68 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
BOOKS
LOVE YOU MORE
Shirley Hazzard and the art of outsized intimacy.BY ALICEGREGORY
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENA GIAVALDI
T
oward the end of Shirley Hazzard’s
first novel, “The Evening of the
Holiday” (1966), 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. There is
no immediate obligation calling her back,
but she is determined to go.
Sophie struggles against their claus-
trophobic misery. As her mind gyres
outward (“All around them, across the
countryside, men and women went
about their work or sat down to their
lunch, talked and laughed—or wept,
as they wept now”), she tries to “fit
this love into some immense, annihi-
lating context of human experience,
assailing it with her sense of propor-
tion.” Tancredi, wryly credited with
being the one “who knew more about
proportion,” lifts his head. “What could
be worse than this?” he asks Sophie.
“What could be worse?” The chapter
ends soon afterward, and the next one
opens half a year later, during a winter
of record-breaking freezes and deaths.These contrasts in scale—individ-
ual and historical, intimate and epic—
occur throughout the novels of Shirley
Hazzard, whose writing, like her name,
tends to begin demurely enough, all
weak tea and lace curtains, but grows
quietly comic, and then abruptly ca-
lamitous. Her characters know poetry
by heart, believe in honor, and speak in
epigrams. Their biographies are revised,
drastically, by plane crashes and ship-
wrecks, fatal battles, and grave illnesses.
They travel widely and suffer emotional
devastation.
Hazzard, who died in 2016, at the
age of eighty-five, once described her
reading life as one of “impassioned hu-
mility.” This is the effect of her books,
too, in which vast, inhuman forces cir-
cumscribe her characters’ most personal
experiences. She was, as she told the
Paris Review, skeptical of fiction that
was “hard, cool, indifferent”; she thought
that literature should be “an intensifi-
cation of life,” not merely a skillful re-
capitulation of it.H
azzard 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 unso-
licited manuscripts that The New Yorker
received annually at the time, but Wil-
liam Maxwell, the fiction editor, pulled
it out of the slush pile and instructed
Hazzard to send more.
“Woollahra Road,” which closely
heels to the consciousness of a small
Depression-era Australian child, was,
in 1961, the first story of Hazzard’s that
the magazine published. It now ap-
pears, along with twenty-seven others,
in “Collected Stories” (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux), edited by Brigitta Olubas,
a literary scholar from the University
of New South Wales who has edited
a collection of academic essays on Haz-
zard and is at work on a biography. The
stories, most of which were written in
the nineteen-sixties, are often set in
exotic locations—the Gulf of Corinth,
South China, Florence—and are filled
with short sentences of tossed-off-
sounding sophistication: “The War
Crimes people gave parties that lastedHazzard believed that literature should be “an intensification of life.” all night”; “The Danish couple and (^) PHOTOGRAPHS: SHUTTERSTOCK (BACKGROUND TEXTURE); MARTHA COOPER / NEW YORK POST ARCHIVES / GETTY (HAZZARD); LEO WEHRLI (OCEAN)