On Shirley Hazzard – Michael Hofmann in TLS:

‘I had so little interest in producing my copy for this review, which should have been in a month ago – or in the dreary, ox-tongued language of critical praise – that I preferred to put it off by re-reading Shirley Hazzard’s principal novels, The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003), the memoir Greene on Capri (2000) and Brigitta Olubas’s superb new biography of Hazzard, militantly subtitled “A writing life”, all one further time, hand running.

I had so little interest in producing my copy for this review, which should have been in a month ago – or in the dreary, ox-tongued language of critical praise – that I preferred to put it off by re-reading Shirley Hazzard’s principal novels, The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003), the memoir Greene on Capri (2000) and Brigitta Olubas’s superb new biography of Hazzard, militantly subtitled “A writing life”, all one further time, hand running.
I first read The Transit of Venus shamefully late, seven years ago. Why was it not sooner? The book was first published in 1980, when I already had my English degree, and could just about read. Who had been hiding Hazzard from me? Where was the shofar of publicity or reputation that would have shivered my timbers? When I read it I wished all novels could be like that, and didn’t understand why they weren’t. This mix of admiration and bewilderment is, I think, a fairly widespread reaction to Hazzard. There is admiration for her self-evidently superior workmanship, and then: where does this come from, and is there more? Followed by the almost guilty thought: but it’s so late (it’s a theme of the book as well), they no longer make them like that, you silly, people don’t write with this purity of attention, without flaws or longueurs or loose ends; doesn’t she know the novel has fallen upon hard times, the barbarians have conquered it, everyone can write one, or has one inside them? She is so good, she makes the reader feel bad – probably for slumming it the rest of the time. (Coming upon Lampedusa’s The Leopard is a not dissimilar experience.)’

(…)

‘You could say the whole purpose of Hazzard’s enterprise, in life and fiction, was to put the world together again, and do it properly (and by the rules of art and love and goodness). Having been taken to see Hiroshima on her first trip overseas, when she was just sixteen, would she not have desired, as a novelist and as a woman, to make amends, to heal the atom by recombining her particulate characters in the right way – Jenny, Gioconda, Gianni and Justin, two pairs of Js in The Bay of Noon, Caro and the endlessly patient Ted Tice in The Transit of Venus, Helen and Aldred in The Great Fire, all novels of après-guerre – to find some better future for the species? In some fairly real way, the protagonists of her books are the continents of this blasted planet, and what she is doing is hauling Australia (where she was born – under protest, so to say – in 1931) up to Asia (Reg, her – upwardly mobile – father, was appointed Australian trade commissioner to Hong Kong in 1947), then briefly back even further away in a desolate, lovelorn period to Wellington, New Zealand, then at last across to Europe. A quickie bounce in postwar London in 1951, “scoffing chockies cadged from Yankees” (The Great Fire), and then hurriedly on to the US (where she got her first job working at the United Nations, of all aptly resonant if unresponsive places), and then away from there in some frustration to the Italy she adopted, to Naples, then Tuscany, then Capri. “For one thing”, Olubas quotes her, “I became joyful … really for the first time I knew what joy was. It became a part of my life, I understood at last what that was.”’

(…)

‘Yes, earlier writers had written foreign figures and set their novels in whole or in part abroad – James, Conrad, Lawrence, Rhys, Barnes, Fitzgerald, Hemingway – but that “abroad” gives the game away. By contrast, some of the postwar writers saw their arena as the whole world, in an altogether more complex and multipolar and equal way. Theirs are not simple journeys, reversible at will, but the being somewhere. They are “citizens of nowhere”, but with no particular desire (or fear) of repatriation. There is no “home”, and if there is they may never have been there. It brings to my mind Under the Volcano, yes, first thought of in 1936, but not completed and published until 1947, with locations in Mexico, Canada, Hawaii, England and Spain, whose hero, dubbed “the Consul”, but an “employee of nowhere”, seems neither to work nor to have been trained or sacked, as a similar undertaking to Hazzard’s. I described it in these pages as “a planet dancing”. Malcolm Lowry, Birkenhead-born, never set a novel in England. There is something equally planetary about Hazzard. She herself is perfectly convinced she could never have written a book had she stayed in her native Australia. Or perhaps her native anywhere.’

(…)

‘Elsewhere, she writes: In the circles where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature – both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice.
This kind of thing has been mistaken in certain quarters for snobbery – much as The Transit of Venus was mistaken for schlock. It is merely an unfeigned statement of her privation.’ (…)

‘The reaction of person to place is, I think, Hazzard’s supreme gift and preoccupation. The way she brings people from all over the Anglosphere to Hong Kong, or to Japan, in The Great Fire, and describes the resulting emulsion, is a wonder. In The Bay of Noon, set in Naples, she thinks about the deeper loneliness of expatriates, their being thrown together and the possibility of being thrown with locals, in a way I have not seen in other books. Distance is a real category. In The Great Fire, when Helen’s family whisk her away to New Zealand, even in a novel one feels it. “There was the antipodean touch of desolation: the path indistinguishable from all others, the wayside leaves flannelled with dust, the net bag. The walking into oblivion.” In Hazzard the continents feel as dispersed as planets in the solar system, and as inaccessible. “There would be a flight, by Dakota, to Manila, thence to Darwin, to Sydney; and within days to New Zealand.” Some things can only be said in French. “Fatalité des lieux.”’

(…)

‘Where a recent Life of Elizabeth Hardwick seemed to expect applause for leaving out most mention of Robert Lowell, Shirley Hazzard folds in an account of the early life and background of Hazzard’s much older, more productive – and eccentrically productive: as well as more orthodox writings on Flaubert, Apollinaire, Cocteau, etc, he made a highly successful translation into French of The Owl and the Pussycat – and for a long time more visible husband, Francis Steegmuller, as well as an unhurried account of his first marriage, to Beatrice Stein, an indomitable, wheelchair-bound, radically left-wing heiress, painter and collector of paintings. It was, after all, Beatrice’s inheritance that made it possible for Steegmuller and Hazzard to travel abroad three or four times in an average year, pay rent on several properties and keep a car – a gold Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud II no less, bought on the royalties from Le Hibou et la Poussiquette – garaged either in Switzerland or in Hampstead for periods when they were in the States.’

(…)

‘She keeps an awareness of money and passports, things that many biographies seem unaware of – and yet try living without them. She coins miraculous summaries: “her layered reflexivity”, “her mobile protagonists and their shifting worlds”, the UN as “a disavowed battleground for her”. Last and certainly not least, she allows us to feel that for long stretches this novelist’s life was solitary and typewriter-bound, and that speech was her second language.’

Read the review here.

It’s most often a delight to read a Hofmann-review, even when a review consists of nothing but ‘ox-tongued language of critical praise’.

He succeeded in making me want to read a Shirley Hazzard novel right away. Well, right away, it’s probably going to be March or April, before the Day of Atonement hopefully.

Within the review, or within the biography, there seems to be the suggestion that in order to be able to discover the pleasures of joy, money worries should have faded away. An inheritance might help. Or a successful translation of Le Hibou et la Poussiquette, another book that I never read. Perhaps this translation will bring the French language closer to my son.

But first ‘Transit of Venus’. Who doesn’t want to read a novel that makes the reader feel bad, because the novel is so good.