In the Memorial Room by Janet Frame

the search for the ‘truth’ in words. His conversation, I was told, included only things visible. He spoke nouns, pronouns, and verbs. ‘I take tea.’ ‘I took tea.’ And prepositions:
    I take tea with you.
    They use the boat on the Mediterranean.
    There was a fall of snow on the mountains.
    All references to emotion were excluded because they could not be described accurately. There was no reference to things of the spirit: no abstract words – ‘truth’ was excluded in the search for the truth – no descriptions apart from those of agreed measurement, e.g. the temperature of the air, the size of a room, the shape of an object (round, square and so on), hardness and softness, where they were without dispute, could be discussed. Also colours, and so on. Everything, that is, acknowledged to be in common sight. No thoughts. Not, ‘I think I will have a cup of tea’ but ‘I will have a cup of tea.’ ‘I will write a letter.’
    And the letter when it is written, say, to relatives in England, would (I’m told) go something like this:
    Margaret,
Your letter arrived yesterday. You wrote of your journey to Bognor Regis, and that the weather there was fine with the temperature eighteen degrees Celsius. Here I look at the sea, I go walking on fine days, I work in the garden, where I have planted geraniums, chrysanthemums, spinach, a small olive tree a metre high, beans and daffodils which will be in bloom in early March.
    For lunch I have pot-au-feu which contains vitamins, protein, and vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, leeks. I drink wine with my meal. Also I eat camembert cheese, blue vein cheese, goat’s milk cheese and a cheese which contains walnuts both as a nut itself and in the flavour where the nut is not embedded.
    I write all this because, suddenly confronted by the retirement of people and their hopes for their retirement, and then hearing – I forget where, or maybe I imagined it – the story of the retired professor whose chief study had been Shakespeare and whose preoccupation in retirement became the stripping of his mind of the corruptions of language, and thinking also of the trouble with my eyes and of Doctor Alberto Rumor, and finding myself suddenly with a beautiful room and desk and typewriter lent to me by the retired Fosters, I developed a combination of hauntings which resulted in the ideas for my novel. And I began to write it, spending long hours at the new desk, sometimes visiting the Memorial Room, to work there in the damp atmosphere of a tomb where the small birds, however, always came to sing to me, uttering their secrets which I could not understand, and from time to time meeting the Watercresses, all four, in their pursuit of Rose Hurndell. Michael tracked down a woman who had seen Rose admiring a magnolia tree, whereupon Max, in a morning of family ‘stint’ commanded the family to ‘draw Rose Hurndell by the magnolia tree’. These family sessions were a life-blood life-paint or -prose to Max in his openly desperate attempt to keep his son by his side to neutralise, by making a chemical composition of mother, father, son, the potent effect of the mixture of the wife, Grace, with the son, Michael. Max sensed his attempt would result in failure once the four left Menton – he and Connie for New Zealand, and Michael and Grace for London – and you could see a despair in his eyes, and tears sometimes, when he realised the hopelessness of his dream.
    Regularly, the Watercresses claimed me, for a journey, for a visit, for a meal, to enlist my cooperation in their annihilation of me and their replacement of me by their son. I realised this. I was no longer afraid. The Fosters were more to be feared, I sensed: their mutual assurance of their complete happiness was beginning to show signs of collapse and they were looking around for a strengthening or repairing instrument. Until the Rose Hurndell letters had been edited and published (an American publisher had made a contract with