`It Was in Reading that One Could Truly Live'

Seldom do I pace myself when reading. If the book is rich and strong enough to induce self-forgetting and I remain otherwise undisturbed, I move at a comfortable jog, unaware of effort and the passage of time. A bad book hobbles me and soon I give it up. A difficult but worthy book is slower and perhaps sweatier, with occasional breaks to savor or decrypt a passage, but such persistence carries its time-delayed reward. Then there’s the rarest book of all, the sort one parcels out in disciplined increments in order to prolong one’s pleasure and postpone the anxiety of contemplating the final page. Last week, Levi Stahl at the University of Chicago Press passed along such a book, one that moved me to impose a chapter-a-day regimen -- Shirley Hazzard’s Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples.

Best known for her novels The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, Hazzard is a writer whose acuity of perception, moral rigor and fineness of sensibility invite the flattering but misunderstood label “Jamesian.” Earlier this year, Bryan Appleyard rightly called her “the greatest living writer on goodness and love.” Ancient Shore, too, concerns love – for a city, a culture, a way of life – while suggesting the potency of Hazzard’s love for her late husband, Francis Steegmuller, the Flaubert scholar and translator of Madame Bovary and the incomparable letters. Ancient Shore includes Steegmuller’s “An Incident at Naples,” published in The New Yorker in 1986.

An Australian by birth, Hazzard is a citizen of Great Britain and the United States, with an apartment in New York City and a 50-year part-time residency in Italy. As a child she lived in Hong Kong, Japan and New Zealand. In her internationalism (she once worked for the United Nations), Hazzard (now 77) recalls another great Australian-born novelist, Christina Stead (as well as, again, the bi-continental Henry James). In her introduction to Another Shore, “Italian Hours” (James again), she writes of her early Italian experiences:

“I was warned – as are all who pursue their dream – by those who define reality as a sequence of salutary disappointments that `reality’ would soon set in. I was reminded that immemorial outsiders had followed that same cisalpine path. Yet we trusted to the private revelation.”

The Jamesian note resounds again. The first chapter, “Pilgrimage,” begins as seemingly straightforward autobiography, tracking Hazzard’s youthful travels with her father, a diplomat. She speaks of the thinness of culture in Australia:

“What we did have was literature, which came through our British forebears. It was in reading that one could truly live: in one’s mind, in books, in the world. A form of pilgrimage.”

This theme of literature as a means of expanding consciousness, of preparing one for the world, and the co-dependent nature of the real and bookish realms, is a recurrent theme:

“The contemporary Western world, grappled to its explanations, sets itself to ignore the accidental quality of our existence. For the expression of chance mysteries, we must turn to literature, to art.”

As these excerpts suggest, one need not know Naples or Italy to savor Hazzard’s book. My own experience is limited to a single blurry afternoon in Torino in the Watergate-distracted summer of 1973. She reassures us: “The moment comes: we intersect a history, a long existence, offering it our fresh discovery as regeneration.” Another Shore is peppered with allusions to writers who preceded Hazzard in her devotion to Italy – Pliny, Gibbon, Goethe, Byron, James, Auden. Her lesson is continuity – that a culture as ancient and storied as Italy’s invites, even demands, our investigation, however tentative. A park in Posillipo holds the tombs of Virgil and Leopardi. Nearby is buried the Renaissance poet Jacopo Sannazaro, James visited here in 1880 and 17 years later Wilde completed “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Of her bookishness Hazzard writes:

“Life, for me, has been a succession of such destined accidents, when what was latent in the reading mind and in the aroused imagination acquired reality in daily life. Thus one wasn’t completely unprepared for extraordinary places, unpredictable events. The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through literature, as being more real than our factual origins. It was thus that pilgrimage had been set in motion.”

ADDENDUM: A reader passes along this story:

“I was visiting my older sister, Shirley, in Florida a few years ago and she had a copy of THE GREAT FIRE. I read it with great pleasure, sitting on her balcony, and somebody snapped a photo of the two of us together. Shirley died suddenly last January, and her daughter, as she was cleaning out her apartment, came upon the photo and sent it to me. Shirley and I are together, looking very happy, and it's a wonderful photo to have. What makes it really special is that I'm holding Hazzard's book and the word SHIRLEY is clearly visible in huge letters. I don't know what to call this--a living memorial? The picture is framed and faces me on my bureau.”