The first short story Shirley Hazzard ever wrote was plucked from the slush pile of the New Yorker by William Maxwell, the magazine’s long-standing fiction editor. Maxwell, who would go on to publish most of Hazzard’s short fiction, later recalled the submission as “an astonishment to the editors because it was the work of a finished literary artist about whom they knew nothing whatever”.
Collected Stories, edited by her biographer, Brigitta Olubas, contains two previous volumes: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). It also includes eight uncollected stories – among which is the inaugural story, Woollahra Road, about a girl in Depression-era Australia – as well as two unpublished works found among Hazzard’s papers after her death in 2016. While the two posthumously-published pieces are, unsurprisingly, not fully developed, the voice is unmistakably Hazzard’s, containing her characteristically clever repartee.
Cliffs of Fall features young women exasperated by, but nonetheless beholden to, self-involved men. In A Place in the Country, a woman despairs at the end of an affair with her cousin’s husband. “You mustn’t exaggerate the importance of this,” he tells her, dismissively. The Picnic brings the two together eight years later as each silently reflects on the relationship (while the wife grips a rock, white-knuckled, observing them at a distance). “I think I might rather like to come first with someone [– after themselves, of course]” muses another mistreated mistress, tethered by inertia to an unsatisfying affair.
The United Nations
People in Glass Houses is a series of interconnected stories, (sometimes considered a novel), satirising life at the Organization – a thinly-veiled United Nations (UN) – with projects like “the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Weapons and Forceful Implementation of Peace Treaties”. If Cliffs of Fall deals in the casual cruelties of romantic relationships, People in Glass Houses depicts professional pitfalls: being at the mercy of a boss whom one disdains, a sadistic secretary or the unfair politics of promotion.
With no college education, Hazzard worked at the UN Secretariat in a clerical capacity, which was woefully underpaid and held no opportunities for advancement: “A young woman was given a typewriter and told to shut up,” she once said. While she shared her extensive ideological criticisms of the United Nations in two non-fiction books, Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990) as well as in essays, the stories are humorous, sending up office life and civil service. “Not naturally malicious,” she writes of one gossipy employee, “he had developed rapidly since entering bureaucracy.”
Hazzard’s prose is marked by its precision; she took her vocation seriously, redrafting each page up to 30 times. Her style is often compared to Henry James, and the slowing down of time allowing for the extended reflections of the former lovers in The Picnic is certainly Jamesian.
While conceding a shared care for language, however, she resisted the comparison, arguing that her work was more amusing, more sensual, brisker and less snobby. She preferred to be likened to George Eliot, despite it being an admission of old-fashionedness. Indeed, in the foreword to the Collected Stories, Zoë Heller writes that the young protagonist dumped by her married lover sounds “how one might expect. . . Dorothea Brooke to sound, were she to be spirited out of Victorian England and given contraception and an apartment.”
Poetry
It’s not only an elevated register and omniscient asides that lend Hazzard’s oeuvre an air of formality but the bygone era of intellectualism she evokes, with cosmopolitan characters slipping into Italian or French and quoting poetry. “Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life,” she told the Paris Review in 2005. It was also the genesis of a long friendship with Graham Greene, chronicled in her memoir, Greene on Capri (2000). Seated nearby in a cafe on the island, Hazzard supplied a line of Robert Browning’s The Lost Mistress that Greene couldn’t recall when reciting it to his companion.
With an ear attuned to dialogue – both internal and external – Hazzard believed that speech “can crucially suggest what is not said”. Nestled in her characters’ exchanges are gut-punching aphorisms: “Marriage is like democracy – it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with.”
Once she dedicated herself to the novel form, Hazzard rarely returned to short fiction, although her novels were built of the same bricks, with certain chapters of both of The Transit of Venus (1980) and The Great Fire (2003) originally appearing as stories in the New Yorker. Carefully crafted and astutely observed, Hazzard’s stories accomplish what she held to be the purpose of literature: “a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a human condition”, as she wrote in her 1982 essay We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think. In a world increasingly focused on the self, she suggested, “the testimony of the accurate word is perhaps the last great mystery to which we can make ourselves accessible, to which we can still subscribe.”
