THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 69
the Greek guide speak French among
themselves.”
In “The Picnic,” from 1962, Hazzard
came upon a theme that preoccupied
her for a lifetime: the way love can be
at once perishable and, in its reshap-
ing of our minds, permanent. Nettie
and Clem—distant relatives by mar-
riage, illicit lovers long ago—sit in awk-
ward silence on a hillside. The story
contains hardly any dialogue. It is the
first time they have seen each other in
a decade. Clem takes note of Nettie’s
inappropriate dress, which she has (pre-
dictably, he thinks) stained. Nettie ob-
serves Clem’s faded face and dreary
caution. Their private thoughts con-
struct a history of their relationship
and reveal what they both deny to them-
selves: that they have lastingly altered
each other’s very cognition; that each
still intrudes on the other’s thoughts
almost every day; that they are them-
selves, in some ways, because of each
other. Although they have not been to-
gether in years, they have, in this sense,
never quite been apart. Love, which
takes place in the mind, is eternal, “the
only state” in which “all one’s capaci-
ties” are engaged. The entire story spans
just a few minutes.
In “Collected Stories,” we see Haz-
zard practicing the floor routines of
her later novels, sticking all the land-
ings if not always having yet worked
out the full choreography. The erudite
similes and lethally precise adjectives
are there, as are the astute observations
about domestic phenomena. The sen-
tences of shocking wisdom appear
freakishly often. The intelligence is re-
lentless. Hazzardians will read “Col-
lected Stories” with impatient pleasure,
reminded from the first page that, once
they are through, they can start reread-
ing the novels.
T
he globe-trotting cosmopolitan-
ism of Hazzard’s own life emerged
out of a childhood in what she de-
scribed as “a remote, philistine coun-
try.” Growing up in Sydney, Australia,
with a bipolar mother and an alcoholic
father, Hazzard yearned for the au-
thority 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. “Literature had
not simply made these things true,”
she writes in “The Transit of Venus,”
her 1980 masterpiece. “It had placed
Australia in perpetual, flagrant viola-
tion of reality.”
Her early education was conducted
at a school that primed its young charges
with poetry, but it soon became impos-
sible to ignore the conflagration that
had overtaken Europe and the Pacific.
Already Hazzard was familiar with the
wounded veterans of the Great War
who hobbled down the streets of Syd-
ney, and, as a child, she had once been
evacuated to the countryside with her
fellow-students. “I had been raised in
the climate of war,” she wrote half a
century later, having by then published
five books of fiction absolutely rife with
combat imagery.
Hiroshima was a wasteland when
Hazzard arrived there at the age of six-
teen, less than two years after the at-
tack. She saw a city where (as a char-
acter in one of her novels puts it) “the
crust of the earth had been lifted off
only to reveal more man-made horrors
beneath.” The family was en route to
Hong Kong, where Hazzard’s father
had accepted a diplomatic post. Once
there, having quit school, she found a
job working for British intelligence; on
her time off, she read literature with
an autodidact’s reverence for tradition,
and had a love affair with a British
Army officer. After her sister contracted
tuberculosis, the family relocated to
New Zealand. Hazzard said that the
move was “a sort of death.” Heartbro-
ken in Wellington, she studied Italian
and read Leopardi.
The family moved again, in 1951, to
New York City, where Hazzard took
an underpaid secretarial job in the
“dungeons” of the United Nations, a
hellish experience on which she drew
heavily in “People in Glass Houses,” a
collection of linked satirical stories pub-
lished in 1967. Though her disappoint-
ment in the institution, with its squan-
dering of talent and its misplaced
ideals, is the subject of two nonfiction
books of hers, “People in Glass Houses”
conjures the dark comedy of a place
where co-workers banter on rugs do-
nated by the Republic of Panama and
officials carry on about freedom as
though it were “some extinct creature
being pickled in a jar of spirits.”Like one of her fictional U.N. em-
ployees, 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. In 1963, the year that
“Cliffs of Fall,” her first story collec-
tion, appeared, she married Francis
Steegmuller, the recently widowed Flau-
bert scholar. The couple settled in Man-
hattan but spent half of every year in
Capri. There they befriended Graham
Greene, after Hazzard met the novel-
ist in a café and helpfully supplied him
with the last line of a Robert Brown-
ing poem he was struggling to remem-
ber. (Their friendship was the subject
of Hazzard’s “Greene on Capri,” a short
memoir, published in 2000 and filled
with sentences like “We were speaking
of Dryden.”)
By the decade’s end, she had pub-
lished her first two novels, “The Eve-
ning of the Holiday” (1966) and “The
Bay of Noon” (1970). Delightfully out-
moded and set in Italy—whose sum-
mer sky, in a lapse of cosmic good taste,
is colored “an injudicious paint-box
azure”—both are about self-knowledge,
love, and epicurean errands. (Hazzard
bristled at comparisons to Henry James,
whose “greatness” she conceded only
with reservations.) Still, like a James-
ian character, she felt herself, in Italy,
to be “living more completely among
the scenes and sentiments of a human-
ism the New World could not pro-
vide”; centuries seemed to collapse in
on themselves all around her. It was
the country’s constant “admixture of
immediacy and continuity, of the long
perspective and the intensely personal”
that, in the coming decades, bloomed
in each of her books.
Though Hazzard’s politics were left-
leaning, her self-presentation was de-
cidedly Old World—starched shirts, a
closet full of Chanel tweeds. In an act
of treasonous grooming, she wore her
hair pinned up in a bouffant through
the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.
She spoke in a muted British accent
that was the muddied average of all the
English-speaking countries in which
she had lived. “If a highly intelligent