Looking at the lonely ones

Janet Frame’s prose is a highly volatile material. Words, sentences, paragraphs behave like mercury on the page, running this way and that, forming new shapes and smears from one silvery, trembling blob.

“Living where I am”, says the narrator in The Edge of the Alphabet (1962), republished this month to coincide with the centenary of Frame’s birth, “how can I cleave to anything? Please tell me now. Am I plugged in to the sky? Is it a waste of light out here, in the natural dark, with the mauling sea so close?” And so the novel begins, in syntax that rearranges the reading eye: “Toby is sitting by the fire at Aunt Norma’s … ‘Tomorrow’ he said to himself while the rats and bogies inhabiting the wall under the wallpaper and the scrim scuffled about tearing up documents and carrying the Great Plague like a peppermint under their tongue”. The rush of words comes at us from out of the blue, disturbing our expectations of what we might be reading about. A character called Toby getting ready to leave for England? Or another part of him stuck within sensation and dream – saving his pennies along with “three fingernails of snail shell” and hearing his dead mother’s voice? Either, or both, or something else again. “Norma spoke briskly. ‘I’ve brought the car, I’m driving out’”, the passage finishes. Nothing is settled.

Frame’s fiction was always this way. The short-story collections The Lagoon (1951), The Reservoir (1963, 1966) and You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983) can seem conventional enough: an event and a set of characters interact across the space of a few pages. But even these slip out of genre quickly enough. An eerie intervention by a second narrator arriving in the middle of someone else’s story, or the sudden use of capitals for speech, or a chiming nonsense poem on repeat – there is always something external going on that disrupts the enclosed form. I remember reading “The Bed-jacket” in class when I was about twelve, and all I could think about was the strange and wonderful way a yellow hedge had been cut like a “slice of cake”. The simile took over, dropped whole into my head, and lodged there as the story’s governing conceit. The rest of the so-called plot – “Is there one?”, our English mistress asked – had to manoeuvre itself around that slab of madeira. The protagonist seemed to drift off the page and away.

Such effects, uncanny and disruptive, are writ large in Frame’s novels. In The Edge of the Alphabet someone who is not Toby haunts an already strikingly erratic account of three misfits who meet on board a ship sailing for London from New Zealand. The note at the beginning of the novel tells us that this “someone” is Thora Pattern. One unstable piece of writing is further destabilized by another, one might say, as Thora slips from first to third person, taking over the other characters’ stream of consciousness and overlaying it with her own hectic sensibility. “Boiled hearts and sandals’ wandering eyeballs’ vision” describes a stop in Panama. Or there’s this:

People went ashore … And the lonely ones – the Zoes and Toby and Pats? From the deck Zoe watched. She clenched her fists. There was a tight curling of her toes inside her shoes. Her feet arched and pointed. A quick ink-onk movement made itself felt deep in her loins as she watched the lovers. I know.

“Writers who constantly question the purpose of their writing … want to transfer their … existential curiosity to the reader”, Catherine Lacey suggests in her fine introduction to the new edition. And for Frame, constantly interrupting her own effects, never letting one idea take a hold, this is the point exactly. From the beginning of her career – a long one that began in 1951 and produced thirteen novels and many other books of criticism, memoir and poetry – she conceived fiction that would make readers think, and especially about difference and neurodiversity, long before the latter term was invented.

The result is an up-close way of seeing the world that takes us to fresh parts of our own brains. Slipped in among exposition and the dialogue between Pat and Toby is the following: “And why in a closed society – ship, room, prison, human heart – is it so necessary to invite the Gods and Goddesses and worship them, touch the hem of their garments?” The leaps we are asked to make, from one way of thinking to another, are exhilarating. Are the fissures in the prose pathological? A form of madness, Frame used to say, was for her a kind of freedom. “One’s ‘own’ can so easily be lost!”, as she puts it in The Edge of the Alphabet. “Sometimes at night Pat was seized by anxiety which set him trembling and wondering. Where was his own? Why was it not safe … Then he would smile to himself, confident again, assured.” The self, in Frame’s fiction and in actuality, exists somewhere else, exciting but hidden.

Until now British readers have probably come to Frame mostly through Jane Campion’s film An Angel at My Table (1990), based on Frame’s three-part autobiography of 1982–5 (To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table and The Envoy from Mirror City). There we meet a wild but shy child growing up in rural New Zealand in the 1930s, one of a family of seven criss-crossed with tragedy and illness (two sisters who drown, a brother with epilepsy). The young girl eventually leaves for London and a life of cold-water bedsits and intense loneliness. Many of Frame’s novels are set in both hemispheres and share themes of isolation and an unsettled sense of self. It was her fellow countryman Frank Sargeson’s invitation to spend time with him in Ibiza, then to return to New Zealand to live in a shed in his garden and write, that brought her “home” to herself as an artist. There, deep in the suburbs of Auckland, amid Sargeson’s feijoa trees and vines, this idiosyncratic author was able to be on her own and herself, writing her way into the modernist canon as one of its most significant practitioners in English. In that shed, because she was protected from ever thinking she had to write anything else, she never did. The result is a form of prose that is utterly intact and unaffected by other influences.

Critics and scholars have compared Frame to James Joyce and her style to the literary gymnastics of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Some present-day writers might also seem to echo her freewheeling turns of phrase and switches in point of view. But to my mind it is only Muriel Spark – who shares a vision of literature that is more than literary effect – with whom this author can be usefully compared. Like Spark, she understood that there’s no such thing as story, no pattern to life, no order, and that the notion of “identifying” with a piece of writing is nonsense. “Words are ideas”, said Spark; anything can happen. Janet Frame’s fiction, too, made not of some stale conception of verisimilitude but of the shifting stuff of sentences, can take us to a borderless, boundless anywhere.

Kirsty Gunn has just published a new collection of short stories, Pretty Ugly

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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