Aaron Hamburger Goes Searching for Janet Frame

Who are the best people on earth? Readers. And none more so than the semi-obsessive literary sort who make religions of their beloved favorite writers. Aaron Hamburger (whom you know for his fine gay stories and novel Faith for Beginners) traveled halfway around the world for A Literary Pilgrimmage: In Search of Janet Frame's New Zealand. Inevitably, he discovers many locals who have never read her, or even heard of her, but he also finds the godson of a gay writer, Frank Sargeson, who despite his own impoverished circumstances, gave shelter to Frame for sixteen months. Aaron writes:

"Cole told us that his godfather had been a solicitor until his arrest for indecency (i.e., gay sex) in a public toilet. After the arrest, Sargeson gave up his career, lifestyle, and even his old name and moved to his family’s “bach” — New Zealand slang for a summer home — to write fiction full-time. Here, in this tiny spartan house, he lived until his death in 1982, surviving on his meager writing income as well as his vegetable garden, where he grew such exotic European plants as tomatoes and zucchini.

"Cole went on to explain that before the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1959, the North Shore had been a sleepy farming area mostly cut off from the main city of Auckland, and Esmonde Road a quiet cul-de-sac terminating in a mangrove swamp. This cheap, isolated area attracted a community of writers eager to live the bohemian life free from the constraints of New Zealand’s strict middle-class conventions.

"Also, as an openly gay man in a country where homosexuality was criminalized until 1986, Sargeson carried an additional burden. “I remember once there was a heavy knock at the door and his face went all white,” said Cole. “He was afraid it was the police.”

"In Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson saw a fellow misfit, an artist who could thrive only by surviving on society’s margins. He invited her to live in a shack (now demolished) in his garden to work on her writing undisturbed."

Read Aaron's full essay.

Thanks to the Jane Campion film from 1990, Frame's best known work is the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at My Table. Among many honors late in life, she was awarded an OBE. She died in 2004, having written 12 novels, 3 volumes of stories, and a storm of poems. In 2010, The New Yorker ran an unpublished bit of fiction, Gavin Highly. If you want more about her life from another perspective, try Michael King's biography Wrestling with the Angel.