In Janet Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet,Zoe Bryce says, “I’m just out of the ship’s hospital, and you know how you feel when you’ve been ill and are up again out of bed; as if everything is walking through you without your consent, ignoring your flesh and bones; and you hang, helpless, like a bamboo curtain in the doorway of all events and purposes.”
It’s a vivid, hyperbolic, yet utterly true description of post-illness delirium. In the novel, Zoe is aboard the Matua, sailing from New Zealand to Britain. She is a former schoolteacher from the Midlands, returning home after “a year in the Antipodes, 11,000 miles there and back in search of what most people find in the next room or, closer, in the lining of their skin”. Aboard the ship she meets Toby Withers, a New Zealander who suffers from epilepsy and hopes to start a new life in London, and his cabin mate Pat Keenan, an Irishman returning to Europe after an unsuccessful trip abroad to find a wife.
The Edge of the Alphabet, Frame’s third novel, was first published in 1962 and has been republished to mark the centenary of the New Zealand author’s birth. It is a revelatory portrait of the sometimes unbearable unease of being a human, wrapped up in a consummately playful metafiction.
“The following manuscript was found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death,” reads a note at the beginning of the novel. Pattern narrates the ensuing tale, occasionally referring to herself as her characters’ puppet-master: “Do I, Thora Pattern, imagine that I can purchase people out of my fund of loneliness and place them like goldfish in the aquarium of my mind’s room and there watch them day and night swimming round and round kept alive by the tidbits which I feed to them? Shall I overfeed them as people do with goldfish? Shall I starve them?”
Pattern doesn’t starve her characters, but she isn’t kind to them either. She is far too obsessed with death – “It is the clutter of death which is inescapable,” she insists – to keep them too far from it. When Zoe, Toby and Pat arrive in London their varying forms of despair continue. Throughout the book Pattern flits between the present, her characters’ memories and their dream worlds like “an invisible eel”, writes Catherine Lacey, the American author of Pew and Biography of X, in a new introduction. This slippiness is disorienting, even disquieting. It is, Frame knows, an appropriate means of depicting human consciousness, “for people shift, like panels of lantern-slides or cards mysteriously removed and replaced, and one person is another, and people do not stay”.
Frame made the month-long voyage from Wellington to Southampton herself in July 1956. She turned 32 the day before the ship, the Ruahine, berthed, and like Zoe had spent the first two weeks of the journey in bed with seasickness. She was already an acclaimed author – her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, had been published in New Zealand in 1951 and her debut novel, Owls Do Cry, had been accepted for publication and would appear the following year. Frame was travelling on a £300 literary grant with the purpose of “broadening experience overseas”. But she was also escaping a country that had for eight years committed her to mental institutions where, she later wrote, she had been forced to take “a concentrated course in the horrors of insanity and the dwelling-place of those judged insane, separating me for ever from the former acceptable realities and assurances of everyday life”.
Frame was born in Dunedin on New Zealand’s South Island in 1924. She was the third of five children. The family was poor – her father worked for the railways – and moved often before settling in Oamaru, on the South Island’s eastern coast. In her second year at Waitaki Junior High School she resolved to become a poet, and began writing verse in a small railway notebook.
Frame’s home life was difficult. Her older brother Robert, known as Bruddie, was diagnosed with epilepsy. His seizures and the bromide prescribed to him made him violent. Then, when Frame was 12, her 16-year-old sister Myrtle died by drowning. Around that time Frame was reading Mount Helicon, an anthology of verse for schoolchildren, which included work by John Keats and Walt Whitman. “To my amazement I discovered that many of the poets knew about Myrtle’s death and how strange it was without her,” she later wrote. Ten years later, her then 21-year-old sister Isabel would also drown.
During the polio epidemic of 1936 Frame often heard “admirable” stories of “brave and noble” local disabled children excelling in poetry or music. In her collected memoirs An Angel at My Table, which Jane Campion adapted into a film in 1990 and which Virago has republished, Frame wrote that she “longed to be struck with paralysis so that I might lie in bed all day or sit all day in a wheelchair, writing stories and poems”. She and her sisters submitted their writing to children’s magazines, and Frame won several accolades. But “there was still the question of a disability”. “Coleridge and Francis Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe had their addiction to opium, Pope his lameness, Cowper his depression, John Clare his insanity, the Brontës their tuberculosis as well as the disablement of their life about them…”
After leaving school, Frame began training to become a teacher in Dunedin. Away from home she was anxious and lonely, unable to find her place in the world. She experienced an emotional breakdown and attempted suicide. She was committed to the psychiatric ward of the local hospital, and then to Seacliff asylum, “where the loonies went”. She spent six weeks there, the experience informing her second novel, Faces in the Water (1961).
The ideals she had as a child of a correspondence between disability and genius soon wavered. “There is an aspect of madness which is seldom mentioned in fiction because it would damage the romantic popular idea of the insane as a person whose speech appeals as immediately poetic,” the narrator of Faces in the Water, Istina Mavet, notes. “Few of the people who roamed the dayroom would have qualified as acceptable heroines, in popular taste.”
Frame left Seacliff on a six-month probationary period with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the Dunedin Public Library she studied case histories of patients with the condition. She learned to employ her diagnosis when she wanted to: “I… turned on my ‘schizophrenia’ at full flow.” In her writing, even after being declared “sane” years later, “I deliberately chose imagery known to be ‘schizophrenic’ – glass, mirrors, reflections, the sense of being separated from the world by panels to glass.” She had read the medical literature and knew what was expected of her.
In total, Frame spent more than eight years in psychiatric hospitals. She later estimated that she received over 200 applications of unmodified electroconvulsive therapy, which “shredded” her memory. By 1951 she was due to have a lobotomy, a now discredited treatment that involves severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Then her doctor saw a newspaper item announcing that The Lagoon and Other Stories had won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are,” he told her. Frame was discharged.
“It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life,” Frame wrote. In London in the winter of 1957, a doctor would tell her that she had never had schizophrenia, that she never should have been admitted to a mental hospital, that any problems she had now were almost certainly a result of her time on those wards. But for the rest of her career – before her death from leukaemia in 2004 she wrote many more novels and short-story collections, was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand and was awarded every national literary prize for which she was eligible – she would be associated with madness.
Frame witnessed the callousness with which society treats mentally ill people first hand. She knew what it was to be deemed unfit for public life and then allowed to re-enter it. Those experiences allowed her writing to find a balance between life and death, light and dark, the sane and the insane. For all the violence she experienced, her writing is often serene. “I inhabited a territory of loneliness which I think resembles that place where the dying spend their time before death,” she wrote in An Angel at My Table, “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; at times I think it must be the best view in the world.”
But even this “best view” did not return her to the romanticisation with which she viewed illness in her youth. In The Edge of the Alphabet Zoe, Toby and Pat remain dislocated from reality and from themselves. The novel, as the title suggests, is about living so far on the fringes of society that you lose all sense of how you might ever communicate with those in it. “How can one really identify oneself, living so close to the edge of the alphabet?” asks Thora Pattern. Only Janet Frame, a writer who spent so long at the threshold of what is explainable, could ever begin to tell us.
The Edge of the Alphabet
Janet Frame
Fitzcarraldo, 296pp, £12.99
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame
Virago, 480pp, £16.99
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[See also: Eleanor Catton and the problem with “literary thrillers”]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire