthologies are publishing biographical comments which refer to her previous state of mind as sick or disordered. I understand that some people are going so far as to suggest that her creative ability is in some way related to a history of mental illness.... She has been seen by a number of eminent psychiatrists all of whom agree with my opinion that she has never suffered from a mental illness in any formal sense" (qtd. in King 388). This problem was particularly endemic among New Zealand critics who were concerned with biographical links, believing her work romans a clef.

In one of the most thorough books on Frame's early work, by Patrick Evans, published in 1977, the problem is explicit. Throughout his book, Evans unflinchingly critiques her works through his selected mode of criticism, biographical criticism. It is not until the epilogue that Evans even attempts to discuss "issues which are not intrinsically a part of the biographical approach to criticism" (195). Yet even as he attempts the shift the discussion falters. When he argues, for instance, that "The single trait which most often reveals the introspectiveness of her writing is her obsession with language" (203), he places the argument back within the realm of biography with his definition of introspectiveness: "Her imaginative world is possessed by a force of gravity that draws all things to a center at which she herself stands ..." (203). The fundamental difficulty with this type of criticism is that it insists on a particular, and in this case erroneous, perspective. The works are seen less as creative enterprises and more as essays or expositions, since attempts are made to discern the "biographical intent" of each work. Evans's critical perspective removes narrative concerns from consideration. Because he removes narrative concerns, Evans is not in a position to mention that Frame broadened narrative possibilities. Yet her primary purpose, of course, was not to expand narratology but to render her imagination, an imagination that positions her as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951)

While Janet Frame was still in Seacliff, her first collection of stories, The Lagoon and Other Stories, was published. The collection not only won the prestigious Hubert Church Memorial award, it literally saved her from undergoing a leucotomy, the New Zealand equivalent to a lobotomy. When the hospital superintendent, Geoffrey Blake-Palmer, read about the award, he scratched her name from the procedure list, saying, "I've decided that you should stay as you are. I don't want you changed" (Autobiography 222); Frame, it seems, was within days of having the devastating operation. while Frame was spared, the daughter of a college lecturer of hers, Audrey Scrivener, or Nola, underwent the procedure: "when I was eventually discharged from hospital, Nola remained, and although she did spend time out of hospital, she was often re-admitted.... Nola died a few years ago in her sleep. The legacy of her dehumanizing change remains no doubt with all those who knew her; I have it with me always" (Autobiography 223). Frame, realizing that she could easily have ended up in the same incapacitated state, wrote Audrey a stream of letters.

The collection of stories was submitted for publication by John Money, a graduate student studying psychology. He had encouraged Frame's writing for diagnostic purposes and believed her stories would give him insight into her mental state. Unfortunately, unlike Robert Cawley, Frame's British psychologist, Money did not have the literary foundation to recognize that Frame often played with literary conventions during their conversations and in her stories. It was Money, in fact, who facilitated her first admission to the hospital.

While Frame did not select the title nor for that matter the stories included in the collection, the title story nicely locates the collection as it deals with the slipperiness of truth. The female protagonist in "The Lagoon" revisits a childhood haunt with her aunt. Having always heard stories from her now deceased grandmother, the protagonist asks the aunt to tell her the truth, so her aunt tells a story: "your great-grandmother was a murderess. She drowned her husband, pushed him in the lagoon" (5-6). This story exhibits many conceits that Frame would use throughout...

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