King - Wrestling With The Angel: A Life of Janet Frame

Wrestling with the Angel

A life of Janet Frame

Michael King

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2000

Copyright Michael King 2000

The right of Michael King to be identified as the author of this work in terms of section 96 of the Copyright Act 1994 is hereby asserted.

Digital conversion by Pindar NZ

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ISBN 978-1-74228-827-7

Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

For Maria:the angel at my table

So Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled an angel with him until daybreak, who, when he saw he was not throwing him, struck his hip socket so that Jacobs thigh was dislocated The angel said, Let me go for the day is breaking. But Jacob replied, I will not let you go until you bless me The angel said, Your name will be Jacob no longer, but Israel, because you have striven with God and with men and have won And the angel blessed him there. Jacob named that place Peniel, for I saw God face to face and yet my life was preserved

GENESIS 32, 2431

Author Note

Janet Frame agreed to cooperate with the writing of this book but expressed two preferences: that it not be a critical biography (an analysis of her writing); and that I do not quote verbatim from my interviews with her. I have complied with both requests. There was no question I put to her that she did not answer; and she made no attempt to dissuade me from publishing any information that my research uncovered. For all of which I thank her, and for permission to quote from her copyrighted material, published and unpublished.

Michael King

Prologue

The Frame sisters thought of themselves as Bronts: because they held, by right, silk purses of words; and because their family was an anvil on which disasters fell. Not just the allotted portion of infant deaths, cancers and thromboses, but more than their share. One surviving daughter, the younger, would say that she spent her life dancing before a tide of doom that threatened to sweep her family to oblivion; the other, the writer, that she had entered a territory which resembled the place where the dying spend their time before death. Those who return from there, she said, brought a point of view equal in its rapture and its chilling exposure to the neighbourhood of the gods and goddesses.

This is the story of the writer-sister, who persevered by making designs from her dreams and going out into the world with no luggage but memory and a pocketful of words.

Chapter 1

Railway People

The people are Scotch, Mark Twain said of Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1895. They stopped here on their way to heaven thinking they had arrived. Twains theology might have been suspect but his powers of observation were acute. Dunedin was celestially beautiful, lying at the head of a long narrow harbour. The pasture, groves of trees and dry stone walls on the surrounding hills hinted at an Arcadian version of Caledonia. And the city itself was Scottish in its appearance and in the ethnic character of most of its citizenry. Dunedins street names, public buildings of brick and stone, church steeples, scattering of Queen Anne towers all made it seem more like Edinburgh and Glasgow than any other New Zealand settlement. Its very name was the Gaelic version of Edinburgh. And in pride of place in the centre of town, a fine bronze statue of Robbie Burns overlooked the Octagon.

Janet Paterson Frame, born in Dunedin on 28 August 1924, was an heir to this character and to the traditions that came with it. She was named Janet after a Frame aunt who died in infancy; and Paterson from the family name of her Scottish grandmother. From the first, she was known by the very Scottish diminutive of Jean, contracted further by her immediate family to Nini. Her childhood was soaked in transplanted Scottish culture. When her mother spoke of Resurrection Day, Janet envisaged a heavenly kind of Sports Day, with a brass band playing The Invercargill March and kilted pipers skirling The Road to the Isles. Even the Second Coming, it seemed to her, would have a ScottishNew Zealand flavour. The immediate history of her family explains how this eschatological vision developed.

Alexander Frame, Janets fathers father, was part of a chain migration that brought around 68,000 Scots to New Zealand, mostly to the southern parts of the country, in the nineteenth century. The first wave arrived in 1848 as part of the Free Church settlement of Otago an attempt on the part of artisans, farmers, farm labourers and domestic servants to escape the gloom of Celtic twilight for the bright dawn of a new start in a new country, where organised British colonisation had been under way for less than a decade.

The second group of Scottish immigrants followed in the 1860s to join the rush to the Otago goldfields and build on the foundations laid by their predecessors. Then the third and largest wave arrived in the 1870s as a result of the colonial governments drive to recruit more hard-working immigrants. They too gravitated to those parts of New Zealand already settled by their compatriots. And they included Alexander Frame, a stoker from Hamilton in the Clyde Valley, whose four older brothers had chosen to go to Canada and the United States. Alexander disembarked at Port Chalmers and was directed eighty miles to the north, to the coastal town of Oamaru, then burgeoning with a prosperity induced by wool and grain. Mary Paterson, who had begun work in a Paisley cotton mill at the age of eight but arrived in New Zealand as a domestic servant, followed him. She had come to New Zealand in 1874 on the maiden voyage of the Mairi Bhan . Her daughters believed that she had conceived a child en route for New Zealand and that the infant had died. True or not, she was unencumbered in May 1877 when she married Alexander Frame in Oamaru. He was twenty-three and literate; she twenty-one and uneducated.