In the quieter, easterly fringes of New York’s Upper East Side, there is a
large white apartment block. It was completed in 1951. Francis Steegmuller,
the distinguished writer and Flaubert scholar, knew the architect, Gordon
Bunshaft, and immediately rented one of the apartments. Steegmuller died in
1994, but his second wife stayed in the flat. Now, in the way of such
things, the block is being “remodelled”, the apartments converted for sale.
Almost all the old renters have left, and the place has become an eerie,
uninhabited shell. Yet, defiantly surrounded by paintings and books, the
second Mrs Steegmuller, now 77, remains. You may know her by her maiden
name: Shirley Hazzard, for me the greatest living writer on goodness and
love.
Love is, I suggest, a very unfashionable subject. “Yes, I know that. People
don’t love each other any more, it’s too much trouble... In my books, they
have to suffer. They’re not calculating, ‘Is it worth it?’ It’s inevitable.
And they know that if they’re ever going to get deeply into something, it
will be this. It’s a kind of inevitability. You can’t cold-bloodedly say,
‘I’m not getting into that.’ Well, a million times it might be like that,
but if we are talking about somebody really living, and having to weigh
their impossible circumstances against that or think about their future,
then it becomes very serious.”
She hates the contemporary word used to cover all such matters. “That word
‘relationships’ – these ships, we have to sink a few of these ships. A
relationship is an abstraction, it’s something everybody has, it’s a common
denominator – ‘Oh, we have a relationship.’” She waves her hand, impatiently
dismissive.
One of her novels, The Transit of Venus, was described to me by a man who
knows as “the greatest novel written in the past 100 years”. Having read it,
I can see his point. Another, The Great Fire, so overwhelmed me that I came
close to being unable to read the last three pages. If the last sentence
doesn’t make you gasp and weep, you are not fully conscious. Yet she is
underappreciated. Oh, she has won awards here and there, but somehow she is
not routinely listed among the greats of the contemporary novel. It is time
to put this right.
She is not well when we meet in the big white block. She looks breakable, very
thin and very unsteady, though her eyes dance and gleam. She had broken her
leg in Italy and was recovering from four general anaesthetics – “Yes,
that’s right, but I don’t want to become a person who greets people by
saying she has had four general anaesthetics.” She wears a linen shirt, the
collar of which she keeps plucking, and large blue jogging pants. The pants
are a problem. When we go out to lunch, she apologises profusely for having
to wear them. She is a proper lady, though also a playful one.
She has a Matisse and two Picassos in the hallway of her flat. Steel shelves
sag under the weight of books. More books cover every surface. JM Coetzee
seems to be her current reading. A maid comes and goes. The flat is
immaculate, but frozen in the time before her widowhood. There are paintings
of Steegmuller; his spirit hovers over the place. She was deeply in love,
and she speaks of his death as if it had just happened.
“People think they can imagine what it will be like, but they can’t. Until
such a thing happens, you don’t know what effect ... And you don’t care,
really, about this or that, or should I get this right? There’s a kind of
obliteration. It’s now six years – no, more. Isn’t this awful? It’s longer
than that. This is awful – it’s because I feel he is always there.”
Five minutes later, she suddenly blurts out “1994!”, the correct date of her
husband’s death. It is not six years, it is 14. Steegmuller was her second
great love; the first was somebody she met when she was a 16-year-old spy in
Hong Kong.
She was born in Sydney in 1931. She offers withering, exact assessments of her
parents. Her father was stingy with everyone but himself, and her mother had
a temper, that, finally, destroyed the marriage. They were reasonably well
off, however, and Hazzard went to a fine school, where, from an early age,
she read intensively, especially Conrad. She was – and is – obsessed with
stories. Every question elicits a tale, and, when we go to a restaurant
round the corner, she keeps stopping in the middle of the street to listen,
stricken by wonder and glee, to my stories of England and journalism. Even a
man who shares the lift with us somehow becomes a story.
The war came, and Hazzard watched in wonder as Australian men queued up to go
and fight. “We were little creatures of the British empire, and whatever
Britain felt, we were feeling very deeply – also because the whole male
population had gone abroad in the great war, then they were all abroad
again.”
The men wanted to get out because Australia, before the days of mass air
travel, was nowhere. For Hazzard, it was also nothing. “There was nothing
there for people like me. It was an extremely male society, and the males
were brash and tough, so any suggestion that you loved poetry or were
interested in things like that, they just found sissy – it wasn’t
encouraged.”
Then the war ended. Hazzard’s father, an engineer, was posted to Japan and,
after that, Hong Kong. She leapt onto the little ship and revelled in the
five-week voyage to Kure. This is the port of Hiroshima, and, within an hour
of landing, Hazzard was riding in a Jeep through the ground zero of the city
centre.
“We were used to the photographs of the blitz. This was different. It was
pulverised; you could see it had been instantaneous. I was 16, and stupid in
the way one is, and I was thrilled to see something the world knew about. I
was told that 40,000 people had died in 20 minutes, something like that, and
of course we’d been thinking they were only the enemy. But when you were
there, you grew up in a matter of seconds. That impression has grown on me
ever since. It was violence visible.”
From Japan, they went to Hong Kong, where Hazzard was recruited by British
intelligence. It was bliss; she had found cultivated men who liked poetry.
“I would sit on the edge of a desk somewhere, and somebody would come in and
say a poem. That was a great release.” She fell in love with one of the
officers. But the romance was swiftly ended when her sister developed
tuberculosis and, seeking a better climate, the family moved to New Zealand.
“It was,” she says, apparently close to tears, “a kind of death.”
The sheltered upbringing had been shattered by the spectacle of war and the
pain of love and separation. In Hazzard’s childhood, Conrad had simply been
a wonderful story-teller; now he could be seen as the supreme artist of our
helplessness in the hands of fate. She uses the Italian word for destiny – il
destino– but uses it as a kind of consolation to represent a mature
awareness that most things are out of our control.
“I don’t see how people can exclude destino. We are fated
to die, and we don’t know when until it comes very close. There is a
fatalism of feeling. I wonder whether these two terrible wars in our
civilisation – so-called – derailed our sense of destiny.”
Her parents separated in 1951 and, ever on the move, Hazzard ended up in New
York. Suffused with idealism, she started working for the United Nations.
Her idealism rapidly faded. She was employed there for a decade, with
increasing dismay. Some years after she had left and become an established
short-story writer, thanks to The New Yorker, she produced two damning books
about the UN – Defeat of an Ideal and Countenance of Truth. Now, few would
disagree with their conclusions, but at the time she was abused to the point
where she concluded that direct involvement in politics was not for her.
“I read The New York Times this morning. I looked at the clock, and an hour
had gone by, and I thought, ‘ Basta.’ I can be just as
interested in something more interesting. Why am I doing this? I know I
can’t change anything, so why am I giving up time and feeling to this? I
once tried to tell things nobody else would tell. Now I think, ‘Well, I’ve
done all that.’”
Yet even the UN produced its own fragment of benign destino. She was
posted to Naples. She fell in love with Italy and contrived to return at
every opportunity. Then, in January 1963, Muriel Spark invited her to a
party at her rooms in the Beaux Arts hotel, Manhattan. Spark claimed to have
found a man Hazzard ought to marry. “Normally, in your twenties, when people
say that, you just think, ‘Oh, God.’ But Muriel was different. She was
clairvoyant, and it wasn’t like her to say a banal thing.”
Steegmuller walked into the room, stooping slightly because of his height.
Their eyes met and, in December, they were married.
“ Destino.”
They were happy for 31 years, living in New York, in a house in Capri and in a
house in Naples – rented primarily to contain their vast collection of
books. In Capri, they befriended Graham Greene. Hazzard overheard him in a
restaurant, trying to remember a line of poetry. She knew it – she has a
prodigious memory for poetry, and recites a long section of Hardy over
lunch. The friendship led to her superbly shrewd and profound memoir Greene
on Capri, written after his death.
She graduated from short stories with her novel The Evening of the Holiday in
1966 and, in 1980, produced The Transit of Venus, an exquisitely plotted
masterpiece that put her among the greats. Then she started The Great Fire –
the flames were both of love and of war. But she stopped working on it to
help Steegmuller with his work. There was a further hiatus after his death,
but it was finally published in 2003. It was another masterpiece.
There has since been a further hiatus, but she admits tentatively that she has
started writing again. She still needs to find words to capture the
“terrible, terrible” 20th century. “The particular vice of that century –
they want to be able to explain everything away or tell you why this is so.
They don’t keep quiet and try to think about what is said to them.”
“Thank you,” I say as we part. “You have written some beautiful novels.”
“Pardon, what did you say?” I repeat myself. “I know, I heard you. I just
wanted to hear you say it again.”
I left her in the empty shell of the big white building on the easterly
fringes of the Upper East Side, the quiet, playful, lovestruck artist of
love, goodness and death in the 20th century.
www.bryanappleyard.com
