immigrant | Feral Strumpet

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.

“It is as though London stretched unbroken from St. Albans to Southend in a tangle of ten-lane four-deck super parkways, hamburger stands, banks, topless drug-stores, hippie hide-outs, Hiltons, drive-in mortuaries…all shrouded below the famous blanket of acrid and corroding smog.”

–James Cameron wrting of Los Angeles in the Evening Standard, 9 September, 1968

los-angeles-ca-1932

Like it or not, most of my adult life can be pinned to a map of the Southern California coast. The privilege of the emigrant is to know home through absence, perhaps better than those who’ve never left. I have been researching 19th century California history, a quixotic and surreal endeavor as I sit in my London flat overlooking a street where a Morris Minor and black cab park nightly, a street with a pub which plays the footie and a green that was quite recently glowing with daffs.

The friends and lovers from the past were all tied to the Southern California beach. There was no place else to go. Drunken nights, wandering, the ocean was always there cradling us, setting an infinite boundary to our boldness. Cruising up and down PCH, all of it was ours. And then I left.

Like Dick Whittington and his cat of the pantomime, I heard the two-syllable bell of Lon-don tolling for me. I packed up Lemmy-cat (and my SoCal husband) and crossed the ocean. I know many of my fellow ex-pats have surrendered certain aspects of their Americaness– they have closed themselves in that London po-faced way or have let the tumbles of immigrant life smooth their broad accents to something rounder and more placeless. But the longer I reside here the more American I become, or, even more West Coast.”…to speak in superlatives, to live out-of-doors, to tell tales…to believe what isn’t true, to throw dignity out the window, to dress dramatically, and, last but not least, to tackle the impossible.” I have embraced Lee Shippey’s list of California traits without knowing it. And more and more I am struck by how completely UnLondon it all is.

London, in its present manifestation, is a hard place of fiscal facts, of interiors and conformist decorum. Increasingly it has become, for me and probably most other writers and artists working here, a place defined by the narrow possible.

I find myself perpetually in a mind of two maps; the jagged, golden coast twisted round the M25.