Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
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the Pacific. On arrival in Auckland after a rough flight, she wrote to Brown in order ‘to keep in touch, to remind myself of much happiness found at Hermosillo Drive: when I fall asleep I dream of it’.
After a week with her sister June and her family on Auckland’s North Shore, Frame arrived home in Dunedin on the first day of April. A creative but often solitary period of eight months ensued that at times felt like exile from the excitements of North America, especially her friendship with Brown. She wrote to him of her loneliness: ‘It’s a new experience for me to miss people’. Dunedin was no substitute for the Californian ‘live oaks’, which was one of her most frequent endearments for Brown, Wonner and Ned (their cat):
‘Life is pretty barren here for me, socially, because everyone is so bloody staid and straight-laced. I’m getting to rely more and more on the under-population I meet when I go out walking—the numerous cats sitting on fences, absorbing everything with their uncensored gaze . . .’
In May, Frame gave an interview on a national radio programme about her experiences at Yaddo and MacDowell entitled ‘Artists’ Retreats’bb:
New Zealand Listener, 27 July 1970
‘It was a rich experience, for me, to feel for the first time in my life that I was among my own kind, so to speak, living and working and playing with them unselfconsciously.’
She gradually became involved with Dunedin activities and friends such as Charles Brasch, Ruth Dallas and Dorothy White, and visited an elderly relative in hospital. Her correspondence with Brown continued, full of musings, wit and poetry. She commented on the frequency of her letters: ‘Another hailstone in my storm of correspondence—dodge it if you wish.’ Her letters were an imaginative projection: ‘I don’t look on my letters to you as letters, not really, they’re just a way, for me, of being there from time to time with the three live and lively oaks.’ The phrase being there was most powerfully explored in the long poem On Not Being Therecc that she wrote in early June. This brilliant poem operates on several levels: the theme of desire underlies a description of a concert that the narrator does not attend.
First published in the posthumous volume of Frame’s poetry, The Goose Bath (Random House, Auckland, 2006)
Frame occasionally entertained the possibility, encouraged by Brown and Wonner, that some arrangement might be worked out for her to live with them. Soon after she returned to Dunedin, she wrote, ‘as soon as you get that small servant-kennel built on to the kitchen let me know’. Several months later she exclaimed, ‘Do you really mean that there will be a little place for me with you? I can try it, anyway, and leave it very open as all living is’. Another time, she admitted it was a fantasy: ‘I will shatter this fantasy because it is unendurably not true (who said fantasies ever were?)’
CHARACTERS
There are many scenarios and themes that interweave throughout the letters. Many of the characters would have originated in conversations between Frame, Brown and Wonner.
A major picaresque narrative involves a cast of characters who live on the patio at ‘Live Oak Inn’ in Hermosillo Drive, Santa Barbara, California—Brown and Wonner’s address. One of these ‘characters’ is a carnivorous plant, Carnie, which sometimes eats people. Carnie transplants a slip of itself to New Zealand from where it occasionally writes ‘home’. Mostly, though, it is Jay, sometimes called Jaybird or J, who writes the letters. Jay writes to Bee—i.e. B, the initial of Bill; Paul is Pee. These were nicknames for each other that the three friends often used in the correspondence. The title of the introduction to this book captures this witty interplay.
Other leading characters are Ned, an actual cat (whose servants are Bee and Pee) and Steinie, a Steinway piano that Bee owns and plays. Other characters and cats visit periodically, for example Dame Mary Margaret, an alter-ego of Paul’s, a formidable pantomime-dame figure reminiscent of Margaret Rutherford the actor or Princess Margaret, sister of the British monarch who features in some of Frame’s collages. Originally, this dame was a character in the asylum in Frame’s novel Faces in the Water: ‘the original Dame M.M. who used to broadcast to Egypt’. Frame kept track of her ‘characters’ amidst all their adventures that frequently paralleled what Brown and she were doing or dreaming.
Some of the characters retain some mystery, such as The Mortal Enemy, which is identified in an April letter as Frame’s ‘new novel [that] wavers (it is my mortal enemy)’ but at other times is something else. The concept had developed since its first appearance in January as a reference to the novella by Willa Cather: ‘my short novel (Mortal Enemy style) which remains out of reach like a tame chickadee that’s decided it won’t settle on my hand after all.’ She illustrates the interrelationships between a number of these characters in one of her final letters before she returns to the USA:
‘Hi. I’m just moving, still in imagination only (having left that crumby motel in Offing) out of one horse Focus Town into the pretty little resort of Foreground where I’m staying at the Foreplay Inn before I take the plane to Live Oak Inn. Quite a complicated journey, as complicated as a bee’s dance at the entrance to the hive, at sundown.’
Frame’s trips to and musings upon ‘The Place of the Stone Bees’—the image of a bee carved on the facade of Ajax Bee Supplies near the Dunedin railway station—is one of many fascinating sub-plots. Just before leaving Dunedin at the end of 1970, she describes to Brown a walk
‘to the place of The Stone Bees, to photograph them, and when I came to them I was confronted by my own imagination and memory, for they were so small I had to search for the carvings and I don’t think my photographs will show them.’
This particular image of a bee inspired one of the poetry sections of her next novel, Daughter Buffalo.
Possibly the most curious and pervasive character is the peedauntal, which appeared in Frame’s first correspondence to Brown, a postcard from MacDowell on November 15, 1969:
‘The Management of Peedauntals Ltd thanks you for your visit to the East and reminds you that it wishes to keep close to its valued client. It moves shortly to lonely premises in Baltimore. Singing opera you need never be peedauntally underprivileged or under-achieved with our late model Peedauntals.’
Several months later Brown sent a drawing of a prototype of the peedauntal, a device whose intended function was to enable people not to ‘have to pee down their leg’, but whose design was fraught with problems. Frame commented on his prototype:
‘Alas sir, the Peedauntal model as illustrated has no sex appeal whatsoever, unless of course the buckles fastening it to the leg are diamond or snakeskin. I had in mind something less like an attached bagpipe—’
On another occasion she acknowledged that ‘of course I never forget, Ace Bee, that you [. . .] were the originator of the Peedauntal Principal’. The Peedauntal Saga evolved through more than twenty of Frame’s letters. She wrote in early July:
‘Tonight I am going to Charles B’s place for dinner after which we are going to see/hear the Opera Company’s The Impresario and Il Pagliacci. It will be a very good opportunity for me (as co-director of the Peedauntal Company N.Z. Ltd.) to see how the product actually works.’
‘The Peedauntal Report’, spliced with a collage of text from newspapers, is the climax of this particular saga. There are a number of sagas of other ‘characters’ that intersperse the correspondence with hilarity and poignancy: Steinie (a Steinway piano), Carnie (a carnivorous plant) and A Sweater. And then there is Lucas.
LUCAS
Early in August 1970, midway through her ten months back in New Zealand, Frame adopted a kitten for a couple of months that became the focus of emotions ranging from joy to grief. In Frame’s correspondence with Brown, cats are cats but also familiars, surrogates, confessors, mysteries, metaphors. She found the kitten ‘exceedingly refreshing as he hides nothing and is not ashamed of any of his feelings’. She named it Lucas after