The New Zealand Novel 1860-1965
Write to Survive
Write to Survive. The major novelist of our 1960s is undoubtedly Janet Frame, who followed Owls Do Cry with Faces in the Water, 1961, The Edge of the Alphabet, 1962, Scented Gardens for the Blind, 1963, and The Adaptable Man, 1965. The last is set in England.
Essential to an understanding of Janet Frame's achievement is her autobiographical essay in Landfall, March 1965, in the series "Begin- page 127 nings". She writes there of the early absorption in writing which she shared with her sisters. "There were tragic happenings in our family. Sometimes ... we would console ourselves by remembering the Brontes . . . With a background of poverty, drunkenness, attempted murder and near-madness, it was inevitable that we should feel close to the Brontes."
This confession brings a major critical illumination, as readers who know the Bronte story will recognise. The Frame girls chose a Bronte each; Janet was Charlotte. The imaginary worlds of Angria and Gondal in which the Brontes lived as children, writing endless wild sagas peopled with their fantasies, brought destruction to Branwell and near-destruction to Emily. Charlotte turned her back on "that world" and made her way into the world of reality only with difficulty. Janet Frame, however, came to live increasingly and dangerously in her imaginary world, and in her early twenties suffered a mental breakdown from the strain of attempts to conform to normal life. She spent some eight years in hospitals. When the therapy was suggested to her of "making designs from my dreams", she wrote The Lagoon and Owls Do Cry. A Literary Fund grant took her overseas. After another breakdown she consulted an English doctor, whose advice she records—"Why mix? Why conform? I think you need to write to survive. First write the story of your years in hospital, then keep on writing."