Shirley Hazzard, the Australian-born author of an acclaimed if small portfolio of fiction peopled with characters whose lives, much like her own, toss them up far from home, has died, aged 85.
Hazzard’s fiction is dense with meaning, subtle in implication and tense in plot, often with disaster looming: A shipwreck tears away the parents of tiny children. A man who has waited a lifetime for a woman loses her at the last moment. A disease slowly saps the life from a beloved brother. Nuclear weapons wreak destruction and menace the next generation.
Catastrophes are accompanied by life’s cruelties: The true love turns out to be the incestuous one. The bureaucrat basks in his power, refusing compassionate leave to an underpaid young worker facing an emergency.
Hazzard's major characters are fiercely intelligent, with an eye for oddments and battered trinkets to cherish as emotional souvenirs – like the teacups in the novel The Bay of Noon, veined by time and "heavy with Victorian roses".
Born in Sydney, Hazzard lived in Hong Kong, Italy and New Zealand, both with her family and on her own, before landing in the United States at 20, going to work for the United Nations and making a home in New York. She said, however, that she would never consider herself an expatriate. “I’m not even sure which country I’d be an expatriate of,” she said.
The poet and critic JD McClatchy wrote in The Paris Review in 2005 that through her early travel, frequent moves and work for the British government in Hong Kong, Hazzard "came by her precocious interest in the heart's negotiations and the mind's deceptions in a way few contemporary novelists have."
She conveyed these complex dramas with an austere economy of words, in slim books of winding sentences. “Speech – in literature as in life – can crucially suggest what is not said,” Hazzard once remarked.
And yet her novel The Transit of Venus, which won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is "stuffed with description so intellectually active as to be sometimes exhausting," Thomas Mallon wrote in The Atlantic.
The Transit of Venus begins with the shipwreck that orphans the Australian sisters Caro and Grace Bell and traces the hopes of a man who has patiently kept alive a lonely love for Caro across the decades.
The novelist John Banville described the novel as “intricately plotted and gorgeously written,” noting, “a peculiar and powerful sense of evil hangs over the narrative, so that even as one is impelled toward the conclusion, one is at the same time fearful of getting there.”
To the disappointment of her admirers, more than 20 years elapsed before Hazzard followed The Transit of Venus with The Great Fire, which won the 2003 National Book Award for fiction. Mallon noted that her fans had begrudged her "even the time she spent on a brief memoir of her friendship with Graham Greene" – Greene on Capri, published in 2000.
The Great Fire had been a long time percolating, however, fed by experiences from Hazzard's time in Hong Kong and excerpted as early as 1987 in The New Yorker.
Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney on January 30th, 1931, to a Welsh father and a Scottish mother, both of whom had immigrated to Australia and worked for the company building the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Her childhood in Australia was filled with reading – she said of poems that she “ate and drank them up as nourishment” – but also with family discord, alcoholism, mental illness (her mother’s), infidelity (her father’s) and ultimately the disintegration of her parents’ marriage. She recalled seeing maimed veterans of the first World War still haunting Australia years later, and she had felt the effects of the Depression.
After the second World War, her father joined the foreign service and was posted to Hong Kong. Moving to Asia opened a door to the wider world for Hazzard, but it was also the beginning of a string of wrenching leave-takings.
At 16, she began working for the British Combined Intelligence Services in Hong Kong and was submerged – for a brief, happy period – in a stimulating social and intellectual atmosphere before being whisked away to New Zealand (as the fictional teenager Helen Driscoll is in The Great Fire) and ultimately to New York.
In New York – she never went to college – she was employed at the United Nations Secretariat for about a decade, during which time she wrote People in Glass Houses (1967), a collection of linked stories that satirised the bureaucratic life.
She also took aim at the United Nations in her nonfiction, most notably in Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Cas (1990), a follow-up to a series of magazine articles she had written beginning in 1980 examining allegations that world powers had been complicit in covering up Kurt Waldheim's Nazi past before his rise to secretary general.
Literary success came to Hazzard without the usual blizzard of rejection slips. Her long association with The New Yorker began with the first story she submitted, Woollahra Road, which had been fished from the slush pile by the fiction editor William Maxwell and published in 1961.
In 1963 she met Francis Steegmuller, a Flaubert scholar, writer and translator, at a party given by Muriel Spark. They married later that year.
Steegmuller died in 1994. They had no children. Hazzard had a sister, Valerie, but had lost touch with her years ago.
Hazzard's other fiction includes a collection of short stories, Cliffs of Fall (1963), and the novel The Evening of the Holiday (1966).
She became a US citizen in the 1970s. Before her husband's death, as well as in recent years, she divided her time among apartments on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Italy – on the island of Capri and in Naples. Her time in Naples led to the book The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples, a collaboration with Steegmuller that was published in 2008.
For Hazzard, Italy was the magic place where, she said in an interview, “the mysteries remain important: the accidental quality of existence, the poetry of memory, the impassioned life that is animated by awareness of eventual death.”
– New York Times syndication