Janet Frame's World of Books by Patricia Neville

Author:Patricia Neville [Patricia, Neville,]
Language: deu
Format: epub
Publisher: Ibidem Press
Published: 2019-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4: Walt Whitman in Washington, DC, circa 1863. Uncropped print made from glass negative. Photo by Mathew Brady. National Archives NARA.

In her novels, Frame uses—in among prose chapters—sections of free verse with diverse functions, reflecting imaginative processes; the layering of voices; and the subtle and sometimes unknowable workings of the human mind. Turnlung’s words echo Whitman’s “Song of Myself” when he says: “I am a bottle with a message in it. I will float back and/forth in the dark for many years” (426), lines which resonate with Whitman’s message that

I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,

The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me. (Whitman 2009, 45)

There are specific references to Whitman’s tropes: the lilac bushes, for example, which were laid on Abraham Lincoln’s coffin—Lincoln died in May when the lilac was in flower. Turnlung and his former lover Selwyn had planted lilac bushes in memory of Turnlung’s Aunt Kate, with their “heartshaped leaves which defy a writer to trespass on the territory of Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot” (DB, 446). Frame reworks the story of the solace she gained from Whitman’s poetry after her sister Myrtle died, as Turnlung’s headmistress friend says, “I was able to use the incomparable facilities for grief and mourning given by Walt Whitman”, quoting the opening lines of “The Lost Mate”: “Once, Paumanok, when the lilac-scent was in the air and the fifth-month grass was growing” (454).

Frame’s matter-of-fact portrayal of Turnlung’s homosexuality as an ordinary aspect of his life—and Edelman’s difficulties in acknowledging his—mark the rare inclusion of a positive portrayal of sexual desire in a Frame novel. Physical passion is usually either thwarted, as in Malfred Signal’s rejection of Wilfred in A State of Siege, or reduced to farce as in the “love-a-dove” antics of Peggy Warren in Intensive Care. Daughter Buffalo was published in 1972, when anti-sodomy laws, inherited from the British, were still on the statute books in many American states. The process of repealing these laws began in some states from 1961 onwards, but they were only finally and completely overturned in 2003. The law in England and Wales was partly liberalized in 1967, in response to the Wolfenden Report published ten years earlier; but not in Scotland, Northern Ireland or the Channel Islands until 1982; and not in New Zealand until 1987.

Frame was aware of the tension the legal situation created in the lives of homosexual men—and this included a number of her closest friends—and it was reflected in their writing. She was living in London when the Wolfenden Report was published in 1957, and sent Sargeson a copy of it, as the wrapping around a little present of what he described as “some pansily-scented snuff” (Sargeson, 2012, 266) much to Sargeson’s amusement. Sargeson had received a letter from the English novelist E.M. Forster, whose novel Maurice with its subject of homosexual love, was published posthumously. Forster had read Sargeson’s novel I Saw in My Dream, and found it “extraordinarily haunting” (FSH December 29, 1949).

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