Janet Frame

In 1955, aged 30, Janet Frame emerged from a decade of incarceration in mental hospitals. Her "case" had appeared to get worse over the years. She had had innumerable electric-shock treatments, which she hated and feared, and had been put down for a leucotomy, an operation to sever the frontal lobes of the brain. What saved her was the publication of a collection of her short stories.

Janet Paterson Frame, writer: born Dunedin, New Zealand 28 August 1924; CBE 1983; ONZ 1990; died Dunedin 29 January 2004.

In 1955, aged 30, Janet Frame emerged from a decade of incarceration in mental hospitals. Her "case" had appeared to get worse over the years. She had had innumerable electric-shock treatments, which she hated and feared, and had been put down for a leucotomy, an operation to sever the frontal lobes of the brain. What saved her was the publication of a collection of her short stories.

How and when these were written is not clear; but when The Lagoon (1951) was awarded a literary prize someone in the medical fraternity must have stopped to wonder whether the brain which had produced these images of childhood, in which the language sparkles like webs on a frosty morning, needed any kind of correction.

But now what was to become of her? She was shy to the point of social incompetence, could not cope with strangers, and had been institutionalised for so long, freedom must have been terrifying. Her sister took her to visit the Auckland fiction writer Frank Sargeson, who suggested she might like to occupy an army hut in the garden at the back of his house. He would look after her. She accepted and lived there through 1955 and on into 1956, wrote her first, and possibly still her most admired novel, Owls Do Cry (1957), and made her first close post- childhood friendships. Of Sargeson she said, "he saved my life".

Late in 1956 she set off for her first trip abroad. There were adventures and misadventures in Spain, further episodes of mental breakdown, and a period in the Maudsley Hospital in London, where Dr R.H. Cawley, to whom she dedicated at least one of her books, took a friendly interest in her. Later, the publisher Mark Goulden, who would write that Frame was one of only three people he had known to whom he would apply the word genius, provided a London flat in which she was to write a more conventional novel that would make her famous.

Despite her best efforts to oblige, Frame's fiction like her life continued to take swoops into the fantastic and dives into the abyss. The nearest she got to Goulden's requirement was The Adaptable Man (1965), set in a conventional English village, at the end of which, however, Frame brings a large conventional chandelier down on the heads of her principal characters, as if to pass judgement on herself for creating them.

Frame's work is all based on her sense that language is a paradigm of reality, a precarious and magical structure continually threatened with breakdown. She said of one of her novels,

I wrote it as a result of a visit to the dentist in London. He was very vague. He went to the window and he looked out and there was a patch of blue in the sky. He said, "What I wouldn't give to be in Sussex!" Then he said, "Rinse whilst I'm gone." I hadn't heard anyone say "whilst" and it was that word that prompted me to write the whole book.

An anecdote of that kind would always be told in a tone that seemed to tremble on the brink of helpless laughter. Her voice and articulation were bell-clear, almost child-like, and key words were hesitated before and hovered over, as if she and her interlocutor should pause to marvel at the huge pretence they were engaging in, behaving as if they could hold chaos in check by the device of linguistic communication.

The same sense of marvelling at itself, and mocking itself, pervades the best of her writing. It represents, I think, a scepticism native to post-colonial societies, where national identity is insecure and the social imprint faint. Add Frame's mental history to her New Zealand background and, with the accident of literary genius, you get this vivid articulation of a sense that reality itself is fiction, a linguistic construct.

It is a view not properly described as despairing, nor as tragic, though it can sometimes seem blacker than either. There can only be tragedy where there is a faith that things might have been different, and better. In Frame the darkness is of laughter. Nothing else is appropriate - and there is a pleasure in it, an illicit joy. Frame loved language, loved poetry, loved literature. How marvellous that we should have such toys!

Palgrave's The Golden Treasury floats through all her work as the Bible does through the work of those brought up on it. She was poet as well as novelist; and though she only published one collection of poems, The Pocket Mirror (1967), she wrote them compulsively throughout her life.

Her other, and lesser, mode was the satirical one, where she seemed to punish the world which had so misunderstood and damaged her. In this mode there is a bitter wit which diminishes her fictional characters to the point where the reader's belief in them is sometimes undermined. Her novels characteristically veer between magic and satire.

Frame was always respected in New Zealand and by those in the international academic community who knew her work. In America her novels customarily received serious attention in magazines like Time. But she had no great commercial success until the publication of her three volumes of autobiography, To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). They were collected in 1989 as An Angel at My Table, the title given also to Jane Campion's award-winning film of them in 1990. Here were revealed, in the childhood reminiscences, the extremes of her experience - the wonder of books and language, the shame of poverty, the horror of the accidental deaths of her two sisters.

But Frame's overriding purpose in the autobiography was, so to speak, to clear her name of the stigma of madness - to show how she came to be wrongly diagnosed as schizophrenic. This is a matter which research will show she simplified a good deal, since diagnoses of her case were always various and contradictory; but there can be little doubt that the long incarceration during her youth was needless, and the treatment on the whole barbarous.

She became, however, because of this, an icon of the feminist movement, a role she did not enjoy since her literary success had never depended on her sex, but solely on her talent, and she did not like the sense of being segregated into a class of deserving victims.

Janet Frame always guarded her privacy and lived alone, though close to her sister and her sister's children. In her later years she learned to cope well with public appearances and with international travel. She won numerous literary awards and prizes, was appointed CBE in 1983 and in 1990 to the 20-member Order of New Zealand, her country's highest honour.

In 2001 she was the subject of a biography, Wrestling with the Angel, by Michael King. She was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Prize, most recently last year.

C. K. Stead

I met Janet Frame only three times but I feel privileged and still slightly surprised to have met her at all, writes Fleur Adcock. Before I left New Zealand in 1963 she was a figure of mystery, a shy recluse who had nevertheless written vividly shocking semi-fictional accounts of her own life. Friends of mine later knew her; I never did. In 1984 she came to England to promote her books, and the Women's Press invited me to a party in Hampstead to meet her. It was like being about to meet Emily Dickinson or Emily Brontë.

Janet Frame sat on a sofa, surrounded by eager questioners, and murmured her answers in a soft but unflinching voice. I hesitated to add to the interrogation: this was a vulnerable woman, I felt. (But I underestimated her resilience; she was a survivor if ever there was one.) When my turn came I did question her, mentioning the names of friends or acquaintances we had in common: the Steads and the Duggans in Auckland, Charles Brasch (editor of Landfall magazine and a generous literary patron) in Dunedin.

"Oh yes, Charles Brasch," she said, adding that she had always secretly called him "Must you". Whenever she had tea with him there came a moment when conversation ran out (he was shy too); she would say "I must go" and he, leaping eagerly to his feet, would say "Must you?"

There were questions I dared not ask, notably the one about the effects of electric-shock treatment inflicted on her in the mental hospital: if it had really damaged her memory, how was it that she had such brilliant, detailed recall of her childhood and adolescence?

But at least we had talked. Our second meeting was at a reception at New Zealand House, where she was being lionised and I talked more with her sister June.

The third occasion was when she gave a reading at the Wellington Festival in 1986. I forget which story she read; what stays with me is her delivery: utterly unaffected, simple and direct. "Innocence" is the only word for its quality. It was the voice we hear in her writings at its best: the voice of an extremely intelligent, perceptive and imaginative child. I have seldom seen an audience so transfixed, and the applause at the end was overwhelming. When I congratulated her afterwards, as everyone did, she was puzzled by our enthusiasm; quite clearly she had no idea what we were on about.

At the Hampstead party we had talked about poetry, and she had told me that she still wrote a lot of "verse" - to call it "poetry" would have offended her ridiculously modest estimate of her own abilities - she saw it partly as a record of events, since she kept no journal and thought of publishing it when she was 80, as a kind of supplement to her autobiography.

Janet Frame didn't quite make it to 80. I hope we shall see the poetry, but there is already plenty of her writing to be grateful for.