New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

80 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019

Cawley told me that the medical staff

considered her their most interesting

patient. They had all taken an interest in

her, and were divided more or less evenly

between those who accepted the New Zea-

land diagnosis of schizophrenia, and those,

like himself, who thought she had no clas-

sifiable mental illness but was suffering from

what he would later describe as “an existen-

tial dilemma – an identity crisis, something

very real and alarmingly elusive”. He also

told me that he thought the number of ECTs

(shock treatment) that had been forced on

her in New Zealand was “barbaric”.

The division of opinion about her “ill-

ness” is not quite the story she tells in her

autobiography, which seems, throughout,

motivated by the wish to clear her name

of the slur of “madness” – an odd and old-

fashioned motivation, it now seems, at a

time when we are encouraged (quite prop-

erly) to understand that mental health, like

physical health, is a spectrum, or scale, up

and down which we all move at different

times. Janet’s movements up and down

were more extreme than is common. There

was something unusual about her brain,

which (I don’t think it’s too much to say)

caused her at times to be partially disa-

bled socially, but which was also no doubt

connected to her brilliance and creativity.

After Maudsley, I think there were no

further hospital episodes, though her

contact with Dr Cawley, and her reli-

ance on his support, whether near at hand

or at a distance, continued. She dedicated a

number of her novels to him, and also the

third volume of her autobiography.

Her life was now focused on her writing,

but involved a lot of moving from place

to place. She had been a failure as a sea-

traveller, confined to bed, and even to the

ship’s hospital for most of that first journey

to Europe, but once air travel became afford-

able, she made frequent use of it, moving in

and out of New Zealand, spending periods

in the US (where she found new admirers,

and even rich patrons) and back in England.

In New Zealand, she changed addresses
often, usually following sister June and
June’s family, but also sometimes in search
of silence. She had a Proustian horror of
noise, and I remember a visit to one of
her many homes, I think it was in Levin
and probably in the early 1980s, when she
had piled a great deal of furniture into the
middle of the sitting room, leaving only a
narrow path around it, and had had the
front wall of the house covered with hide-
ous tiles meant to shut out the sounds of
what was, after all, a very quiet suburban
street. Janet never gave the impression of
having much sense of style when it came
to appearances.
And all the time there was new work
being written and published. Owls Do Cry
had established her as a brilliant new star
of New Zealand writing. She had strong
publishers’ backing in England and the US.
There was academic interest in her work,
and studies of it written. In New Zealand,
her books were set in English courses. She
was a success. Prizes were won and honours
awarded. She must, over the years, have
received every conceivable honour New
Zealand could confer.
The New Zealand PEN (Society of Authors)
wrote at intervals to the Swedish Acad-
emy nominating her for the Nobel Prize
for Literature, and in the late 1990s it was
rumoured, I think on good authority, that
AL she was among the very small group whose
AM

Y

80 YEARS

Kerry Fox as Frame in Jane

Campion’s 1990 movie An

Angel at My Table. Inset, the

author with the three actresses

who play her in the movie.

Lower inset, Frame’s home at

56 Eden St, Oamaru.

Her work’s special

genius is in the

language – simple,

direct, with glittering

clarity (something she

shares with Katherine

Mansfield) and full of

brilliant images.