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    On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers
    On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers
    On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers
    Ebook69 pages52 minutes

    On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers

    By Michelle de Kretser

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    About this ebook

    Hazzard was the first Australian writer I read who looked outwards, away from Australia. Her work spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go … It was reading as an affair of revelations and gifts. It fell like rain, greening my vision of Australian literature as a stony country where I would never feel at home. Splendour had entered the scene.

    In this vibrant, rich and personal essay on acclaimed author Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser offers a masterclass in writing that is powerful and exhilarating, that is ‘perfect’ because it is ‘exact’. She celebrates the precision and musicality of Hazzard’s prose and illuminates the humour, humanity and revelatory impact of her work. This jewel of a book is both a wonderful introduction to Hazzard and a treat for her long-time fans.

    In the Writers on Writers series, leading authors reflect on an Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

    Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781743821077
    On Shirley Hazzard: Writers on Writers
    Author

    Michelle de Kretser

    Michelle De Kretser was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her family emigrated to Australia when she was a teenager, and she was educated in Melbourne and Paris. She is the author of five previous novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winners Questions of Travel and The Life to Come and the Man Booker Prize long-listed The Lost Dog. An honorary associate of the English department at the University of Sydney, she lives with her partner, the poet and translator Chris Andrews, in Sydney.

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      Book preview

      On Shirley Hazzard - Michelle de Kretser

      Laurel’

      AN ENDING

      In December 2016 an email came to tell me that Shirley Hazzard had died. I read it and began to cry. It was a response to the crushing Too late! that attends all our negotiations with the dead. I was a reader weeping because now there would be no more books; I was a writer weeping because now I could never write to Hazzard, telling her what her work meant to me and thanking her for it.

      The tears went on, returning steadily, stealthily as day followed day. This silent, unstoppable cascade embarrassed me. It felt excessive. Hazzard was eighty-five. I knew that she’d been ill for some years, latterly spending the greater portion of her days asleep. She had been well cared for during her decline. I’d never met her, never corresponded with her – I couldn’t argue any personal tie. Mutual friends seemed largely undisturbed by her death; it was, as they pointed out gently, a good ending and not unexpected. My weeping felt imposterish, as if I were claiming a connection that didn’t exist.

      At some point in those sorrowful days there came into my mind Jacob Burckhardt’s declaration, quoted by Hazzard, that Italy belonged to all who fell under its spell ‘by right of admiration’. So, fittingly, it was Hazzard herself who provided the explanation for my tears: they flowed by right of admiration.

      HOW TO ACCOUNT FOR IT?

      Hazzard was the first Australian writer I read who looked outwards, away from Australia. Her work spoke of places from which I had come and places to which I longed to go. It conjured cities and rooms: sociable spaces. Yet what she had to say was expansive, not enclosed – I felt enlarged by it, my view widened. It was reading as an affair of revelations and gifts. It fell like rain, greening my vision of Australian literature as a stony country where I would never feel at home. Splendour had entered the scene.

      She describes a fresco: ‘The impression it made was unaccountable; there was nothing in any of its details to suggest the splendour of the whole.’

      Faced with writing about her work, I ask myself: how to account for the impression of splendour?

      It’s striking how frequently Hazzard evokes the value of phenomena that resist description. She notes the ‘incommunicable grandeur’ of a landscape, and the ‘silent, inestimable losses’ that modernity brings. It’s hardly unusual for a writer to appreciate the expert articulation of experience, but it’s rarer to find one who prizes what expertise can’t say. ‘Unaccountable’ is a word that recurs when Hazzard writes about literature or painting. It acknowledges the mystery that resides in art, as well as the contingent nature of our response. A book comes to find you at a particular season of your life. Afterwards, nothing is the same.

      I decide to quote Hazzard extensively in this essay. I repeat my mantra: literature lives in sentences. Quotation seems the best way of indicating what I admire in Hazzard as well as giving readers unmediated access to her prose.

      As soon as I begin, I’m beset by doubt. I have the impression that I’ve been entrusted with something large and shimmering and whole, and that in attempting to hand it on, I’m reducing it to shards. Instead of conveying the moonlight, all I’m showing is the glitter of broken glass.

      Julian Barnes cites Degas: ‘Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? ... Among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say, humph, he, ha, and everything has been said.’

      Humph, he, ha.

      STRAYA

      One reason for the affinity I feel with Hazzard is the question mark that hovers over our right to be considered Australian: in her case, because she left the country at the age of sixteen; in mine, because I didn’t arrive until I was fourteen.

      Born in 1931, Hazzard described the Australia in which she grew up as ‘a country where sameness was a central virtue’. It was ‘a

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