Janet Frame, Prizes: Selected Short Stories
\nVintage, $34.99
\nISBN 9781869791131
\nWiti Ihimaera, His Best Stories,
\nRaupo, $ 30.00.
\nISBN 9780143010906
\nOwen Marshall (ed), Essential New Zealand Short Stories
\nVintage, $40.00.
\nISBN 97818697791285<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
There is something unexpectedly, but suitably, upbeat about the title of this Vintage selection of Janet Frame short stories. Prizes, draws from all four of Frame\u2019s previous collections, but unlike those ominous location titles, The Lagoon and The Reservoir, here we have the glitter of victory and eminence. Of course, the title story is not about simple triumph, but a sharply satiric account of a young girl whose excellence is clawed away from her by the steady efforts of mediocre and conformist rivals.<\/p>\n
Frame, battling not just mental illness, but the possibility of radical, irreversible surgery to remedy it, knew all about the value of prizes in the late 1940s when she wrote the first of her remarkable short fiction. As Ian Fraser observes in his useful introduction to this collection, the success of The Lagoon and Other Stories won her the Hubert Church Award and a reprieve from her surgeons \u2013 quoting from her Autobiography, he notes her own words : \u201cmy writing saved me.\u201d (p.9)<\/p>\n
It is all of sixty years since Janet Frame emerged, as if from a girlish chrysalis in Oamaru. Her eminence in New Zealand letters is second to none but Katherine Mansfield – and in range and maturity, even she is confined to her brief years in a way that Frame is not. There are no prizes that Janet Frame did not receive or deserve, but, it seems, it is only in posthumous publication that her unerring eye and startling prescience is so fully apparent. This collection, bringing together the stories from across her career, builds around the author\u2019s own collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart (1983) and also includes five splendid uncollected stories ranging from 1954 to 1979. <\/p>\n
The first stories from The Lagoon are as fresh and unexpected as ever. It is bizarre to think now of the dismissive early reviews patronizing and bemoaning their semi-competent simplicity. About as simple and artless, you might say, as Eudora Welty or Flannery O\u2019Connor. In \u201cKeel and Kool\u201d, the child, Winnie, struggles with the death of her sister Eva, competing with their friend Joan to mythologise her in memory. But while noting the strange and painful rivalry of grief, it is the heart-loss itself that Frame captures with such keening lyricism :
\n\u201cBut there was no-one to answer her. Only up in the sky there was a seagull as white as chalk, circling and crying Keel Keel Come home Kool, come home Kool. And Kool would never come, ever.\u201d (p.31)<\/p>\n
Time only highlights how much, in giving strong voice to her own apparent diffidence, Frame described the unjust invisibility of other women \u2013 in \u201cThe Day of the Sheep\u201d, a sheep in the washhouse is an epiphany for Nance, trapped in panic and ungainly domestic servitude, and the mother in \u201cSwans\u201d lost in isolated confusion when she takes her children to the wrong beach. Their children watch these mothers, and often it\u2019s the daughters who are coolly critical – like the girl (rather like the author, perhaps) who, in \u201cMiss Gibson and the Lumber Room\u201d, sees beyond the composition clich\u00e9s of her English teacher, or the narrator of \u201cChild\u201d, watching her mother shake her pinny at her \u2013\u201cas if it were wheat for a little chook\u201d (p.58) Elsewhere, with no mother at all, \u201cDossy\u201d withdraws richly into compensatory fantasy. <\/p>\n
In Snowman, Snowman, (1963) Frame experimented with what she called \u201cFables and Fantasies\u201d with mixed success. \u201cSolutions\u201d and \u201cThe Daylight and the Dusk\u201d are mannered and fey at times, the whimsy fanciful rather than deft. But not so in \u201cThe Terrible Screaming\u201d – a Thurberish tale of the Emperor\u2019s Neu-rosis, perhaps ? Or \u201cTwo Sheep\u201d, a droll fable about the presentiment of death. <\/p>\n
The Reservoir: Stories and Sketches finds Frame in command and with near perfect pitch. The reservoir is the bogey place of parental fears about the World Beyond, where the children roam forbidden – near a jersey bull \u201cpolished like a wardrobe\u201d (p.123) and along creek beds in an idyll where trespassers are only prosecuted much much later. In the mysterious castration in \u201cThe Bull Calf\u201d the young Olive is confronted with a kind of earthy Lawrentian blood ritual prefigured by \u201cthe dusty plums split and dark blue with pearls of jelly on their stalk and a bitter blighted taste at the centre near the stone.\u201d (p.150) <\/p>\n
After childhood there is often uncertainty and disappointment \u2013 Alan in \u201cThe Triumph of Poetry\u201d and Edith (will it be Edie?) becoming more anxious and paranoid as she solicits Bill, Eliotic in his indifferent boredom in \u201cThe Teacup\u201d. Life is a long climb with short shrift in Frame\u2019s world, as an aging, infirm Dunedin widow struggles as if in the grave itself in \u201cThe Bath\u201d or the elderly American teacher, required to show her Franciscan unconcern in a snake-handling demonstration to her class, in the brilliantly quirky \u201cYou Are Now Entering the Human Heart\u201d. Entering the human heart ? In the magnificent stories of Janet Frame we are never out of it. <\/p>\n
In the candid, often digressive notes to his own selection of His Best Stories, Witi Ihimaera declares : \u201c I always like to think of myself as being a witness of my times and my primary witness is as a Maori writer who belongs to the iwi. I\u2019m not the only the one . There\u2019s a whole academy of Maori writers \u2026\u201d (p.185) He goes on to list nine others, including Api Taylor, Briar Grace-Smith, Keri Hulme and Hone Kouka. But at the time he published Pounamu Pounamu in 1972, he was a solitary voice. The dust jacket of the Heinemann edition even proclaims it as \u201cthe first collection of short stories by a Maori writer to be published.\u201d <\/p>\n
Many of us recall the impact of those stories \u2013 so direct and sharply vivid and including what the author himself calls his \u201ccalling card,\u201d (p.9) \u201cA Game of Cards\u201d, a vignette of Maori life and its powerful matriarchies, celebrated in bilingual text and with cultural explanations hard to find in either the literature or the education curriculum of that time. <\/p>\n
Ihimaera\u2019s stories explained New Zealand to itself and with A New Net for Fishing in 1977 he extended the reach of his writing in keeping with changing times. \u201cThe Seahorse and the Reef\u201d is prophetic of the contested foreshore and seabed that was to come, as well as the environmental degradation which besets coastal communities world-wide. After his song, the father\u2019s exhortation \u2013 \u201cSea we have been unkind to you. We have poisoned the land and now we feed our poison into your waters. We have lost our aroha for you and our respect for your life. \u201c (p.21) \u2013 resonates even more strongly in a later century.<\/p>\n
In this collection, reprinted from 2003, Ihimaera\u2019s definitive stories stand strongly. \u201cThe Halcyon Summer\u201d, when the young city-raised Tama goes to the East Coast to stay with his grandmother, Nani Puti, is a classic childhood memoir but it also effortlessly describes a whole world, both elsewhere and very present, in the New Zealand psyche. Unlike Frame, whose stories are more about immutables than the turbulence of social change, Witi Ihimaera\u2019s stories exist, sometimes overtly programmatically, to register shifting allegiances and identities. \u201cTent on the Home Ground\u201d describes tensions and divisions as the personal becomes political His stories chart the move from rural life to urban centres – the Yellow Brick Roads to the Emerald City, as Ihimaera characterises them. The theme is freshly explored in the later story, \u201cDustbins\u201d. <\/p>\n
Ihimaera has a deliberate iconoclastic strategy in many stories. The collection Dear Miss Mansfield from 1989, re-imagines the colonial assumptions and social castes of a different era and such intertextual re-writings as \u201cThe Washerwoman\u2019s Children\u201d are as intriguing now as when they first appeared. Twenty years on they remind us of the author\u2019s strong commitment to challenge and sometimes perturb his reader, to unhinge and re-frame the national portrait. <\/p>\n
Sometimes in His Best Stories Ihimaera has included less satisfactory choices \u2013 \u201cShort Features\u201d and \u201cA History of New Zealand Through Selected Texts\u201d for example. The former is frothy, the latter \u2013 though, heaven knows, the pretensions of academic writing deserve a cudgelling \u2013 is too peevish and laboured to rate inclusion. The best are very good, however and this collection, along with the author\u2019s exuberant commentaries on his selections, is timely both for the new reader and those returning to be surprised and engaged all over again. <\/p>\n
Essential New Zealand Short Stories is well-named, not surprising given they are from the safe hands of editor and masterful writer, Owen Marshall. Anthologies are rarely entirely new, rather they are built from the aggregations of their predecessors. In this case The Oxford Anthology of New Zealand Writing Since 1945, the excellent collection from 1983, edited by MacDonald Jackson and Vincent O\u2019Sullivan, prefigures some of the choices, as does Lydia Wevers\u2019 New Zealand Short Stories Fourth Series, also from Oxford, which appeared in 1984. <\/p>\n
No anthologist is free of previous obligations and wisely, Marshall does not pretend to be. In his perceptive introduction he discusses attempts to define the genre :
\n\u201cAs soon as we move from an individual story to generalizations about literary form, there is lack of critical precision. The genre itself falls to pieces in our hands: yarn, fantasy, fable, metafiction, romance, psychological realism \u2013 the short story, like the molecule, breaks down into smaller and smaller entities when under pressure.\u201d (p.10) <\/p>\n
Instead he suggests that the story aspires to the condition of poetry, quoting H.E Bates \u2013 \u201cin its finest mould the short story is, in fact, a prose poem. \u201c (p.10) \u2013 and William H. Gass \u2013 \u201cit is a poem grafted on to sturdier stock.\u201d (p.10). Reminding us that his brief is to find the essential, not the most popular, and that he has no wish \u201c to side-step the best known pieces and highlight alternative work\u201d (p.11), Marshall has selected, in useful chronological order and strictly one item per author, a cavalcade of work which would suit both the tutorial room and the bedside table or bach, the casual reader and the literary devotee.<\/p>\n
Beginning with Mansfield\u2019s perfect miniature \u201cThe Doll\u2019s House\u201d, there are selections from Sargeson, and A.P Gaskell, and anthology favourites Dan Davin\u2019s \u201cThe Quiet One\u201d and Maurice Duggan\u2019s \u201cBlues for Miss Laverty\u201d. Joy Cowley\u2019s \u201cThe Silk\u201d, the pensive story of a wife sewing Chinese pyjamas for her dying husband, sits beside Phillip Mincher\u2019s \u201cThe Mace\u201d, a story of exceptional optimism and warmth in the often bleak parameters of the genre. Maurice Gee\u2019s \u201cA Glorious Morning Comrade\u201d is an evermore apposite portrait of raveling old age and Albert Wendt\u2019s schoolgirl account of her lonely teacher, \u201cCrocodile\u201d is also expertly poised. <\/p>\n
Amongst a preference for the everyday, Craig Harrison\u2019s \u201cBroad Sunlit Uplands\u201d combines a futuristic theme which includes rare and welcome excursions into speculative technology. Shonagh Koea\u2019s \u201cCinnamon Toast\u201d is also a memorable inclusion, as a successful young man returns to his formative origins to find himself completely unremembered. There is a fine array of established names here \u2013 the raucous Vincent O\u2019Sullivan story, \u201cPutting Bob Down\u201d, is set in Melbourne, Lloyd Jones\u2019s story describes an anxious boy caught between alienated parents in \u201cWho\u2019s That Dancing with my Mother\u201d and Owen Marshall\u2019s own impressive oeuvre is represented by the mordant geriatric revenges in \u201cThe Rule of Jenny Pen\u201d.<\/p>\n
This collection, updated from 2002, has five new stories added \u2013including two, \u201cNecropolis\u201d from Eleanor Catton and \u201cCopies\u201d by Craig Cliff from last year\u2019s Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 5 (Vintage) They are both fine stories, but the first features demoralized casual workers in a hardware chain store, the other is about a young man\u2019s fear of replicating his not much admired father. Like many in the anthology -and like much New Zealand short fiction- the stories, are pessimistic and downbeat. That is perhaps another attribute of the genre \u2013 poetic, yes, but the mournful, elegiac kind, bitter rather than comic, nibbling at the edges of life but not quite embracing it. These melancholy stories are essential, of course, but maybe not all there is. Perhaps the short story is a house of many mansions, including some with a sunny aspect. Perhaps, if the shrift has to be short, it could also sometimes be sweet. <\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell teaches Drama at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. He is theatre reviewer for The Adelaide Review and The Australian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Janet Frame, Prizes: Selected Short Stories Vintage, $34.99 ISBN 9781869791131 Witi Ihimaera, His Best Stories, Raupo, $ 30.00. ISBN 9780143010906 Owen Marshall (ed), Essential New Zealand Short Stories Vintage, $40.00. ISBN 97818697791285 Murray Bramwell There is something unexpectedly, but suitably, upbeat about the title of this Vintage selection of Janet Frame short stories. Prizes, draws from all four of Frame\u2019s previous collections, but unlike those ominous location titles, The Lagoon and The Reservoir, here we have the glitter of victory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1708,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/1708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}