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Lawrence Jones

From ‘Towards Another Summer' to An Angel at My Table : Janet Frame, Laura Jones, Jane Campion

By the time of her death in 2004, Janet Frame had become a New Zealand icon, recognised as one of the nation's greatest writers. However, it is likely that many more New Zealanders had learned of her life story than had read her fiction.   Certainly her works with the greatest sales were her three volumes of autobiography – To the Is-land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy from Mirror City, collected in one volume in 1989 as Janet Frame: An Autobiography. But that life story was probably known to even more people through the film adaptation than through the books. A complex Venn diagram might be drawn to show that almost all of those who have read the fiction have read the autobiography, but not all those who have read the autobiography have read the fiction; almost all of those who have read the autobiography have seen the film, but not all those who have seen the film have read the autobiography.

As she was writing the first volume of the autobiography, Frame wrote to her friend E. P. Dawson that once she overcame her initial resistance to the project, she found herself ‘enjoying it immensely, particularly the new insights and the glimpse of the pattern, the absolute pattern of my life, which I think would be true of everyone's life'. By 'absolute pattern' Frame seemed to have meant ‘the wholeness of being alive, of past present future…'.

However, there are other, less universal patterns, and the one that came to be the organising pattern of the book was the ‘one story' common to the New Zealand literary autobiographers of her generation (and the previous one), that of ‘the struggle of the artist to find a “place” (often literal as well as figurative) in a hostile provincial environment, a story of defeat and persecution but also of victory in the achievement of art (even if the art succeeds only in holding up a mirror in which the society could see its unlovely self)'.

In this paper I will look at evolution and treatment of that pattern in the presentation of five versions of Janet Frame's life story:

1. her unpublished ‘novel-length autobiographical essay' (her term) from 1963, ‘Towards Another Summer';

2. her autobiographical essay "Beginnings", first published in Landfall in 1965;

3. her three-volume autobiography of 1982-85;

4. Laura Jones's screenplay adapted from those three volumes;

5. Jane Campion's film based on that screenplay.

In the discussion I will briefly show how the pattern of Frame's ‘one story' evolved through her writing, and then I will focus on how Laura Jones in reducing a 435-page autobiography to a 93-page screenplay made a pattern of Frame's pattern, and how Jane Campion in making a 151-minute film of that screenplay made her pattern of Jones' pattern of Frame's pattern. In the process I will discuss such matters as the selection that Campion made from Jones's screenplay (with some attention to the deleted scenes included on the DVD version) and to the ways in which the visual language of the film can communicate and/or modify what is presented in the verbal language of the books.

Janet Frame, letter to E. P. Dawson of 2 April 1980, quoted in Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Auckland: Viking, 2000) 433.

Lawrence Jones, “Autobiography 1973-85: The One Story, the Two Ways of Telling, and the Three Perspectives”, in Barbed Wire & Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose , second ed., (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1990) 313.

Janet Frame, “Beginnings”, in Beginnings: New Zealand Writers Tell How They Began Writing , ed. Robin Dudding (Wellington: Oxford UP, 1980) 33.

Select Bibliography:

1. Primary Texts:

a. Frame, Janet. “Towards Another Summer”. Unpublished ms., held by the Janet Frame Literary Trust.

b. Frame, Janet. “Beginnings”. Beginnings: New Zealand Writers Tell How They Began Writing. Ed. Robin Dudding. Wellington: Oxford UP, 1980. 26-34.

c. Frame, Janet. Janet Frame: An Autobiography. Auckland: Vintage, 1989.

d. Jones, Laura. An Angel at My Table: The Screenplay from the Three-Volume Autobiography of Janet Frame. London, Sydney: Pandora, 1990.

e. Campion, Jane, dir. An Angel at My Table. New Zealand Film Collection (DVD), n.d. (original release 1990).

2. Secondary Texts (a selection from a much larger group)

a. Bilbrough, Miro. “Being Janet”. NZ Listener, 8 October 1990. 104.

b. Jones, Lawrence. “Autobiography 1973-85: The One Story, the Two Ways of Telling, and the Three Perspectives”, in Barbed Wire & Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose, second ed. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1990. 313-41.

c. McLeod, Marion. “The Language of the Is-land”. NZ Listener, 8 October 1990. 102-03.

d. Martin, Helen. “Frame by Frame”. NZ Listener, 8 October 1980. 103.

e. Mercer, Gina. “A Trilogy of Autobiographies (1982-85)”, in Janet Frame: Subversive Fictions. Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1994. 223-36.

Biography

Lawrence Jones is Emeritus Professor of English, University of Otago. The first academic critic to publish on Janet Frame's work (1970), he wrote the general introduction to the new Random House/Vintage edition of Frame's fiction, “The Janet Frame Collection”, and is a trustee of the Janet Frame Literary Trust. Lawrence Jones is the author of the section on “The Novel” in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (second ed., 1998) and of Picking Up the Traces: The Making of a New Zealand Literary Culture 1932-1945 (2003). He is currently working on a history of New Zealand literary culture 1945-65 and on a jointly-authored book on Maurice Gee.