Immerse yourself in literary days gone by in this preview of the sparkling correspondence between Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower, as curated, introduced, and insightfully edited by Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham in Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters. Below you will find an edited extract from the introduction to the book, and a glimpse of the letters it brings to light.

Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower met in person for the first time in London in 1972, six years after they began a correspondence that would span four decades. They exchanged letters, cards and telegrams and made occasional phone calls, their mail travelling (often with maddening delays) between Harrower’s home in Sydney and Hazzard’s in New York and Italy. They wrote about their lives, friendships, their writing, and reading, about politics and world affairs. And they wrote about Hazzard’s mother.

Kit Hazzard, charming, lonely, and mentally fragile, had brought the two writers together. In 1966 she was a familiar figure in the streets around her home in ‘The Chimes’ apartment building in Macleay Street, Potts Point, in Sydney’s inner east. Harrower recalled that the owner of the Macleay Bookshop, Norma Chapman, had introduced her to ‘Shirley Hazzard’s mother’, after becoming concerned about Kit’s welfare, perhaps with the thought of a therapeutic literary connection. Harrower admired Hazzard’s stories, which had been appearing in the New Yorker magazine since 1961 and, as Chapman pointed out, both writers were published by Macmillan. Kit took immediately to the much younger Harrower, and Harrower was charmed enough to stay in touch when Kit took off shortly after on one of her regular, doomed, trips around the world.

That August, while visiting her daughter in New York, Kit wrote to Harrower, and Hazzard added an appreciative note, to which Harrower replied a few months later. At first, their letters were short and courteous, but when they turned, as they quickly did, to the saga of Kit, they became longer and more intimate.

[…]

The enduring legacy of these two extraordinary women is, of course, the books – too few – they wrote. And also, now, their remarkable correspondence.

Want Street | 13 December, 1967

Dear Shirley,

I was so pleased to have your letter. You were knee-deep in proofs at that time. Now your book is out and I hear of excellent reviews everywhere. Many congratulations! I read it in The New Yorker, then in page proofs, then finally read the printed book. So good, so pleasing in so many ways. I’ll watch for local reviews here and send them to you.

When you wrote to me – at that time – Israel and Egypt were fighting. Since then so many other ghastly things have happened that it becomes harder and harder to respond to world events in any rational way. In Australia it is peculiarly easy for people not to notice what is going on, because the newspapers give so little space to overseas news. Vietnam, of course, does get space because there are Australians there …

How is your mother? She writes to me every few weeks. You said you were worried about her, and I can understand that well. London does not sound the most cheerful place in the world just now, and it is possibly the place where she has fewest connections. (I have a gentle, intractable mother who worries me, too, and am apt to run on, giving her good advice which she listens to with interest and takes no notice of.)

[…] In Sydney as you know your mother and I met towards the end of her stay, and did not see so much of each other, but did see each other in a real way. She was clearly not very happy, but she took the trouble to be entertaining, and to make me laugh, which I thought was very generous and gallant. (She and my cousin, Margaret, agreed that being born in Scotland was enough to blight anyone’s life. They felt for each other. Australia’s not perfect, heaven knows, but it is better as a birth place, I’m sure.) Anyway, having an excessive talent myself for happiness and unhappiness, when there are reasons, and there usually are, I sympathized with your mother. So now I’m conscious of her being there in London and think of her and wish her well.

Earlier this year – about September – Sidney and Cynthia Nolan were in Sydney for a couple of months for the opening of his Retrospective Exhibition and the publication by Macmillan of a book about his work, and one by Cynthia – Open Negative – An American Memoir. The Nolans are immensely likeable and added much to the Sydney landscape for those few weeks. The exhibition was quite overwhelming. It reminded me that there were probably better ways of passing the time than in my very comfortable and pleasant office, and I applied, after resisting the idea for years, for a Commonwealth Literary Fund Fellowship. The application went in three weeks after the closing date. My friends were ready to murder me because of the indecision and alarm all round. So the application stayed in, and I did get a Fellowship for 1968. They give me $6000, and I am supposed to write a book. (There’s no time limit, of course.) So this is pleasing and alarming. As I must resign from Macmillan’s and do not feel that I have any capacity for supporting myself by writing, the future seems dark and precarious, and the application quite reckless and silly. On the other hand, if you want to write …

The latest drama on the literary front blew up last Monday. The General Council of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Awards Committee rejected the advice of the Literary Committee, and said there would be no award for literature this year. ($10,000 each for various branches of the arts and sciences.) The next day, Patrick White wrote to the Herald disclosing (and deploring strongly) the fact that it was Christina Stead who was turned away from the door, because she has not lived in Australia for many years. Sidney Nolan was passed over for the Art award for the same reason. Patrick’s letter stirred things up and today there is a leader in the Herald about it. But the Committee is not likely to budge. Really, really.

Thank you again for your letter and for liking The Watch Tower.

Let me hear from you sometime when there’s time. – Happy Christmas.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth

New York | 7 December 1970

Dear Miss Harrower –

Hearing about you often from my mother who loves you dearly and enjoys her times with you, we want to be in touch – and, as she has told us the exciting news that you had a new manuscript, we both wanted to say how very much we hope it will be in print this year. ‘The Watch Tower’ has been an unforgettable book for both of us; and while it is selfish to urge another writer for one’s own pure pleasure, we are feeling that it is high time for another Harrower. We also hope that we can meet one day and I can thank you then, too, for all your friendship to my mother in Sydney. Meantime, with my warmest greetings –

Shirley H-S

Dear Miss Harrower –

I find The Watch Tower very strong and impressive & I am its and your great admirer. Please accept my warm congratulations for such an accomplishment – F. S.

Want Street | January 10th, 1971

Dear Shirley and Francis Steegmuller,

Do please call me Elizabeth. I hear of you often from your mother (and Kit) and feel, too, as you say, that we are in touch.

[…]

After meeting or speaking to your mother, and certainly after reading Bay of Noon, I have often intended to write to you. Reading your novel gave me more than pleasure; it really made me happy. Your writing is felicitous, and I have thought so since I read your first stories in The New Yorker. Apart from making everyone not living in Italy dissatisfied with his existence, it’s a beautiful book. My cousin, who reviewed it for The Herald and was sorry not to have more space for her enthusiasm, was inclined to say afterwards, about any novel set in another place, ‘It isn’t Naples …’

As a preparation for Cocteau, I’ve recently re-read some of his work, and now look forward to the biography.

Your mother tells me she is having her sailing date moved from February to April. I ask her if this journey back to England is any sort of answer, but she seems to feel it necessary. Because it’s warmer here (not that heat is so marvellous) and less overpowering than London when one is in the wrong sort of mood, I am sorry that Sydney hasn’t worked out better. Kings Cross is probably the least neighbourly and sociable area in the country. – I haven’t been able to do very much. Some time ago I tried to persuade her to see a diagnostician, in the hope that he would consider the whole person and perhaps find some way of relieving stress and tension, as well as attending to any physical problems. But beyond a certain point, it’s more harassing than useful to press people, so I let the idea drop.

– Frequently, after I’ve worked out and propounded a particularly intricate argument in favour of some constructive attitude or other, your mother has replied, ‘But that’s exactly what Shirley says!’ At first, I was quite surprised (evidently believing my thought processes to be unique!). – In general, over coffee in town, we talk about books and places and people we’ve liked, and exchange the more cheerful and enlivening pieces of news.

You mention my new manuscript. Alan [Maclean] accepted it for Macmillan’s in London, but we both know (though he is too compassionate to say so) that it is disappointing. Whether it will be more inhibiting in the long run to publish and face justified harshness from critics, or to write off two years’ work and the CLF’s $6,000 is the choice. There was an interesting book to be written, but I blocked it for all sorts of reasons and my concentration disappeared. People. Since January 1st, I’ve been cutting and re-typing. Alan will be here shortly, and I’ll probably give it to him. Then the way may be clear for something better.

When Kit worries that you are both working too hard, I assure her that the only pitiable state for a writer is the opposite one. It wouldn’t be human to tell any non-writer how enviable it is – in its peculiar way – to be engulfed in work, or what it adds to leisure and enjoyment.

On this strenuous note – warmest good wishes to you both for 1971.

Yours,

Elizabeth