A Mind Cast Out

The Edge of the Alphabet

by Janet Frame.

London: Fitzcarraldo, 289 pp., £12.99 (paper)

The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame had a rather startling story to tell about the relationship between her work as a writer and her existence as a human being. Writing saved her life, she explained, and she meant it literally. In December 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, after spending more than seven years in and out of various psychiatric institutions—following a suicide attempt in 1945 and a hurried diagnosis of schizophrenia—she was institutionalized again and scheduled for a leukotomy, or prefrontal lobotomy. Her mother had signed the consent form. In anguish and fear Frame was counting down the days till the surgery when her short story collection The Lagoon won what was then New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award, the Hubert Church Memorial Prize.

I repeat that my writing saved me. I had seen in the ward office the list of those “down for a leucotomy,” with my name on the list, and other names being crossed off as the operation was performed. My “turn” must have been very close when one evening the superintendent of the hospital, Dr Blake Palmer, made an unusual visit to the ward. He spoke to me—to the amazement of everyone.

As it was my first chance to discuss with anyone, apart from those who had persuaded me, the prospect of my operation, I said urgently, “Dr Blake Palmer, what do you think?”

He pointed to the newspaper in his hand.

“About the prize?”

I was bewildered. What prize?

“No,” I said, “about the leucotomy.”

He looked stern, “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.”

This last-minute reprieve was the beginning of a slow return to life outside institutions (although Frame would later voluntarily spend two long spells in the Maudsley Hospital in London, where she was told that she did not suffer—and never had—from schizophrenia). She went on to publish eleven novels and numerous short stories, to travel (she lived in Ibiza and England and spent long periods of time in the United States), and to win many more prizes and awards. Eleanor Catton’s assessment of Frame as “the greatest New Zealand writer… utterly herself” is now regularly printed (1982–1985), that readers tend to know, and more familiar still is the 1990 film adaptation, directed by Jane Campion, with an astonishing performance by Kerry Fox as the pathologically shy and fragile grown-up Frame.