Derek Drinkwater review of Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life; and Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham, eds., Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters

(London: Virago, 2022), 564 pp., PB $34.99, ISBN 9780349012872

(Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2024), 384 pp., PB $39.99, ISBN 9781742238180

The novels and short stories of Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower attest to the accuracy of the dictum that ‘deprivation’ is a key impulse behind the writing of autobiographical fiction.¹ Their parents’ miserably unhappy marriages produced in both women a form of emotional deprivation that was nevertheless critical to their success as writers. These books—the first (by Brigitta Olubas),² which can be considered the definitive biography of Hazzard; and the second, a highly revealing epistolary portrait edited by Olubas and Susan Wyndham³—constitute a handsome and deserving tribute to two Australian authors whose commitment to literature was lifelong.

Why did Hazzard and Harrower choose to become writers? How did this vocation shape their lives? And what was the sum of their literary achievements? First to Shirley Hazzard. Born in Sydney in 1931 to upwardly mobile, intellectually middlebrow parents—the younger of two sisters whose relationship, like that of their mother and father, only worsened over time (there were no brothers)—Hazzard flourished at her private school where she developed a love of literature (especially poetry) that became a ‘point of self-definition’ (Shirley Hazzard, p. 48).⁴ The teenaged Hazzard’s world opened up during her father’s post–World War II stints as an Australian trade commissioner, successively in Hong Kong, Wellington and New York, where she secured a junior secretarial post with the United Nations (UN). Despite UN work in Naples—which enabled Hazzard to cement her fascination with things Italian—poor promotion prospects combined with the New Yorker’s publication of her short stories at lucrative rates and the support of its legendary fiction editor, William Maxwell, prompted her to resign from the UN in 1962 to write full-time—a decision she never regretted.

A stellar literary career followed, during which she produced two short story collections, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967); four novels (the first two are essentially novellas), The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003) (acknowledged widely as a masterpiece); two non-fiction works critical of the United Nations, Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990); as well as Coming of Age in Australia (1985) (the 1984 ABC Boyer Lectures); Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000); and The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008). Her Selected Essays (2016) and Collected Stories (2020) solidified Hazzard’s reputation as a literary and social critic, and a writer of fiction, respectively. Her work, which continues to be rediscovered by new generations, received much critical recognition—in the US the O. Henry Award (short stories); the William Dean Howells Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award (fiction); and in Australia the Miles Franklin Award.

By 1963, when her friend Muriel Spark⁵ introduced Hazzard to a wealthy and cultivated intellectual widower 25 years her senior, Francis Steegmuller,⁶ Hazzard already knew her way around the New York and London literary and publishing worlds. Married within a year, they became practically inseparable until his death in 1994, dividing their time between apartments in New York, Naples and Capri. The union was no mariage blanc—Hazzard suffered an early miscarriage—and they were a formidable literary partnership who read Gibbon to each other over breakfast and always had separate writing projects on the stocks. Though a part of New York’s intellectual establishment—exemplars of a world defined by ‘high civility, grace, and an enduring dedication to literature’⁷—the Steegmullers avoided involvement in its frequent skirmishes. By now an honorary citizen of Capri—a rare distinction for a non-Caprese—Hazzard’s final years were marred by deteriorating health. She died in New York in 2016 aged 85.

Born in Newcastle in 1928, Elizabeth Harrower was an only child whose mother’s two marriages brought neither woman much happiness. After leaving school, she became an office worker, educating herself after hours by courtesy of the Sydney City Library, chiefly utilising its literature and non-fiction shelves. Harrower spent the 1950s in the United Kingdom, absorbing valuable material for her five novels: Down in the City (1957), The Long Prospect (1958), The Catherine Wheel (1960), The Watch Tower (1966) (acclaimed as her finest novel) and In Certain Circles (2014). A short story collection entitled A Few Days in the Country appeared in 2015. Harrower’s strongly autobiographical fiction reflects a preoccupation with ‘oppressive relationships, orphaned and abandoned children, [and] damaged and manipulative adults’ (Letters, p. 6).⁸ During the 1960s, she worked at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), as a book reviewer on the Sydney Morning Herald and for the publisher Macmillan (Australia). An inheritance in her early 40s, a frugal lifestyle and shrewd property investments enabled Harrower to pursue the freelance writer’s life in reasonable comfort until her death in 2020 aged 92 in Sydney—the centre of her life and fictional universe. Fortunately, Harrower lived long enough to witness the early twenty-first-century revival of interest in her fiction made possible by Text Publishing’s reissue of her novels and short stories in new editions between 2012 and 2015.

Through their skilful delineation of four themes germane to these women’s personal and literary lives, Olubas and Wyndham provide readers with penetrating studies of both writers. The correspondents are themselves sometimes overshadowed in these books by Hazzard’s mercurial mother Catherine ‘Kit’, whose domineering nature, manipulative ways and erratic (likely bipolar) behaviour stretched both women’s patience for two decades. Hazzard and Harrower began corresponding in 1966 after the Potts Point bookseller Norma Chapman introduced Harrower—an admirer of Hazzard’s short stories—to Kit. They got on and a friendship began, with Hazzard and Harrower sharing a degree of responsibility for Kit, who could be charming and good company or difficult and demanding whether in Australia or on her frequent cruises to visit friends in the United Kingdom or the Steegmullers in New York. Though her 1954 divorce settlement had left Kit financially secure, she complained frequently of money worries and seemed beset by a medley of physical and psychological maladies (real and imagined). The burden of looking after Kit fell to an increasingly frustrated Harrower. Hazzard, in distant New York, may have felt that too much time spent with Kit was akin to being tethered to her in a ‘shipwreck’ (Letters, p. 224), but it was more often Harrower in Sydney at ‘Wit’s Endville’ (Letters, p. 142).⁹ This saga, which continued until Kit’s death in 1985, was straight from Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novel, Brothers and Sisters (1929), whose dominant character is the tyrannical mother Sophia.¹⁰

No event better demonstrates the dysfunctional nature of their childhoods than the invitation by each girl’s mother to join her in a suicide pact. Kit and her husband Reginald ‘Reg’ were a combustible mismatch from the beginning of their marriage (a situation worsened by his serial infidelity), and their daughters were raised in an atmosphere of verbal violence. Harrower’s father deserted the family when she was about seven. She was raised in Newcastle by her maternal grandmother—whose husband was an abusive drunk—while her mother worked as a nurse in Sydney before remarrying (again unsatisfactorily) a well-off but financially shady man who was certainly an alcoholic and possibly mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, Harrower was dubious about matrimony—she never married—observing that, as a child, she saw no ‘happy marriages’ (Letters, p. 6), though she had a small number of lasting male friendships and she adored the kind, urbane and scholarly Francis Steegmuller. Harrower, convinced of her ‘excessive talent … for happiness and unhappiness’ (Letters, p. 26), was less successful than Hazzard in exorcising the pain of her early years.

The Letters, in particular, lay bare the literary life’s frustrations for both women—not chiefly the solitude decreed by writing, but the interruptions of invited guests and gatecrashes; the drain on energy and time of participating in public aspects of the world of letters, such as sitting on literary prize-judging panels; and the emotional costs of entering the lists in literary controversies. Hazzard spoke for them both when she commented that the ‘literary life’ was ‘a phenomenon hard to convey in its full horror to anyone who has not experienced it’ (Letters, p. 186). Few writers would be surprised at the frustration these women felt without ‘something on the desk or on the typewriter’ (Letters, p. 24). This ‘pitiable state’ (Letters, p. 29)¹¹ was relieved only by settling on a subject and persisting, and through regular immersion in their favourite authors, a shared idol being C. P. Cavafy¹²—‘a love of mine’ (Hazzard; Letters, p. 188)—whose every word and thought seemed to have been ‘weighed on silver scales’ (Harrower, Letters, p. 192).

Hazzard’s decade at the UN was exciting and stimulating, but the behemoth’s reluctance to use the strengths of its junior employees (like herself)—and what she saw as an endemic misogyny among the senior ranks of all foreign offices and international organisations—led her to doubt their reformist credentials. Both women rejected the label ‘feminist’, Hazzard reserving special scorn for the UN’s ‘Women’s Year’—a ‘disheartening rhetorical exercise’ overseen by a body whose female staff were ‘massively discriminated against’ (Letters, p. 132).¹³ Harrower, in her fiction, depicted the harsh lives of women in post–World War II Sydney and the limited choices open to them.

Olubas’s meticulously researched and stylishly written biography misses nothing of note about Hazzard and her world. It has also been well-edited and is enhanced by extensive notes and an excellent index. However, the book has some shortcomings. The British Imperial honours system and the titles that went with it still resonated for many in the Anglophone world described in this book. Why, then, omit all honorifics, whether the individual concerned held the title at the time they were referred to (Sir Harold Nicolson) (Shirley Hazzard, pp. 243, 553) or received it later (Dame Muriel Spark)? Some biographical background information could also have been more accurate. Sir Osbert Sitwell, the fifth Baronet’s claim on posterity rests more on his majestic and best-selling five-volume autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand! (1945–50) than on his reputation as a ‘poet and art collector’ (p. 293). The term for the accolade is the Nobel Prize in (not for) Literature (pp. 283, 553).

At 376 pages, the Letters volume is testament to how well the editors have been able to reduce some 400,000 words to a publishable and insightful monograph. It opens with a perceptive and succinct biographical and critical introduction, though there are no illustrations; the 10-page index is workmanlike rather than comprehensive (Letters, pp. 367–76); and the editorial apparatus, which can make or break such collections, is inadequate to the task of describing—in a mere five pages—the many literary actors and bunfights referred to (pp. 362–6). On occasion, Olubas and Wyndham supply the requisite information needed to make sense of a reference—Maeve Brennan and ‘the original long-winded lady’ (pp. 32, 364)—but, more often than not, the reader is left to struggle. Who were Jacques Barzun and Elizabeth Bowen (pp. 134, 126–7)¹⁴ for whom no biographical notes are provided? Ditto in relation to the Australian poets Bruce Beaver and Francis Webb (p. 107),¹⁵ and the novelist Jean Rhys,¹⁶ a writer both women admired and whom Hazzard praised for her capacity to ‘transform self-pity into art’ (pp. 140–1). Collections such as this one gain much when their editors are generous with notes and interlinking commentaries in chronicling not only the lives of the principals, their friends and their contemporaries but also the events of a literary era; inexplicably, Olubas and Wyndham have eschewed any ambitious attempt to do so in this volume.¹⁷

Despite major personal blows—the unexpected death at 61 of her mother (Harrower) and the decline into dementia of an adored husband and soulmate (Hazzard)—the dedication of both women to the craft of writing remained—as it had always been—unwavering. The strain of looking after Kit took a toll on Harrower: a concerned Patrick White lamented that she was ‘living a novel instead of writing one’ (Letters, pp. 9, 85); and Kit’s behaviour often acted like ‘a series of depth-charges and torpedoes’ (Letters, p. 35) on Hazzard’s writing abilities. Nevertheless, neither woman doubted that the writing life was a worthwhile marathon in the face of every obstacle. Their readers can be grateful to them for persevering and to Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham for ensuring that these literary individualists have at last been given their due.

1. 1 This observation owes its widespread circulation on one side of the Atlantic to the long-serving fiction editor of the New Yorker, William Maxwell (1908–2000); and on the other to the gruff English poet, Philip Larkin (1922–1985), who opined that ‘deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’.

2. 2 Brigitta Olubas, Professor of English at the University of New South Wales, is the author of Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist (2012). She edited the first collection of critical essays on Hazzard’s writings (2014) as well as a selection of her essays (2016) and Collected Stories (2020). Olubas also co-edited (with Elizabeth McMahon) a volume of critical essays on Elizabeth Harrower’s work (2017).

3. 3 Susan Wyndham, sometime literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian newspaper’s New York correspondent, conducted extensive interviews with both letter writers.

4. 4 Poetry, Hazzard would later reflect, was also a ‘natural antidote’ to the tumult of international affairs (Letters, 62). Her friendship with the English novelist Graham Greene began in a Capri restaurant when Hazzard supplied him with the last line of a Robert Browning poem he could not remember (Shirley Hazzard, 418–19).

5. 5 Dame Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a prolific Scottish novelist, short story writer and poet. Her novels include The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).

6. 6 Francis Steegmuller (1906–1994) was a Francophile biographer, editor, translator and fiction writer, winner of two National Book Awards, and recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. Spark quipped that this piece of matchmaking was her best ever novel (Shirley Hazzard, p. 194).

7. 7 The New York Society Library, Literary Lives: The World of Francis Steegmuller & Shirley Hazzard (New York: The New York Society Library, 2010), 5.

8. 8 The critic, James Wood, was struck by the ‘strikingly similar darkness of vision’ pervading all of her novels. See James Wood, ‘No Time for Lies: Rediscovering Elizabeth Harrower’, New Yorker, 20 October 2014, 92.

9. 9 See also Shirley Hazzard, 36–7, 320–1.

10. 10 Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) was an English novelist. Her fictional bailiwick was the Edwardian upper-middle-class family.

11. 11 See also Shirley Hazzard, 294–5, 311.

12. 12 C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) was a Greek poet, resident for most of his life in Alexandria.

13. 13 See also Shirley Hazzard, 318–19.

14. 14 Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) was an eminent, French-born American historian of ideas and cultural critic. Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer. Both were longstanding friends of the Steegmullers.

15. 15 Bruce Beaver (1928–2004) was acclaimed at home and abroad as among the world’s finest poets. The literary critic Sir Herbert Read regarded Francis Webb (1925–1973) as T. S. Eliot’s equal.

16. 16 Jean Rhys (1890–1979) was an English novelist, whose best-known work is Wide Sargasso Sea (1966).

17. 17 A model letters collection is Miles Franklin, My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, ed. Jill Roe (Pymble: Angus & Robertson, 2010).