Janet Frame and Exile

The New Zealand writer's brilliant novel of a woman writer in exile

I encountered a book on my travels that really got me thinking about some of the issues I’ve been wrestling with this year as I work toward creating a new life for myself. As I’ve said before, I brought an e-reader with me for my year of travel, vowing not to buy any books. But I only made it four days before buying one. I was in Paris, at San Francisco Books, which sells used books in English. I really had no business in there in the first place. :)

I don’t remember why I pulled one particular tan, nondescript paperback from the shelf. It was Towards Another Summer, by Janet Frame, a New Zealand writer I’d never heard of. There was a feather on the cover.

The back said the book was too personal for her to publish in her lifetime. Immediately I was hooked.

She wrote it in 1963. Virago published it three years after her death, in 2007. I wondered, what did she write that she couldn’t bear having published while she was alive but still wanted to be published someday? I’m a sucker for a mystery like that. Repressed stories, buried tales—they are like hidden treasure or skeletons no one is supposed to find. Very often they seem to be by women.

Then there was description of the protagonist, Grace, a blocked writer living in London:

She feels more and more like a migratory bird, as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life away from it seem transitory. Grace longs to find her place in the world, but first she must learn to be comfortable in her own skin, feathers and all.

I’ve longed for representations of rootless women like myself, to help me figure out the meaning of my need to fly away, to help me not feel so entirely alone in my flight. The blurb on the front calls Towards Another Summer a “deeply personal novel of exile and loneliness.” I wonder now, is this why I was drawn to it? Have I felt like a lonely exile? Am I worried I’ll become one?

Of course, Grace and her creator, who also lived in London for many years, were hardly exiles. They were neither expelled from New Zealand nor barred from returning. They were expatriates, choosing to live outside of their native country.

I’ll admit I have a strong romantic attachment to the idea of being an expat. Preferably sitting at a sidewalk cafe with a pen and notebook in my hand, watching the world walk by and taking notes. I love the idea of not being of a particular place but an observer of it. You can be whoever you want to be when you arrive someplace new. And if you are on the outside always looking in, you don’t have worry about belonging. You live in what someone (I can’t remember who) called a writer’s country. Is that what I want?

The metaphor of a bird is made literal only a couple pages into the novel. She awakes as Kafka’s Gregor Samsa did, transformed. Thankfully she is a bird, not an insect, and she only feels the feathers growing; they aren’t actually appearing on her arms. No one else can tell she is not fully human.

The epigraph to Frame’s novel is part of the poem “Islands” by Charles Brasch:

…and from their haunted bay

The godwits vanish towards another summer.

Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring

Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;

And none knows where he will lie down at night.

It’s a melancholy image of the life of a godwit, a cinnamon-and rose-colored shore bird with a long bill. Thousands of them migrate each year between Alaska and New Zealand, flying for as long as ten days straight. Their 7,000-mile journey is the longest known migration of any species of bird. When they arrive each year in New Zealand, cathedral bells ring.

Godwit, image from ebird.org

This idea of distance looking our way—of something inside of us compelling us to leave home—is, for birds, a survival strategy encoded in their DNA. They aren’t exiles, expats, or nomads. They know exactly what they are doing and where they are going. We humans don’t. We may be escaping life-threatening violence or poverty, but often we seem to wander off in search of something vaguer—a better life. We head to North America or Europe with high hopes but few plans.

Birds are much more at home on this earth than we are. They can find their way back using a variety of senses we still don’t fully understand. Even in their first year they can find exactly the right spot to go, without guidance. They just know where home is—it’s the homing instinct. Do we have that, too? Is it possible to get in touch with a deep place inside that just knows where home is?

Janet Frame was pretty migratory, going back and forth between her birthplace—Dunedin, New Zealand—where she maintained a home, and London, the epicenter of the British Empire. I have lived in Kansas City, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Germany, England, Indiana, Michigan, and New Orleans. None of which feel like home. Has my homing instinct failed me? Or have I simply blown so far off course that it doesn’t know where to send me anymore?

Grace is becoming confused about which place is home—New Zealand or England. She tells a man interviewing her, who keeps talking about New Zealand, “This is my home now.” But he presses her. Doesn’t she want to go back? It’s so much more beautiful there than in London.

Soon Grace doesn’t know where she is or where she is going:

I'm not there. I'm nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.

It’s as if she doesn’t exist. You have to be somewhere to exist.

Grace is relieved to discover her “true identity” as a bird. “For so long she had felt not-human, yet had been unable to move towards an alternative species.” Her writing flourishes. She can enter into her story and characters more easily. The door of the world shuts behind her. “Rejoicing fiercely in her aloneness, she is anything now, nothing human.”

While writing, she treats her body, her hunger, like dogs, telling them, “Down there, Down!” She is utterly happy to have arrived in this chaotic realm of creation. “Whatever moored me?” she wonders. She has ascended so far beyond earth that she no longer sees the people, the animals, or “commotions of love” that inhabit it. She is so far gone that “Communication is lost!” When she wakes, she is confused. “Which world do I inhabit?”

Janet Frame in 1963, when she wrote Towards Another Summer (from The Encyclopedia of New Zealand)

It seems as if all would be well were it not for an insistent invitation from the critic who interviewed her. He pulls her out of her writer’s identity and into the “commotions” of his family for a weekend in the country. The idea of sharing their home with them paralyzes her. She imagines not knowing when to get up in the morning or what to talk about. And how to tell them that she is a bird. What will they say?

The idea of going into the country for the weekend and the idea of journeying all the way back to New Zealand have collided. “Now journeys were not simple matters for Grace; nothing is simple if your mind is a fetch-and-carry wanderer from sliced perilous outer world to secret safe inner world.” That safe inner world, a secret she can’t share with anyone, is made manifest in her becoming a bird. Yet still, no one sees. As a bird she retreats “farther and farther away from the human world.”

As I read about Grace, transfixed by her creative flights, I wondered what it takes to sustain a creative life. I wondered whether alienation and the absence of “the commotions of love” are the necessary preconditions of being a “writer”—or the inevitable result of being one.

I can’t help looking up Janet Frame’s biography, especially since Towards Another Summer was a deeply autobiographical novel. I discover that her mind, her “secret safe inner world,” was nearly taken from her during the decade she was hospitalized on and off in a psychiatric ward back in New Zealand with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. She endured extensive rounds of electro-shock therapy. Writing saved her, and not just figuratively. When her first book was published and won a major literary award, her doctors canceled a schedule lobotomy.

While she was in London, she again went into hospital, voluntarily, fearing she would harm herself. There they told her that she was not schizophrenic and had been misdiagnosed. She felt a certain loss, not having a name for what made her different. She had always felt cut off from others, alone in her difference.

Janet Frame left no instructions for the publication of Towards Another Summer. She did, however, preserve two neatly bound manuscripts of it in two separate locations. Her literary estate took that as a sign that she expected it to be published after her death.

It was an “embarrassingly personal” book, she once wrote. She was Grace, Grace was her, and the weekend stay was a real event with real people. They would probably read it. If being in their presence was painful for her, what would it be like to have them read the contents of her mind?

Not long after writing Towards Another Summer, she did migrate back to New Zealand, and she stayed for the rest of her life, traveling often to England and the U.S., publishing prolifically and winning every literary award she could in her home country. She was a national treasure and was shortlisted more than once for the Nobel Prize.

According to her literary trust, she chose not to marry and live a conventional life. She resisted the idea that she was “crazy” for choosing solitude and “her ‘own world’—her writing.” She changed her name so that she could hide her identity as she became more famous. “Janet Frame” was the name on her books, but not her real name anymore. She also appeared rarely in public events, which contributed to the idea that she was mentally unstable.

When men like J. D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon retreat from the world, they are geniuses. When women do, like Janet Frame and Dora Maar, they are crazy. Because women are supposed to need people, particularly men, in their lives. Men don’t need anyone else.

When she died in 2004, obituary headlines called her “Reclusive Writer Janet Frame” or “Reclusive, but World-Renowned, Writer.” After her death, Jane Campion wrote, “I see now that she was not, as I sometimes thought, lonely, but lived in a rare state of freedom, removed from the demands and conventions of a husband, children and a narrow social world.” Like Dora Maar, she chose the life she wanted and she does not need our pity.

Further Reading and Watching

Janet Frame, Autobiography, 3 vols. (1982-1984); also posthumously reprinted under the title An Angel at My Table, Virago, 2008).

Jane Campion, An Angel at My Table (1999), a biopic based on Frame’s autobiography (available in Netflix).

Jane Campion, “In Search of Janet Frame,” The Guardian, 2008.

Happy reading! And I’ll see you next time.

—Anne

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