Written in the Stars

As soon as I meet Shirley Hazzard, before we begin to engage in a conversation, she is quoting Thomas Hardy’s poetry to me. She insists that the love Hardy expressed for his first wife in his later verses is genuine, that after Emma Hardy died he somehow managed to recall all the old love and feelings: ‘Not guilt, that’s too modern. He was able to recall the way he had felt when he first met her.’

We are meeting in a restaurant near Shirley Hazzard’s home in New York. What prompted the outpouring was that she had spent the morning sorting out the papers of her late husband, the writer and translator Francis Steegmuller, before sending them to a university archive. And she had been in tears recalling their love. Over lunch she tells me about her childhood and her slight formal education. She was born in Australia in 1931. As a child she travelled widely, for her parents were diplomats. At 16, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947–8, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand, Europe and the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York. She has been deeply critical of the United Nations ever since. She taught herself through books, and by studying human nature. She was in her thirties by the time she married Steegmuller, a widower more than twenty years older, in 1963. ‘It was marvellous to be married to a writer. Sometimes I’d be staring into space searching for a word and, although he encouraged me to write, he knew this was just a necessary part of the thinking process.’ Words are precious. She uses them carefully and sparingly, as anyone who has read her book The Transit of Venus will know. This deeply sensual novel has long been a favourite of mine and it improves on rereading. I did not adequately appreciate it when I first read it shortly after publication in 1980, but I came back to it after discovering her grippingly perceptive account of Graham Greene, Greene on Capri (2000). In her observation of Greene, Hazzard demonstrates her deep understanding of how women and men, not necessarily married but in sexual thrall to each other, behave. From the opening sentence of The Transit of Venus – ‘By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation’– you know you are in the hands of a skilled driver but that it’s going to be a bumpy ride. The book is laced with sexual tension sometimes pulled so tight it is almost suffocating. But it is also full of poetry. The novel is the story of two orphaned sisters, Caroline (Caro) and Grace Bell, who leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England – a transit through love and life. Both sisters are beautiful. While the ‘fair’ Grace quickly settles for a wealthy but unsatisfying marriage, dark-haired Caro works (for a time as a shop girl) and soon embarks on a passionate adulterous affair. Her lover, a duplicitous but handsome playwright called Paul Ivory, newly married to a rich and boring woman, warns Caro he has never suffered greatly – ‘I have not felt enough. Whatever enough means.’ Aware of his power to wound, he is not afraid to use it. Years later, when he learns that his son has leukaemia, he rages at fate and at his powerlessness. ‘I’ve always detested any sense of power over me.’ At the same time Edmund Tice, an astronomer, falls in love with Caro. She rejects him, but he continues to adore her from afar, unable to move completely out of her orbit. He lives in hope, continuing to meet her and write her long letters, and he tries to settle for her enduring friendship. When Caro marries a wealthy and urbane New Yorker, a widower, it seemingly dashes any hopes Ted may have of finally winning Caro’s love and he, too, marries. But in Caro’s transit through life, such stability is not destined to last, and Ted is offered one last chance to grasp happiness with the woman who has seared herself on to his soul. It is Ted, the scientist, who understands that love is a kind of madness; Ted, with one flawed eye, who is the most clear-eyed of all when he states, ‘the tragedy isn’t that love doesn’t last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.’ He also observes, ‘Even through a telescope, some people see what they choose to see. Just as they do with the unassisted eye . . . Nothing supplies the truth except the will for it.’ Caro is from the outset described as a child of Venus and we are told in the first few pages that a transit of Venus occurs when the tiny planet moves like a dot across our gigantic sun. There are other facts: in 1769, James Cook set sail in the Endeavour to study a transit of Venus and in doing so found Australia. But it is Tice, the astronomer, who explains to the young Caro how a Frenchman had travelled to India years earlier to observe a previous transit, and was delayed by wars and misadventure. Having lost his original opportunity, he waited eight years in the east for the next transit. When the day came, visibility was freakishly poor; there was nothing to be seen. There would not be another such transit for a century. Destiny – the way that people kept apart by circumstances are drawn together or, conversely, the way that people thrown together by circumstance are yet condemned to mutual isolation – is the theme of this book. That and of course love. The Transit of Venus has been described as a story of place – Sydney, London, New York, Portugal, Stockholm – as much as time. But it’s the people who linger in the memory; men but mostly women, and especially Caro. In the course of the novel, which ranges from the brilliantly depicted drab Fifties to the unravelling late Seventies, the women face seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. The sad tale of Dora, Grace and Caro’s pitiable half-sister, who devotes herself, martyr-like, to the young girls when their parents drown and then, late in life, finds a handsome major who steals all her money, gives an interesting insight into the limited options open to women in the immediate post-war period. One of the book’s most intriguing historical reference points is the attitude towards women who wanted or needed to work. Paul Ivory refers with disdain to ‘little shop girls’, forcing Caro to remind him that she too has been a shop girl: ‘We are not necessarily diminutive.’ Caro graduates to government work – ‘only recently opened to women’ – which requires her to take an exam. She is not expected to pass but, even if she does, her career prospects are limited. The story repays slow and careful reading. Those who love it praise its voluptuous vocabulary (‘cataphract’ and ‘entelechy’ were new to me). Her critics call this literary pretentiousness. Shirley Hazzard herself believes in careful use of the right word even if that slows up the pace, and she is never less than elegant. Besides, what’s the rush? This is a slice of another world, a more leisurely world. When it’s time to go we discuss another autodidact, Winston Churchill. Hazzard immediately observes that his power of oratory, his ability to summon up courage and leadership through words and speeches, was perfect for the radio age. She remembers waking at all hours to hear his words, ‘and he had just the right words delivered in just the right way, derived from the basics of English literature’. But, she notes, ‘It would not be effective now in a television age, with the inability to listen that has resulted.’ I have loved every minute of my time with her and understand better the world from which The Transit of Venus was created. I tell her I hope we will meet again. Unoriginal words for a departure, but I mean them. Taking my hand she says, with her usual precision, ‘I depend on it.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © Anne Sebba 2009