A review of TOWARDS ANOTHER SUMMER by Janet Frame
I read Owls Do Cry when in Dunedin as a student at Otago University in the early 1980s. Having migrated to NZ from Germany in the 1970s, I was not familiar with NZ literature, having eclectic tastes (what might be called leftwing world literature). I had studied psychology at Munich University with a vague ambition to become a psychiatrist but abandoned my studies, partly because the study programme at the time was heavily focussed on American behaviourism (see Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour for example), whilst I had romantic ideas about Reich, Freud, Jung, Foucault, and the likes of Fritz Perls, Timothy Leary, R.D Laing and Ivan Illich. One of my earliest jobs, in the mid 1970s, in NZ, was as a trainee psychiatric nurse at Carrington Hospital in Auckland, a ‘lunatic asylum’ very much in the shape of Seacliffe, north of Dunedin, and made infamous my Janet Frame. At Carrington I had witnessed ECT, and as part of my ‘training’ at the nursing school I had proposed to do an audit of ECT at Carrington. Nobody suspected that my aim was to show that ECT didn’t work – and that it was a barbaric treatment – hence I was given permission to check all past and present patient files for ECT. Indeed the audit showed that ECT was mainly a punitive treatment but of course, as a mere trainee nurse, my audit no impact whatsoever, and anyway I left shortly after for another overseas adventure. When having returned to NZ with wife and daughter in tow, I thought I would continue my university studies I had started in Germany, i.e. I enrolled in a pre-med course at Otago University (my wife as a nurse being the breadwinner). With this background, it was only fitting that I stumbled on Owls Do Cry. It was also fitting that the book blew me away, what with a literary style that was unique, as much as the story itself was something so quintessentially ‘New Zealand’ – something, I think, only an immigrant (or migratory bird, as Janet Frame would have it) like myself can appreciate. Then, whilst Janet Frame became a major literary figure, not only in NZ but across the world, I lost interest, as I tried to read some of her later works which did not resonate with me. Now then, in 2020, I looked at my bookshelves and saw Towards Another Summer and out of curiosity started to read it. There are quite a few books in my shelves that I started to read but did not finish due to lack of interest aroused, so to my surprise this ‘previously unpublished novel’ (i.e. in her life-time) kept me turning the pages. Here the juxtaposition of an incredibly advanced language against the simplest of story lines is as unique as in Owls Do Cry. We are told of an author (a Janet Frame thinly disguised) visiting a journalist and his family for a weekend. We are in England, she in London and the journalist up in the wintery and icy north. We are told that she is scared and panicky at the prospect of visiting an acquaintance because she is socially phobic and endlessly worried about her lack of conversational skills, which as a reasonably famous writer she would expect of herself to have in abundance. To remove herself from a chattering, human society altogether, she adopts the personae of a migratory bird, invoking the famous (in NZ) poem by fellow Dunedinite Charles Brasch – Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night (Janet Frame would have to laugh her head off if she were alive today, given that on Twitter people ‘tweet’ like brainless birds). In those days, however, the godwits seem to have had a particular attraction for NZ writers, given the long-time obsession of New Zealand anglophiles, who must do their OE to London first of all, and then perhaps further to the other members of the five eyes. This crazy idea of travelling halfway around the world, just to end up in a place that is just like the place you came from – the curse of British colonialism – might be softened by the idea of a migratory bird like the godwit, not to find a place the same as NZ but a place where there is summer when in NZ there is winter. The joke is of course that for humans, England and New Zealand share only winter (London only has one day of summer). As such our author, calling herself Grace, is ensconced in miserable London weather, with the prospect of even getting colder when travelling north to visit the journalist family. So, naturally Grace yearns for the New Zealand summer (Towards Another Summer). This she does not by invoking actual summer weather in New Zealand but by reminiscing about her childhood that was spent in Otago and Southland. There is an absolute truth in one’s upbringing determining one’s adult life, and Janet Frame, like no other author I know of, lays this bare, not in retrospect but from the point of view of the child she adopts so very well. She does not dwell on the tragedies we know happened in her childhood, because a child sees the world in a different light, where things happen because they happen, where the adults (her mother and father, mainly) concoct rhyme and reason that pass the children by. Children have their own explanations of the world around them. They know the world is full of contradictions. For example, the railway-employed father tells Grace not to go into the railway magazine, lest children get hurt by the machines stored there. Magazine – what a word! Out of bounds. Danger. Magazine, magazine, magazine. Grace knows, now and then, that one cannot trust words, especially when spoken. So, why does mother read a magazine? In fact, early on in the novel a man ‘from the magazine’ comes to her London flat to interview her, which is another cause for a panic attack, because she knows that she will not be able to say anything expected of her as a famous writer. All she can say is that she has nothing much to say. There are endless triggers for Grace to switch to being a child. Moving, moving. Always moving from one place to another, due to her father’s railway jobs. From the relative isolation of the countryside to the town of Oamaru (by world standards just a very small town but by Grace’s still very limited world-view, a place where their house is surrounded by other houses, streets with houses, and people and children everywhere. A bit like London. Grace, the child, and more so as the adult, is super sensitive towards verbal warfare amongst married couples (father-mother), picking up the slightest disagreement, fearing that they will ‘kill’ each other. Grace over-analyses every utterance, unearthing the subtlest of verbal swipes, investing words with immense potential to deceive, to attack, to subvert, to hurt – or to be devoid of all meaning. She is irritated by British English, like when her hosts say ‘bye-bye’ which in good old NZ is the speech of children, yet ‘spoken with such seriousness by grown men and women’ in England. When she gets back to her miserable flat in London, she can only think of her ‘inability to compose one beautiful dignified sentence’ and her ‘once-weekly visit to the psychiatrist’.
Did Janet Frame suffer from a personality disorder? Was she socially phobic? Was she wrongly diagnosed as a schizophrenic at Seacliffe? Why does she chastise herself in her writing? Why is she so insecure about her written words when everyone around her admires her for them? To fathom a complex personality like Janet Frame, if only in her writing, must be the dream-come-true of every psychoanalyst – Freud would have had his come-uppance, for Janet – the archetypal woman - was anything but hysterical. Quite the opposite in fact: extremely introvert, shy, self-doubting and yet extremely capable of telling stories, poetically, infused with a basic humanity, telling like it is. Is there any pretence? Does she know that her style of writing has a winning formula and thus pushes it to the limits? Whilst I do not believe in any souls, I nevertheless find the idiom useful: Janet bares her soul without mercy to herself. Or is it navel-gazing, bordering on narcissism? No, she is not in love with herself. She does yearn for this elusive love though, the love she glimpses in her hosts as much as between her mother and father. In this novel she proclaims quite proudly that she had several ‘affaires’ but, alas, they came to nothing permanent. Some of her male friends and advisors, such as John Money, were highly-strung, controversial personalities themselves, and those that were gay, like Frank Sargeson, had that particular nous that treats women like Janet as poetic siblings, providing the encouragement that was missing from straight quarters. Grace/Janet’s own siblings loom large in her reminiscences, coming from a large family where children look after themselves when the parents are otherwise occupied. When confronted with Philip and Anne’s (the journalist couple she is visiting) children, she is both panicked and reassured when the little girl recognises her as an adult one can trust. Children’s judgements are final. One of a child’s tragedies is to realise – as an adult – that one’s parents were in fact role models disowned, or at least treated badly by literary and intellectual circles. Janet’s parents were unpretentious poets, writers and singers at the kitchen table, bohemians to such a degree that straight society in the shape of social welfare officers bemoaned their ‘untidy’ living habits. Grace has in her ears the anti-war song that her father always sang about the war. Here mother’s axiom was ‘kind words and a happy home’ – how sweet is that! While her parents remained poor and unrecognised for their verbal skills, Janet reaps all the rewards afterwards. How fair is that? Janet must feel guilty to the extent that in her writing she sets the record right. She honours her parents for their poetic language they imparted, if not for their lives that at times went off the rails – so to speak – because poverty breeds grime and crime. Her own diffidence may be as such a veil she throws over her natural ability she inherited from a long line of Scottish peasant poets, not speak of Dunedin poetic nobility like Robbie Burns. In the end, however, Janet Frame remains an enigma, hard to put down when she tells her story.
