Tad friend shirley hazzard1/2/2024 All her heroines are "good with words", and profit not only professionally but morally just as some of her male characters are at a loss for the words that would clarify an inner vagueness. Inheriting the talent, Hazzard conquered the adversity. Her mother was "very good with words unfortunately, good with words in an adverse way". It's not a disastrous thing, as long as it isn't carried to extremes, because it's a sort of preparation for being in the world." Although she is keen to stress she "did not suffer as a child", the tone of the household is conveyed in details such as that her father "loved music but my mother prevented his continuing that interest and said she couldn't stand the sound of the gramophone in the house". There is something that prompts them to the idea of mortality and sadness. "I perhaps wouldn't say that now, but I think there is a lot of hidden unhappiness in childhood: not only the terrible dramas at home that emerge from an unhappy marriage, such as my parents had, but there is a sadness in existing at all, the ache of being alive, even when you're very little. A reader of Hazzard's first novel, The Evening of the Holiday (1967), might be startled at the suggestion that the central character's childhood, "like all childhoods, was unhappy". They met, as if symbolically, on a bridge - the Sydney Harbour Bridge, then under construction. Her father, a chemist, had come from Newport, Wales, her mother, a secretary, from Dunfermline in Fife. The Hazzards were an accidental Australian family. She has recorded the relationship in a marvellous memoir, Greene on Capri, which serves also as a compressed record of her life on the island with Steegmuller.īefore then, her existence had been restless and difficult. The memory makes her shiver, but he remains a commanding presence in her life. Greene, she says, was apt to throw a tantrum at the most trivial prompting. Hazzard relates the story while sitting at the very table in Gemma's, with a view over sheer crags to the neighbouring island of Ischia. Later that evening, she and Steegmuller were seated next to Greene in Gemma's, a well-known local restaurant, and there began an enduring, if turbulent, friendship as each party returned to Capri year after year. As Hazzard prepared to leave, she discreetly supplied the missing words. He was with a companion to whom he started to recite "The Lost Mistress" by Robert Browning - "Mere friends are we -well, friends the merest / Keep much that I resign" - but stalled at the concluding lines. In the late 1960s, while she and her husband were wintering on Capri, Hazzard found herself sitting near Greene in a cafe. The third significant encounter was with Graham Greene. " The couple were married before the year's end, and sustained what appears to have been an exceptionally happy union until Steegmuller's death in 1994, aged 88. "To think, I might not have gone! This accidental factor that governs all our lives. "It was an extremely cold night," she says. Then, in 1963, at a party given by Muriel Spark full of New Yorker folk, she met Francis Steegmuller, translator of Flaubert's letters and biographer of Cocteau and Apollinaire. I sent it to the New Yorker absolutely cold, not even bothering to keep a copy." Maxwell replied with a cheque and a note whose contents Hazzard relates tenderly: "Of course we'll publish your story." The tale, "Harold" - it is in her collection Cliffs of Fall - became the first of many of her works of fiction and non-fiction to appear in the magazine. One was with the New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, to whom she sent a short story in the first year of the decade. Meetings with three men changed Shirley Hazzard's life in the 1960s.
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