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Maxwell was, Edward Hirsch observed, “the most present of anyone I’ve ever known as a person. He immediately, if he liked you, started talking to you about your childhood. It sort of dismantled everything else. For me with him it was love at first sight. Friendship was immediate. When he spoke to you it was as if you were the only person.” Benjamin Taylor recalled, “With Bill Maxwell there was no small talk. You just sat down and started talking about books.” Shirley would have prized that complication of sensibility and comportment, that presence, and presence of mind, and presentness, and all the talking about books. She admired Maxwell’s writing, particularly The Folded Leaf, although she was less impressed by The Château, ironically enough the book Francis had helped with. In 1961, early in their friendship, Bill had presented her with a copy, inscribed, “For Shirley Hazzard, whose beautiful and firm beginning it has been my great pleasure to watch.” She wrote the following year to Rache Lovat Dickson that she found The Château “heavy going—it has rather an air of All Done By Hand, it is completely lacking in passion of any kind, or spiritual adventure; this may be a result of his having gone through a profound psychoanalysis between this and his previous books. At any rate, he is an extremely nice person, with a very delicate intuition.” The connection between Shirley and Bill over their longer friendship was intense. Alec Wilkinson described seeing the two of them together as “just sublime. Two gigantic sensibilities that were utterly enfolded with one another.” Maxwell and Francis were also close, but Shirley and Bill were “two people clearly capable of appreciating each other fully. To love each other without having any emotional or erotic complication to it. Just pure love. For the artist, for the character, for the person.” The friendship was a central force in Shirley’s mature life.
Throughout the novel, time is upended, complicated, its passage thwarted—the past is never past. At one point Sophie remembers a failed love affair, remembers listening to the man’s “complicated exposition of the reasons why he could not love her in return,” and she is “glad now to be reminded of the intricate, lasting nature of any form of love.” Tancredi, sitting with Luisa and Sophie in the garden one evening, waiting for the nightingales, remembers having heard them at his family’s seaside summerhouse some thirty years before. He reflects that Luisa would then have been a young woman: “I would have been in love with her, he realized—and the absolute certainty of this touched him deeply. It struck him like a loss actually suffered, impoverishing his experience, diminishing all his prospects.” This imagining of an impossible and wholly speculative romance as something that has actually taken place, and that has consequences extending into the future, suggests an understanding of love that is in defiance of chronology and the world, something wholly interior, without external reference points. It also speaks to love’s overwhelming consequence.
All this was distraction; her real work continued, slowly, behind the scenes. In May 1979 the New York Times poetry editor Thomas Lask reported in his column that “a major novel by Shirley Hazzard … longer and more complex than anything this writer has done previously” would be published the following spring. Prepublication marketing affirmed the event and the achievement: “Shirley Hazzard’s first novel in many years is already being hailed as a literary masterpiece.” With publication came reports of the extraordinary labour of the novel’s construction—that it had taken a decade to write, with “as many as 20–30 drafts per page”—feeding into the sense of its consequence. The Transit of Venus is undeniably a masterpiece, one of the great novels of the century. Its complex, densely wrought plot traces the lives of two Australian sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, across the globe, through lives, marriages, and love affairs. The sisters take up with public figures—writer, scientist, doctor, bureaucrat, activist—while around them unfold the dramas of the globalising postwar world: “In America, a white man had been shot dead in a car, and a black man on a veranda. In Russia, a novelist had emerged from hell to announce that beauty would save the world. Russian tanks rolled through Prague while America made war in Asia. In Greece the plays of Aristophanes were forbidden, in China the writings of Confucius.” There is an insistence on the weight and substance of human words and lives, a sense of expectation and portentousness that comes straight from melodrama. The novel begins with the arrival of a marked figure, a stranger, at “the farthest and largest house” in the middle of a storm wreaking devastation at once ordinary and mythic: “Housewives were rushing, and crying out, ‘My washing.’ And a sudden stripe of light split earth from sky.” The action, largely visual, sweeps from the elemental world of vale, hill, castle, and deluge to a richly domestic interior, a circular hallway, a bowl of roses, a newspaper, “a dark picture framed in gold.” A little later, the melodrama is made explicit: “A little curled chrysanthemum of a dog was in heaven at her approach. ‘Grasper. Grasper.’ The dog jumped up and down, speechless. Someone was shaking a bell. Grace was opening a door. And the lights went up by themselves as on a stage.”
There is also Transit’s untimely relation to feminism. The second wave that was exploding all around through the years of its writing is barely evident in its pages, despite its interest in women’s lives. Shirley was not, then or ever, drawn to feminism; her concern with women’s authority and agency in the world was expressed through other modes. The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami, a friend of her later years, describes Transit’s Caro Bell as “one of the great women characters of the modern novel—someone we recognize for a kind of strength at a time when feminism was not in the air, and so women possessed of such strength had no peg of doctrine to hang it on.” Bilgrami proposes that Caro’s situation is particularly poignant because, unlike her great antecedents—Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke—she “lives and loves in the decade just before the turn to feminism, and so all the reader’s urges on her behalf are of the sort we feel when we think of a ‘close miss’; and yet Shirley is confident in her resolve that these qualities of character and temperament in Caro might well be the more interesting for having missed.” There is in this view a richness in the combination of feminism’s proximity and its absence.
There is something untimely about this novel, above all stylistically. In 2010, Michael Gorra wrote that it “would have seemed old-fashioned in 1980,” when it was published, a view echoed by other readers who, in the decades that followed its publication, seem often to have been delaying, holding off, even resisting its appeal. Geoff Dyer wrote that he had finally turned to read Transit twenty years after buying a copy and was struck then by the sense that he was reading it “at the perfect moment,” that he had been in fact “destined to read the book at this moment,” his experience chiming with the novel’s deep investment in destiny. David Miller, a few years later, wrote of his irritation at how long it had taken him to read the novel and that having begun, “I was ensnared, like having been bitten by a puppy or kitten that wouldn’t let go until it tasted blood.” Another decade on, Michelle de Kretser remembered that in 1980 she had wondered, “Why the fuss?” She had read the novel and “forgot about it for twenty years”; then, opening it again, “the sensation came, like a blow to the breastbone,” from the first page, “the shock of the great.”
On its publication in the spring of 1980, reviews, laudatory, were also personal, even intimate; readers were drawn fast into the novel, experiencing shocks and revelations along with the characters. In The New York Times, John Leonard wrote that Transit’s “business is to break the heart” and confessed that “although I suppose that such emotions are inappropriate to criticism, I finished the book angry and in tears.” The affect was itself a function of the writing: “No matter the object—a feeling, a face, a room, the weather—it is stripped of its layers of paint, its clots of words, down to the original wood; oil is applied; grain appears, and a glow. Every epigram and apostrophe is earned. A powerful intelligence is playing with a knife. It is an intelligence that refuses to be deflected by ironies; irony isn’t good enough.” The allusive prose that had beguiled readers of the early novels was now fully formed, strikingly not of its time, but drawing, somehow, on the long traditions of literature. Anthony Hecht spelled this out in his formal introduction to her in a 1983 Library of Congress series of public talks on poetry. Shirley Hazzard was, he said,
A writer of fiction in a series of programs usually devoted to poets. But by dint of the craft of her work, the lyric movement, the voluminous literary resonance of her beautiful and meticulous prose, she very evidently elects to keep such company. For she brings to her writing that wealth of literary tradition that poets have always conceived to be their special heritage, but which only a very few novelists have tried to make use of … What distinguishes her writing above all is that she takes her words seriously, as very few novelists do these days. Her words recur within her text like lyric refrains, each repetition bearing a new increment of meaning. Yeats could do that sort of thing, and Shakespeare, and Joyce. It is more than mere technique; it is knowing the reach and dimension, the metric weight of each simple, innocent word, and using that knowledge to advantage.
The poet John Malcolm Brinnin wrote that on finishing the novel, he had immediately picked it up again and reread it: “The didactic side of me wants to treat it in the way art historians take paintings and reduce them to geometry, just to show that, behind all the shapes and colours there is that reticulum of ideas, that controlling hand,” adding that he was “in a sort of enchanted jeopardy: I swear you write just for me.”
Maxwell had been contacting members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, seeking nominations for Shirley for the Harold Vursell Award, given each year for recently published prose notable for the quality of its style. She did not win (the award went that year to Tom Wolfe), but her nomination was endorsed by Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller. Miller wrote Maxwell, “I am in the middle of ‘Venus’ and have not been so enthralled by a book in many years […] I think she merits everything anybody can give her.”
awww
The critic Don Anderson dismissed the lectures as “a speech-day address by the headmistress of a girls’ private school, of, dare I say, Queenwood” (Shirley’s old school) and criticised her “apparent ignorance of contemporary Australian thought and letters” and of “current social and political events.” In this last point he was mostly correct, although her correspondence with Elizabeth Harrower reveals a sustained and detailed discussion of Australian political and cultural affairs, and her 1977 New Yorker essay about Australia is detailed and informed about the contemporary Australian scene. Beyond this, critics of her lectures also disregarded her belief that writers must challenge and criticise nationalistic assertions. These were matters already encountered in her battles with Murray Bail and others. In the moment, it was the ferocity of Anderson’s comments, and their implicit misogyny, that hurt most. It is worth noting that this was not an isolated instance. In 1980, amid the glowing international reception and extraordinary success of The Transit of Venus, another Australian critic, Peter Pierce, had dismissed the novel as “the best-dressed women’s magazine fiction of its year.” Two decades later, another Australian critic, John Docker, wrote of Greene on Capri: “The book claws at its reader, calling admire me, admire me. Get away, I thought. I responded to the book’s preciousness by (as it were) manhandling it; I underlined, wrote in the margins and notated ‘fuck’ next to particularly studied phrases (like ‘cold evenings of Rilkean stars’).”
rude
On Capri, Shirley grieved for her mother’s life as much as for her death: “One of her tragedies—as I do believe she had tragedy—was the inability to believe that other people appreciated her best qualities and had goodwill towards her; that she did not need to keep testing affection till it collapsed under the strain.” She wrote to Elizabeth—“You were so good—immeasurably good—to her. What was bearable in her latter life was in great part thanks to you”—and she thought long about her mother’s life and qualities:
What almost no one could know was that her trouble was more than just an exaggeration of the unleashed Mother of her own balked generation; but a real instability that was sometimes madness. Yes, I’m relieved of course that the last prolonged twilight finally ended. Most of the strongest feelings I might experience have been used up, at least for the time being, and only come in twinges. I chiefly feel—“Rest, perturbed spirit”; and the waste; and sadness when I think of childhood times when MM was clearly, as I now see, more often than not a lively and practical woman, not yet tipping her imbalances in dread directions. Reading the letters about her, I’m reminded too of what so often appeared in her life—that she could not really believe in the goodwill of others, and in her process of testing used it up, wore it down, and scared it off.