Jay to Bee - Janet Frame

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which combined with the natural wind resulting from the glorious High P in the famous aria might bring the house down . . .. I had in mind something less surgical in appearance—though again the surgical element might appeal to rather more people than I suppose; I had thought of a kind of cosmetic accessory, especially in the modern dress version where the peedauntal would be the only dress.

      See Brown’s drawing on page 75

      It looks as if we’ll have to give up the whole enterprise and return to the days of peeing down the leg.

      What a beautiful little blue jay you drew. Not at all predatory; rather hesitant-looking.

      I’ve just had a fan letter from someone who read my story in the New Yorker—yes, it’s from a man whose wife died. He writes from the Yale Club in New York—a touching letter which assumes that my name is a nom-de-plume and I am writing from my own experience. He identifies himself so completely with the character in the story that he describes some of the difficulties of his marriage and adds, ‘You seem to have sensed all this’—which indeed I did not do. Such confidences are touching and one feels first of all that their privacy must be respected at all costs. It’s a worry. I understand how some writers burn fan letters without opening them. I’m sure May S would never do this; she would sit down, with the habit learned from her father, as she described it in Plant Dreaming Deep, and answer the letter the same evening. And here I am in a turmoil because I’ve lost that letter from the young man in France, and so haven’t even his address. Oh hell.

      Talking about letters. Any word from you is mountainous to me (forgive the confidence and treat it as a fan-confession).

      I too have notions of Rilkean correspondence but I’d give it up for peanut-butter-feelie in the patio.

      I’ll have to live by correspondence when I get back to New Zealand and I’ll attach a snapping device to my mail box so that the letters are seized immediately the mailman (postman) puts them towards the box, and are thus not blown away in the high winds that sometimes blow in the hilly place where I live. I have ideas of writing long verse letters.

      I’ve had to be thinking more and more about my return to New Zealand, readjusting myself so to speak, and I’ve been trying to imagine what my life will be like. I’m going to miss you terribly—I can’t explain why (internal thinking)—there’ll be a kind of loss around as there is now and as there used to be at MacDowell when B was absent (fan-confession). I see myself in my little house and am cheered by the thought that I like my study and it’s a good place to work and the changing light is magnificent to watch (but only butterflies are nourished on the changing light); and I have my solitude and my books, I mean books, and I’ll have to get some kind of music. Dunedin is a beautiful place of sky and light. I live there chiefly by the sky and the light!

      My contact with people will be pretty meagre. The chief problem will be where to get my necessary supply of laughter: Dunedin is a prim place and my friends are on the sedate side. Limericks, frustrated sex—good heavens no. I remember I was very daring to make up a riddle about the English Professor whose name is Alan Horsman and the Psychology Professor whose name was Stephen Grew.

      Q: Why was Alan Horsman?

      A: Because Stephen Grew.

      But I had no-one to tell it to!

      I have a friendbb, a poet, whom I shall see about once in ten days. She lives with her niece about fifteen minutes walk from where I live, a walk through the Botanical Gardens. She lives a very retired life (she rather resembles early photos of May Sarton, though she’s approaching her mid-fifties, a decade older than I). She has leanings to Buddhism and she speaks Japanese (having recently learned it) and lives entirely for her garden, poetry, music, art. She exudes such purity that whenever I visit her I feel positively as if I’m unclean. For many years she was the Secretary to the Editorcc of Landfall who retired, and their association was very close. I shall see him too. He is a pure earnest bachelor in his early sixties; also a poet, a scholar, Doctor of Literature, Advisor to the Art Museums and the Queen Elizabeth Arts Council. Until his mid-fifties he led a shatteringly lonely life, as far as his relationships with people went, but suddenly around his mid-fifties people were saying they had seen him smile! Someone even made a joke with him! Most people were naturally frightened of him. I remember very vividly when I was a waitress at the Grand Hotel (!) accepting an invitation to afternoon tea—this would be fifteen years ago—it was a dull day and I had no coat to wear and one of the waitresses, when she knew I was going to a grand place on the hill, said, –Perhaps he will give you a coat.

      Ruth Dallas

      Charles Brasch

      I arrived in fear and trembling, and was greeted by a beautiful white cat. I remember the afternoon and the conversation but I won’t bother to recount it. We had slices of seed-cake. When I was leaving and C saw it was raining he said innocently, –Would you like a coat? I can give you a coat!

      (I don’t mean that the beautiful white cat and I had slices of seed cake!)

      At that time of his life he was not known to laugh . . .

      During my year as Burns Fellow he welcomed me to the city by taking me to various concerts and plays until Dunedin hostesses began (embarrassingly to me and no doubt to him) to include us as partners in small select dinners. I would arrive to find him as the only other guest.

      I gave up going to dinner parties—as a Burns Fellow I had felt obliged. About once in six or seven weeks C invites me to dinner and after a suitable interval I invite him to my place and cook a meal or make tea with my specialties of cookies and hot date scones and freshly baked bread . . .

      The other people I may see are my aunt’s niecedd who lives near and whose husband is Economics Professor at the University. She, by the way, would be a perfect Peedauntal wearer should I try to promote the product in Dunedin. She was a source of much envy to us when we were children because she and her cousin used to sing in public and win Rose-bowls (secret pedauntals) for performing arias. Her mother was an old horse, sharp-lipped, and she didn’t seem to have any father around; perhaps he died or never was.

      Iona Livingston

      (I hope this letter’s not too boring.)

      I also have another friendee upon whom I rely to feel the pulse of the city. She is an immensely talented woman who in her youth (she’s in her mid-fifties) studied in America on a Carnegie Fellowship. She has raised two children and buried one husband (always an old old man who seemed to be living in the Victorian era) and now has acquired another husband. I should think she is the most verbally literary woman in New Zealand. She lives conventionally completely within the society of the city. She goes to church regularly, she keeps abreast of local politics, she knows what’s going on, particularly in Arts, ‘in Wellington’—the equivalent of what’s going on ‘in Washington’; and she’s very exhausting to spend time with.

      Dorothy Ballantyne

      Can’t think of anyone else I know in Dunedin.

      O there’s Rff, whom I don’t know at all and have seen rarely. He used to live with Cgg. He’s a dwarf, very bright, a university lecturer whose impulses keep getting him in trouble with the police and everyone (his friends) in Dunedin sees to it that he isn’t put in prison. He gives allnight dinners and parties but at the only one I’ve been to I was kept in a corner all night by the wife of a psychiatrist who was confiding that she’d ‘done a little writing herself’. R was living at this time with a surgeon who had just returned from being in Tibet with Edmund Hillary and who wore a magnificent Tibetan robe . . .

      Rodney

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