Book Commentary: Together Again — C.K. Stead and Janet Frame

Another neglected master from New Zealand — writer C.K. Stead

by Bill Marx

C.K. Stead

I just noticed that a week before Janet Frame’s previously unpublished story “Gorse is not People” appeared in “The New Yorker” the magazine published a poem by another fine New Zealand author, C.K. Stead. He not only knew Frame at the time she wrote the tale but has sketched a fascinating prose portrait of what the author was like during that early period in her creative career.

Stead is best known in academia for his groundbreaking critical study of modernist poetry The New Poetic. His latest volume of criticism, Book Self: The Reader as Writer and the Writer as Critic, was published last July by Auckland University Press. But he is a very fine novelist and accomplished poet (his Collected Poems will be available this January). Unfortunately, though Stead has won a number of major literary awards in his homeland, his fiction has yet to make much of an impact in America, perhaps because of its determinedly mature beauty, a refreshingly civilized lyricism that welcomes historical complexities.

The last book of his I read, 2000’s Thinking about O’Dwyer, memorably deals with the haunting reverberations caused by the mysterious demise, during World War II in Crete, of a soldier in New Zealand’s Maori battalion. Believing that the man’s commanding officer was responsible for the death, the man’s family placed a makutu, a Maori curse, on him. Stead’s most recent novel, My Name Was Judas, received admiring notices and I plan to get around to it soon.

The novel provides a striking picture of the young Janet Frame.

As for Frame, Stead wrote about her in 1984’s All Visitors Ashore, a delightful autobiographical novel that chronicles his days in the mid-1950s living on Takapuna beach with his wife. The couple had just returned from a lengthy stay in England; the pair found themselves living in apartment near the famed short-story writer Frank Sargeson and Frame, who was staying in a hut in Sargeson’s garden. Frame had just spent nine years in a mental hospital, memories of which fill “Gorse is not People.”

Stead paints a moving remembrance of the eccentric Frame, who is the inspiration for Cecelia Skyways, an ex-nun who sees herself as “a lady Caliban.” The woman is looked after, in a fashion, by her landlord, Melior Farbro (Frank Sargeson). The voice of Skyways hums along in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of Frame’s fiction:

But I am attending to my Zen Master who inhibits a web just over the door and he instructs me not to draw back from my fears but to go forward into them, to become my fear because it’s the division in me between self and self that is the cause. Last night I lay in bed with my door ajar and out there lay the shadows and I looked at the shadows and the shadows looked at me and neither of us moved and when I thought I was going to die because my breath had stopped Melior’s door opened and shot a long shaft straight into the shadows killing a couple of the worst of them dead and out came Melior with a torch and he worked his way here and there pointing the ray this way and that and that shooting holes in shadows to left and right only stopping now and then to pick a snail or a slug off the leaves of his vegetables.

Stead talks about his time with Frame and Sargeson in a March 2007 “Guardian” interview:

We made a very strange foursome back then,” Stead recalls. “Frank was gay and in his 50s, Janet was mad, as it used to be called, and we were this young couple. But it all felt tremendously bohemian and exciting, and helped make me think I’d made the right decision in coming home. There’s been a few ups and downs since then, but I’m still glad I did it.

All Visitors Ashore sports a blurb from a no doubt amused Janet Frame – “A masterpiece of creative writing.”

2 Comments

  1. Brad R on September 9, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    I read the Janet Frame short story. It’s truly remarkable.

  2. Dionysus on January 9, 2009 at 4:53 am

    I completely agree with the comments about Stead – America is missing out!

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