Showing off

One last passage from Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus before I leave it and return to Fanny Burney's Journals and Letters. In this one, a woman waits for a friend in a tea-room:

Admitting only seemly sounds, the room sheltered none but the decorous. All tables were occupied by women. Waitresses like wardresses kept a reproving eye on performance, repressively mopping a stain or replacing a dropped fork.

Try reading that last sentence aloud, hearing its lovely rhythm, the back-and-forth of consonance and assonance, enjoying the imagination that casts a waitress in the warder's role, the fine eye that sees a stain mopped "repressively." Then remember that this line is required to do nothing but set the scene in the tea room--yet Hazzard lavished sufficient attention on it to make it a thing of beauty on its own. That showiness could easily seem too much: when I read that line aloud to rocketlass, though she understood what I admired she found it overwritten. But encountering the unnecessary perfection of that sentence in the midst of a 340-page novel made me gasp with admiration, reminded of the countless hours of writing and revision necessary to work prose up to such a pitch. As I'd already fallen under the spell of Hazzard's writing, that line struck me like the flourish of a great athlete reveling in his talents--like Randy Johnson breaking off a wicked slider to a banjo-hitting backup just because he can. It's extravagant, even flagrant, but beautiful and breathtaking nonetheless.

The Transit of Venus, part two

Friday's post about Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus (1980) focused on her prose; today I'll turn to how she uses that prose to delineate character. Hazzard brings to her descriptions of people the same tone—grave, authoritative, and confident—that she uses to depict landscapes and objects. Her words are pronouncements as much as sentences, judgments on the way that people have always been at the same time as they are descriptions of a particular set of people. This account of a difficult step-daughter is a good example:

Josie had the eyes noticeable in troubled young women, eyes that are sidelong even when direct. She had the inanition that announces self-engrossment. She was already setting up an apparatus of blame, in apprehension of failure.

In a single paragraph, Hazzard offers three broad generalizations, drawn from a specific character. It's an approach that demands the reader's complicity, his willingness to accept these judgements—and it could easily wear, if mishandled. But in the 300-plus pages of The Transit of Venus, Hazzard rarely missteps, in part because she is also good when she resorts to the truly specific, the details of a person, as in this introduction to a young heiress:

So sleekly pretty, so fair and tall that she seemed an advertisement for something very costly. She had driven a car from the castle, and her hair was bound with a strip of pink silk that passed behind her ears. Her eyes were light blue—shining with what at a distance passed for sheer delight, and perhaps in childhood had truly been. Up close, however, the clarity was stinging, and neither gave nor received a good impression. Nothing about her appeared to have been humanly touched.

A few paragraphs later, we are treated to a physical manifestation of her self-regard:

Tertia Drage plucked a leaf from her dress and flung it emphatically in the empty grate. It was something they were to notice again in Tertia—that she handled objects or pushed doors with punitive abruptness, seeing no reason to indulge an uncompliant world. The occasional human anger felt against inanimate things that tumble or resist was in her case perpetual.

Then there's this particularly sharp rendering of a relatively familiar type, the person who, through their self-pity and frustration, showers gloom, if not madness, on all around them:

Caro was coming round to the fact of unhappiness: to a realization that Dora created unhappiness and that she was bound to [her guardian half-sister] Dora. . . . At least for the present, Caro was stronger than [her sister] Grace, and was assuming Dora as moral obligation. Dora herself was strongest of all, in her power to accuse, to judge, to cause pain: in her sovereign power. Dora's skilled suspicion would reach unerringly into your soul, bring out your worst thoughts and flourish them for all to see, but never brought to light the simple good. It was as if Dora knew of your inner, rational, protesting truth, and tried to provoke you into displaying it, like treason. On the one hand, it was Dora seeking havoc, and, on the other, the sisters continually attempting to thwart or divert.

This later passage allows a hint of irony to creep in, but without dissipating the seriousness of the difficulty posed by Dora's blightedness:

Dora could always die, so she said. I CAN ALWAYS DIE, as if this were a solution to which she might repeatedly resort. She told them that death was not the worst, as if she had had the opportunity of testing. She said she could do away with herself. Or she could disappear. Who would care, what would it matter. They flung themselves on her in terror. Dora don't die, Dora don't disappear. No, she was adamant: It was the only way.

How often, often, she drew upon this inexhaustible reserve of her own death, regenerated over and over by the horror she inspired by showing others the very brink. It was from their ashen fear that she rose, every time, a phoenix. Each such borrowing from death gave her a new lease on life.

Even with its humor, that pasage retains the fundamental seriousness of Hazzard's narration. Every emotion, every action, every reaction must be rigorously analyzed, and all that prodding and poking of her characters invests their story with a feverish intensity and a sense of deep consequence; by the end of The Transit of Venus we fully believe that in the private griefs and irrevocable mistakes of everyday lives lies the stuff of great tragedy.

The Transit of Venus

On the first page of her novel The Transit of Venus (1980), Shirley Hazzard describes the approach of a storm:

That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve—for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in those moments—waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.

The prose of this paragraph offers much to admire: the action occurring "under a branch of lightning," as if lightning were as much a part of our landscape, and as near, as the trees; the phrase "almost human expectancy" to describe the tension inherent in the ion-charged pre-storm air; the man being "kinetic," advancing "against circumstance" just as the prose of the paragraph advances the action against its own deliberate pace. Best of all, and what made me pause in admiration, is the line about "every nerve" waiting, "fatalistic." It's the sort of thought I might have put down, had I tried to write a scene of incipient violence, human or natural. But on re-reading, I would certainly have stricken the thought: there's only one human in the landscape, only one set of nerves to tense--to write of every nerve tensing is to invite skepticism. Hazzard, however, not only allows that suggestion to stand, but adds the assertion that, in such teetering moments, inanimate objects do have nerves—"develop" them, even. She almost dares the reader to disagree, to deny what he himself has felt in similar situations. It's the heart of a brilliantly realized paragraph, and it's emblematic of the pregnant qualities of Hazzard's prose. Hazzard's metaphorical richness is reminiscent of Dickens. Though her stately prose bears none of Dickens's manic intensity, it shares with his a fecundity that imbues the many inanimate objects of our thing-filled world with discernible life. A Bentley is "rolled backwards to a herbaceous border, where it crouched to spring." A new road is "fanned out across a rise, houses splayed back like buttons released over a paunch." A barn squats "by the roadside like an abandoned van." A bus "plunged forward. At its roaring, a small car withdrew into a hedge: an animal bayed." Between two headlands "the Pacific rolled, a blue toy between paws." A room is described as appearing

unawed by him—not from any disorder but from very naturalness. A room where there had been expectation would have conveyed the fact—by a tension of plumped cushions and placed magazines, a vacancy from unseemly objects bundled out of sight; by suspense slowly dwindling in the curtains. This room was quite without such anxiety. On its upholstery, the nap of the usual was undisturbed.

This is description that acknowledges the constant interplay between person and surroundings, the way that our every action ripples out into our environment, soaking it with our intentions and emotions; it sets scenes indelibly and with economy. Jenny Davidson at Light Reading the other day quoted from a Gary Lutz article from the Believer about the sentence:

[N]arratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.

While it would be a stretch to claim that The Transit of Venus quite fits that description, it is nevertheless rife with that sort of sentence, as piercingly perfect as an aphorism:

"Whatever heresy had existed in this house had come from upper servants." "She was one of those persons who will squeeze into the same partition of a revolving door with you, on the pretext of causing less trouble." "You felt that the walls of such houses might topple inwards, that they would crush but not reveal."

The perfection of these and many other of Hazzard's sentences is such that their polish makes invisible the worrying and working over that surely were their origins; they feel natural, as if they had sprung from her pen fully-formed. Hazzard sets a deliberate, stately pace which even such arrows as the above cannot disrupt. Her prose unfolds extremely slowly, the meanings of her sentences shifting word by word, as much left unsaid or implied as is said directly. One cannot read The Transit of Venus quickly. Like Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hazzard demands close attention; anything less risks missing her meanings entirely, as into any descriptive passage might be interwoven a moral insight or observation of character. Hovering near every line is the authorial presence, yet that proximity somehow avoids seeming overbearing, coming across instead more like the kindly attentions of a guide or assistant. Hazzard's words slow the reader to molasses pace, and cast a powerful spell, one not dissimilar to that which descends on the solitary reader of a horror novel: the world itself sinks into a background silence, little registering, and re-emergence—especially if occasioned by noise or surprise—is jarring, even disheartening.

Talking of writers talking

Early in his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell attempts to justify his publication of so much of Johnson's daily conversation:

Of one thing I am certain, that considering how highly the small portion which we have of the table-talk and other anecdotes of our celebrated writers is valued, and how earnestly it is regretted that we have not more, I am justified in preserving rather too many of Johnson's sayings, than too few; especially as from the diversity of dispositions it cannot be known with certainty beforehand, whether what may seem trifling to some, and perhaps to the collector himself, may not be most agreeable to many; and the greater number that an author can please in any degree, the more pleasure does there arise to a benevolent mind.

As any regular reader of this blog knows, I am firmly in Boswell's camp on this question. Snippets of conversation from my favorite authors are great prizes, akin to a glimpse into their notebooks or a trawl through their library. Such knowledge isn't by any means necessary to an understanding or appreciation of a writer, but it offers an additional layer of context and character for their work--and it can be such fun!

For example, what Borges fan wouldn't enjoy this exchange he had with Paul Theroux, preserved in The Old Patagonian Express (1979):

Borges said, "It's like Hardy. Hardy was a great poet, but I can't read his novels. He should have stuck to poetry."

"He did, in the end. He gave up writing novels."

"He never should have started."

We have many essays and lectures from Borges outlining his literary tastes (to say nothing of the account of them we are given in his fiction), but none quite offers the casual curmudgeonliness of that exchange, and I'm grateful that Paul Theroux was there to chronicle it.

Graham Greene, however, seems to have taken the opposite position, at least on one occasion. Shirley Hazzard, in her Greene on Capri (2000), tells of a dinner with Greene,

a familiar moment--the evening scene of Italian pleasures and trellised vines, a young man at the nearby table reading his Corriere, the lovers passing in pairs in the street just below us; and Graham turning to Henry James.

A long conversation about James unfolds, with Greene revealing that

he could no longer read the late and "greatest" novels. . . . "And now I have the very criticisms I despised as philistine, that the writing is self-indulgent, convoluted, effete, that the story inches along, losing its hold. I've loved those books so long. And now I can't read them.

A conversation that any fan of Greene and James would enjoy overhearing . . . which fact led the mercurial, even cruel, Greene to cause a scene at the conclusion of dinner:

Then, abruptly, with a voice that rang out theatrically: "There's a spy in this restaurant."

People turned, stared. We ourselves were not astonished.

"This young man has been listening. He hasn't turned a page in half an hour. He's been watching us."

Useless to point out--Graham, knowing it was you, understanding English, why not want to hear you speak of Henry James?

The young man got up and left.

Painful.

Graham said, "He may have followed us here." Yet he knew.

Greene, like Borges, had reached a level of fame and esteem that left him little choice but to become, in some sense, a performer. But while Borges had accepted that role, as Theroux notes--

There was something of the charlatan about him--he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before.

--Greene seemed still to want to deny it. And while I have sympathy for his for his frustration, inappropriately as he may have expressed it, I'm glad that Hazzard herself decided that the interest of preserving and presenting the talk of her late friend, warts and all, outweighed his desire for privacy. Boswell would surely have approved.

Shirley Hazzard on Graham Greene . . . and, unexpectedly, on another old favorite!

Still beset by the busy-ness of business at work, I was casting about this evening for something brief to share, when Shirley Hazzard unexpectedly came through with a passage comparing someone to Sydney Greenstreet--another entry for my slowly growing collection!

In her book about the friendship she and her husband, Francis Steegmuller, shared with Graham Greene in his last decades, Greene on Capri (2000), Hazzard introduces an English friend of Greene thus:

Ian Greenlees, a cultivated and independent mind, had left Capri for Florence, where he long directed the British Institute, but retained, and regularly visited, his picturesque old Anacapri house, Villa Fraita, acquired from the writer Francis Brett Young in the late 1940s. In appearance, manner, and pallor, a ringer for Sydney Greenstreet, Ian had a long past in Italy.

Though not as playful as Donald E. Westlake's Greenstreet comparisons, the description makes clear what a useful figure he can be to a writer, instantly conjuring up, entire, both an appearance and an affect.

Because I never tire of Graham Greene anecdotes, I'll also pass along this unforgettable account of an eruption of Greene's antipathy for Robert Louis Stevenson's wife, whom Greene--displaying his not infrequent lack of sympathy for a woman's perspective or position--blamed for Stevenson's peripatetic search for a climate that would agree with his poor health:

Graham's close feeling for Robert Louis Stevenson led him to high resentment against Stevenson's wife--in his view a predatory and destructive influence on Stevenson's short life. When Francis once protested that Mrs. S. herself, while an undoubted oddity, had had much to bear, Graham would have none of it: "No, no. She ran him to ground, and she ruled him. She got him out there"--to California, and, later, to the South Seas--"and she"--unforgettable grappling gesture, hands outstretched across the table with fingers crooked--"got the hooks in him." Eyes wild, blue, unblinking.

That image of Greene--hands clutching cruelly at air--could itself slide nicely into one of Stevenson's more macabre tales.