![]() ![]() In the story “Cliffs of Fall ”, a young woman’s husband has died in a plane crash. The novelist Michelle de Kretser writes in her shimmering tribute On Shirley Hazzard of a character’s “realisation, shared by the reader, that nothing can ‘fix’ what has happened” in the first world war. In Greene on Capri, a memoir about her friendship with Graham Greene, Hazzard describes the “vaunted attestable gains and silent, inestimable losses” of the island’s transformation after the second world war. Few writers capture it so well: that which cannot be undone. Walking home one night after dinner, she stopped on a staircase. Robert Harrison, her friend, said recently that he only ever heard Hazzard use the word “hate” once. Her writing feels more old-fashioned than the 1950s and 60s in which her stories are set – which might be why, like a frog left to simmer in a delicate consommé, we don’t see our own total annihilation coming. To enter this world – “ Hazzard-land”, as the writer Alice Jolly calls it – is to surrender to being in the company of characters who know the classics, quote poetry and move through elegant surroundings wearing nice clothes. Of another, his colleagues wonder: “Was his rounded back in its antiquated tweeds not turned to two potentially useful windows? Might not the fluorescent light that shone down on him have shone more profitably on another?” “Not naturally malicious, he had developed rapidly since entering bureaucracy,” she writes of one man. As idealists – those “of crushable substance” – attempt to tunnel through the bureaucracy, these silvery seams glint in their light. Here, the afternoons are for meetings: the performance of work when people are too tired to possibly take any action. Like a frog left to simmer in a delicate consommé, we don’t see our own total annihilation coming A senior figure describes his baby as “just learning to verbalise”. In these satirical stories, at what Hazzard calls “The Organization”, employees make a mockery of language and truth as they ask after a colleague’s daughter when what they have is a son, and misspell, in the staff gazette, the name of a former employee who has died. She later exposed, in two nonfiction books, McCarthyism’s influence on the UN’s senior leadership and secretary general Kurt Waldheim’s complicity in Nazi war crimes. In 1961, when the New Yorker published her first short story, “Woollahra Road”, she quit. The middle section in Collected Stories is inspired by the 10 years Hazzard spent working, mostly as a typist and increasingly disillusioned, at the newly established United Nations. In “A Place in the Country ” she writes: “The warm afternoon, the garden, the tray of empty glasses on the grass, succeeded in conveying foreboding and dissatisfaction.” And during “the shade of strange afternoon” in “Sir Cecil’s Ride ”, “There was the glow of reflected, unremitting day and the spell.” The title of “The Worst Moment of the Day ” refers to the period just after lunch, the uncleared table “like a beach from which the tide had ebbed”. The soft focus of golden hour will always sharpen to cool dusk. ![]() In the stifling heat, women shield their eyes from the sun. Tick: the day’s course is set, it’s too late to change the outcome. ![]() Hazzard’s stories begin as though the clock’s minute hand has just moved past noon. ![]() Most of the 28 pieces in this collection, edited by Hazzard’s biographer Brigitta Olubas, originally appeared in the New Yorker. Born in Australia in 1931, by the time Hazzard was 25 she had lived in Hong Kong (where at 16 she worked for the Office of British Intelligence), New Zealand, Britain – the setting for her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus – and Japan, the setting for The Great Fire, which won the 2003 National Book award. ![]()
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