Shirley Hazzard published her first collection of short stories, Cliffs of Fall in 1963 and her second, People in Glass Houses in 1967, with the first of her four novels appearing between the two in 1966. There were no further collections of short stories during her lifetime but she published individual short stories, mainly in The New Yorker, up to 1984, when “Forgiving” appeared in the Ladies’ Home Journal. She died in 2016 and her Collected Stories, edited by Brigitta Olubas, was published by Virago in 2020. Collected Stories includes the contents of both Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses as well as ten previously uncollected stories, two of which had not been published before.
People in Glass Houses while clearly not out of place in the Collected Stories, could be said to stand apart from the stories on either side of it. I hadn’t expected to return to the discussion of “linked” short stories quite so soon after my recent post about Melissa Bank’s fiction. The stories that make up People in Glass Houses are indeed very closely linked. They have a set of recurring characters, and references are to be found in several of the stories to the events of others. They’re all set in an international body whose aims are to safeguard world peace and foster economic development in the less developed world. That body, called “the Organization” in the stories, is clearly meant to represent the United Nations, where Hazzard worked in the 1950s. As Zoë Heller puts it in her introduction to the Collected Stories:
For seven years she had been toiling unhappily and without hope of advancement in the general service ranks of the UN Secretariat. (“A young woman was given a typewriter and told to shut up,” she said later.) (p. vii)
Her stories do not present the UN in an encouraging light. This organization is rigidly bureaucratic, preoccupied with issues of promotion and assignment to more or less undesirable locations. Its employees are divided into “Specialized” and “Subsidiary” categories, which are further subdivided: a young woman with a typewriter might be doing “Specialized” work but have no prospect of promotion because she has long been classed as a Subsidiary.
Humorous though they are, the effect of these stories is dispiriting: it’s disturbing to think that the role of international peacekeeper is in the hands of such venal and short-sighted functionaries. I might write about People in Glass Houses separately at some point; for now, I don’t intend to say any more about this collection.
The stories from Hazzard’s first collection, and those formerly uncollected ones which make up the third section of Collected Works are really very different from the ones about “the Organization”. Their characters tend to be articulate, witty, well read and insightful (about others, if not about themselves). They sometimes speak (and often think) in epigrams.
“… So much trouble — being charming and artful, finding ways to pretend less affection than one feels, and in the end not succeeding, because one doesn’t really profit from experience, one merely learns to predict the next mistake …” (p. 10)
I cannot trust him completely — but after all one would not trust anyone completely; it would hardly be fair to them. (p. 26)
It also occurred to her that an obligation is not the less incurred for being unacknowledged. (p. 29)
Once out of sight, her suffering would quickly become bearable to him. (p. 71)
The characters’ easy way with words does not necessarily make it possible for them to say what’s on their minds. What is surprising is that it often seems for the best that they shouldn’t articulate their concerns. Not speaking about such things allows everybody to ignore facts that are obvious to everybody, but which most of them would rather avoid speaking about. Some of these characters are unexpectedly transparent.
In “In One’s Own House”, James is infatuated with Miranda, the wife of his much older brother, Russell. James is by some measure his mother’s favourite son. Constance, we’re told, “had never felt at ease” (p. 57) with Russell but, as we find out, that may be because she understands him all too well. Russell is very depressed and is about to fly to Greece for several months, leaving Miranda in Constance’s house, where James is also staying.
James hopes that his mother won’t notice his infatuation with Miranda, but the reader learns immediately that Constance is fully aware of her adored son’s feelings:
If only, she prayed, if only he would get over these grotesque notions about Miranda. (Thank God Miranda herself hadn’t noticed yet.) It really couldn’t be worse, if the two of them were to be in the house all summer. (p. 60)
Russell, too, thinks that Miranda is oblivious to James’s attraction to her:
Miranda cast about uneasily for a means of turning the conversation. She felt it would be the last straw if James’s interest in her, ridiculous as it was, were to come to Russell’s attention now.
Russell could only hope that James would get over it soon. It was better, he had decided, not to mention anything to Miranda. But she really was impossible — any other woman would have noticed such a thing immediately. (p. 64)
Russell is not as transparent to James as James is to Russell. The younger brother asks Constance what’s wrong.
“He’s just terribly depressed, dear. He feels we are all doomed — which is, after all, no more than the truth, though one can’t afford to give it undivided attention …” (p. 65)
Although Constance certainly loves her younger son more, it seems that she and Russell are much more in tune with each other. That, indeed, may be why they don’t get on well together. Before Russell leaves for Greece, he tells her:
“The main thing seems to be to get away … since all the things I should face up to are here. I feel like a fugitive from justice.
Constance was herself again. She sighed. “We are all that,” she said. (p. 71; original ellipsis)
James’s “readability” is echoed in one of the later stories, “The Statue and the Bust”. An Italian man, Michele, watches an English teacher, Miss Ingram, lead a group of schoolgirls through Florence’s Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. While the girls have gone to buy slices of watermelon to quench their thirst, Michele engages the teacher in a brief conversation, after which he reflects:
What a lot I now know about you, Miss Ingram. That you came into this piazza because of that statue, that you know nothing about art, you like poetry, you live in Islington, and you have a lover who is either poor or stingy, who has been in Paris and is now in Italy. Since he quoted to you this poem, the lover is married and intends to stay that way. (p. 314)
The teacher, in contrast, barely remembers Michele once she has left his company. She has told the schoolgirls about Browning’s poem with the same title as the story. They encourage her to recite it and she hesitates — clearly she knows it well enough — but says it’s too long. (It is 250 lines long.)
Two other stories take their titles from poems. The title story of her first collection, “Cliffs of Fall”, quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “No worst, there is none”. It’s the story of Elizabeth, a young widow, whose husband has been killed in an air crash very soon after their marriage. Elizabeth is staying with a couple, Cyril and Greta, in the Swiss Alps, ostensibly to try to get over her grief, though she feels as if she’s waiting for the grief to start. Everybody is taking pains not to remind her of the tragedy. While her husband was alive, they had been apart several times, once for almost three months. Then she had missed him “unbearablly” (p. 81), so she can’t understand why she doesn’t seem to miss him now. She is passively accepting whatever comes to her.
The final story in the Collected Stories, one of the two not previously published, also has a poetic title. “The Sack of Silence” quotes Auden’s “The Cave of Making”, part of his “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”, and written in memory of Louis MacNeice. The story is slight but amusing and well judged: a couple have just come from New York to their (presumably second) home in the country and find the noise intolerable, though people keep telling them they must be glad to escape from the din of New York. Most of the stories’ titles don’t come from poems, though poetry is often quoted. In “Weekend”, Tennyson becomes a crossword clue: “‘A secret’ — blank — ‘in the stream.’ Tennyson. Nine letters” (p. 98) — another poem written “in memoriam”, like Auden’s for MacNeice. The unhappy husband in “The Worst Moment of the Day” (the last story in Cliffs of Fall) has been carrying around a volume of Louis Aragon, and when his wife asks him to read her something he says “Il est plus facile de mourir que d’aimer” (p. 123), echoing something that Nettie has thought in an earlier story, “A Place in the Country”:
She thought that it would, in fact, be easier to die than to get used to living without him. (But that, perhaps, was not a fair way of putting it, since it is really easier to die than to do almost anything.) (p. 40)
Nettie, in her late teens, is having an affair with her cousin’s husband, Clem, aged forty-two. The cousin, May, is spending the summer in the country, where Nettie visits her each weekend. Clem, working in the city, also comes for the weekend. The story opens with the three of them unpacking the books that May has brought from her and Clem’s city apartment, to read during the summer. May tells Nettie to try to keep the poetry separate. The affair ends when May finds out about it. Nettie is badly hurt, but philosophical:
I have disturbed the balance. There is balance in life, but not fairness. The seasons, the universe give an impression of concord, but it is order, not harmony; consistency, not sympathy. We suffer because our demands are unreasonable or disorderly. But if reason is inescapable, so is humanity. We are human beings, not rational ones. (pp. 33–4)
“A Place in the Country” is the first in the only pair of “linked” stories in the collection, outside of People in Glass Houses. “The Picnic” again features Nettie, Clem and May, some eight years after the end of the affair between Nettie and Clem. Clem and May have stayed together and now have three children. (Only the eldest, Matt, is mentioned in the earlier story.) May and Nettie have run into each other in a shop and May has invited Nettie to visit them in the same “place in the country”.
The first half of “A Picnic” is told from Clem’s point of view, the second from Nettie’s, with a final short paragraph about May. May has left her husband and her cousin alone together and gone to watch her youngest son while he plays. Clem and Nettie don’t have anything to say to each other once they’re on their own, though Nettie was chatty over lunch. Their recollections and perceptions are markedly different. Clem thinks it was “generosity” on May’s part to leave them alone, though “she was mistaken in thinking they had anything to say to one another” (p. 112). It doesn’t appear so straightforward to Nettie:
And how like May to have arranged it this way, how ostentatiously forbearing. Magnanimous, Clem would have called it (solemn again), but May had a way, Nettie felt, of being magnanimous, as it were, at one’s expense. (p. 117)
The passage I quoted above about not profiting from experience but merely learning to predict the next mistake comes from the first story in Cliffs of Fall, “The Party”, a compressed (9 pages) portrait of a marriage. Minna and Theodore attend a party together. As they discuss it afterwards, it becomes clear that they are living apart and in effect estranged. Theodore is sometimes cruel to Minna, perhaps physically — at least that’s one way of reading his “You must hurt all over” (p. 11). They seem to have had sex before going to the party: Minna thinks she has lost an earring there but Theodore tells her it’s on the table beside the bed. He had noticed it but forgotten to tell her before they had gone out.
The story ends as Minna is about to leave Theodore’s apartment to go home. She tells him that he should be trying to build up her confidence, not undermining it.
“Confidence is one of those things we try to instill into others and then hasten to dispel as soon as it puts in an appearance.”
“Like love,” she observed, turning to the door.
“Like love,” he said. “Exactly.” (p. 11)
That story has a family resemblance to “Comfort”, one of the previously uncollected ones, in which Lucia (Miss McKitterick) visits her friend Morgan in his walk-up apartment. Morgan is in love with Lucia; she is in an unsatisfactory relationship with somebody else, with whom she has just returned from a trip to Yugoslavia. Lucia comes to see Morgan infrequently, when she needs “comfort” (p. 283).
“It isn’t awful for you — to see me, I mean?” Her head was bent toward him with a certain insistence.
“I love to see you.” After a moment, he added, “It is awful, yes.” (p. 285)
As Lucia is leaving, Morgan’s cleaner, Mrs Fanshaw, who has a talent for malapropisms, thinks to herself that the young woman has been “Reaping havoc” (p. 286).
Of the remaining stories, two in particular seem to me to stand out. They’re both stories that were previously published in periodicals (The New Yorker in one case) but not collected until the Collected Stories. “Leave It to Me” is really quite straightforward. A celebrated writer, hosting a dinner party in his rented villa outside Florence, criticizes what he claims is a characteristic Italian failing: an unwillingness or unpreparedness to take responsibility for anything that needs to be done. At the same time, all but ignored by him and his guests, a terrible conflagration devastates the hill across the valley from his villa.
In contrast to that story, “The Everlasting Delight” (which is also set in Italy) is poignant, nuanced and surprising, but I don’t think I’ve left myself enough time or space to to justice to it here. I may well write about it separately before too long. I’d like to think about it some more before attempting that.