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Such courtesy was, for Shirley, of a piece with local respect for the arts. She recalled sending, in 1973, a congratulatory telegram from the Capri post office to Patrick White on hearing of his Nobel Prize: “The cable boys (far from the imposing stern professional ethics of indifference to message) were thrilled, having just read the news in the papers. ‘Dev’esser bravissimo! Auguri!’ Auguri indeed.” In early 1984 Francis recorded in his diary an episode in Rome when their taxi driver began reciting poetry as he drove them back to the Hassler hotel one evening. Shirley of course joined him, and together they recited works by “Palazzeschi, Pascoli, Foscolo,” and then, inevitably, Leopardi: “all of Silvia, much of La Sera, L’Infinito, La Ginestra, Pastore Errante, Vaghe Stelle. Beautiful. His name Ernesto. (Spoke of Wilde). Refuses payment absolutely. Boy at Hassler door says, ‘It is only among simple people that there is poetry now.’ Both, all three, near tears.” There were many such moments: “Lively, youngish taxi driver, finding we were writers: I write too, but with my mouth. And with my hands.” They consulted a doctor in Naples about a sprained arm, “a charming elderly orthopaedist, man of culture, who has remained faithful to the Futurists and himself paints in that manner.” They found that he had come to meet their ferry from Capri, and then refused payment. Francis observed, “These experiences make you feel you never want to leave this place.”
awww
In September she marked the deaths, three days apart, of Alberto Moravia in Rome and Patrick White in Sydney. The news, not unexpected in either case, was nonetheless “somehow shocking.” Both were, she wrote Donald Keene, “difficult men, and both, I’d say, writers who had lost impetus in later years. But, in part because of formidability, they were the kind who don’t die, don’t appear subject to death.” The following month, “Graham Greene, on phone, tells us he is living from constant transfusions. (He sounded very ill; but livened up as he developed antagonism.) This strange procession, as Barbara Pym calls it.” Greene died six months later; Shirley remarked that after Moravia’s death, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica had the headline “Senza Moravia,” and added, “For Graham too, there were hardly any English-speaking people who had not grown up aware of him and somehow counting on him to be there always.” A few months after Greene it was the turn of her old friend Sumner Locke Elliott, of cancer. Red Warren had died the previous year. Shirley and Francis had gone to Vermont for the usual Christmas visit in 1988; Warren’s biographer, Joseph Blotner, writes that Shirley sat with Red looking out at the winter scene. “She thought of Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and intoned the lines ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate / The weakening eye of day.’ And he, without missing a beat, took up the next line: ‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings from [sic] broken lyres…’”
nooooo
Unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable, Alec’s death, the persistent and reiterated loss prompted endless recollection, reflection: “As if one had swallowed a stone. The compulsive blighting.” Inexpressible—not simply because the right to the expression of grief remained with his widow and family, but, this perhaps most of all, because grief’s object was itself impossibly past. As well as the “centre, gone,” there was also completeness, forestalling understanding. And once again she voiced a criticism, the sense of some falling short on Alec’s part, some “incapacity—not for love, exactly, he was affectionate—but for passion, for great love, for intimacy sustained; for imaginative love. Compared with mine, what was his love? Strange but it was passive.” Alongside this she felt, if not anger, then the burden of her husband’s increasing frailty and her boundedness:
The wish to be away, to regain my being, to matter, to give pleasure. To matter. What use to enumerate episodes, words? Nothing is but what those represent. And that is the world, in essence, for humans. For the present, no wish to live, that is to be lively. Yet, always the life struggling up, wanting to cast off the blight. Rebellious, the impulse to be alive, oddly different from “wish to live.” Waste … The typewriter clicking, rattling, pounding on, the machine running ahead like a locomotive over every appeal for love, for company. The reciprocal time to do my own work, think my thoughts, live in my appropriate state (cannot express this—return to the realm of spontaneity, of poetry, to the centre). Clicking, clicking, rattling, pounding on.
Through 2000, it was clear to their friends that Emmy and Bill Maxwell were both increasingly frail and, by the summer, that Emmy was close to death. Bill was reading War and Peace to her, and then to himself. Shirley later wrote that his “solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those rooms.” When Bill grew too weak to hold the book, Annabel came each afternoon and read for him. Throughout these days Shirley also came often and, if the Maxwells weren’t well enough to see her, sat in the living room. These long daily visits were important. Alec Wilkinson, who was also there each day, felt that “Shirley and Bill connected on some level that was beyond social. Shirley was there in a profound way, the way one person would be there for another, to ease the burden, drawing on all the capital of the years of friendship and regard … There was something fierce about it … She was seeing their friendship, their love, to the end. Attending it. The attention of love. It was in character of what she would do. It was duty in the best sense.”
nooooo
She mused in her diary on the alignment of passion and morality shadowed by her own sense of fated misalignment—the coming-round of things and the too-late that are so completely expressed in The Transit of Venus—in her new novel. And she reflected on the timing of her own coming to love: “Reading these excruciating letters, our tragic story, I realise that one—and at any rate I—needed half a lifetime to prepare to deserve—or to be a person who might deserve—love; to subdue self and to comfort, nurture, inspire perhaps and share the life of such a man. We need what we can’t have: the rehearsal for the rightful life. With … Francis it came right, as right as ever such a life can be. The strangeness of this dichotomy, the re-living of a great love.” The coming “right” of her life with Francis now seemed to provide the “happy ending” of her past story with Alec, a happy ending that she sought to write into the book.
[...] Helen Garner, who offered a compelling account of the kind of shift that might take place in the mysterious spaces of reading, taste, and perception. Garner recalled her own early hostility to Hazzard’s novels, “back in the 80s”:
Everyone I knew was swept away by them. I tried to read them but they bored me. They made me feel cranky, bolshie and obscurely ashamed. I couldn’t hack her elegant women with their fancy, made-up names, women who were soignées, who had their hair done and wore heels and sheer stockings, who trailed their long fingers in fountains and let their bracelets jingle against the marble basin. They (and their creator) shuddered, I knew, at oafish Australians like me, and at the coarse world I came from and was content to live in. I was viscerally insulted by the way she drew her skirts aside from the daggy, rough-grained Australia that I knew I belonged in, the country outside which I already sensed I would never be able to flourish. I don’t think I spoke about these thoughts to anyone. I just thought them, resentfully and, though I didn’t admit it to myself, sadly.
When Garner returned, decades later, to Hazzard’s work, she found her view transformed. She recognised qualities she had, she felt, been “unable to appreciate at the time: the way she handles a sentence, her wit and subtlety, her deep knowledge of the world … the fine sensibility, the adult sensibility that I was not ready for…” This emphatically and thoughtfully “Australian” reading upends the sense that Hazzard’s writing is outdated, or out of place in Australia, suggesting as it does that such simple coordinates might not necessarily determine either a reader or a writer.
There was another side to this generosity. Shirley’s sociability, the alacrity with which she shared her learning and her enthusiasms, could turn at times to intractability, particularly about the UN. And there was the matter of her tendency to monologue, noted by many, and even for good friends sometimes a problem. Annabel heard before she met Shirley of her capacity to monopolise and found that conversation generally involved “finding a moment when you could interrupt.” Most people really did not mind. Benjamin Taylor memorably described her as “more cataract than woman once she got going, and everything she has to say is of interest.” Ann Goldstein, impressed with Shirley’s range of reference, also felt she had “this very hard intellect” that involved speaking her opinions but not listening. After attempting at first to present alternative views, “I realised there was no point. So I was content just to listen to her.” Michael Mallon felt that “what she had to say was so much more interesting than what most other people have to say that I was happy to let her discourse.” People felt that it wasn’t about Shirley wanting to dominate. It had, Alison West said, “nothing to do with pride. Just the tidal waves of knowledge that she had stored up and that she was eager to share.” And it was of a piece with the authority of her bearing. Evan Cornog made the point that Shirley “wouldn’t let stuff pass if she thought it was intellectually or in character shoddy in some way. She would call people out on it. Not in a throw down the gauntlet way but you’d know it had been noticed.” Alec Wilkinson felt that this quality made her something of “an assassin.” She was “not judging so much as measuring, observing,” and this was part of her sharp focus on the world: “She was paying attention. Ferociously. It was her habit of mind to pay attention.” Francis carried similar authority, although he tended to defer socially to her. In company, many friends observed, “it would be Shirley being vivacious and lively, doing most of the talking, protecting Francis. He was always quieter, she much more the dazzling one.” Akeel Bilgrami recalled one dinner at the Steegmullers’ apartment with Edward Said, an occasion both guests felt to have been “marred” by Shirley dominating the conversation, talking endlessly about the UN. “She wouldn’t give Francis a chance to talk because she was so incensed—about Waldheim, about bureaucracy, about everything to do with the UN.” At the same time, Bilgrami found that one-on-one she was notably less garrulous, was indeed an attentive conversationalist, completely charming, “keen on probing what you thought.”