Yearning for the centre

A judicious account of a vanishing age

Frances Wilson

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life

by Brigitta Olubas Virago

$34.99 pb, 571 pp

Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.

In Hazzard’s self-mythology, the story about the young poet was the first she submitted to the New Yorker, but, writes Brigitta Olubas, she had sent others to the magazine before which had not been published. Hazzard’s first New Yorker story, appearing in 1961, was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’, which was written in Siena but set in suburban Sydney, where Hazzard was born in 1931. Her relations with her natal land were always ambiguous, and it was in keeping with her reinvention that Hazzard would later root her genius in the Old World rather than the new one.

Born, she believed, with the Western canon embedded inside her, Hazzard described reading as ‘the marvellous adventure of my life’. Reading was a form of remembering; from the age of four, poetry was her lodestone and guiding star. Because no other adult, apart from her teachers, cared for books, Hazzard – one of the twentieth century’s great autodidacts – grew up with the sense that she was on the periphery while the ‘centre’ was somewhere above the equator where ‘things like the seasons were in the proper order that was given in literature’.

Hazzard came of age in Hong Kong, where her father, Reg, was posted as a diplomat in 1947. Her formal education now complete, she worked for the British Combined Intelligence

Services and fell in love with a White Russian named Alec Vedeniapine, twice her age. He would be the first of her older men. In the East she felt, as she put it, ‘in a great land that wasn’t looking to anywhere else’, that ‘didn’t feel the tyranny of distance’. The family’s return to Sydney in 1948 was recorded in her diary as ‘the end of life for me … A dying, a death.’ Wellington, where her father was next posted, was ‘just as dull as it possibly could be’.

Hazzard’s relations with her natal land were always ambiguous

In 1951, the Hazzards moved to New York, where Shirley found a secretarial job with the United Nations, an organisation she would later feel even more animosity towards than she did for Australia. Reg, leaving his wife for his mistress, now disappeared from the scene and Hazzard’s relationship with Alec similarly foundered. ‘The sorrow of that first, devastating romance,’ observes Olubas, never left her.

Hazzard’s novels were Jamesian, and so too was her early life. A bright-faced young girl in pursuit of the best that has been thought and said, Hazzard propelled herself forwards like a damaged Isabel Archer. ‘I know that I am starved for affection and love and security and this makes me what I am,’ she wrote in her notebooks. Olubas charts with great care the pattern of romantic disappointment between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two, and the increasingly fractious relations with her mother and sister. Until she discovered southern Italy in 1956, Hazzard was, as she put it, ‘miserable to the point of derangement’. She was saved by Naples, which became her parent and companion. Hazzard’s celebration of the city can be seen in her second novel, The Bay of Noon (1970), where Gianni tells Jenny that Naples ‘knows something … like an important picture, or a book’. After a year of living there, Jenny herself knows, for the first time, what ‘joy’ is.

Hazzard’s introduction to the Vivante family, who took paying guests in their dilapidated old house on the outskirts of Siena, completed her rebirth. The Villa Solaia contained the ‘underswell of literature and poetry’ she had been searching for, and she now wrote her first stories. The Vivantes became Hazzard’s replacement family, and time spent in Solaia would be recalled, Olubas shrewdly notes, like precious childhood memories. Hazzard read like a hare, but her four great novels appeared with tortoise-like slowness. Her writing grew in the soil of Solaia

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Roostam Sadri

Sid Harta Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-922958-08-2

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because Italy, she felt, was the past and being in the past gave Hazzard a sense of deep belonging. ‘If you come to live there,’ says Jenny in The Bay of Noon, ‘come to know it, you will live in other times.’ For the next five decades, Hazzard spent half the year in Italy, principally in ‘dear lovely, loved’ Capri, the kingdom of Tiberius.

After her stories appeared in the New Yorker, Hazzard was able to leave her loathed job at the United Nations. In 1963, Muriel Spark introduced her to the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller. Twenty-five years older than Hazzard, Steegmuller was the personification of ‘other times’. Tall and austere, he dressed beautifully, knew everyone, and drove a Rolls Royce. Hazzard, aged thirty-two, had at last found a husband.

The Steegmullers were culture itself, civilisation at its highest. In London they stay in the Connaught, in Rome at the Hassler, in Paris they have a room in the Ritz (‘ordinarily that of the Comtesse de la Rochfoucauld’, Hazzard explains, ‘absent in winter’), in Florence they are the guests of Harold Acton. The Rolls accompanies them on their European jaunts, driven by hired chauffeurs. Hazzard’s diaries now pay less attention to her emotional weather and more to listing the names of the VIPs they mix with. Over a randomly selected two pages of the biography, we learn that on a stretch of deserted beach near San Raphael the Steegmullers run into the brother of Isadora Duncan; in the Château de Castille near Uzès they sleep beneath a painting by Leger; in Venice they discuss Cocteau with Peggy Guggenheim, and in London they dine with the Trillings and Isaiah Berlin, and talk about the Nobel Prize for Literature. The dreariness of the name-dropping is occasionally relieved by a catty observation. The wife of Anthony Burgess, for example, affected ‘a bohemianism I’d have thought about 50 years out of date’.

As the routine of their ‘lovely life’, as her mother bitterly called it, takes hold, Hazzard disappears into her Missoni jackets and Ferragamo shoes. She has become a double act, and Olubas is now effectively writing a joint biography. Was the marriage a success? On one level, yes, but there were no children and Steegmuller, as Hazzard learned, was largely homosexual. She described in her diaries ‘the crushing, the neurotic coldness and moodiness’, but, as Olubas puts it in a magnificent sentence,

What remains, and remains important for Shirley Hazzard’s life and work, is that she found happiness in marriage to a man with inclinations towards literary and artistic figures and subjects marked by complexity rather than transparency, with a preference for the undisclosed rather than the vaunted truth, interests that drew her to him, which she shared.

Hazzard was furious with Patrick White for describing her life as ‘unusually charmed … writing away in your NY apartment and Capri villa while collecting your celebrities and charmers and pairing them off around the world’. ‘Patrick,’ she said, ‘knows nothing of our life.’ One of the things he knew nothing of was the ongoing saga with Kit, Hazzard’s now bipolar mother, whose daily care fell to the Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower, who became an epistolary friend of Hazzard’s until she was invited by the Steegmullers to Italy and relations broke down. In her handling of this material, Olubas is at her most sensitive, not least because Hazzard’s disregard of her mother and condescension towards Harrower was, from the start, appalling.

It is hard to get the measure of Hazzard as a friend. Her routine monologues, we soon realise, stifled the voices of her companions, making intimacy a chore. She was disliked from the start by Elizabeth Hardwick and Diana Trilling, who equally disliked one another, and she fell out with Muriel Spark, who fell out with everyone. She was not a feminist, and Olubas notes that she lacked sympathy for the wives in the love triangles she wrote about, as well as the love triangles she involved herself in.

Olubas’s style in this elegant and powerful biography is to show Hazzard in both light and shade, while never taking her eye off the writing. For example, if the critic Don Anderson noted Hazzard’s ‘apparent ignorance of contemporary Australian thought and letters’, her correspondence with Harrower, Olubas tells us, ‘reveals a sustained and detailed discussion of Australian political and cultural affairs’. Radiant reviews of Hazzard’s ‘Tolstoian’ achievements are balanced against the warier responses, such as John Docker’s opinion of Greene on Capri (ABR, October 2000): ‘The book claws at the reader, calling admire me, admire me.’ The only time I am not persuaded by Olubas’s judicial fairness is when she suggests that Hazzard was as interested in ordinary folk as she was in her cultured friends. The telling detail is that she would apparently bring ‘a little girl or an old lady’ back to her apartment in Capri, and ‘give them copies of her books’.

After Steegmuller’s death, aged eighty-eight, in 1994, Hazzard began work on The Great Fire (2003), her fourth and final novel, which won the National Book Award in New York, and the Miles Franklin Award in Australia. It was described by one critic as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’, which might be said of Hazzard herself.

Hazzard, who died in 2016, suffered in her final years from dementia; in a painful image, Olubas describes her sitting in a café in Capri, not knowing where she is. Predeceased by all her friends and increasingly alone and penniless, there was a desperate sadness to the last decade, but also a sense of completion. Hazzard’s life ended as it began, with an isolated figure in the margins, yearning for the centre. g

Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and the author of six books, the most recent being Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence (2021). This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.