New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

AUGUST 10 2019 LISTENER 77

W

hen I try to focus

as exactly as I can

on Janet Frame as

I knew her, what I

always think of first

is humour – her jokes, and her response to

jokes. But these were not just any old “fun-

nies”; they often had to do with language

and with perception, and were full of

dangerous intelligence. It was as if the

whole of human existence was a joke

• a black one perpetrated by the gods.
  Here we were “on Earth”, destined to
  live (good), but also to die (bad), and
  with nothing certain “beyond” except
  extinction, and nothing that alleviated
  the starkness of this fact except our own
  inventions. That’s why the inventions –
  which we could make only because we
  had the gift of language – were the most
  important expressions of our humanity.
  There was truth and there was fiction,
  but in a way everything was a fiction,
  because it seemed we had no choice but
  to go on behaving as if everything was
  forever. We had to pretend our social
  structures enshrined absolutes. We had
  to pretend that there were universal
  sanctions, not because we could see that
  there were “really” (as children say), but
  because there ought to be, otherwise
  we were inhabiting a universe without
  justice.
  Janet’s presence, when I first knew her,
  had the feel of a self-recognising fabrication.
  It was tentative, an offering, as if she were
  saying, “This is quite absurd but – under the
  circumstances – what else can one do?” Later,
  that presence would become the voice of
  her fiction – equally tentative, but strange

and brilliant, as if she and her readers were

required to walk on water, and somehow,

by the magic of her language, contrived to

do it.

Apart from this darkly comic scepticism,

there was, however, another aspect to her

personality and her work, not a contradic-

tion, but an addition, which came largely

from her periods in mental hospitals and

from her memories of childhood. She had

no consistent “message”, but she had suf-

fered and seen suffering, and she did not

want it to be overlooked. She knew it con-

tinued everywhere, mostly unseen, mostly

inside people’s heads, and she felt a moral

responsibility to acknowledge that it was

there. It was this sense of responsibility that

produced some of the most vivid recollec-

tions and recreations in her writing; it gave

purpose and authority to the uses she made

of that part of her life-experience which was

exceptional, and exceptionally dark.

It could also sometimes trap her into

characterisations that equated misfor-

tune with virtue and luck with vice. Her

novels tended to be uncomprehend-

ing and unforgiving of those who were

comfortable and at home in the world,

and this could at times undermine the

quality of the fiction, making it seem

programmatic.

Janet (by her own account) grew

up with a sense of shame, of being

unwashed, with bad teeth, badly clothed,

poor. But it was a household rich in

poetry and stories, and the sense of

magic that went with them. Literature

transformed reality, redeemed it, even

superseded it. So there was a way out for

her, an escape through books, first in

reading, then in writing. But the shame

of poverty remained.

Many others from such backgrounds

have simply asserted their talents and

been able to leave deprivation behind.

She could not – she brought it with her

• and the reason for that, I suppose, was
  something genetic, biochemical, a social
  incompetence springing from extreme,
  almost morbid shyness, made worse by
  incarceration in mental hospitals at the time
  when a young adult needs to be out in the
  world learning social skills.
  Janet never quite lost the look of someone
  who was socially “disadvantaged”. Her body

Unmistakable

quality of genius

Janet Frame’s “dangerous intelligence” allowed her to see, feel

and express the mysteries we all experience, wrote CK Stead.

JAN

E (^) U
SSH
ER
This obituary of Janet Frame is reprinted from the February 7, 2004, Listener.