`Creativity," Les Murray wrote, "is the wound you receive in childhood that never heals." If this is so, then Janet Frame might have had a difficult time choosing between wounds. Two sisters drowned in separate incidents. Her brother was epileptic, violent, drank excessively, grew envious of her later success and just generally became the literary brother from hell. One uncle tried to commit suicide by slitting his own throat. Frame herself spent much of her 20s in mental hospitals, and the ensuing decades recovering from the experience. She was born in 1924 in Dunedin, New Zealand. Her father worked for the railways. Her mother mostly suffered, in the way that mothers do. By the time she was 21, Frame had attempted suicide and been misdiagnosed as schizophrenic.
For much of the next 10 years, she was trapped in a mental health system in which it was considered unhealthy for patients to talk about their thoughts and feelings. Instead, they sewed and received ECT. Frame managed to stay afloat by holding fast to "a final sanity, a kind of inviolable core," and through the friendship of John Money. Money was first her university psychology professor, then her therapist. But even this relationship was tainted by her diagnosis. Getting a head start on the transference process, Frame was already obsessed with Money when they embarked on therapy and in order to keep his attention, would intersperse symptoms of the disease (gleaned from her reading) with her own genuine anxieties. The effect of this strategy on Money was to convince him of the accuracy of the diagnosis. The effect on Frame was worse; gradually, she lost the ability to differentiate between the symptoms that belonged to her and those that were part of the "game."
Anyone who has seen Jane Campion's film on Frame, An Angel at My Table, will likely recall the scene in which Frame has been scheduled for a prefrontal leucotomy, otherwise known as a lobotomy, but in an eleventh hour reprieve, is spared by the announcement that she has won the Hubert Church Memorial award for her first book of stories. Campion didn't juxtapose events for dramatic effect. Frame's mother - naively acting on doctors advice - had signed the permission form on December 20. On December 26, within days of the scheduled operation, the award was announced.
Upon her release from Seacliff Mental Hospital in 1955, Frame met Frank Sargeson, one of New Zealand's most prominent writers. He took her in for 16 months and Frame wrote her first novel while living with him. Sargeson was a homosexual and there was nothing romantic between them. Instead, he gave her refuge, treated her difficulties with sensitivity, and imbued in her a sense of discipline and a respect for her ambitions. Ultimately, he encouraged her to go abroad. Bravely, she did.
Frame settled in London, mostly in a succession of dark, cold flats, which she survived with admirable humour and optimism. (Unable, at one stage, to create, she wrote: "I am cut off: (perhaps) I did not pay the communication bill.") But by 1957, things were not going well and, on Money's recommendation, Frame committed herself to Maudsley Hospital in London.
This proved another turning point in her life, firstly because the diagnosis of schizophrenia - which had conditioned her "treatment" in New Zealand - was scrapped, and secondly, because of her meeting with Dr Robert Cawley, who was to have a profound and positive influence on Frame's mental health over the next two decades. On being told she did not in fact suffer from the disease, Frame recorded her reaction: "`Thank you,' I said shyly, formally, as if I had won a prize."
The relief, however, was tempered with fear. Schizophrenia was the "garment" had worn for 12 or 13 years. Terrified as she was of it, she'd also found an "unexpected warmth, comfort, protection" in knowing what was wrong with her. "The loss was great. I was bereaved." Naturally, she now wondered what was wrong with her. Well, she had "a pathological personality with schizoid and depressive features, and difficulties
ordering perceptions and controlling behaviour." Which doesn't sound a whole lot better, really. Importantly, Cawley recognised, and managed to convince Frame that many of her current problems stemmed from her time in New Zealand hospitals.
Through all the hospitalisations, family crises, and financial instability, Frame produced numerous novels, volumes of stories, and poetry. But it was not until 1982, with the publication of the first volume of her autobiography To the Is-land (and to a greater degree in 1990, with the release of Campion's film), that she achieved real recognition. Patrick White deemed her autobiography "among the wonders of the world", and Michael Holroyd declared it "one of the greatest autobiographies written this century."
And this is the book we should be reading, not Michael King's biography. There is nothing really wrong with this book, other than the fact that it is almost uniformly dull, and for some obvious reasons. Frame granted King unlimited interviews, but stipulated that he not quote directly from these. She also insisted that he not produce a critical biography. The latter constraint results in King's reprinting of far too many reviews of her work, but never offering much insight of his own.
Instead, King pads his book with itineraries of Frame's transatlantic jaunts, details of her budgetary and income tax woes, inventories of furnishings, meals and relocations. The most moving and insightful passages are undoubtedly provided by Frame herself, in the letters and autobiography from which King quotes, and to which he himself adds little. To John Money, Frame wrote " . . . my intense human curiosity will not rest until I have observed the results of the transactions you have made with Change . . . how much you have had to pay for the privilege of travelling in Time." Frame, too, paid for the privilege.
Molly McCloskey is a writer and critic