Janet Frame - Between My Father and the King: New and Uncollected Stories

OTHER TITLES BY JANET FRAME

For further information on Janet Frames work, visit www.janetframe.org.nz

Novels

Owls Do Cry (1957)

Faces in the Water (1961)

The Edge of the Alphabet (1962)

Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963)

The Adaptable Man (1965)

A State of Siege (1966)

The Rainbirds aka Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room (1968)

Intensive Care (1970)

Daughter Buffalo (1972)

Living in the Maniototo (1979)

The Carpathians (1988)

Towards Another Summer (2007)

Short stories

The Lagoon and Other Stories (1952)

Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963)

The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963)

The Reservoir and Other Stories (1966)

You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983)

Prizes: Selected Short Stories aka The Daylight and the Dust:

Selected Short Stories (2009)

Poems

The Pocket Mirror (1967)

The Goose Bath (2006)

Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems (2008)

Childrens book

Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969)

Non-fiction

To The Is-Land (1982)

An Angel at My Table (1984)

The Envoy from Mirror City (1985)

Janet Frame In Her Own Words (2011)

COUNTERPOINT

BERKELEY

BETWEEN MY FATHER AND THE KING

Copyright Janet Frame Literary Trust, 2012

First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2012, as GORSE IS NOT PEOPLE

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available

ISBN 978-1-61902-216-4

COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Between My Father and the King includes some of the best stories Janet Frame ever wrote. More than half of the twenty-eight stories in this volume have never been published before. Of the rest, seven were individually published in Janet Frames lifetime but were never included by her in a collection; and another five have been published since her death in 2004. The new stories span almost the entire breadth of Frames publishing career, from University Entrance (1946), the very first story she published as an adult, to A Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle, written forty years later. They extend the themes and characters of the seventy-one stories that appear in the five previous collections: The Lagoon, The Reservoir, Snowman Snowman, You are Now Entering the Human Heart and Prizes (also known as The Daylight and the Dust).

There are several reasons why these stories have not previously been published. First, we know from Frames autobiography that the rejection of the story Gorse is Not People by Charles Brasch in 1954 had crushed her: I felt myself sinking into empty despair. What could I do if I couldnt write? Writing was to be my rescue. I felt as if my hands had been uncurled from their clinging place on the rim of the lifeboat. Similarly, just one year later when she had rallied from the previous years setback, had moved to Auckland and was making yet more headway in her career she proudly showed her latest achievement, An Electric Blanket, to Frank Sargeson; but after his nitpicking criticism she never offered that story for publication. Taking the experience as a lesson in learning to trust her own judgement about her writing, she also never showed any further work to Sargeson.

Second, at times Frame was so prolific that she found she had a backlog of manuscripts. For instance in 1965 and 1966, when she held first an official and then an unofficial Burns Fellowship, her working conditions were so favourable that as well as completing a book of poems, finishing one novel, writing another and starting a third, she also worked on a new collection of about thirty stories. In May 1966 she reported to Professor Horsman at the University of Otago: Im ahead of myself in publication of my work. The planned collection never appeared, but Frame did publish individual stories from it such as The Bath, A Boys Will and In Alco Hall. She was scandalised by the knowledge that stories published in prestigious magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, Mademoiselle or Harpers Bazaar earned her more than some of her publishers offered as an advance for a whole book.

Frame withheld other work because it was based too closely on living people. The Silkworms is an example of a story she called back from an editor for fear of causing offence to its lampooned subject. Some recognisable events from Janet Frames life recur in her short fiction and her long fiction and even her poetry, and its interesting to have the opportunity now to compare the way she transforms the same source material for different literary ends. Several of the stories in this volume share their subject matter and sometimes also their title with a chapter or passage in her autobiography, although the material is always treated in a much different way. Frame distinguished clearly between writing fiction inspired by her life and writing autobiography: It is harder to write in the autobiographical form. Actually its awful. All those sticky facts to work in. In fiction, one can just go to town. The story Dot is a good example of the way Frame was able to start with a true life experience and shape and twist it to make fiction, so that it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was imagination.

Later in her life Frame occasionally drew up a proposed table of contents for a new selection of stories; and her lists included the abandoned older typescripts. But once she had moved on from earlier work, she was reluctant to revisit it. It is also true that once she had financial security she was less willing to subject herself to the rigours of publication and the inevitable public attention, for good or otherwise. She had been very disillusioned by the initially hostile reception to her last book The Carpathians (1988), even though the critical tide on that novel subsequently turned so much in its favour that it won not only the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction but also the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book.

Whatever the motivation, we know that Frame deliberately left work unpublished during her lifetime. She often remarked of this decision,... I think posthumous publication is the only form of literary decency left.

Pamela Gordon & Denis Harold

Trustees

Janet Frame Literary Trust

My father fought in the First World War that used to be called Great until the truth of its greatness was questioned and the denial of its greatness accepted. My father came home from the war with a piece of shrapnel in his back, remnants of gas in his lungs, a soldiers pay book, an identity disc, a gas mask, and a very important document which gave details of my fathers debt to the King and his promise before witnesses to repay the King the fifty pounds borrowed to buy furniture: a bed to sleep in with his new wife, a dining table to dine at, linoleum and a hearthrug to lay on the floor, two fireside chairs for man and wife to sit in when he wasnt working and she wasnt polishing the Kings linoleum and shaking the Kings hearthrug free of dust; and a wooden fireside kerb to protect the hearthrug, the linoleum and my father and his wife from sparks when they sat by the fire. All this furniture, the document said, cost fifty pounds, which had to be paid to the King in agreed instalments.