Steve Braunias sets the record straight on a literary achievement
It was with tremendous confidence – always a dangerous state of affairs – that I claimed almost in passing in ReadingRoom last week that Vincent O'Sulllivan had recently become the first New Zealand writer to win each category in the national book awards. His biography of Ralph Hotere won the non-fiction prize at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand book awards in May, giving him a spectacular hat-trick as the previous winner of the fiction prize (1982, 1993) and winner of the poetry prize (1999, 2014).
But the claim is wrong. Kind of. I mean it's right as far as it goes for writers who were alive at the time their books were published and certainly it's always preferable to be alive when prizes are handed out. But it never pays to under-estimate the powers of the dead to talk, and so it was that immediately after my claim appeared in ReadingRoom, a post appeared on Facebook to state that the first New Zealand writer to win each category in the national book awards was, in fact, Janet Frame. As well as winnning the fiction prize in 1980 and 1989, and the non-fiction prize in 1983, 1984 and 1985 (for each volume of her incredible trilogy of autobiographies), she also won the poetry prize, posthumously, in 2006.
Frame died in 2004. O'Sullivan is very much alive. I can claim this with really tremendous confidence because I ran into him last month in Dunedin and Auckland. But while that makes him the first living New Zealand writer to win each category in the national book awards, it must be stated for the historical record that Janet Frame beat him to it, beyond the grave, to become the first New Zealand writer dead or alive to win each category in the national book awards.
I was alerted to the Facebook post about Frame's achievement by a colleague at Newsroom. "Let me guess," I replied. "It was posted by Pamela Gordon." And of course it was. As Frame's niece, and chair of the Janet Frame Literary Trust, she has worked tirelessly and indefatigably to keep the flame of Frame's genius burning bright, and to set the record straight wherever she reasons it may be wronged or in some way dishonoured.
An example is set out in the newly published third volume of CK Stead's memoirs. He reveals in What You Made Of It, "In South-West of Eden [the first volume of his memoirs] I had made the mistake of quoting a letter from Janet Frame without getting permission from the copyright holder, her niece Pamela Gordon. It was a letter to me and in my possession, so I was its legal owner; but I should have remembered that in law I owned the document, not the copyright…There was nothing amicable about the Frame faction's response. They wanted my book withdrawn, and when that was refused, they made it clear it was going to cost me and Auckland University Press dearly. I am prevented by the legal agreement from spelling out the detail - but there was no profit in the book for me, and a significant loss for the Press and the university."
The book that won Frame the poetry prize in 2006, The Goose Bath, was edited by Pamela Gordon, her partner Denis Harold, and Bill Manhire. "I promised Frame on her deathbed that I would get a volume of her poetry published as soon as possible," Gordon told the New Yorker magazine.
It was put together in unusual circumstances, as described by Susannah Whaley, writing in Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics: "Janet Frame died before she could collect and present the poems of her later years…The task was passed to others, who acknowledge that The Goose Bath, published posthumously from drafts Frame kept in a receptacle once used as a bath for geese, is not the book as Frame would have presented it…. These are poems picked up from where they were left at the writer’s desk, extracted from amongst polished and unpolished works. The poems are fragments, reflections of experience snatched from the world and Frame’s mind, perhaps forgotten, picked up again, added to, discarded…Bill Manhire notes that Frame’s goose bath often contained several versions of the same poem, and it was up to the editors to choose the one which they believed was the most finished. The Goose Bath therefore represents not only Frame’s writing, but the choices of its editors."
Gordon, in that New Yorker interview: "Posthumous publishing is common enough in the history of literature, although the default position of the critics seems to be that posthumous work is by definition going to be inferior to the lifetime oeuvre." Well - yeah. After The Goose Bath won the prize for poetry at the 2006 New Zealand book awards, the rules were changed to prevent such a thing from happening again. Rule number six of the Ockham New Zealand national book awards eligibility criteria states, "Deceased authors’ books are not eligible for entry unless the author died after the book’s manuscript was submitted to and accepted by its publisher."
At any rate, and to repeat: Frame, not O'Sullivan, is the first New Zealand writer to win all three categories at the national book awards.
I tracked O'Sullivan down at his lair in Port Chalmers and asked how he felt about this state of affairs. He replied, "How do I feel? Suitably Framed. And perhaps to sneak in while living, does have the edge on posthumously."
