We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think Read online

  The value of literature thus lies first in its capacity to compensate for or repair loss—“Through art we can feel, as well as know, what we have lost; in art, as in dreams, we can occasionally retrieve and re-experience it”—through its capacity for immediacy, its ability “to transmit sensations and sentiments.” That “directness to life” draws from a commitment to the rightful labor of writing and to its veracity, a “responsibility to the accurate word.” The only authentic response to literature is through pleasure, and reading is “in part an act of submission, akin to generosity or love; and confession to it, through praise, is a commitment to a private ‘unauthorized’ response.” Hazzard is here presenting a kind of apologia for amateur reading, which speaks to her own role and practice working outside the circuits of professional literary criticism. She is particularly critical of the forms of literary criticism that developed in universities in the second half of the twentieth century.10 Her amateurism is central to her constitution as an intellectual; it draws on a tradition of literary devotion and is nourished by a privately gleaned intellectual rigor.

  Part 2, “The Expressive Word” includes Hazzard’s writings on specific works and authors, and focuses more tightly on the practice of literary reading. Its title is taken from her reflection on the particularity of one of her literary friendships, with author Graham Greene: “We were…writers and readers in a world where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount.”11 These five reviews, from 1968 to 1978, of fiction by the English authors Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, and Barbara Pym, and by the nineteenth-century Neapolitan Matilde Serao, and the Australian Patrick White, are brought together with four essays published more than a decade later, from 1990 to 2004: a discussion of different translations of Proust; introductions to new editions of two very different, favored works of Hazzard’s—Geoffrey Scott’s The Portrait of Zélide and Iris Origo’s biography of Giacomo Leopardi; and an essay memorializing her former New Yorker editor and great friend, William Maxwell.

  The diversity of these subjects is indicative of the range of Hazzard’s literary interests, and the variety and depth of her reading. It constitutes an archive of her personal taste but also suggests a loose map of literary friendships and associations, preferences, and points of familiarity. We might note the career interruptions, the vagaries of late or re-publication in her discussion of Rhys, Pym, and Spark; viewed together these names implicitly suggest the particular attenuation and belatedness that might be seen to characterize the careers of writing women of the mid-twentieth century, including Hazzard’s own. Her selection also highlights writers whose subject matter sits just outside identifiable national literary frames; in Rhys, the lives of whose characters flicker around the edges of the “perfectly dreadful little corner of a foreign field” that is Paris, or conversely, Spark and Pym, who exemplify the acerbic complexities and delights of national representativeness. If other writers appear to exemplify local traditions, it is through the lens of the “parochial” or quiescent international ignorance of their worth as with Australia’s Nobel laureate Patrick White, or the continuing and tragic aptness a century later of Matilde Serao’s writing of conditions that resulted in an outbreak of cholera in Naples.

  Hazzard approaches Proust through the prism of translation and great writing, quoting François Guizot on his experience of rereading Edward Gibbon, whom he had initially dismissed only to find on a “second attentive and regular perusal of the entire work” that he had “exaggerated” the importance of the errors found and was struck now rather by “the immensity of his researches, the variety of his knowledge.” This respect for the labor of erudition subtends Hazzard’s defense of devoted amateur scholarship, which receives its most expansive and eloquent consideration in her introduction to Iris Origo’s biography of Giacomo Leopardi, the poet whose work touches her own perhaps most deeply. Her tribute to William Maxwell provides some sense of the importance of her connections to the New Yorker magazine, a rich account of writerly sympathy and, related to both these, a further testament to the belles-lettristic tradition: “Maxwell was not drawn to intellectualism. His gift lay in acute humane perception.” The invocation of Francis Steegmuller in her introduction to Geoffrey Scott’s The Portrait of Zélide is similarly resonant, and she notes as a theme of Scott’s book and of Steegmuller’s oeuvre a figure, which is also hauntingly suggestive of her own: “the intelligent and gifted woman seeking to ripen and express her best powers; yet carrying within her an ideal of love unlikely to be realised.”

  The title of Part 3, “Public Themes,” is a phrase Hazzard has used to describe her interests and concerns beyond literature. It includes a very small part of the volume of writing she produced on the subject of the United Nations, much of which was brought together in her two monographs on the topic from 1973 and 1990. I have chosen essays that respond to specific events and that voice concerns around which Hazzard was particularly exercised: the compromising of human rights by endemic failings of the UN at an organizational level; the UN’s politicized suppression of dissident Soviet author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; its failure to protect rights of individual employees from the lower levels of the Secretariat; the moral and personal deficiencies of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim; and, more subtly, her attention to the ways that global and planetary perspectives might be seen to be forming in the postwar landscape. If Hazzard’s output on the subject of the UN and its failings is extensive, that published work sits on an even more massive body of unpublished writings, including hundreds of letters by Hazzard and to her from agents in the matters she is pursuing, or from other commentators, along with press clippings about the UN—many annotated—and internal UN documents, stretching back to the period of her first employment in the early 1950s. This archive speaks voluminously to Hazzard’s expressed frustration at being taken away from her work as a writer of fiction as well as to the gravity with which she saw herself a public figure with a profile that could be used to pursue matters of great public weight, and therefore with the responsibility to take on this labor.

  It is important to note that much of that work has gone unacknowledged. While Kurt Waldheim’s wartime involvement in the Austrian Nazi party became public knowledge during his campaign for the Austrian presidency in 1986, it was Shirley Hazzard who first broke this story in 1980, sparking a preliminary inquiry by US Congressman Stephen Solarz and mendacious denials from Waldheim.12 Similarly, Hazzard’s earlier exposure and analysis in Defeat of an Ideal of the extent and impact of FBI investigation of the political orientation of US employees at the UN from its earliest years was one of the first such accounts to be published; her role in documenting these matters is, however, not generally acknowledged.13 (It has become lost, perhaps, in the sheer volume of her criticisms of the institution.) A third story is worth highlighting here: her investigation and disclosure of the UN’s removal of works by the Soviet dissident and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn from bookshops on its property in Geneva in 1974. Her approaches generated involvement from PEN American Center, among others, and led to the reinstatement of the works amid assertions from Waldheim and his spokesmen that they had not been removed at all. Hazzard’s striking response to these claims, which can be read here in her published letter to the New York Times, give some sense of the tone of much of her archived correspondence and illustrates once more the gravity with which she approached her public responsibilities as citizen.

  The question of the role and function of the UN continues to perplex and engage writers and the general public today; Tony Judt notes in an essay originally published in 2007, “Is the UN Doomed?” that “the United Nations is a curiously contested topic.”14 And Hazzard’s writings on issues such as human rights remain current, indeed urgent, three decades after they were published, as does her consideration of the responsibility of nongovernment bodies to take on issues like human rights that had been so poorly managed by the UN.15 Her close friendship with Ivan Morris, one of the founders of Amnesty
International in the United States, is reflected in her careful tracing of the developing role of this and other NGOs as a counter to the lumbering inaction of the centrally funded world body: “Into the vacuum created by United Nations inaction on human rights has come an active humanitarianism by individuals and private agencies that has gradually formed itself into a moral force—a force of the kind that a different United Nations might have inspired and led.”

  Hazzard also tracks the UN’s efforts to “thwart” and “short-circuit” the expression of public will and concern through these movements as a threat to its own role. Against the hopeful rise of citizens’ movements she charts the rising power of multinational corporations—and the rise of their influence within the UN—and she voices concern at the dominance of bureaucratic approaches and of corporate and commerce models in the administration of the UN’s agendas, arguing that the UN’s “high potential…was quickly broken on a wheel of seminars, social events, academicism and Establishment contacts totally removed from perspective and actualities.”

  The heart of her concern with the United Nations is its inability to represent with any integrity the international scope of the postwar world, partly through the shambling inefficiency of its bureaucratic organization but more through having been compromised by its structural allegiance to what she calls its “archaic pattern of nationalism.” In place of the nationalistic investments she finds in the capitulation to both US interests in the McCarthyist surveillance of its UN employees and the Soviet government’s pressures around the discrediting and suppression around Solzhenitsyn, she posits a “planetary” allegiance, grounded in the beliefs and actions of citizens, with the hope of generating what she calls, resonantly, “human systems as global as our emergencies.” While the kind of critique she makes of the UN might be seen as a feature of her historical location—that is to say, contained within the framing of public debates through the postwar decades around positions identified as “idealist” and “realist”—it is in the end not simply reducible to its context.16 After all, her claims are meticulously based on factual evidence not mere polemic, as these essays show; she was right all along on Waldheim, on Solzhenitsyn, on Iran, and so on. Further, reading these essays in light of her writings about the public role of literature illuminates the larger sense of public responsibility being enacted in and through them, extending their reach beyond their particular political and world-historical reference, without dulling their pertinence as historical artifacts. Indeed, it is enlightening not only to read them outside of their specific historical context and as themselves now historical documents but also to be able to attend to the larger insights into the global condition of late modernity, the “irresistibly planetary nature of the age” that they provide.

  This section closes with an essay that provides a further context for Hazzard’s UN writings: “A Writer’s Reflection on the Nuclear Age,” published in 1982. Preoccupation with the consequences of the deployment and continuing development of nuclear weaponry was of course widespread in the postwar decades, but it is important to note that this concern bore directly on wider perceptions of international cooperation and the role of the United Nations, perceptions that no doubt influence Hazzard through this period.17 Her essay steps back from a political assessment of the moment of the Hiroshima bombing and its ramifications, although she is keenly aware of the historical urgencies encompassed by the events described. What she provides in place of political analysis is a combination of the direct and domestic experience of youth—“I was dressing to go to school when the announcement came on the radio”—and mature reflection, with the public perspectives it occasions—“the fallout of the bomb on our modern thought and life has been continuous and incalculable.” The essay provides a primary if fleeting source for the event itself—“Twenty months after the bomb was dropped I was at Hiroshima”—and for the moral and ethical dilemmas it continued to pose.

  The two final sections, “The Great Occasion” and “Last Words” are very much shorter, the first comprising a selection of travel and autobiographical pieces and the second two speeches. “The Great Occasion” draws its title from one of Hazzard’s luminous travel essays, “Pilgrimage” (not included here), where she describes witnessing “at the port of Capri a trio of handsome matriarchs…gold and silver lace over their coiled hair and on their dresses of rosso antico that swept the ground. By their festive costume they honored the great occasion of travel.”18 The individual experience of travel in its contemporary, cosmopolitan, fortunate forms is always bound in Hazzard’s writing to its at times unexpected antecedents, to the occasion it provides for confronting the unfamiliar and unknown. Travel works as a kind of touchstone for the rich historical and individual foundation of modernity, a synecdoche for the globalized world that had taken on clear contours by the end of the twentieth century, and which is in itself part of the core matter of Hazzard’s novels and stories. It is for this reason that her travel writings constitute in themselves a significant part of the corpus of her work. This section opens with a long essay, just on the brink of narrative, of Hazzard’s experiences as a sixteen-year-old living and working in Hong Kong in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It is difficult to separate the errors and confusions of youth from those of the foreigner and indeed those of the reflective narrator, looking back after twenty years to a city she knows must now be unrecognizable to her. The protagonist encounters at every turn the constraints and opportunities of life beyond a family unit she cannot wait to shed, alongside tangible signs of her own colonial privilege—“Through some standard injustice, I was led to the front of this crowd”—and, always, the play of weight and inconsequence, familiarity and misrecognition in the apprehension of particular locations both new and remembered.

  “Canton More Far” thus forms a graphic counterpoint to “A Writer’s Reflections on the Nuclear Age,” situating Hazzard’s writing self at the middle of the century and in Asia, beyond the more keenly known worlds of Europe, the United States, and Australia, and providing an absorbing foreshadowing of The Great Fire. The final two essays in this section add to the corpus of her writings on Italy; both express her delight in and familiarity with their specific locations—Tuscany and Naples—through the actions, cares, and energies of people living or visiting there.

  The collection closes with transcripts of Hazzard’s last public words, both delivered extempore: the first on the occasion of the National Book Award for The Great Fire in 2003, an impromptu response to a speech by Steven King in which he criticized the attention paid to high literature by institutions such as the National Book Awards; and the second her unscripted, unprogramed contribution to a panel discussion about her work and significance “Shirley Hazzard: Literary Icon,” hosted by the New York Society Library in 2012. Her voice and tone in both carry the same gravity and thoughtfulness heard in her written pieces, despite their somewhat less formal diction and phrasing. Together they provide succinct recapitulation of the views and perspectives that she has so painstakingly presented over the last half century. There is hopefulness and pleasure—“We have this huge language so diverse around this earth”—along with fear for the future—“I feel very much…that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element now.” They provide a compelling record of Shirley Hazzard’s eloquence, her thoughtfulness, civility, and public generosity, and stand as the final statement of her remarkable career.

  PART 1

  Through Literature Itself

  WE NEED SILENCE TO FIND OUT WHAT WE THINK

  Everyone who writes is asked at some stage, Why? Some writers give replies to that question, but I wonder if it is truly answerable. If there is a worthy response, it would to my mind have to do with a wish to close the discrepancy between human experience, with all its strangeness of the mind, as it is known to each of us, and as it is generally expressed. We live in a time when past concepts of an order larger than the self are dwindling away or have disappeared—the deference of the human spe
cies and of societies to nationhood, to social systems. The testimony of the accurate word is perhaps the last great mystery to which we can make ourselves accessible, to which we can still subscribe.

  Horace wrote that strong men had lived before Agamemnon, but they lacked a poet to commemorate them, and thus passed into oblivion.1 A modern Italian poet, Eugenio Montale, reminds us, however, that memory existed as a literary genre before writing was invented: men who lived before Agamemnon were not in their time unreported or unsung.2 Articulation is central to human survival and self-determination, not only in its commemorative and descriptive functions but in relieving the soul of incoherence. Insofar as expression has been matched to sensation and perception, human nature has seemed to retain consciousness. A sense of deliverance plays its part in the pleasure we feel in all the arts and perhaps most of all in literature.

  I say most of all in literature because language, unlike other arts, is a medium through which we all deal continually in daily life. William Butler Yeats said that “if we understand our own minds, and the things that are striving to utter themselves through our minds, we move others, not because we have thought about those others, but because all life has the same root.”3 In its preoccupation with the root of life, language has special responsibilities. Its manipulation, and deviation from true meaning, can be more meaningful than in the case of other arts. And there are always new variations on old impostures, adapted to the special receptivity of the times. In our era, even the multiple possibilities for valid approaches to truth through language are themselves circuitous and increasingly insistent on their successive claims to be “definitive.” In repudiating such pretensions from the Realists and other self-styled “schools,” Flaubert says, “There is no ‘true.’ There are merely different ways of perceiving truth.”4