{"id":105963,"date":"2016-12-19T15:29:39","date_gmt":"2016-12-19T20:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=105963"},"modified":"2016-12-19T16:21:35","modified_gmt":"2016-12-19T21:21:35","slug":"shirley-hazzard-1921-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/12\/19\/shirley-hazzard-1921-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Shirley Hazzard, 1931\u20132016"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Photo: New York Society Library<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The call came at eleven at night. I was breathless, having raced inside to pick up. I\u2019d been on my way out to dinner, and only a shot of curiosity at who might have been calling at such an hour, on a Friday, had urged me to run back and catch it.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs this Matthew Specktor?\u201d<\/p>\n

The voice on the other end was remote. It sounded, for a moment, as if she might have been calling from somewhere far away\u2014an analog, transatlantic connection\u2014but that wasn\u2019t it. The accent wasn\u2019t American, wasn\u2019t Australian, wasn\u2019t English, certainly, although it muddled a few of these things.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is Shirley Hazzard \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Once I got to know her\u2014it would take a few years\u2014I\u2019d understand that this \u201cremoteness\u201d was not geographical but temporal. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. But just then what I felt was surprise\u2014something akin to what an astronomer might\u2019ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Proof of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Six months earlier, I\u2019d sent a letter. I was fevered with admiration after having read Hazzard\u2019s novel The Transit of Venus<\/em>. For reasons I couldn\u2019t quite explain\u2014I had a job then that involved acquiring film rights to literary properties, which meant it would\u2019ve been easy enough simply to call her agent, if such was what I wanted to know; although of course I was writing a novel of my own, so there was that, too\u2014I\u2019d looked her up in the telephone directory. Rather, I\u2019d tried to. There was no listing under her name, but I remembered she\u2019d been married to Francis Steegmuller, the late, great Flaubert scholar. Sure enough, there was<\/em> a listing, with address, for one \u201cSteegmuller, F.,\u201d on East Sixty-Sixth Street. Lacking the nerve to call, I wrote. And waited. And as the weeks lapsed into months, I assumed, fairly enough, that my letter had either never been received or had, more probably, been ignored. Why not? Hazzard certainly had better things to do than ward off importunate admirers.<\/p>\n

Shirley was calling, that night in 1996, to ask for my address. That was all\u2014our conversation was brief. She\u2019d received my letter only to misplace it, and now wanted to respond. She said something about having been in Italy for the past several months\u2014I didn\u2019t yet know she divided her time between her place on the Upper East Side and the one on Capri\u2014and how the mail tended to disappear after it had stacked up on the stove. (It would be a while before I saw what this meant, how her modest-but-elegant apartment in Manhattan House was deluged<\/em> with correspondence: books, letters, manuscripts, communiques from all corners of the world piled on her dining table, coffee table, kitchen counter \u2026)<\/p>\n

A week or so later there came her response: typed, on blue stationery, with a handwritten postscript. She deflected my praise with a wryness I would come to know as characteristic:<\/p>\n

I happily accept comparison with Middlemarch <\/em>and War and Peace<\/em>, fantastical as such analogy is; since those are works to which I feel very close, from which scenes and passages are vivid to me\u2014one feels that they are one\u2019s own, as Burckhardt would say, \u201cby right of admiration.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cAs Burckhardt would say\u201d? I might have cringed inwardly, but there was no Google, then, to which I could refer the question: Burckhardt who? As Shirley and I struck up a sporadic but sturdy correspondence, I secreted away whatever bits of knowledge I could. She impelled me to read Leopardi. I might, if I could slide the question into a letter without sounding like a fool, wonder which translations of Eugenio Montale, say, she preferred? (For those of us who had to read him in translation at all. Shirley\u2019s Italian\u2014as her French, so far as I could tell; I presumed there were other languages too\u2014would ultimately demonstrate itself as immaculate.)<\/p>\n

But what struck me, as I began to know her\u2014on the page, both in her occasional letters and through her other books, all of which were then out of print\u2014was that remoteness I mentioned before. There was nothing antique about it. She didn\u2019t seem to be living in, or writing out of, a vanished past so much as living with<\/em> it, carrying it around with her. And to call it erudition would be a disservice. She breathed literature, or indeed what one would have to call\u2014to use a word that is now almost embarrassing, indicative as it is of everything we have even since lost\u2014culture. I\u2019ve never met a more civilized, which is to say a more complete, human being. It\u2019s painful to consider now that I\u2014that most of us\u2014likely never will.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

<\/a>

The first edition of The Transit of Venus<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Transit of Venus<\/em> is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century. It\u2019s difficult to make such a straight, simple claim without wanting to modify or amplify it, but it is. It is greater than any novel by Don DeLillo. It is greater than any work by Alice Munro\u00a0or Thomas Pynchon. No disrespect to those three indisputable geniuses, or to anyone else whose books have been tagged, however deservedly, with the word masterpiece<\/em>, but I\u2019m hard-pressed to think of a better novel than Shirley\u2019s.<\/p>\n

I read everything of hers. At that time, she was still working on The Great Fire<\/em>, and hadn\u2019t published a novel in fifteen years. She\u2019d written two nonfiction books, Defeat of an Ideal<\/em> (1973) and Countenance of Truth<\/em> (1990), the latter an account of how Kurt Waldheim managed to conceal his Nazi past and become the leader of the UN, where Hazzard herself had worked in the 1950s. But my attention was drawn, naturally, to the fiction. The Evening of the Holiday<\/em> was a short, Jamesian novel about an affair between an older Italian man and a young, half-English visitor; The Bay of Noon<\/em> (1970) was more expansive, if similarly Jamesian in its frame: a young woman, this time positioned in Naples as a NATO<\/small> observer, becomes involved with an Italian writer and her lover, a famous filmmaker. This one had more of the telescopic intelligence, the sheer magnanimity\u2014I\u2019ll come to it in a moment\u2014of Hazzard\u2019s later novels,\u00a0but it\u00a0felt still like a rehearsal. There were also two collections of stories, Cliffs of Fall<\/em>, published in 1963, which rounded up her early fiction published in The New Yorker<\/em>, and People in Glass Houses<\/em>, a curious, satirical collection of linked pieces based on her experience at the UN.<\/p>\n

The Transit of Venus<\/em>, though. Where had it come from? I\u2019d never read anything quite like it\u2014still haven\u2019t\u2014and so was reduced to sleuthing her letters and the rudimentary Internet for old interviews and articles, then marching over to Gotham Book Mart on my lunch hour to find what I could. Elizabeth Bowen? Patrick White? Muriel Spark, maybe? (Hazzard had mentioned in one of her letters a friendship, and a falling out, but no. For all of her early books\u2019 excellence, there was none of Hazzard\u2019s planetary grandeur in Spark.) The accomplishment wasn\u2019t merely one of style, though it was certainly that, too; it was one of scale<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In one sense, The Transit of Venus<\/em> is a love story: a young astronomer comes to study with an older, eminent one in England, in the 1950s. He meets and falls in love with the astronomer\u2019s Australian ward, a girl named Caroline Bell. The next thirty years of his life will be dedicated to his\u2014possibly, seemingly\u2014fruitless pursuit of her. That\u2019s \u2026 not much. It sounds, in a way, like it could easily be a bodice ripper, or at least a more minor-key triumph. To treat private passion as a matter of import\u2014and of course Hazzard\u2019s triumph is that she both does and does not\u2014is to risk seeming sentimental, even ridiculous, in the late twentieth century. Except that Hazzard politicizes it. By sending Caro to work in a government office, by making young Ted Tice\u2019s argument over the placement of a telescope a matter of iconoclastic conviction, Hazzard has greater things\u2014if there are greater things\u2014on her mind than love. The novel moves: from rural England, to Australia, to London, to South America, to Stockholm, to New York. Its people move (even, briefly, to Los Angeles; a fair-haired playwright named Paul Ivory writes a letter from a hotel that sounds suspiciously like the Chateau Marmont: \u201cSo far, California offers the greatest contrast imaginable between the works of God and the desecrations of Man. California is a beautiful woman with a foul tongue.\u201d) And the various forms of unrest that rippled through the sixties and seventies are present throughout:<\/p>\n

In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war in Asia. In Greece, the plays of Aristophanes were forbidden, in China the writings of Confucius \u2026<\/p>\n

On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy, a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What sounds a little cursory here, in excerpt, begins to unlock the novel\u2019s defining quality: its elevated, sometimes uncomfortably Olympian, perspective. Which is partly, but not exclusively, tied to its style, an unabashed omniscience that hesitates not at all to tell us things its characters do not know. There are no spoilers in this novel. We learn on page twelve that the protagonist will eventually commit suicide. What we do not know until the book\u2019s final, pulverizing paragraph is why.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tempting to refer to this style as nineteenth century, but that\u2019s not it. One can hear in the passage quoted above a note\u2014several notes, in fact\u2014that are distinctly more modern, not least the incredulous dismay that concludes it. Hazzard\u2019s aphoristic intelligence goes full tilt here. Her simple descriptive powers are no less lethal:<\/p>\n

A man stood on a white porch and looked at the Andes. He was over fifty, white-haired, thin, with a stooping walk that suggested an orthopaedic defect, but in fact derived from beatings received in prison. His appearance was slightly unnatural in other ways\u2014pink, youthful lips and light, light-lashed eyes: an impression, nearly albinic, that his white suit intensified.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Really, though, the book\u2019s achievement goes beyond style, and even beyond structure. The characters exist within, and at the mercy of, a widest possible cosmos. As the astronomical metaphor of its title suggests, Venus <\/em>grapples squarely with the unanswerable: the gulf between man and \u2026 well, whatever word applies when God seems far too domestic a concept.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Photo: Roberto Pane<\/p><\/div>\n

I met Shirley, finally, in 1999. I\u2019d prevailed upon my friends at The Paris Review<\/em>\u2014former management\u2014to allow me to conduct an interview. The project ultimately failed (I was living in Los Angeles at the time, and the difficulty of coordinating my schedule with Shirley\u2019s was knocked aside when George Plimpton decided to have J. D. McClatchy conduct it instead, on evidence<\/a> a superior idea), but it gave me an excuse to knock on her door. I did, tape recorder in hand, and that first day we spent three or four hours together. She talked, for the most part, and I listened. She showed me her apartment, which seemed fully inhabited by two people, rather than just one. Her husband, Francis, had died five years earlier, but his presence, and their relationship, felt ineradicable. There was the overcoat hanging on a stand, the English brand of tooth powder in the spare bathroom. At one point, Shirley was showing me a photograph taken on Capri and indicated, with a delighted grin, how he\u2019d crept into the frame.<\/p>\n

\u201cLook,\u201d she said. \u201cHis toe!\u201d<\/p>\n

One can never speculate too far upon the intimate lives or losses of others, but what struck me then, and on each subsequent meeting, was how he seemed to remain. This wasn\u2019t a Miss Havisham situation: Shirley never struck me as someone draped in desiccated widow\u2019s weeds. Rather, she was someone whose past was so fully vitalized within the present that it seemed almost inseparable. In fact, one of the qualities I noted in Shirley was how young<\/em> she could now and again seem. Not in the way you\u2019d expect, bursts of energy or vitality or any sort of cosmetic indication of \u201cbeauty.\u201d It was something that happened when she spoke of things or people she\u2019d loved. Her face would seem\u2014this is hard to describe, since I honestly can\u2019t say I\u2019ve ever observed this in any other human being\u2014to blur<\/em>, almost. She would appear, at least to me, almost girlish. At one point in that first conversation she brought up a poem<\/a> by Thomas Hardy, and recited it from memory. As she did, her voice broke a little, and her eyes clouded. It was perhaps the most immediate reading of a poem I\u2019d ever encountered. And yet there, too, the distance between the poem and its meaning to her, whatever memories it carried, seemed to collapse altogether.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reluctant to lean on such subjectivities. I knew Shirley for the better part of a decade after that, before we fell out of touch. For a while, in the fall of 2004, when I was living again in New York with my then-wife and our infant daughter, I saw her often: we would have lunch at least once a week, and we came to speak regularly on the phone. I came to know her, at least, as someone unflappably elegant (I will never again see a pair of Ferragamo shoes without thinking of her), unerringly gracious, and\u2014at least at times\u2014as abundant in her speech as she was in her written language. I\u2019d actually managed, eventually, to track down and acquire the film rights to The Transit of Venus<\/em>, and then to adapt the novel myself\u2014the project was then in development at Warner Brothers\u2014so we spoke a fair bit about work, both mine and hers. But I don\u2019t pretend to have known her any better than that. I would often observe the way she reached directly into the fathomless past. Asking after a small painting above her mantle that proved, upon inspection, to be a Braque, I was told, \u201cFrancis acquired that, in Paris. It was very cheap, considering. Right after the war.\u201d Inquiring how she and Francis had met, I was told of a party that had included \u201cStephen\u201d\u2014Spender\u2014\u201cWystan,\u201d and others. It was, I suppose, like her conjuring of the eighteenth-century Swiss art historian, Burckhardt, further proof of the world that, once upon a time, could almost be taken for granted. The things one knew, and the people one did, and the things and people one knew of<\/em>, altogether almost consubstantial. If that\u2019s not a fair definition of civilization, <\/em>in the personal sense, I\u2019m not sure what is.<\/p>\n

The Great Fire<\/em> was published to proper acclaim in 2003. It\u2019s a wonderful novel, echoic in certain respects (though not in others) of The Transit of Venus<\/em>, and it was gratifying to feel that Shirley and her work were anything but forgotten. (I\u2019m not sure they had been, really, but a twenty-year gap between novels is formidable.) It won the National Book Award, as Transit<\/em> had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Transit <\/em>is the one that changed me, perhaps because of its ruthless tragic force. Once, when she was describing The Great Fire<\/em> to me a few years before its publication, Shirley remarked, proudly, that it had a happy ending. When I said that readers of The Transit of Venus<\/em> might be glad to hear it, she smiled, perhaps a little deviously.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Transit<\/em> has a happy ending,\u201d she said. \u201cThe stage is littered with bodies, but it is<\/em> a happy ending.\u201d<\/p>\n

True, too. And if there are no truly happy endings in life\u2014or, indeed, in civilizations\u2014there remains the happiness of what one has known. \u201cMemory is more than one bargained for,\u201d she writes in The Transit of Venus<\/em>: \u201cthis sense of past, past, past, that can turn even the happiest memories to griefs.\u201d Yet the reverse may be so, too: the present can occasionally resurrect one\u2019s misery into delight. Shirley\u2019s work, so touched with both suffering and an almost suprahuman capacity to understand it, offers the consolations of both.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels <\/i>American Dream Machine and <\/i>That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book of film criticism. He is a founding editor of <\/i>the Los Angeles Review of Books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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