To: K-list
Recieved: 2004/01/31 04:59
Subject: [K-list] Forgive
From: hbrost
On 2004/01/31 04:59, hbrost posted thus to the K-list:
Dear List,
Please forgive the length and 'not-of-my-pen' of this obituary. It comes from the New York Times and if I had just sent a link most of you can't access the text without joining the NYTimes.com site. However, this obit really moved me and you may find it interesting, perhaps enough to explore Ms Frame's works.
Hety
_____________________
Janet Frame, 79, Writer Who Explored Madness, Dies
January 30, 2004
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Janet Frame, whose vividly romantic explorations of madness
and language in novels, poetry and autobiography propelled
her to worldwide attention, died yesterday in Dunedin, New
Zealand. She was 79.
Dunedin Hospital said the cause was acute leukemia, The
Associated Press reported.
In 1973 she legally changed her surname to Clutha, after
the river south of Oamaru, her childhood home, but
continued to write under the name Janet Frame.
Ms. Frame's work used her own disturbing life to weave
fictional nightmares that reflected, in her words, the
"homelessness of self." After a suicide attempt she spent
eight years in mental hospitals in New Zealand, receiving
200 electroshock treatments. She was about to have a
lobotomy when a hospital official read that she had won a
literary prize. She was released.
Later, a panel of psychiatrists determined that she had
never had schizophrenia. In the sort of bitterly
perceptive, highly personalized twist that infuses much of
her writing, that news did not please her.
"Oh why had they robbed me of my schizophrenia, which had
been the answer to all my misgivings about myself?" she
wrote in the third volume of her autobiography, which, with
the first two, was dramatized in Jane Campion's 1990 film
"An Angel at My Table."
"Like King Lear I had gone in search of ATthe truth' and now
I had nothing," she continued.
Ms. Frame's 12 novels, four story collections, one poetry
collection and three volumes of autobiography won dozens of
awards.
"As the body of her work has enlarged, one comes to
understand it not just as a series of extraordinary
insights into suffering and thought, but as a mighty
exploration of human consciousness and its context in the
natural world," the American Academy of Arts and Letters
citation read when she was made an honorary foreign member
in 1986.
In her novel "The Edge of the Alphabet" (Braziller, 1965)
words literally crumble into meaninglessness and
communication becomes useless. Even spelling becomes
sinister. In "Intensive Care" (Braziller, 1970) she spells
history hiss-tree to make an unsettling connection to
Eden's serpent. "All dreams," she wrote, "lead back to the
nightmare garden."
Ms. Frame created romantic visionaries - eccentrics, mad
people, epileptics - and pitted them against the repressive
forces of a sterile, conformist society. Or maybe she was
just reporting on her life. A continuing discussion among
critics was whether her autobiographical work was mostly
fiction or whether her fiction was mostly autobiographical.
Janet Paterson Frame was born on Aug. 28, 1924, in Dunedin.
Her father was a railroad engineer. Her mother, who once
worked as a maid in the home of the New Zealand writer
Katherine Mansfield, wrote poems that she sold door to
door.
Janet's youth was blighted by the drownings of two sisters.
She attended the local teachers' training college, where
she felt so lonely that she found peace sitting among
tombstones in a cemetery. While practice teaching, she
panicked when an inspector entered the classroom, and she
fled, never to return. She suffered a breakdown that was
misdiagnosed as schizophrenia.
After her eight years in two psychiatric hospitals, she was
befriended on her release by Frank Sargeson, a writer, who
let her stay in an army hut in his backyard in Auckland,
New Zealand. She wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry"
(Pegasus, 1957), while staying there. The narrator was
Daphne, a patient in a mental hospital.
She next traveled abroad on a grant from the New Zealand
government, and in London a panel of psychiatrists
determined she was not mentally ill, just different from
other people. While living in Europe she published five
novels from 1961 to 1963.
Ms. Frame is survived by her sister, June Gordon.
She
returned to New Zealand in 1964 and wrote more novels, and
three volumes of autobiography (Braziller, 1982, 1984,
1985). Despite the deep introspection of her writing, she
developed a reputation as a private person.
In the early 1990's she had two mild strokes, which
affected her mental stamina and power of concentration, but
she continued to write.
"Writing is a boon, analgesic, and so on," she said. "I
think it's all that matters to me. I dread emerging from it
each day."
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