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Dead writers can be dangerous
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This short, funny and often beautifully written novel — completed in the early 1970s but just now being published — provides an excellent occasion for remembering the weird wisdom and genuine talent of Janet Frame, who died in 2004 after a startlingly diverse life. Born and raised in New Zealand (her mother worked as a maid for Katherine Mansfield’s family, her father for the railroad), Frame developed a youthful love of poetry that sustained her through several years spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals — until the publication of her first book, a collection of stories called “The Lagoon,” in 1951. (After her receipt of a major literary award, her doctor sensibly decided against giving her a lobotomy.)
Harry Gill, the protagonist of “In the Memorial Room,” shares much with Frame: He is awarded an international literary fellowship that takes him to Europe and the dreary, cold and poorly plumbed former home of a deceased writer; he seems glad to leave New Zealand for France; he devotes himself so thoroughly to writing that he often ignores the rest of his life. He even starts to feel as if that life is vanishing — or he is vanishing from it. (Possibly both.) He begins to lose contact with the outside world. His sight dims, his hearing fades. He becomes a world unto himself.
The problem with being a writer, Harry decides, is that it teaches him to pay more attention to the fictive than to the real. “I am the kind of person who is inclined to miss the best trains, to find the worst rooms in hotels, the surliest waiters in restaurants; nor am I the kind of person to protest, for the life-long disability with my eyesight has accustomed me to the belief that others see the ‘real’ world but I do not — how can I when my eyesight is defective; I have to take the words of others and of the world on trust.” There is, Harry reflects, an essential “nothingness” in his nature.
The problem with literature, Harry concludes, is that this very nothingness — like the nothingness of the dead writer, Margaret Rose Hurndell, in whose honor his award has been given — is what critics and readers memorialize. His social life is consumed by people who knew Rose, who adored Rose, who edit and produce books about Rose and who write their own poems in the spirit of Rose. Even more disconcerting, they’re all starting to look at Harry with that same dim glow of admiration in their eyes. They offer him places to live and work and write. They want to be near him. They cherish the flame that, Harry starts to believe, isn’t inside him anymore.
The problem with the adoring fans is that they can’t stop “feeding on the death of Rose Hurndell, nourishing themselves with the power of permanence which death has and which they so much desire. ... They constituted a power, a permanent storm, which could strike the so-called ‘innocent bystander’ who because of his circumstances must join the circle about the dead and because of his nature, the nothing-nature of a novelist who lives only through his characters, must be obliterated, erased.” Being a writer in a dead writer’s house is like being haunted by yourself.
“In the Memorial Room” is filled with terrifyingly beautiful reflections on how writing books (and even reading them) can feel like digging your own grave. It also serves as a sly warning to those of us who obsessively cherish the works of dead writers. Watch out! The death you memorialize may well be your own.
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