SHIRLEY HAZZARD AND ELIZABETH HARROWER: TWO WRITERS & FOUR DECADES OF CORRESPONDENCE – SUSAN WYNDHAM

Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower are two giants of Australian and international literature who were brought together by Shirley Hazzard’s mother who became Elizabeth Harrower’s friend. In a long and complicated correspondence over 40 years, the world they knew and wrote about comes to life, no longer the substance of their numerous novels but from the real life experiences of the world in the second half of the 20th Century. How they saw it, how it affected their lives can now be told in their letters over that time. In Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters, edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham, a new personal history emerges of literary Australia and beyond. On Monday 11 November 2024, Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham addressed The Sydney Institute to give some insights to these 40 years of correspondence

SHIRLEY HAZZARD AND ELIZABETH HARROWER: TWO WRITERS & FOUR DECADES OF CORRESPONDENCE

SUSAN WYNDHAM

Some of you may have been at the Regent Hotel on 13 August 13 when Shirley Hazzard gave The Sydney Institute’s Annual Dinner Lecture. The title of her address was Bread and Circuses – Thought and Language in Decline, which was a frequent theme in the writing, conversation and letters of the erudite author of The Transit of Venus.

She started by quoting the newly re-elected US President, Bill Clinton, who had said at his first inauguration in 1993 that the intelligence of the American people was not valued in the preceding decade, but that did not mean it had ceased to exist. That was a wise remark from a man who was not always wise, Shirley said. And wise remarks were in short supply as the world approached the chaotic Millennium, in thrall to the Machine and Money, with no regard for History or Humanism.

Shirley went on to compare that present – almost 30 years ago – with the period of crisis in Rome that prompted Juvenal’s “bread and circuses” remark 2000 years earlier. Rome at that time was not in decline but at a high point of mastery and achievement, Shirley said. The crisis arose from “a vicious abuse of imperial power”, the debasement of city life, the decay of civility, conscience and inward existence; the young people who wore long hair, fur coats and trousers. If she were standing here tonight, she would give you, with heavy heart, almost the same lecture about politics and society today.

You can read the rest of her lecture in The Sydney Papers, Spring 1997, and it gets a mention on page 332 of our book.

I was there that evening as literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. What I didn’t know until much later was that Elizabeth Harrower was also in the audience. I had interviewed both writers – Shirley at her home in New York in 1993 for a profile in The Australian, and Elizabeth in Sydney for the Herald in 1996 when she won the Patrick White Award. Elizabeth would have been nodding in agreement with Shirley’s exhortation to “keep our wits, and our wit, and our sceptical humanity about us”. These were ideas they shared many times in the letters they exchanged for 40 years.

That correspondence and the complex long-distance friendship between two of Australia’s greatest writers of the 20th century is the subject of our book, Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters. The first letters were exchanged in 1966 soon after Elizabeth was introduced to Shirley’s mother by a Potts Point bookseller. Kit Hazzard was divorced, alone, mentally fragile and endlessly problematic to Shirley and her sister Valerie, who also did not get on with each other. Kit was a warm and enthusiastic friend to Elizabeth and wrote to her from New York when she went to visit Shirley and her husband. Shirley added a note, Elizabeth responded with admiration for her stories in the New Yorker, and the rest is Hazzard and Harrower.

As the book opens, Shirley Hazzard has just published her first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, and Elizabeth Harrower has simultaneously published her fourth novel, The Watch Tower. Both books were extremely well reviewed, and the authors – both in their thirties – seemed to be approaching the peak of their careers.

Shirley went on to publish three more novels, including The Transit of Venus in 1980, winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fire in 2003, winner of the Miles Franklin Award here and the National Book Award in the US, as well two nonfiction books exposing corruption in the United Nations, a memoir about Graham Greene and Capri, and many short stories and essays.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, had published three earlier novels in quick succession in the 1950s while living in London – Down in the City, The Long Prospect, and The Catherine Wheel. Everyone was waiting for the novel to follow The Watch Tower, a powerful story of a young woman’s marriage to a domestic tyrant who is one of the most memorable villains of Australian literature. But in the next few years Elizabeth wrote another novel, withdrew it from her publisher and, apart from a few short stories, stopped writing altogether, even though she lived until she was 92.

This gaping disparity between Shirley Hazzard’s writing life and that of Elizabeth Harrower is one of the intriguing questions raised and partly answered in their letters. There’s much more between the lines, which we’ve both spent years discovering – Brigitta in her brilliant biography, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, published in 2022, and I in my biography-in-progress of Elizabeth Harrower, who is a most fascinating and frustrating riddle.

The two women had much in common. Both children of the Depression and the Second World War, they had unhappily married parents who divorced and gave their daughters unstable beginnings. They were not from wealthy families but both lived at different times in Mosman houses with stunning views over Balmoral Beach. Their deprivation was not material but emotional.

Shirley Hazzard’s response was to abandon Australia and seek romantic love, with some disastrous results, but finally in a long, successful marriage to the American biographer and translator Francis Steegmuller. This gave her security and a place in the intellectual establishment that allowed her to write as they moved between homes in New York, Naples and Capri.

Elizabeth Harrower, disillusioned about marriage, remained single and, like Shirley, did not have children, no pram in the hallway to distract her from writing. Friends became her family and among her intimates were the writers Patrick White, Kylie Tennant, Christina Stead and Cynthia Nolan. Shirley and Francis were good friends too, but in the 40 years they corresponded by mail, they only met six times – in London, Sydney and Italy.

Elizabeth saw a lot more of Kit Hazzard, and quickly became involved in helping her see doctors, find flats to rent, survive mental breakdowns, apply for the pension, and eventually move into a nursing home. Elizabeth was at her funeral but Shirley was not.

Kit’s problems filled many of their letters – we have not put them all in the book – and were a cause for empathy and therapeutic dark humour about MM and YM (My Mother, Your Mother). Kit was one reason that Elizabeth was not writing. But how much was that Shirley’s fault for allowing the burden to fall on her friend, and how much was it a symptom of Elizabeth’s own difficulties and procrastination? You may form your own opinion if you read the letters.

While Kit was the foundation of Hazzard and Harrower’s friendship, the letters show that they formed a deeply affectionate and mutually admiring bond for many reasons. They were both, in their own ways, self-taught intellectuals whose education came from books and theatre, galleries and films. They record their constant reading in particular: the latest Patrick White, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, Sumner Locke Elliott, Julian Barnes, as well as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and wide-ranging poetry, history, religion, philosophy and politics.

Being on opposite sides of the world greatly enriched their exchange of news, gossip and observations. The letters themselves, cleanly typed over many pages and with beautiful stamps, often took weeks to arrive or were swallowed up by postal strikes and machinery.

Elizabeth’s first letter introducing herself in November 1966 raised a sensitive question:

Someone was arguing the other night to the effect that Australian writers had to live abroad if they were to write anything of any consequence. Your name was then brought in to support this idea. You would not have been writing about the United Nations if you lived in Australia. Since nothing of international importance ever happens here, this journalist went on, writers were at a great disadvantage. – If people write about public events, I suppose this is true, but if they write about people, the only handicap here or anywhere else is a lack that no change of continent would be likely to alter. Since your work seems to me at all times extremely private, I was taken aback to hear this and could only feel that you have been misunderstood by my acquaintance.

The years of their correspondence trace great cultural, social and political changes. Both were of the moderate political left and were most engaged during the 1970s when Shirley was glued to every detail of the Watergate investigation and Nixon’s downfall, and Elizabeth joined the Australian Labor Party in order to support the Whitlam Government.

On 11 November 1975, she happened to be staying with Christina Stead in Canberra and gives a vivid eyewitness account of Whitlam’s dismissal. As we are meeting here on November 11, forty-nine years later, I’ll read part of it:

Telephone rings. I hear Christina saying many times, “But that’s terrible. That’s terrible.” Finally she came in. “What’s happened?” “Malcolm Fraser is Prime Minister. Kerr has got rid of Whitlam.” Horror. Horror and stupefaction. People very nearly fell down in the street with amazement and dismay. Manning Clark (our most splendid historian) said he was literally sick. Switched on radio which was booming away in stunned voice. Chris offered gin, brandy, sherry, while I paced about holding head and listening to reports. Finally knocked off some Nescafe and took taxi to Parliament House. People surged there from everywhere. It was so AWFUL. Everyone was outraged. Our votes meant nothing. Moderate reform is not allowed to take place here. The new leaders came out on the balcony and laughed like Nazis. Then our deposed mates came out on the front steps where we all were, to talk to the crowd, and were hugely cheered.

I might add that Elizabeth’s hyperbolic use of “Nazis” goes back to a childhood lived under the shadow of war, her nightmares and imagination shaped by newsreels and Hollywood. As a primary school pupil in Newcastle, she wanted to go to Europe and tell Hitler that violence was wrong. In London, as an adult she joined the first Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons in 1958. In her fiction, the oppressive power imbalances between small-time bullies and their victims in marriage, family and workplace reflect the dramas of her own experience and also the politics of hot and cold war that were her backdrop.

Much later in her life, Elizabeth regretted giving so much of herself to politics, at the expense of her writing and her peace of mind. She also regretted some of the sacrifices she had made to demanding friends – not just Shirley and Kit Hazzard, but certainly she devoted herself to Kit for almost 20 years.

When Shirley wrote about Australia in the New Yorker and her Boyer Lectures, she was criticised by some Australians for having the outdated view of the expat, but she was saved from worse by Elizabeth’s informative letters, piles of newspaper clippings, and personal introductions to literary and political figures including her heroes Patrick White and Gough Whitlam. All through their letters, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s, Shirley and Elizabeth mourned the dire state of the world – a mixture of despair and hope that gives us some perspective, and perhaps amusement. But they also showed their differences, and a degree of resentment set in.

While Shirley was a constant, cosmopolitan traveller, Elizabeth came to dislike overseas travel and had to be persuaded for many years before she visited Shirley and Francis in Italy in 1984. Far from reinforcing their bond, the trip could have destroyed the friendship. Elizabeth thought Shirley was bossy and garrulous, Shirley thought Elizabeth was rude and ungrateful. Rather than go on to New York, as her hosts offered, Elizabeth left abruptly to visit the Whitlams in Paris and her relatives in Scotland. They did not meet again until Shirley came to give The Sydney Institute Lecture thirteen years later.

Again, you have to read between the clipped but polite lines of their letters to understand what was happening. Brigitta found Shirley’s upset account in her diaries, and Elizabeth told both of us later that Shirley had become “grand” as she became more famous. There were aspects of Australia that offended Shirley’s delicate sensibility. She wrote impatiently in May 1983:

How ever could someone like you, Eliz, not realise how Austs can seem compelled to act out the very Aust caricature they claim to resent?…Why can’t such Austs simply disown the Barry Humphries caricature when it is brought up to them? – but Patrick and others praise it, in fact, as a show of the real nature of things.

Despite this fracture, their generous natures, their long history, and the safe distance of letter writing enabled their friendship to flow on through old age and loss, until Shirley was disabled by dementia.

We feel very privileged to have this long record of two great minds in dialogue, which is preserved on paper and in their personal archives, and to have shaped it into a compelling narrative of our times.