Papers left by Janet Frame illustrate a life of literature and adventure, write Anna Blackman and Kirstie Ross.
Internationally acclaimed, Dunedin-born writer Janet Frame read widely and deeply. Words caught her attention, whether they were printed on a bus timetable or in a classic work of literature.
Growing up in Oamaru in the 1930s, Frame’s reading included comics and True Romances. In London for the first time in the late 1950s, she was captivated by the ‘‘public reading’’ afforded by the city - via the stacks of newspapers and magazines, advertisements in the windows of news agents, illuminated outdoor signs, blackboard menus for greasy spoon cafes, posters in train stations and graffiti in the metropolis’ road tunnels and public toilets.
The breadth of Frame’s reading alongside her writing is reflected in her literary and personal papers, which were added to the Unesco Memory of the World New Zealand Register to coincide with the celebration of the writer’s centenary on August 28, 2024.
To mark this significant achievement and anniversary, material from Frame’s papers held at Hocken Collections has been carefully selected for an exhibition ‘‘Janet Frame’s Bookshelf: A Writer’s Reading Life’’ mounted at the University of Otago Library de Beer Gallery.
The exhibition of about 60 documents, books and images reveals the great diversity of the author’s reading, including a rich vein of ephemera, which usually shares shelf space with Frame’s original literary manuscripts at the Hocken.
The items on display echo the variety of texts that Frame knew while growing up in Oamaru, as a member of the local library, and as a student attending Waitaki Girls’ High School from 1937-42. Some material is connected to key moments in her career, including the filming of her autobiography, while items reveal aspects of her everyday life. The fact that she saved these things suggests that Frame took pleasure and inspiration in all types of reading.
Frame was very much an international traveller, and her papers record the travelling she did to take up literary grants, fellowships and residencies as she realised her ambition of writing full-time. A Spanish language guide with a colourful and evocative cover plus a ticket and boarding pass for a ferry heading to Barcelona are records of a life-defining trip to and from Ibiza in 1957.
Two passports from the 1950s to the 1970s document her appearance at the time of issue as well as her travel in Europe and North America. They are in the name of Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, Frame’s legal name from 1958 that she took to give her a degree of anonymity.
An airline ticket reminds us that Frame was an early adopter of air travel (when she could afford it or when fares were paid by friends and benefactors) as she suffered from seasickness. Knitting and novels by Henry James kept her occupied on these long-haul flights.
An orange carte de sejour temporaire (temporary residence card) represents her time in Menton, France, as the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship in 1974; the ‘‘Welcome Map to the San Francisco Bay area’’ dates from 1962, so could have been used in October 1964 when Frame enjoyed wandering around the city on a stopover, on the way to the UK, also visiting her friend John Money in Baltimore and her American publisher in New York.
Conversely, domestic matters - the creation and occupation of ‘‘home’’ - are also represented. A rent book survives from a London flat where she lived and wrote supported by a New Zealand Literary Fund grant in the late 1950s, while recipe books, knitting and sewing patterns, and warranties for appliances and technology also survive.
There is a brochure she consulted before buying a small motorcycle (the ubiquitous Honda 50) - a practical response to a lack of public transport - while flyers for double-glazing and a white-sound machine attest to Frame’s desire to write in silence while living in suburbia. DIY brochures speak to the many homes she consecutively owned around New Zealand from the 1960s onwards.
And there was the challenge of owning and storing books as well as writing them, which can be discerned from Frame’s papers in the Hocken. Some of the ephemera relates to shipments of belongings, including her books, between countries.
A list of chattels from the 1980s mentions 22 bookshelves! Some of her home furnishings were purchased second-hand - noted in a poem entitled I Write Surrounded by Poets. Others were assembled by Frame from kitsets, judging by the flyers for this type of furniture that have survived in her papers.
While Frame’s publications are at the apex her literary imagination and reputation, the diversity of material in her papers cared for by the Hocken from 1965, are valuable for their capacity to enrich our understanding of both her life and her life’s work.
• Anna Blackman is head curator archives and Kirstie Ross is head curator published and special collections at Hocken Collections - Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka.
