4 - Short Stories and Poems: Generic Variety

Summary

THE SHORT STORIES: THE LAGOON, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE HUMAN HEART AND THE RESERVOIR

It is little wonder that I value writing as a way of life when it actually saved my life. (II 106)

The first collection of short stories, The Lagoon, introduces the reader to nearly all the subjects with which Frame will concern herself in her later fiction: the lives of children, the lives of the ‘mad’, the lives of the solitary, the unsuccessful, the inadequate, the marginals and those whose cry for ‘Help’ is repeated throughout the novels. In ‘My Last Story’, the narrator first says: ‘I'm never going to write another story’ (La 110) and ends with these words: ‘I think I must be frozen inside with no heart to speak of. I think I've got the wrong way of looking at Life’ (La 112; italics mine). With The Lagoon, Frame won the Hubert Church Award and was spared the lobotomy she was about to undergo a few days later. ‘Writer Wins Prize for Prose’: ‘The New Zealand centre of […] PEN announces that the Hubert Church Memorial award for prose has been won by Miss Janet Frame of Oamaru for her book “Lagoon and other stories” (WA 112). In the Autobiography, the announcement is made by the doctor: “You've won the Hubert Church Award for the best prose. Your book, The Lagoon.’ I knew nothing about the Hubert Church Award. Winning it was obviously something to be pleased about. I smiled. ‘Have I?’ ‘Yes. And we're moving you out of this ward. And no leucotomy.” (II 108) This crucial episode is related almost verbatim in Jane Frame's novel Faces in the Water.

You Are Now Entering The Human Heart is composed of twentyfive stories of unequal length (‘Snowman Snowman’, written twenty years before the publication of the collection, covers seventy pages) that span fourty years of Frame's life. Seven of the short stories in The Reservoir, published twenty years before, are resumed in the later collection, and the thirteen others read like variations on the Autobiography or some of the other stories. All of them are interwoven with autobiographical details; the trips overseas (in ‘Burial in Sand’), ‘Royal Icing’ on Christmas cakes, anticipate the ‘words and phrases that could be eaten’ (I 96), etc.