PART V
Last Words
2003 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD ACCEPTANCE
There’s a moment to say I am delighted, and I am delighted. I’m delighted to have been in the company of the other nominees tonight who of recent days I’ve heard read from their works and been so impressed by the variety of our feelings and our approaches. There was no uniformity at all in what we brought except the wish to do well by the English language, to find the word that mattered. I honor the people who were with me because I enjoyed so much hearing them read and hearing this large diversity.
I want to say in response to Stephen King that I do not—as I think he a little bit seems to do—regard literature (which he spoke of perhaps in a slightly pejorative way), that is, the novel, poetry, language as written, I don’t regard it as a competition. It is so vast. We have this marvelous language. We are so lucky that we have a huge audience for that language. If we were writing in high Norwegian, we would be writing in a great ancient language, but we would have mostly reindeer for our readers. I’m not sure that that is the ideal outcome. We have this huge language so diverse around the earth that I don’t think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction because we are reading in all the ages, which have been an immense inspiration and love to me and are such an excitement.
I can take one of the ancient poems of our language and feel so excited and moved and even sometimes terrified by it that it seems very immediate to me. I don’t see this as “we should read this or we should read that.” We have mysterious inclinations. We have our own intuitions, our individuality toward what we want to read, and we developed that from childhood. We don’t know why. Nobody can explain it to us.
I think America, especially, is drowning in explanations, and what we need is more questions, not explanations, perhaps because the explanations are not leading us into good places, at least the official ones that I hear.
I’m so grateful for readers, for writers. We are here because we love our language. We are reading and writing from both sides. It draws up all our humanity, and we need our humanity and we need our individuality, our originality. We need them more than we ever did because we are in such a position of power. I don’t mean readers and writers, I mean, in this nation. We should do our best by the language. We mustn’t torture it; we mustn’t diminish it. We have to love it, nurture it, and enjoy it.
Pleasure, that’s what we want from it, the true pleasure. A lot of information comes through pleasure and generosity, and that’s what we have in literature. That’s what we have in fiction.
I thank you so much for this award. It’s lovely for me, but I honor every writer who is here and every reader. Thank you.
THE NEW YORK SOCIETY LIBRARY DISCUSSION, SEPTEMBER 2012
I feel very much—I have felt increasingly in recent years—that the world has a kind of Vesuvius element now, that we’re waiting for something terrible to happen, and we do have an idea what it might be like, but maybe we’re pleasing ourselves with that because it might be much more terrifying. And I don’t want to say this to be doom-laden, but the world is not thinking—if it ever was—it’s not thinking of itself as something going on forever, our world, our so-called civilized world, the world we live in. I think that there is now a feeling of some terrible (how shall I say), culmination that’s happening, and we aren’t handling this is in any (I don’t mean we ourselves) way to absolutely reject that feeling; people who are sensitive to this aren’t grappling with it but sort of feeling that it’s almost become impossible to contest these things.
I hope I’m wrong about the doom part of this, but living in Naples, living in those ancient places, it does give you a feeling of a world that has gone on, with its errors and its triumphs and its art and its disasters, a world that’s gone on like this; that there was some price to pay, ultimately. And I’m sorry to talk like this, but I think that we haven’t dealt with this—I don’t mean me and I don’t mean you—but human beings have been living more in the immediate life and living in consumerism. And of course, scientists take much greater interest, but we aren’t prepared for what is the unknown for our coming world.
We have so much good that human beings have created in our world, our literature and art, these things that many people don’t participate in, but they would not have the life they have unless such things did exist in the world. And now there is, I feel, a kind of suspension: So what comes next? We know that this is leading to a world, which I hope may be better, but in which we don’t understand what’s happening.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: SHIRLEY HAZZARD—AUTHOR, AMATEUR, INTELLECTUAL
1. While there is as yet no biography of Shirley Hazzard, the story of her early life is covered in the following biographical essays: Lacey Crawford, “Shirley Hazzard: A Profile,” Narrative (Spring 2010), available at http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2010/shirley-hazzard; and Jan McGuinness, “The Transit of Shirley Hazzard,” in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, ed. Brigitta Olubas (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014), 123–135.
2. Martin Stannard covers the matter of Hazzard’s close association with key New York Intellectual figures, in particular Lionel Trilling’s biography of Hazzard’s close friend, Muriel Spark, in Muriel Spark: The Biography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2009). In Brigitta Olubas, Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist, chap. 2 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2012), I consider some of the shared conceptual, political, and philosophical aspects of Hazzard’s work and that of Trilling, Alfred Kazin, and Dwight MacDonald (who were also friends of Hazzard and Steegmuller), and the broader currents of liberal thought through the period.
3. Quoted in Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 5.
4. Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: “Partisan Review” and Its Circle (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 6.
5. Richard Howard, “Fond Memory,” in Literary Lives: The World of Francis Steegmuller and Shirley Hazzard, ed. Mark Bartlett et al. (New York: New York Society Library, 2010), 31.
6. Wendy Smith, “Shirley Hazzard: Interview,” Publishers Weekly 23, no.10 (1990): 48–49. I provide an extended discussion of this question in Olubas, Literary Expatriate, chap. 2.
7. Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 6; Nicholas Birns, Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory from 1950 to the Early Twenty-First Century (Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press, 2010), 18.
8. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012), 309. For an account of Hazzard’s critique of the UN as aligning with Left politics, see Nicholas Birns, “Does Idealism Preclude Heroism? Shirley Hazzard’s United Nations Writings,” in Olubas, Hazzard: Essays, 111–120.
9. Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 7.
10. See, esp., Shirley Hazzard, “A Jaded Muse,” in From Parnassus: Essays In Honor of Jacques Barzun, ed. Dora B. Weiner and William R. Keylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 121–134.
11. Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (London: Virago, 2000), 9.
12. Hazzard’s claims about Waldheim are included in “The League of Frightened Men,” included here. Hazzard’s archive contains evidence of the response to this essay. The allegation was pursued at the time by US Congressman Stephen Solarz (see Letter, Solarz to Waldheim, November 26, 1980, and reply, Waldheim to Solarz, December 19, 1980). At this point Hazzard had correspondence with a member of the Brooklyn Council, Susan D. Alter, who pursued the matter on behalf of her constituents and who confirmed Hazzard’s disclosure (Letters, Alter to Hazzard, October 24, 1980, and January 2, 1981). When the story was taken up again and published by the New Republic writer Jane Kramer in 1986, Hazzard’s role was acknowledged (Letter, Kramer to Hazzard, October 9, 1986, and
reply, Hazzard to Kramer, November 6, 1986). Further evidence of the response to Hazzard’s revelations can be seen in the letter from Robert Ratner, president of the UN Association to the New Republic (January 21, 1980) in correspondence with her friend Graham Greene (Letter, Greene to Hazzard, January 17, 1981) and in the 1980 Washington Post interview with Waldheim’s wife that reports: “His wife is angered the most by the unsubstantiated report in Hazzard’s article that Waldheim took part in the Nazi youth movement. ‘That is absolutely untrue!’” (Myra McPherson, “Waldheim: The UN’s Muted Peacekeeper Amid the Passion,” Washington Post, January 18, 1980, B1, B6). After publication of Kramer’s article, Solarz then pursued the matter with Waldheim (Letter, Solarz to Waldheim, April 1, 1986, and reply, Waldheim to Solarz, April 21, 1986). Copies of these letters are held in Shirley Hazzard Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
13. Hazzard writes in a letter to Phillip C. Jessup, former US delegate to the UN: “Lest you continue under the misapprehension that my criticism of the United Nations Secretariat for some reason has precluded addressing myself also to governmental iniquities, I may simply mention here that I am, as far as I know, the only person to have drawn to public attention the facts and documents of the illicit secret agreement contracted between the United States Department of State and the United Nations Secretariat in 1948—a conspiracy which, with its infinite and tragic consequences, is described at some length in my book Defeat of an Ideal.” (Letter, Hazzard to Jessup, March 14, 1974). A copy of this letter is held in Shirley Hazzard Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
14. Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995–2010 (New York: Penguin, 2015), 252.
15. It should also be noted that, as Lynn Hunt argues in her historical study of the development of international human rights, while “these NGOs frequently brought more pressure to bear on offending governments and did more to ameliorate famine, disease, and brutal treatment of dissidents and minorities than the United Nations itself,…almost all of them based their programs on the rights articulated in one or another part of the Universal Declaration.” Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), 208.
16. See Mark Mazower on George Kennan’s “denunciation of the escapism and wishful thinking that lay behind popular support for the United Nations” and his articulation of “a new ‘realism’ in thinking about international affairs.” Mazower, Governing, 236.
17. Mazower outlines the development of the “Committee to Frame a World Constitution” in 1947 to address “the terrors of nuclear war” (232) as one response from those who “believed the United Nations had not gone far enough,” (233) and notes also that the concern of participants at the 1955 Bandung Conference was “to speak out for a world whose basic survival was threatened not so much by the Cold War as by nuclear armageddon” (259).
18. “Pilgrimage,” in Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23.
WE NEED SILENCE TO FIND OUT WHAT WE THINK
First published November 14, 1982, in the New York Times Book Review, 11, 28–29.
1. “Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, / But all went down unmourned, unhonoured into the smothering darkness / For lack of a minstrel to be their glory-giver.” In The Odes of Horace, trans. James Michie (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), bk. 4, 247, 249.
2. Eugenio Montale, It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook, trans. G. Singh (New York: New Directions, 1977), 29.
3. W. B. Yeats, “Samhain: 1905,” in Explorations, ed. George Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1962), 199.
4. Quoted in The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857–1880, ed. and trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), xii.
5. “Veronese Before the Holy Tribunal (The Minutes of the Tribunal of the Inquisition Tribunal of Saturday 18 July 1573),” in Literary Sources of Art History, ed. and trans. E. G. Holt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 129–132.
6. W. H. Auden, “The Novelist,” in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 147.
7. Paul Valéry, “Entre deux mots il faut choisir le moindre,” Tel Quel (Tome 1), cited in François Richaudeau, “Paul Valéry: Précurseur des Sciences du Langage,” Communication et Langages, no. 18 (1973): 16.
8. T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” from “Four Quartets,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), 177.
9. Flaubert to George Sand, March 10, 1876, in Steegmuller, Letters, 1857–1880, 231.
10. Shirley Hazzard, “A Jaded Muse,” in From Parnassus: Essays in Honor of Jacques Barzun, ed. Dora B. Weiner and William R. Keylor (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 121–134. Hazzard notes that this was said “in conversation.”
11. James Boswell, Life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 689.
12. “To write in plain, vigorous language, one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.” George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” in The Orwell Reader: Fiction, Essays, Reportage (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1956), 374.
13. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “And I hold that no man has treated mankind worse than he who has studied philosophy as if it were some marketable trade, who lives in a different manner from that which he advises. For those who are liable to every fault which they castigate advertise themselves as patterns of useless training.” Letter 108, “On the Approaches to Philosophy,” in Moral Epistles, trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917–25), available at http://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_3.html.
14. Lord George Gordon Byron, “Don Juan,” in Byron: Poetical Works, ed. Frederick Page and revised by John Jump (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Canto 3:697.
15. Jose Ortega y Gasset, “The Self and the Other,” in Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature, trans. Willard R. Task (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 202.
16. Editor’s note: I have been unable to trace the source of these quotations in Hazzard’s papers or in the published works of Montale. It is likely that they were originally published in Italian and have not been republished.
17. “It is not pathetic messages that make us shed our best tears, but the miracle of a word in the right place.” Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order, trans. Roll H. Myers (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1936), 153.
THE LONELY WORD
The Gauss Seminars: The Lonely Word were originally presented on April 27, April 29, and May 6, 1982, at Princeton University.
1. “Di un gatto sperduto,” in Eugenio Montale, It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook, trans. G. Singh (New York: New Directions, 1977), 86–87.
2. W. H. Auden, “The Poet and the City,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 78–80.
3. Editor’s note: I have been unable to trace the source of this quotation in Hazzard’s papers or in the published works of Montale. It is likely that it was originally published in an Italian journal or newspaper and has not been republished.
4. W. H. Auden, “The Shield of Achilles,” in W. H. Auden: Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 454–455.
5. W. H. Auden, “Secondary Epic,” and “No, Plato, No,” in Auden: Collected Poems, 455, 669.
6. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, “A Satire Against Reason and Mankind,” in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Veith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 99.
7. Henry Reed, “The Naming of Parts,” in Henry Reed: Collected Poems, ed. Jon Stallworthy (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2007), 49.
8. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “To Virgil,” in Poems and Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 530.
9. Ibid., 531.
10. “And no—for enough, and more, wilt thou find eager to sing thy praises, Varus, and bu
ild the story of the grim war—now will I woo the rustic Muse on slender reed.” Virgil, Eclogue VI, in Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 43.
11. Eugenio Montale, “La storia,” I and II, in Satura 1962–1970 (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1971), 51–53.
12. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 1, Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens, trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 35.
13. Paulinus to Ausonius, quoted in S. Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (London: 1898), 332.
14. W. B. Yeats, “Vacillation,” in W. B. Yeats: The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 252.
15. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2006), bk. 1, chap. 13, 14–15.
16. Wordsworth, “Ode to Duty,” in Wordsworth Poems, ed. W. E. Williams (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 65.
17. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953); “Virtue reconciled with Pleasure,” chap. 5, in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber 1958), 78–88.
18. Alexander Pope, “The Dunciad,” in The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 467.
19. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 5, scene 2, lines 212–213.
20. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 15, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (London: A and C Black, 2010), 141.
21. Walter Scott, entry March 14, 1836, in Journal of Walter Scott, 1825–1826, ed. J. G. Tair (London: 1939), 135. Quoted in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B. C. Southam, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1968), 1:106.
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