Writing Letters with Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham

UNSW Centre for Ideas: UNSW Centre for Ideas

Ann Mossop: Welcome to the Curiosity Lecture Series supported by UNSW Sydney. I'd like to acknowledge that we meet on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. This lecture features Brigitta Olubas and Susan Wyndham on Writing Letters. Academic and biographer Brigitta Olubas, and journalist and writer Susan Wyndham are the joint editors of Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters. 

Susan Wyndham: Thank you all very much for coming out this morning. I'm Susan Wyndham. This is Brigitta Olubas and we are the co editors of Hazzard and Harrower: The Letters. We're here to take you back to a time before the internet, before email, before text messages and WhatsApp. A time when people had the patience and the time to write letters and wait days or weeks to receive them. 

Two of Australia's greatest novelists of the 20th century, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower, wrote to each other for 40 years. You may know their books, especially their most powerful masterpieces. Harrower's The Watchtower, published in 1966, and Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, published in 1980. Although both writers were born in Australia around 1930, Hazzard lived most of her life with her American husband, the writer Frances Steegmuller, in New York, Naples, and Capri. 

Harrower spent the 1950s in London, where she wrote and published her first three novels, but rarely left Australia. After her return in 1959. They might never have met, or even connected, except that Harrower was introduced in 1966 to Hazzard's mother, Kit Hazzard, a lonely divorcee who lived in Potts Point in Sydney's inner east.  

On a visit to New York that year, Kit told Shirley how delighted she was to meet another writer. Together, they wrote to Harrower and this warm but formal note from Hazzard began the correspondence.  

"August 30th, 1966, 200 East 66th Street, New York. Dear Elizabeth, if I may call you that, my mother has let me read your so nice letter, with its lovely and generous words about me. I'm happy that you liked Nothing in Excess, because it's part of a book I'm working on just now, an alternately despairing of and pressing on with. I'd like to read your writings one of these days and look forward to that. Also, perhaps to meeting you eventually in London or here. With very best regards. Most sincerely, Shirley H. S." 

Both women were in their 40s, intellectually engaged and very busy at that time. Hazzard had just published her first, The Evening of the Holiday. She was working on People in Glass Houses, a collection of satirical short stories based on her years working for the United Nations, including that story Nothing in Excess. Harrower was also managing the Sydney office of Macmillan, the British company that published both their books. 

She took two months to write back. "6 Wont Street, Mosman, 16th of November, 1966. Dear Shirley, I was so pleased to have your note along with your mother's letter since the time I found your stories for myself. I have taken an exclusive sort of interest in your work and watched for it in the New Yorker. I like it very much. I find it extremely congenial, and as I seem to remember saying before, in some mysterious way, that I probably could, but won't pin down - a great relief.  

When circumstances organised me into Macmillan's I was delighted to see that they were publishing Cliffs of Fall. Then recently I so enjoyed meeting your mother. We were well disposed towards each other, of course, because of our common enthusiasm. But it turned out that we would have been well disposed anyway. 

I was sorry we met so late in the day. So close to your mother's return to New York. Someone was arguing the other night to the effect that Australian writers had to live abroad if they were to write anything of any consequence. Your name was then brought in to support this idea. You would not have been writing about the United Nations if you lived in Australia.  

Since nothing of international importance ever happens here, this journalist went on, writers were at a great disadvantage. If people write about public events, I suppose this is true. But if they write about people, the only handicap here or anywhere else, is a lack that no change of continent would be likely to alter. Since your work seems to me, at all times, extremely private, I was taken aback to hear this, and could only feel that you had been misunderstood by my acquaintance. However, this sort of thing has been gone over far too often already, although not by me.  

It would be pleasant to meet sometime. After years in London, I came back to Sydney for a visit, stayed, and now seem very disinclined to wander. Still, it is nice to see new places. I am sending you a copy of The Watchtower, my new book, under separate cover. I wish you well with your new novel and look forward to seeing more of it in the New Yorker before long. All good wishes, Elizabeth." 

So you can see how the conversation took off immediately in its polite, formal way, but immediately engaged, and it would continue for 40 years with long and passionate discussions about books, politics, world affairs, friends, enemies, and especially about Kit. 

Harrower became a friend to Kit Hazzard, who was mentally unwell, later diagnosed as manic depressive or bipolar, but also very good company. And through the 1970s and into the 1980s Harrower took increasing responsibility for her. The letters between Harrower and Hazzard become intense, despairing and grimly funny, often running on for pages and pages as they report Kit's latest misadventures, and how to handle her. 

They are plunged into intimacy despite, or because of, their distance. Harrower took Kit to doctors, organised her pension and hearing aids, helped her change apartment and country many times, packed up her last home when she went into aged care. Hazzard and Harrower sent money and deep thanks in return. They wrote about Kit so often that my mother and your mother became MM and YM.  

"Capri, 6th of July, 1977. Dearest E," – you can see already there is a more casual tone. – "We may dread Australian stamps, but we glory when we discover your hand or type on envelope. Thank you for all. We'd be in a heart of darkness otherwise. Latest development in saga of MM versus the world, doubtless superseded by the time this reaches you, is letter from Honolulu chaotic about dress vis pool, volcanic soil, red flowers, garden party and casually info that although undecided next address should probably be care of Bank of New South Wales, Sackville Street, London.  

A month ago MM was starving and could not afford an egg. Now she is contemplating Magellan-like expeditions. Could I ask if you have any news of a definite move of MM either return to Sydney or on to London in next couple of weeks that you cable us at Hassler Hotel, Rome? Then please forgive us this pestiferousness but at the mo I literally don't know if she's in Hawaii or Piccadilly or Mogadishu. How she loves this chaos and how hateful are both the chaos and the love of it. 

Brigitta Olubas: It certainly was chaos. So one of the great mysteries that presented itself to us as we compiled this book of letters is the question of why Elizabeth Harrower stopped writing. As Susan noted she had produced four highly regarded novels through the late 1950s and 60s, but then in 1971, she withdrew her fifth novel from publication. Then there was silence. Many years later, in 2014, when that fifth novel, In Certain Circles, was finally published, she spoke about her earlier silence with a kind of impatience, as if it didn't, or shouldn't, matter. 

She claimed in an interview she did with Susan, that she had forgotten the novel, or that she was no longer interested in it, or in her writing life, or indeed in writing at all. Two years earlier she had said to another interviewer, "There are a lot of dead novels out there that don't need to be written". A point that plays suggestively alongside her claims not to remember In Certain Circles.  

She said in an earlier interview, "I looked up the blurb and it said it is an intense psychological drama. And I said, well, that sounds like me." So I'll come back to the psychological drama of Hazzard's writing… of Harrower – there was a slip, a Freudian slip – of Harrower's writing in a minute, but I want to sit for a minute with the drama of her own life and how that bears on her writing, her writing of letters and the writing of novels. 

So in a letter she wrote while on a visit to London, a letter to her cousin Margaret, she mused on the ways that writers keep raking back over their unhappy childhoods. She wrote that her own unhappy childhood "no longer moved her", adding that this was "partly because of writing, and partly because, I told you and you listened and thought it hadn't been right or fair." 

It's fascinating the way letters offer a place to say something that we might not say anywhere else. Or rather, letters provide this kind of screen – a screen of formality or of distance or of delay that allows us to say something that's perhaps too stark to say in the immediacy of the face to face. "I told you, you listened and thought it hadn't been right or fair." 

She had been heard and understood. Her novels draw on that unhappy childhood, but at the same time, in both her novels and her letters, she shuns disclosure. For instance, in her letters to Hazzard, she mentioned her own mother's death, which we know really affected her. She only mentions it twice. And just in passing. Harrower is drawn to dark psychology, her brutal protagonists that have been described by Fiona McGregor as "little despots of little worlds. They wreak destruction on those in their thrall, and around them the Earth itself bristles with potential or remembered cruelty. The violence that is all around us."  

In her novels, she's not telling us anything particular about her own childhood. And yet it is very clear how she felt. As she said, the emotional truth is there in the books, but none of the facts, to give a sense of the violent confinement that covers the world of Harrower’s novels, here is one of those 'little despots'. This one from the long prospect, responding to what is clearly a glorious view of the Pacific Ocean from another character's flat. So a more innocuous and awe inspiring thing you might not be able to name than a view, a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. 

So here's how this little despot responds. "There below and straight ahead was that much praised view of the sea. A lot of water, yes, but nothing to make a fuss about. She had once said, 'For all I care, the Pacific can jump in the lake'. It had been a success, and on the strength of that success, she now relaxed her mouth at the Pacific and admitted that it was blue." 

Susan Wyndham laughs. 

This is wry. It's funny, but there is also a cold withholding, aimed at wounding here. There's also, by that character a refusal to confront scale or beauty. In her novel The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard has her narrator make a similar kind of point, but it's then taken in a very different direction, and this highlights the very different styles and perspectives of both these writers in both letters and novels.  

So here's a little quote from The Transit of Venus, where we've got someone confronting beauty, or people confronting beauty and withdrawing from it. So the narrator says "There was nothing mythic at Sydney. Momentous objects, beings and events all occurred elsewhere – abroad or in the elsewhere of books." That was the measure of resentful obscurity. They could not imagine a person who might expose or exalt it. There was the harbour and the open sea. It was an atmosphere in which a sunset might be comfortably admired, but not much else. 

The Australia of Shirley Hazzard's childhood offered her, above all, a sense of privation, of something being kept from her, something she wanted. That privation provided the impetus that propelled her into the wider world. So where Harrower’s writing thrills us with the crackle of menace within even the least moment of a day. What Hazzard does is to announce the possibility of what she calls 'glory', of meeting the larger world, of rising to the occasion. 

There's much of this in her letters, too, even while she's often caught up in the prosaic. And it really marks the difference in styles, I think, between these two writers. In Harrower's letters the malice of the world that we find everywhere in her novels is much less evident. Here's a postcard she sent Hazzard in 1972.  

"October. Do you like hearing about beautiful Australia? I'm glad. Last week, from Tuesday to Saturday, I was driving out in the west of New South Wales with Margaret. We didn't go so far, just over the Blue Mountains and on to Bathurst the first night. Then we stayed at Parkes, saw the radio telescope, then at Cowra, then Katoomba of all places.  

But arriving was nothing much and traveling was everything. The light is really ravishing. It transforms everything. Bathurst, Orange, Forbes, Parkes have trees everywhere now. Wide, clean, empty streets and footpaths, more or less. We saw rolling hills and wheat and galahs and cockatoos and had to stop while sheep and lambs surrounded the car. Some parts reminded me very much of Sidney Nolan's” – Sidney, she calls him, Sidney Nolan's– “Dimbulah paintings, with little mop trees scattered sparsely over the landscape, each with its shadow and little dams seeming to run uphill.  

There is a drought, needless to say, and they were feeding the sheep by hand outside Parkes. The ground was cracked open and the creeks were dry, and yet it was to me, enchanting and magnetic, and I couldn't bear to turn back to the city." 

So in Harrower's letters, the world is beautiful and a largely benign place. The darkness she has to deal with is provided rather by other people – as Susan observed, often by Kit Hazzard and by her other dependent friends. Here's a letter from the following year, July 73.  

"I had a call from Daphne last Monday morning (Daphne was one of Kit's friends) to say that Kit was very low. I rang Kit, rang Andrew – Andrew was Kit's psych nurse and went over to the chimes at 2. He arrived with his yellow pills at 3 and we stayed in spite of being invited to go till about 7:30, by which time we'd all had three cups of tea, three brandies, and three cups of coffee and snacks, and by which time the scene had improved considerably.  

When I first got there, I thought Kit must have taken ten tranquillisers all at once, she was so sunk and inert. After great talking's and silences and arguing, and she doesn't always feel friendly towards Elizabeth and Andrew. So it might be best if you never said a kind word about us. We learned the reason for this bad slump. She had run out of, and deliberately stopped taking, the yellow pills.  

When we suggested local holidays she said she couldn't afford them. No wonder the doctor had given me a bottle of tranquillisers this week. I despise myself rather for needing them, but my weird mob, friends that they are, always have sad bad times at the same time. Oh yes, I think it was when Kit said to Andrew that she had been 'unlucky and never found anyone to listen to her troubles'. It must have been about then that we all had the third brandy to console ourselves."  

Shirley Hazzard was a very different kind of writer. If Harrower's letters a brimful of a natural, spontaneous wit and lively insight, Hazzard's are at once more disclosing, more formal. She writes of the pleasure she takes in the world around her, definitely. And her accounts are compelling, but not so personal.  

This is June 1973: "My dear Elizabeth. After unruly, countable horrors of the Italian mails. We hit the jackpot with a concentration of your letters and had a delicious and literary time reading them in, yes, blue Capri. I sit typing this, looking into our horizon of blue Rothko, against which psychedelic notes are struck by pots of lobelia and geranium.  

We're in Paradise here. It is so natural to be in Paradise that we're having second thoughts about the doctrine of original sin. No cars in itself would be such a holiday. Added to that such beauty and calm and incredible weather. We get up early, have breakfast in the sun, inspect sea, mountains, etc. with critical eye, work, sit in cafe and read papers, take long walk, read, eat, go to bed. It is as if there was never anything other. And even when there is drama to be found, it can read like a novel.  

Elizabeth, the chaos that fell on us tooth and claw when we put our foot off that beloved island does give us pause. To sketch in a few essentials, we left Capri in a violent storm after weeks of such September October beauty as you never saw. We swam in mid-October, just before storm broke, marvellous. Arrived in Naples to spend the night before taking train to Rome. Shoot out at side of hotel just around the corner in via Santa Lucia. Battle between contraband bands of drug and cigarette smugglers. Street of 1890s buildings, each palazzo closing its big portone doors as fast as possible, while desperate pedestrians sought to be admitted in flight from hail of bullets. Hotel informed us that train might not leave on morrow, as all trains suspended between Naples and Rome because of bomb threat on line.  

Did leave, however. Uncheerful feeling of being first to try out minefield. Arrived Rome airport - a hellhole. Best of times - to find Air France on strike from that moment. Waited five hours. Managed to get ourselves on Alitalia flight. Arrived Paris. Shirl's luggage missing. All Shirl has was what she stood up in. The proverbial toothbrush was absent."  

So a little bit of the personal, but not too much. In Harrower’s was letters. We have a different order of drama. Again. Her lived experience of political life in the upheavals of 1975, with the sacking of the Whitlam government and its aftermath.  

So here's a letter from, late 1976. "A word from the bush dear friends. A heavenly day in an incredibly pretty valley. Remote, sunny, sweet, cool air. M and I, on the way back to Sydney in 2 or 3 days after two weeks of driving through country. Was very glad to get away from Sydney Harbour. 

The Monday 20th September meeting at Town Hall for constitutional reform was packed and overflowing. All ages and all relieved and happy to see each other still caring as much as ever. Those who fall away because they only want to be on the winning side are well lost. Patrick” – Patrick White – “will be home when we get back. Hurrah! Cristina,”– Cristina Stead – “Cristina says to me, Patrick and Mannoli are your brothers, and I do count on them as if they were. Though I have never felt that relatives mattered more than friends.  

Harrower was also very invested in Hazzard's work and her achievements, her successes. In January 1977, Hazzard published in the New Yorker magazine a lengthy essay called Letter from Australia. Much of the information for which had been provided by Harrower, or through Harrower's circles. The publication was reported in Australia and Hazzard was interviewed.  

Harrower wrote in 1977 "M and I had dinner at Patrick's last Wednesday. There were two conservative friends present. It became very lively. You must share some of the entirely good responsibility, dear Shirl, because some of the first words exchanged were about your letter.” – Meaning letter from Australia. – “Lucid explains it just as it was, had to be said, all with speaking looks. 

We were very pleased that the ABC went into action with the AM interview. Everyone listens to that program. The advanced announcement that yours was the longest article about Australia in the outside world for 25 years.” – It's such a telling, kind of cultural cringe statement, the longest article for 25 years –  “would have caught attention too, it would be too painful to describe in detail, the warnings days before this event to why M, to organise transistor, batteries, alarm clock, God knows what else. On the morning itself, 4 or 5 calls. Then she missed it.  

Back to Susan. 

Susan Wyndham: So this was a friendship, as you can see, that thrived largely because it was conducted through letters, which enabled Hazzard and Harrower to read and reply at leisure, to share scenes from their lives and reading, to think carefully about their responses. And when necessary, to cool down and be tactful. There were also telegrams and phone calls when news or congratulations or condolences needed to be passed on quickly. But these friends met in person only six times - in London, in Sydney and in Italy in 1984, when Hazzard and Steegmuller persuaded Harrower to visit them there.  

By then, Harrower was feeling somewhat burdened by all that she had done for Kit Hazzard. While Shirley wrote her books and travelled with her lovely husband to the beautiful places you've just heard about from Brigitta. She thought Hazzard was becoming grand in her tone, as The Transit of Venus and her books about the United Nations brought her public acclaim. They irritated each other in Italy, Hazzard keeping up long monologues and an exhausting schedule. Harrower, resisting being swept up in Hazzard's plans, complaining about the expensive accommodation her friends had arranged and paid for.  

After a few days together on Capri she abruptly cut her trip short. The friendship could have ended then. The letters that followed were polite but evasive, and curt. Harrower sent a postcard from Sydney on her return in December 1984, which said in part, "I've cared about you both a great deal for years and refuse not to be cared for back, because all of a sudden I got worn down and ran out of energy." 

Hazzard replied quickly, "No, please. I did not say, not to write a letter, merely that you needn't tackle a long letter on exhausted return. Nor, as I said on the phone, do you have to refuse not to be cared about. There is no question of that." This old friendship recovered and carried on warmly, though more carefully, for another 20 years.  

They had shared so much difficulty and so much enjoyment. They had so much in common as well as their differences. As they aged, they shared losses. Kit died in 1985. Frances Steegmuller in 1994. Close friends including for Harrower, the writers Patrick White, Christina Stead, Kylie Tennant, while Hazzard marked the deaths of Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia and William Maxwell. 

They withdrew gradually from public life, though Hazzard finally completed her last novel, The Great Fire was published in 2003 to critical acclaim and won the US National Book Award and the Miles Franklin here. These wonderful letters are an account of two great writing lives, and of the world that they lived in. They had the sweep of biography and history and also the shape of a novel. 

Over 40 years there is a great narrative arc as there is in well-written fiction, with rising tension, dramatic peaks, thrilling climaxes, and quiet denouement. We have to remember that even the most sincere letters are a form of creative writing. Hazzard even wrote drafts of some letters. Both Hazzard and Harrower were prolific correspondents with many friends, and it's fascinating to see how they had different voices for different people. Even when they told the same stories they might include or leave out different details. We choose how we want to present ourselves to our friends, and when we write, we have the control over how we craft our persona.  

Brigitta and I were privileged to become more familiar with Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower through their own intimate words. We laughed often as we edited this huge bundle of letters down to a book sized collection, and we choked up every time we approached the elegiac ending, which is full of memories and mutual concern. They last saw each other in Sydney in 2005, when Hazzard received her Miles Franklin Award. And then their communication gradually fell away as Hazzard became unwell.  

These are Harrower's last two notes. "Cremorne, 13th June 2005. Dearest Shirley, too much to say, except that I look forward so much to seeing you. The sooner the better. If we can speak when you when you arrive, we can arrange times, places. You suggested, prompt lunch or even a cup of tea and perhaps dinner on Friday 17th or 18th. I'd like any or all of these. You say you hope to be recognisable, and I look much more worn than I feel. But we’ll know each other. With love. Elizabeth." 

And then she sent a Christmas card with a Japanese woman holding a light up over a plum blossom tree in flower. This is an undated card, but sent in 2008. "Dearest S, this card, a light in the darkness. It was good to hear your voice when you left a message some weeks or months ago. Then weeks ago, I rang when it was too late for me and too early for you. You seem to say, or I seem to remember your saying, that you'd been in bed since January because of trouble with your left leg. But perhaps I was dazed or am now because of lack of sleep. Then I told you Margaret would be 93 in January and you spoke a little of getting on with your work. Not sure where you will be for Christmas. You're often in Italy, I know. I hope to stagger through the day and survive. I think of you, of Frances, of YM somewhat differently. The prodigious letters and thoughts exchanged. The girl in your story who often comes to mind, hoping to see things less clearly. With love. E" 

The end. Thank you.  

Brigitta Olubas: Thank you all very much. 

UNSW Centre for Ideas: Thanks for listening. This event was presented by the UNSW Centre for Ideas and the Sydney Writers' Festival as part of the Curiosity Lecture series. For more information, visit unswcentreforideas.com and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.