'The Only Thing That Matters Is the Quality'

David Myers and I squabbled some in 2009 when putting together “Best American Fiction,1968–1998,” our “selected bibliography.” He wanted Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew and something by Philip K. Dick, and I said no. I lobbied for Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, and he said no. There was compromise. I let Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels slip through my net and he agreed to my demand for Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, one of my favorite novels from the period. The result, in retrospect, is an interesting and fallible list about which few general conclusions can be drawn. There’s little to be ashamed of.

Inclusion of Hazzard’s novel pleases me. Like Christina Stead, another of my favorite novelists, she was born in Australia but lead a cosmopolitan life, eventually becoming an American citizen. I’ve just found an interview Hazzard gave to Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick that was published in 1983 Texas Studies in Literature and Language. Asked “What do you most want your readers to get from your fiction?” she replies: “I want them to have pleasure,” which she follows with this:

“Of course a writer has responsibility. One can’t allow oneself to be led into self-indulgence, self-exorcising, and so on. The writer’s responsibility is to his or her best self; that is the same, I think, as responsibility to readers.”

Pleasure seems to have become a dirty word when it comes to reading. Perhaps it’s our lingering Puritan streak. Too many books are stridently preachy, which is never pleasant, or selfishly “experimental.” In either case, the reader’s welfare is disregarded. A writer has no business trying to convert his readers to anything. Hazzard impresses me as a thoughtful, formidably well-read writer who never shows off. Her sensibility is thoroughly bookish without being pedantic. Here are several other good bits pulled from the interview:

“I feel strong sympathies with other centuries, not least with ancient writers, with poets of the Renaissance, the seventeenth, the eighteenth century. If I were to choose one nineteenth- century work that gives me more sheer delight than another, it would probably be Byron’s Don Juan, far from the American academic perception of a typical nineteenth-century work, yet stemming from very definable traditions as well as undefinable genius.”

“The eighteenth century is very fine on the transience of things. There is also the Renaissance, beautiful treatment of the theme in Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti. Or in Horace, in Virgil. Above all, perhaps, in Leopardi. It seems to me that ‘Progress’ intimidated writers somewhat about dwelling on the past. Modern writers tend to treat the immediate events and the thoughts present in their minds, rather than their retrospective impressions. There is even an often gimmicky, I think, predilection for the present tense in current fiction.”

“The ideal reader, if he or she exists, would be simply a person who understood without having explanations and who recognized the writer’s intention in the words and phrases intuitively. (By intuition I mean a synthesis of intelligence, understanding, wit, instinct, and above all the ear for the sound of meaning).”

After citing Herzog, Muriel Spark's Memento Mori. William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow and Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter, Hazzard says: "However, I try to stress again, poetry has been the stronger influence. And of course, all writings that have interested me: Seneca, Gibbon, Doctor Johnson, etc.”

Hazzard is no creampuff. When asked “Do you have an opinion on what contemporary women novelists with a specifically feminist consciousness might be contributing to the art of fiction?” she answers:

“No: I don’t care if it’s male, female, or Tiresias. The only thing that matters is the quality. When I feel a message is being smuggled through the lines (sic), I feel with Horace: Quodcumque ostendis mihi sic, incredulous odi.”