an angel at my table

spring grass at Willow Manor

I picked up a lovely hardback copy of Janet Frame's autobiography, An Angel At My Table, at G-Dub last Friday.  I fell in love with Frame several years ago, after seeing Jane Campion's film, by the same title.  Today I sat down to read, and was bowled over by this brief, but stunning, first chapter:

The future accumulates like a weight upon the past. The weight upon the earliest years is easier to remove to let that time spring up like grass that has been crushed.  The years following childhood become welded to their future, massed like stone, and often the time beneath cannot spring back into growth like new grass:  it lies bled of its green in a new shape with those frail bloodless sprouts of another, unfamiliar time, entangled one with the other beneath the stone.  

Frame's Pocket Mirror, 1967, a collection of some of her poetry is brilliant, by the way.

forgive me, jane campion

Last fall, upon arriving home from one of his traveling escapades, WT ask me if I wanted to go see the new Jane Campion movie, Bright Star, the story of the Romantic poet, John Keats, and his love for Frances "Fanny" Brawne.  He knows what a huge fan I am of Campion.  My reply was, "eh".  After a seemingly long string of mediocre Austenish period films, I wasn't in the mood. 

Well, I finally watched the DVD, and am quite ashamed of myself for thinking the stellar Ms. Campion could ever be mediocre. Yes, it is a gorgeous, lush, period film.  But, Campion's work (she wrote the screenplay, as well as directed) has a certain edgy, artistic bite, which sets it apart from the others. This one is certainly no exception. Add this movie to your queue right now. You'll thank me.

The following is a sonnet by Keats, inspired by his love for Brawne.


Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The background music in the above video is from a wonderful scene in the film of an orchestra of male voices singing Mozart's Serenade No. 10, in B-flat major, K.  Heaven. Absolute heaven.

(one little bit of interesting Campionia:  Kerry Fox, the redheaded wild girl of Campion's An Angel at My Table nearly two decades ago, portrays Brawne's mother in this film)

An Angel at my Table

You've probably noticed from my sidebar, that I'm reading a book by New Zealand novelist and poet, Janet Frame, Towards Another Summer, written while she was in London in 1963. She considered the book to be too personal to share during her lifetime and it was just published this year (2009).

This week's Netflix pick An Angel at my Table, 1989, was originally produced as a three part miniseries for New Zealand television. I had seen this movie years ago, but wanted to watch it again, since my interest in Frame has been renewed with the novel. I enjoyed it even more the second time around.

It is superbly directed by Jane Campion (The Piano) and is based on the autobiography Janet Frame. Starting with her birth in 1924, it covers the first forty years of her life and takes nearly three hours to tell the story. The film is divided into three sections, but I was so intrigued, I had to watch the whole thing at one setting.

Suffering from introversion and depression, Frame was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic and spent eight years in a psychiatric hospital, nearly lobotomized. Frame would later become one of New Zealand's most celebrated poets and novelists, publishing her first books while she was still confined to a mental ward.

This film follows her harrowing and often frightening journey as she struggles to accomplish her life's dream of writing, which she used as a form of survival and self defense. Three talented actors play Frame at different ages throughout the film, with Kerry Fox, pictured above, giving a powerful performance as the young adult Janet, whose skill and creative perseverance would prove to be her salvation.