Zealand, she delighted in every novelty; ‘everything she saw was charged with significance’, especially the Underground and everyday chores.8
She felt her angel had provided her the ideal city and weather to work on her stories.9 Indeed, as she wrote to Sargeson a few days after her arrival, she had finally resumed writing.10 She soon found ways to engage with contemporary literature and bought copies of the most important literary magazines, in which she found particularly exciting the works, prose and poetry, of West Indian authors:
I was much influenced by the West Indian writers and, feeling inadequate in my New Zealand-ness (for did I not come from a land then described as ‘more English than England’?), I wrote a group of poems from the point of view of a West Indian new arrival and, repeating the experiment that Frank Sargeson and I had made with the
London Magazine when I pretended to be of Pacific Island
origin, I sent the poems to the London Magazine with a covering letter explaining my recent arrival from the West Indies.11
When she submitted her poems, she claimed a different identity. She had already camouflaged her real self; now she wanted to experience an-other point of view. But why change a peripheral literary position – given by her ‘New Zealand-ness’ – for an even more marginalised perspective – the West Indian? What is the reason behind the desire to hide her origins behind an identity that
8
Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (London: Picador, 2001 [2000]), pp. 147–49.
9 Ibid., p. 149. The figure of the angel is recurrent in Frame’s autobiography. She often
spoke about an angel who protected her and guided her. See King, pp. 137, 346.
10 Ibid., pp. 149–50. 11
could be victim to even more prejudice? The following paragraphs will try to answer these questions.
Frame’s conception of identity certainly changed with the passing of time and certain experiences inevitably influenced her perception of herself, and of personal identity in general. The years in mental hospitals not only damaged her memory permanently, but profoundly affected her sense of self.12 After those years, the experience at Frank Sargeson’s home unfortunately did not boost her self-confidence. When The Lagoon and Other Stories won the Hubert Church Award, Frame was still a patient at Seacliff Hospital. Up to that moment, she had not imagined becoming a professional writer, but thanks to the award, her name started to become known in New Zealand literary circles, and Sargeson, the most famous national writer at the time, decided to help her. It has been said that Sargeson took Frame under his wing before she had to face the crude reality of being a woman writer in the New Zealand of the 1950s – a condition exacerbated by the rumours of her mental illness. He took her into his home, renting her a hut by his house where she could live and write with the necessary quiet. Sargeson reported that he taught her ‘how to live as a writer in a society which was hostile to those who rejected the Puritan work ethic, writing not being classified as “proper” work’.13
Thus, on the one hand, Frame finally had a place to work; on the other, this support was heavily conditioned by Sargeson’s misogyny.14
As Pamela Gordon points out, Sargeson’s admirers have long portrayed a picture of Frame that is untrue. To give an example, in Speaking Frankly, the collected Waikato University Frank Sargeson Memorial Lectures, he is referred to as a ‘patient friend to the seemingly impossible Janet Frame’.15
This biased view was transmitted over the years by Sargeson’s supporters and has perpetuated one of the myths attached to Frame: the female writer-to-be who needed to be saved, educated, and introduced to the right circles by the
12
See Chapter 1.
13 Tara Hawes, ‘Janet Frame: The Self as Other-Othering the Self’, Deep South, 1.1 (2005)
<http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol1no1/hawes1.html> [accessed 9 March 2012] (para. 26 of 40).
14
Ibid. (para. 27 of 40); King, p. 136.
15 Pamela Gordon, ‘To Be Utterly Frank’,
An Angel @ My Blog
professional male writer. It has also been said that Sargeson taught her how to write, but Frame was already a published and award-winning author. Gordon has often suggested that Sargeson was envious of this new literary talent and tried to undermine her success in many ways.16 What is certain is that critics have tended to see Frame as someone constantly in need of guidance, and biographer Michael King’s portrait seems to confirm this opinion. In chapter twelve of Wrestling with the Angel, King writes of the mentor-figures in her life, Sargeson and Dr Cawley:17 ‘The momentum of her career as a writer, which had commenced under the nurturing of Frank Sargeson, was resumed under the patronage of another mentor’.18
Sargeson and Dr Cawley were certainly important male figures in Frame’s life, but while Dr Cawley did all he could to nurture her self-esteem, Sargeson often tried to impose his rules and judgements on her. In her autobiography, Frame reported:
The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realization of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who now looked on Frank Sargeson as saviour, was forced to recognise through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done.19
Frame experienced an undermining of her persona during her stay with Sargeson. She was forced to conform to certain standards and Sargeson’s opinion had such an influence on her that she felt like she was still in the asylum:
My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital, where it had been
16 Pamela Gordon, ‘Fake Janet Frame “quote” promotes bogus “Janet Frame”’, An Angel @ My Blog <http://slightlyframous.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/fake-janet-frame-quote-promotes- bogus.html> [accessed 1 August 2013].
17
See Chapter 1.
18
King, p. 199. See also p. 125.
19
thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum, where the desire was that my body should be of another gender.20
Yet Frame was very grateful to Sargeson and appreciated many of the moments they lived together. She wrote of the things he taught her, the experiences they shared, and praised ‘his encouragement’: ‘I was desperately shy, just emerging from a state of intimidation. Frank was protective and kind’;21
‘Dutifully at first, but inspired by Frank’s enthusiasm, I began to read Proust [...] and each day Frank and I talked of the highlights of what I had read’.22
Her feelings towards Sargeson were ambivalent: while she did not like being told what to do or how to approach her writing, she admired him as a professional writer and appreciated being treated as a writer (‘I was amazed and grateful at his acceptance of me as a writer’).23
However, she did not appreciate that he expected to read her work regularly, and then criticised her stylistic choices (‘I resolved not to show him more stories, and I kept my resolve, later showing him only the beginning of my novel’).24
It would thus be too simplistic to say that he was a severe, negative figure, but Frame’s self-confidence was certainly not helped by his attitude towards women:
In all his conversations there was a vein of distrust, at times hatred, of women as a species distinct from men, and when he was in the mood for exploring that vein, I listened uneasily, unhappily, for I was a woman and he was speaking of my kind. I was sexually naive, unaware, and only half awake, and I was ignorant of such subjects as homosexuality, but I felt constantly hurt by his implied negation of a woman’s body. [...]
In exchange for this lack of self-esteem as a woman, I gained my life as I had wanted it to be.25
20 Ibid., pp. 298–99. 21 Ibid., p. 298. 22 Ibid., p. 303. 23 Ibid., p. 295. 24 Ibid., pp. 296–97. 25 Ibid., pp. 298–99.
It seems that Frame was willing to accept the negative aspects of life with Sargeson in exchange for being able to write in peace. Sargeson’s mortifications inevitably affected Frame’s idea of self and of female identity. It could be argued that he suggested Frame’s first ‘cultural cross-dressing’: ‘He chose a name for me — Santa Cruz — repeating solemnly as if I did not know, “That means Saint and Cross”’.26
As has been mentioned, Sargeson once wrote about Frame to an editor (John Lehmann), presenting her as ‘a woman from the Pacific Islands who was new to Auckland’.27
According to Tara Hawes, Sargeson was implying that she wrote as if she had just arrived from another country and had not mastered English. Sargeson’s actions worked on Frame’s identity on different levels: ‘Sargeson is not only making Frame ashamed about her sex, but is implying that her vision is so different, she might as well not be a New Zealander’.28
Such episodes are likely to have affected Frame’s approach to identity-related topics and the related expressive forms in writing.
Frame’s quest for identity became even more complicated when she arrived in England. It was there that, according to Hawes, she really adopted the identity Sargeson had pinned on her. Once in London, Frame decided she had to wear the point of view of a West Indian.29 However, her cultural cross- dressing seems paradoxical: it would have been plausible for her to dress up as an English woman to achieve a more powerful social status; her native language was English after all. Instead, she pushed her marginalised position even further: she culturally cross-dressed as though she were not a New Zealander (as Sargeson had taught her) in order not to feel the burden of being unable to use her naturally literary, poetic language, and avoid the risks of a label as demanding as that of poet:
I did realize that such literary pretences were a safeguard against the discovery by others that my ‘real’ poetry was worthless. […] in a sense my literary lie was an escape 26 Hawes, (para. 30 of 40). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., (para. 31 of 40).
29 The notion of ‘cross-dressing’ refers back to the ancient tradition of women who had to
from a national lie that left a colonial New Zealander overseas without any real identity.30
As with the West Indian disguise, here Frame is not only questioning her geographic origins, but also her own language and literary talent. Because her identity as a writer and a woman had been so violently suppressed, she now perceived herself as faulty. Nonetheless, she kept writing and did not give up the investigation of her mental issues. She wanted to know the truth about her illness, perhaps just because she needed to find her real self.
In her writing, which was the most important expression of herself, she chose to inhabit an unexplored territory on the margins. In the 1950s, the literary scene was dominated by European authors (mainly men), and Frame decided to propose a doubly marginalised point of view: a female writer who came and wrote from the margins. Hawes maintains that in this process of self- marginalisation, Janet Frame was not looking for a specific type of literary identity; she was, instead, clearly seeking a post-colonial position. Though one cannot be sure whether Frame had a precise idea of how she wanted to appear to the public, the additional marginalisation she imposed upon herself is likely to have been linked to her strong lack of belief in her poetry. As has been said, Frame had always wanted to become a poet and wished the world to consider her a poet; nonetheless, she published prose almost exclusively in her lifetime.31 She probably felt more confident that her prose would be accepted by editors, which means that to her prose was the way to keep living as a writer. Interestingly, though, she frequently mixed poetry and prose; she would also start off writing a poem and then transform it into a piece of prose.
Hawes sees Frame’s process of self-marginalisation differently, framing it as a determined refusal of traditional values: ‘choosing to adopt a doubly- colonised identity includes an explicit rejection of patriarchal power structures, and white men’.32 Although Hawes’s idea is confirmed by Frame’s questioning
of biased, old-fashioned attitudes, her point appears quite generic and needs to be fine tuned. Frame’s identity as a writer was a cardinal component of her
30
An Angel at My Table, p. 365.
31
See the Introduction to Chapter 6 and Section 6.1 for a wider discussion on this point.
32
identity as a woman; therefore, if she chose to project herself against conventional social values, this would inevitably have been manifested in her writing. Frame’s self-marginalisation can thus be interpreted as a way of disguising her insecurity about her work – however it was her feeling not good enough to belong to the canon that pushed her to pursue a path never trodden before. Her self-imposed peripheral position was a metaphysical place with which she deeply identified, a place where she could express herself fully and safely. In agreement with Hawes, this section concludes that ‘[t]o escape “a national lie” she must adopt a literary one, a culturally inflected othering of the self that gives her her very own true post-colonial identity’.33