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 King’s words directly: “I don’t 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.

A couple of weeks before the National Book Award ceremonies, Shirley Hazzard gave a reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street YMHA. She was introduced by the poet J. D. McClatchy, who spoke of “a special shrine to Shirley Hazzard” beside which he had “moped” for the past twenty years, waiting for her next book. He had, he said, turned for consolation through that time to words by Flannery O’Connor, words that might seem to have constituted in advance a rebuttal of Stephen King’s speech, a defence of high literature that addressed the larger currency, the presentness, of complex art. Alongside the insistent temporality of what Hazzard had called reading “in all the ages,” these words set a sense of literature’s achievement as something always speculative, unknowable in advance:

The great novels we get in the future are not going to be those that the public thinks it wants, or those the critics demand. They are going to be the kind of novels that interest the novelist. And the novels that interest the novelist are going to be those that have not already been written. They are those that put the greatest demands on him, that require him to operate at the maximum of his intelligence and his talents, and to be true to the particularities of his own vocation. The direction of many of us will be towards concentration, and the distortion that is necessary to get our vision across. It will be more toward poetry than toward the traditional novel.

McClatchy added that O’Connor’s statement “almost precisely, indeed uncannily, describes Shirley Hazzard’s new novel The Great Fire, so long in the making, so brilliant now, at last, in our hands.” She was, he said “a novelist’s novelist’s novelist.”

Aligned with that project of feeling, observing, imagining—the novelist’s work—is the human and poetic matter of love. She explained that she had wanted to write “a story of falling in love,” to tell truthfully “the accidental meeting of man and woman and a sense of destined engagement that would possibly last out their lives. This, to serve as a counterweight to the huge disillusion of a ravaged world. I will let myself in for derision, whatever I say on this theme, I suppose. Yet I think that such a story is not necessarily idealized, and that the dream, at least, of such love still supplies the poetry of all manner of unpoetic lives.” This statement of large belief in romantic and sexual love stands behind all Shirley Hazzard’s writing. It is aligned with her sense of human connectedness and above all with poetry, which is at heart for her a way of being human. She put it like this in one of her last public appearances: “Poetry comes in different forms, it can come in mere feeling, I think, people realize within themselves that they have deeper feelings than language always allows them to express. And poetry can save very much the souls of people who feel that way—who feel cut off from a deeper thing within themselves and having to fit in with much more daily forms of expression.” Some years earlier, she had recorded in her diary how after a performance, “stupendously beautiful,” of Lucia di Lammermoor, with Joan Sutherland and Alfredo Kraus, her friend the art historian John Pope-Hennessy had observed, “It treats Romantic love as an ideal,” and how she had responded, in words that expressed her sense of the irreducible and necessary power of love, “A principle, almost. Something elevated and supreme, transcendent over reason, ambition, loyalty, even decency.”

The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation or friendship was itself reserved; “One loved her,” Mendelson said, “without there being a centre of herself that one loved. One loved her attributes—generosity, her sweetness, her learning, her sense that you were better than you were.” She also had “an absence of irrational hatreds and passions,” a commitment to “see in everyone the best they have.” She made a similar observation herself about her friend the poet James Merrill: “He had the generous talent of bringing out the best in his friends; one rose to his articulate occasion.” There was also a sense of serenity about her own place in the world, Mendelson felt: “She didn’t seem to care if you admired her work or not … She didn’t want anything from you. She wanted a sense of being part of your world of excellence … It was not that she felt ‘I am a famous person and I am being generous to you,’ she was absolutely at peace with herself.” That serenity embraced a notable reserve; despite her loquacity and her generosity, it was clear that there were things she chose not to disclose. The writer Matthew Specktor recalled her as “very very well defended” and described her use of conversation, admiringly—“she spoke in arias”—as a form of filibuster. Amanda Vaill, one of her editors at Viking, saw some of The Transit of Venus’s Caro Bell in her, a quality not exactly of reserve or aloofness but more of “being able to hold herself apart from a discussion … It was observant … She wasted nothing. She didn’t throw things away. She kept them.” And, Alec Wilkinson noted, she made judgments: “There was something so avid about her intellect; an intelligence that couldn’t help but take the measure of all it saw.”

The Auden scholar Edward Mendelson described her as, above all, civilised: “There was a sense Shirley had, it was not courtesy, it was a sense of your value as a human being. It wasn’t a demand, it was that she assumed good motives on your part, civilised motives.” The intimacy of her conversation or friendship was itself reserved; “One loved her,” Mendelson said, “without there being a centre of herself that one loved. One loved her attributes—generosity, her sweetness, her learning, her sense that you were better than you were.” She also had “an absence of irrational hatreds and passions,” a commitment to “see in everyone the best they have.” She made a similar observation herself about her friend the poet James Merrill: “He had the generous talent of bringing out the best in his friends; one rose to his articulate occasion.” There was also a sense of serenity about her own place in the world, Mendelson felt: “She didn’t seem to care if you admired her work or not … She didn’t want anything from you. She wanted a sense of being part of your world of excellence … It was not that she felt ‘I am a famous person and I am being generous to you,’ she was absolutely at peace with herself.” That serenity embraced a notable reserve; despite her loquacity and her generosity, it was clear that there were things she chose not to disclose. The writer Matthew Specktor recalled her as “very very well defended” and described her use of conversation, admiringly—“she spoke in arias”—as a form of filibuster. Amanda Vaill, one of her editors at Viking, saw some of The Transit of Venus’s Caro Bell in her, a quality not exactly of reserve or aloofness but more of “being able to hold herself apart from a discussion … It was observant … She wasted nothing. She didn’t throw things away. She kept them.” And, Alec Wilkinson noted, she made judgments: “There was something so avid about her intellect; an intelligence that couldn’t help but take the measure of all it saw.”

Shirley Hazzard embarked early on a project of self-cultivation and self-creation through extensive and passionate reading. Throughout her adult life she mixed in elevated cultural circles, seeking out people to admire and learn from. This all culminated, in a way, in her marriage in 1963 to Francis Steegmuller, a marriage described by their friend the poet and translator Richard Howard as “a conjugal version of literary high life.” Francis was significantly older than Shirley. He had lived through the exhilarating years of the American “discovery” of Paris and of European art in the interwar years. He was a biographer and translator, an independent scholar with a private income and a private art collection, qualities he would lend to Transit’s Adam Vail: “He had lent the picture, which belonged to him.” The Steegmullers were close in sensibility and temperament and were devoted to each other. Shirley delighted in the worlds her marriage opened up for her, but the marriage was also, importantly, daily, intimate, practical. Francis helped her manage the tribulations—which were considerable—of her mother, and in his later years, as his memory began to fail, she set her own writing aside to care for him, helping him write his last books. He had been married before, happily, for thirty years to a wealthy amateur painter, Beatrice Stein Steegmuller, and he brought not just financial security. When Shirley first met him, she thought “he looked like a person who had learnt, who had suffered and learnt and who had enjoyed life in a very deep way. There was a lot to be seen in his face.”

Last summer, Vladimir Nabokov was remembered in the press as having told his students: “You have to saturate yourself with English poetry in order to compose English prose … You must study the poets.”

I read this to Francis and he said: “Exactly. Still, one cannot truly do it for a ‘purpose.’ Only for love.”

More interesting to Shirley were the young RAF officers who were also part of the unit, skilled linguists with expertise in Chinese languages, who worked alongside local Chinese teachers, translators, and administrators. She was struck by the knowledgeability and social ease of these officers, “people who had had what used to be called a classical education, and who displayed this knowledge in the most marvellous, natural way.” One of these, not British but an officer in the British Army, was Alexis Vedeniapine, who would feature significantly in her life; two others, Christopher Cooper and Alan Green, also became important friends. Shirley was delighted at the willingness of Cooper and Vedeniapine in particular to recite and discuss poetry, as well as by her own ability to join them in this—“proof,” as she reflected later, that she was “not alone in the world,” that she was “not dreaming.” It seems that Vedeniapine could match Shirley’s extraordinary memory for poetry, and it is remarkable that almost as soon as she had left Australia, she had met others with whom she was so profoundly aligned. Chris Cooper later described Shirley as impressively cultivated and precociously well-read, and Alan Green recalled her sociability, lively manner, and “lovely face.”

Shirley and Vedeniapine had first met in early September 1947, on a day marked by “clarity of sky and air,” and soon were attached, if not publicly a couple. On New Year’s Day 1948 Shirley recorded in her diary, “Half day at work. Alec took me for a walk before lunch … we climbed a hillside into a hollow and he took me in his arms and kissed me, differently than before. It was warm and green and blue and peaceful, and we stayed there until lunch time—Happy New Year!” This diary reveals a very different relationship from the grave passion shared by Helen Driscoll and Aldred Leith in The Great Fire. The attraction between the young woman and older man is clear, but so too are the vast differences in their experiences and interests. While they shared a passion for poetry, Alec was also deeply connected to the local world of Hong Kong, to active and solitary pursuits, and to his friendships with other men—sailing with Dick Kindersley, taking long walks around Hong Kong and surrounding islands, fishing. These were not worlds Shirley could or would share. At thirty-two, Alec was nearly twice her age, clearly charmed by her intellect and bright beauty but also reluctant to consolidate a flirtation into more public form, in part at least because of the impropriety of their age difference and, no doubt, also with an eye to his position in the office and in the British community in Hong Kong. He raised with Chris Cooper his concern at Shirley’s “emotional instability and fretting,” indicating his reservations about their compatibility despite being engaged by her “mental abilities.” The romantic interludes recorded in her diary are not infrequent, but there was clearly some inconsistency in Alec’s responses, some vacillation, and Shirley, consumed by anxiety, longing, and a confusion driven by inexperience with intimacy and affairs of the heart, was shaken by their fleeting nature. This was her first significant emotional connection outside her family, and it perhaps lent an intensity that in turn further constrained Alec’s responses to her.

It was not all misery. In later years she recalled “Alec and I on foot over the hills from Aberdeen to Hong Kong, a lovely deserted path and prospect, a bird alighted on the path, and we were still. He said, low-voiced, ‘I think it’s a plover.’ Such pleasures were new to me. Respect and curiosity for Nature.” At the time, she’d been caught up in feeling. Her diary entries see her circling back again and again to the same points of elation and despair. In February: “Alec was good to me again. Although I don’t feel I can go on much more without something more definite. He is unfair. Why should he pick me up and toss me down like this? Please let it be different soon.” In March: “(Please, God.) I wish it didn’t look so appalling in black and white. I don’t feel that he’s obliged to return my feeling, but he has made the best of it as it suited him. This is awful. If he doesn’t ring this weekend, it’s all up, I think,” and then three days later, “a lovely day” at the Bank. “He took me in his arms and was suddenly wild-eyed and passionate and ‘wicked and loose’ … I am happy and hopeful.” Then in early April, “I’m struggling against this neglected feeling, knowing I have no right to be so, but oh Alec, am I not good enough?” Everything was intensified by the way the relationship was playing out in a very closed and constrained social world and across a very compressed stretch of time—by September, one short year after meeting Alec, she had left Hong Kong. While her inner world was being tormented by the peaks and troughs of adolescent romance, her social life in the privileged contours of colonial Hong Kong continued. It is notable that despite the intensity of her emotions, those around her appeared to have no idea of the romance, although there was some gentle ribbing from coworkers about “the eyes of Ahlex.” Outside work hours, she was attending parties, sometimes with her family or with friends from the office, sometimes with Alec, or going to dinners at the Tientsin, or the Parisian Grill, or King Fu, and lunches at the Clubhouse at Deep Water Bay. On days off she would join outings to beaches around the island—spectacular locations, less than an hour’s drive from Central, such as Shek O, Repulse Bay, Deep Water Bay, or Stanley—with Alan, Chris, Alec, and others from the office, sometimes conveyed by army jeep. Or she went walking.