Jay to Bee. Janet Frame
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is being torn out. It’s a new experience for me to hear sounds like this so close to the source. In my brief term of learning the piano as a thirteen-year old (and we didn’t even have a piano at home) I learned ‘Puck’ (which sounds nice and dirty), ‘Robin Adair’, ‘Londonderry Air’, A Curious Story, The Waltz from the Opera of Faust, the Chopin Prelude which goes de/dee de de ??????? Wagner’s Star of Eve, Handel’s Largo, and a piece called The Shepherd Boy, which was prefaced by the lines, ‘Like some vision of far off times lonely shepherd boy/
What song art thou singing in thy youth and joy?’
That was the end of my private musical education. Music (i.e. singing only) was a big thing at school with a festival each year in which little-medium-sized-big-bigger girls sang ‘Oh have you seen my lady go down the garden singing’ and ‘Where’er you walk’ and played Moment Musical, Fantasy Impromptu, Marche Militaire, various lullabys, the Moonlight Sonata—all day.
Another instalment next week.
As I was saying it’s a new experience for me to hear music so close. The music of all the pieces I ever played had ‘safe’ sounds, though one or two phrases were a bit shattering; it was fairly safe and neat and self-contained; plaintive and poetic in parts; but each chord was not so clearly part of a tremendous whole. Oh My! (as Elizabeth Ames of Yaddo used to exclaim).
So you see how my MacDowell experience affected me! One of the ways, at least.
FOUR STARS NO TV IN ROOM
THREE STARS NO BATHROOM OR TV
Glad you liked the Y limericks. I sent them to Jo and Elnora too, and today had a brilliant letter from Jo, and I’ll go down in history as being driven to despair by her brilliance. It’s snowing in New Hampshire! Maybe it’s just as well I’m not there as I’d be writing verse about the snow. Yes, Elnora snored at the Y and thus will go down in history. She made a noise like a factory with all its machines working. I was in such a state of shock at having said au revoir to you that I didn’t mind but Jo kept whispering urgently to her, while outside the contractors decided to get to work in the middle of the night on the new parking lot they are building near the Y. We were all pretty much in a state of shock, I think, and the temperature in the room was eighty-five and the radiators hissed all night (they didn’t really, I’m just inventing this), and before we went to sleep we had one of those confessional chats that women have when they’re taking off their make-up and fixing their hair, their glass eyes, their false teeth; and washing their dildos.
NO MEALS, NO TV NO BATHROOM.
ROOM ONLY AND BOARD PINE OR WALNUT
GROAN BONUS INFLATABLE
PRESIDENT KENNEDY OR CHOICE WHICH MUST BE
MADE WHEN BOOKING
The moonlit evenings, the stars and the palms sound like Auckland New Zealand in the summer; with beach not far away. I had that impression too from the light in your paintings. The light in Dunedin is luminous, slightly blue like snow-light, clear and untouchable, sometimes hostile—what nonsense this is but this is what it seems to me. The light in the subtropical north is more invading, intimate, catastrophic; diffused yet the whole daylight is so brilliant one is constantly blinking and closing one’s eyes against it.
FRIDAY.
I’m sending you a New Zealand quarterly of five years ago. I have something in it—a part of a series N.Z. writers were doing called Beginnings.
I feel less homesick when I read your letters.
Blah
You will know this limerick?
Young man, said the countess at tea
Is it true you fart when you pee?
I replied with some wit
‘Do you fart when you shit?
If you do then you’re one up on me.’
I didn’t make this up, it’s in a book. I’m sure we should get our literary gems printed somewhere, even where you suggest, and you, certainly, should make the illustrations.
Goodbye for now.
A parking lot near the Y?
I’m afraid that I’m much too shy.
A quarter a time
is a swindling shime
it’s far too cheap at the pri
That limerick shows how my battery has run out!
J
a library at MacDowell
b The writer, Joan Colebrook, who had been born in Australia, had just arrived at MacDowell
DECEMBER
8. Baltimore December 1
Dear Bee,
First, the business news.
We decided to adopt the conservative approach: to call for and print selected testimonials with photographs if possible, in a nation-wide advertising campaign. The response so far is fair-good although we expect a rise in sales towards the Christmas Season. We are glad that our clients on the West Coast are solidly behind us and we affix a sample of our advertising technique.
The paintings are beautiful. I can’t decide which is my favourite as my preference changes. I had Ride in the Desert and Pedestrian Crossing propped where I could see them. Ride in the Desert is so fluid, poetic and full of light that falls not, as in many paintings, where the artist chooses it shall fall but where the light itself decides and that means of course that the conspiracy of painter and light is total—one becomes the other; maybe this sounds silly.
I’m not a painter, mister, but I know what I like and what I feel. I remember I used to think that people’s thoughts came startlingly out of the back of their head and when I suggested this I was laughed at; but how pleased I was many years later to read in a Chekhov story that when a person has his back to you, if you know him, you know the thoughts from glancing at the back of his head—well, not thoughts, feelings. One knows the rider here as one knows the character in a good novel and one sees so much in the back view and shape. I like the way you treat people and their environment as equals, as beings with no barriers* [footnote: Without barriers natural digestion, with barriers, cannibalism.] between them. This painting is sad, I think, but it’s also full of the bliss of being in a world where man, rock,