Monumental Afternoon Quality

At lunch with Graham Greene at a trattoria on the Italian island of Capri, Shirley Hazzard and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, once found a plaque commemorating the first-century poet Statius. Greene asked, one assumes rhetorically, whether anyone still read that old Roman. When Hazzard and Steegmuller promptly responded that in fact they did, Greene laughed and said, “What swank.”

Swank or no, Hazzard the novelist and Steegmuller the biographer established a reputation as one of the major intellectual power couples of the mid- to late twentieth century. They were among that rare breed of popular writers whose cultural pursuits actually connect them with civilization, and in the broad sense that makes one want to start capitalizing abstract nouns—Literature, Culture—and overusing the word “great” for books, poetry, men, aspirations. There was a timeless element to their interests: Hazzard had whole volumes of Romantic poetry in her head, Steegmuller produced the preeminent translation of Madame Bovary, they spoke French in Paris and Italian in Rome. They read Homer at dawn and Muriel Spark over dinner, and both with pleasure. 

One assumes that this cultural dolce vita—New York part of the year, Italy for the rest—could only be the slow-ripened fruit of generations, grown from established wealth and a long lineage of learning. But Shirley Hazzard grew up in the 1930s in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and then shuttled around Hong Kong and New Zealand following her father’s career as a diplomat. She started teaching herself Italian in her teens after stumbling across some Leopardi translations and saw Italy for the first time at age twenty-five when she was stationed in Naples as a young missionary for the United Nations. Her marriage and writing were intertwined in an intense literary fusion that insisted on the epic over the essay, fate instead of happenstance, the whole historical sweep of Italy over dusty Australia. In Shirley Hazzard: A Writer’s Life, the first biography of Hazzard, Brigitta Olubas shows this autodidact and cultural aspirant using fiction in the highest Romantic fashion—as magic. Hazzard rewrote reality into fiction when the former didn’t suit and created an entirely new life for herself through literature.

This was a pursuit Hazzard shared with Steegmuller, who started out ahead of her. Twenty-five years older than Hazzard, when he met her he was an accomplished widower with half a shelf of detective novels, biographies, and translations to his name. Hazzard, by contrast, was relatively new to the New York scene, with a C.V. that was mostly blank. But she was sharp: she could remember poetry on sight—famously, she later made friends with Greene by supplying the final line of a Browning poem he was struggling to remember—and she had a vibrant voice and magnetic personality, which had led to some early successes with magazine editors. In 1963, when she first met Steegmuller, she was writing her first novel and had published some short stories in the New Yorker. The first, “Woollahra Road,” is a period piece that evokes her dissatisfaction about her Australian origins. It is promising, charming, but unquestionably minor.

Still, Muriel Spark, a fortuitous early New Yorker connection, saw something. She introduced the two, saying to Hazzard: “There’s a man coming I think you ought to marry.” He had an austere face, a gentlemanly manner, and a list of literary accolades as long as his beautifully tailored greatcoat. They sat on the same armchair and talked. Completing what Spark called her own “best novel ever,” they married later that year, after the always cool Steegmuller conquered his fear of commitment, especially to a fiery young upstart like Hazzard. The two took off traveling, more for Steegmuller’s work at first than Hazzard’s, to France and Italy as Steegmuller interviewed French artistes for his biography of Jean Cocteau, along with other scholarly projects.

Hazzard kept writing. Her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, appeared in 1966 and expressed less interest in the lovers who are its protagonists than in the country that provides its setting. The plot is simple: a frigid Northern woman has a reluctant affair with a hot-blooded Italian man. She changes her mind and leaves; their story ends. 

But the romance is Italy:

The cafe where they sat was freshly painted, and their corner of it faced the piazza’s single architectural asset—a church consecrated to one of the town’s numerous patron saints, who appeared in marble above the portico with an open book short-sightedly held before his face. 

The transitory polite smile on Sophie’s face developed into something less fictitious. The scene was so totally lacking in haste or violence. It provided an easy accustomed setting for the long afternoon, which today had such a monumental afternoon quality that it might have been any afternoon in the whole of memory. It was for just these anonymous public pleasures that Sophie came to Italy.

The backdrop for The Evening of the Holiday was Hazzard’s frequent stays, beginning in 1957, at the Villa Solaia near Siena in Tuscany. Her friend Elena Vivante regularly hosted foreign intellectuals there and provided much of the air of Old World sophistication and liveliness that so enamored Hazzard early in her affair with Italy. The Italian hostess provided a formative model for Hazzard of the strength and pull that a cultured woman could have: “To have known her was to understand that the human ideal is not a striving for perfection but for wholeness: she was true, vital and entirely human, not a paragon but a criterion,” Hazzard wrote—clearly also thinking of herself. Elena made “a principled life believable … She had lived it, she was it.”

The Bay of Noon, Hazzard’s next novel, was her love letter to Naples. The protagonist, Jenny, is sent to the city by NATO soon after World War II on one of those portentous bureaucratic missions that ends up as a masquerade of pushing papers until afternoon tea has been drunk and it’s time to go home. The idealistic Jenny becomes the romantic one as she, like Hazzard, gazes with adulation at the Bay of Naples and follows the affair of two elegant Italian connections: a beautiful, mysterious Italian writer and her lover, a film director. Almost as a sidenote, Jenny passes on a chance to start an affair. Love, in Hazzard’s early novels, is larger than the people who contemplate it; it lives in the charmed air, water, and earth of Italy. 

Heady stuff, and themes that would develop in Hazzard’s later work, but her breakthrough novel didn’t come until ten years later, in 1980, with The Transit of Venus. It is about the motions of fate. A pair of orphaned sisters leave Australia for postwar Britain and make fateful decisions about the men they will marry or love, with fateful consequences. Caro, the Venus of the novel and an Elena or Hazzard figure, from start to finish eclipses in beauty, insight, and, ultimately, destiny her sister Grace and the men with whom she has affairs. Neither nature nor fate looks kindly on any of them: “Men go through life telling themselves a moment must come when they will show what they’re made of. And the moment comes, and they do show. And they spend the rest of their days explaining that it was neither the moment nor the true self.” The entire novel feels circumscribed by ominous portents, from Grace’s unambitious marriage to the sisters’ abuses at the hands of their older half-sister (drawn, disturbingly, from Hazzard’s relationship with her mother) to a lover’s prophesied suicide. Love does not come easily without the blessing of fate, and fate in the late 1940s is not in a blessing mood. 

Steegmuller said of Transit: “No one should have to read it for the first time.” This seems to be less a statement about its gloom than an acknowledgment of the work’s high-minded aspirations to serious literature. The classical allusions in the title are obvious on their face but demanding in context, and the characters ask more of the reader than do most merely human acquaintances. Transit’s characters quote poetry at a Hazzard-esque clip and regularly experience weighty, George Eliot–like moments of mutual comprehension such as this in the course of their amorous affairs: 

Caro sat without speaking, turning toward him her look that was neither sullen nor expectant but soberly attentive; and, once, a glance in which tenderness and apprehension were great and indivisible, giving unbearable, excessive immediacy to the living of these moments. Paul had seen that look before, when they first lay down together at the inn beyond Avebury Circle.

The brilliant expat Caro awes all the rest with her brilliance, gravitas, magnetism. This is “Hazzard-land,” as Alice Jolly named it: a place where the mundane is resolutely swept into the closet, the character with the best grasp of Victorian poetry wins, and no character can be imagined using the loo or living contentedly in the dirt and backwardness of someplace like, say, Australia. This is the beef that some Australian writers, such as the crotchety realist and Nobel winner Patrick White, had with Hazzard: Hazzard-land seemed to deliberately exclude his beloved Australian muck.

But Hazzard’s romantic inclinations were not so much a sign of detachment from reality as a sensibility that led her to adhere to ideals and principles beyond it. There can be a better world, and is; I have seen it and am proof of it—this was also the subtext of both her fiction and nonfiction. It’s what fired her scathing reports on the United Nations, after her youthful enthusiasm for the organization was swept underneath what became ten years’ worth of low-level typist’s work in the 1950s. This frustration with not only the UN’s bureaucratic daily operations but also its false nationalism and its failure to meaningfully engage with foreign cultures led to her books on the “self-destruction” of the UN, including a major expose of the Nazi past of its secretary-general Kurt Waldheim. But more ruinous for believers in global progress through the United Nations are Hazzard’s short stories satirizing the organization, collected in People in Glass Houses, from 1967. There, Hazzard proves that Spark didn’t have sole possession of the comedic talent in the friendship between “Shirlers and Mu” (which would eventually break down when, according to Olubas, a history of nasty but typical Sparkisms about Hazzard came back through the grapevine). 

Hazzard’s office tyrant in the story “Miss Sadie Graine” could easily be the secretary of Miss Jean Brodie: “had Miss Graine ever been seriously contemplated as a life partner, had she even been asked—let alone taken—in marriage, her demands on the world might have been different.” But unfortunately she’s already busily at work for the UN: “Senior members of Pylos’s staff would compliment him on her efficiency, saying ‘What would you do without her?’ As time wore on, a note of wistful speculation crept into this rhetorical inquiry, and it developed the ring of a real question.” And here is her writer’s belief that murky language leads to failure in mission: “‘Got one.’ Algie Wyatt underlined a phrase on the page before him,” as the hero of the story, whose tenure is doomed by his intelligence, mocks a UN writeup’s contradictions in terms. He soon finds another: “cultural mission.”

Throughout the 1970s, Hazzard and Steegmuller seemed to work themselves onto equal intellectual footing as Hazzard added to Steegmuller’s powers of observation as scholar and biographer her novelist’s gift of astonishing insight and intuitive grasp of human motivation. There is also an acceptance of fate: after a miscarriage sometime in their first years together, they settled in to the ways of childless writers. They rented an apartment in Naples, and another on Capri, where they enjoyed literary friendships with eminences such as Greene, Harold Acton, Robert Penn Warren, and so on. Whole seasons were spent in this writerly bliss: read poetry aloud at dawn, write until lunchtime, repose over wine, cheese, and literary discussion, explore the Italian countryside, and return for an early dinner and late talk over drinks before bed. 

It was Hazzard who did most of the talking. While Steegmuller presided as the staid gentleman, Hazzard would discourse on a massive range of topics, sometimes trying the patience of her listeners but more often impressing them with the breadth of her knowledge. Alec Wilkinson, a young protege, said that he “thought she talked too much” at their first dinners together with New Yorker editor Bill Maxwell and other New Yorker colleagues. “[T]hen of course you couldn’t hear her talk enough. You were in the presence of someone whose gift was so profound that you better just shut up and listen. The amount of poetry that she could quote … The appreciation of it, a great discernment.” At its heart was a simple thing: a love for literature that bound Hazzard and Steegmuller and drove them—Hazzard especially—to pursue ever-greater largeness of vision, depth of feeling, in a way that is almost galling for those who may now cringe at the threat of being something so earnest as inspired.

Consider this statement from Steegmuller, commenting on Nabokov’s insistence that his students saturate themselves with English poetry in order to write English prose: “One cannot truly do it for a ‘purpose.’ Only for love.” Hazzard and Steegmuller’s romanticism about literature, and their immersion in the places that produced its greatest works, was what kept their own romance alive. Hazzard’s fullest realization of this romantic vision came late: in 2003, with The Great Fire, a book decades in the writing. Set in the late 1940s, it’s a story about Aldred Leith, an older, British man, aged further by his heroic military feats, who falls in love with Helen Driscoll, an Australian teenager whom he meets while traveling through Asia chronicling the aftermath of the war. After a long and tortured courtship, this one works out.

But not entirely convincingly. The Australian novelist and critic Michelle de Kretser calls Aldred’s devoted pursuit and winning of his precocious and preternaturally patient Helen a “fulfillment of wishes.” Hazzard offered an almost defensive explanation: “in fiction one can correct an ultimate tragedy into a suggestion, at least, of a ‘happy ending’. That is, set life right, as one can’t manage to do it in reality.” This reveals her state of mind regarding her own life around the turn of the century: Hazzard had been retelling her love stories for years. Steegmuller had died a decade before, in 1994. As he lost his memory, she had nursed him and read him Gibbon, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare. By all accounts, she was a loving and patient caretaker. But her diary reveals, potently, that her life with Steegmuller challenged her romantic notions, and had long done so:

So many good things—but on this—a blank. Not a shred of real understanding, nor wish to understand. Immediate rebuttal, egotism…. As I’m speaking, with (a little) animation, feel the lack of response, the boredom on the other side. Whenever I show spontaneity there is this. Surely connected to a compulsion to make me feel that spontaneity is a show, unwelcome, of foolishness…. The best self in prison…. no expression of the heart allowed me—neither the spontaneous sharing; nor the loneliness, the subsiding “with a shudder” … I feel within, often, like a bleached bone.

After Steegmuller’s death, though, the frustration inherent in their high-strung intellectual relationship disappeared, and soon, “She was living within the shrine she had constructed to their marriage,” according to Matthew Specktor, who worked with Hazzard on a screenplay for The Transit of Venus. Olubas notes throughout her biography the extent to which Hazzard used her fiction to pull her own experiences to a higher plane: to the epic, the fated, the Romantic. The question of the plot’s success notwithstanding, in The Great Fire Hazzard’s late turn to the happy ending is perfectly consonant with her idealistic fusion of art and life. Olubas finds a model for Aldred in an old love affair with Alec Vedeniapine, a colleague from her teen years in Hong Kong who, in Hazzard’s telling, cowardly chose his farm over her love (though even Hazzard’s friends at the time thought there may be some wisdom in not consigning this ambitious social climber and spouter of poetry to a lifetime of milking cows). With Aldred, Hazzard wanted to set Alec, and also Steegmuller, right.

The novel won the National Book Award all the same—deservedly so, for The Great Fire is by far Hazzard’s greatest achievement in prose. The destruction, physical and moral, of the war are rendered in poetry like this, about one of Aldred’s friends, Paul Exley, considering a relationship with a coworker: “The airy room, the light of Asia, and strange red lilies in a vase could do nothing for them…. As ever, his thoughts drawn by pathos; his imagination captured, when it might have been fired.” Exley is a minor character; there are entire chapters of this masterly sustained alignment of close observation and uncanny insight.

In her acceptance speech for the National Book Award, Hazzard revealed further the way she fit the romances in her life and work into the grand edifice of Literature. Stephen King had received a medal for his “Distinguished Contribution to American Letters” at the same ceremony and had proceeded to rebuke the audience for small-mindedness in prizing “literary” fiction over “popular” (read: Stephen King’s) books. Hazzard deviated from her planned remarks to respond to his ignorant or self-serving false dichotomy:

I want to say in response to Stephen King that I do not—as I think he a little bit seems to do—regard literature (which he spoke of perhaps in a slightly pejorative way), that is, the novel, poetry, language as written, I don’t regard it as a competition…. We have this huge language so diverse around the earth that I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction because we are reading in all the ages, which have been an immense inspiration and love to me and are such an excitement.

This huge language turned a Sydney suburbanite into a fine novelist and one of the twentieth century’s largest cosmopolitan sensibilities. 

For Hazzard, another definition of romance may be this: one should not settle for reporting reality when one can chase fate. When it favors her—and in so many ways it did—it transports her to a higher realm, where culture lives and swank holds sway. 

It may be a matter of taste whether one prefers her Italian fantasies to the Australian muck. But Shirley Hazzard is always moving.