James BertramThis month’s ‘out of the archives’ review is of Janet Frame’s 1966 novel The Reservoir and Other Stories, by Rhodes scholar and journalist James Bertram.
The Reservoir and other stories, by Janet Frame (Pegasus, 1966). 22s. 6d.
This is the first collection of short stories by Janet Frame to become generally available in this country since The Lagoon in 1951: in the light of her remarkable achievement as a novelist of steadily increasing power and range, it is a literary event of some importance. Thirty prose pieces have been chosen (with the help of Dr Margaret Dalziel) from two volumes published three years ago in New York; the stories are not dated, but it seems clear from the chronological sketch outlined by the writer in ‘Beginnings’ (Landfall, March 1965) that most of them belong to the London years which saw the completion of that ‘transitional’ novel The Edge of the Alphabet, and preceded the more disciplined, structured, and completely professional accomplishment of Scented Gardens for the Blind and The Adaptable Man. It is not surprising, then, that this collection should produce a somewhat uneven effect, as if these were the by-products of a talent fiercely concentrated on larger designs.
I find it hard to write of Janet Frame with any detachment, for she cannot put words on a page without generating the kind of magnetic attraction that seizes and locks the reader’s sensibility. But any brief description of The Reservoir would have to note that these stories vary considerably in length and manner, that they explore extremes of realism and of fantasy, that while some are precisely located (in the ‘Waimaru’ countryside or suburban London), others are parables or poetic fables for our time written with the burning urgency of a Blake or a Dostoievsky. The experience of reading this book is rather like bathing in a thermal lake: we move from slices of life in the earlier manner of The Lagoon, familiar and reassuring even if sad, to chilling intimations of a private or general doom. And doom is sometimes as capricious and arbitrary as the ending of a fairy tale.
Perhaps the total effect of all this is rather like the quality of modern life, where the bogies, heaven knows, are real enough. Perhaps dreams more often terrify than console. If so, this book has more unity of vision, and even of theme, than at first appears. But I must admit my own preference for the stories which attempt to say limited and particular things by the conventional means of fiction, to those pieces which try, by shock tactics, to say too much.
The first third of this book is made up of short fables, mostly minatory, grouped around two longer fairy tales, one pleasant, one distinctly unpleasant. All are written with great skill and a stylized compression of language which barely controls the force of protest behind them: this voice is carefully’ modulated, that it may not break. It would not help to transpose these parables into the specific terms of contemporary politics, or even of perennial morality: these are ‘illuminations’, private intuitions with universal application. We may recognize the calligraphy, but we must spell out the content for ourselves. The best of these pieces, I think, is ‘Two Sheep’, which is more Tolstoyan than Kafkaesque, and seems to me a small masterpiece in its own kind.
The central group of ‘Waimaru’ stories begins with ‘The Reservoir’, and brings us back within hailing distance of The Lagoon. This is the remembered world of childhood, of children seen with adult understanding and of fumbling adults seen with a child’s clear unsentimental gaze. Here Janet Frame can hardly put a foot wrong: she is of the country, and she is of the country of words. The Reservoir’, ‘Royal Icing’, ‘The Bull Calf’, are stories complete in themselves where a sense of place and atmosphere is fully achieved, stories we may learn to know New Zealand by. Others in this group – ‘Prizes’, ‘Stink-pat’, ‘A Sense of Proportion’ – are more inward and disturbing; they tell secrets, without shame. The narrative line is sometimes harsh but still clear; we do not need the occasional final sentence, or paragraph, to draw the moral. Technically, these New Zealand stories are assured, straightforward, and refreshingly direct. I do not know if Miss Frame feels they are too easy for her to write, too like Katherine Mansfield; but for my part, I wish there were more of them.
In the last section of the book, we meet work which seems to me much more obviously experimental, studio studies by a writer who is extending her range of subject matter and making herself into a novelist. ‘The Teacup’ is a grim genre-study of lodging-house life in London, faithful in detail but dull and dispiriting as the people who inhabit it. ‘Burial in Sand’ twists the knife in the old, still-bleeding wound of the artistic expatriate; ‘The Triumph of Poetry’ does the same thing, less surely, with the fate of the artist on the home front. (Why, one faintly protests, are all academics in our fiction condemned to early desiccation? No doubt it is an occupational hazard; but Miss Frame has less reason to take this unkindly view than some of our poets, or Mr Patrick White.) The remaining stories are variations on the theme of human loneliness or frustration in the desert of modern cities; one may admire the honesty with which they are presented, without granting them more than a measure of success in their own right. An exception must be made of one admirable piece of social comedy, ‘A Relative of the Famous’,
where people are allowed to be amusingly, not horrifyingly absurd.
Dostoievsky once claimed that all the best of Russian fiction in his own time had come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’. In New Zealand writing, it would have to be ‘The Garden Party’ – that period piece, remote now as an Edwardian album, where the shadow first fell suddenly across the sunny colonial lawn. An awareness of the fragility of life, of the nearness of death, has been with Janet Frame from the time when she made that first story which she still considers her best: ‘Once upon a time there was a bird. One day a hawk came out of the sky and ate the bird. The next day a big bogie came out from behind the hill and ate up the hawk for eating up the bird.’ The hawk and the bogie still haunt her pages, but she has learnt how to keep them at bay with the magic spell of words. For the patterned words, and all the talent and courage behind them, we can only be grateful.
Adding to the controversy, King openly admitted that he withheld information “that would have been a source of embarrassment and distress to her,” and that he adopted publisher Christine Cole Catley’s notion of “compassionate truth.” This advocates “a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted embarrassment, loss of face, emotional or physical pain, or a nervous or psychiatric collapse.” King defended his project and maintained that future biographies on Frame would eventually fill in the gaps left by his own work.
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