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INTRODUCTION

Janet Frame’s letters to Bill Brown (William Theophilus Brown), the Californian painter, written over two decades, are humorous and wide-ranging, revealing little known aspects of her creativity. She felt she had met her match in Brown, a painter, classical pianist and confidant of famous writers, musicians and artists. They met at the MacDowell artist colony in New Hampshire, USA, in late 1969, beginning a friendship that lasted until her death in 2004.

Frame wrote over 500 letters to Brown, from a rate of at least two a week in the first year to one a week for several years, dwindling to one every couple of months by the mid 1980s. The letters include observations of events and people, art and politics, philosophy and comedy, quotes from and parodies of poets such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, all intertwined with drawings, doodles and collages.

The bulk of the correspondence spans the decade of the 1970s during which Frame published Daughter Buffalo in 1972 and Living in the Maniototo in 1979. She poured so much dynamism and invention into this correspondence that it together with the novel In the Memorial Room (written in 1974 but not published until 2013) constitute the previously unknown masterpieces that fill what had seemed to some academic commentators to be a seven-year dry spell in Frame’s middle period. The swift changes of tone and structure of these letters arguably relate to and even prefigure the style of these novels. The letters also provide insights into her ideas and life, thus complementing her three volumes of autobiography published in the first half of the 1980s.

Frame’s letters to Brown combine many styles and registers of prose, poetry, drawings, illustrations, typographical flourishes and quotations. She implied they had the characteristics of collages when on thanking Brown in late June 1970 for his ‘lovely letter and its enclosures’ she quoted a passage from W.H. Auden’s long poem ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ that describes how ‘exciting letters’ are full of enclosures such as gossip, cuttings and maps: they are a ‘collage that you will read.’ Frame as early as her student years in the mid 1940s at Dunedin Teacher Training College was interested in the possibility of collage. A project entitled ‘The Growth of Cities’ bored her until she realised that ‘my only hope was to write (and illustrate) the long essay in my own way’ by fitting together various texts and images.

Frame’s friendship with the very well-read artist-musician Brown was a catalyst to her imagination. Her drawings and collages in her letters to him are most prolific during the early years, especially the first, the period of Jay to Bee. She sometimes claimed that she lacked any talent as an artist, but in these letters she expresses a personal style of drawing and design. Brown’s letters to her are similarly enlivened by humorous drawings. In later years, she did less art but sometimes included photographs in her letters to Brown, especially of her various houses and cats.

MACDOWELL AND YADDO ARTIST COLONIES

Frame first met Brown at MacDowell in New Hampshire, one of the most famous American artist colonies, where she stayed from mid-September to late November in 1969. She had a lot of fun as a member of a group that included Brown and the writers Jo Carson and Elnora Coleman. They dined and joked together as a reprieve from the earnest seriousness of other guests. They referred to themselves as ‘the baby table’ and all kept in touch when they left. Two months after leaving MacDowell, Frame stayed a month at another major American artist colony, Yaddo, near Saratoga Springs in northern New York State.^aa

This was her third visit there: her first stay was in May 1967, then subsequently from mid February to mid June 1969, October to December 1971, and February-March 1982. During the years 1967 to 1982, she spent a total of twelve months spread over six separate visits at these two artist colonies.

After leaving MacDowell and before going to Yaddo, Frame flew to California in early December to spend a week with Brown, then on to Baltimore to stay with her friend, John Money, a New Zealand born sexologist at Johns Hopkins University, whom she had known in New Zealand in the 1940s. She went to Yaddo in January 1970 and within a fortnight penned word portraits for Brown of fellow guests such as the composers Ned Rorem and Douglas Allanbrook, writers Ann Kazin and Norman Podhoretz and the critic Kenneth Burke. She formed a rapport with Burke, who one evening asked to see some of her poems and the next morning presented her with two pages of incisive critique. She was stimulated by these interactions but compared to the atmosphere of MacDowell felt, as she described in a letter to Brown, that

‘the formality of Yaddo makes it difficult for people to be themselves among one another—yet this is no great disadvantage for one’s work, and I think maybe it is an advantage; it means, though, that people get quickly ‘stir crazy’.’

She wrote that she left Yaddo early, accompanying the literary critic Alfred Kazin, husband of her fellow guest Ann Kazin, on the bus down to New York, where she dined that evening with the Kazins at their apartment. She wrote to Brown:

‘I was glad to see the Kazins in ‘real life’ because at Yaddo Ann was very-too-brilliant and witty, and Alfred seemed shyly disapproving, but in their home they were warm and happy—it’s marvellous not to be conscious all the time that one’s a ‘writer’.’

During this period, she stayed with Elnora Coleman in her apartment in New York, then travelled to Baltimore to see John Money, whom she found ‘less crabby than when I was last here—I think he is pleased with his series of lectures to the Medical students on Pornography’.

RETURN TO NEW ZEALAND

In early March Frame flew to California for three weeks with Brown and his partner and fellow artist Paul Wonner, before continuing on the long trip back to New Zealand. Understandably, there was no correspondence during this time so there is a gap in the narrative of Jay to Bee, but the intense delight and stimulation of this visit can be inferred by the subsequent mutual flow of letters across the Pacific. On arrival in Auckland after a rough flight, she wrote to Brown in order ‘to keep in touch, to remind myself of much happiness found at Hermosillo Drive: when I fall asleep I dream of it’.

After a week with her sister June and her family on Auckland’s North Shore, Frame arrived home in Dunedin on the first day of April. A creative but often solitary period of eight months ensued that at times felt like exile from the excitements of North America, especially her friendship with Brown. She wrote to him of her loneliness: ‘It’s a new experience for me to miss people’. Dunedin was no substitute for the Californian ‘live oaks’, which was one of her most frequent endearments for Brown, Wonner and Ned (their cat):

‘Life is pretty barren here for me, socially, because everyone is so bloody staid and straight-laced. I’m getting to rely more and more on the under-population I meet when I go out walking—the numerous cats sitting on fences, absorbing everything with their uncensored gaze . . .’

In May, Frame gave an interview on a national radio programme about her experiences at Yaddo and MacDowell entitled ‘Artists’ Retreats’^bb:

New Zealand Listener, 27 July 1970

‘It was a rich experience, for me, to feel for the first time in my life that I was among my own kind, so to speak, living and working and playing with them unselfconsciously.’

She gradually became involved with Dunedin activities and friends such as Charles Brasch, Ruth Dallas and Dorothy White, and visited an elderly relative in hospital. Her correspondence with Brown continued, full of musings, wit and poetry. She commented on the frequency of her letters: ‘Another hailstone in my storm of correspondence—dodge it if you wish.’ Her letters were an imaginative projection: ‘I don’t look on my letters to you as letters, not really, they’re just a way, for me, of being there from time to time with the three live and lively oaks.’ The phrase being there was most powerfully explored in the long poem On Not Being There^cc that she wrote in early June. This brilliant poem operates on several levels: the theme of desire underlies a description of a concert that the narrator does not attend.

First published in the posthumous volume of Frame’s poetry, The Goose Bath (Random House, Auckland, 2006)

Frame occasionally entertained the possibility, encouraged by Brown and Wonner, that some arrangement might be worked out for her to live with them. Soon after she returned to Dunedin, she wrote, ‘as soon as you get that small servant-kennel built on to the kitchen let me know’. Several months later she exclaimed, ‘Do you really mean that there will be a little place for me with you? I can try it, anyway, and leave it very open as all living is’. Another time, she admitted it was a fantasy: ‘I will shatter this fantasy because it is unendurably not true (who said fantasies ever were?)’

CHARACTERS

There are many scenarios and themes that interweave throughout the letters. Many of the characters would have originated in conversations between Frame, Brown and Wonner.

A major picaresque narrative involves a cast of characters who live on the patio at ‘Live Oak Inn’ in Hermosillo Drive, Santa Barbara, California—Brown and Wonner’s address. One of these ‘characters’ is a carnivorous plant, Carnie, which sometimes eats people. Carnie transplants a slip of itself to New Zealand from where it occasionally writes ‘home’. Mostly, though, it is Jay, sometimes called Jaybird or J, who writes the letters. Jay writes to Bee—i.e. B, the initial of Bill; Paul is Pee. These were nicknames for each other that the three friends often used in the correspondence. The title of the introduction to this book captures this witty interplay.

Other leading characters are Ned, an actual cat (whose servants are Bee and Pee) and Steinie, a Steinway piano that Bee owns and plays. Other characters and cats visit periodically, for example Dame Mary Margaret, an alter-ego of Paul’s, a formidable pantomime-dame figure reminiscent of Margaret Rutherford the actor or Princess Margaret, sister of the British monarch who features in some of Frame’s collages. Originally, this dame was a character in the asylum in Frame’s novel Faces in the Water: ‘the original Dame M.M. who used to broadcast to Egypt’. Frame kept track of her ‘characters’ amidst all their adventures that frequently paralleled what Brown and she were doing or dreaming.

Some of the characters retain some mystery, such as The Mortal Enemy, which is identified in an April letter as Frame’s ‘new novel [that] wavers (it is my mortal enemy)’ but at other times is something else. The concept had developed since its first appearance in January as a reference to the novella by Willa Cather: ‘my short novel (Mortal Enemy style) which remains out of reach like a tame chickadee that’s decided it won’t settle on my hand after all.’ She illustrates the interrelationships between a number of these characters in one of her final letters before she returns to the USA:

‘Hi. I’m just moving, still in imagination only (having left that crumby motel in Offing) out of one horse Focus Town into the pretty little resort of Foreground where I’m staying at the Foreplay Inn before I take the plane to Live Oak Inn. Quite a complicated journey, as complicated as a bee’s dance at the entrance to the hive, at sundown.’

Frame’s trips to and musings upon ‘The Place of the Stone Bees’—the image of a bee carved on the facade of Ajax Bee Supplies near the Dunedin railway station—is one of many fascinating sub-plots. Just before leaving Dunedin at the end of 1970, she describes to Brown a walk

‘to the place of The Stone Bees, to photograph them, and when I came to them I was confronted by my own imagination and memory, for they were so small I had to search for the carvings and I don’t think my photographs will show them.’

This particular image of a bee inspired one of the poetry sections of her next novel, Daughter Buffalo.

Possibly the most curious and pervasive character is the peedauntal, which appeared in Frame’s first correspondence to Brown, a postcard from MacDowell on November 15, 1969:

‘The Management of Peedauntals Ltd thanks you for your visit to the East and reminds you that it wishes to keep close to its valued client. It moves shortly to lonely premises in Baltimore. Singing opera you need never be peedauntally underprivileged or under-achieved with our late model Peedauntals.’

Several months later Brown sent a drawing of a prototype of the peedauntal, a device whose intended function was to enable people not to ‘have to pee down their leg’, but whose design was fraught with problems. Frame commented on his prototype:

‘Alas sir, the Peedauntal model as illustrated has no sex appeal whatsoever, unless of course the buckles fastening it to the leg are diamond or snakeskin. I had in mind something less like an attached bagpipe—’

On another occasion she acknowledged that ‘of course I never forget, Ace Bee, that you [. . .] were the originator of the Peedauntal Principal’. The Peedauntal Saga evolved through more than twenty of Frame’s letters. She wrote in early July:

‘Tonight I am going to Charles B’s place for dinner after which we are going to see/hear the Opera Company’s The Impresario and Il Pagliacci. It will be a very good opportunity for me (as co-director of the Peedauntal Company N.Z. Ltd.) to see how the product actually works.’

‘The Peedauntal Report’, spliced with a collage of text from newspapers, is the climax of this particular saga. There are a number of sagas of other ‘characters’ that intersperse the correspondence with hilarity and poignancy: Steinie (a Steinway piano), Carnie (a carnivorous plant) and A Sweater. And then there is Lucas.

LUCAS

Early in August 1970, midway through her ten months back in New Zealand, Frame adopted a kitten for a couple of months that became the focus of emotions ranging from joy to grief. In Frame’s correspondence with Brown, cats are cats but also familiars, surrogates, confessors, mysteries, metaphors. She found the kitten ‘exceedingly refreshing as he hides nothing and is not ashamed of any of his feelings’. She named it Lucas after the character Lucas Burch in William Faulkner’s novel Light in August, referring to the cat after it left as the hero of an apocryphal novel, Cat in August. She summed up this interlude:

‘I’m fighting fit but so sad, so sad. I learned so much from Lucas. It was an ideal situation for studying learning between woman and beast. Cats are so full of knowing on (to us) invisible evidence and I think they could teach us a way of reaching the invisible evidence.’

In October 1970, Frame attended the rehearsal of a play adapted from her novel, A State of Siege. Her letters now included practical details of her planned return to the United States. This year, spent in two contrasting places, was proving to be a period of transition for while in one place she was thinking of the other, ruminating on loss and longing, of ‘not being there’.

She considered Brown and Wonner’s suggestion that she seek a teaching position in the States and enquired about a work visa, but nothing was finalised by the time she returned there early the following year. She posted Brown a copy of a satirical letter she sent to ‘To J. J. Smith, Immigration Dept., Wishington’, thanking him for his letter and the ‘test’ he had sent her to fill in. She queried one of the questions, which she shared with Brown:

‘There’s a question of colour. I am Blue—it does not appear in the photograph I enclosed with my application. I believe, however, that the Blue disappears when one sets foot on U.S. soil.’

Though Frame had the resources to return to the USA, her plans were boosted when Brown offered to pay the airfare and her friend Sue Marquand, the wife of writer John Marquand whom she had met on her first visit to Yaddo in 1967, offered her the long term use of an apartment in New York.

RETURN TO THE USA

In one of Frame’s last letters to Brown before she left New Zealand, she exclaimed, ‘What a year’s history is being written in my letters’ thus acknowledging their significance. She flew to Auckland early in December where she based herself at her sister June Gordon’s family home. In early January, she took the train to Wellington to spend a week with her friend, Jacquie Baxter^dd, and on January 29 flew to California where she stayed several weeks with Brown and Wonner. She then flew on to the East Coast where she spent the rest of the year living and writing intensively, several times revisiting Brown in California. From October to December, she stayed at Yaddo. The year 1971 was Frame’s American year.

New Zealand poet and short story writer (1927-2009), widow of poet James K Baxter

Frame’s correspondence with Brown continued, though much diminished in volume, up until 1989 when she was shocked to learn that he had sold her letters to a collector, who on-sold them to Pennsylvania State University library. Brown explained that he had been anxious that the collection was cared for. Though troubled by the incident, she forgave him but rarely wrote letters from then on, preferring the telephone, postcards and eventually email.

EDITING JAY TO BEE

Jay to Bee preserves the integrity, atmosphere and narrative drive of the first fourteen months of Frame’s correspondence with Brown by excluding only repetitious and inconsequential material from a total of 136 letters (including eight postcards) for this period.

The layout of the correspondence is chronological. Given that about half the items are undated, we rigorously scrutinised and cross-checked to establish the sequence, which is slightly different to the order in the catalogue at Penn State University Library in the USA where the originals are lodged.

Frame wrote to Brown an average of twice a week, with Brown writing about half as many times. Most of her letters include drawings and or collages, and many of his include drawings with the occasional collage. Most of hers are typewritten, although there are many hand-written inclusions. She wrote about one fifth completely by hand, usually when she was travelling and away from her typewriter. Almost all of Brown’s are handwritten on both sides of blank note paper (about A5 size). Frame also corresponded several times with Wonner: for example in late December 1970, just prior to her return to the USA, she wrote as Dame F.C. [Frame Clutha] to Dame M.M. [Mary Margaret].

Our primary aims with the layout of the letters have been to preserve their integrity and show the relationship of Frame’s images to her words by placing them as close as possible to their place in the original text—several facsimiles of this interplay are included. As the images vary considerably in scale, we have resized them so that, for the readers’ benefit, they relate more seamlessly to the text. This book, of course, can only be a reasonably faithful and coherent translation of the visceral materiality of the original letters that encompass many kinds and sizes of paper, writing methods and image production.

Frame generally wrote her letters in orthodox sentences with punctuation and spelling according to the standard of the time. We have formatted the paragraphs with regular indents in a way that was not possible with a typewriter, but otherwise we have made minimal edits. We have preserved the lines of asterisks that Frame and Brown jokingly called ‘stars’. Some collages that were less striking than the best, or that were somewhat obscure from a present-day perspective, have been omitted.

Frame variably dated and addressed her letters—fewer than half are dated with the day’s date. She sometimes wrote her full or partial current address and sometimes her forwarding address. We have standardised the heading to each letter so as to give the location, the exact date or month, and any comment she may have added. For clarity’s sake, Frame’s verse is rendered in italics while other verse is within quote marks. Footnotes are used sparingly. This is a reader’s edition. Jay to Bee is not an academic work but is the uncensored revelation of a great writer’s imagination at play.

Denis Harold

29 January 2016

^a This was her third visit there: her first stay was in May 1967, then subsequently from mid February to mid June 1969, October to December 1971, and February-March 1982. During the years 1967 to 1982, she spent a total of twelve months spread over six separate visits at these two artist colonies.

^b New Zealand Listener, 27 July 1970

^c First published in the posthumous volume of Frame’s poetry, The Goose Bath (Random House, Auckland, 2006)

^d New Zealand poet and short story writer (1927-2009), widow of poet James K Baxter