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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”)

Hazzard disdained the tendency toward a conversational, plain-spoken style in modern fiction. It seemed to her a perverse rejection of art’s proper aspiration to beauty. (Writers, she told The Paris Review in 2005, had abandoned “the power of formal language” in favor of trying “to seem casual, sassy, democratic, ‘young.’”) In Hazzard’s work, beauty in whatever form—a sentence, or a table setting—has a moral value. Demotic idiom rarely appears in these stories, even in the mouths of her protagonists, and when someone does use ugly slang or jargon—when, for example, a woman worries an acquaintance will find her “a bit dykey,” or a man says “utilize” instead of “use”—it almost always denotes a certain crudeness of character. (By the same token, caring about and quoting poetry is a reliable indicator of virtue—the equivalent of riding into town wearing a white cowboy hat.)

Much of the drama in Hazzard’s work arises from the bruising interactions between those who are responsive to beauty, and those who are not. Her heroes and heroines are modern romantics who cleave to high feeling and high seriousness in a world largely hostile to their idealism. (“One said ‘relationship’ nowadays about those one loved,” a gloomy bureaucrat muses in “Official Life.”) Her villains are pragmatists and philistines who want at all costs to “keep the poetry separate.” The puzzlement and condescension that Hazzard’s high-minded characters inspire as they make their pilgrim’s progress through twentieth-century life supply the comedy of these stories. The sufferings they endure for their romantic integrity supply the tragedy. Here is Nettie, the teenage protagonist of “A Place in the Country,” responding to the news that her married lover is abandoning her.

Nothing could convince her that this first sharing of her secret existence, more significant even than the offering of her person, represented less than it appeared to. That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

This is rather how one might expect George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke to sound, were she to be spirited out of Victorian England and given contraception and an apartment. Nettie is not nearly as clever, or as reliably high-minded, as Dorothea. (In a later story, we meet her again, in early middle age, and discover that she has grown up to become a slightly silly person.) Yet in the moment of Nettie’s earnest adolescent heartbreak, Hazzard endows her with something approaching nobility. Urged by her sheepish lover not to “exaggerate the importance” of her broken heart, she understands instinctively that the greater sin is to take matters of the heart lightly.

The portrait of the permissive era that emerges from these stories is a rather somber one. Eros is less the bringer of carnal fun than a dark and rather dangerous force on which men and women (but mostly women) pin their romantic hopes at their peril. Hazzard’s female characters are not constrained by conventional sexual morality, inasmuch as they engage in premarital and extramarital sex without compunction or shame, but they evince none of the antic libertinism or experience-gathering curiosity of, say, Mary McCarthy’s women. Sex remains for them a solemn rite, a significant act of surrender, and their inability to divorce the act from higher feeling leaves them horribly vulnerable to the emotional sadism and moral carelessness of men.

In Hazzard’s later novels, her noble characters are ultimately rewarded for their integrity: they get to walk out of their soul-crushing jobs, to thumb their noses at the insufferable snobs who have oppressed them, to find enduring love with their Platonic other halves. In these stories, the pure of heart are largely denied such satisfactions. They remain chained up in their grim offices, or else they get sacked; the people they fall in love with don’t requite their love, or aren’t worthy of their love; the people who love them, they don’t want. What few glimpses of romantic fulfillment Hazzard affords us are either in rear view, or from a distance: a woman grieving a dead husband in “Cliffs of Fall,” two lovestruck Norwegian travelers seen on a ferry in “Out of Itea.” (“But what will they eat?” “Tomatoes.” “Where will they sleep?” “Together.”)

To the extent that these stories withhold earthly satisfaction from their romantics, they might reasonably be described as austere, or even bleak: “Il est plus facile de mourir que d’aimer” is the line that one unhappy wife in “The Worst Moment of the Day” happens upon in a book of Louis Aragon’s poetry. Yet, these stories insist, to be open to the difficulty and pain of love is better than to be comfortably protected from its sting. Hazzard’s seekers of truth and beauty may suffer, but, as one wise character remarks, “We should remember that sorrow does produce flowers of its own. It is a misunderstanding always to look for joy.”

CLIFFS OF FALL

THE PARTY

The Fergusons’ door opened on a burst of light and voices, and on Evie’s squeal of surprise—quite as if, Minna thought, we had turned up uninvited. Evie kissed her.

“Our shoes are a bit wet,” said Theodore. He stood aside to let Minna enter. “Is that all right?”

Evie had slanting eyes, and a flushed, pretty face. She was wearing a shiny brown dress, and her hair bubbled down her back in fair, glossy curls. She had an impulsive way of embracing people, of holding them by the hand or the elbow, as though she must atone for any reticence on their part with an extra measure of her own exuberance—or as though they would attempt to escape if not taken into custody.

“Minna, what a beautiful dress. How thin you are. Theodore, you never look a day older, not a single day. I expect,” she said to Minna, “that he is really very gray—with fair people it doesn’t show. He’ll get old quite suddenly and look like Somerset Maugham.” She gave Minna a sympathetic, curious look from her tilted eyes. (Minna could imagine her saying later: “I never will understand why that keeps going, not if I live to be a hundred.”) “Here’s Phil.”

Evie’s husband came out of the living room, a silver jug in one hand and an ice bucket in the other.

“You look like an allegorical figure,” Minna told him.

Phil smiled. He went through life with that sedate, modest smile. He was a corporation lawyer, and he and Evie had been very happy together for fifteen years. Long ago, however, at his own expense and to everyone’s surprise he had published a small book of love poems that carried no assurance of being addressed to her. “What would you like to drink?” Phil asked. “Minna, come into the kitchen and help me with the ice. Otherwise I’ll never get a chance to talk to you.”

Evie was leading Theodore away. Minna looked apprehensively at his straight back as it receded toward a group of people in the living room. He will enjoy himself, she thought, and then reproach me for letting him come.

In the kitchen, Phil’s eleven-year-old son was emptying ashtrays into a garbage pail.

“Hello, Ronnie,” Minna said. She turned on the cold tap for Phil.

“Oh hullo,” Ronnie said, intent on his work. “Alison’s got the virus.” Alison was his sister.

“But not badly,” said Phil. “Thank you, Minna, I think that’s about enough.”

“I got her a card,” Ronnie said.

“How nice,” said Minna, breaking up a tray of ice.

“It says ‘Get Well Quick.’”

“That sounds a trifle peremptory.”

“I expect the sentiment counts for something,” Phil observed from the sink.

“Taste is more important than sentiment,” Minna decided, without reflection.

“Yes, I suppose I agree with that.”

She smiled. “The combination, on the other hand, is irresistible.”

“You’re beginning to talk like Theodore. Ronnie, you could be handing round the peanuts.”

“There aren’t any peanuts.”

“Shrimp, then—whatever there is. For God’s sake.” Phil took the ice bucket from Minna and put it on a tray with the jug. They moved toward the door. “Now,” he asked her again, “what would you like?”

She would have liked to stay in the kitchen with Phil and Ronnie, although the light was too bright and there was nowhere to sit down. The kitchen chairs were covered with half-empty cartons of crackers and, in one case, with a large chalky bowl in which the dip had been mixed. Ends of celery and carrot had been left on the table, together with an open container of sour cream and two broken glasses. It was, Minna decided, like the periphery of a battlefield strewn with discarded equipment and expended ammunition. When I go into the other room, she thought, I will have to talk, and listen, and be aware of Theodore across the room.

“What can I have?” she asked Phil, as they went down the corridor.

“Anything you like. There’s punch, if you want that.” He paused to introduce Minna to a young man and a girl with a hat full of roses.

“Minna?” said the girl. “What a pretty name.”

“Her real name is Hermione,” said Ronnie, coming up with a plate of shrimp.

“Preposterous name,” Minna agreed. “I don’t know why parents do such things.”

“We called our baby Araminta,” said the girl bravely.

“‘Araminta sweet and faire…’” Phil quoted tactfully.

Minna frowned. “That’s ‘Amarantha,’” she said, and wished she hadn’t. She and Phil edged past, and found themselves at a long table, beside a bony man in black and an opulent, earnest woman in purple. “Punch would be lovely,” Minna said to Phil.

“A Browning revival,” said the man in black. “Mark my words—I forecast a Browning revival.”

The purple lady sighed. “Ah. If only you’re right.”

“Then you do like Browning?”

“Of course. Pippa Passes. And I’ve always adored The Rose and the Ring.”

The bony man looked disappointed. “That’s Thackeray. You mean The Ring and the Book.”

“I mean the one with the marvelous illustrations.”

“Rather weak, I’m afraid,” Phil said, handing Minna a full glass. “All the ice seems to have melted.” He helped someone else to punch and turned back to her. “Well, Minna—we hardly ever seem to see you. Are you very busy? Are you happy? How are you?”

“Oh, I’m well,” she said, and could not prevent herself from looking toward Theodore. He was standing not far from her, leaning his shoulder against the wall and talking to a plump man with a beard.

The bearded man looked cross. “My dear sir,” he said in a loud voice, “this is not just any Rembrandt. This is one of the greatest Rembrandts of all time.”

“Take Sordello,” the bony man was insisting. The woman in purple gazed at him with rapt inattention.

The girl with the roses in her hat was still standing in the doorway by her husband’s side. I should go and talk to them, Minna thought; they don’t seem to know anyone. All the same, they looked quite contented. She glanced round at Phil, but Evie had just come up to him with a question; she laid her hand on his arm—beseechingly and not in her public, clamorous way—and he put his head down to hers. Minna set her glass on the table. Theodore, smiling broadly, had turned away from the man with the beard. She exchanged a glance with him, and wondered what his mood would be when they were alone.

“Have you looked in the refrigerator?” Phil was saying. His head remained lowered to Evie’s a moment longer. Minna looked away, as if she had seen them embrace.

The girl by the door was laughing now, the roses shaking on her hat, and the man beside her was leaning against the doorframe and smiling at her.

Minna took up her glass again and turned it in her hand, and went on watching them—with admiration, as one might watch an intricate dance executed with perfect grace; and with something like homesickness, as if she were looking at colored slides of a country in which she had once been happy.

“I behaved rather well, didn’t I?” he asked. “All things considered.”

She came and knelt beside his chair and kissed him. “Admirably,” she said. He put his arm about her but she disengaged herself and settled on the floor, leaning against his legs. “It wasn’t so bad, now, was it?”

“You sound just like my dentist.” He stretched back in his chair, his palms resting on his knees and the fingers of his right hand just touching her hair.

The one lighted lamp, at his elbow, allowed them to see little more than each other and a pale semicircle of the rug on which she sat. She lowered her head and watched the bright shine of his shoe, which was half hidden by a fold of her dress. Outside their crescent of light, beyond the obscured but familiar room, the cold wind blew from time to time against the windows and the traffic sounded faintly from below. During the day there had been a brief fall of snow and, frozen at the window ledges, this now sealed them in. She tilted her head back against his knees. “It’s so nice here,” she said, and smiled.

He passed his hand round her throat, his extended fingers reaching from ear to ear. Her hair spread over his sleeve. “Minna dear,” he said. “Minna darling.”

She suddenly sat upright and raised her hand to her head. “I’ve lost an earring. It must be at the Fergusons’.”

“No, it’s here,” he said. “In the other room. On the table beside the bed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. I remember noticing it. I meant to mention it before we went out.”

“I must have looked odd at the party.” She settled back again. “What was I saying?”

“How nice it was.”

“Oh yes. How nice.”

“Just because we haven’t quarreled today.”

“More than that. You’ve been quite…”

“Quite what?”

“Sweet to me.”

“Not something I make a habit of, is it, these days?” His fingers were tracing the line of her jaw. “I really thought you wouldn’t come today. After last week.”

“We had to go to the party,” she said.

“That hardly seemed sufficient reason. I thought, She won’t come—why should she? There’s a limit, I thought. All morning, I sat here thinking there was a limit.”

“And drinking,” she added, but pressed her hand, over his, against her neck.

“Well, naturally.” He yawned. “God, that awful party.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” she said again.

“The Fergusons are dull.”

“I like Phil.”

“Evie, then.”

“Well … But she’s a good person.”

“Good? I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a virtue to be good. It seems to be the cause of so much self-congratulation among our friends. The sort of people who were there tonight—who choose a convenient moment to behave well and then tell themselves how sensitive they are, how humane.”

“But isn’t that all one can hope for? And what is virtue, if not that?”

“Oh—something less conscious, I suppose; something more indiscriminate. Less egotistical, more anonymous. Like that brotherhood in Italy whose members still hide their faces under masks when they assist the poor.”

“I thought that was to protect them from the Plague.”

“Don’t be irritating. What I mean is, our good seem to be so concerned with themselves, so clubby, not mixing with the natives. Do you think those people tonight would ever make allowances, for instance, for those who want to live differently, or more fully, or risk themselves more?”

So he, too, is only concerned with himself, she reflected.

“Why, even religion—even the law, than which, after all, nothing could be more unjust—takes account of extenuating circumstances. But these people exclude anyone who doesn’t meet their particular definition of sensibility. I’m not sure that I don’t find it as distasteful as any other form of intolerance.”

“I suppose they think that anyone can be kind.”

“That’s like saying ‘Anyone can be clean’ in a city where most houses don’t have running water. And in the end the well-meaning people seem to do more harm than the others, who make no pretensions. Don’t you think?”

“Not entirely,” she said, with faint irony.

“Now you are only thinking of yourself. That’s the sort of thing that makes it impossible to have any real discussion with a woman. No matter how abstract, how impersonal the subject, they will always manage to connect it in some way to their love affairs.”

They were silent for a moment. She rested her hand on one of the thick, embossed Chinese roses of the rug. “Would you rather not have gone, then, tonight?”

“Infinitely.”

“You only had to say so.”

“You couldn’t have gone alone.”

“I could.”

“All right, you could—but you’d have sulked for days.” He turned her face slightly to him. “You’re practically crying as it is.”

“I always look that way.”

“When you’re with me, at any rate.” He let his hand drop. “There were women with hats on at the party. And young couples who talked about their children. Oh, and an old lunatic who wanted to revive Swinburne.”

“Browning,” she said.

“Browning—was that it? So it was. Then there was Evie, of course, feeling sorry for you because of me. Because I’m so disagreeable.” He laughed. “At least, it wasn’t as bad as the last party they had—someone actually sang at that, if you remember.”

“I do remember. Yes.”

“And you played the piano.”

“Yes.”

He smiled pleasantly at the recollection. “You were terrible,” he said.

“Was I?”

“Darling, you always play so badly—didn’t you know that?”

“I didn’t know you thought so,” she said, reflecting that the knowledge must now be with her permanently. She sighed. “Theodore, why do you have to do this?”

“Why?” He looked over her head for a moment, as if the question arose for the first time and required consideration. “For that matter, why anything? Why are you here? And why is your earring in the other room? Why, in fact, do you allow this to continue?”

“Eventually, I suppose, I won’t.” Her voice had taken on a conversational note. “A matter of will power, probably—of making oneself want something else.”

“Perhaps you don’t even know what else to want.”

“I think I might rather like to come first with someone—after themselves, of course. And it does seem a waste, this love, this thing everyone needs, this precious commodity—it could be going to someone who would use it properly.”

“Perhaps, then, that’s all you want? Someone to give love to—a sort of repository?”

“Perhaps. No, something more reciprocal. Only, starting over again in love is such a journey—like needing a holiday but not wanting to be bothered with packing bags and making reservations. So much trouble—being charming and artful, finding ways to pretend less affection than one feels, and in the end not succeeding, because one doesn’t really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake. No, I just can’t be bothered at present.” She shifted her weight and, turning, laid her arm across his knees. He bent forward and smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “So there you are,” she told him. “It’s all a question of inertia. I stay because leaving would require too much effort.”

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