Brigitta Olubas - Shirley Hazzard--A Writing Life

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In memory of my parents, Gloria Rainbow and Edvardas Olubas,

and of my sisters, Mariana and Katharine

When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. One can only say, it will be a wholea region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colours. Not to direct, but to solace us; not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came.

The Bay of Noon

AMONG SHIRLEY HAZZARDS papers at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library on the Upper West Side of Manhattan are several boxes of small appointment diaries, four for each year. These are small, palm- or pocket-size, with clear plastic covers and shiny metallic spiral bindings. They are made by Herms, the dates are in French, and they go back to the 1950s. They were bought each year, first by Shirley Hazzards husband, the biographer and translator Francis Steegmuller, whose distinctive, often illegible hand records the bare bones of meetings, dinners, flights, and occasionally a flurry of details of a scene from his travels or notes about a dream he wanted to remember. In later years of their marriage, some of the entries are by Hazzard. Her handwriting is (a little) more legible, her notes and descriptions more detailed, less reserved, less diffident. After Steegmullers death, in 1994, she took over the diaries and wrote in them until a decade or so before she died. The 4me Trimestre diary from 2003 has a pencilled appointment for Novembre 19: National Book Awards. Black Tie. Marriott Marquee Times Square. Shubert Alley red carpet arrival, 45th St Reception 6:307:30 dinnerthen the announcement. (Press conference later for winners.) Prepare putative remark. Ceremony concludes 10:15. Then, over the top, in red marker pen: I won the National Book Award.

The National Book Award is one of the premier literary prizes in the United States. It is open only to U.S. writers but carries international distinction. Shirley Hazzard had twice before been nominated, first in 1971 for The Bay of Noon and again in 1981 for The Transit of Venus . The 2003 award was for The Great Fire , her fourth novel. It had been completed just half a year earlier and published only the previous month, but for all that haste had been long awaited. The reviews made much of this: More than two decades have passed since the publication of Shirley Hazzards The Transit of Venus ; For years her admirers have been awaiting what would be next; For Shirley Hazzardnot to mention her readers and her publisherit has been a long wait; In the 22 years since the publication of The Transit of Venus , readers and critics who declared that novel a modern classic have kept a Penelope-like vigil for a new novel from Shirley Hazzard. At last, there is The Great Fire . And: Few writers are worth this long a wait. The great Shirley Hazzard is one of them.

The award announcement was made before a crowd of some nine hundred people in the Marriott ballroom. There was an unusually large media contingent because the novelist Stephen King was to receive a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Commentators had noted that King, as a writer of popular fiction, was an unusual choice for the medal, which had previously been awarded to such literary authors as Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, and Philip Roth. There had been some heated public discussion, with Harold Bloom, tireless champion of high culture, lamenting Kings award as a dumbing down, drawing in turn the response that his carping demonstrated an elitism that borders on a death wish. Stephen King took up these terms in his acceptance speech. He asked, provocatively, of his audience, What do you think? You get social or academic brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture? and he listed a number of popular novelists, authors who he felt had been overlooked by august literary institutions like the National Book Award.

If Shirley Hazzard had indeed prepared a putative remark, as flagged in her diary, she must have decided to set it aside. Instead, she addressed Stephen Kings words directly: I dont think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction, she said. We read in all the ages. We have mysterious inclinations. We have our own intuitions, our individuality toward what we want to read, and we developed that from childhood. Even the most ancient works, she continued, in moving us, become part of our immediate experience. The most important thing that literature brings is Pleasure the true pleasure. Her comments were spontaneous, unrehearsed, but at the same time this was a speech she could have made at any stage in her adult life, long given over to the deep rewards of reading and of writing.

There was in her devotion to literature something that set Shirley Hazzard aside, quite consciously, from the contemporary world, something that was certainly apparent to her readers. The Great Fire , one reviewer wrote, is timeless as opposed to timely; it read, another felt, like the last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility, even of a certain understanding of civilization. The judges for the Miles Franklin Award, Australias most prestigious literary prize, which the novel went on to win in 2004, commented that The Great Fire is a reminder of why, in a digital age, the novel still matters. There was also to be found in her writing, reviewers wrote, great intellectual depth and an utterly singular style, a clarity only possible to a writer of fastidious intellectual assurance. A style as complex and lucid as this constitutes a species of moral achievement. Some years later, the biographer Stacy Schiff described this aspect of Hazzards work. The erudition, she wrote, shimmers through the prose like a demure, decorous spice: You may only dimly register its presence. You may mistake it for something else Some will thrill to the imported line of Browning, the nod to Wordsworth, the classical allusions and painterly touches. They are hardly necessary to the enjoyment of the novel. Schiff quoted an observation from The Transit of Venus : Knowledge was for some a range of topics; for others, depth of perception, adding that Hazzard herself managed both. While she is in a league with Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Bowen, she is more muscular than either. Some readers pointed out that the erudition itself created difficulties of fictional voice, noting that several of the characters in The Great Fire spoke in ways that were impossibly learned, overly similar to each other, and too close, too, to the diction of the narrator. On the other hand, Thomas Mallon made the point that the dialogue never forces a suspension of disbelief, because Hazzards narration is more articulate than almost anything were now accustomed to reading: whats within quotation marks seems credible simply by the standard of whats without. This is a point made often and in different ways by her readers: within the world of Shirley Hazzards novels it is precisely the distinctiveness and the distinction of the prose, the sentences, that compels us. No one else writes like this. The novelist Alice Jolly called it Hazzard-land.

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