A Life of Shirley Hazzard, Sublime Chronicler of Affairs of the Heart (Published 2022) (2024)

SHIRLEY HAZZARD: A Writing Life, by Brigitta Olubas

In 2003, at the 92nd Street Y, the writer Shirley Hazzard spoke of her new novel, “The Great Fire,” which would go on to win a National Book Award a few weeks later. She said: “The world likes to trace the author’s life in the novel but the obvious isn’t always true. Something that was very close to you and resembles your experience isn’t necessarily the deepest version of the story. … One feels for another person. One observes. One imagines.”

That formula, that particular admixture of experience and imagination, observation and reading, is the great lure of the literary biography. Readers of Shirley Hazzard, devotees most of us, have had to wait a long time for the story of the life of the creator of some of the most incandescent prose of the past century. “A style as complex and lucid as this,” Alan Wall wrote in The Guardian, “constitutes a species of moral achievement.” We are accustomed to waiting. We waited from 1980, when her magnificent novel “The Transit of Venus” appeared, until 2003, for “The Great Fire.” Finally, out of Australia, Hazzard’s country of origin, and six years after her death, comes Brigitta Olubas’s “Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life,” an impeccably researched and deeply incisive account of Hazzard’s life and work, and the intriguing interplay between the two.

Hazzard, the author of four novels, two story collections and several works of nonfiction, was born in Sydney in 1931. Her father was a heavy drinker and a philanderer, her mother erratic, most likely bipolar. Hazzard said her mother could be funny and delightful, but melodrama, derangement and suicidal threats were more the norm. Once, when Hazzard was 6 or 7, her mother asked her to come put her head in the oven with her to die. Hazzard said that her relentlessly infuriating and manipulative character Dora, in “The Transit of Venus,” is “a very mild dose of my mother — a destroyer who sees herself as a perpetual victim.” Her parents were an unhappy pair raising two unhappy daughters who, in that warring household between two real wars, did not bond but became adversaries. The only mention of any connection between the siblings came with the Second World War when they, like the sisters Brontë and Alcott before them, wrote epic romances, theirs about injured pilots and devoted girls. Hazzard’s mother claimed her daughter’s love of poetry began nearly as soon as she learned to read, remembering little Shirley “sitting on the bottom step reading poetry to me in the kitchen, asking me ‘Don’t you think that’s beautiful?’” Throughout her life, poetry was her deepest literary love, and she had a prodigious memory for it. During her early years in Australia, poetry was a private passion, one not shared by anyone she knew.

Her arrival in Hong Kong at 16 marked the end of her formal education. She took a job as a junior staffer in a British intelligence unit, where she met Alexis Vedeniapine, a 32-year-old officer in the British Army, whose love and memory for poetry rivaled hers. A Russian raised in Shanghai, educated in England and scarred by the Second World War, Alec would become her first and arguably — despite the many to follow, including her husband of 30 years — her greatest and most enduring love. Alec’s brutal war experiences and trauma show up frequently in her fiction, spread among several characters. Hazzard fell hard and fast; her diary entries reveal a girl tormented by an older man’s ambivalence and inaccessibility.