Janet Frame (1924-2004), An Angel at My Table. Virago, 2014. First published in New Zealand 1989, UK 1990.

Janet Frame’s trilogy was known to me from Jane Campion’s 1990 award-winning film of the same name, which I seem to remember was deeply moving and beautifully done.

It was originally published in three volumes:

To the Is-land (1982)

An Angel at My Table (1984)

The Envoy at Mirror City (1985)

It’s a highly poetic, impressionistic autobiography, dealing with the author’s childhood in New Zealand, the effects of WWII, a long spell in institutions for what would then have been known as mentally ill or mad people, then her growing success as a published author.

Janet’s family were poor: her father worked on the railways, and ruled the household like a Victorian patriarch. Her mother played the role of submissive wife and housewife (‘an everlasting servant’), and carer for her children. They moved from one depressing, tiny rented home to another, always worried about finding the money to pay the rent and bills.

Always a shy, imaginative and introverted child, Janet was deeply affected by the early death of one of her sisters, followed a few years later by that of another. It was her inability to cope with this lacerating grief that possibly led to her, as a young woman, attempting suicide. Soon afterwards she’s admitted to hospital, where she’s ‘shocked’ to find she’s in a psychiatric ward. She’s transferred to Seacliff, the dreaded mental hospital, ‘where the loonies went’.

From this point, and for years to come, she loses agency:

No one asked me what my plans were for the future. I became an instant third person, or even personless…I was taken (third-person people are also thrust into the passive mood) to Seacliff…

This part of the book is the most moving and powerful. She recounts how she becomes institutionalised, along with all the other – well, it’s not quite fitting to call them patients, for that implies they were being cared for and treated, but this was far from the case. Once diagnosed as schizophrenic, Janet became even more personless: a label had been attached to her, and the consequence was that she was drugged and electrocuted into deeper passivity, and only narrowly avoided being lobotomised.

Her account of this horrific time is difficult to read, but salutary. It put me in mind of the men in a similar institution in the USA in the book and film ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. Seacliff staff were all more vindictive and cruel than Nurse Ratched.

Finally released, she’s awarded a writer’s grant to travel so that she can broaden her experiences. She spends an idyllic time with local families in Ibiza and Andorra, then a more hectic period in various dingy parts of London. There’s a sad return to NZ at the end: her parents have died, but she’s becoming acclaimed at last as an author.

There are elements of autofiction in the telling of her story: she reflects on the nature of fiction, how it’s structured and expressed, and its flexible relation to what would generally be considered the factual nature of autobiography. She states several times that even in reconstructing and narrating events that she believes really happened, she’s inclined to embellish and invent. The book is as much a meditation on the nature of representation of a life in literature as it is about her life as it evolved in the real world.

A central image is that of what she calls ‘the mirror city’. Looking out of her window in Ibiza she sees ‘the city mirrored in the sea’. One day she walks round by the harbour:

…where the real city lay that I knew only as the city in the sea, but I felt as if I were trying to walk behind a mirror, and I knew that whatever the outward phenomenon of light, city, and sea, the real mirror city lay within as the city of the imagination. (p.399)

A few pages later she goes to sit on a ‘pine-bordered beach’ and there follows one of the countless lyrical descriptions in the book of her response to nature:

…where I lay under the trees and listened to their their hush-hush, and the light fell like blue and green snow around and upon me, and the sea glittered through the pine branches. Not an unusual scene, but, as in my visit to the pine forests of the interior, it touched the antenna reaching from childhood, just as childhood contains its own antennae originating in conception and the life of the dead and the newly begun; and feeling the sensation at the nerve ending and its origin in the past among the pine trees and sky and water and light, I made this scene a replacement, a telescoping with the trained economy of memory, so that from then on, and in the future the memory of this scene contains the collective feeling of those past, and now when I listen to the pine trees by water, in light and blue, I feel the link, the fullness of being and loving and losing and wondering, the spinning ‘Why was the world?’ that haunted me in childhood, the shiver of yesterday, yet I remember the pine trees of Ibiza.

I’m not sure I understand all of that, but it’s beautiful. I suppose those ‘pine forests of the interior’ are another iteration of her ‘mirror’ imagery, while all that stuff about childhood antennae, the sensations along the nerve endings, the ‘telescoping’ and what follows sounds Wordsworthian to me. It’s worth reading this long trilogy just for passages like that.