Frame - An Angel At My Table

Gathered here in a single edition are the three parts of Janet Frames autobiography. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student and years of incarceration in mental hospitals (essentially for wanting to pursue a career as a poet), followed eventually by her entry into the saving world of writers and the Mirror City that sustains them. This is not just the records of a life but also the flourishing of a writers career. Janet Frame accomplishes the transformation of ordinary facts and ideas into a shining palace of mirrors. All three volumes of this autobiography - To The Is-Land (1983), An Angel At My Table (1984) and The Envoy From Mirror City (1985) have won major literary prizes.

Janet Frames first novel, Owls Do Cry , created a publishing sensation in New Zealand. It was hailed as the countrys long-awaited first great novel and a masterpiece by some, and criticised for being modern and too depressing by others who hated the italicised inner monologue, but for me when I read it at fourteen, the same age as Daphne in the novel, Daphne of the dead room, her dark, eloquent song captured my heart.

The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots.

It was this inner world of gorgeously imagined riches that Janet affirmed in Daphne, but also in me, and quite probably in all sensitive teenage girls. We had been given a voice, poetic, powerful and fated a beautiful, mysterious song of the soul.

I read the book at fourteen when my life felt like torture. I remember sitting up in bed, leaning against my white plastic headboard, my filmy white chiffon bed cover stretching out in front of me, matching my rose-embroidered curtains. My room had none of the romantic mood I had dreamed about when I imagined the bed cover and the curtains hovering like a forest mist above my green carpet; instead they were a fire hazard with my bar heater, a humiliation evidence of my effort at romanticism and its failure. But where I had failed to create an atmosphere, Janet had succeeded magnificently and I loved it.

Owls Do Cry is experimental and partly based on events in Janets own life, including her experience of spending eight years intermittently in mental asylums. It provoked many rumours and dark imaginings about her actual life. Some believed she was still in an asylum, perhaps having had a leucotomy, a genius tragically doomed to mental illness. Others said she had gone overseas and was living anonymously.

Most weekends our family drove to our beach house in Plimmerton, passing the notorious loony bin, Porirua Hospital.

Was Janet Frame in Porirua? I would ask, peering at the flat prison-like buildings surrounded by misshapen macrocarpas.

No, not Porirua.

Where?

Sunnyside.

Sunnyside? They call a mental hospital Sunnyside? Is she still there?

I looked and wondered.

I viewed her life with admiration, pity and fear. To be abnormal in New Zealand society was a stigma; to be mental was an unrecoverable shame.

Fifteen years later I was to become sadly familiar with Porirua Hospital, Ward K2, as my mother tried repeatedly to find some relief from the overwhelming terror and bleakness of her late-life depression. I visited Janet Frames territory, stepping over Maxs false leg left lying in the corridor, and trying to fend off an elderly man who shuffled with alarming purpose up to my mother in the day room, put his hands on her armrests and asked, Edith what will it cost me to sleep in your bedroom?

She was unfazed: Michael, I told you before, Im not going to discuss money.

In 1963 Janet Frame returned to New Zealand, and partly because of the whispers and conjecture that continued to surround her life, she decided to write the truth. In doing so, she began her three-volume autobiography, collected here under the title An Angel at My Table , which I believe is one of the most beautifully toned and moving books I have ever read and the best book ever written by a New Zealander.

She has achieved that supremely difficult task of finding a voice so natural it feels as if it was not written but always was. She does not falter; Janet Frame is born and we grow up with her. Janet does so much more than clarify her personal history of misdiagnosis she tells us her whole life, which is unexpectedly enchanted and also tragic. Apart from the years she spent in and out of mental hospitals I had no idea that two of her sisters had died by drowning in unrelated incidents, nor was I aware of the life-saving role Frank Sargeson played in offering her a place to live and teaching her how to survive as a writer. A later delight in the third volume was her love affairs, one on the island of Ibiza, and another with a Spanish man with two-toned shoes.

Perhaps Janets unique genius, and what makes the book for me a masterpiece, is the depth and openness with which she reveals her vulnerability; her ability to write about her pain and humiliation as calmly and even-handedly as her successes. She disarmed me. I wasnt asked to admire Janet, yet I got to know her in intimate detail and loved her tenderly.

Back in 1982 my mother sent the first volume of this autobiography to me in Sydney where I was living and studying film-making at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. The book had just been published and was not available in Australia. So fourteen years after first opening Owls Do Cry I was once more sitting up in my bed, once more reading Janet Frame, this time Volume One of An Angel at My Table . I had, however, abandoned any attempt at bedroom atmosphere. My mattress sat on a board held up by four milk crates, and had no bedhead or bedspread.

I remember these details so well because Janets book had an enormous effect on me. As I read, I sobbed and sobbed. She had struck a blow right to my heart. But it was not only about Janets life, I was also re-experiencing my own childhood exploring in the gully formed by the fault line, long-running games of Pioneers with covered wagons made from vegetable boxes, the rounders played in the Katherine Mansfield Memorial at the corner of our street, and the humiliation of being abandoned by Geoffrey Baird at the Queen Margaret College school dance retribution, he said, for having dropped him three weeks earlier.

Lying in bed that weekend in Sydney, it dawned on me that I wanted to share this unique experience as widely as possible. I didnt think I could improve the book, I only had the idea that perhaps a television series would serve to share her work more widely. Later that year, I went in search of Janet Frame.

I met her on 24 December 1982. Back in New Zealand for Christmas, I drove in my mothers car to Levin, to ask her for the rights to her autobiography. I was twenty-eight years old and my godmother Marga Gordon knew Janet and had got me her address and arranged an appointment.

Levin is a flat, plain, neat country town, every house a brick or wood bungalow of identical size and style. Janets house was easily distinguished from all the others by the uncut golden coloured grass in the front yard and by the extra layer of bricks Janet had paid to be put around the front to try and soundproof it. It looked empty and derelict. I was almost surprised when Janet answered the door. We were both nervous. I had brought her some fresh eggs but they had broken when I braked hard at a corner. I tried to explain Id had an accident, but before I could finish, Janet became alarmed.