Owls Do Cry Read online

  JANET FRAME was born in Dunedin in 1924. She reluctantly qualified as a teacher but secretly wanted to be a poet. Her first story was accepted for publication in 1945, and later that year she walked out of the classroom. Desperate when the authorities demanded she return to work out her bond, she attempted suicide and was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Frame spent the next ten years alternating between hospital stays and menial work, and more writing. She wrote her first book, The Lagoon and Other Stories, in 1946 while working as a live-in maid and studying part-time at university. When the collection was published in 1952 and won a prestigious literary prize, Frame’s doctors cancelled a lobotomy they had planned for her.

  Owls Do Cry, Janet Frame’s first novel, was published in 1957. Shortly before its publication, she left New Zealand for what would be seven years and spent most of that time in England, where her earlier diagnosis was officially overturned and her writing gained international acclaim. Frame published another ten novels, three more short-story collections, a poetry volume and a three-volume autobiography during her lifetime. Another two novels, a short-story collection and a book of poems have been published since her death. Frame’s works have been published in twenty-five languages, and her bestselling autobiography was made into the film An Angel at My Table.

  Janet Frame received numerous awards and honours, including a CBE and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 1990, she became a Member of the Order of New Zealand.

  Janet Frame died in 2004.

  DAME MARGARET DRABBLE was born in Sheffield in 1939. She is the author of eighteen highly acclaimed novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Sea Lady and most recently The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies and screenplays, and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980 and made DBE in 2008.

  ALSO BY JANET FRAME

  The Lagoon and Other Stories

  Faces in the Water

  The Edge of the Alphabet

  Scented Gardens for the Blind

  Snowman Snowman:

  Fables and Fantasies

  The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches

  The Adaptable Man

  A State of Siege

  The Reservoir and Other Stories

  The Pocket Mirror

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

  Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun

  Intensive Care

  Daughter Buffalo

  Living in the Maniototo

  To the Is-Land

  You Are Now Entering the Human Heart

  An Angel at My Table

  The Envoy from Mirror City

  The Carpathians

  The Goose Bath

  Towards Another Summer

  Storms Will Tell: Selected Poems

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

  Gorse is Not People (published in Australia and the USA as Between my Father and the King: New and Uncollected Stories)

  Janet Frame in Her Own Words

  In the Memorial Room

  The Mijo Tree

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Janet Frame 1957

  Introduction copyright © Margaret Drabble 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  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.

  First published by Pegasus Press, Christchurch, 1957

  This edition published by the Text Publishing Company, 2014

  Cover design and illustration by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147899

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148896

  Author: Frame, Janet, 1924–2004, author.

  Title: Owls do cry / by Janet Frame ; introduced by Margaret Drabble.

  Series: Text classics.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Drabble, Margaret, 1939– .

  Dewey Number: NZ823.2

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A Cry of Joy and Pain

  by Margaret Drabble

  Owls Do Cry

  A Cry of Joy and Pain

  by Margaret Drabble

  JANET Frame’s first full-length work of fiction, Owls Do Cry, is an exhilarating and dazzling prelude to her long and successful career. She was to write in several modes, publishing poems, short stories, fables, and volumes of autobiography, as well as other novels of varied degrees of formal complexity, but Owls Do Cry remains unique in her oeuvre. It has the freshness and fierceness of a mingled cry of joy and pain. Its evocation of childhood recalls Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as well as the otherworldly Shakespearean lyric of her title and epigraph, but her handling of her dark material is wholly original. Although the story of the Withers family is sombre, indeed tragic, what remains in the reader’s mind is the glory and intensity of the language, the heightened imagery, the brightness of an early world. She transforms the real (and at times uncomfortably identifiable) New Zealand provincial seaside town of Oamaru into a mythical and magical Waimaru, where places, events and characters are seen with the sharp remembering eye of redeeming love. This novel, which boldly confronts illness, physical and mental disability, ageing, and violent and sudden death, has a buoyancy of creativity and brightness. Some of its characters encounter defeat, but it is a song of survival.

  Owls Do Cry was first published, to much acclaim, in 1957 by Pegasus Press in New Zealand, and gained Frame an international reputation when it appeared in 1960 in the US and 1961 in the UK. Some contemporary critics at home saw this account of the life of the town and of the Withers family—the parents Bob and Amy, and their children Francie, Toby, Daphne, and Chicks—as a satire on the monochrome, monocultural, impoverished but materialistic society of post-war New Zealand, struggling slowly towards affluence. And it is true that Frame does make fun of the habits and opinions of the townsfolk, while deploying descriptions of material objects to singular effect, particularly in later passages about Chicks’ married life. In earlier sections, we learn much of family and neighbourhood folklore and dreams—the visits of the tooth fairy ‘with a promise of sixpence’, the small silver tin of wedding cake to be put under the pillow, the adolescent longing to train to be an opera singer, the bribe of a new bicycle to ride ‘in colours, red and gold and black’, the false hopes placed in beauty aids (Wisteria Peach Bloom, Gloria Haven)—but the overall impression is not of mockery but of wonder, a childlike wonder at the often incomprehensible oddities of the world. Frame remembers exactly how schoolchildren think, how they misunderstand and understand and make free associations (the ‘nurse shark’ is a wonderful flight of fancy), but not all her prose is poetic: an unexpected everyday throwaway phrase such as ‘He was to have his tonsils out, he said, and everyone felt envious’ takes one back, wholly convincingly, to a schoolboy mindset. She surprises, and she rings true. There is comedy as well as pathos.

  The novel, which covers twenty years in historic time, is, of course, now valuable as a social document, and readers (including o
verseas readers like myself) who remember the period that Frame is describing will recognise many references from their own past: the acid drops and aniseed balls and licorice allsorts, the hoarded Easter eggs smelling of straw and cardboard, the sparse and sad Christmas decorations, the lavender soap and bath salts, the mothers at school functions redolent of ‘talcum and stored fur’, the first defiant pair of slacks, the names of forgotten dances, and ‘the milk-bar cowboy, the teddy-boy, hanging around the door and putting money in the nickelodeon’.

  But it is not principally for its compelling realism of detail or as a period piece that we now value this book. It is not a conventional novel but a modernist masterpiece, bearing witness to Frame’s wide reading (William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Frank Sargeson, Katherine Mansfield) and to her confidence in insisting on her own idiosyncratic punctuation, her own way of telling. She was to say that she wasn’t even sure that it was a novel: it was more of ‘an exploration’. And what she explores is the deep well of her own past: her parents’ relative poverty and their pragmatic but principled stoicism and faith, the early death by accidental drowning of two of her sisters (both of whom had congenitally weak hearts), her brother’s epilepsy, her youngest sister’s survival through marriage and motherhood, her own dangerous descent into mental anguish and years of hospitalisation and institutionalisation and misdiagnosis. She revisited these themes again and again, reworking them in many different ways, as she struggled, heroically and successfully, to come to terms with and rename her condition. She made her way through, with the help of one or two gifted and loyal professionals who became lifelong and supportive friends. In Owls Do Cry we see her stepping out on her long and often lonely journey of discovery and achievement.

  Frame’s original chosen title was ‘Talk of Treasure’, which became the heading for Part One of the published work. On one level, this refers to the rubbish dump to which the Withers children are drawn, playing truant and seeking castaway treasures, and which becomes (perhaps a little abruptly) the scene for catastrophe, but it is clearly a metaphor for the novelist’s store of memories and images. It works well in both senses, and suggests to us an understanding of the very structure of the book: not a chronological narrative, but a flow of moments, of insights, some inspired by random words and by objects quarried from the past, excavated from the dump of the subconscious, drawn up from the well of the archetypes. The dump holds, in this case literally, poetry. The rubbish dump, or tip, features in the memoirs and fictions of many authors, for whom it has an obvious appeal: Alice Munro, in her story ‘Underneath the Apple Tree’, makes an unofficial town dump in rural Canada the scene for an intense adolescent romance. We dig for layers of meaning, rescue broken thoughts from oblivion. Visiting the village tip by the river with my aunt in the 1940s was one of the great pleasures of my childhood. We rescued glass marbles, shards of willow pattern pottery, beads and buttons. The dump was once a universal point of reference in the history of childhood.

  Janet Frame once likened herself to a ‘princess, shepherdess, waitress, putter-on of raincoat buttons in a factory…who chose rags from an old bundle, stitched them together, waved a wand, and found herself with a completely new dress…I do collect bundles of rags And I like to sew them together: I suppose I must accept the fact that I have no wand.’ (Frank Sargeson to C. K. Stead, quoted by Michael King in his biography, Wrestling with the Angel, 2000.) Years earlier, in 1948, she had written to her counsellor John Money ‘I have got to learn that I am alone for ever…I will never have anybody close to me. The rest of the world is miles away over desert and snowfield and sea. Nobody knows how far away I am from everything. Looking at living, for me, is like looking mentally through the wrong end of opera glasses.’ (in M. King, Wrestling with the Angel.) These two quotations give a fine sense of her narrative methods and of the determination and courage with which she held herself together in the face of extreme doubt and suffering. The painful portrayal of Daphne’s fragility and fear in the asylum where she ‘lived alone for many years…in days unshining and nights without darkness’ is drawn from Frame’s own experiences at Seacliff and Avondale, but she proved herself stronger than Daphne in the dead room, and there is tenderness and affection as well as horror in her descriptions of her fellow inmates.

  Owls Do Cry proved to be one of the first works of fiction to deal with life in a mental institution. Virginia Woolf was familiar with this territory and had attempted to portray schizophrenia in Mrs Dalloway (1925); Ken Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), is set in the mental ward of a hospital; and Sylvia Plath gives an account of electro-convulsive therapy in The Bell Jar (1963). Since then, many writers have entered this world, but Frame’s first novel, of 1957, remains a landmark, a classic. Against the odds, she emerged to tell her story, and she told it unforgettably.

  Owls Do Cry

  Where the bee sucks, there suck I;

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

  There I couch when owls do cry;

  On the bat’s back I do fly,

  After summer, merrily.

  THE TEMPEST

  PART ONE

  TALK OF TREASURE

  1

  The day is early with birds beginning and the wren in a cloud piping like the child in the poem, drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe. And the place grows bean flower, pea-green lush of grass, swarm of insects dizzily hitting the high spots; dunny rosette creeping covering shawl cream in a knitted cosy of roses; ah the tipsy wee small hours of insects that jive upon the crippled grass blades and the face of the first flower alive; and I planted carrot seed that never came up, for the wind breathed a blow-away spell; the wind is warm, was warm, and the days above burst unheeded, explode their atoms of snow-black beanflower and white rose, mock the last intuitive who-dunnit, who-dunnit of the summer thrush; and it said to plant the carrot seeds lightly under a cotton-thin blanket of earth, yet they sank too deep or dried up, and the blackfly took hold among the beans that flowered later in midnight velvet, and I thought I might have known, which is the thought before the stealth of fate; lush of summer, yes, but what use the green river, the gold place, if time and death pinned human in the pocket of my land not rest from taking underground the green all-willowed and white rose and bean flower and morning-mist picnic of song in pepper-pot breast of thrush?

  And now, voluminous, dyspeptic Santa Claus, there is a mound of snow at the door of Christmas that no midsummer day or human sun will dispel, and it is that way, and seems that way, to fit in; and now do we buy a Christmas card and write or sign the obituary of string with sticky tape; wrap our life in cellophane with a handkerchief and card; buy a caterpillar that is wound up and crawls with rippling back across our day and night. Sings Daphne from the dead room.

  2

  Their grandmother was a negress who had long ago been a slave with her long black dress and fuzzy hair and oily skin, in the Southern States of America. She sang often of her home,

  —Carry me back to ole Virginny,

  there’s where the cotton an’ the corn an’ taters grow,

  there’s where the birds warble sweet in the springtime,

  there’s where my old darkie’s heart am long to go.

  And now that she is dead she will have returned to Virginny and be walking through the cotton fields, with the sun shining on her frizzy hair that is like a ball of black cotton to be danced on or thistledown that birds take for living in if their world be black.

  No, you must eat your cabbage, for colanders hang on the wall that cabbage may be pressed through them, that the green water may run out; though if you have diabetes you must drink the green water or you may, like your grandmother, lose two legs, and have new wooden ones made, that you keep behind the door, in the dark, and that have no knees to bend, no toes to wiggle.

  Colander?

  Colander?

  Calendar?

  Calendars hang upon the wall and have bills pinned to them from the grocer and milkman and butche
r; and somehow they contrive in hanging there to collect all the days and months of the year, numbering them, like convicts, in case they escape.

  Which they do, always.

  —Time flies, said Mrs Withers. And it is calendar, not colander, you silly children. Francie, Toby, Daphne, Chicks, drink up your cabbage water or you shall lose two legs, like your grandmother.

  3

  —I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go to the rubbish dump an’ find things.

  Francie, Toby, Daphne, not always Chicks because she was too small and dawdled, found their treasure at the rubbish dump, amongst the paper and steel and iron and rust and old boots and everything that the people of the town had cast out as of no use and not worth anything any more. The place was like a shell with gold tickle of toi-toi around its edges and grass and weeds growing in green fur over the mounds of rubbish; and from where the children sat, snuggled in the hollow of refuse, warmed sometimes by the trickling streams of fires that the council men had lit in order to hasten the death of their material cast-offs, they could see the sky passing in blue or grey ripples, and hear in the wind, the heavy fir tree that leaned over the hollow, rocking, and talking to itself saying firr - firr - firr, its own name, loosening its needles of rust that slid into the yellow and green burning shell to prick tiny stitches across the living and lived-in wound where the children found, first and happiest, fairy tales.

  And a small green eaten book by Ernest Dowson who said, in confidence, to Cynara,

  —Last night ah yesternight betwixt her lips and mine.

  Which was love, and suitable only for Francie who had come, that was the word their mother used when she whispered about it in the bathroom, and not for Daphne who didn’t know what it felt like or how she could wear them without they showed and people said, Look.