In 1982, Shirley Hazzard flew to Britain for a reunion with Alec Vedeniapine, a man with whom she had been in love more than 30 years before. Vedeniapine and his wife farmed in Wales, and their world – cats and cows; damp, rural isolation - couldn’t have been more different from that of Hazzard, who lived with her husband, Francis Steegmuller, a biographer of Cocteau and Flaubert, on New York’s Upper East Side in an apartment filled with paintings by Matisse and Picasso. Yet the contrast only made her feelings for Vedeniapine the more categorical. The considerable achievements of her own life were, even now, to be measured (favourably) against her sense of what she felt he had “renounced” all those decades ago. Carefully closing her eyes to the existence of his family, she found herself struck by “this theme – this transcendent theme – of fulfilment and non-fulfilment; and those who bind themselves to limitations”. Though the two of them would stay in touch, they did not meet again.
As I’ve written it, this may sound unkind, cold to a degree. In fact, the opposite is true. Hazzard’s judgments – in life, as on the page – were born of a deep intensity of feeling; a sensitivity that was unfashionably romantic. She and Vedeniapine had fallen for each other in postwar Hong Kong, only to be separated when Hazzard, then still a teenager, had to follow her parents to New Zealand, a move made for the sake of her sister, who was ill with tuberculosis. But the memory of their broken engagement – ended by Vedeniapine in a letter – would stay with her for ever, underpinning all that she wrote. Love between two people, she believed, is never a small thing. It may be frangible, the victim of fated misalignments, but its mark is permanent. The abiding themes of her marvellous novels – there are just four, of which the most celebrated is The Transit of Venus, published in 1980 – are love and destiny; devastation, for her characters, is always around the corner for the simple reason that vast and unseen forces are working unceasingly to impede love’s bliss and power, its ineffable ability to change everything in a stroke.
Brigitta Olubas’s new biography of Hazzard runs to more than 500 pages and I must admit that I approached it with trepidation. Olubas is an academic at an Australian university and her subject’s life was, to a large extent, inward: a writing life, above all. It seemed impossible that she would be a good match for a storyteller who gives her readers (passionately devoted, but still far too few in number) access to the most grand of emotions; whose husband said of her piercing final novel, The Great Fire: “No one should have to read it for the first time.” There would, I assumed, be jargon of the kind that Hazzard, an autodidact who disliked modernism in most of its forms, would have loathed.
