Lecture by Gregory O'Brien

Where the alphabet ends
Gregory O’Brien

Are there ‘pockets’ of poetry in the world as there are ‘pockets’ of depression and wealth, areas breeding poetry like a rare plant which the nation eats to satisfy an extra appetite, enjoying the pleasant taste without thinking too much of the dangers of the ‘insane root’.
Janet Frame, ‘Beginnings’

A brief introduction to where the alphabet ends

I would not have been the only person who, when Janet Frame died early last year, felt a sense that a piece of a jigsaw had gone missing and the puzzle would never be completed ever again. The particular alphabet of one very particular writer had come to an end.

However, two days after Janet Frame’s death, I opened my computer on the mezzanine floor here at the City Gallery and just about fell off my chair when I found in my INBOX an email from Janet Clutha (aka Frame). Although, as my friends keep on reminding me, I don’t seem to have attended God’s funeral, such direct communications from the hereafter leave me as flummoxed as anyone. Later in this talk I will return to that incident—which resembled an episode in a Frame novel—and the content of the posthumous communication.

However, I would like to propose that this talk today is my long overdue reply to Janet’s email.

The edge of the alphabet

Where might the alphabet end? Where the dry land of the known is lapped by the ocean of the unknown? Or is it the creek that rolls down the valley between reason and unreason? Is the edge of the alphabet the edge of understanding—or the edge of our capacity to express such things? It is certainly something Janet Frame spent a lifetime rephrasing and exploring. Maybe the edges of the alphabet are everywhere: at the edge of the page, the table, the label on a gallery wall... Until the posthumous email arrived from Janet Frame I thought that maybe death was the edge of the alphabet. But the alphabet goes on.

An exhibition entitled ‘Small World, Big Town’

Prior to the general election last month, there was much talk around the country of Don Brasch’s notion of a ‘mainstream’ New Zealand: a nation with a spine rather than a nervous system, unified rather than atomised, a kingdom of clear-eyed practical folk rather than dreamers, all of us focused on the practical things, a little blank perhaps, but resolutely so. I think it unlikely Don Brasch would have read Frame—and I certainly don’t think he would feel at home in the exhibition currently on at City Gallery Wellington, ‘Small World, Big Town’—an exhibition in praise of the arterial routes and side roads which take us away from the obvious centre, that take us into new territories.

This talk will follow a few arterial routes suggested by the exhibition, attending particularly to some locations suggested by art works which I also recognise in the writing---or, as I would rather think of it, the conceptual art---of Janet Frame.

I can’t think of a New Zealand artist more intrinsic to the concept of ‘Small World, Big Town’ than Frame. She was and is a fervent inhabitant of both the wide world and the small town, spending considerable time in Europe and America, and living in a maverick assortment New Zealand provincial locations. Her writing—which can be thought of as an obsessive map-making---oscillates between a series of far-flung geographical points. In The Carpathians (1988) an American writer washes up in Puamahara—a small New Zealand town resembling Levin—whereas, in Living in the Maniatoto (1979), a New Zealand writer washes up in Baltimore and then California. Frame’s last two novels, The Carpathians and Living in the Maniototo succinctly play out the ‘Small World, Big Town’ of our title—with its conspicuous avoidance of ‘nation’ or ‘country’. Frame was never much of a literary nationalist. ‘New Zealand’ as such is a comprehensive absence from her work. The universe and the parish, the cosmos and the backyard were her territories.

Janet Frame’s art is remarkably timely and relevant to contemporary New Zealand art. Her concerns prefigure many of the current crop of art world obsessions: domesticity and the everyday, toxicity and mutation, globalisation and millenarianism, an obsession with function and/or dysfunction, with sanity and health. She was the queen not only of the ‘mixed-up childhood’ but also of the tortured adolescence.

In a Landfall essay, Frame recalled how she and her sisters, as teenagers, went through a phase of writing novels with titles like There is Sweet Music, Go Shepherd, and The Vision of the Dust. Of these three titles Frame said she favoured the last because she was becoming ‘anti-shepherd, anti-sweet music, seeking the poetry in “the heart of the unobvious” by writing about such topics as cellophane paper, factories, ditches, slums, ugliness’. Certainly, much work in ‘Small World, Big Town’ has to be considered ‘anti-shepherd, anti-sweet music’.

If the show strikes an accord with Frame’s work, however, I also find myself thinking of her writing as a very deep questioning of the works in the show---but I will come to that later. Firstly, let’s dwell on certain matters raised by the exhibition title, concerning space and distance, the gap between the X that locates us on the map and the wide world out there.

The colour of distance

During the period I was involved in the curation of ‘Small World, Big Town’, I was co-editing The Colour of Distance, an anthology of work by New Zealand writers in France and, a rarer species, French writers who have worked in New Zealand. The book includes writing both by and about Janet Frame. (In fact the title of the book was taken from a passage in Frame’s novel Living in the Maniototo.) I found that both of these projects—exhibition and publication—were fixated on distances and proximities, the wide world out there and the interior.

The narrator in Maniototo—a typically Framesque self-projection---flits between America and her own house in Bannockburn Road on Auckland’s North Shore, with an interlude at the Rose Hurndell Room in Menton, France. We quote Frame on the back cover of The Colour of Distance: ‘I was glad the colour of distance was beginning to touch my view of my life…’. A letter Janet sent me in 1994 stressed not only the importance of place but also of this ‘colour of distance’—the need to move away:

I too am interested in place and the way I have lived in different places and, later, written of them or used them as a background. I was living in Stratford, Taranaki, when I wrote Living in the Maniototo; and in Auckland when I wrote of the area around Levin; and in New Zealand when I wrote of Suffolk… Absence, for me, is the first necessity of presence.

A helicopter over the Villa Isola Bella

I would like to take a brief detour to France, where my wife Jenny Bornoldt was the Katherine Mansfield Fellow in 2002. Arriving in Menton (a small town of a relatively big country) from Wellington (a relatively big town of a small country) we pondered the way that once writers or artists have colonised a place it becomes an imaginative province of their homeland. Such is the case with Menton—an outpost claimed for New Zealand by Katherine Mansfield in the 1920s and reclaimed by New Zealand writers on an annual basis courtesy of the K.M. Fellowship.

A week or so before Jenny and I left for France, I visited Janet Frame and we had a high-spirited conversation about Menton---where she had been the writer in residence back in the seventies---and where she completed a novel. We were drinking tea in her Melbourne Street villa. Frame gestured towards a filing cabinet on the other side of the room, where her unpublished novel set in France was tucked neatly away, like a sleeping child. When I announced an enthusiasm to read the thing, she stated her dissatisfaction with it—although subsequently deemed it neither better nor worse than any of her other novels, the published ones.

The characters in Frame’s novels often channel their author’s frustration at the small everyday things that conspire against the creative life: ‘Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down…people will play radios, traffic will change gear…’. I suggested that the French fellowship was a chance to escape all that. Not quite. Janet said that the main creative hurdle during her tenure in Menton had been the incessant noise of helicopters over the Mansfield Room (where she was living for a time as well as working). She told me she went so far as writing a letter to the local daily, the Nice Matin, complaining about the intrusive air-traffic. (This letter, she said, amounted to her collected published works in the French language).

Jenny, our two small sons and I had been in Menton for a few days before first venturing to the Mansfield Room. During that time, bearing in mind Janet Frame’s helicopter problem, we kept an eye out for choppers but, never sighting a single one, assumed such hardware was now unnecessary as, with the advent of the EEC, the border with Italy (750 metres from the Mansfield Room) was no longer patrolled. Upon opening the garden gate, however, and standing in front of the pink stone Villa Isola Bella for the first time, much to our delight a very Janet Frame-esque helicopter swept immediately into view, as if it had been waiting for us, invisible behind the adjacent palms and the Villa Louise. The helicopter hovered directly over the rooftop of the Mansfield Room for perhaps half a minute before vanishing. We never saw another helicopter anywhere near the place during the following six months and we came to think of this solitary example as our unofficial welcome to the place from Janet Frame.

A cup of tea and a lie down

It might be instructive, at this point, to assign the two parts of the moniker ‘Small World, Big Town’ to two hot beverages: Let’s equate the pot of tea with the ‘towns’ of provincial New Zealand. On the other hand, the cup of coffee can be an emblem of the wide, cosmopolitan world out there—coming to us by way of Paris and New York. With its tinge of Old-New Zealandism and provincialism, tea drinking can be thought of as a last stand against the encroachment of the international coffee-café culture.

These diametrically opposed drinks run like two parallel streams through Dylan Horrock’s graphic novel Hicksville—pages of which are included in the exhibition. Early in the book we come across Hone Heke wielding a piping hot cuppa rather than the more accustomed axe. Horrock’s small town idyll has at its heart the Rarebit Tearooms. Later in the book, we encounter a nationalist landscape in the tradition of Rita Angus’s Cass (c. 1936): a full page drawing of a shop in the middle of nowhere bearing a BUSHELL’S TEA sign. Throughout the opus some very serious tea-drinking goes down, although our internationist hero Leonard Batts has no part in it. From the depths of a dark coffee-less night of the soul, the caffeine-addicted Batts writes a letter home from Hicksville,: ‘I can’t even get a damn coffee here,’ he moans. ‘It’s all tea, tea. Death to tea!’.

There are some strong echoes of Frame in Hicksville. I’d like to think that the sun on the cover of the American edition of Frame’s Maniototo is the same one that blazes over East Cape in the book. Maybe this is just a coincidence---but coincidences, as Janet Frame would say, can be the most illuminating of things. I also like to think that Horrocks’ character Leonard Batts might have picked up his surname from Frame’s short story ‘Insulation’.

When asked about any direct references of Frame, Dylan Horrocks recalls seeing Jane Campion’s film adaptation of Frame’s autobiography while living in London in the 1990s: ‘…one of those heartbreakingly homesick-inducing expat moments...’ he writes. ‘I suspect the image of the older Frame as presented in the movie was a part of the inspiration for Mrs. Hicks—at least visually. When combined with my grandmother. Or something...’.

Beyond its English roots, tea-drinking is something New Zealand has colonised, reinterpreted and revived. I remember, a few years back, the vast teapots at Parihaka Pā with their multiple spouts so more than one cup could be poured at a time. (And I remember everyone present in the wharenui, down to the smallest child, drinking cups of tea.) Between Hicksville and Parihaka and Frame’s small town of Puamahara—at the centre of The Carpathians—I imagine a river of tea flowing through this country. A good provincial brew, poured and drawn in big towns of a small world.

Further observations about tea drinking
Certainly, much tea is drunk in Frame’s fiction. In the early 1990s I contributed an essay entitled ‘Drinking tea because of you’ to The Inward Sun, a book of tributes to Janet Frame, edited by Elizabeth Alley. At the time this photograph was taken [see right], Janet told me she did not drink tea, except socially or ‘when she had to’. She said that when she was very young the taste had become ‘tainted’ for her. She declared herself a coffee person.

Some years later, however, she refuted that statement, telling me that this had never been the case—in fact she drank pots of tea. It must have been one of her non-tea-drinking characters speaking, she said. Back in 1987, she had been very busy at work on The Carpathians and the Sargeson Residence, where she was living, had become a very over-populated place with that number of characters coming and going, all hours.

Under the influence

I first met Janet Frame on Easter Saturday, 1987. I was twenty-five years old and had spent the previous day holed up in my Epsom bedsitter reading all three volumes of her autobiography. Earlier that week my first collection of poetry and drawings, Location of the Least Person, had come back from the printers. Janet took something of an interest in the book. She later suggested three figures she considered ‘of particular relevance to someone in my position’. The three role-models proposed were:

The German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

The Russian/French painter Marc Chagall

The French composer Erik Satie

I’ve pondered this threesome often over the years: Obviously, in prescribing a painter, a poet and a composer she was making some kind of point. Her prescription embodied a very European way of thinking about artistic formation: drawing imaginative co-ordinates from beyond the obvious catchment. It’s the kind of thinking that positions Rilke’s poetry, as is often done, between ‘the philosophy of Nietzsche and the sculpture of Rodin’.

If Rilke, Chagall and Satie had in common a propensity towards states of weightlessness and transfiguration in their work, it also seems to me now they were all exponents of the ‘Small World, Big Town’ manner of thinking and being. Early paintings by Chagall, during his Russian period, are very ‘Big Town’, with their large cast of village characters, their imaginative/folkloric leaps and bounds. So too are Erik Satie’s musical and textural experiments which emerged from a welter of painting, literature, theatre, ballet and popular culture. I’ve often pondered what Erik Satie might have meant when he wrote that ‘the centre of Paris is France—with its colonies of course’. In the light of the present exhibition, this strikes me as an early outbreak of ‘Small World Big Town-ism’, with its collapsing and turning inside out of geographical scale—an exercise Satie managed while busily dissolving boundaries between the separate arts.

Let’s jump across borders, sings Erik Satie, as we might small streams.

After bathing

When I visited Janet Frame prior to our departure for France in 2002, I dropped off a copy of my book of essays After Bathing at Baxter’s. She approved enthusiastically of the Noel McKenna painting Woman Reading reproduced on the page facing the essay-journal I had written about her. (Recently that painting was included in McKenna’s ‘Sheltered Life’ exhibition here at City Gallery.) The morning’s conversation spanned many topics---among them the Anne Noble exhibition currently at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, which she loved. We discussed music, art and literature—and the great typically French conflation of these… the Symbolist notion of ‘correspondance’—how the art forms aspired to be like one another. Mostly, though, we talked about things French, bathing in the Mediterranean, the Musée Chagall in Nice, Erik Satie (in particular his account of bathing, ‘La bain de mer’, from the portfolio of musical sketches ‘Sports & Divertissements’, from 1914)).

After bathing at Paekakariki

At this point I would like to introduce another story which involves swimming in the sea, one concerning mistaken identity and coincidence. As the world is divided between tea and coffee, it is also divided between those things that are connected scientifically/reasonably and those that are miraculously brought together, pricked by what Frame calls ‘the bent hairpin of unreason’. Artists tend to go for the latter kind of connection. Frame, for one, approved Schopenhauer’s definition of artistic procedure as the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason. So let’s leave reason behind for the moment and think about coincidence and its somewhat mystical and mystified relation, superstition.

One of my favourite records is Joni Mitchell’s 1979 jazz-folk outing, Mingus, which bears the inscription on the back of the album sleeve: ‘In memory of Charles Mingus 1922-1979’. In the liner notes Mitchell states that on January 6, 1979, the day after his death from cancer, Charles Mingus—aged fifty-six—was cremated. ‘That same day fifty-six sperm whale beached themselves on the Mexican coastline and were removed by fire.’ Was this a most apposite coincidence, or an implausible superstition. Such an unlikely parallel feels like it must mean something, but does it mean something?

My essay about Janet Frame in After Bathing at Baxter’s concludes with a sighting of Frame swimming at Paekakariki Beach—where her close friend Jackie Sturm lives. Mary Jane Duffy, who hails from up that way, telephoned excitedly one afternoon to tell us that Janet Frame had been sighted offshore, after the fashion of a Great White Whale. Telephones along the Kapiti Coast must have been running hot. There it was for all to see: Frame’s unmistakable head of ginger hair bobbing above the waves some way from the beach.

Before my book of essays was published, I asked Janet to have a look over my essay about her lest there be any mistakes. She was perfectly happy so the piece went in exactly as intended. It was only when I travelled down to Dunedin and handed over the published book that she gleefully told me that she had never in her life been swimming at Paekakariki Beach. Although the image of Frame powering through the Kapiti channel appealed greatly to her as it did to me.[1] Now Janet Frame is dead, I have no doubt such reported sightings and apocryphal appearances will increase. Janet is bound to become the next Elvis—seen moving at speed through take-aways and animal parks the length of the nation.

But we must return to the Paekakariki Beach of the Reported Sighting for one last observation: A few days after Janet Frame’s death, millions of onions were found washed up along that stretch of the Kapiti Coast. In fact Paekakariki Beach was so covered with the vegetables that dogs and pedestrians had trouble walking along it. And soon the air was tasting of French onion soup. (As a lover of all things French, this detail would have been approved by Janet.)

The day after the migration of vegetables, the council posted a health warning recommending that no one ate these mysterious onions as they could be ‘contaminated’, although the precise form of the contamination was not stated. Many of the locals who had doubtlessly been boiling up, frying and consuming the crop were staunch in their disbelief, the salt water having enhanced the onion flavour. After the expected deliberations scientists revealed that the onions, by the million, had been washed down to the sea after huge slippages on crop-growing land due to unseasonal rain in the Manawatu district. It was the wettest February in the region since February was invented. With the earth crumbling around them, the migrating vegetables slipped from creek to river then out to sea, to be returned on the incoming tide.

Perhaps we can ponder coincidence for one last moment: fifty-six whales beached for Charles Mingus aged fifty-six; Paekakariki awash with onions in memory of Janet. I imagine these onions being raked into huge mounds which are then set on fire. The beachfront becomes a pyre producing black whale-shaped clouds which drift out over Kapiti and away.

An interlude pertaining to mistaken identity

While touring England back in the 1990s, the guitarist in the band The Muttonbirds, David Long was approached after a gig by an audience member—evidently a New Zealander on his Big OE. The young fan said earnestly how good it was to hear the band playing their Janet Frame tribute song. It took a while for David Long to figure this out, but finally he realised that the youth was referring to their song ‘Giant Friend’, which he had misheard as ‘Janet Frame’. Who knows what he would have made of the song’s resounding chorus, ‘Can I play with your Janet Frame’?

Pages blowing down a road

Returning to the exhibition ‘Small World, Big Town’: I have been contemplating the signage designed specifically for the exhibition by Dylan Horrocks. Might the airborne pages on our banner be carried by the west wind of Romanticism (they could easily be lifted from Baxter’s ‘Blow wind of fruitfulness’), or are they just caught in the slipstream from a speeding vehicle? The pages in Horrocks’ drawing are blank—suggesting, maybe, a low white cloud of possibility; this might be the land of the long white ream of paper. The skies are cloudless, the road ahead clear. If it wasn’t for the damned pieces of paper this could be a National Party campaign poster.

I like the silence of Horrocks’ blank pages, their reticence. They bother me a little, in the way that Frame bothers me: Are we in the process of losing our language, or are we about to start writing it? Without getting too nationalistic about it, maybe these pages ask whether we are the Strong Silent Speechless Types of Don Brasch’s daydream—or are we are people struggling to become articulate? Has the alphabet yet to reach these pages or has it, for some reason or another, fled.

Flying at a slant

At this point our circuitous route, our wobbly itinerary delivers us to an exhibition at the Hirschfeld Gallery last year by Karin van Roosmalen. ‘Flying at a Slant’ was a strikingly Frame-esque investigation into surfaces and underlying materials---an excavation of the plain and the ordinary. Sarah Farrar has written of the alchemical nature of the installation, quoting Martin Herbert’s description of art that is ‘spiked and intensified by aspects of the solidly real’. Spiked like a sharp stick but also like a lethal cocktail. Alchemy is certainly never far from Frame’s writing. The prologue to The Adaptable Man begins with a Shakespearean witch-scene: ‘A contemporary ingredient in the cauldron world of the witch-novelist is a pilot’s thumb’. (Frame would certainly place the magical, transformative potions of childhood, folk tales and William Shakespeare alongside the aforementioned transfigurative magic of Chagall, Rilke and Satie.)

The materiality of van Roosmalen’s installion makes me think of Frame’s story ‘Insulation’ and the novel Living in the Maniatoto. Here we see the artist as insulator and/or reality-technician: someone who makes incisions into the surfaces and spaces of the everyday; the artist as handy-man or woman. There is also an indwelling sense in the productions of both van Roosmalen and Frame that reality is a process rather than a fixed state—things, like ideas, are in a perpetual state of construction and deconstruction.

Damaged goods

There are a lot of damaged goods in Frame’s book. And language, like goods, can be harmed in transit—as Janet made clear on the back of a marvellously grim envelop which arrived in my letterbox some years back. (The envelope has been glued down then reopened then stuck back together with white tape; an urgent inscription in Frame’s hand is on the right: A BANDAGED LETTER!) Not too many artists these days are all that concerned with the restoration or cleaning up of battered realities. Often they set out to rephrase this brokenness, emptiness or vacuousness---which is well and good, as far as it goes. However, in proposing Janet Frame as an exemplar of the (post)modern artist, I am making the point that art and artists can go beyond that point. I wonder if there is too much sampling and rephrasing in contemporary art—and not enough transfiguration (but maybe that’s because I have spent too much of my adult life in the company of Erik Satie, Marc Chagall and Rainer Maria Rilke).

Human weather

In Living in the Maniatoto, Frame sings a typically ironic anthem to the ‘rich material culture’ which, she finds ‘as vivid and exciting as that of a land where, say, there is a flourishing of literature or great music; except that this renaissance is lacking a soul, the satisfaction is a gloss, a chemical protection with no relation to human weather…’.[2]

In a scene from Maniototo which infuriates more traditionally inclined novelists, Frame’s character Tommy is obliterated by a Blue Flash as he is seeing the narrator off at his door:

There was a flash of light, a smell of laundry and the penetrating fumes of a powerful cleanser, then a neutral nothing-smell, not even the usual substituted forest glade or field of lavender or carnation, and all that remained of Tommy were two faded footprints on the floor.

Is this a Jif advertisement gone seriously wrong, a comment on the consumer culture or a parable about the fate of the artist? Tommy is deleted from the planet by the substances out of which he seeks to make art. ‘We were both shocked by the sudden plague of unreality’, Frame’s narrator observes, but boxes on regardless. The imaginative as well as the material world, Frame infers, contains toxic substances. We work and play at our peril---and are in constant danger of losing our humanity. Yet, paradoxically, Frame is herself capable of wiping out humanity with one stroke of her imaginative brush.

Even smaller world

In this marvellously small world of very big towns, it was the aforementioned artist Karen ‘Flying at a Slant’ van Roosmalen who, in the early-late 1980s designed the covers for every one of Janet Frame’s books as they were issued or re-issued by Century Hutchinson. These beguiling, subtle studies, with their pin-prick of angst, belong in the National Art Collection. I can imagine them slotting into a history of watercolours, somewhere between Olivia Spenser Bower and Saskia Leek. They have something of Frame’s ‘human weather’ in them.

SMALL WORLD BIG TOWN DEVELOPMENT—SOME STRUCTURES

1. Small world even smaller house

Before we look at the various architectures contained within ‘Small World, Big Town’, I’d like to introduce something from left of field—an architectural oddity brought to my attention by the architectural historian Chris Cochran.

He writes: ‘The bungalow in the photograph is at Jack's Mill School, Kotuku. This tiny place is around 5 kms from Moana, which is on the shore of Lake Brunner, about 25 minutes drive inland from Greymouth... The bungalow was built 1938-40’. Constructed by school children in the school grounds, the structure is a seventy-five percent scale model of a normal house, and is placed in a seventy-five percent scaled garden. Alas, the flowers that grow there are a hundred percent--but I’m sure one day they’ll be genetically down-scaled. The project was dreamt up by the school’s headmaster who believed children could and should do the things adults do. The children designed the house, ordered the material, hammered the nails… It is a small world built by children for children—a utopian model of industry and existence. In the best Frame-sense, it is more than a little unreal but then, as she keeps telling us, reality is indeed crammed with unreality.

It would be convenient to think of this miniature house as part of the back-story to artist Derrick Cherrie’s Studio (2001), which is included in the exhibition. That said, Cherrie’s half size structure alludes to a different utopian model---that of modernist architecture rather than 1930s enlightened socialism. But there is also something of the dolls’ house about Cherrie’s construction. I think Janet Frame would like Studio, although not quite as much as she would the Jack’s Mill School bungalow.

Elsewhere in ‘Small World, Big Town’, the collages of Ava Seymour and Marie Shannon’s photographs offer further scaled down dwellings; Andrew McLeod has produced a series of ink-jet prints incorporating architectural floorplans and perspectives. Beyond this exhibition, miniature houses have cropped up in the sculptural work of Ronnie van Hout; they also featured in Noel McKenna’s ‘Sheltered Life’ exhibition at City Gallery Wellington earlier this year. (His wall-mounted Appliance Heaven is particularly Frame-esque in construction as well as conception.) These miniature abodes take us back, directly or indirectly, to the early modernist model-making of the Russian constructivists who were hugely influenced by P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (1911), a study which proposed ‘the making of art not as an imitation of a sensible reality, but as a kind of model building’. (Malevich’s incorporation of aerial views of architecture into abstract, geometrical compositions was reprised locally by the painter Don Peebles in the 1960s.)

While Frame is more apparently concerned and bothered by housing maintenance than by actual construction, I think McKenna’s Woman Writing, with its tabletop dwelling, would have led her back to Rilke who, in his Sonnets to Orpheus, speaks of his art in terms of a small architectural construction:

And where there had been

just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,

with an entryway that shuddered in the wind—

you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

2. The architecture of letter boxes

Back in 1994, while writing my book Lands and Deeds, I visited the artist Michael Stevenson in Palmerston North. Somehow Janet Frame came up in the conversation—she was living in the city at the time---and Michael asked me if I could give him her address. When refused, he said it was probably just as well people didn’t have Frame’s address because, in this bogan town, there were certain protocols for honouring esteemed citizens. One involved, he said, the driving of loud, smoking cars up and down the street of the feted person at all hours of the day and night. And her letterbox… Michael went on… if she was really someone then her letterbox wouldn’t last five minutes. Around here, if you’re someone your letterbox gets stolen. And when you replace it, it gets stolen again…

Some years later Janet told me that, while living in Dahlia Street, Palmerston North, her mailbox had in fact been stolen on a number of occasions. I probably set her wondering whether this Michael Stevenson was implicated.

3. Desks and pianos

Not only are desks and pianos strikingly present in contemporary art practice, they crop up often in Frame’s writing. There is a great moment in The Carpathians when the character Gloria exclaims: ‘We used to be a great piano country! The early settlers, the families hoping to find paradise with acres of land, a mansion, servants, leisure, all brought their pianos and sheet music. The great battles to get land at all costs were fought by furniture—pianos and writing-desks—as well as by people’.[3]

Contemporary artists have certainly kept the battle raging with pianos being a staple in art for some decades now—the non-playing pianists including film-maker Jane Campion and the Michaels Stevenson and Parekowhai, amongst others. Somewhere, I can’t remember where, Frame asks the apposite question of whether in fact we are a nation of piano tuners rather than pianists. I find myself thinking of the dislocated piano at the entrance to a meeting house in Laurence Aberhart’s iconic photograph ‘Te Waiherehere’, Koroniti, Wanganui River, 29 May 1986.

In ‘Small World, Big Town’ the piano’s mute relation, the desk, asserts its ongoing valence at the entrance to Stevenson’s installation This is the Trekka (2003-05). On an earlier occasion, Brett Graham produced a pair of carved desks which were shown here as part of the ‘Telecom Prospect 2001’ exhibition; Merylyn Tweedie ‘et al’ has included desks in her installations, amidst various other pieces of clapped-out office equipment; and Beverley Rhodes included a desk in her Michael Hirschfeld Gallery exhibition ‘Home is where we start from’ earlier this year.

Back in the early 1970s, Frame herself inherited a now legendary desk: the Landfall desk, at which Charles Brasch once sat and read submissions. He handed the desk down to her. Underlining the proximity of fiction to daily life, in Living in the Maniototo, Frame’s narrator contemplates the shipping of furniture to New Zealand from California but decides against taking her American desk because it seems both ‘impractical and greedy to ship it home when I already have the desk once used by the editor of Landfall, although it and I are not always on good terms’. The desk itself now resides at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University. A few years back Bill Manhire asked me to make a drawing of Janet’s desk for a brochure promoting the writing programme. It was some months later that Michael King was delighted to tell me that Janet Frame now had this drawing installed as her ‘wallpaper’ on her computer screen. It had been there since September 11, 2001. Up until that date the ‘wallpaper’ on Frame’s home computer had been a view of the Twin Towers in New York, as viewed from the harbour on a clear day.

Janet Frame as Gravity Star

Janet Frame’s art lays down a challenge to contemporary artists, particularly those who share her fixation with post-modern reality, with its surfaces and shallowness. What would she have made of the squeaky clean processes of contemporary artists: with the manicured surface of Peter Stitchbury’s portrait of Chester Karnofsky (2004)? There is certainly absence aplenty in the work of Stitchbury and, for that matter, Yvonne Todd, but I’m not sure it is the powerful absence of Rilke and his distant relative Frame. Contemporary photographic practice in particular is characterised by ‘absence’—and a whiff of mortality, for sure---but these tend to be dealt with clinically and at a distance. With Frame you feel she has crawled inside her subject—be it life or death—and turned it inside out. Maybe most of us are too content to dwell on surfaces, to make ourselves comfortable, chemically fortified and cleansed in the pavilions of art and life. Shouldn’t art be an act of inspired resistance rather than compliance? What is art about? You might ask Janet Frame. And she would answer: ‘You are now entering the human heart’.

Back in 1988, I used a phrase of Janet Frame’s as the title for a book about New Zealand writing, Moments of Invention. Most likely she was paraphrasing Rilke when she offered that to me as the heart of the writing experience. The German poet wrote of the process by which ‘A painter’s moments of illumination must not come to him through his consciousness… his discoveries, mysterious even to him, must bypass the long road of deliberation and go so fast into his work that he has not time to notice the transition’. An irrational basis for art, to be sure. But isn’t the irrational side the one that artists should be on? Sometimes, looking at contemporary art, I crave the transfigurative energy Frame gleaned from Satie, Chagall and Rilke.

I do not for a moment want to portray Frame as the Fairy Godmother of Us All, sprinkling star-dust and petals over the planet—because I think that, more than anything else, she is a looming, dark spirit. She has to be confronted---much the way that if you are a tenor saxophone player you have to find a way through John Coltrane.

Genuinely great artists like Frame are attuned to the currents and patterns, the alive and changing edges of world, land, alphabet; like the narrator in A State of Siege they engage with ‘the relentless questioning that characterises the whole world’. The task of the writer or painter is, as Frame implores, to ‘Tell. Tell. Answer or else. Give’.

In the future, will the works of art in ‘Small World, Big Town’ give us an idea of the subconscious life of this place, with its migrations of words and meanings, its shifting nature? Time will tell. And so, for now, the alphabet runs out and we find ourselves back in the realm of the everyday—but mercifully not in Don Brasch’s ‘mainstream’. Perhaps we could end, as Janet Frame ended Part One of The Adaptable Man, at that defining moment, that instant when the world makes sense: when ‘Alwyn unscrewed the thermos and poured his cup of tea’.

The posthumous email

The email that arrived on my computer in February last year two days after Janet Frame’s death was in fact sent from her computer by her niece Pamela Gordon. It was an invitation to Janet’s funeral in a few days time. Pamela had sent the message out to the names on the writer’s email-address file. I did not get to the funeral in Dunedin but I would like to think of this talk as an act of some kind of restoration.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Pamela Gordon and the Janet Frame Literary Trust for permission to use published and unpublished material; and to Chris Cochran for the house photographs. Thanks to Courtney Johnston, Sarah Farrar and Lizzie Bisley for their help. To Robert Cross for his photos of Janet Frame and to Emma Bugden and Natasha Conland.

[1] It occurs to me now that Janet Frame may indeed have swum at Paekakariki and the later denial might be the fictional part of proceedings. Ditto regarding the tea story earlier in this talk.

[2] Janet Frame, Living in the Maniototo, Auckland: Century Hutchinson, 1979, p. 58.

[3] Janet Frame, The Carpathians, Auckland: Century Hutchinson, 1988, p. 71.