A Cry of Joy and Pain – Margaret Drabble on Owls Do Cry
British novelist Margaret Drabble has penned the
introduction to the new Text Classics edition of Janet Frame’s novel Owls Do Cry
and we share it here. Drabble writes about Frame’s story of poverty and loss with its
‘buoyancy of creativity and brightness’ and investigates the links between Frame’s own
history and the book that would bring her international recognition.
The selection of Janet Frame’s debut novel Owls Do Cry as the 2015 Great Kiwi Classic dovetails nicely with the recent publication of the Text Classics edition. Frame’s first novel was chosen as this year’s most treasured book after a month-long search by the New Zealand Book Council and the Auckland Writers Festival, and its claim to classic status will be debated at a special event during the festival. Kate De Goldi will lead New Zealand writers Courtney Sina Meredith and Anne Kennedy, as well as Scottish author Damian Barr, in a passionate live discussion of the book on Sunday 17th May. In the lead-up to the event, the legacy of Owls Do Cry will be explored on Booknotes Unbound and we can promise plenty of discussion and giveaways for readers on the Great Kiwi Classic Facebook page.
A Cry of Joy and Pain
By Margaret Drabble
JANET Frame’s first full-length work of fiction, Owls Do Cry, is an exhilarating and dazzling prelude to her long and successful career. She was to write in several modes, publishing poems, short stories, fables, and volumes of autobiography, as well as other novels of varied degrees of formal complexity, but Owls Do Cry remains unique in her oeuvre. It has the fresh-ness and fierceness of a mingled cry of joy and pain. Its evocation of childhood recalls Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, as well as the other-worldly Shakespearean lyric of her title and epigraph, but her handling of her dark material is wholly original. Although the story of the Withers family is sombre, indeed tragic, what remains in the reader’s mind is the glory and intensity of the language, the heightened imagery, the brightness of an early world. She transforms the real (and at times uncomfortably identifiable) New Zealand provincial seaside town of Oamaru into a mythical and magical Waimaru, where places, events and characters are seen with the sharp remembering eye of redeeming love. This novel, which boldly confronts illness, physical and mental disability, ageing, and violent and sudden death, has a buoyancy of creativity and brightness. Some of its characters encounter defeat, but it is a song of survival.
Owls Do Cry was first published, to much acclaim, in 1957 by Pegasus Press in New Zealand, and gained Frame an international reputation when it appeared in 1960 in the US and 1961 in the UK. Some contemporary critics at home saw this account of the life of the town and of the Withers family—the parents Bob and Amy, and their children Francie, Toby, Daphne, and Chicks—as a satire on the mono-chrome, monocultural, impoverished but materialistic society of post-war New Zealand, struggling slowly towards affluence. And it is true that Frame does make fun of the habits and opinions of the towns-folk, while deploying descriptions of material objects to singular effect, particularly in later passages about Chicks’ married life. In earlier sections, we learn much of family and neighbourhood folklore and dreams—the visits of the tooth fairy ‘with a promise of sixpence’, the small silver tin of wedding cake to be put under the pillow, the adolescent longing to train to be an opera singer, the bribe of a new bicycle to ride ‘in colours, red and gold and black’, the false hopes placed in beauty aids (Wisteria Peach Bloom, Gloria Haven)—but the overall impression is not of mockery but of wonder, a childlike wonder at the often incomprehensible oddities of the world. Frame remembers exactly how schoolchildren think, how they misunderstand and understand and make free associations (the ‘nurse shark’ is a wonderful flight of fancy), but not all her prose is poetic: an unexpected everyday throwaway phrase such as ‘He was to have his tonsils out, he said, and everyone felt envious’ takes one back, wholly convincingly, to a schoolboy mindset. She surprises, and she rings true. There is comedy as well as pathos.
The novel, which covers twenty years in historic time, is, of course, now valuable as a social document, and readers (including overseas readers like myself) who remember the period that Frame is describing will recognise many references from their own past: the acid drops and aniseed balls and licorice allsorts, the hoarded Easter eggs smelling of straw and cardboard, the sparse and sad Christmas decorations, the lavender soap and bath salts, the mothers at school functions redolent of ‘talcum and stored fur’, the first defiant pair of slacks, the names of forgotten dances, and ‘the milk-bar cowboy, the teddy-boy, hanging around the door and putting money in the nickelodeon’.
But it is not principally for its compelling realism of detail or as a period piece that we now value this book. It is not a conventional novel but a modernist masterpiece, bearing witness to Frame’s wide reading (William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Frank Sargeson, Katherine Mansfield) and to her confidence in insisting on her own idiosyncratic punctuation, her own way of telling. She was to say that she wasn’t even sure that it was a novel: it was more of ‘an exploration’. And what she explores is the deep well of her own past: her parents’ relative poverty and their pragmatic but principled stoicism and faith, the early death by accidental drowning of two of her sisters (both of whom had congenitally weak hearts), her brother’s epilepsy, her youngest sister’s survival through marriage and motherhood, her own dangerous descent into mental anguish and years of hospitalisation and institutionalisation and misdiagnosis. She revisited these themes again and again, reworking them in many different ways, as she struggled, heroically and successfully, to come to terms with and rename her condition. She made her way through, with the help of one or two gifted and loyal professionals who became lifelong and supportive friends. In Owls Do Cry we see her stepping out on her long and often lonely journey of discovery and achievement.
Frame’s original chosen title was ‘Talk of Treasure’, which became the heading for Part One of the published work. On one level, this refers to the rubbish dump to which the Withers children are drawn, playing truant and seeking castaway treasures, and which becomes (perhaps a little abruptly) the scene for catastrophe, but it is clearly a metaphor for the novelist’s store of memories and images. It works well in both senses, and suggests to us an understanding of the very structure of the book: not a chronological narrative, but a flow of moments, of insights, some inspired by random words and by objects quarried from the past, excavated from the dump of the subcon-scious, drawn up from the well of the archetypes. The dump holds, in this case literally, poetry. The rubbish dump, or tip, features in the memoirs and fictions of many authors, for whom it has an obvious appeal: Alice Munro, in her story ‘Underneath the Apple Tree’, makes an unofficial town dump in rural Canada the scene for an intense adolescent romance. We dig for layers of meaning, rescue broken thoughts from oblivion. Visiting the village tip by the river with my aunt in the 1940s was one of the great pleasures of my childhood. We rescued glass marbles, shards of willow pattern pottery, beads and buttons. The dump was once a universal point of reference in the history of childhood.
Janet Frame once likened herself to a ‘princess, shepherdess, waitress, putter-on of raincoat buttons in a factory…who chose rags from an old bundle, stitched them together, waved a wand, and found herself with a completely new dress…I do collect bundles of rags And I like to sew them together: I suppose I must accept the fact that I have no wand.’ (Frank Sargeson to C. K. Stead, quoted by Michael King in his biography, Wrestling with the Angel, 2000.) Years earlier, in 1948, she had written to her counsellor John Money ‘I have got to learn that I am alone for ever…I will never have anybody close to me. The rest of the world is miles away over desert and snowfield and sea. Nobody knows how far away I am from everything. Looking at living, for me, is like looking mentally through the wrong end of opera glasses.’ (in M. King, Wrestling with the Angel.) These two quotations give a fine sense of her narrative methods and of the determination and courage with which she held herself together in the face of extreme doubt and suffering. The painful portrayal of Daphne’s fragility and fear in the asylum where she ‘lived alone for many years…in days unshining and nights without darkness’ is drawn from Frame’s own experiences at Seacliff and Avondale, but she proved herself stronger than Daphne in the dead room, and there is tenderness and affection as well as horror in her descriptions of her fellow inmates.
Owls Do Cry proved to be one of the first works of fiction to deal with life in a mental institution. Virginia Woolf was familiar with this territory and had attempted to portray schizophrenia in Mrs Dalloway (1925); Ken Kesey’s first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), is set in the mental ward of a hospital; and Sylvia Plath gives an account of electro-convulsive therapy in The Bell Jar (1963). Since then, many writers have entered this world, but Frame’s first novel, of 1957, remains a landmark, a classic. Against the odds, she emerged to tell her story, and she told it unforgettably.
Dame Margaret Drabble is the author of eighteen highly acclaimed novels, including The Millstone, The Sea Lady, and most recently The Pure Gold Baby. She was appointed CBE in 1980 and made DBE in 2008. In 2011, the English PEN gave her the Golden PEN Award for a lifetime’s distinguished service to literature. A biographer and critic as well as a novelist, she was also the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Text Classics: You can find out more about the new Text Classics edition of Owls Do Cry, with an introduction by Margaret Drabble, on the Text Publishing website.
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