Award-winning writer Hazzard dies aged 85
Braithwaite dead at 104
NEW YORK, Dec 14, (AP): Shirley Hazzard, an award-winning novelist who wrote of love affairs disrupted and intensified by age, distance and war, has died at age 85.
Hazzard had been in failing health and died Monday at her home in Manhattan, according to her friend Frances Alston. The Australian-born Hazzard had lived in New York City for decades, but also had spent time in Hong Kong, Britain, New Zealand and Italy, an international perspective shared by her characters.
She was a writer of pre-digital tastes who composed on a yellow legal pad and had no interest in computers or even an answering machine. Her novels, too, had a vintage wealth of detail and introspection that led to comparisons to Henry James and some criticism that the sophistication of her prose interfered with the enjoyment of the narrative.
Peers and awards judges recommended her highly. “The Transit of Venus,” published in 1980, won the National Book Critics Circle prize. Hazzard also was a three-time National Book Award finalist and won in 2003 for “The Great Fire.”
Her other books included the short story collections “Cliffs of Fall” and “People in Glass Houses.” Hazzard also wrote a memoir about her friend Graham Greene, “Greene in Capri,” and two books about the United Nations, where she worked in the 1950s: “The Countenance of Truth” and “The Defeat of an Ideal.”
Rare
Rare was the happy marriage or simple romance in a Hazzard book. From early stories such as “A Place in the Country” to the novel “Bay of Noon,” she wrote of strained and cold relationships and the inevitable search for outside comfort. True passion was often forbidden. Hazzard acknowledged that “The Great Fire,” about a tender affair between a young Australian woman and a British soldier in World War II, was based on her own youthful romance that her parents had ended.
The author did find love in New York in 1963 when she met author and translator Francis Steegmuller at a party hosted by novelist Muriel Spark.
Hazzard, the daughter of a diplomat, was born in Sydney in 1931 and lived throughout Asia as a young woman. “The Great Fire” was inspired partly by people she knew in the late 1940s in Hong Kong, where she helped monitor the civil war in China on behalf of British intelligence.
“The literary atmosphere of that office — British officers, linguists, young veterans who were almost innately charged with literary reference — was joyful,” she later told The Paris Review. “For the first time, I could share literature with delight and freedom.”
Hazzard never attended college, but compensated with the very finest self-education — reading and travelling constantly. In her early 20s, she joined the United Nations and spent a decade in the General Service division, which she would jokingly call “the dungeon.”
She did at least have spare time to work on writing. An early short story was accepted by The New Yorker, and “Cliffs of Fall” was published in 1963 to encouraging reviews. “Bay of Noon,” released in 1970, found a new readership 40 years later. It was shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, established for fiction from 1970 that, because of rule changes at the time, was not eligible for the 1970 or 1971 Booker award.
E.R. Braithwaite, the Guyanese author, educator and diplomat whose years teaching in the slums of London’s East End inspired the international best-seller “To Sir, With Love” and the popular Sidney Poitier movie of the same name, has died at age 104.
Braithwaite’s companion, Ginette Ast, told The Associated Press that he became ill Monday and died at the Adventist HealthCare Shady Grove Medical Center in Rockville, Maryland.
Focusing
Schooled in Guyana, the US and Britain, Braithwaite wrote several fiction and nonfiction books, often focusing on racism and class and the contrast between first world and colonial cultures. He was regarded as an early and overlooked chronicler of Britain from a non-white’s perspective, his admirers including the authors Hanif Kureishi and
Caryl Phillips.
He also served in the 1960s as the newly independent Guyana’s first representative at the United Nations and later was ambassador to Venezuela. Upon his 100th birthday, he received an honorary medal from his native country for lifetime achievement.
Guyana President David Granger on Tuesday remembered Braithwaite as “an eminent Guyanese and distinguished diplomat.”
To Sir, With Love,” his first and most famous book, was published in 1959. The autobiographical tale about how a West Indian of patrician manner scolded, encouraged and befriended a rowdy, mostly white class of East End teens, who in turn softened him, was an immediate success and a natural for film. Poitier played Braithwaite (renamed Thackeray) in the 1967 release and the pop star Lulu was featured as one of the students. The title song, performed on screen and on record by Lulu, became a No. 1 hit.
Audiences loved the movie, but critics found it too sentimental: Braithwaite agreed. He criticized director-screenwriter James Clavell for downplaying the author’s interracial romance with a fellow teacher and said Poitier’s performance was too light-hearted.
“The movie made it look like fun and games,” he later observed.
One former student, Alfred Gardner, would allege that Braithwaite himself sanitized his life. In the self-published memoir “An East End Story,” Gardner described Braithwaite as a cold and rigid man who “struck fear into us by favouring corporal punishment.”