Collected Stories, by Shirley Hazzard
CRESSIDA CONNOLLY Collected Stories By Shirley Hazzard Virago £14.99
Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia in 1931 and moved to New York with her parents during the early 1950s. Her adult life was divided between the Upper East Side and long periods in Capri, France and Naples.
This is worth stating, because the world of her short stories – of her first and best collection, in any case – is very much of its time and of such places.
A certain cultural milieu is evoked and tacitly expected of the reader. Her people take siestas in the afternoons and read or write poetry; they have a good working knowledge of Latin. They visit archaeological ruins with the Guide Bleu in their pockets. The women dress well, often in linen, and try not to be too imploring. The men are short-tempered and self-involved and wish their girlfriends wouldn’t be so emotional.
There’s a lot of looking out of windows feeling wistful. In Europe, these windows are in villas or hotels. In America, it might be the windows of a car through which a jilted, tear-stained girl looks out. Almost everyone talks at cross-purposes and the more crucial a conversation is to their future happiness, the worse this tendency gets.
At their best, the ten stories originally published as Cliffs of Fall (1963) have the astringency and observation of John Updike’s finest. Hazzard (a linguist in real life – so she must have had a good ear) is brilliant at dialogue:
‘I hate the way you keep saying “Oh”.’ He saw, in the mirror, her eyes deflect. ‘And the way you keep agreeing.’ ‘Agreeing?’ ‘Humouring me.’ Or:
‘The things is,’ he went on, ‘that I need you. You know that, I suppose?’ ‘And you resent it.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course. But it could be worse, couldn’t it? I mean, I don’t shout at you or anything.’ Or: ‘Marriage is like democracy – it doesn’t really work, but it’s all we’ve been able to come up with…’
Often the trouble is infidelity, but sometimes it’s just boredom. Ordinary exasperation snowballs into an always very self-consciously dramatic rage. People can’t, or won’t, say the right thing. They sulk and quote lines from Louis Aragon or Gerard Manley Hopkins. Being in love is ghastly, like an ailment.
In bright contrast, two or three of the stories from Cliffs of Fall, and another couple from the previously uncollected stories, take place in rural Tuscan pensioni. These have a wider, more amusing cast than the lone, warring couple who often find themselves under the microscope elsewhere. They are marvellous, like tiny versions of A Room with a View. Had I been Shirley Hazzard’s editor, I’d have urged her to make a whole book of them.
The present editor, however, has done Hazzard no favour by putting the material from Cliffs of Fall together with a later collection, People in Glass Houses (1967). Sometimes, there is a good reason why a book is out of print.
This second collection must have seemed like a good idea at the time: a group of eight tales, all taking place within the offices of a thinly disguised United Nations.
But nothing dates like modernity. Details that must have seemed daring at the time – mimeographed papers; sheet-glass windows; abstract sculpture; drip-dry! – seem only dingy now. It’s hard not to feel that Hazzard finds the African, Dutch and Greek names comedic in themselves.
Stylistically, too, these stories are weaker. Even among the pleasures of her earlier work, Hazzard can be a little too mannered. In these office-based stories, this tips into a clunking archness.
Spinster secretaries; droning bureaucrats; office politics and affairs; the mind-numbing dullness of committees… They are all described with a sort of knowing wink in the reader’s direction. It’s as if she’s saying, ‘Sophisticates such as you and I know how trivial and small these lives are.’
Tucked away at the end of the book are a further ten previously uncollected or unpublished stories, and some of these are a delight.
Hazzard is especially good at unrequited love. Comfort, a tale in which a lovesick girl goes to seek solace from a man who is in turn pining for her, is a little gem. There are more travels in Europe.
But, after the unwelcome teasing of the central section, it is hard to trust the author entirely. You keep wondering if she’s going to peep out from behind a pillar with a knowing look and spoil the fun.