Feeding on the fellow

This novel comes to us some forty years after it was written. Janet Frame (1924–2004) did not allow it to be published during her lifetime. Very probably she was anxious not to be seen as savaging the hands that had fed her: and it is indeed a gleeful, glorious savaging. In 1973, Frame was awarded the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, which allowed her to write for a year in the Memorial Room, a small stone room at the base of the villa Isola Bella in Menton on the Côte d’Azur, where Mansfield had lived and worked. This is more or less the plot of In the Memorial Room, with name and gender changes: the New Zealand author Harry Gill, who tells the story in his journal, is awarded the Watercress–Armstrong Fellowship, which allows him to write in the Memorial Room, a small stone room at the base of the Villa Florita, where the New Zealand poet Margaret Rose Hurndell lived and wrote. She died tragically young, and the fellowship has been set up in her memory. Things don’t begin well in the Memorial Room. Harry finds – as Frame did – that it’s a cheerless place with no running water and no access to a toilet. But that’s nothing compared to Harry’s other troubles: the parasitical types who administer the fellowship; a belief that he’s going blind; and an even deeper conviction that he’s about to disappear. Are we then reading a roman-à-clef? Did Frame go through the same unsettling, surreal, and increasingly bizarre journey as her hero, and is this book her confession and her revenge? That’s for scholars and biographers to determine: the reviewer must look at what’s on the page. And yet there’s an inevitable context. Nine years after her death, Frame has a secure place in the New Zealand literary hall of fame. Yet most of us know her not so much for her twenty-eight published books of fiction, memoir, and poetry as for the unforgettable portrait in An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 film based on Frame’s autobiographical trilogy (1982–84). We know Frame as a shy, awkward misfit with Raggedy Ann hair and bad teeth, who fought her way through a life so full of cruel irony you couldn’t make it up. Perhaps the most spectacular reversal came when she was languishing in the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia and about to undergo a lobotomy, only for it to be cancelled when news came through that her first book had won a major literary prize. This knowledge is bound to inform anyone’s reading of In the Memorial Room. Yet even if you knew nothing about the author, the book would still have a weird hypnotic power that is only enhanced by the fact that it is constantly poking sly fun at the characters. Don’t be prepared for characters in the usual sense, however. Harry is a construct, the almost literally self-effacing author, and the little community of British and Antipodean expatriates who form his support group and social life in Menton (the French don’t really get a look-in, and the Côte d’Azur is a surprisingly gloomy place of inclement weather and dogs who eat their masters) are comic types. Within these self-imposed limits, Frame achieves some wonderful effects. Harry is looked after by the ghastly Max and Connie Watercress, keepers of the Rose Hurndell Fellowship flame (‘Somehow their writing life had been separated from their ambition, and lost, like the tail cut from a lizard’), and their son Michael, handsome and bearded like a young Hemingway and destined to be a great writer. The fact that he hasn’t yet written a book is a minor detail: the almost ludicrously diffident Harry sees Michael as the writer and himself as an impostor. Other supposedly generous and equally grotesque friends keep turning up to feed on the Fellow: Rose Hurndell’s sister Elizabeth Foster and her husband, Dorset; and the Englishwoman Liz Lee and her husband, George, a man with an unintelligible voice who seems to be always saying the same sentence, ‘Angela will be livid.’ Frame has grim fun with their dialogue and with Harry’s bursts of paranoia: ‘As long as they were together in force around Rose Hurndell and her death, they constituted a power, a permanent storm’, which could draw him in, ‘and because of his nature, the nothing-nature of a novelist who lives only through his characters, [he] must be obliterated, erased’. Indeed, the ‘nothing-nature of the novelist’, which also tantalises writers such as Keats, Kafka, and Coetzee, is something that preoccupies Frame through the medium of Harry’s musings (she tackled the subject further in her novel Living in the Maniototo [1979], which was written about the same time). These philosophical ramblings may fascinate some, but I found them the least convincing part of the book: Harry is paradoxically too transparent a character to have such deep thoughts, though no doubt his creator might have them. Nonetheless, In the Memorial Room is a welcome if belated discovery, a delightfully absurd and creepy exploration of a certain kind of writer’s plight. Its satire on the literary industry is also chillingly contemporary. Go to any writers’ festival and take a look at the people pontificating onstage. You will see a lot of Michael Watercresses: they belong to a tribe that goes forth and multiplies. But you will have to look very hard to find a single Harry Gill.

Jane Sullivan

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Pursuit of the New: Louise Hanson-Dyer, publisher and collector edited by Kerry Murphy and Jennifer Hill

We All Lived in Bondi Then by Georgia Blain

‘Calm Voice’, a new poem by Anders Villani

Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths by Matthew Lamb

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