Shirley Hazzard’s essays reflect her humanist vision

Shirley Hazzard’s writings eloquently bear out her love of literary humanism and her faith in the power of posterity.

Shirley Hazzard: ‘The world is not thinking … of itself as something going on forever.’ Picture: Graham Jepson

There should be a term for the surprise, or frisson, or delighted recognition that arises when a supposedly antiquated world view comes roaring back into view. Even those who disagree with Bernie Sanders’ politics, for example, recognise that an earlier current of American politics is suddenly back in currency after decades of ideological alienation. And even those who do not share her religious belief must grant that US author Marilynne Robinson has, in her novels and essays, rejigged the 19th-century thought of everyone from Emerson to William James in ways that gain fresh purchase on the present.

It may also be also how readers greet this slight but not insubstantial selection of Shirley Hazzard’s nonfiction, guided into print via the tender editorial ministrations of Australian scholar Brigitta Olubas and built mainly around three previously unpublished lectures delivered by Hazzard in 1982 as part of Princeton’s Gauss Seminars. Supplemented by reviews of contemporaries such as Muriel Spark and Patrick White, pieces related to the flawed UN — where she first worked on arriving in the US — and a clutch of speeches, biographical essays and travel pieces, We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think manages the difficult task of making old-school, mid-century liberal humanism feel alive, urgent and necessary once again.

Admittedly, taken together, it is not a lot of piecework to show for decades of literary labour. But then, Hazzard’s marriage to scholar, biographer and translator Francis Steegmuller — whose first marriage left him independently wealthy — freed her from the obligation of writing with her left hand. What we have instead in these pages are essays, reviews and recollections that reflect her true loves as a reader, and her central concerns as a writer and public intellectual. As Olubas observes in a clear and comprehensive introduction, Hazzard has been shaped in interesting ways by such rare and happy circumstance.

Though formidably well read, Hazzard is not of the academy. Mistrust of the euphuistic interpretative tendencies of American universities in the latter decades of the 20th century shadows her defence of literature throughout. And although she has spent much of her adult life at the heart of a great literary capitol — working and living on equal terms with those scholars, writers and editors whose talents made New York such a creative and intellectual powerhouse — her determined amateurism, her gender and her expatriate status mark Hazzard as an outsider. It is these fruitful tensions between margin and centre, between private reader and public intellectual, that lift these pieces out of their historical moment and geographic grounds.

The three Gauss lectures are a case in point. In them Hazzard is concerned to coddle the mystery posed by the survival of some literature over time, rather than murder it for the purposes of dissection. At a time when the popularity of continental theory on east coast American campuses had reached an early high-water mark, she grandly wields Seneca: “To my mind, no one lets humanity down so much as these people who study knowledge as if it were some sort of technical skill.”

Instead, she clears ground for reverence. Tracing the long arc of Western humanistic culture from Virgil to Eugenio Montale, Hazzard examines the ways in which the heroic public role of the archaic poet shrinks to the essentially private mode and “contingent loneliness” of ­poetry in modernity. She then explores the relationship of candour and literature over the same period:

“Literature, like philosophy, is concerned with truth. But the nature of poetry — of literature — extends beyond intellectual inquiry. It engages all human perception, intuitive, rational, mystical, spontaneous, or reflective. It proposes no outcome. It not merely enhances understanding, but is in itself a synthesis.

“Poets have been at pains to explain this to critics throughout the ages, but their words are unnecessary to lovers of poetry and have been disregarded by critics: The judgment of great poetry, said Whitman, ‘is as the sun falling around a helpless thing’.”

Hers is, then, a theory of literature premised on a refusal to theorise: it is the position of Woolf’s common reader, though a superbly insightful one — one, moreover, who relies on a secular faith in the power of certain writers to use language in such a way that it strikes a note of “immemorial immediacy” even across millennia. It is to these rare figures that Hazzard vouchsafes the preservation of honesty of utterance: a kind of ethical-aesthetic tuning fork to strike against the mediocrity and mendacity that characterises much of the postmodern moment from which she speaks.

This leads to her third lecture and a final mystery: the process by which posterity preserves literary excellence. For Hazzard, posterity is a “kind of Tenth Muse, hovering ironically over the other nine”: “The human wish that something of our existence should linger to inform later generations is at its best one of our larger desires — the reciprocity between the living and the dead. What we frankly call the pleasure of ruins must derive from the simultaneous reassurance and confirmation of shared mortality evoked by evidence of past existence, of the helplessness and power of human knowledge, the urge of our forbears to strike the heart of some unknown future soul.”

It is not, as she claims, “the only afterlife of which we have evidence” — human biology surely permits us to rhyme, if not exactly replicate, ourselves into the future — but Hazzard makes a strong argument for the poet’s laurels as a crucial aspect of human culture. Her long historical perspective may overwhelm her argument — she has bitten off whole epochs to chew on in these brief lectures — yet Hazzard’s sense of the power and virtue of literature to survive over time is not to be gainsaid. Not just in the political sense — as when the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in the wake of World War II and the totalitarian moment in his nation of birth, “You who harmed a simple man, do not feel secure; for a poet remembers” — but in terms of the broader ecology of culture. Literature is not supplanted by what comes after; it is not an experimental method like science. Rather it is a reef built on accretion, in which certain species — a Shakespeare or a Petrarch, say — may occupy an apex role. A capstone quotation comes from her beloved Giacomo Leopardi:

Here look and see yourself, you preposterous century / That going backwards calls this progress, / Ignoring all the arduous knowledge of past ages.

Hazzard’s “invincible nostalgia” for the best efforts of the West would have seemed laughable by many at the time of their first performance. But today, during a far more fragile and less irresponsibly playful moment in our history — at least in intellectual terms — they hold the force of truths momentarily withheld from public attention. The few brief stand-alone book reviews accompanying these lectures are shotgun riders, and they sometimes suffer from Johnsonian aloofness — a solemn judgment from above, rather than that more democratic covenant with the text at which contemporaries such as Elizabeth Hardwick and VS Pritchett excelled.

Nonetheless, Hazzard is capable of devastating compression in critical response: of new translations of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu designed to supplant Scott Moncrieff’s much debated Edwardian version, she rights that too often “assiduity has edged out elan”. And for those of us who have always regarded Hazzard’s posture towards Australia as essentially indifferent and ungenerous, her review of Patrick White’s The Eye of the Storm is a model of magnanimity and shared insight into the unfairly marginal status of Australian letters in relation to the old Anglosphere centres: “[White’s] Nobel citation itself proclaims that Australia has now been ‘introduced into literature’ — as if literature were some august academy outside of which Australian writers had hitherto been practising their art.”

In those essays gathered under the rubric Public Themes, there is a strong sense of the artist being chivvied from her beloved study. While Olubas is insightful on the connections between the role of the amateur readers and that of individual citizens in Hazzard’s mind — each bearing a responsibility for speaking out at perceived deviations from some civil norm or presumed collective decency, whether in the aesthetic or political sphere — a dustiness clings to these pages. It’s a little like hearing a Fabian socialist of the 1920s rail against the flaws of the League of Nations: contemporary concern has been shaded by events into terminal disappointment. Yet those later sections dealing with the author’s early life, or which reproduce, largely verbatim, off-the-cuff responses to issues or events, remain crisp. Here she is in 2012:

I feel very much — I have felt increasingly in recent years — that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element ... that we’re waiting for something terrible to happen ... I don’t want to say this to be doom-laden, but the world is not thinking — if it ever was — it’s not thinking of itself as something going on forever, our so-called civilised world, the world we live in.

For such a fierce and elegant partisan for Western civilisation in its broad and generous sense, as opposed to the neoconservative’s battle cry, this is a firm condemnation from Hazzard of our current predicament. The greatest virtue of these essays may be that they return us — with wit, admiration and passionate immediacy — to those hard-won collective brilliancies we seem determined to relinquish. She calls for nothing less (and here she furnishes, via Pope and Byron, the term we were looking for at the outset) — the “bright reversion” that all lasting literature has earned.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.

Stephen Romei is on leave.

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

By Shirley Hazzard, edited and with an introduction by Brigitta Olubas

Columbia University Press, 248pp, $57.95 (HB)