Frame Owls Do Cry (Annotated Edition)

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942531-22-7
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

New Zealand's most celebrated author, Janet Frame, published her first novel, Owls Do Cry, in 1957 to almost instantaneous critical recognition and praise throughout the English-speaking world. A prose stylist of rare ability, Frame was able to refine a method of injecting deeply personal impressionistic passages within a traditional narrative framework to achieve a whole that artistically surpassed its component parts. Her acute sensitivity towards her characters and their lives made Frame much more than a mere craftsman of beautiful passages. Frame's own battles with mental illness, recounted in autobiographical works such as the acclaimed An Angel at My Table, made her literary achievements all the more remarkable. She began writing short stories while still institutionalized. A legend developed after she was scheduled to receive a lobotomy when the surgeon learned that she had won a literary prize for a short story and scuttled the surgery. In Owls Do Cry the character Daphne Withers, like Frame, is institutionalized. Frame brilliantly conveys the mental unravelling of the character and her grim surroundings while retaining a crystalline clarity for the reader. Owls Do Cry tells the story of the Withers family from Waimaru, New Zealand, working-class laborers who struggle with life at a near poverty level. In delicate, highly poetic prose Frame reveals the triumphs and tragedies of a close-knit family as life pulls them apart. Edge of the Alphabet, published in 1962, is the sequel to Owls Do Cry.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Frame, Janet

Leseproben

3

I DON’T WANNER GO to school, Toby said. I wanner go to

the rubbish dump an’ find things.

Francie, Toby, Daphne, not always Chicks because she was too small and dawdled, found their treasure at the rubbish dump, amongst the paper and steel and iron and rust and old boots and everything that the people of the town had cast out as of no use and not worth anything any more. The place was like a shell with gold tickle of toi-toi3 around its edges and grass and weeds growing in green fur over the mounds of rubbish; and from where the children sat, snuggled in the hollow of refuse, warmed sometimes by the trickling streams of fires that the council men had lit in order to hasten the death of their material cast-offs, they could see the sky passing in blue or grey ripples, and hear in the wind, the heavy fir tree that leaned over the hollow, rocking, and talking to itself saying firr - firr - firr, its own name, loosening its needles of rust that slid into the yellow and green burning shell to prick tiny stitches across the living and lived-in wound where the children found, first and happiest, fairy tales.

And a small green eaten book by Ernest Dowson4 who said, in confidence, to Cynara,

—Last night ah yesternight betwixt her lips and mine.

Which was love, and suitable only for Francie who had come, that was the word their mother used when she whispered about it in the bathroom, and not for Daphne who didn’t know what it felt like or how she could wear them without they showed and people said, Look.

—You will drop blood when you walk, Francie said.

And not knowing how to answer her, Daphne said

—Rapunsel, Rapunsel,5 let down your hair;
quoting from the prince who climbed the gold silk rope to the top of the tower, it was all in the fairy tales they found at the rubbish dump. The book smelt, and it too had been eaten by worms which still lived in its yellow pages, and it was dusted over with ashes, and it had been thrown away because it did not any more speak the right language, and the people could not read it because they could not find the way to its world. It had curly writing on the cover, saying, The Brothers Grimm. It spoke of Cinderella and her ugly sisters with their cut-off heel and toe and the blood flowing black, the snow colour of every bean flower.

—But I don’t wanner go to school, Toby said. I wanner go

to the rubbish dump an’ find another book.

The lady doctor was coming to school that day. She wore a grey costume and because she was the school nurse and fierce, they had her mixed in their mind with the grey nurse shark that is deadly, creeping behind you when you swim, to swallow you in one gulp; though not found in these waters, only, I believe, near Sydney.

Every time she came the nurse took the dirty children to look at them and whisper at them through a roll of cardboard. Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one, she would whisper; and the children, if they were the dirty ones and being examined, would have to echo, Thirty-two, fifty-five, sixty-one; and if they echoed correctly it meant they could hear and would not have their ears poked at and operated on. And the lady doctor would then take a stick like an ice-cream spoon and very very gently part the strands of the pupil’s hair, to look through it and find if it were inhabited.6 She would look at their clothes, too, and see how often they had been washed, and if they were hand-me-downs or new. And she would hold a square of cardboard in front of the dirty children and point to the letters printed on it, and expect to be told the alphabet, muddled up, and them to see small print, even smaller than the middle column of a page of the Bible where it says See Tim. Rom. Deut., and other mysterious words.

Toby did not like this. He feared it all. He had seen on a page of the doctor’s book that his mother kept on top of the wardrobe, a picture of the animals with many legs that walk through people’s hair; and the red spots that come on people’s faces, and the way legs turn crooked. Toby was a sick boy, himself, who took medicine, a teaspoon in water after each meal until his mother found out what the writing on the prescription meant. And then,

—Bromide, she said. Drugs.

So whenever the bottle of medicine came, in twos or repeats, Toby’s mother said

—No child of mine, no child of mine will drink this filth; and she broke the seal and popped off the cork and poured away the thick mulatto fluid.

Toby did not get better. He went to school and sat in the back row and put his head on one side, trying to know what was written on the blackboard and what the master, Andy Reid, was saying in the history lesson.

There had been Maori Wars and the white people had taken a block of land—how big is a block of land, Toby wondered. They built houses with blocks and walked in the morning around the block, touching every second fence and plucking every third marigold. But this block of land in history, they say it held a forest of kauri7 that only a storm could walk round in a minute and pull out by the hair, every second and third tree.

—The government was good then, Andy would say.

And sometimes he said—The government was bad.

And he talked of peace and war that never seemed to happen at the same time in history. There were, say, six years of peace when Maoris and white people spent every day and night of the years smiling at each other and rubbing noses and exchanging greenstone and kumaras and kauri and marrying and going for picnics and boiling the billy8 and drinking tea and eating fish and laughing and no one was ever angry.

Until the six years finished. On New Year’s Eve, perhaps, with the white and brown people standing outside the New Year, the same way people stand outside theatres and cricket grounds waiting for the films or the shield match to begin; and the mothers warning their children, Remember you must not laugh or play or swap anything. We are killing for six years. It is War.

Toby could not imagine years of war, but Andy Reid told everyone and Andy Reid knew. He said also that there had been a Hundred Years’ War when some people’s faces must have been born angry and died angry without any smiling in between.

But history was hard to understand with its kings good and bad and their wigs and their white fitting pants for dancing a minuet; and then the two princes sitting in the dreadful tower and listening to the water dripping from an underground cavern on to their faces and down their necks and on their heads poked like flowers from their pretty petal ruffs. Toby felt sorry for them but he could not understand history and wanting to get more land and gold; nor, sometimes, could he understand what the master said, or read the words on the blackboard. And that is why he wanted not to go to school when the lady doctor came.

He was often sick and had to stay away from school. When he was sick his hand shook as if it felt cold and then a dark cloak would be thrown over his head by Jesus or God, and he would struggle inside the cloak, pushing at the velvet folds, waving his arms and legs in the air till the sun took pity, descending in a dazzling crane of light to haul, but, alas, preserve, where in all the sky, Toby wondered, this cloak of stifling recurring dream. And he would open his eyes and see his mother beside him, her big tummy and the map of wet and flour on her sack apron.

He would cry then.

The velvet cloak came over and over again so that whenever Toby moved his hand or arm too quickly, his mother would rush to his side and ask,

—Are you all right, Toby?

Or at school Andy Reid would say,

—You can go and lie down, Toby Withers, and you may be able to stop it.

—It?

Did Andy Reid understand what happened, and how the cloak came with its forest of a million folds? Did he know why some people are given a private and lonely night, with a room of its own but no window that the stars, called by the tattered woman at the show Zodiac, may look through?

So Toby did not go to school that day when the lady doctor came. He said goodbye to his mother and father and said,

—Yes, I’ve got a hanky and I’ll tell them if it comes on; and he ran on ahead of Daphne. Daphne was glad, for it made her afraid to be close to him in case it happened and she was alone watching him, and he would die or choke out of the terrible mulberry colour of his face and his hands twitching and his eyes rolled back, and white, like the eye, closed, of a dead fowl that Daphne had seen by the fowl house. And yet, standing there on the wet side of the street, with Toby gone ahead, and the African Thorn hedge, hung with berries like penny oranges, leaning over to jag her legs if she walked too close, she felt alone, and wanted to catch up; so she caught up and went with Toby to the rubbish dump to find things. They found a bicycle wheel and a motor tyre. Inside the motor tyre was a stack of ledgers full of neat writing and figures written carefully in a beautiful blue ink; and each page seemed, to the children, like something out of a museum, to be kept under a glass case, like the handwriting of a pioneer or governor.

Daphne gathered the books and put them in her lap, stroking them because they were valuable.

—These are treasures, she said. Better than silver paper, this lovely...