In Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of the Holiday (1966), we are told very little about Sophie, the young woman who comes from England to visit her invalid aunt for a short summer vacation. We never even learn Sophie’s last name. Hazzard wants us to remain in the here-and-now because that is where Sophie lives, unconcerned about her past or her future. At an afternoon social event one day, Sophie meets Tancredi, an architect whose wife has just left him, taking their children with him. (We never learn his last name either.) At first, Tancredi is unimpressed with the “archetypal Englishwoman,” who “was nothing special.” She seems unimpressed with him as well, deducing that she was only one year old when he was already in university. And very soon the reader begins to be unimpressed with Tancredi as well, when the word “conquest” creeps into his thinking, as he watches the Englishwoman more closely. “He liked the idea of supremacy and believed, correctly, that women want to be prevailed upon.” That single word “correctly,” slipped between commas by the book’s omniscient narrator, hammers home an unpleasant image of Tancredi.
Nevertheless, he begins to drive her around the countryside to introduce her to the sights, and he finds himself falling for her. She has some strange appeal for him, though she keeps her emotional distance. She eventually warns him she is going to return to England. “You’re a threat to me,” she tells him.
But she stays. “Nothing need be undone; nothing more need happen,” she tells herself. They continue to see each other and he immediately senses she is changing her opinion of him. Then the annual summer holiday happens in the city, celebrating some great battle that took place centuries earlier (the city was defeated). Sophie has decided to stay in the city, in her hotel room, avoiding the events of the festival as much as possible. Tancredi has gone to visit his children for a week. On the main evening of the holiday week, he telephones her. He has begun divorce proceedings. “I have to tell you something. Don’t be horrified. . . I’m in love with you. . . Would you come to Florence with me?” “Yes,” she says. Before we know it, she has moved into Tancredi’s house. It’s one of those sudden, unexplained, change-of-heart reversals that happen in Hazzard’s novels.
For the most part, Hazzard keeps the reader at arm’s length from the daily thoughts and decisions of Sophie and Tancredi. She leaves few, if any, clues to help us decide whether Tancredi has buried his sense of male superiority because of Sophie or why Sophie has finally fallen for Tancredi, or why she ultimately decided to break off the relationship and return to London. Is she really an independent woman or has she mistaken being decisive for true personal autonomy?
The Evening of the Holiday (Knopf) is less than 140 pages long and was originally published in the April 16, 1965, issue of The New Yorker. It contains some of the key ingredients of the three novels that lie in her future, but it reads a bit like a sketch. With less use of free indirect style, it is not as fully fleshed out with the interior thoughts of its main characters as her later novels. But, like all sketches, it leaves more to our imagination.
Ω
How tortuous, these strands of love.
After The Evening of the Holiday, with its simple plot and only two main characters, Shirley Hazzard’s second novel The Bay at Noon (1970) feels almost symphonic by comparison. At its heart it is the story of three couples, but it is also a portrait of a complex city (Naples, Italy), a report on a giant bureaucracy (NATO), and a scathing image of the new postwar military complexes. The writing in The Bay has taken a great leap forward. It is richer, more complex, much more dazzling than that of The Evening. Time, in Hazzard’s second novel, has become fractured. She moves the narrative back and forth across years without warning.
Jenny, the book’s narrator, has come from London shortly after the end of World War II to work at a giant NATO base in Naples, translating documents and doing other clerical tasks (read: women’s work). She is a watchful observer of how the gears of the world operate around her. She wants to be an independent woman. In addition to closely watching all the new people in her life, she often finds herself staring out at the Bay of Naples, which she describes as an “oval mirror.” A view of the Bay is inescapable from practically any vantage point across the city, as is Mount Vesuvius. Vesuvius, which sits at the edge of the Bay across from Naples, has ruined the city more than once, and is a constant reminder throughout the novel of the possibility of imminent disaster.
The Bay is structured around the relationships of three couples, all seen from Jenny’s perspective: there is her own on-again, off-again affair with a divorced Scotsman named Justin; the marriage between her brother Edmund and his wife Norah, which she analyses from a distance; and the ongoing romance between her new best friend in Naples, Gioconda, and Gianni, a film director who is separated from his wife but cannot obtain a divorce because it is prohibited by Italian law.
The novel is also a loving, if gritty portrayal of Naples, a “city of volcanic extravagance where a “sense of catastrophe, impending and actual, heightened the Neapolitan attachment to life.” Hazzard, who lived there for many years, paints a detailed picture of the streets and the people, and a panoramic view of the Bay and its stunning islands, notably Capri. Gianni warns Jenny that Naples will change her. “This will change everything for you,” he tells her. “Naples is a leap. It’s through the looking-glass.”
One way to characterize this novel is to rephrase Tolstoy’s opening sentence from Anna Karenina “All happy couples are alike; each unhappy couple is unhappy in its own way.” In every novel by Hazzard, a key motif is the question: Why are people attracted to each other? What turns that switch on and then, sometimes, off again? Why do some people (but especially women) commit to another despite all the shenanigans, the seemingly ever-present (but mostly male) issues of infidelity, the never-ending misogyny, and all the other potential risks to heartbreak? In Hazzard’s universe, what people call love can be a form of chemistry, a type of personal calculus, or several other excuses that characters give to stay with another person.
What is curious to me is that Hazzard, is so brave and clinical at locating the illnesses in male-female relationships that she feels like a feminist. But she does not let any of her three female characters break free in The Bay at Noon. Jenny’s sister is destined to continue with her misguided marriage. After several terrible infractions and a very serious blow-up, Gioconda takes Gianni back for good, knowing he will never reform. And Jenny informs us that she, years after all her Naples era has ended, is back in London and is married to a lawyer. Nevertheless, she has been oddly haunted by Justin, the man she hardly seemed to care about in Naples, but who left the city one day without a word and disappeared. She now admits having searched for him everywhere. But, by accident, she reads in an newspaper article that he is one of several occupants of a small airplane that has disappeared and presumed to have crashed in the Caribbean. She can only think: “Trapped in the events, we must live through them in order to learn the outcome.”
Both of these novels are short and very entertaining, and they let the reader watch a masterful writer taking giant steps forwards toward the style that comes fully into its own with The Transit of Venus (1980), which I wrote about in my previous post.
The Evening of the Holiday. NY: Knopf, 1966.
The Bay at Noon. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1970.
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