A Writer Whose Novels Explored the Edges of Normalcy

Minnie Mouse and Orpheus meet at a singles mixer on an ocean liner, en route from New Zealand to England. Orpheus, who is really a man named Toby Withers wearing a game nametag, has never heard of his assigned identity. Deprived of a “proper education” as a child because of his epilepsy, he is unsure which ghost he is supposed to seek on the ship’s underworld dance floor. Minnie, a retired schoolteacher named Zoe Bryce, urges Orpheus to find Eurydice, but their destined counterparts have vanished; there is no sign of cartoon mouse or dead wife. Instead, they falter and, fumbling for conversation, arrive at their own unlikeliness. She asks, “It doesn’t make you afraid, does it, that you are fiction, that you are not really aboard the Matua sailing to England, that you exist only in someone’s mind, some poor writer who cannot do better than bring forth the conversation of musicians, poets, mice?”

The poor writer above, in whose mind Toby and Zoe converse, is Janet Frame, in her 1962 novel, “The Edge of the Alphabet,” reissued last year by Fitzcarraldo Editions, with a new introduction by Catherine Lacey. Canonized and largely adored in her native New Zealand, Frame’s writing—across thirteen novels, six short-story collections, and three books of autobiography—frequently returns to the strange, self-doubling rituals of normalcy, required of us to find so-called connection. Frame is invested in those who fail such performances, and who sometimes reach a type of multiplicity far past them. Her sentences, always at the shore of some great nothingness, have the intricacies and echoes of a conch shell. Vibrating air catches in their pink smeared curves, turrets of mineral detail hovering over a hollow that was formerly something’s home, something then soft and now absent. And, like the small miracle of any benthic shine found in sandy human hands, Frame’s prolific œuvre very nearly didn’t exist for us, but for drastic, tidal chance.

As a tale of creative genesis, a real-life Künstlerroman, Frame’s life story approaches myth. It has been retold in various forms, most famously when the director Jane Campion adapted Frame’s memoir, “An Angel at My Table,” into the 1990 film of the same name, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival that year. Frame was born in Dunedin, in 1924. She arrived into a literary working-class family—her father was a railway engine driver, her mother worked as a maid in the home of the writer Katherine Mansfield’s family, and later sold her own poems door to door, for extra income. Climbing out of the poverty of her upbringing, Frame studied to be a schoolteacher but was hospitalized in her early twenties, after a suicide attempt provoked by the anxiety of her teaching assessment.

When her mother came to pick her up, after a few weeks, Frame felt the onslaught of “all the sadness of home and the everlasting toil of my parents and the weekly payments on the blankets and the new eiderdown from Calder Mackays, and the payments to the Starr-Bowkett Building Society or we’d be turned out of our house again; and the arguments at home, and Mother’s eternal peacemaker intervention; and my decaying teeth; and my inability to find a place in the Is-land,” a term she sometimes uses for the present moment, the land of “is.” Frame yelled at her mother to go, believing that she’d be able to be discharged independently to Dunedin, but instead, she was committed to Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, on the basis of her refusal to leave the hospital. There, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, losing almost all of her legal rights and individual autonomy overnight.

Seacliff, said to be the largest building in the entirety of New Zealand at the time, exemplified the era’s forsaken approach to mental illness, relying on electroshock treatment and surgical intervention. The consequences were tragic; only a few years before Frame was admitted, thirty-seven female patients died in a fire, unable to escape after being locked inside their rooms. Institutionalized, in and out but mostly in, in the course of a decade, Frame managed to publish her first book of fiction, “The Lagoon and Other Stories,” in 1951, while she was still a patient. Frame, trapped under the marbled slab of her diagnostic history, was scheduled to receive a lobotomy, which, she wrote in her memoir, was becoming a “ ‘convenience’ treatment” for long-term cases, when “The Lagoon” unexpectedly won the prestigious Hubert Church Memorial award. A doctor at Seacliff noticed the announcement in the newspaper. The surgery was cancelled, the value of her brain clinically reassessed, but Frame didn’t leave for good until 1955, several years later. She emerged, mind entire, and novels poured from her.

“The Edge of the Alphabet” is the third in a sequence of novels published after Frame left the hospital, following “Owls Do Cry,” in 1957, and “Faces in the Water,” in 1961. The novels’ deep-sea dive into her experience, the years of institutionalization, of forcible detachment from the social world, of being written off, made disposable—until she was suddenly holding the pen, writing, writing, writing. They haunt the alleys of the autobiographical, but never fully step onto the recognized thoroughfares of memoir, or even autofiction. Despite clear reference to the events of her life, the novels remain shadowy and irreverent, winding behind the normative façades of storytelling.

The loose trilogy begins with something like the truth, but molded by a stark counterfactual: in “Owls Do Cry,” for example, the protagonist, Daphne, undergoes the lobotomy that Frame herself narrowly avoided. The Withers family, presented first in “Owls Do Cry” and then picked up again in “The Edge of the Alphabet,” refracts Frame and her siblings: Daphne, locked up and deemed insane; her sisters, Chicks and Francie (who dies by falling into the fire pit at their local dump); and her brother, Toby, who struggles with epilepsy, are versions of Frame; her sisters Myrtle and Isabel, who each accidentally died by drowning, years apart; her surviving sister, June, and her brother, George, who was epileptic.

With Daphne, Frame writes herself out of being a writer, and into the dire outcome planned for her. In “The Edge of the Alphabet,” she writes herself also into her brother, another person whose life was excised from the narrow body of social acceptance. Frame refuses to bask in her exceptionalism, her almost miraculous escape. Triumphantly, mournfully, her plots are anti-redemption and anti-assimilation. In her memoir, she writes of Nola, a peer at Seacliff who was scheduled for a lobotomy around the same time as her, but whose surgery went ahead as planned, “Over the years I kept in touch with her, and it was like living in a fairytale where conscience, and what might have been, and what was, not only speak but spring to life and become a living companion.” Frame’s novels do the same work, asserting the irreducible existence of the people she left behind, the inner worlds of those who are conventionally treated as inside-less. In that way, Frame never gets out. In that way, she gets out everyone.

In “The Edge of the Alphabet,” Frame creates a persona that allows her to withstand the doubleness of self that fiction writing entails. Her narrator, Thora Pattern, is established on the first page as the keeper, possibly the inventor, of the stories of Toby and Zoe, our ocean-liner lonely hearts: “The following manuscript was found among the papers of Thora Pattern after her death.” Pattern’s experience of life, peeking around the bulwarks of the characters she documents, is halved or pronged, a both-and, or, perhaps, a neither-nor. She exclaims, “And I, Thora Pattern, living—no! in a death-free zone.” Living, with a red line through it, an immediate self-edit, is replaced with a strange double negative to describe where she is: not life but a place currently free from its opposite. We are left to assume, from scattered details, that she is writing from within an institution. (It is important to note that Frame, too, was voluntarily re-hospitalized, in 1957, after moving to London; there, she met a psychiatrist who formally rescinded her diagnosis of schizophrenia.) Hearing voices, writing novels, both encounters with the other inside you—what’s the difference, Frame asks, except the page?

The story of Zoe Bryce and Toby Withers, inventions of the hazy mind of Thora Pattern, could struggle to break the surface of the novel. As Frame writes, “Do I, Thora Pattern, imagine that I can purchase people out of my fund of loneliness and place them like goldfish in the aquarium of my mind’s room and there watch them day and night swimming round and round kept alive by the titbits which I feed to them?”

In the hands of a lesser writer, such characters would be caught in a loop, glazed and limited, secondary to the drama of metafictional authorship. But Zoe and Toby are two of the most fully conceived characters in twentieth-century fiction. Ironically, what gives them their profundity is the unrealized language they carry. Both have a thwarted, propulsive urge to create, which is held at bay for the majority of the novel by their straining commitment to normalcy. The tension between the desire to make something outside the self and the inability to fulfill that desire coils inside them, wringing out their psyches. But it also tethers them to other people and to the thick dirt of a shared universe.

Toby’s form of the “intensities of making nothing” will be familiar to many readers of this essay; he has plans to write a book. Discounted and rejected as a boy owing to epilepsy and difficulty with spelling and casual conversation, he has grown competitive and self-doubting in adulthood. His discomfort with language is bodily: “Sometimes Toby felt the words moving in his arms, down his arm into his hand, wriggling like silkworms. . . .  He could do nothing to help them.” He tends to the title of his proposed book, “The Lost Tribe,” with a fierce possessiveness, so fearful that the idea will be stolen he threatens to kill anyone who pockets his secret story. The specifics of the plot remain unclear, but the title refers to a familiar trope in representations of colonized nations—an Indigenous group that remains hidden away in the denser wilderness of the land, protected from the violent influence of empire. There is something heartbreaking in Toby’s precious title being such a cliché—a fantasy inherited from a colonizer state, a dream of the limitations of its own reach and harm. Perhaps “The Lost Tribe” must remain unwritten, voided, for it to remain Toby’s, wrenched away from the nation that produced him. After arriving in London, Toby lives in poverty working as a street-sweeper, half-heartedly nursing a wounded arm that has gone septic (are the words sitting in there, rotting?) and guarding a notebook that contains only his three beloved words written across the first page. Unexpectedly, the following blankness is his saving grace. Late in the novel, when internal voices exhort him to “get rid” of himself he laughs: “Haw Haw. No thank you. I’ve my Lost Tribe to think of.” It carries him forward, the book he is unable to write, named yet unknown.

Frame’s approach to the frank misery of her characters is unrelenting, especially because she insists on how their sadness, their inability to connect or communicate, contains a weird buoyancy. The symptom helps them survive in a world committed to conformity; the silent parts of themselves enclose and protect. In Frame’s work, self-articulation is a kind of infinity, hitched to other kinds, like love or death. Welcome one, and they all rush in. At the beginning of the novel’s journey, Zoe is a mediocre schoolteacher from the Midlands, a self-described old maid who, at thirty-seven years old, has never been kissed. On the ship, Zoe experiences an almost “mythological act,” so great are its powers of metamorphosis: an anonymous crewmember plants one on her, as she lies in the ship’s hospital, disembodied by seasickness. The kiss is out of the blue: “a slight progress away from the shame of being unloved,” which unseals something in Zoe. She had previously believed in “boundaries and fences and scrolled iron gates” between people, but after feeling the mouth of another against her own mouth, she is “interested now in traffic lanes, in byways, highways.”

What Zoe experiences is less a sexual awakening than a Joycean epiphany, what Stephen Dedalus describes as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” After the kiss, Zoe can see “people’s lines of behavior, like wire-netting in the sky, with the sun like a big yellow hen testing its beak on the wire. . . .” She sees the fascia of an inhabited universe. Observing artists sitting in a café, she watches how “words moved like spiders from their mouths, forming a white web in the centre of the room to trap the paintings which they wanted to paint but could not, could not.” The externalized self—the metaphor, the sketch, the song—lives in the room with us, unmaterialized but ever present. Frame whispers her hand along the veil, and a glinting breeze makes itself known. Everyone’s art is on the other side, with the dead. Will you reach across to grab yours?

When Zoe returns to London, she begins to work as an usherette in a cheap cinema, embarking on “private research.” She buys a book on sexual education; she watches the Italian movie playing at work fifteen times; she knits a tiny white dress, in shell-stitch, for nobody, no baby; she dreams of swans. As time passes, she wanders closer to the edge of society. A painter named Peter, a sex worker named Zara, a gay man named Lawrence, sit with her at Serpentine Lake, smoking and talking. Absent-mindedly, Zoe starts to twist the discarded silver paper wrapping that lines their cigarette packet, creating a shape.