We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Read online

  WE NEED SILENCE

  TO FIND OUT

  WHAT WE THINK

  We Need Silence

  to Find Out

  What We Think

  SELECTED ESSAYS

  Shirley Hazzard

  Edited with an Introduction

  by Brigitta Olubas

  Columbia University Press

  New York

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54079-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hazzard, Shirley, 1931–

  [Essays. Selections]

  We need silence to find out what we think : selected essays /

  Shirley Hazzard; edited with an introduction by Brigitta Olubas.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-231-17326-1 (cloth : acid-free paper) —

  ISBN 978-0-231-54079-7 (e-book)

  I. Olubas, Brigitta, editor. II. Title.

  PR9619.3.H369A6 2016

  824’.914—dc23 2015016426

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Catherine Casalino

  Cover photo: © Getty/David Levenson

  References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Shirley Hazzard—Author, Amateur, Intellectual, by Brigitta Olubas

  Part I. THROUGH LITERATURE ITSELF

  We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

  The Lonely Word

  1. Virgil and Montale

  2. The Defense of Candor

  3. Posterity: “The Bright Reversion”

  Part II. THE EXPRESSIVE WORD

  A Mind Like a Blade: Review of Muriel Spark, Collected Stories I and The Public Image

  Review of Jean Rhys, Quartet

  The Lasting Sickness of Naples: Review of Matilde Serao, Il Ventre di Napoli

  The New Novel by the New Nobel Prize Winner: Review of Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm

  Ordinary People: Review of Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn and Excellent Women

  Translating Proust

  Introduction to Geoffrey Scott’s The Portrait of Zélide

  Introduction to Iris Origo’s Leopardi: A Study in Solitude

  William Maxwell

  Part III. PUBLIC THEMES

  The Patron Saint of the UN is Pontius Pilate

  “Gulag” and the Men of Peace

  The United Nations: Where Governments Go to Church

  The League of Frightened Men: Why the UN is So Useless

  UNhelpful: Waldheim’s Latest Debacle

  A Writer’s Reflections on the Nuclear Age

  Part IV. THE GREAT OCCASION

  Canton More Far

  Papyrology at Naples

  The Tuscan in Each of Us

  Part V. LAST WORDs

  2003 National Book Award Acceptance

  The New York Society Library Discussion, September 2012

  Notes

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It has been a privilege to edit this selection of Shirley Hazzard’s nonfiction writings. I would like first of all to thank the author for permission to reproduce here the unpublished essays and the published work for which she holds copyright, and also for granting me access to her private archives and working manuscripts. This access was facilitated in formal and practical ways by Frances Alston and Annabel Davis-Goff, and I would like to express my gratitude to both. I also wish to thank staff at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, for their assistance with Hazzard’s papers held there. I undertook a large part of the work of editing this material while a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, in 2014, and I am grateful for the welcome and support provided by colleagues there. My work has also been greatly helped by grants and other forms of institutional support from the School of the Arts and Media and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales in 2014 and 2015, and an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (2011–2013): DP110104174, “Shirley Hazzard: Life, Work and Ethical Engagement.” My efforts to track down the more arcane references in Hazzard’s essays were greatly assisted by Nicholas Birns, and I would also like to express my gratitude to Jonathan Galassi for his help with Hazzard’s numerous references to the work of Leopardi and Montale, and to Edward Mendelson for help with some of her references to Auden. I would like once again to acknowledge with thanks the interest and support for my work on Shirley Hazzard shown by Akeel Bilgrami. The collegial and convivial atmosphere provided by my colleagues in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW has made for a particularly stimulating working environment, and the ongoing support of Bruce and Zoia makes everything possible—thanks to you all. Finally, I would like to thank Jennifer Crewe, Kathryn Schell, and the editorial team at Columbia University Press for their thoughtful and rigorous attention, all of which has helped me to do justice to the task of bringing Shirley Hazzard’s remarkable prose into an accessible form for a new audience. Any errors that remain are, of course, mine.

  With the publishers, I would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyrighted material: the New York Times for “We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think,” November 14, 1982, 11, 28–29; “A Mind Like a Blade: Review of Muriel Spark,” September 29, 1968, 1; “Review of Jean Rhys: Quartet,” April 11, 1971, 6; “The New Novel by the New Nobel Prize Winner: Review of Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm,” January 6, 1974, 1, 12; “The Patron Saint of the UN Is Pontius Pilate,” February 23, 1974, 31; “‘Gulag’ and the Men of Peace,” August 25, 1974: 446; the New Republic for “Where Governments Go to Church,” March 1, 1975, 11–14; “The League of Frightened Men: Why the UN Is so Useless,” January 19, 1980, 17–20; “UNHelpful: Waldheim’s Latest Debacle,” April 12, 1980, 10–13; Farrar, Straus and Giroux for “Translating Proust,” in ed. André Aciman, The Proust Project (1994), 174–181; Editions Slatkine for “The Tuscan in Each of Us,” in An Antipodean Connection: Australian Writers, Artists and Travellers in Tuscany, ed. Gaetano Huber and Marie Christine Huber (1993), 77–82; James Kirkup/New Yorker for “On a Tanaka by Ochi-Ai Naobumi,” October 3, 1959, 46. Extracts from W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles,” (Copyright © [1955] renewed 1976 and “Letter to Lord Byron” [1937] renewed 1976), are both reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  INTRODUCTION

  SHIRLEY HAZZARD

  Author, Amateur, Intellectual

  BRIGITTA OLUBAS

  Shirley Hazzard stands as a distinctive, even idiosyncratic figure in the New York literary scene she inhabited from the middle of the twentieth century. Her significance as a literary author is by now well established; a claim—such as that made implicitly by the publication of this collection—that she might also be viewed, and valued, as a public intellectual rests on the basis of her distinctive life and associations as well as her fiction. She left her native Australia in 1947 as a very young woman, without having completed a formal education, and wound up in New York, where she worked in a relatively lowly capacity for the United Nations from the early 1950s.1 After resigning her post there to wri
te full time, at first mainly short fiction for the New Yorker, she published a number of acclaimed novels. In the early 1960s she met and married the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, and the couple lived part of each year in Naples and Capri, and part in Manhattan, where their extensive circles of friends and associates included many of the significant literary figures of the time, including those known as the New York Intellectuals.2

  Hazzard’s background and character—an expatriate with no strong ties to her country of origin; an exquisite stylist, skilled linguist, and fiercely intellectual autodidact, deeply immersed in the Western literary canon and committed to the individual apprehension of art; a meticulously informed observer of local and international politics, intent on holding its representatives and practitioners to the highest ideals—defined in important ways the kind of writer and thinker she became. In many senses, the description by David Daiches of Lionel Trilling, whom Hazzard and Steegmuller knew well, might also apply to her: “in many respects my idea of the perfect New York intellectual…intelligent, curious, humane, well read, interested in ideas, fascinated by other places, immensely knowledgeable about European culture.”3 Similarly, Terry A. Cooney’s claim that “Western culture as a whole provided the general frame of reference for the Partisan Review circle and the widest standard of aspiration; their perspective was consciously and emphatically international,” applies readily to Hazzard.4 With a private income from Steegmuller’s first marriage, the couple were able to devote their lives to writing, and to reading. Described in retrospect as “a conjugal version of literary high life,” they practiced amateurism or belles lettres at the most elevated levels; producing, on Steegmuller’s part, erudite and scholarly biographies of a range of mainly French literary and cultural notables, and translations, principally of Flaubert, and on Hazzard’s delicately wrought, thoughtful, morally charged fictions about the newly forming global, or cosmopolitan, postwar world.5 And also, if to more muted acclaim and less sustained recognition, a succession of nonfiction writings.

  This collection brings together for the first time that nonfiction, produced and mostly published in the last three decades of the twentieth century. These essays, lectures, and reviews track Hazzard’s acclaimed fiction, echoing, extending, and illumining it; however, the writing of these nonfiction pieces created something of a distraction for their author, drawing her away from her primary labor. Hazzard noted this herself in an interview around her second monograph about the United Nations, Countenance of Truth (1990), observing that working on “antipathetic matters of this kind” had taken her away from the “work that I love as a poet” but that she felt that she had had no choice, given the gravity of its subject matter and her sense of her responsibilities as citizen.6 This sense of her writerly practice as defined in the tensions and contrary demands of the political and the aesthetic, the public and the private domains, is at once instructive and deceptively straightforward as a way of thinking about her work and significance, as I hope this collection of essays will demonstrate. This tension is one of the important features aligning her work with that of the New York Intellectuals, who were editing and publishing in the same journals as Hazzard, and many of whom, as already noted, were her friends. The close fit between art and politics, formed around the figure of the intellectual, is common to most commentaries on this group, with Alexander Bloom arguing that they “held out for the pre-eminence of art, not devoid of social context but reflective of it…[and] they held strongly to ideas about the special and crucial role for critics and for intellectuals in general,” and Nicholas Birns noting their commitment to “the relationship of literature, especially the novel, to society. They sought to establish a public arena of conversation about literature that would touch on politics and social questions but not be contaminated by or held hostage to them.”7

  Shirley Hazzard has clearly always seen the work of literature, and thus of the literary author, in terms that embrace the domains of politics and art; for her they are not easily or usefully separated. Her fiction—in particular her two larger, later novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire as well as her early collection of satirical stories People in Glass Houses—have their action firmly grounded in the world of midcentury public and political life, and also in the interior worlds, sensibilities, and sympathies of their protagonists. Although the primary matter, densely poetic, of her fiction is that of sexual and romantic love, she also deals directly with the recollections and consequences of world war, the administration of peace with all its brutal militarism, ongoing agitations around the world in relation to dissidents and refugees, the pernicious endurance and ineptitude of bureaucracies as well as the expressly political dimensions of the domestic and international policies of diverse governments. These worlds meet most pointedly in the moral and ethical choices presented to protagonists in their personal and professional lives as artists, scientists, activists, lovers, or friends; they are choices that embody a necessary continuity of interior lives and social and political realities. This shared space of art and politics is likewise at the heart of Hazzard’s nonfiction.

  The essays in this collection were first published in a range of newspapers and magazines, mostly in New York; three of them have never been published before. While some essays about the United Nations appeared in journals associated with the New York Intellectuals, such as the New Republic and the Partisan Review, there is no sense of a singular or identifiable audience with shared views; rather the impression they give is of a spectrum of perspectives and of a willingness on the author’s part to step outside readily identifiable political categories. And this distinctiveness of her political position has led to some unexpected responses to Hazzard’s work: for instance, in Mark Mazower’s discussion she is characterized as a “conservative” critic of the UN, alongside William F. Buckley Jr., even though her political orientation was consistently of the Left.8 More broadly, while it is useful to think about Hazzard in the context of the New York Intellectuals, it is also important to bear in mind that she understood herself to be working around and outside such groupings, unaligned in all important matters. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi’s recent work on exiled or expatriated “foreign” intellectuals is perhaps useful here, despite the cultural closeness of the United States to Hazzard’s country of origin, Australia. Ritivoi observes that the very position of intellectual severs bonds of national affiliation: “intellectuals have always been part of a transnational rather than national order, even before terms like transnationalism and cosmopolitanism became fashionable,” adding that “Richard Pell views modern intellectuals as, by the very nature of their mission, outsiders or marginal in relation to any form of power—whether represented by the state, the market, or the university—so as to be able to reflect critically on it.”9

  The essays have been divided into five unequal groupings; this unevenness of volume itself speaks to Hazzard’s priorities and also reflects something of the way these writings speak to her biography—the span of her writing life and her priorities in organizing her energies and attention. Part 1 draws its title, “Through Literature Itself,” from the first of three lectures Shirley Hazzard presented in early 1982 in the Gauss Seminar series at Princeton University, which are published here for the first time from Hazzard’s typescripts. They are preceded by “We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think,” published in the New York Times later that year, which outlines and defends the importance and the larger demands of literature, its necessity, and the conditions needed for its survival. It is clearly drawn in part at least from the Gauss seminars but is sufficiently distinct to warrant the inclusion of both. The essays in this section give the clearest and most compelling sense of Hazzard’s thinking about the place of literature in the contemporary world; they require nonetheless only a brief introduction, as their significance is everywhere evident in their superb prose and the breadth and depth of their reference.

  The Lonely Word is Hazzard’s title for the three Gauss seminars. In th
em she takes up with self-conscious gravity the opportunity to speak across the professional/amateur divide as a literary writer and reader, an intellectual from outside the university, providing a very personal but erudite survey of the condition of Western literature in late modernity as trace and exemplar of humanism. Her themes are as follows: in the first lecture “Virgil and Montale,” the public role of the poet from the classical to the modern era through the collapse of heroism that attended the rise of Christian thought and aesthetics in the West; in the second, “The Defense of Candor,” the relation of poetic language to truth across this same period; and finally in “Posterity: The Bright Reversion,” the nature of literary fame and longevity, of poetic remembrance, and of canonicity.

  The temporal arc of Western humanistic culture is her initial point of departure. She notes the concurrence of celebrations in Italy the previous year to mark “the two thousandth anniversary of the death of Virgil; and…the death [last year], at the age of eighty-four, of Eugenio Montale,” two poets whose work resonates through the three essays. This time frame—she notes that Tennyson’s commemoration of Virgil, which provides the title for the series, was composed “just a century ago”—suggests the closeness of bonds between writers as well as the immensity that must be bridged in reading and scholarship, and it offers the occasion for the announcement of her own ethical proof, her right to speak as author, through the practices of literary emulation and apprenticeship. It also grounds the imagined future of poetic posterity; art is “the only afterlife of which we have evidence—the transmission of human experience and thought.” Against this expansive background she traces the “diminution of high heroic passion” in modern life and literature as a form of loss, with Auden’s “disappearance of the Public Realm as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds” at its heart.