Shirley Hazzard--A Writing Life by Brigitta Olubas

Author:Brigitta Olubas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Work brings humanity into the bleak world of bureaucracy: “You remain always conscious that a system isn’t just an abstraction, it is made up of individual human beings who are responsible for themselves and the rest of us. We can see at this moment in history … the difference one determined person can make.”

Macmillan promoted People in Glass Houses in bookstores near UN European offices: “I think we have now covered Geneva, Rome and Paris and other places where they speak UNESCO.” Early responses were caught up by the book’s UN references, and some were negative. The first criticism came before the book appeared; Shirley recorded in her notebook an encounter with UN under-secretary-general Brian Urquhart at a party: “‘Why are you so bitter about the UN, Shirley?’ (said bitterly) then I should ‘stop this romanticising about the UN.’ Subsequently said he had recommended that twenty floors of staff be eliminated years ago; that there were ‘thousands of errors’; that they (UN staff) were unbearably smug, insulated like a small city.’” The New York Times ran an acerbic review by Frederic Raphael, who dismissed the book as satire that simply reinforced “the comfortable despair of the conservative who believes in the folly of aspiration, in the irremediable frailty of man” and presenting “the viewpoint of world-weariness as opposed to that of impatient or revolutionary rage.” Such criticisms of her criticisms of the UN would continue throughout her writing life, leading perhaps to the prevailing but mistaken sense of her as a conservative critic of the institution. Francis wrote in some anger an unpublished letter to the Times: “The ‘review’ of Shirley’s book by Raphael yesterday was in no sense a review of a work of literature; it was an attack on Shirley’s character. I am really ashamed that the ‘Book Review,’ with which I have been happily associated, should have printed it.”

For Shirley, the subject of the UN itself was less important than the portrayal of bureaucracy, the study of office life. When “Swoboda’s Tragedy” was published that summer in The New Yorker, she had already heard from Ved Mehta that a friend who worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs liked it so much “he made everyone in his section read it and he says he’s going to have passages of it included in his letter of resignation.” The Times followed Raphael’s review with an admiring response from Charles Poore that applauded the book’s satire, noting that its target was little different “from any other buzzing lair full of organization men” and delighting in Hazzard’s “joyful lampooning of pomposities, her solemn owls who shuffle multilingual papers, her vivid foreign scenes, her tenderness toward the few who are truly dedicated and ask no fanfare for devotion.” He argued that this “places her on a high ground between Katherine Mansfield and Evelyn Waugh.” Other reviewers shared that delight, finding the satire “analogous to and … every bit as good as Mary McCarthy’s The Oasis.” There was praise for “the

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