Read Between My Father and the King Online
Authors: Janet Frame
Between My Father and the King
ETWEEN
M
Y
F
ATHER AND THE
K
ING
OTHER TITLES BY JANET FRAME
For further information on Janet Frame's work, visit
www.janetframe.org.nz
Novels
Owls Do Cry
(1957)
Faces in the Water
(1961)
The Edge of the Alphabet
(1962)
Scented Gardens for the Blind
(1963)
The Adaptable Man
(1965)
A State of Siege
(1966)
The Rainbirds
aka
Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room
(1968)
Intensive Care
(1970)
Daughter Buffalo
(1972)
Living in the Maniototo
(1979)
The Carpathians
(1988)
Towards Another Summer
(2007)
Short stories
The Lagoon and Other Stories
(1952)
Snowman Snowman: Fables and Fantasies
(1963)
The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches
(1963)
The Reservoir and Other Stories
(1966)
You Are Now Entering the Human Heart
(1983)
Prizes: Selected Short Stories
aka
The Daylight and the Dust:
Selected Short Stories
(2009)
Poems
The Pocket Mirror
(1967)
The Goose Bath
(2006)
Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems
(2008)
Children's book
Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
(1969)
Non-fiction
To The Is-Land
(1982)
An Angel at My Table
(1984)
The Envoy from Mirror City
(1985)
Janet Frame In Her Own Words
(2011)
COUNTERPOINT
BERKELEY
BETWEEN MY FATHER AND THE KING
Copyright © Janet Frame Literary Trust, 2012
First published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2012, as GORSE IS NOT PEOPLE
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available
ISBN 978-1-61902-216-4
COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Between My Father and the King
A Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle
Letter from Mrs John Edward Harroway
The People of the Summer Valley
Between My Father and the King
includes some of the best stories Janet Frame ever wrote. More than half of the twenty-eight stories in this volume have never been published before. Of the rest, seven were individually published in Janet Frame's lifetime but were never included by her in a collection; and another five have been published since her death in 2004. The new stories span almost the entire breadth of Frame's publishing career, from âUniversity Entrance' (1946), the very first story she published as an adult, to âA Distance from Mrs Tiggy-winkle', written forty years later. They extend the themes and characters of the seventy-one stories that appear in the five previous collections:
The Lagoon
,
The Reservoir
,
Snowman Snowman
,
You are Now Entering the Human Heart
and
Prizes
(also known as
The Daylight and the Dust
).
There are several reasons why these stories have not previously been published. First, we know from Frame's autobiography that the rejection of the story âGorse is Not People' by Charles Brasch
in 1954 had crushed her: âI felt myself sinking into empty despair. What could I do if I couldn't write? Writing was to be my rescue. I felt as if my hands had been uncurled from their clinging place on the rim of the lifeboat.' Similarly, just one year later â when she had rallied from the previous year's setback, had moved to Auckland and was making yet more headway in her career â she proudly showed her latest achievement, âAn Electric Blanket', to Frank Sargeson; but after his nitpicking criticism she never offered that story for publication. Taking the experience as a lesson in learning to trust her own judgement about her writing, she also never showed any further work to Sargeson.
Second, at times Frame was so prolific that she found she had a backlog of manuscripts. For instance in 1965 and 1966, when she held first an official and then an âunofficial' Burns Fellowship, her working conditions were so favourable that as well as completing a book of poems, finishing one novel, writing another and starting a third, she also worked on a new collection of about thirty stories. In May 1966 she reported to Professor Horsman at the University of Otago: âI'm ahead of myself in publication of my work.' The planned collection never appeared, but Frame did publish individual stories from it such as âThe Bath', âA Boy's Will' and âIn Alco Hall'. She was scandalised by the knowledge that stories published in prestigious magazines such as
The New Yorker
,
Vogue
,
Mademoiselle
or
Harper's Bazaar
earned her more than some of her publishers offered as an advance for a whole book.
Frame withheld other work because it was based too closely on living people. âThe Silkworms' is an example of a story she called back from an editor for fear of causing offence to its lampooned subject. Some recognisable events from Janet Frame's life recur in her short fiction and her long fiction and even her poetry, and it's interesting to have the opportunity now to compare the way she transforms the same source material for different literary ends. Several of the stories in this volume share their subject matter â and
sometimes also their title â with a chapter or passage in her autobiography, although the material is always treated in a much different way. Frame distinguished clearly between writing fiction inspired by her life and writing autobiography: âIt is harder to write in the autobiographical form. Actually it's
awful
. All those sticky facts to work in. In fiction, one can just go to town.' The story âDot' is a good example of the way Frame was able to start with a true life experience and shape and twist it to make fiction, so that it was impossible to tell what was fact and what was imagination.
Later in her life Frame occasionally drew up a proposed table of contents for a new selection of stories; and her lists included the abandoned older typescripts. But once she had moved on from earlier work, she was reluctant to revisit it. It is also true that once she had financial security she was less willing to subject herself to the rigours of publication and the inevitable public attention, for good or otherwise. She had been very disillusioned by the initially hostile reception to her last book
The Carpathians
(1988), even though the critical tide on that novel subsequently turned so much in its favour that it won not only the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction but also the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book.
Whatever the motivation, we know that Frame deliberately left work unpublished during her lifetime. She often remarked of this decision, â. . . I think posthumous publication is the only form of literary decency left.'
Pamela Gordon & Denis Harold
Trustees
Janet Frame Literary Trust
My father fought in the First World War that used to be called âGreat' until the truth of its greatness was questioned and the denial of its greatness accepted. My father came home from the war with a piece of shrapnel in his back, remnants of gas in his lungs, a soldier's pay book, an identity disc, a gas mask, and a very important document which gave details of my father's debt to the King and his promise before witnesses to repay the King the fifty pounds borrowed to buy furniture: a bed to sleep in with his new wife, a dining table to dine at, linoleum and a hearthrug to lay on the floor, two fireside chairs for man and wife to sit in when he wasn't working and she wasn't polishing the King's linoleum and shaking the King's hearthrug free of dust; and a wooden fireside kerb to protect the hearthrug, the linoleum and my father and his wife from sparks when they sat by the fire. All this furniture, the document said, cost fifty pounds, which had to be paid to the King in agreed instalments.
I found this document the other day, and the accompanying
note of discharge from debt; and it was the first time I had known of my father's dreadful responsibility. For besides promising to repay the loan he had sworn to keep the bed and mattress and fireside kerb and hearthrug and linoleum and dining table and chairs and fireside chairs in good order and on no account sell or exchange them and to be prepared at any time to allow the King's Representative to inspect them.
If only I had known!
In our conscienceless childhood days we ripped the backs from the kitchen chairs and made sledges from them; we drove nails into the wooden kerb â the
King's Kerb
! We pencilled and crayoned the dining table, scuffed the linoleum, bounced on the bed, split open and explored the mattress and the two fireside chairs, looking for money. Finally, the tomcat peed on and permanently impaired the hearthrug. And all this was the King's property on gracious loan to my father and we never knew!
It is all so far away now. I have no means of discovering what my parents thought or talked about when they lay in the King's bed and ate at his table and sat in his chairs and walked on his linoleum. When a knock sounded on the door did my father glance quickly around at the fifty pounds' worth to make sure it was in good condition in case the King's Representative happened to be passing?