AUGUST 10 2019 LISTENER 81
names were being seriously considered. Last
October, it was reported she was again in the
running, but I doubt that at that time the
picture had significantly changed for her.
There had been no new work since 1988,
and her chances in Stockholm had receded.
In fact, that flurry of renewed attention,
though I’m sure it can’t have been entirely
unwelcome, came at a bad time. She was
seriously ill. She emailed me, after it had
been announced that the South African
JM Coetzee had won: “Vampire-fashion I
have to have blood transfusions until ‘the
end’, and the day I was receiving phone calls
about the ignoble
prize I was in a
hospice learning
of my curtailed
future.”
“Curtailed
future” was char-
acteristic of her,
as her reply had
been when a
journalist asked
her what she
would do with
the money if she
won: “I’d buy back the railways.” Later, she
emailed me a photo of herself in hospital
receiving a blood transfusion. She was read-
ing a review I had written for the Listener,
holding it so the heading could be seen.
Success didn’t, of course, mean instant
and reliable happiness, but I think it stead-
ied her. Her sense of self no longer depended
solely on what was happening in her head.
It existed partly outside herself, even beyond
her control. Perhaps that was the biggest
award of all – a secure identity – and yet it
was something that, being the person she
was, she was partly embarrassed by and
wanted at times to escape from. When she
was beginning to be widely known, she
changed her name. The name on the pub-
lished work would remain Janet Frame. That
was the public person, the one upon whom
the honours were conferred. But her name
in law became Janet Clutha.
Her work is quirky, original, experimen-
tal, structurally discontinuous, very uneven,
full of surprises and, at its best, dazzling. Its
special genius is in the language – simple,
direct, with glittering clarity (something she
shares with Katherine Mansfield) and full of
brilliant images. She was a poet of prose (she
perhaps lacked the sense of form necessary
to be a poet of poetry), and I think it was
because her primary appeal lay in language
rather than in her
characters or subject
matter that she was,
as author Joy Cowley
said, “a writers’ writer”- or, anyway, a writer for sophisticated, liter-
ary readers.
Janet Frame’s novels have never quite
been bestsellers, either in New Zealand or
abroad, but she has always earned huge
respect. The broader public has been more
interested in her life than in the subtleties
of her writing. She came from poverty and
deprivation, through family disasters and
her own suicidal depressions and mental
breakdown, to become New Zealand’s best-
known author. It was an extraordinary story,
and when she wrote it as fact, rather than
just quarrying it randomly for the material
of fiction, she reached beyond her estab-
lished readership.
The three-volume autobiography, fol-
lowed by the Jane Campion movie AnAngel at My Table, gave her a much wider,
less literary public. That public was inter-
ested in her as a phenomenon, a victim of
the medical system, a mysteriously brilliant
author whose novels serious readers revered,
the woman who looked like a housewife
of the 1950s and was said to be admired
overseas and even a candidate for the Nobel
Prize! So, she was at one end of the scale a
writer whose work presented a challenge to
high-powered literary and academic minds,
and at the other a suburban success story, a
Dame Edna of Letters.
I find it hard to imagine how a Janet
Frame would be seen or would behave if she
were just arriving now into a literary scene
so commercialised, democratised, homog-
enised, in which so many emerging writers
are so keenly aware of what may and may
not be said, and so willing, even eager, to be
smoothed out and schooled for the market-
place. There was one British publisher in the
early 1960s – Mark Goulden – who tried to
teach Janet how to write “books that would
sell”. He failed, of course, and she went her
own way. We have to be grateful for that.
I think what is essential and durable in
her work is a tragicomic vision, bleak in its
implications but full of life, courage and
humour in its expression. New Zealand
has lost an icon, but we have not lost the
books she wrote or the letters and records
of an exemplary life. The life and the work
together are reminders of how unpredict-
able, uncontainable, unmanageable – how
rare and mysterious – real talent can be. lShe was at one end of the
scale a writer whose work
presented a challenge to
high-powered literary
and academic minds, and
at the other a suburban
success story, a Dame
Edna of Letters.CK Stead with Frame at the 1985
Wellington Writers Festival. Inset,
the author reading a Listener review
while receiving a transfusion.