SHIRLEY HAZZARD AND ELIZABETH HARROWER: THE LETTERS – BRIGITTA OLUBAS

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 into these 40 years of correspondence. Brigitta Olubas’ paper has been taken from an edited transcript of her words on the night.

SHIRLEY HAZZARD AND ELIZABETH HARROWER: THE LETTERS

BRIGITTA OLUBAS

The political conversations between Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower were central to their intellectual and social lives. Politics really sparked through their letters and they offer readers of today some of the lived experience of those times for particularly engaged onlookers. There is also their commentary on the formal politics of Australia, Italy and the US. The two writers shared notes about experiences of the politics of the time. So, postal strikes, transport worker strikes, come back again and again through the letters in a way that’s very surprising for readers today.  For Shirley, as the inveterate traveller, there was the ever-present threat of terrorist incidents – something again not so familiar to contemporary readers.

Politics, in the broader sense, were as compelling for the two writers as literature itself. Susan has mentioned Shirley’s near obsession with the Watergate Hearings in the US through the middle years of the 1970s. She and her husband remained glued to their wireless even when they were in Capri. When Elizabeth said to Shirley, “You must go and see Last Tango in Paris,” she replied, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll go when Watergate closes.” That was the only entertainment Shirley wanted at the time. As a result, Shirley provided Elizabeth with endless commentary, including lengthy transcripts, pages, and pages of transcripts of the hearings with fiery denunciations of most of the protagonists. We edited a lot out.

As I see it, Shirley Hazzard’s approach was moral rather than party political, although she never voiced any approval at all for any Republican presidents. She was also fiercely critical of many Democratic presidents. Elizabeth, on the other hand, was staunchly partisan. She was a paid-up member of the ALP and she was drawn to this through her own working-class family background. As well, there were those politicising moments from her youth and through her friendship with Patrick White who was very much a politically engaged writer. While Shirley was, in her own words, not a joiner she was a tireless critic of what she found to be political mendacity or a venality across the board, whether she was talking about conservative or progressive politicians.

Such politics was her abiding obsession – and I don’t use the word lightly. Friends in the US say that Shirley Hazard ruined dinner parties because she wouldn’t stop talking about the United Nations. She had worked for the United Nations in her youth as a typist. Through that, she learned a lot of insider secrets about particular perfidies going on and she insisted on publishing about these. It went on through her writing life from the 1970s. She continued to write about the UN and complain about how much time that took and how it stopped her writing novels; but then she would write another essay on the UN. In the late 1980s, Hazzard complained to Harrower about how much time she was spending on a couple of essays she was writing on Kurt Waldheim. In 1990, she published a book that brought these two essays together; it was called Countenance of Truth. It was not the novel that her fans had been waiting for, for a decade, but a dry monograph. In it she revealed in excoriating detail the mendacity as she saw it of the United Nations and its former head, Secretary General Kurt Waldheim.

Countenance of Truth came from a phrase from one of the lesser works of the great poet John Milton. Hazzard paraphrased Milton as lamenting the need to set aside poetry, his higher calling, to address what he found to be the urgent evils of his day – in his case it was corruption in the clergy. And Milton wrote in an essay about his need to do this, saying, “I have a work that I love as a poet. As if I would turn away from that bright countenance of truth to mix up with antipathetic matters of this kind if I didn’t feel that I could not forbear to do it.” That sequence of negatives embed the complexity of the task that Hazzard is undertaking – drawing attention here to the very vexed question of when and how writers and artists should participate in the public world. Hazzard saw it as something she could not avoid, something that writers should not avoid.

1990, Shirley Hazzard been writing about the United Nations for two decades and through the years she weighed and lamented the cost of political writing. She was always anxious about not getting back to her novel. In the 1960s she’d written to the American intellectual and her friend Alfred Kazin about the travails really of public involvement. She wrote, “I feel as you do about protests, that they are a dreary and thankless business for artists to have to involve themselves in and that the maximum influence still rests in one’s work, however far it may seem from the context. However, an occasional lifting of the head seems necessary just to show that it is not bowed on these matters.” In other words, the writer has a responsibility.

At first Hazzard’s efforts were directed towards changing the UN, but she quickly realised that this wasn’t going to happen and became resigned to a different level of influence and participation. As she explained in an interview in 1990,

I had information about the UN, just by the circumstance of having worked there. And, as years go by with nobody else doing it, I feel some obligation, but I can’t go on with it. If this book doesn’t make any immediate impression at least it’s on the record of history and I suppose the ultimate reason for writing is to tell the truth. In the beginning, I had hoped to change things, but one loses that expectation. But, I think that a truth set out takes on a life of its own. These aren’t private truths they belong to everybody, although they always come back to personal conduct. People talk in categories, even I have to use this phrase, the leadership of the UN, but these are single men – we can use the word men because there are so few women in the leadership – human beings who should be made answerable for their actions.

Again, you can hear the moral urgency in what she’s saying there.

For Hazzard, the writer’s responsibility was in the service of truth. She had a terribly admirable sense of the need to enact her public responsibility. There’s a sense of solemnity and a sense of occasion in doing this. There’s also her awareness of the inherent significance of the writer who might speak out on important matters. But, for her audience, she was very much out of step, out of kilter with this. Even in her own time her actions had seemed somewhat histrionic. Her knowledge of the institution of the UN had been gleaned while she worked there, as she said, as a lowly administrator, a stenographer really. Sir Brian Urquhart, the former Under-Secretary-General and her great adversary, would write a response every time Shirley Hazard published an essay criticizing the UN. At a party that they’d both been invited to by a friend, he told the host that Hazard knew nothing of the UN as she wasn’t a player there. He was so infuriated at how much attention she was getting. So, as a writer criticising the UN, Hazard spoke without formal authority. She spoke as a private citizen and there was something indecorous about the fervour with which she undertook this task.

I want now to quote from a fascinating review in the New York Times of her first UN book. It was a critique of the ways that Hazzard felt the UN had betrayed its charter from the very beginning because the leadership of the UN permitted, in the early 1950s, the McCarran Committee of inquiry. That the UN had allowed US employees of the UN to be interrogated by the McCarran Committee, as far as Hazard was concerned, was a fundamental breach of its charter. The UN was not to be beholden to member governments. And she was equally critical of interference and involvement by the Soviet government that followed. But the first breach she said was this breach by the UN at the behest of the US.

Hazzard wrote with great passion about this important, but quite dry subject. The reviewer, the late Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, characterised her battle with the UN as a lover’s quarrel. He wrote beautifully about it, so it’s an unseemly overblown impassioned engagement. He wrote:

It’s like being at the dullest of cocktail parties, a United Nations reception perhaps, with cliches dripping all around you, when suddenly a voice rises above the others, a finely, modulated voice speaking with rising passion and you stop what you’re saying to listen in utter fascination and you turn to see this dark handsome woman advancing on this fat, carbuncle, blubber of a man. Cursing him, befuddling him with scorching wit. Flaying him bloody with lashes of rhetoric. Backing him into a corner of the room and laying it on without mercy until all conversation in the room has stopped and all the guests are staring horrified at this woman cursing and this fat old man weeping now, and you wonder why this is happening. Until you realize she loves him.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt didn’t like Shirley Hazard but that’s another story. The scenario of the impassioned woman speaking truth to power, speaking too loudly, speaking too passionately, staging a private battle in a public space suggests, I would say, that we are in the domain of melodrama. Not melodrama in that simple pejorative sense of an excess, usually a feminine excess, or exaggeration, but rather in the more abstruse sense of a secular drive to virtue in the world. One that draws subjects of the world into a conflict between good and evil that plays out under the surface of things. It’s another definition of melodrama, a more sombre and serious, and political definition of melodrama. In other words, Shirley Hazard’s commitment to veracity, to telling the truth, to integrity underpins and justifies the force and energy of her political writing. It is her desire to expose the truth and to account for the truth, to hold political institutions to task and refuse compromise. All of which is really honourable and really necessary and a bit boring within a kind of social context. This is certainly what her New York friends related to me.

Some of that earnestness and seriousness can also be found in these more private registers and we certainly find it in her letters, including her letters to Elizabeth Harrower. It’s that sense of self-importance that comes through, what is actually a very engaged moral and political investment by Shirley Hazard. Perhaps that was one of the things that led to the breach in the friendship, a certain fragility in the friendship that Susan mentioned. This reluctance on Shirley’s part, to what Elizabeth felt increasingly was an increased self-importance by Shirley. This grandness about her, which she later came to speak of very critically. So, for Shirley, the writer’s private self simply must participate in the public world, must take itself seriously, whatever people thought, however boring it made you. As Hazzard said in that Annual Dinner lecture at The Sydney Institute in 1997 – which she titled Bread and Circuses-Thought and Language in Decline:

… the writer’s vigilance over language and attention to language are themselves an assumption of responsibility. When, with the Renaissance drama, men and women began to speak through literature with individual voices, rather than as types, there was a humanistic assumption of personal accountability for what was uttered … and so we have continued in theory at least to regard it. Our words whether in literature or life are accepted as a revelation of our private nature and an index of the measure of responsibility we are prepared to assume for it.

Hazzard, nonetheless, always lamented the intrusion of these matters into her working day. She wrote to Elizabeth Harrower of the lethal effect of her UN writing was having on what she called her real work. Nonetheless, she continued to commit herself, over and over, to producing these essays, almost all of it directed at the UN. While her commentary was welcomed by some UN employees, or more often former employees, it had no perceivable effect on the institution itself. Nor more widely on public debate around the UN. A measure of this apparent failure might be seen in the fact that she was the first writer to air publicly the claims about Kurt Waldheim having concealed a very close involvement with the Austrian Nazi Party during World War II. She was saying, it’s not the fact of his involvement with the Nazi Party (people did that in the war), but he covered it up and this meant that he became manipulable within his role in the UN.

Hazzard published this in an essay in 1980. Waldheim denounced it and denounced her. Then, as the essay raised some public commentary, a US Congressman spoke to her and her sources, then wrote to Kurt Waldheim, who was still secretary of the UN. Waldheim denied it all. The story was finally picked up by the journalist Jane Kramer and published at the time Waldheim was standing for the presidency of Austria. But it made absolutely no difference and he was elected. It became a storm in a teacup, even though it was a really significant story at the same time. So, there’s that contradiction going on all the time.

Hazzard will not be remembered for that work, no matter how important it was. She will be remembered rather for her novels, for her stories. But what’s important for us was the way she understood the relative importance of the two kinds of writing. Of political writing in the world and her great fiction. As a writer, she lived the great divergence between politics and fiction. But her focus was always on fiction and on the important labours of writing and of reading. As she said, “There is at least one immense truth to which we can still adhere and make central to our lives – responsibility to the accurate word.”

In this commitment she was certainly joined by Elizabeth Harrower. Whatever the differences between their respective styles and modes of political commitment, their devotion to the written word, to those labours of writing and reading are and remain exemplary and this collection of their extraordinary correspondence is testament to that.