Wouldn’t you like to be normal?

Janet Frame​ didn’t like people writing about her. When they asked for interviews, she described them as ‘Porlock people’ (one biographer reported being ‘vigorously and efficiently rebuffed’). She believed she should be entitled to a private life, so she legally changed her name to Nene Janet Paterson Clutha – in honour of a Māori chief and the Clutha river – while continuing to write as Janet Frame. She also thought that she was misrepresented. This stemmed from a lifetime spent enduring other people’s categorisations, which seemed to cling to her like bindweed.

There were her nicknames: Nini with the nits at home as a child, Fuzzy and Jean at school, Miss Educated in Seacliff psychiatric hospital, Waldo to the writer Frank Sargeson, Janetta in Ibiza. Then there was what people said about her: she was dirty, a thief, shy, different, an aspiring poet, ‘a lovely girl, no trouble at all’, officially insane, ‘pleasant to the guests at all times’, the ‘niece who is going overseas’, the grande dame of New Zealand letters. She remembered her clothes as if they were costumes: a dreaded ‘grey serge tunic’ at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred her to wear, the ‘large fawn cardigan with a hood’ she knitted herself, her Roman sandals, a black mantilla for going to church in Andorra. She was someone to whom people gave things, and perhaps the categorisation she resented was often a misplaced gift. She couldn’t easily be defined by her romantic relationships and didn’t ‘hold down a job’, though she had stints as a trainee teacher, a dish-washer in a student canteen, a housemaid-waitress-nurse, a laundry assistant in a hospital mangle room, a waitress at the Dunedin Grand Hotel, an usherette at the Regal Theatre in Streatham and an archivist ‘cataloguing medical papers in the brain museum’, until, aged 34, she put herself on National Assistance at her psychiatrist’s suggestion, in order to write full time. He told her that, for her own good, she shouldn’t feel under any pressure to ‘join in’. She would dedicate seven books to him.

In order to free herself from these unwanted categories, and to have what she called ‘my say’, Frame wrote an autobiography in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted embarrassment, loss of face, emotional or physical pain, or nervous or psychiatric collapse’. He said that the ‘communication and trust’ generated by this approach were worth it. Without them, I doubt Frame would have allowed him to write it at all.

Born in 1924, in Dunedin, New Zealand, as a child Frame moved around the South Island with her family. In her autobiography, she describes a landscape that was ‘swamp red, beastie gold, sky grey, railway red, railway yellow, macrocarpa green, tussock gold, snowgrass gold, penny-orange orange, milk white, snowberry white, all lit by the sky of snow light reflected from Antarctica or, as we knew it, from Mother’s constant reference, “the South Pole, kiddies”’. Her mother, a Christadelphian who communicated her sense of wonder to her daughter, wrote poems which were published in newspapers and magazines. She had worked ‘in service’, including as a maid to Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother. Frame’s father was a railway worker of Scottish origin, who fished, did embroidery and bagpiped the children to sleep. There were five children, and Janet came in the middle, the survivor of a pair of twins. The Frames owned two cows, white Leghorns and a rooster ‘with a tall, arched tail’ that had ‘the end feathers arranged like a hand of playing cards’. In 1937, her sister Myrtle drowned at the public baths (all her life, Janet couldn’t bear to see dead bodies, and avoided funerals). Her brother, Geordie, whom she calls Bruddie in the autobiography to protect his privacy, was epileptic. The family didn’t have much money. They paid for their blankets in weekly instalments. Frame’s writing is often compared to Faulkner’s, and her family history reads like a Southern Gothic novel.

Yet Frame can be an extraordinarily cheerful, funny writer. Language was a source of continual revelation: she often used repeated phrases in quotation marks to demonstrate her acquisition of new words and concepts – the news of a farmer being ‘gored’ gathered meaning thanks to her mother’s ‘earthquake-and-tidal-wave voice’; as a frizzy-red-haired child, the arrival of the ‘permanent wave’, which had to be repeated every few months, shattered her concept of linguistic truth. She told King that hers was ‘an excitable family with a passion for detail and a love of home and hearth that helped to make the smallest expedition beyond home an occasion to recall in minute detail’. As a teenager, she wrote diaries addressed to a Mr Ardenue, the grey-bearded ruler of the Land of Ardenue, the first in a series of imaginary kingdoms she would think of as ‘my place’. In her account, memory imbues the railway huts and houses they lived in – Ferry Street, Wyndham; Eden Street, Oamaru; Willowglen – with a halo of significance. Each of them was defined by its areas of cold and warmth:

Willowglen, we discovered, had a special share of sun. Unlike at 56 Eden Street, where the land lay full under the sun and the sky, the house at Willowglen, set against a western hill and facing an eastern hill, with the north boundary of hawthorn hedge, may trees, willow trees, had only brief sun in the morning, making the house cool even in summer, but if you looked from the cool and often cold world of the house you’d see, down on the flat by the creek and beyond it, a world where the sun stayed late, in summer until the evening; and perhaps if you looked out, as Mother did, when the day and working energy were fast being spent, you might feel ‘down on the flat’ to be an unattainable world of sun.

When I pleaded for mother to come down on the flat in the sun, she said in the tone she used for talking of publication, the Second Coming, and, now, the white fox fur as a 21st birthday present, ‘One of these days.’

When she was nineteen, Frame left home for Dunedin Training College. Too timid to use the sanitary towel incinerator, she carried hers back to hide in the dressing-table drawers at her aunt’s house, where she was staying, or threw them into the cemetery on the way home. She ate alone (conscious that her teeth were decaying). When her younger sister moved in too, Isabel got Janet into trouble (among other exploits, she convinced Janet to steal from the chocolate boxes Aunt Isy had won at Highland dancing competitions and kept, unopened, on display in the sitting room). Frame was attending lectures at the university ‘in my spare time’ and had a ‘pash’ on her psychology teacher, the 24-year-old John Money. In Frame’s probationary year teaching at Arthur Street School, she stiffened, avoiding the staff teas. This is where her autobiography and King’s retelling, based on interviews, diverge, but in both she swallows a packet of aspirin, and wakes the next morning relieved – nose bleeding, ears roaring – to find herself alive. She wrote about this experience in her psychology homework and on the September day the school inspector called, she said, ‘Will you excuse me a moment please?’ and fled. Money, alarmed, tried to arrange counselling and to put her on the path to becoming a librarian, but her behaviour became increasingly unhappy and in October 1945 Frame entered the psychiatric ward of Dunedin Hospital. ‘I felt suddenly free of all worry, cared for. I could think of nothing more desirable than lying in bed sheltered and warm.’ Clinical staff told Frame there was nothing wrong with her, and that her mother could come to pick her up. ‘Faced suddenly with the prospect of going home, I felt all the worries of the world returning, all the sadness of home and the everlasting toil of my parents and the weekly payments on the blankets and the new eiderdown from Calder Mackays.’ She screamed at her mother to leave, and was committed for six weeks in Seacliff hospital.

You have to wonder why Seacliff was so big. Why, during the late 19th-century gold rush when it was planned and constructed, did the largest building in New Zealand need to be an asylum? Why was it built in Scots Baronial style, why were a thousand keys needed for its doors and why did it have ‘an observation tower almost fifty metres tall’? Was there a lurking fear, among the turrets, towers and corbels, that the line between madness and sanity is like a river that changes its course, both over time and as a result of human interference? During this period, Frame’s letters were opened by the doctors, who deemed them ‘foolish’. A line about gorse smelling of peanut butter was singled out as a sign of her disordered mind and reason enough to prevent contact with the outside world for a time. Even Money was denied entry. When Frame was released, she returned to Dunedin but discovered she couldn’t go back to teacher training: she had been failed in absentia. She also had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, which restricted her options. She moved into a boarding house, where she cared for bedridden elderly women in the mornings and wrote in the afternoons. ‘My inspiration for my stories came partly from my reading of William Saroyan, and my unthinking delight, “I can do that too.”’ In the evenings she went to ethics, logic and psychology lectures at the university, and once a week she met up with the ‘young handsome’ John Money, ‘glistening with newly applied Freud’, and played up to her diagnosis to keep his attention, her act bolstered by the case histories of schizophrenics she read in the public library (‘It’s masturbation,’ she told him, ‘worry over masturbation’). She wrote her notion of schizophrenia into the stories she let Money read, and which he showed to a publisher. Then, as enough time had passed, she was declared sane again. Money announced he was leaving for the US. Frame later wrote that it was around this time that her ‘destructive sense of realism’ prevented her from continuing to believe he loved her. On holiday in 1947, Isabel drowned when swimming in Picton harbour as the result of a heart defect – ten years after Myrtle. Of the siblings only Geordie, Janet and June remained.

Grete Christeller, a friend of Money’s, who Frame hoped might arrange to have her teeth extracted, persuaded her to become a voluntary boarder at Sunnyside Hospital where ‘there was a new electric treatment’. During the next eight years, Frame found herself stuck in a psychiatric system that took her feeling for language as evidence of madness. When she compared herself to Pierre in War and Peace, her doctors thought she was describing a schizophrenic delusion. ‘I inhabited a territory of loneliness,’ she later wrote, ‘which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death, and from where those who do return living to the world bring inevitably a unique point of view that is a nightmare, a treasure and a lifelong possession.’ While she was in the hospital, in 1951, her first book was published, under the title The Lagoon and Other Stories (‘The Caxton Press, not I, had decided the title’). The norm at the time was for hospital workers not to speak to patients, but rather to teach them lessons, mostly through punishment. Along with degrading treatment, Frame was subjected to insulin coma therapy and, she writes, ‘over two hundred applications of unmodified ECT, each the equivalent, in degree of fear, to an execution’. In 1952, a member of staff told her that she and her friend ‘Nola’ were both ‘down for a leucotomy’ – a lobotomy. A ward sister told her about one patient who had undergone a leucotomy and was now ‘selling hats in a hat shop … as normal as anyone. Wouldn’t you like to be normal?’ In her novel Faces in the Water Frame had Istina reply that she doubted she could sell hats. But then the superintendent read in the Evening Star that Frame had won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, then the country’s most prestigious prose prize (the winner received £25), for The Lagoon. He showed her the paper. ‘We’re moving you out of this ward. And no leucotomy.’ Following some occupational therapy (making lace) and a stint brewing tea for the doctors, Frame was discharged, aged thirty. ‘My writing saved me.’ Nola, whose real name was Audrey Scrivener, and had been admitted for asthma of suspected psychosomatic origin, was not so lucky. A leucotomy was a ‘convenience treatment’, Frame wrote some years later, but its effects could be disastrous. ‘Although [Nola] was formerly aware and interested in things of the mind, now she sits and knits.’

Through her youngest sister, June, Frame met the writer Frank Sargeson in Auckland in 1955. * Sargeson collected and anthologised the work of local authors; after meeting Frame, he let her live in an old army hut in his garden. ‘Frank sometimes dispensed people as if they were medicine and he were the doctor in charge of the case. He prescribed for himself too.’ When she visited home (a north-south journey that took more than a day), her mother, Lottie, was finally persuaded to go out onto ‘the flat’.

We ate our sandwiches of bread and butter and chives and drank, with little black flies from the creek dropping in the tea. The pukekos watched us through the fence in the next paddock.

But Mother was restless. What if the phone rang? Surely we wouldn’t hear it, down on the flat? What if ‘your father’ came home and found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.

Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.

Frame and Sargeson read Proust and The Death of Ivan Ilyich together, listened to Beethoven’s violin concerto and played chess in the evenings. As a gift, she bought him silkworms, which they kept in a shoebox. Frame picked mulberry leaves for the worms to eat and ‘in the silence of the night as I lay in bed I heard a sound like the turning of tiny pages in a tiny library … the sound of steady chewing and chomping.’ Then she and Sargeson watched as the silkworms ‘entered their next life, as they began to wave their heads in a circular motion, with a thread like a golden spiderweb being drawn from their mouths … The golden thread of plaited silk hung on the wall by the window in that same room where Ivan Ilyich and the old Prince died.’ She began to write an ‘exploration’, which Sargeson helped her sell. (It came out in 1957 as Owls Do Cry, marketed as a ‘novel’; in it, among other things, a boy, Toby Withers, struggles under the ‘velvet cloak’ of epilepsy.) Sargeson advised her to go abroad, away from what he saw as New Zealand’s conformism, and they applied for, and secured, a grant of £300 from the New Zealand Literary Fund for her to ‘travel overseas and broaden my experience’. Frame feared that if she stayed, she would end up in an institution again.

The​ voyage to Southampton on the Ruahine took 32 days. Frame’s 1962 novel, The Edge of the Alphabet, which has been reissued in the UK after sixty years out of print, was inspired by the time she spent in England. When she arrived, Frame wrote to Money describing the ‘buses like bright red sandwiches’ and the ‘men with briefcases, yeast-bun hats and Freudian-sinister umbrellas’. Sargeson, who had found it difficult to work on his own books with Frame around, continued to worry about her from Auckland, asking visitors to report on her welfare and extract work from her. As a housemaid-waitress at Battersea Technical College Hostel, Frame emptied ashes from fireplaces, polished floors, and waited high table. The codes and hierarchies reminded her of psychiatric hospitals. She swapped impressions with her colleagues from the Commonwealth: ‘The class system? They’re in the Middle Ages.’ For a few months, she lived off Clapham Common, where she was taken under the wing of an overbearing Irish bus driver known in her autobiography as Patrick Reilly. Reilly wanted a wife. ‘There’s no doubt,’ he assured Frame, ‘that I’m manager material.’ In her opinion, he was ‘yet another reject of a demanding world’. His romantic strategy was ‘never to take your eye off the quarry’. With him, she felt like ‘a clinging insect that had glued itself to the wrong plant in the wrong garden in the wrong world. Wrong for the insect, the plant, the garden and the world.’ From there (who can blame her), Frame went to Ibiza, where ‘my bedroom was large and airy with a wide window overlooking the harbour and the distant shore where the buildings lay like those of another city, a sea or mirror city reflected in the clear water.’

Staying on the floor above her was an American painter called Harvey Cohen (Edwin in Frame’s autobiography). Frame fell for his friend George Parlette (Bernard), who ‘laughed heartily and each time he laughed I felt … as if I were a vast empty palace awaiting the guests and the feast’. They had an affair and ate breakfast cakes, as well as corned beef that Reilly sent, along with notes saying ‘I hope you are still fancy free.’ She was offended when Bernard said that it would be ‘terrible’ if they had a baby, and refused to see him again, so he left the island. The local women were pleased to hear of Bernard’s departure.

‘Los Americanos,’ they said. ‘They disturb everything. Everywhere. Even the light.’

And that was true, for Edwin was in disgrace again having blown the electric fuses with his high-powered lamps.

‘They disturb the light,’ Francesca said. ‘And make everything dark.’

Heart darkened, Frame left for Andorra, where she moved in with a local family. She had realised she was pregnant, and began running ‘like a terrier up and down the mountains’, downing quinine and taking ‘immensely hot baths’. She miscarried. Shortly afterwards, she was persuaded to go for a picnic in the Pyrenees by an Italian man known in her autobiography as El Vici:

I, always an admirer of those with a gift for language, was prepared to like this tall handsome man. I admired his fight against the Fascists led by Il Duce, Mussolini, I sympathised with his suffering and torture in a concentration camp; the fact, however, that I could not accept his wearing of two-tone black and white shoes, and particularly his wearing them in the photograph he gave me, is more a comment on me and the influence of my early life than on the character of El Vici. In my past and lost world any man wearing ‘two-tone’ shoes was a ‘spiv’, a ‘lounge lizard’, possibly a gangster.

But she couldn’t get rid of him. (‘After the day of that picnic he made sure that I did not walk alone.’) Soon El Vici produced a ring, leaving Frame ‘flattered, alarmed and melancholy, for it was Bernard who still occupied my thoughts and dreams’. She claimed to have ‘things to see to’ in London, that she would take care of them, then return to El Vici in Andorra. ‘And so it happened again that during the remainder of my stay in Andorra I found myself assuming my most accustomed role, that of the passive person whose life is being planned for her while she dare not, for fear of punishment or provocation, refuse.’ Back in London, in May 1957, Reilly had taken it on himself to rent another room on Frame’s behalf in Clapham Common, and her brother, Geordie, had turned up. He wanted her to read the manuscript of a book he had written, which she thought read like a child’s work. She found herself having to avoid him, too, until he finally went to Belgium. Eventually he was repatriated by the New Zealand High Commission.

Low on money, Frame found work in a cinema, got herself an agent and pr0mised herself not to take ‘one notice’ of publishers who rejected her work as ‘not sensational, topical, sexy’. ‘I am not going to entitle my next work Conversation with My Lover.’ Frame’s mission in London was to find out ‘the truth’: she wanted to know whether she really had schizophrenia. She spent six weeks at the Maudsley in Denmark Hill, which she found to be more enlightened than the hospitals in which she had been locked up. The doctors interviewed the patients ‘several times a week, at first daily, and not, as happened in New Zealand, once on admission, once on discharge, with occasional fatuous “Hellos” between, no matter how many years the interval “between” may have been’. The Maudsley’s approach, she wrote later, ‘helped to give patients a sense of being, and of being somewhere’. After an electroencephalogram, an American psychiatrist called Dr Miller told her that her brainwaves were ‘“more normal than normal”, thus shattering my long-held acquaintance and kinship with Van Gogh, Hugo Wolf’. She had never suffered from schizophrenia, she was told. Instead, her current symptoms were the aftershocks of her years in hospital.

Perhaps I remember so vividly Dr Miller’s layers of clothes worn against the winter season because I myself had been suddenly stripped of a garment I had worn for twelve or thirteen years … I remembered how … I had accepted it, how in the midst of the agony and terror of the acceptance found the unexpected warmth, comfort, protection: how I had longed to be rid of the opinion but was unwilling to part with it. And even when I did not wear it openly I always had it by for emergency, to put on quickly, for shelter from the cruel world.

Avoiding Reilly, Frame moved to Kentish Town and befriended some artists (‘outsiders’) with whom she would visit ‘sleazy clubs’ in Soho. She continued with her appointments at the Maudsley. Miller was leaving, and she was treated by a doctor whose small talk about the world heavyweight championship was ‘remote from what I felt to be the centre of concern’. Things improved with the arrival of a new psychiatrist, Dr Cawley. He ‘had been a zoologist and mathematician’, ‘dressed as for a day in the office’ and ‘spoke with an “English” accent that chilled me when I heard it’. His professional opinion was that Frame ‘genuinely needed to write, that it was a way of life for me, and that the best practical help for me was to arrange a National Assistance weekly payment and for me to find accommodation near the hospital so that we might continue our talks’. He believed she had suffered ‘an existential dilemma – an identity crisis’. Dr Cawley suggested she write about her time in psychiatric institutions, Frame wrote, ‘to give me a clearer view of my future’.

In 1959, she moved to Camberwell, which was convenient for the Maudsley. Sixty-five years later, I moved to the same street. From my window, I can see the house where she wrote The Edge of the Alphabet as well as Faces in the Water, published in 1961, which she called ‘a series of sketches or episodes’ and ‘documentary fiction’, and which told the ‘story of my experiences in hospitals in New Zealand’.

With​ Faces in the Water, Frame said she was ‘planning a subdued rather than a sensational record’, ‘aiming more for credibility than a challenge to me by those who might disbelieve it’. In her notebook she drew columns recording her ‘timetable’, ‘progress’ and ‘wasted days’. She found that having ‘an impartial observer in Dr Cawley’ made her more enthusiastic ‘than usual’. Whether it was because of the doctor’s presence or because time had passed since she was last in an institution, she achieves a tonal distance between herself and her story. As Fleur Adcock wrote in the TLS, ‘she can be both detached and passionate at the same time.’ The effect is to suggest that a situation might be comic even when it is harrowing. King said of his interviews with her that she told the story of her life ‘in a tone that acknowledged past tragedies but seemed more frequently to tremble on the brink of laughter’. ‘On the brink’ captures it well: the voice in Faces in the Water is never fully dramatic, touching, nostalgic, serious, knowing or harsh – even when what Frame’s describing is heightened.

Frame’s account of the lives of what she called the ‘“secret” people’ in psychiatric hospitals begins with a list, a typical feature of her expansive style of writing. She starts by logging aspects of ‘dangerous reality’: ‘lightning snakes traffic germs riot earthquakes blizzard and dirt’, each word replacing the last in an endless emergency. Her fictional institutions, Cliffhaven and Treecroft, both deeply hierarchical, do their best to abolish patients’ sense of their own personal narrative. Instead, there is only obeying and disobeying. Each area in them – the Brick Building, Lawn Lodge, Ward Two, the Park, the Yard – has its distinctive routines, nurses and procedures. Frame’s narrator, Istina Mavet, has no backstory and believes she will never leave the hospital system. (Istina is the Serbo-Croat word for ‘truth’ and mavet the Hebrew for ‘death’.) ECT is ‘the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realise that orders are to be obeyed’. ‘Will I be for treatment tomorrow?’ is a fear that comes round cyclically. It is said that ‘when a prisoner is condemned to die all clocks in the neighbourhood of the death cell are stopped; as if the removal of the clock will cut off the flow of time and maroon the prisoner on a coast of timelessness where the moments, like breakers, rise and surge near but never touch the shore.’

The doctors don’t expect to hear from the patients. The prevailing logic is: ‘If you can’t adapt yourself to living in a mental hospital, how do you expect to be able to live “out in the world”?’ Frame’s project is to show how ineffective, cruel and self-reinforcing that logic is. Watching the new queen’s coronation on the hospital television or attending dances (‘We danced the Destiny’) or the sports day is nothing like real life.

When the possibility arises of a leucotomy for Istina, the doctors feel a thrill, falling into ‘a confused excitement of planning and speculation’; she thinks they are ‘like meter readers, furniture removers or decorators sent to repaper an upstairs room’. Frame applies the language of politics to the staff (‘abrupt communications like diplomatic notes between distant foreign powers passed between the doctors and my parents’) and that of trade to the patients (‘Ted … was a young man with a love of admiring and of being admired, and his cunning expression arose from his continual need to practise the commerce of admiration in which he had truly invested his life’). The staff have real power; the patients only the power to barter.

Istina’s subjectivity is an issue for the hospital, and for one nurse, Sister Bridge, in particular: ‘By an unintentional glance I had surprised her into surprising herself into an uncomfortable consciousness that seemed to amount to fear.’ She describes her opinions of the doctors – ‘Dr Howell was young catarrhal plump pale-faced (we called him Scone)’ – and the abuse of the staff:

‘Love me, Helen,’ the nurse would call, and Helen smiling with anticipated joy, would advance carefully towards the nurse only to be turned aside with a scornful remark when her arms had almost encircled their longed-for objective of flesh. Her love changed to hate then; she would attack, and the nurse would blow her whistle bringing other nurses to her aid, and Helen would be put in a straitjacket and for the rest of the day would rage about the room using her feet, her shoes having been removed, to convey her anger and frustration.

Visitors are scrutinised, too: a well-meaning but clueless group of women, ‘the Ladies’, say things like ‘Never mind, you’ll soon be home won’t you?’ A ‘more sophisticated visitor’, the ‘One-Lolly Man’, knows better how to please the patients.

Istina prescribes a more benign environment, where the patients can devote themselves to making something ‘with the involvement and detachment of true artists’, and with greater access to nature: ‘I think it is the removal of the sun’s influence that has made us mad.’ Slips of description of the natural world – a cow’s teeth ‘worn, like square white stools often sat upon’ or the ‘herringbone patterns on the sand’ of the beach – suggest that she responds to nature as she can’t to her surroundings.

Her account of the patients themselves is precise. For Istina, their protests, their depression, their unexplained bouts of joy, cunning, violence and disobedience are what makes them human. She refuses ‘the easy Opheliana recited like the pages of a seed catalogue or the outpourings of Crazy Janes who provide, in fiction, an outlet for poetic abandon’. These are not the ‘charmingly uninhibited eccentrics’ of idealised portrayals of madness; they are the bullies, the pedantic dance partners, the romantics ‘thrusting questionable notes through the six-inch opening in the bottom of the dayroom window’, those who patronise Sunday request programmes on the radio, those with delusions of grandeur that make people uncomfortable. There is the woman who tells enthralling tales at night (‘As she spoke, what the advertisers might call a “secret ingredient” passed her lips inside the words, and forced us to believe her stories’). There’s Brenda, with her attitude of ‘sympathy envy and longing which made me feel responsible for her rescue and for her plight if rescue never came’. She is a talented pianist who gives the book its title:

Listening to her, one experienced a deep uneasiness as of having avoided an urgent responsibility, like someone who, walking at night along the banks of a stream, catches a glimpse in the water of a white face or a moving limb and turns quickly away, refusing to help or to search for help. We all see the faces in the water. We smother our memory of them, even our belief in their reality, and become calm people of the world; or we can neither forget nor help them. Sometimes by a trick of circumstances or dream or a hostile neighbourhood of light we see our own face.

When Istina graduates to being asked to make tea for the doctors, ‘it was strange to be among people who talked, and at first I could not grasp the idea of talking, making sentences aloud, entering conversation, shunting back and forth with words in the once-darkened carriages lit with meaning.’ She eventually leaves the hospital and writes this book. But rather than a betrayal of her fellow patients, the book is an act of disobedience directed at the nurses who tell her that she must forget what she’s seen and ‘put it out of your mind completely as if it never happened and go and live a normal life in the outside world.’ Istina refuses both parts of the instruction. She remains doubtful about the possibility of a ‘normal life’: ‘I dreamed of the world because it seemed the accepted thing to do, because I could not bear to face the thought that not all prisoners dream of freedom; the prospect of the world terrified me.’

Frame hated noise​ . She claimed that her street (our street) became too loud when, after Harold Macmillan came to power, the residents had the money to buy TVs and record players, though she herself blasted out Schubert to disguise her illicit typing when her landlord was sleeping. Throughout her work, Frame incorporates sounds usually excluded from language (her seagulls cry ‘keel, kool’). She seems to be testing the idea that anything can be accommodated in her medium. The Edge of the Alphabet is about trash, debris, dreams, the incommunicable and the excluded. It begins: ‘Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill-judged, costly, criminal – especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products.’

The story follows an epileptic man, again called Toby Withers; a schoolteacher, Zoe Bryce; and an Irish bus driver, Pat Keenan. They meet on the boat from New Zealand and try to find their ‘place’ in London. Told by Thora Pattern, a sort of clairvoyant with access to all three, the narrative steps into each character’s perspective in turn. Thora lives ‘at the edge of the alphabet’, a place ‘where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence’. The proposition Frame seems to be making is that marginality means semantic exile too; vivid, broken images are her characters’ alternative vehicles for communication. The text works according to a principle of difference. Loneliness pervades and lingers like damp.

Toby decides to move abroad after the death of his mother. ‘There was no one now to care for him, to defend him, to give him special glances of love.’ But her memory pursues him and seems as real as his surroundings. At the edge of the alphabet, the dead ‘keep cropping up like daisies with their floral blackmail’. Toby doesn’t do what his father, Bob, does, and try to compartmentalise. ‘Bob’s use of the term “your mother” acted as a temporary disownment, a shifting of the responsibility and reality of the grief that had overtaken a personal relationship which had always been so complicated that it needed division anyway into two or three or four in order to survive. Your mother, Mum, Amy, The Wife.’

The edge of the alphabet is also close to bodily waste. After Toby wets the bed in a fit, he becomes aware ‘of urine that had lost its first warmth and nearness’. He picks his nose by ‘working his finger with a drilling motion and peering curiously at the little blots of salvage’. Words are unmanageable and therefore also a kind of waste: they ‘became blots, fly-specks (like the dead), mouse-dirt, a mess to be cleaned up’. Sometimes he feels them ‘moving in his arms … wriggling like silkworms’.

The character of Zoe may be Frame’s attempt to imagine who she would have been if she hadn’t written. ‘I am concerned with an intensity of making – yet I make nothing.’ Instead Zoe shops (and shoplifts) from a fictional department store called Norton and Stroods, dreams of being kissed and tells everyone that she is engaged in ‘private research’ that never materialises. The third principal, Pat, has his own difficulties connecting to others. He ‘could never keep the triumph from his voice when he talked of people who were “friends of his”. He was like a big-game hunter, proud of the carcasses, but doomed to have no relationship with the living animal.’

When Toby first arrives in London, he is struck by

the scaffold stations. The cheated faces. The change of echo under the bridges. The sky crowding down close like grey pastry being pressed around a tenpenny steak and kidney pie that has been cooked once then warmed up, fouled by great black squawking birds with ragged wings that lean forward in the sky like clergymen striving for a pittance. Cry warning, a racketing shudder, a slowing-down, time to think, to draw out the meaning like necessary matter from an unclean wound.

When he gets to Piccadilly Circus, he finds it throbbing ‘with lights which seemed at first to be the Crown Jewels only they said Bovril Bovril’. At Hyde Park, people shout about ‘the urgent need for contraception, licensed brothels, nuclear disarmament, National Health Euthanasia, transistors and hi-fi equipment in coffins’. These impressions don’t form a coherent whole for Toby but impose themselves abruptly and are replaced by others, leaving him disoriented.

Pat becomes a bus driver, Zoe an usherette and Toby a street sweeper (‘disposing of the social snow, the city flakes that fell endlessly from man’s winter need – the need to buy little packets, tear them open, empty them, get comfort from them, discard them’), but they remain excluded. As Toby’s Aunt Cora puts it, they have been left off ‘from the mystical long division sum’. In the upper circle of the Palace Cinema, Zoe is alarmed by canoodling youths: ‘The love-makers threaten the survival of others by refusing to accommodate anything but their own survival.’ She longs to acquire the ‘substance’ of usherettes which allows them to take charge of a situation. She buys an encyclopedia of sex. But as she waits to be transformed into some kind of artist, she sees herself undergoing a different metamorphosis, losing her femininity and even her personhood, ‘changed to a step-ladder, a bony triangle where the hands meet in prayer, a heap of thin twigs among the salt plants on a hill exposed to the sea, where people pass me by, intent only on gathering the first spring asparagus’. The sentence is self-deprecating; it leaves open whether it is Zoe’s own passivity or the heedless passers-by who are to blame.

Peter, a young painter, turns up at her house. ‘For a moment she could not remember him. “The coffee bar,” he said. “You gave me your address. I promised to take you out, one afternoon in summer.”’ Zoe doesn’t remember, but goes with him to a bar, where she meets another man, Lawrence. She senses that the encounter has special significance: ‘You are one of those people,’ she thinks, ‘who … appear at crossroads, at the entrance to mazes, on the outskirts of cities, at the edge of the alphabet.’ Lawrence invites them both to the Serpentine, where they meet his friends – a louche crowd – and while the others swim and smoke, Zoe sits, folding some cigarette packet paper. ‘It was absurd, how absurd it was, but it was silver trees and people with hats like silver planets, like priests, lost in the forest … I am making something at last.’ Her small, risky act of creation becomes ‘the creation of my life’ – and has unintended outcomes. Peter becomes a salesman, Pat a ‘stationery supervisor in a large city store’ and Toby moves back to New Zealand to live with Aunt Cora.

The Edge of the Alphabet gestures towards ideas about origins, language and myth that were becoming more important to Frame. Around the time of its writing, she experienced a

subtle shifting of my life into a world of fiction where I spread before me everything I saw and heard, people I met in buses, streets, railway stations, and where I lived, choosing from the displayed treasure fragments and moments that combined to make a shape of a novel or poem or story. Nothing was without its use. I had learned to be a citizen of the Mirror City … The self must be the container of the treasures of Mirror City, the Envoy as it were … Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination, learning the unique functioning of Mirror City, its skies and space, its own planetary system, without stopping to think that one may become homeless in the world, and bankrupt, abandoned by the Envoy.

The envoy was both the second self who could be issued into the world and return to fiction, and also a muse of sorts, who led her to her fiction.

Over the three years Frame lived on my street, that envoy helped deliver another novel, Scented Gardens for the Blind, and 39 stories. It was probably here that Frame wrote ‘The Linesman’, the first work of hers I read. When I came across it, I had a routine of ordering three or four story collections at the library where I went to work on my computer, and just before closing time I would read the shortest story in each book. In Frame’s two-page piece, the narrator watches a man who has climbed up a tall pole by her house to repair the telephone lines. She is unable to look away. ‘I was reluctant to leave the window because I was so intent on watching the linesman at work, and because I wanted to see him descend from the pole when his work was finished.’ She is fascinated by the man’s sense of ‘comfort and security’, by his ‘safety harness’, by the ‘rungs which are embedded at intervals in the sides of the pole’. Where her neighbours are oblivious, or worry about being spied on and close their curtains, she spies on him. ‘You see,’ she ends, ‘I was hoping that he might fall.’

‘The Linesman’ must have felt special, because I broke my rule to read a longer story, ‘The Reservoir’, in which the reader is pulled into a memory (‘It was said to be four or five miles along the gully, past orchards and farms, paddocks filled with cattle, sheep, wheat, gorse and the squatters of the land who were the rabbits’). Frame’s tone glitters, the language of childhood cut and rearranged by a future consciousness: ‘For so long we obeyed the command of the grown-ups and never walked as far as the forbidden Reservoir, but were content to return “tired but happy” (as we wrote in our school compositions), answering the question, Where did you walk today? with a suspicion of blackmail, “Oh, nearly, nearly to the Reservoir!”’ At the beginning of writing in this short form, Frame seems to have had a vivid idea of what she was pursuing. She described the process as ‘more like chasing butterflies or mosquitoes than netting a swarm of words … I “capture” them by writing down their titles.’

She suggested to Money that someone might send out some of the stories and, in late 1961, two were accepted by the New Yorker. The first, ‘Prizes’, lists the elements missing in some less accomplished schoolgirls’ musicianship as ‘warmth, expansion, gold finish’. The story doesn’t so much open as switch on like a light, with its affirming, propositional sentences: ‘Life is hell, but at least there are prizes. Or so one thought.’

In​ 1962, Frame left Camberwell. Although she said it made her uncomfortable, she spent a time living in other people’s houses – including a spell near Eye in Suffolk as caretaker of a cottage, a ninety-foot lilac hedge and ‘Minnie the mongrel bitch’ – while thinking of the Mirror City as her true ‘place’. Then, in March 1963, in an apartment in South Kensington arranged by her publisher, she received news from New Zealand that Geordie had turned up at June’s house, wanting to be looked after. He had recently sustained head injuries from a horse. (June didn’t mention that a year earlier Geordie had threatened to shoot her and had been disarmed by the police.) Soon after his arrival, June had a near fatal brain haemorrhage, at 34, then Geordie also deteriorated and was admitted to hospital. The sisters’ theory was that he had tried to enlist them into mothering roles after their mother’s death. ‘The Frames have this intense creative urge, which very easily becomes destructive,’ Janet wrote. ‘He has no outlet for himself.’ It was during this month of family disarray that The Edge of the Alphabet was published in New Zealand. June began to recover, but more bad news followed in August: their father had fallen and the next day died of a stomach ulcer.

Frame asked ‘Millicent’ (Mildred), the librarian with whom she had lived in Kentish Town, to take an extended lunch hour to wave her off from the East London docks. She was shocked on her return to find out that she was, unfortunately, famous in New Zealand. After clearing Willowglen, Frame saw June’s daughter playing with the keepsakes she’d brought back from her old home.

I remember my anger and shock when I perceived that the treasures I had rescued were being treated carelessly, ill used, not given their pride of place; and then I smiled to myself at my concern as I realised that even in my journeys to Mirror City I had abducted treasures from their homeland, placed them in strange settings, changed their purpose, and in some cases destroyed them to make my own treasures even as my niece was doing in her playhouse.

For herself, Frame had taken ‘a pair of old blankets, the eiderdown, Dad’s paintings, leaving some for my brother, Aunty Polly and Aunty Isy’s paintings, the bagpipe chanter, the bedcover sewn by Dad from the collection of blazer material from throughout New Zealand, used by Aunty Isy at the Ross and Glendinning Mills’.

Frame’s​ career was now well established. There was a fellowship, then travel to Baltimore to visit Money, who had become a controversial sexologist. Over the course of many trips to the US, Frame would meet new friends, some of whom would serve as patrons and hosts. She wrote what she claimed was her favourite of her books: a children’s story about an adventuring ant called Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun. After a visit to Philadelphia, where she visited the natural history museum, Frame wrote ‘You Are Now Entering the Human Heart’, in which the narrator, passing through on the way to catch a train, watches an attendant enlisting an unwilling elementary schoolteacher in a snake-handling demonstration. ‘The attendant withdrew a green snake about three feet long from the basket and with a swift movement, before the teacher could protest, draped it around her neck and stepped back, admiring and satisfied.’ Determined to instil a sense of safety (like the linesman in his harness), the attendant overrides the teacher’s fear, ‘as if his perception had grown a reptilian covering’. The story is fast around the edges, painfully slow at the centre, before the teacher loses her pupils’ respect and ‘collapsed into a small canvas chair by the Bear Cabinet and started to cry’. In a feat of literalism that conveys the ungainliness of emotion, the human heart is an exhibit that pulses ‘ceiling-high, occup[ying] one corner of the large exhibition hall, and from wherever you stood in the hall you could hear its beating, thum-thump-thum-thump’.

At Yaddo writers’ retreat, Frame at first avoided Philip Roth. Once they became friends, they took to writing each other provocative notes. (‘Dear Mrs Breast, It has come to my attention that you have not only failed to pay your rent on the nest we have provided for you, but that you sit down there all day twittering your little ass off.’) In 1969, at MacDowell, she noticed a ‘painter who’s a marvellous pianist and he plays in the evenings and I swoon over him’. This was the Bay Area figurative painter William Theophilus Brown, who was to become an important friend. Brown and Frame translated Rilke’s French poems together (‘Stay still, if the angel/at your table suddenly decides;/gently smooth those few wrinkles/in the cloth beneath your bread’). In letters, Frame described getting to know Brown as ‘the chief experience of my life’, writing that it had ‘taught me a lot about myself, for I recognise in him the male counterpart of what I am, although he shares his life with a man as I would never share mine with a woman. In that, I suppose, I am outside both sexes.’

Frame applied for a US residency visa in 1970, in the hope of moving in with Brown and his partner – ‘Are you looking for a maid?’ she wrote to them – but worried that she would be denied on the grounds that her country of birth deemed her schizophrenic, and schizophrenia was incurable. In any case, before a decision was reached, some overture had been rejected in her relationship with the couple that required apologies and made her retreat to ‘a penfriend’s love’. They exchanged mail, collages, doggerel and doodles for the next decades, and Frame settled in New Zealand.

Strategies were developed to protect her from disturbance. She took to sending critics a threat supplied by Dr Cawley, composed on Maudsley notepaper: ‘I have told Miss Clutha that in my opinion any writer who publishes comments referring to her “disordered mind” or “mental illness” is running two risks. One is of public ridicule at the hands of scholars more knowledgable and informed about these matters. The other is litigation.’ She mailed irritated responses to officials asking to anthologise her work for free: ‘If [writers] are to become a charitable institution, then might it not be wise for the Inland Revenue Department to exempt them from tax?’

In 1973, Audrey Scrivener – who never fully left the mental health system – died. After Frame’s friend James Baxter also died, she wrote to Brown: ‘How arrogant I am to have thought that I could keep death in books, lure it there so it would not stray into life’s business.’ Indeed, the inverse notion was becoming stronger: that rather than being a place to sequester unpleasant events, narrative was in some way primary, and could be their cause. She’d had to make Faces in the Water more ordinary in order for events not to look overwritten – life seemed to have shaped itself into too extreme a narrative form. ‘Things seem to fall into place in my life as if it were a work of fiction,’ she wrote, ‘and not, which I doubt anyway, a real act of living.’ She had created an autistic character in her novel Intensive Care (1970), only for her great-niece to be diagnosed as autistic. When she learned of another friend’s death, she wrote to Brown that she had been ‘very worried about her without knowing why’. As King put it, ‘talking and writing, she conveyed a vivid sense that reality itself is a fiction, and one’s grasp on it no more than preposterous pretence and pretension.’

Frame kept working with the aid of earplugs, earmuffs and white noise, moving house to avoid the sounds of building work, circular saws and ‘Ditch Witch’ trenchers, choosing new places with literary names: Stratford, where she lived on Miranda Street, and walked to the postbox on Prospero Place, then Levin (‘not far south is Plimmerton and Karehana Bay, pure New Zealand Glover’). She discovered she liked doing readings with a microphone. Things (noise, boats, words) were bearable as long as she was in charge. She learned to ride a motorbike, practising in the park. In 1981, she joined the protests against the visit of apartheid South Africa’s rugby team.

Alarmed by her own ‘near-total recall’, she began writing her autobiography ‘to set the record straight’. Yet ‘even as I write I realise that’s impossible, that records are born crooked and twisted.’ Threaded with silkworms, clothes and blankets, this was autobiography as a form of construction. Frame burrowed back into ancestral history, resurrected family in-jokes, mythologised the objects that had totemic importance to her, recounted her moments of doubt, exercised authorial discretion and impatience, and established a glinting rapport with the reader who would carry the story on into the future. Her subjectivity was inseparable from the facts and everyday detail of events. The first part of the trilogy, To the Is-Land, came out to enthusiastic reviews in the US in 1982, and in New Zealand and the UK the following year. Behind the guilelessness of her rhythms and repetitions, the books displays the ‘patterning and purpose’ identified by Judith Dell Panny as Frame’s preferred means of structuring:

Where in my earlier years time had been horizontal, progressive, day after day, year after year, with memories being a true personal history known by dates and specific years, or vertical, with events stacked one upon the other, ‘sacks on the mill and more on still’, the adolescent time now became a whirlpool, and so the memories do not arrange themselves to be observed and written about, they whirl, propelled by a force beneath, with different memories rising to the surface at different times and thus denying the existence of a ‘pure’ autobiography and confirming, for each moment, a separate story accumulating to a million stories, all different and with some memories forever staying beneath the surface.

Before the second volume was even published, Frame was being called a neglected genius, recommended for the Nobel Prize, awarded a CBE (she would have preferred to be styled Dame Frame, but ‘that’s my wack’). She had always been short of money; now she was winning every award going. ‘Frame Scores Again,’ the papers trumpeted. Two young filmmakers, Jane Campion and Bridget Ikin, wrote to ask her for the rights to make a television series of the autobiography. Campion described visiting Frame’s bungalow and noticing the ‘extra layer of bricks she had put on the front wall to try and soundproof it’. She suggested they wait to read the other volumes before committing themselves. They did so when the third book came out in 1984, and the film, which took its title from the second volume, An Angel at My Table, won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice. ‘It was not the best film at the festival,’ Campion wrote, ‘but it was the most loved.’ Motions were made to enable Frame’s out-of-print books to be reprinted – though she held back her approval on The Edge of the Alphabet while Geordie was alive. He died in 1989, at which point she worried it might have a ‘subtly degrading attitude to women’ and be ‘narrow in outlook’. Frame quite liked the queen when she met her (to be awarded a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for her 1988 novel, The Carpathians), but found her naive, in particular in her faith in people. She was more enthusiastic about the computer on which she had become ‘hooked’: ‘I play chess on it – and don’t always win! I also have a flight simulator.’ In 2004, she died of leukaemia in Dunedin and is buried with her parents and sisters in Oamaru.