Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
By Brigitta Oloubas
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
By Brigitta Oloubas
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022

It’s a graceful bit of state-setting on the part of author Brigitta Olubas to begin her big long-awaited biography of Shirley Hazzard not with her childhood in Australia in the 1940s or her young adulthood in New York City in the 1950s but rather, decades later, at the 2003 National Book Award ceremony. Those proceedings made a brief tempest in the literary teacups because schlock horror author Stephen King was given a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters despite never having contributed anything to American letters. When King stood up at the podium, he made a predictably vulgar and self-serving us-versus-them speech about how all them lit’rary fellers are outta touch with the reading public. 

Frail, birdlike Shirley Hazzard, being honored for her magnificent novel (her first in 22 years) The Great Fire, took the podium later in the evening and did what, for a kind person and a reflexive introvert, was tantamount to skydiving: she extemporized part of her remarks in order to respond to King directly. With a tight smile on her face, she told a clapping audience that “I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction.” 

“We read in all ages,” she told the crowd, and now at last in Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life Brigitta Olubas has given readers the towering and richly empathetic biography this recondite author has always deserved. 

Ranging through the whole of Hazzard’s literary archive (much of it as yet unprocessed), Olubas fleshes out all the various eras of her subject’s life, her family, the slow and painstaking growth of her craft, her dealings with The New Yorker, her travels (including the very evocative passages in midcentury Naples and Capri), and her lifelong love of her husband, Francis Steegmuller – and the long twilight of her life after his death (“a Richter scale, a geometrical progression, not numerical,” she wrote about it. “It redoubles, extends, intensifies, augments, deepens”). 

That long relationship is the heartbeat of the book, and its incremental decline gives these pages an autumnal feeling even as early as the half-way point. It’s not entirely Steegmuller’s fault; Hazard tended to savor all her pleasures precisely because she tended to outlive them. Long before she makes a personal ritual of haunting the shades of Capri, readers will feel she belongs there. Among its many other joys, this big biography reveals Hazzard’s 2000 memoir Greene on Capri as even more of a plangently joyful masterpiece than it seemed at the time. 

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life is like that for the whole of its 500 pages, turning up revelations and shards of insight so regularly that the reader starts to expect them. This obviously can only happen if the right subject has met just the right chronicler, and that’s what happened here. Virtually every chapter is full of photographic vignettes that are skillfully pulled together from all the sources at the author’s disposal, and all of them put the reader right in the moment:

Alice recalled leaving her after a visit to Posillipo. They had brought their border collie with them on the aliscafo to Mergellina, where Salvatore collected them and drove them to Villa Emma. There was an afternoon of conversation on the terrace, with the bougainvillea, the light and water. Shirley showed them the apartment, the rooms – this is where Francis worked, this is where I work – the dog slept under Francis’s desk. Leaving, they looked back as Salvatore drove them up the long oleander avenue and saw her standing there quite alone: “There was a gap, something missing. At a time of life when she should have had somebody. She with this tremendous gift for friendship.”

Olubas has also edited collections of Hazzard’s short stories and nonfiction. Those two volumes, plus this one, form a stunning monument to Shirley Hazzard, although her novels, particularly The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, have never needed any greater monument than their own slender, invincible wisdom.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.