They also serve who only sit and type

Janet Frame's posthumous novel Towards Another Summer received a review in The NY Times last year [which I have only just happened across] that dealt to what the reviewer calls the 'tedious and condescending debate' about Frame's mental health. The protagonist, Grace Cleave, feels exquisite social discomfort to the point of disability, and much has been made of the fact that publication of the book was delayed until after Frame's death. Many saw this as the author protecting herself, but the NY Times reviewer, David Gates, believes she was trying to protect others, and condemns a rehabilitation physician in 2007 called Sarah Abrahamson who publically diagnosed Frame as high-functioning autistic.

Poets and novelists, who persist in the obsessive-compulsive pursuit of those “interests” of theirs, may seize on that terrifying passage as further evidence that shrinks want to pathologize genius....

Like every writer worth remembering, Frame exploits — or creates on the page, to be absolutely puristic about it — her peculiar sensibility, her private window into the universal.... A writer’s neurochemistry may matter to physicians, biographers and general-­purpose gossips, but it’s not the reader’s business. Frame’s sad, slyly comic fish-out-of-water story needs neither explanation nor excuse, and Grace’s aloneness isn’t a medical condition — it’s a human one.

Which must warm the cockles of the heart of Frame's niece and guardian of her work, Pamela Gordon, who has always said this. Now is the time, surely, to give Frame full recognition for her genius without hissing behind our hands with the next breath in an attempt to diminish that genius. While I haven't hissed exactly, I did murmur something not exactly dismissive of the Abrahamson theory in a Radio NZ review of Towards Another Summer a couple of years back. I regret that now. Discussion of Frame's life belongs firmly elsewhere.

Reading the NY Times review - especially the extracts from Towards Another Summer - makes me want to read the book all over again. The language is as exquisite as the discomfort Cleave feels. Unmatchable.

Full review here.

Frame and Plath

Dear mother, dear father dear husband dear child,
there is no answer,
this microphone like a beehive celled with honey
is blocked forever with the sweetness of death.

In February 45 years ago, Janet Frame started to write Towards Another Summer which was published postumously last year. Three days before she appears to have begun work on it, Sylvia Plath had committed suicide. Frame's literary executor and niece Pamela Gordon says the events were not unrelated.

One example she gives is the poem above which is in Towards Another Summer and, as Pamela says, 'is redolent with Plath-like poetic symbolism and does seem to contain a reference to the BBC radio recording (of Plath re-played the week of her death) which Frame would have been familiar with.'

Pamela says Frame, who was living in London at the time, grieved for Plath. Read more in a fascinating post on Pamela's blog Slightly Framous. Interestingly, the post seems to have been triggered by an earlier post here on literary crushes.