Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
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referring to the cat after it left as the hero of an apocryphal novel, Cat in August. She summed up this interlude:
‘I’m fighting fit but so sad, so sad. I learned so much from Lucas. It was an ideal situation for studying learning between woman and beast. Cats are so full of knowing on (to us) invisible evidence and I think they could teach us a way of reaching the invisible evidence.’
In October 1970, Frame attended the rehearsal of a play adapted from her novel, A State of Siege. Her letters now included practical details of her planned return to the United States. This year, spent in two contrasting places, was proving to be a period of transition for while in one place she was thinking of the other, ruminating on loss and longing, of ‘not being there’.
She considered Brown and Wonner’s suggestion that she seek a teaching position in the States and enquired about a work visa, but nothing was finalised by the time she returned there early the following year. She posted Brown a copy of a satirical letter she sent to ‘To J. J. Smith, Immigration Dept., Wishington’, thanking him for his letter and the ‘test’ he had sent her to fill in. She queried one of the questions, which she shared with Brown:
‘There’s a question of colour. I am Blue—it does not appear in the photograph I enclosed with my application. I believe, however, that the Blue disappears when one sets foot on U.S. soil.’
Though Frame had the resources to return to the USA, her plans were boosted when Brown offered to pay the airfare and her friend Sue Marquand, the wife of writer John Marquand whom she had met on her first visit to Yaddo in 1967, offered her the long term use of an apartment in New York.
RETURN TO THE USA
In one of Frame’s last letters to Brown before she left New Zealand, she exclaimed, ‘What a year’s history is being written in my letters’ thus acknowledging their significance. She flew to Auckland early in December where she based herself at her sister June Gordon’s family home. In early January, she took the train to Wellington to spend a week with her friend, Jacquie Baxterdd, and on January 29 flew to California where she stayed several weeks with Brown and Wonner. She then flew on to the East Coast where she spent the rest of the year living and writing intensively, several times revisiting Brown in California. From October to December, she stayed at Yaddo. The year 1971 was Frame’s American year.
New Zealand poet and short story writer (1927-2009), widow of poet James K Baxter
Frame’s correspondence with Brown continued, though much diminished in volume, up until 1989 when she was shocked to learn that he had sold her letters to a collector, who on-sold them to Pennsylvania State University library. Brown explained that he had been anxious that the collection was cared for. Though troubled by the incident, she forgave him but rarely wrote letters from then on, preferring the telephone, postcards and eventually email.
EDITING JAY TO BEE
Jay to Bee preserves the integrity, atmosphere and narrative drive of the first fourteen months of Frame’s correspondence with Brown by excluding only repetitious and inconsequential material from a total of 136 letters (including eight postcards) for this period.
The layout of the correspondence is chronological. Given that about half the items are undated, we rigorously scrutinised and cross-checked to establish the sequence, which is slightly different to the order in the catalogue at Penn State University Library in the USA where the originals are lodged.
Frame wrote to Brown an average of twice a week, with Brown writing about half as many times. Most of her letters include drawings and or collages, and many of his include drawings with the occasional collage. Most of hers are typewritten, although there are many hand-written inclusions. She wrote about one fifth completely by hand, usually when she was travelling and away from her typewriter. Almost all of Brown’s are handwritten on both sides of blank note paper (about A5 size). Frame also corresponded several times with Wonner: for example in late December 1970, just prior to her return to the USA, she wrote as Dame F.C. [Frame Clutha] to Dame M.M. [Mary Margaret].
Our primary aims with the layout of the letters have been to preserve their integrity and show the relationship of Frame’s images to her words by placing them as close as possible to their place in the original text—several facsimiles of this interplay are included. As the images vary considerably in scale, we have resized them so that, for the readers’ benefit, they relate more seamlessly to the text. This book, of course, can only be a reasonably faithful and coherent translation of the visceral materiality of the original letters that encompass many kinds and sizes of paper, writing methods and image production.
Frame generally wrote her letters in orthodox sentences with punctuation and spelling according to the standard of the time. We have formatted the paragraphs with regular indents in a way that was not possible with a typewriter, but otherwise we have made minimal edits. We have preserved the lines of asterisks that Frame and Brown jokingly called ‘stars’. Some collages that were less striking than the best, or that were somewhat obscure from a present-day perspective, have been omitted.
Frame variably dated and addressed her letters—fewer than half are dated with the day’s date. She sometimes wrote her full or partial current address and sometimes her forwarding address. We have standardised the heading to each letter so as to give the location, the exact date or month, and any comment she may have added. For clarity’s sake, Frame’s verse is rendered in italics while other verse is within quote marks. Footnotes are used sparingly. This is a reader’s edition. Jay to Bee is not an academic work but is the uncensored revelation of a great writer’s imagination at play.
Denis Harold
29 January 2016
a This was her third visit there: her first stay was in May 1967, then subsequently from mid February to mid June 1969, October to December 1971, and February-March 1982. During the years 1967 to 1982, she spent a total of twelve months spread over six separate visits at these two artist colonies.
b New Zealand Listener, 27 July 1970
c First published in the posthumous volume of Frame’s poetry, The Goose Bath (Random House, Auckland, 2006)
d New Zealand poet and short story writer (1927-2009), widow of poet James K Baxter
1. MacDowell November 15 1969 (postcard)
The Management of Peedauntals Ltd thanks you for your visit to the East & 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. You are missed greatly around the factory especially by the management who sends this postcard.
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2. November 17
Dear Bill,
The day in Boston was strange and sad and vivid, from the drive in sunlight and clear air and the arrival over Mystic Bridge near Storrow (I thought it was Sorrow) Street to the bizarre farewell in the lounge of the Y.W.C.A. In my mind it is like a lived piece of fiction