Susan Pearce's Blog, page 2

Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer

Feb 6th: I copied the following paragraph onto the whiteboard for my writing class yesterday, offering it as an on-the-button description of what might happen if you don’t ‘look sharply after your thoughts’, as Emerson said. It comes towards the end of the novel, at the beginning of a chapter in which Grace has been invited to view her host’s office in the attic:

She sat before Philip’s huge desk, considering the drawers and pigeonholes crammed with papers…How could he dare to give a stranger permission to enter this room! Or was this room not the repository of his secrets? Perhaps he himself had no access to his treasures; perhaps he hoarded them elsewhere without ever recognising them; perhaps he discarded them one by one without ever having known them?

There were several passages like this one, that made me stop and wish to commit them to memory. Now, of course, I can’t really remember what they were about…there’s one that describes the subtley shifting expressions on Philip’s face as (she surmises) his feelings change. I particularly enjoyed the chapters that deal with the book’s present moment, in the cold northern city that Grace is visiting. But those chapters act as coat hangers for the chapters about childhood memories, and after a while, wonderfully evocative as they are, those representations of memory seem somewhat self-indulgent & not to fill any larger purpose in the narrative.

Jan 26th: Having finished Patrick Evan’s Gifted, I picked up Towards Another Summer again and took it on our camping trip to the Whangaparoa Peninsula. I bought it when it came out but, at the time, wasn’t in tune with Frame despite having loved her writing since first reading her at 20. Evans’s wonderful novel has helped, and possibly so have my experiences over the last 18 months. Camping didn’t leave much time for reading so I’m still less than halfway through: oh, also, I temporarily put it aside, in the tent, for the more easily accessible stories in The Return by Roberto Bolano. (Must note here that Gifted is still burning in my consciousness.)

Side note: I read the first few paras of Pride and Prejudice on my new Kindle (!!!) this morning, just because it’s the only book on there at the moment, and while I’m determined to enjoy the Kindle (cheaper books, portability, special gift from my love, etc) my first five minutes of use freaked me out a little. I noticed myself reading very self-consciously, hearing my voice echo inside my head rather than, as I’ve been used to since childhood, the text bypassing any inner auditory sense and going directly to my understanding so that I seem to absorb the words rather than having to ‘read’ them. Also, I appreciate the choice of text sizes but am startled by the wide gaps between paragraphs and the frequency with which I have to turn the pages.

Janet Frame's Towards Another Summer

Feb 6th: I copied the following paragraph onto the whiteboard for my writing class yesterday, offering it as an on-the-button description of what might happen if you don't 'look sharply after your thoughts', as Emerson said. It comes towards the end of the novel, at the beginning of a chapter in which Grace has been invited to view her host's office in the attic:

She sat before Philip's huge desk, considering the drawers and pigeonholes crammed with papers…How could he dare to give a stranger permission to enter this room! Or was this room not the repository of his secrets? Perhaps he himself had no access to his treasures; perhaps he hoarded them elsewhere without ever recognising them; perhaps he discarded them one by one without ever having known them?

There were several passages like this one, that made me stop and wish to commit them to memory. Now, of course, I can't really remember what they were about…there's one that describes the subtley shifting expressions on Philip's face as (she surmises) his feelings change. I particularly enjoyed the chapters that deal with the book's present moment, in the cold northern city that Grace is visiting. But those chapters act as coat hangers for the chapters about childhood memories, and after a while, wonderfully evocative as they are, those representations of memory seem somewhat self-indulgent & not to fill any larger purpose in the narrative.

Jan 26th: Having finished Patrick Evan's Gifted, I picked up Towards Another Summer again and took it on our camping trip to the Whangaparoa Peninsula. I bought it when it came out but, at the time, wasn't in tune with Frame despite having loved her writing since first reading her at 20. Evans's wonderful novel has helped, and possibly so have my experiences over the last 18 months. Camping didn't leave much time for reading so I'm still less than halfway through: oh, also, I temporarily put it aside, in the tent, for the more easily accessible stories in The Return by Roberto Bolano. (Must note here that Gifted is still burning in my consciousness.)

Side note: I read the first few paras of Pride and Prejudice on my new Kindle (!!!) this morning, just because it's the only book on there at the moment, and while I'm determined to enjoy the Kindle (cheaper books, portability, special gift from my love, etc) my first five minutes of use freaked me out a little. I noticed myself reading very self-consciously, hearing my voice echo inside my head rather than, as I've been used to since childhood, the text bypassing any inner auditory sense and going directly to my understanding so that I seem to absorb the words rather than having to 'read' them. Also, I appreciate the choice of text sizes but am startled by the wide gaps between paragraphs and the frequency with which I have to turn the pages.

Patrick Evans: Gifted

Feb 14th

Below, in my earlier review, you have it: the proof that I was happily persuaded, via a narrative I knew was fictional, that I 'understood' Frame more thoroughly than I did before reading Gifted. This type of (in my case willing) delusion is just one of the reasons for the recent outraged and abusive post by Pamela Gordon, Frame's niece and the executor of her estate.

As a writer and reader, I object to her objections.

I don't think 'cultural appropriation' is a crime, unless the new artefact is devoid of any meaning, for example car manufacturers' use of Maori designs. What do we now think of any royal objections to Shakespeare's use of actual kings & princes in his history plays?

Gordon also objects to Frame being 'only 7 years dead'. I don't think that makes any difference. Time is a random factor, and apparently much more flexible than we have thought: it's only time that separates us from ancestors with whom we share nearly all of our genetic code. They are closer to us than we usually consider: does that mean we can't reinvent them?

Would Gifted be OK if no-one could remember what Frame was 'really' like? Would we then be allowed to reinvent her? If yes, then why not now? If no, then what's the difference between that and being unable to cartoonify the prophet Mohammed?

Gordon accuses Evans of portraying Frame as 'deceitful, dishonest and inhuman', which makes me doubt that she has read the book at all. For a start, Evan's Sargeson is far harder on himself than he is on Janet. He, who knows exactly what he's writing (a knowingly fallible narrator), shows himself up to be sometimes intellectually and emotionally limited, contradictory, often petty (and despite all that, deeply sympathetic).

What does Frame do, in the novel, that makes Gordon think that Evans has depicted her as such? Hide under the hedge? Give him evasive answers? Tell him that she's doing something other than going to the shops, then go to the shops? I really fail to see how Gifted is an attack on her integrity. Does Gordon mean that in life, Frame always behaved with utter consistency and reliability? She would have been very boring if that were the case.

And where does 'inhuman' come from? Evans's Frame seems to me much more human than most people: that she knew to her core the difficulties of being human, and that her love of truth often did not allow her to fake normality the way most of us [try to] do. I had the impression, after reading Towards Another Summer, that somehow she knew that if she committed all her energies towards blending into normal society, she would lose the connection to her treasures, as Phillip Thirkettle has. ('Perhaps he himself had no access to his treasures…')

And so what if I do feel 'closer' to Frame than I did previously, and if my Frame is not the same as the 'real' Frame? I *did* realise that Gifted is fiction, and that my 'understanding' of Frame is actually in some imaginative world, some kind of mirror city I guess, but (despite the biographical evidence that Frame was keen not to have the facts of her life misrepresented) I do feel that her writer self might have approved of and understood: after all, we all get a deluded idea of who a writer 'is' just from reading their books.

Maybe it's something to do with this: that the 'self' of the writer who comes through their novels are generally very different from their day to day 'selves'; Pamela Gordon knew the day-to-day Janet, and perhaps what Evans has done is to extrapolate from her novels (which he has studied so closely) and has therefore made a Frame from a somewhat different dimension. (My neighbour, who has read Acts of Love, says 'I never would have guessed that you would have written it…it's so different from my idea of you.')

Gordon also states that

'Actually in an online interview Evans claims his novel is the "culmination" of all that Frame never really achieved (in his opinion)… He calls this her "last novel" and claims to have channeled her in writing it.'

If this is true, then it is a weird claim, but not one worth getting upset about. A work of art stands apart from its maker and the maker's ego. I reckon it has a separate consciousness and cannot be discussed in relation to the maker himself (which is why interviews with writers of fiction are often such a diverting nonsense).

I do believe that the ego is not very much concerned with creating. If it is, the art it creates usually doesn't work very well, and / or isn't very interesting or longlasting. In any case, whatever Evans says about Gifted, and whatever his motives were in writing it, has nothing to do with the merits of the book.

However, if Gordon's talking about Margo White's excellent review / interview in the Listener, what Evans actually said there was

"You're listening to a voice and thinking, 'What's the next line?' It's the writing that's doing this … it's coming out of a part of your brain than is not normally accessible." After Evans's decades of teaching and reading "the father of New Zealand fiction", it seems the man was lurking in his subconscious, just waiting to be channelled. "Yeah, a friend of mine has said, 'It's your life's work. This is what you were put on this planet to do'"

It's White who uses the word 'channelled', and it's in relation to the Sargeson character, not Frame. I couldn't find any other online interviews that referred to channeling.

Earlier:

I'm loving being tangled up in this book. It's as though, even when I'm not reading it, Frank Sargeson is at my side, gossiping and philosophising into my ear. I have to keep reminding myself that it's fiction (though actually I don't very often, as I love the delusion) because, probably aided by the knowledge that Frank and Janet were 'real', part of my brain does believe the book contains Frank's memoir.

I'm struck by the difference in my enjoyment of Gifted, and my recent consumption by Franzen's 'Freedom'. I haven't worked through the following thought, but it seems to me something to do with Franzen's more obvious manipulation of his readers. I'd love to be able to do what he does, but Freedom left me feeling bloated and weighed down. Reading Gifted, I feel light, fizzing with the excitement of such a well-wrought fiction. I suppose it's not as manic as Freedom's accumulation of detail. (And as said before, I couldn't forget about the characters while I was reading Franzen's book, but they haven't stayed with me.)