The Transit Of Venus (Virago Modern Classics)

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This is a book that treats its characters with tenderness, as though to mitigate the pain that will be inflicted upon them by time. This is a humor that is built out of close observation and the precision of poetry. Shirley Hazzard lived a life steeped in literature: she and her husband, the extraordinary translator, critic, novelist, and biographer Francis Steegmuller, would read aloud to each other at breakfast “plays of Shakespeare continually, also Byron’s Don Juan inexhaustibly, anything we felt like. Clough’s ‘Amours de voyage,’ Paradise Lost. Gibbon. Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life. It literarily and figuratively saved my life, and enabled me to live inwardly,” as she told J. D. McClatchy in an interview for The Paris Review. Literature would also prove useful in her friendships: she met her husband at a party that was thrown by Muriel Spark, and she met her lifelong friend Graham Greene in a cafe when she overheard him trying to remember the last line of Robert Browning’s “The Last Mistress.”

We see an echo of this futile touch of the foot much later in the book, when Charmian, now an older woman at the hospital where her husband lies dying, “stood at the foot of the bed, and gently touched the outline of his feet, then covered them Once I got to know her—it would take a few years—I’d understand that this “remoteness” was not geographical but temporal. Everything that seemed to constitute Shirley, everything that mattered, was also a piece of the historical past. But just then what I felt was surprise—something akin to what an astronomer might’ve experienced (to borrow a figure from one of her own books) upon receiving a signal from another star. Proof of life. It’s tempting to refer to this style as nineteenth century, but that’s not it. One can hear in the passage quoted above a note—several notes, in fact—that are distinctly more modern, not least the incredulous dismay that concludes it. Hazzard’s aphoristic intelligence goes full tilt here. Her simple descriptive powers are no less lethal:The reader has seen Grace’s thwarted love for her son’s doctor and noted the dignity ascribed to her by Shirley Hazzard. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Ted Tice is a young astronomer come to spend time with Thrale and he falls for Caroline, a love he nurtures beyond the end of novel. Caro however is seduced by a friend of the family, a young playwright, Paul Ivory who in turn is engaged to Tertia who lives in grand style nearby. Paul and Caro begin an affair. The reader is sure that Paul is untrustworthy and that Tertia knows about the affair but has other motives for continuing with her engagement and marrying Paul. The novel’s narrative stretches over 30 years allowing the characters and their relationships to be played out with the inevitability of the transit that gives the book its title. And yet her sharp ear for conversation, and eye for the defining political moment in a social interaction, makes her a novelist well suited for our times when novels about personal autonomy in the context of larger political systems are so popular. Readers are coming to see that Hazzard wrote about her own lifetime as a cosmopolitan and professional woman and simply published late. If her work initially seems dated, it may be because The Transit of Venus was published in 1980, when she personally was an unfashionable middle-aged woman who appeared to leave fussiness and drawing rooms in her wake.

Although the transit of Venus across the sun is predictable it is an event that occurs only every 120 years, and then twice in 8 years. Captain Cook’s voyage to Tahiti in 1768 was designed to coincide with one transit to help with astrological measurements, specifically the size of the solar system. His measurements were inaccurate. The next transit will be in December 2117.Really, though, the book’s achievement goes beyond style, and even beyond structure. The characters exist within, and at the mercy of, a widest possible cosmos. As the astronomical metaphor of its title suggests, Venus grapples squarely with the unanswerable: the gulf between man and … well, whatever word applies when God seems far too domestic a concept. Hazzard has never had a big reputation as a political writer, but her anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial, and generally anti-bureaucratic politics hold a special appeal in our own apocalyptic times. The two writers met by chance at a cafe in Capri in the 1960s. Hazzard was seated close enough to overhear Greene reciting The Lost Mistress by Robert Browning to a friend. Greene had stalled on the last lines, so Hazzard supplied them on her way out. They were seated together by chance at a restaurant that evening and an enduring, if turbulent, friendship began. On the Old World, History lay like a paralysis. In France, the generals died. In Italy, a population abandoned the fields forever, to make cars or cardigans in factories; and economists called this a miracle. Caro’s life has also contained much hurt and loss. She had not remained a spectator, but engaged with the experiences life sent her with dignity, reflection and generosity.

Joint managing director of Hazzard’s Australian publisher Hachette, Justin Ractliffe, said the company was “deeply saddened” by the news. “Shirley was a giant talent who produced a small, but perfectly formed, body of work. She continues to be beloved in Australia as well as around the world and will be missed by the many readers moved by her extraordinary writing.”

True, too. And if there are no truly happy endings in life—or, indeed, in civilizations—there remains the happiness of what one has known. “Memory is more than one bargained for,” she writes in The Transit of Venus: “this sense of past, past, past, that can turn even the happiest memories to griefs.” Yet the reverse may be so, too: the present can occasionally resurrect one’s misery into delight. Shirley’s work, so touched with both suffering and an almost suprahuman capacity to understand it, offers the consolations of both. But Hazzard’s humor expresses itself most fully in her characterizations. Awful Dora, the half-sister who raised Caro and Grace after their parents died in a boating accident, sits “on a corner of the spread rug, longing to be assigned some task so she could resent it.” She is “one of those persons who will squeeze into the same partition of a revolving door with you, on the pretext of causing less trouble.” Tertia Drage, the haughty aristocrat who vies with young Caro for the playwright Paul Ivory’s attention, is described as handling objects “with punitive abruptness, seeing no reason to indulge an uncompliant world. The occasional human anger felt against inanimate things that tumble or resist was in her case perpetual.” Tertia’s snobbish mother is “crushing a billowing blue sofa . . . a creature too heavy for its element, a cormorant on the waves.” The immense cad Major Ingot (what a name!), who marries Dora and briefly takes her off the sisters’ hands before abandoning her while attempting to steal her money, has “a citified paunch and large pinkish jowl . . . his scalp was smooth except for a splaying of strands over the crown; his eyes a hurt blue, were the eyes of a drunken child.” And uptight, meanhearted Christian Thrale is described as “now rising in his profession. Those peering into the oven of his career would report, ‘Christian is rising,’ as if he were a cake or a loaf of bread.” From my own older women relatives, I recognize Hazzard’s indoctrination in British manners, laid over a vast and inchoate political rage.

Grace lives a life of conventional comfort, with her husband making steady progress in the Foreign Office, and children and a nice house with beautiful things. A mirror bought in Bath is frequently mentioned, yet towards the end of the book Caro reflects that At sixteen, she moved with her family to Hong Kong, where she left formal schooling behind but took a job with British intelligence. She says of this time that “the young English officers there knew Asian languages, had fought in the war, were clever and amusing. The only card I had to play was literature. They were all full of poetry and so was I. We were walking anthologies.” At around this time, Hazzard fell into her first great love; the breathtaking potency of this early experience ripples through The Transit of Venus. Later, she would hold positions in New Zealand and, for ten years, with the United Nations in New York, a time that she would lean on while writing two very political books of nonfiction, Countenance of Truth and Defeat of an Ideal. In later life, she would live in London, Paris, Naples, and Capri, and write about each of her homes with care. The book is only most obviously about love; perhaps it is far more deeply and subtly about power. Two Australian sisters have come to Britain in the 50s and are staying in a house of an eminent astronomer, Professor Thrale. Grace is the younger, very pretty, engaged to the son, Christian. Caroline is older and with more purpose in life. There is a third sister, a half-sister Dora who is an eternal victim who has cared for Caroline and Grace since their parents died. We follow Grace and Caro through several decades, and mostly Caro because Grace leads a calm and largely unexplored life. Shirley Hazzard speaking at the National Book awards in 2003, after winning the prize for fiction for The Great Fire. Photograph: NK/Keystone USA/Rex Features

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Reissued this March by Penguin Classics with a new introduction by Lauren Groff, the new edition is a treat for new fans drawn in by the critical revival surrounding the publication of Hazzard’s collected stories last year. The Transit of Venus (1980) was the greatest of her three novels, which include The Great Fire (2003) and The Bay of Noon (1970). Implicitly defending Hazzard against a rude prepublication review in Publishers Weekly, which called her stories “quaint antiques from a bygone time,” Gregory, Groff, and other Hazzard advocates have praised her flair as a worldbuilder while marveling at the strangeness of her place in the culture. Hazzard, who was born in Australia in 1931, wore her hair in a bouffant until her death in 2016, for example, and maintained a similar defiance against casualness or trendy novelty in her fiction, which have given her the odd reputation of a relic of a bygone literary era. With these prospects and impressions, Grace Marian Thrale, forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth. (289) Within her sentences the choice of words, especially adverbs and adjectives, add complexity, depth and nuance to the novel. She writes on a wide canvas: across several decades and across the globe: Australia, Britain and New York as well as parts of Europe and South America. It has been described as an unbearably sad book, but I felt moved by it, as if the experience of reading it had added to my own life. In part this is because of her ‘huge charity towards the people’ (Kirkus Review 1980). A man stood on a white porch and looked at the Andes. He was over fifty, white-haired, thin, with a stooping walk that suggested an orthopaedic defect, but in fact derived from beatings received in prison. His appearance was slightly unnatural in other ways—pink, youthful lips and light, light-lashed eyes: an impression, nearly albinic, that his white suit intensified. Perhaps you have felt uplifted by this novel and are only surprised that I mention it. Or perhaps you have yet to experience one of Shirley Hazzard’s novels, in which case you have a great treat in store for you.