In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame Page A

secretly, moving my desk back and forth, and enjoying their triumphant expression each day when they saw how my desk and my papers were surrounded by the instruments of alteration. I say ‘triumphant’. Had I talked to them of my interpretation of their expression they would have been alarmed and horrified, and exclaimed, —We’re doing this all for you , to make you comfortable so you can write .
    They’d smile and frown, —Oh Harry, you must think we’re awful, but this is to make you comfortable.
    Perhaps I was indulged as a child. I remember that on particularly cold cheerless days my mother would say to me, ‘You don’t want to go to school today, do you, Harry?’ And I’d be tempted not to go, my mother’s painting a picture of such miserable weather inducing me to shiver at the prospect of the wet and the cold and to think favourably of my mother’s kindly qualities. It was only later when I was growing up that I realised it was my mother’s need, her loneliness, which led her to try to keep me home on a wet cold day. She felt that by going to school I was abandoning her. I have observed this attitude towards people who write or paint or compose or in any way desert the living and the visible world to create a world of their own that is a threat to the existence and survival of the generally known world. I have known people to use all kinds of delaying tactics (and the writers, composers and painters and such like themselves use these for are not they as afraid of the threat of the destruction and recreation of the known world?), —Don’t write today. Come and visit us. Let’s talk. Let’s drink. Let’s make love. You don’t really want to work today, do you? Don’t desert us, don’t threaten us, stay here with us, safe in the known world, looking at the sky and the sunlight, relaxing, after all you’re a long time dead .

    The old powerful clichés that don’t even speak the truth, for death is the signal for immediate resurrection, since the souls of the living are designed as scavengers.

    Therefore, while I condemned the strategy of the Fosters, to possess me, to alter me, to obliterate me, I understood their fears, for I had the same fears myself, but it has been my weakness or my strength or both that I am an observer, a nothingness which or who, suffering intended annihilation, is apt to exclaim, with interested attention, I understand the motive . My policy is disengagement; perhaps I should call it my impulse.
    My fellow writers have called me a man of straw. I do not write political articles. I do not march in demonstrations. I do not make my voice heard against tyranny, injustice. In private life I turn the other cheek as I murmur I understand the motive , therefore I do not even have a claim to be a Christian, in the sense of a follower of Christ, for I make no protest to the boss when I realise that the work he has asked me to do will result in my death and when, at the last minute, I doubt the truth of the promises he made when he himself foretold my death. Being nothing, then, am I to join the ranks of the poverty-stricken bad poets who cry, ‘I am the dawn, the wind, the sky’, an assertion which has not even the properties of logic, since the cry is not also, ‘I am a parking lot, a jet plane, a shark, a vulture’. Am I also seeking my own annihilation, as Dr Rumor believed? And therefore do I gather about myself a favourable climate and the people who will act as the prevailing weather? Then why have I not been destroyed before now?
    These were the questions I asked myself as I sat at my desk in the tiny corridor and tried to write my fiction. I began to grow afraid of the new appliances. They were precious; they cost many thousands of francs; their instruction booklets, encased in plastic slip-covers, had the confidence of a well-advertised ‘brilliant first novel’ and the gloss of a record.
    ‘Faites connaissance avec votre cuisinière jeunes foyers’
    Gaz,