London life Framed in Mirror City

Press, 7 December 1985, Page 20

London life Framed in Mirror City

The Envoy from Mirror City: An Autobiography, Vol. 3. By Janet Frame. Hutchinson, 1985. 178 pp. $24.95.

(Reviewed by

Joan Curry)

Janet Frame’s Mirror City is a place of reflections "where everything I have known or seen or dreamed of is bathed in the light of another world.” It is a place to take the bits and pieces of ordinary life for transformation into the material of fiction. In this, the third volume of her autobiography, Janet Frame gathers together the "frag-ments and mo-ments” of the seven years of her overseas experience, treasures ready for shaping and polishing in Mirror City. Important things happened to Janet Frame in those seven years. She had to compress a considerable amount, of growing up into a relatively short time to make up for years of isolation and dependency. Labelled a schizophrenic earlier in New Zealand, she had become accustomed to using her supposed condition as both a prop and an excuse for her uneasiness with the world. In London she was judged sane: “Now, without my schizophrenia, I had only my ordinary self to use to try to explain my distress.” She describes her life as an awkward, uneasy resident of London, gathering her treasures and learning to survive as an individual and as a writer. Although she had been writing since childhood, Janet Frame spent her years overseas learning her craft and incidentally acquiring what she refers

to shyly as her international reputation with the publication of work in New Zealand, in England, and in the United States. She learned to discipline herself to write in a succession of rooms where, distracted by the practicalities of life such as the six-monthly visits of the national assistance man, the cacophony of noises from other occupants, or the need to keep warm on cold winter afternoons, she nevertheless managed to ignore or to come to terms with her surroundings. The very words of London awoke responses in her. She walked or rode buses to places whose names rolled around in her imagination: Tooting Bee, Hampstead Heath, Camberwell, Crystal Palace, Ponders End, Chalk Farm, Battersea, Friern Barnet. The places generally proved disappointingly drab, out the names remained enchanting. So did the notices outside the cafes: Giant Toad and Two Veg, or Shepherd’s. There were posters, graffiti, Tetleys Tips tea, and: Peek Frean biscuits. The history of London worked itself into her mind too, the literary and social history of centuries. Janet Frame the writer was beginning to be “aware of a subtle shifting of my life into a world of fiction where I spread before me everything I saw and heard, people I met in buses, streets, railway stations, and where I lived, choosing from the displayed treasures fragments and mo-ments that combined to make a shape of a novel or poem or story.” There were interludes too. There

was Ibiza, with Bernard who became her lover, there was Andorra, and the journeys to and from these places, the difficulties with language and customs tackled with growing confidence mixed with artlessness. She also tried the seclusion of a cottage in East Suffolk, but found the life uncongenial and soon hurried back to crowded, lonely London. The book ends with Janet Frame’s return to New Zealand more assured, resolved to stand by her own judgment of her work, modest about and even surprised by her reputation at home and abroad. For all the details, however, there are things left unsaid in this book. This may account for a certain flatness here and there, a flatness which was not evident in the first two volumes of autobiography. Perhaps there was no need to guard the treasures of her earlier years because they have been through Mirror City and emerged shaped and polished in poems and fiction.

Towards the end of this book, however, Janet Frame seems to record the facts, the “frag-ments and moments” of her ordinary world with an abstracted air, impatient to withdraw to Mirror City. “I prefer to take my treasures to my home, my playhouse, Mirror City. I have the pressure of the Envoy to do this, and even as I write now the Envoy from Mirror City waits at my door, and watches hungrily as I continue to collect the facts of my life.” Mirror City can be a place of refuge as well as reflections.