Janet Frame
“All writers — all beings — are exiles as a matter of course. The certainty about living is that it is a succession of expulsions of whatever carries the life force…All writers are exiles wherever they live and their work is a lifelong journey towards the lost land…”
I have finished reading Janet Frame’s intimate Autobiography. It is one of those books that on completion feels like a parting. I read the passages of her time in London with special attention. Would she have advice for me? What light would be shown on this in-between place I inhabit as an immigrant writer?
On arriving she was surprised to find no circus in Picadilly; she was that green. Looking back, so was I, thinking that I could with force of will and warmth, make this place mine. I used to feel it calling to me, like a two syllable bell: Lon-don. Now, I’ve traversed it, learning it like one learns a foreign language, through repetition and immersion.
“During those early weeks in keenest anticipation, I made other long bus journeys to places with haunting names– Ponders End, High Wycombe, Mortlake, Shepherds Bush, Swiss Cottage, each time arriving at a cluster of dreary-looking buildings set in a waste of concrete and brick and full of people who appeared to be pale, worried and smaller in build than most New Zealanders.”
Such are the mundane disappointments of London– an ugly, grey place where most people seem very unhappy, no matter what spin you want to put on it. English people often ask me why I would move here from a seeming paradise like California. My usual answer, that there is more to life than weather, is short hand for something else. Loving London is a challenge which involves looking harder. It defies explanation. I thought I would be free here, and, in many ways I am.
“Looking down at London, I could see the accumulation of artistic weavings, and feel that there could be a time when the carpet became a web or shroud and other times a warm blanket or shawl: the prospect for burial by entrapment or warmth was close. “
This is the paradox of an overly-mediated place. So many have rendered it that your own claim remains anonymous if no less real.
The invisibility London affords can initially be liberating. People are as common as rats; you can indeed do anything here because no one will remember you. I often think of leaving London. It is so impossible– expense, callous and everyone leaves, don’t they? When feeling self-indulgent I wonder if I would be missed. I imagine certain streets and buildings, small corners I’ve memorized, would momentarily hold a recognition of my absence.
Frame spent years in London and in the end needed to ask someone to come and see her off, claiming her only family there was the city itself. She returned to her native New Zealand where the “sea and sky still echoed with their first voice while the earliest works of art uttered their response, in a primary dialogue with the Gods.”
I envy her this prelapsarian home.
Many Christian churches in England have been built on sacred pagan sites. Some say the church intended to siphon the energy of these places or contradict their power. The 12th Century St. George’s church and surrounding graveyard belongs to the yew now, and serves as a metaphor for this island as I’ve found it: the Christian history dominating a pagan past that is so strong it can’t be subsumed, and in many ways the two live side by side in a mysterious alliance. The sprouted staff of the pilgrim saint is also the neo-pagan ogham wand.
