On Shirley Hazzard by Michelle de Kretser

Author:Michelle de Kretser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

In the UN stories, anyone who shows imagination, intelligence or compassion is swiftly crushed; in the later fiction, those qualities are displayed above all by the women who work in offices. Through marriage, Caro escapes a life of being condescended to by pompous and stupid men – such as Christian, who returns home one day from the Foreign Office to announce ecstatically, ‘I have been given Africa.’

THE BAY OF NOON

The Bay of Noon was the first Hazzard novel I read, and I read it as if bound by a spell. Related in the first person, it offered an immersive narrative, and I succumbed to its claims on my sympathy and attention at once. I was in my twenties, recently back in Australia after living in France. I identified intensely with Hazzard’s Jenny, whose private drama was lifted into grandeur by the antique, European background against which it played out.

The greedy, gulping way I read The Bay of Noon – a child devouring sweets – returned me to childhood and whole days spent deep in fictional worlds. It was reading as a form of enchantment, a way of reading I continue to value and need. There are novels that, like beloved people, stand between us and the world. They do this by altering our relation to time. They pass through it. They render time irrelevant.

Decades have passed, but whenever I open The Bay of Noon a deep magic still comes off the book. When I try to locate its source, I think of the novel’s rapturous evocation of Naples. Jenny discovers the city as a young woman, at a period when the self is adult yet porous. Naples offers her expansion and transformation; it reveals her to herself.

When writers describe cities they have known since childhood, the result might be deeply affectionate but it won’t be enthralled. Hazzard arrived in Naples in her twenties, and she writes of the city with wonder (of which ignorance is a necessary component). It’s the difference between Christina Stead’s intimate vision of Sydney and Jessica Anderson’s enraptured response, between Elena Ferrante’s Naples and Hazzard’s. When I experienced The Bay of Noon as enchantment I was merely repeating Hazzard/Jenny’s entranced encounter with Naples. All of us were young, open to the lustre of the world.

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