Notes on a friendship

We seldom write letters these days, but 50 years ago it was usual, if not common, to carry on a correspondence by letter, as we might by text or email now.

The difference, of course, is that many letters survive, and when they are written by notable people, they are of great interest to later generations.

A taste of an epistolary conversation between Janet Frame (1924-2004) and Charles Brasch (1909-1973), two literary giants of the mid-20th century with Dunedin connections, is being hand-printed by Holloway Press in a fine-press edition of 150 copies.

The idea arose as a tribute from the Janet Frame Literary Trust to celebrate the 100th birthday last year of her friend Charles Brasch, according to Frame's niece and literary executor Pamela Gordon.

"We'd been reading through her various letters and discovered after Charles died she wrote to her dear friend in the States, Bill Brown, and over a series of letters she poured out her view of Charles and her memory of him.

"It was such a beautiful tribute to Charles from someone who was incredibly perceptive and eloquent. We had the idea to publish it somewhere as the Janet Frame Estate's tribute," she said.

Gordon and her partner Denis Harold conceived a performance of extracts from letters that were like a conversation between the two, and with the permission of Brasch's literary executor Alan Roddick, they selected and edited portions of their letters to each other. These were read at the 2009 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and are now being published as Dear Charles Dear Janet.

The first letters between them were those of a writer submitting her work to an editor and his replies. Brasch founded and edited Landfall, a literary journal, which published her story "Alison Hendry" in June 1947 under the pseudonym Jan Godfrey. Her first adult story, "University Entrance", had been published in the Listener the previous year.

"He didn't initially recognise, I think, how good her work was but he came to, and he was a firm advocate for it," Gordon said.

However, their initial meeting in Dunedin in 1947 was inauspicious.

It was engineered by John Money, Frame's psychotherapist who took an interest in her writing and sent one of her stories to Brasch, who published it.

Money was about to leave for New York and Frame had come from Oamaru to say farewell, not expecting to find another person at their last meeting. As she did when Money had tried to introduce her to James K. Baxter in the same way, she refused to talk.

"Charles being himself of a nervy and shy disposition, was the one who fled after an awkward half an hour," says Gordon.

According to Michael King's biography of Frame. Wrestling with the Angel, Frame wrote to Money later "by way of part-explanation, part-apology: 'I am a moron when people talk to me. My mind freezes'."

Gordon explains Frame's reticence in the presence of strangers: "She took exception to being treated like a child or like someone who had no agency for herself. So she came in to meet [Money] and here was this other person. Throughout her whole life she had to put up with this, especially as she became very famous.