Reading Note:
Nearby But Far Away
15 January 2015
One thing leads to another. Packing the books before the move, I came across Shirley Hazzard’s first novel, The Evening of the Holiday, and decided to re-read it. At least, that’s what I remember. My book-reading records (a newly-revived aspiration) make no mention of this, but, as I say, it was during the move. I remember thinking about the book constantly, a few weeks later, while I was reading Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence, a very different novel but one that bears a strong sibling resemblance. Thanks to Amazon, I came across People in Glass Houses, which I’d never heard of. (I wrote about that last week.) It led me to Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case. Which led me, finally (for the moment), to JD McClatchy’s Paris Review interview with Hazzard. I had been looking at Hazzard’s Wikipedia entry, wondering what it might tell me about the reception of the Waldheim book. Here is what Hazzard herself has to say about it (and her other work of UN nonfiction, The Defeat of an Ideal) in the Paris Review interview:
I saw that the truth would never be disclosed except by someone who had been present and was willing to testify. I knew that I could get a book published, and knew where to look for the documents. In all my UN writings, the UN vituperation against me has never challenged the scholarly apparatus appended to the two factual books, and has never questioned any of the evidence adduced.
She mentions something that comes up in Countenance of Truth as well: in connection with a revealing piece that Hazzard wrote in 1980, Kurt Waldheim and his minions threatened the writer and The New Republic with a libel suit that never materialized. Later, of course, Waldheim would say of these charges (about his Nazi past), “Who cares if they’re true?” But he was still Secretary-General at the time of the New Republic piece. That he didn’t follow through with the lawsuit is clarion proof not so much that Hazzard’s allegations were true but that Waldheim could be sure that neither the UN nor the United States would take any notice. Waldheim had been tapped for the top slot at the UN not despite his past but because of it.
Countenance of Truth is a very chilling book. (I should clear up the possibility of confusion by noting that Hazzard was not present at the UN when Waldheim was Secretary-General, or even when he was Austria’s Permanent Representative to the Organization. Four-odd years elapsed between her “separation” and his arrival.) It argues that the United States, not long after the UN was established, perverted the character of its civil service, which had been intended by the Charter to be impervious to political pressures from member nations. (The US, then in the throes of McCarthyism, insisted upon loyalty clearances for Americans attached to the Secretariat.) Countenance also argues that this perversion resulted in the desolation of the UN’s powers as a force for the good of mankind. Finally, it argues that Waldheim, to no one’s ultimate suprise, presided over the irreversible demoralization of the UN. I find these arguments persuasive, but I am aware that anyone of a “realistic” cast of mind, by nature unsympathetic to the very idea of a United Nations Organization in the first place, would be reduced to eye-rolling by Hazzard’s implacable, smouldering outrage. And, for all its marble-veined eloquence — Countenance seems more chiseled than penned — the arguments are not quite so effective at conveying the existential futility of UN operations as the tragicomic fiction of People in Glass Houses.
The Paris Review interview filled me with the oddest feeling. As nothing else ever has, it made me want to have my life to live over again. This was not a feeling of regret but, on the contrary, one of repletion: it was like sitting in a warmly lighted room while snow fell gently into the evening outside a window. It had nothing to do with the different things that I would do or the things that I would do differently — with one exception. In this second-chance of a life, everything would be the same except that I should know, from the very start, that I was a reader. That I should be storing up not so much the content of books as the many-splendored possibilities of the written word. I say “written,” but I should know, as a reader, to read, always, with my ear.
INTERVIEWER
What are you looking to change when you revise?
HAZZARD
It is mainly a question of the ear. If one has read a lot, and especially in poetry, all one’s life, one’s ear signals falsity, infelicity, banality. What one can do about it is another matter.
And with that I sank back, surprisingly content. “If one has read a lot…” No more than I can have my life to live over again can I have started the first one with a good ear. Well, I did have a good ear, for music as well as poetry and prose (and for voices — I fall in love with them), but not an informed one. Necessarily not. So, instead of pining after what cannot be, I shall urge every young reader as strenuously as I can to read deeply and to listen well. I’m not offering this as advice for becoming a good writer, although I don’t believe that anyone who follows it could ever become a bad one, but simply as a tip conducive to joy.
Whatever she is doing — writing fiction about Italy or fact about the United Nations; remembering the austere Australia of her childhood (“provincialissimo”) or the everyday blisses of her life with Francis Steegmuller — Shirley Hazzard persuades the reader that she has enjoyed the hell out of literacy. So have I — lately. How marvelous it would be to have had a life in which the pleasure of reading were never for a moment regarded as idle or pointless or “irrelevant” or — the worst — self-indulgent.
Here in my hand is the first edition of The Transit of Venus, which I bought when it came out in 1980. I shall tell you frankly that I did not understand it. I was never in the dark about what was going on, but I didn’t know why the story was being told: it was beyond me. If I had my life to live over again, I should never be or have been so callow.