Contrasts in scale—individual and historical, intimate and epic—occur throughout the novels of Shirley Hazzard, Alice Gregory writes. The novelist was born on this day in 1931.
Toward the end of Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, “The Evening of the Holiday” , a young woman and a man twice her age sit in a parked car in Tuscany, near the ruins of a villa. Sophie is from England, in Italy on holiday. Tancredi is a Sicilian architect who is separated from his wife. They have spent the summer in a stately courtship, and Sophie has mostly managed to not think explicitly about its end. But the time has come for her to return home.
Hazzard was in her late twenties when she completed her first short story. She mailed her only copy to this magazine from Tuscany, where she was living in a vineyard-surrounded villa with a family of anti-Fascists. It was one of roughly thirty thousand unsolicited manuscripts thatreceived annually at the time, but William Maxwell, the fiction editor, pulled it out of the slush pile and instructed Hazzard to send more.
The globe-trotting cosmopolitanism of Hazzard’s own life emerged out of a childhood in what she described as “a remote, philistine country.” Growing up in Sydney, Australia, with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic father, Hazzard yearned for the authority of England, with its smoking chimneys, hedgerows, and correctly timed seasons. When it was winter in Australia, it was summer everywhere that seemed to count.
Like one of her fictional U.N. employees, Hazzard has said that she was granted a “miraculous” reprieve by the Suez Crisis, when, at the age of twenty-five, she was sent to Naples for a year. In a “blitzed town” where the streets had been littered with both shrapnel and Vesuvian ash, Hazzard learned to take ceremony seriously and to live amid history.
“Scruple was a tiny measure, used perhaps by a jeweler or a chemist,” Aldred Leith muses in “The Great Fire” , Hazzard’s final and most autobiographical novel. Leith, a wounded British soldier travelling through postwar Asia, has fallen in love with the much younger Helen Driscoll, an Australian teen-ager living in occupied Japan: “He had never dealt, in love or otherwise, in such minute quantities.
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