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FOREWORD

BY ZOË HELLER

The early years of a writer’s career are often a period of throat-clearing, of trying on and discarding styles, but in Shirley Hazzard’s case, this awkward probationary phase seems to have been skipped: she emerged with her distinctive talents fully formed. She was twenty-eight years old when she wrote her first short story, “Harold,” in 1959. For seven years, she had been toiling unhappily and without hope of advancement in the general service ranks of the UN Secretariat. (“A young woman was given a typewriter and told to shut up,” she said later.) “Harold” is a fable of sorts about a group of travelers at a Tuscan guesthouse who are amazed when a gauche, apparently unaccomplished new arrival reveals himself to be a gifted artist. Within a few weeks of sending it to The New Yorker (together with a note indicating that the manuscript need not be returned if it proved unsuitable for publication), she received a letter from the magazine’s fiction editor, William Maxwell. Of course they would publish her story, he wrote, and did she have any others they might look at? Her submission, he later recalled, was “an astonishment to the editors, because it was the work of a finished literary artist about whom they knew nothing whatever.”

The stories that Hazzard went on to produce in a steady stream throughout the 1960s are not typical literary artifacts of their time. Their characters—single young women and their married lovers, adulterous suburban couples, disillusioned salarymen—are recognizably of the period, but their rigorously elegant style is less so. The stately rhythms of Hazzard’s sentences, the epigrammatic precision of her observations, the decorousness of her glancing, ironic blows—have a closer affinity with the classic prose of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with the frank, unbuttoned work of her contemporaries.

The possibility of worldly success had never, by them, been entertained; they conjectured only as to the form that failure would take. (“Vittorio”)

She had a proprietary way of admiring other people’s possessions, as if all good taste were in some measure a tribute to herself. (“In One’s Own House”)

The three boys, now reseated, looked him over with courteous reserve, exercising that perception for affinities and failings with which public-school life had endowed them. (“Harold”)