In the Memorial Room Read online

  IN THE MEMORIAL ROOM

  OTHER WORKS BY JANET FRAME

  The Lagoon and Other Stories (1952) stories

  Owls Do Cry (1957) novel

  Faces in the Water (1961) novel

  The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) novel

  Scented Gardens for the Blind (1963) novel

  Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies (1963) stories

  The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches (1963) stories

  The Adaptable Man (1965) novel

  A State of Siege (1966) novel

  The Reservoir and Other Stories (1966) stories

  The Pocket Mirror (1967) poems

  The Rainbirds (1968) novel (published in the USA as Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room)

  Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun (1969) children’s book

  Intensive Care (1970) novel

  Daughter Buffalo (1972) novel

  Living in the Maniototo (1979) novel

  To The Is-Land (1982) autobiography volume 1

  You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983) stories

  An Angel at My Table (1984) autobiography volume 2

  The Envoy from Mirror City (1985) autobiography volume 3

  The Carpathians (1988) novel

  The Goose Bath (2006) poems

  Towards Another Summer (2007) novel

  Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems (2008)

  Prizes: Selected Short Stories (2009) stories (published in UK and Australia as The Daylight & the Dust)

  Janet Frame in Her Own Words (2011) non-fiction

  Gorse is Not People (2012) stories

  The Mijo Tree (2013) story

  JANET FRAME

  Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most highly acclaimed author, was born in Dunedin in 1924 and died in 2004. Her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, was published in 1952. Frame went on to publish eleven novels, another three short-story collections and a book of poetry during her lifetime, and another novel, a short-story collection and a book of her poems have been published since her death. Janet Frame received numerous awards for her work, including a CBE for services to literature, in 1983. In 1990, she was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand. In that year, the three volumes of her autobiography were made into the film An Angel at My Table.

  In 1973, Janet Frame was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, and she spent the following year in Menton on the Côte d’Azur. Beneath the villa Isola Bella, where Mansfield lived and wrote for a time, is the Memorial Room, a small stone room commemorating her work and given to the Mansfield Fellow as a place to write.

  Though she struggled to work in the difficult conditions of the Memorial Room—with no running water or toilet facilities and delays in receiving her fellowship payment—it was in Menton that Janet Frame wrote In the Memorial Room, the story of Harry Gill, writer and recipient of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship.

  Frame did not allow publication of the manuscript during her lifetime—would certain people see themselves in the characters portrayed and, finding unflattering portraits, be offended? But she always intended the novel to be published posthumously, at the right time. Tucked away, to be looked at later, the Menton novel waited while Frame went on to write Living in the Maniototo, a novel interlaced with some of the same characters, events and places.

  Now, almost forty years after Janet Frame wrote In the Memorial Room, on her second-hand typewriter, the wait is over.

  Janet

  Frame

  In the

  Memorial

  Room

  textpublishing.com.au

  janetframe.org.nz

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Janet Frame Literary Trust 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters depicted are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  With thanks to Hocken Collections—Uare Taoka o Hakena, University of Otago Library.

  Extract from ‘Little Gidding’ (p.81) taken from Four Quartets, © Estate of T. S. Eliot, and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

  Cover design by W H Chong

  Page design by Imogen Stubbs

  Typeset by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Frame, Janet, 1924-2004.

  Title: In the memorial room / by Janet Frame.

  ISBN: 9781922147134 (hbk.)

  ISBN: 9781922148223 (ebook.)

  Dewey Number: NZ823.2

  Grateful thanks to the publishers

  of Margaret Rose Hurndell for

  permission to quote from her work.

  Harry Gill’s Menton Journal

  Meeting and Invitation

  September, 1973

  Today I received word that my application for the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship had been accepted and that I am to be next year’s Fellow. The Committee would like me to visit Wellington for the presentation ceremony early in October, and I am to leave for France by a ship of the Paradise Line in early December.

  Although I am not quite sure why I applied for the Fellowship I’m looking forward to travelling, although indeed I am not a traveller and my first voyage out to New Zealand when I was nine years old, in 1950, gave me enough experience, I felt, to last a lifetime. The money from the Fellowship, however, will give me a chance to write a different kind of novel from my first two which have given me the reputation of being an ‘historical’ novelist. Wairau Days might just be called an historical novel, but I did feel that New Families, with its emphasis on the private lives of the characters, might not have been dismissed as it was as ‘another historical novel from the pen of a talented young writer’.

  I’d rather like to write a comic novel in the picaresque tradition, a desire which is perhaps strongly proportionate to the lack of picaresque qualities in myself, for I am a dull personality, almost humdrum, a plodder from day to day with only an occasional glimpse of light, literally as well as figuratively for the disease in my eyes has worsened and in another three or five years I might not be fit enough to take up an overseas Fellowship: another reason, I suppose, why I applied for it. So here I am, shy, bespectacled, rather slow on the uptake, a reader and a student since my early childhood and an accidental novelist, for Wairau Days was written to correct or bring to full blossoming the half-truths of the story of Wairau. How surprised I was, that I so much enjoyed my task of telling the truth!

  Although it has been a disappointment to my father whose natural desire was that I should qualify in medicine and take over his general practice, it alarms him less, now, that I should be on the way to being a successful writer (described as ‘talented’, and ‘promising’ and not yet too old to panic at the description) than that I should have continued my shilly-shallying of courses at university. The Entomological Course did interest me while I was studying it. And for a while the prospect of Ear-Nose-Throat held me sp
ellbound, and my poor father’s eyes were shining when he talked to his colleagues about me. Then came the blackout and the problem with my sight, and, though that seemed to be only temporary and the family accepted it as such and were cheered when by my accounts and those of the physician it improved (a physician is oblivious to his family’s ills), I have not yet told them of the new problems with it. In some strange way I have fastened my hopes on the scholarship and Menton and I am determined to get there, and to enjoy it, and to write my new kind of novel, and then, when I return home, take whatever is waiting for me.

  This last remark sounds schoolboyish, and might betray my English birth; it shows a recklessness which I have within me but which none may read in my face or behaviour.

  I have a severe headache above my right eye.

  October 3rd

  The notice of the award appeared in this evening’s newspaper:

  WATERCRESS-ARMSTRONG FELLOWSHIP

  TO YOUNG HISTORICAL NOVELIST

  Harry Gill, 33, of Auckland, author of Wairau Days and New Families, has been awarded the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship for 1974. He will leave at the end of November for Menton where he will live for six months working in one of the rooms of the Villa Florita, occupied during her lifetime by Margaret Rose Hurndell, the internationally known poet whose last three books were written at the Villa Florita before her death there in 1960. The Fellowship has been endowed as a living memorial to Margaret Rose Hurndell whose death at the age of thirty cut short a brilliant career.

  So. Each of the five fellows before me has taken time to write a study of Margaret Rose Hurndell or to edit letters and one actually discovered an unpublished poem between the leaves of a book sold casually at the annual bazaar of the local English church. At the presentation ceremony in Wellington (which was held last week), when I was asked if I had any plans for making a study of Rose Hurndell I replied that I did not know, I would see how the land lay at Menton, although inevitably Rose Hurndell would be in my thoughts.

  I said I admired some of her poems very much, particularly those of the last book, Rehearsals.

  Two ladies at the presentation (there seemed to be mostly ladies and very very tall men, almost with their heads near the roof, in the small group surrounding me), Connie Watercress and Grace Armstrong, the two principal donors of the Fellowship, replied that Rose Hurndell’s first two books were their favourites, the ones written in New Zealand: The Harbour, and Manuka Night.

  —Her poems have been translated into thirteen languages, Connie said. —And her Letter to Procne is now known all over the world. Just think!

  I thought – just. There is such intense interest in Rose Hurndell’s works, more so, naturally, now that she is dead, and her last poems have been compared in their purity and otherworldliness, their vision of death, to the Requiem music which Mozart left unfinished, and although they were written before her death they have the effect of being posthumous, of actually being written after death.

  The conversation that evening was mostly about Margaret Rose Hurndell and her life and her family. I was told that her sister and her sister’s husband had retired to live in Menton two years ago, and that two friends she had made when she lived in London came each year to spend the winter in Menton and to make a pilgrimage to the Villa Florita. Her work was known in the city. The city was proud that she had lived and died there – yes, they were even proud of her death there, although her body was taken to London to be buried.

  Towards the close of that presentation evening, when suddenly the talk of Margaret Rose Hurndell had died away, someone asked me – I think it was Connie Watercress – what I planned to write in Menton. I said vaguely that I did not quite know.

  —I’m afraid I haven’t read your last book, Connie said. —But I’ve heard so much about it! The New Family.

  I smiled and murmured, —Yes, New Families.

  —There’s a shortage of historical novelists in New Zealand, someone said, as if talking of petrol or transistor batteries or vacuum cleaners.

  —So we’re proud to have you.

  —Will you be writing something historical, something French?

  —Do you speak French?

  —Did you know that Peter Cartwright, who’s at Oxford now, thinks you are the finest historical novelist we’ve had? I haven’t read your Wairau Days myself but he said it can’t be faulted. I read an article about it in one of the English papers. I get the Times and Guardian flown over.

  —The paper’s too thin, airmail, don’t you find? It tears.

  —We’re proud to have you. Perhaps there’ll be more financial support for the Fellowship when they know you’ve got it. We have to advertise you a little, you know.

  —He’s blushing.

  —So he is!

  —Well, Harry, we’ll soon get rid of those blushes.

  —Your father’s a doctor, I hear?

  And so the conversation continued until one by one the guests found their fur coats and went home, and I stayed a while by myself in the smoke-laden air, snaffling the last few savouries, for I was hungry, and a little drunk, and I went back to the hotel room where they’d booked me (I’d refused to stay with any members of the Committee who’d invited me) and I went straight to bed and fell asleep.

  And I dreamed.

  I dreamed.

  I have definite views about a novelist’s inclusion of dreams in his work. Dreams, I think, are for the first novel where all the material for the future is accumulated, packed tightly as in a storehouse the walls of which are strained to bursting point with their contents. Dreams may be inserted as extra provisions because the storehouse has no further room for solid material; dreams weigh nothing, do not need equipment for their transport and may have a chemical volatility which enables them to be replaced and changed often or annihilated when they are no longer of use. I maintain, however, they are one of the privileged tricks allowable only to the first novel, and, later, when the solid material has been withdrawn and used and the mind itself with the approach of middle and old age and death (not necessarily in that order) begins the process of confirming its doubt of the substantiality of the apparently ‘real’ world, as a preparation for its own final material dissolution, then dreams may re-enter the novelist’s work: he may use them as he will.

  This is just my opinion. I have been brought up with the disciplines of research and study with, perhaps, after observing my father at work since I was a child, a tendency to watch for symptoms, to diagnose a work of art, to determine the prognosis, the etiology, the epidemiology, and then to set about ‘curing’ it by writing it.

  Therefore, after that preamble, I set down my dreams in what is a journal, not a novel.

  That night, after the official presentation of the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship, I dreamed I was back in my flat in Symonds Street, near Grafton Bridge, after visiting my parents at Northcote for dinner. I had just walked in the door when I noticed, sitting on the sofa that was rather worn and covered with a piece of Indian cotton I bought in Queen Street, a woman of about my own age or a few years younger, dressed in the rather short skirt of the late nineteen fifties, with a cashmere sweater, and – pearls, three rows, about her throat. Her hair was fair to gold, quite short and straight and she was slimly built and rather tall, with exceptionally large hands and feet which I thought ugly. She wore no makeup on her face which was rather too broad to be delicate or beautiful as one imagines beauty, but her eyes were the startling blue which is almost violet and so far known by me only inside fiction. She smiled at me. I had a feeling almost of horror when I realised that her perfectly formed white teeth were false – I could just discern the unnaturally pink plastic gums which have since been replaced in dental prosthetics by a more natural colour. The colour of her gums dated, for me, the time of her acquiring her false teeth. She must have been twenty-two or -three then, if, as I guessed, she was now about twenty-nine.

  —Well, aren’t you going to say hello? she said.

  Her
voice was rather deep for her feminine appearance.

  —Oh.

  I felt myself blushing.

  —Harry’s blushing, she said.

  —Oh. You must be Margaret Rose Hurndell?

  —Rose Hurndell, please. The Margaret Rose is something I can’t bear.

  —I was nineteen when you died, I said.

  She looked at me curiously.

  —Did you know of me when I died?

  —I didn’t know your work, I said. —I knew of you, that you’d had a son and gone overseas and lived overseas. Someone showed me a book you’d written once. I didn’t read it, I’m afraid. Studies and so on. And I’ve never cared for women poets with three names. I’m curious though. I hope you don’t mind my asking but – when did you get your false teeth?

  She laughed, showing more of them than I had seen before. The bright pink gums shone; they were horrible, I thought. A bright colour like carnations that have been painted for a flower show.

  —I suppose you think it’s rotten cheek my asking.

  She laughed again.

  —For God’s sake don’t sound like an English schoolboy. You are English, aren’t you?

  —I’m a New Zealander now.

  —Well, for heaven’s sake never use in my presence those awful dated words, ripping, bounder, jolly – you know. I got my teeth, by the way, on the National Health in London. Do you like them?

  —They’re ghastly.

  —Don’t use ghastly, either.

  —Beastly, then.

  —Nor beastly. Not rotten ripping bounder jolly chap. Where’s your New Zealand speech?

  —You’re very fussy, I said, —for someone with such horrible teeth.

  —They’re even and white, are they not?

  —Yes, but the gums, the gums!

  —I know.

  —The gums of Rose Hurndell.

  It was an absurd dream. We simply sat there all evening exchanging absurd remarks. She didn’t seem to me like a poet and I seemed to her like an English schoolboy out of a comic strip of the twenties. And that is all my dream, it simply drifted away. The next morning I took down from my bookshelf a copy of her Fifty Living Men which I bought (the only one of her books I could find) when I knew of my scholarship award.