The Transit Of Venus (Virago Modern Classics)

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The Great Fire was published to proper acclaim in 2003. It’s a wonderful novel, echoic in certain respects (though not in others) of The Transit of Venus, and it was gratifying to feel that Shirley and her work were anything but forgotten. (I’m not sure they had been, really, but a twenty-year gap between novels is formidable.) It won the National Book Award, as Transit had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. But Transit is the one that changed me, perhaps because of its ruthless tragic force. Once, when she was describing The Great Fire to me a few years before its publication, Shirley remarked, proudly, that it had a happy ending. When I said that readers of The Transit of Venus might be glad to hear it, she smiled, perhaps a little deviously. Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia and died in 2016 in New York. She had spent time in the Far East after the war, before being employed by the UN from 1951. She was posted for a while to Naples, and developed a love of Italy. It’s tempting to refer to this style as nineteenth century, but that’s not it. One can hear in the passage quoted above a note—several notes, in fact—that are distinctly more modern, not least the incredulous dismay that concludes it. Hazzard’s aphoristic intelligence goes full tilt here. Her simple descriptive powers are no less lethal: Too young for what? The plot is chaste, and simplicity itself. I can stuff it into one sentence. Two orphaned Australian sisters arrive in England in the 1950s: placid, fair Grace, who marries a wealthy and officious bureaucrat, and independent, dark-haired Caroline, who falls in love with the unscrupulous (and attached) Paul Ivory, while another man, the shabby and sweet Ted Tice, pines for her. A week or so later there came her response: typed, on blue stationery, with a handwritten postscript. She deflected my praise with a wryness I would come to know as characteristic:

Hazzard was born in Sydney on 30 January 1931 to a Welsh father and Scottish mother who worked for the company building the Sydney Harbour Bridge, where they met. She went to Queenwood School for Girls, but left the country with her family in 1947, moving to Hong Kong, Italy and New Zealand before making a home in New York, where she pursued a career at the United Nations through the 1950s.Joint managing director of Hazzard’s Australian publisher Hachette, Justin Ractliffe, said the company was “deeply saddened” by the news. “Shirley was a giant talent who produced a small, but perfectly formed, body of work. She continues to be beloved in Australia as well as around the world and will be missed by the many readers moved by her extraordinary writing.”

Caro’s life has also contained much hurt and loss. She had not remained a spectator, but engaged with the experiences life sent her with dignity, reflection and generosity. A constant flow of power runs between the characters. The reader watches with admiration as, despite her vulnerable position, Caro firmly insists on her will over her life: “She would impose her crude belief—that there could be heroism, excellence—on her self and others until they, or she, gave in.” Sexual power is a large part of this interpersonal struggle: Paul Ivory moves to seduce Caro out of a sort of foolish, terrified assertion of bravado over his rival, who could destroy him. Caro tries to change her fate when she’s in bed with Paul Ivory before his marriage and his fiancée, Tertia, shows up suddenly in her car. Paul is standing in the window of the room where they’d just made love, in his shirt and tie, with nothing else on his lower body, talking to Tertia on the ground below, “when from the fixing of Tertia’s limbs he knew that Caro stood beside him. He knew that Caro had come up behind him and was by his side at the window. Her bare shoulder, perfectly aloof, touched his own. He did not turn, but, as if he himself were Tertia Drage, saw Caro standing naked beside him at that high window and looking down; looking down on the two of them. It was he and Tertia, and Caroline Bell looking down on them. Caro’s hand rested on the sill. She was wearing nothing but a small round watch.” We see time stop for a moment, the panic in Paul, the stutter step in his thinking with these circling sentences and repetitions. But Caro’s calm and thrilling claiming of her own sexual might over Tertia in this moment fails; she finds herself left alone, humiliated, discarded for the better prospect. With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth. (289) I read everything of hers. At that time, she was still working on The Great Fire, and hadn’t published a novel in fifteen years. She’d written two nonfiction books, Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990), the latter an account of how Kurt Waldheim managed to conceal his Nazi past and become the leader of the UN, where Hazzard herself had worked in the 1950s. But my attention was drawn, naturally, to the fiction. The Evening of the Holiday was a short, Jamesian novel about an affair between an older Italian man and a young, half-English visitor; The Bay of Noon (1970) was more expansive, if similarly Jamesian in its frame: a young woman, this time positioned in Naples as a NATO observer, becomes involved with an Italian writer and her lover, a famous filmmaker. This one had more of the telescopic intelligence, the sheer magnanimity—I’ll come to it in a moment—of Hazzard’s later novels, but it felt still like a rehearsal. There were also two collections of stories, Cliffs of Fall, published in 1963, which rounded up her early fiction published in The New Yorker, and People in Glass Houses, a curious, satirical collection of linked pieces based on her experience at the UN.

Reading The Transit of Venusone could not fail to notice the quality of the writing. The novel’s plot is skilfully managed and the tension is held to the final chapter. Some of the sentences are beautifully constructed. Look at what she wrote about Grace’s reaction to the departure of her would-be lover quoted above. And as I typed Caro’s reflections I noted the provisionality of the sentences: ‘not clear now’, ‘not quite certain’, ‘might have missed the point’. The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century. It’s difficult to make such a straight, simple claim without wanting to modify or amplify it, but it is. It is greater than any novel by Don DeLillo. It is greater than any work by Alice Munro or Thomas Pynchon. No disrespect to those three indisputable geniuses, or to anyone else whose books have been tagged, however deservedly, with the word masterpiece, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a better novel than Shirley’s. The voice on the other end was remote. It sounded, for a moment, as if she might have been calling from somewhere far away—an analog, transatlantic connection—but that wasn’t it. The accent wasn’t American, wasn’t Australian, wasn’t English, certainly, although it muddled a few of these things. From my own older women relatives, I recognize Hazzard’s indoctrination in British manners, laid over a vast and inchoate political rage.