It’s a fact readily acknowledged that one can encounter some books simply too late in life to appreciate — or, in some cases, even tolerate — them. The famous examples include “The Catcher in the Rye,” most of the Beats, all of Anaïs Nin. But I’m more curious about the counterpoint: Those books said to require experience, and age, to unlock.
Shirley Hazzard’s newly reissued novel “The Transit of Venus” (1980) reigns in this category. Critics declare it a masterpiece while sharing strangely similar stories of first encountering it in youth with confused irritation. “Why the fuss,” the Australian novelist Michelle de Kretser recalled thinking, in her recent monograph on Hazzard, who died in 2016. Twenty years later, they chance upon it again and are thunderstruck by its genius. “One of the most important postwar novels,” Geoff Dyer has described it, speculating that he might have been too young the first time around, when he gave up around page 72.
Too young for what? The plot is chaste, and simplicity itself. I can stuff it into one sentence. Two orphaned Australian sisters arrive in England in the 1950s: placid, fair Grace, who marries a wealthy and officious bureaucrat, and independent, dark-haired Caroline, who falls in love with the unscrupulous (and attached) Paul Ivory, while another man, the shabby and sweet Ted Tice, pines for her.
Nothing unduly challenging — except, perhaps, that the book is precisely about the misapprehensions of youth, of missing the point and those late-in-life revelations that return us to elemental questions — “Who are the weak?” Caroline wonders. “Who are the strong?” It’s a novel about being wrong about this question and so many others, about our gorgeous and distressing human confidence, the way we march around, plucky protagonists in our minds, armed with horrifyingly partial knowledge of the motivations of those around us. To say nothing of the forces we cannot see. Hazzard’s stories are always enfolded in larger histories, of geological time, of empire’s “jagged devastations” and the long shadow of World War I, which darkens almost every page of this novel, in the broken bodies of former soldiers, the “scabs” of blackout paint on the windows, the cowed fright of the characters, even at their calmest. As the sisters sit, eating desert, Hazzard lingers on their necks — “intolerably exposed,” she writes. “You could practically feel the axe.”
When Hazzard’s husband, the biographer Francis Steegmuller, remarked that “no one should have to read ‘The Transit of Venus’ for the first time,” he might have been referring to its cunning foreshadowing. There is an unnamed dead body on the first page; shortly after, we learn Ted Tice will eventually take his own life. Hazzard seeds clues throughout, along with a trap “for the inattentive reader,” as she once put it.
Here we feel Hazzard’s design upon us, her challenge — to read with an intensity matching her prose. Did it ever rain in fiction — really properly rain — before “The Transit of Venus”? Has the mud streamed in that particularly vivid way, has a character stuffed his sopping cap into his waterlogged pockets, squelched indoors and stood, horribly aware of the smell of his wet socks, the way Ted Tice does, watching his cheap suitcase leak its orange dye all over the floor?
The pleasure this writing affords — its plushness, patient description, etherizing beauty — does not stem from its closeness to life, however. The pleasure Hazzard wants to convey is novelistic and bound up in the act and fact of reading. Hence her love for coincidences, for tellingly significant names (of course, anyone named Hazzard must be granted lenience on this score), for referring to characters by their full names, for patterns. The transit of Venus occurs in pairs; the novel is full of them — two sisters, two ill sons, even two significant watches and two umbrellas. The desire to label Hazzard as a writer concerned with “intimacy” is strange; she relishes handling her characters as characters, drawing our attention to the way she marches them across the chessboard, repeatedly depicting them as looking out of or being seen through windows, as if to remind us that we too are seeing them through a frame.
The novel is threaded with quotations, scraps of poems. When placid Grace recalls a fleeting flirtation with her son’s doctor, the happiness of their afternoons as they pored over the X-rays, she says, “It was like Paolo and Francesca.” Only when I read the book for the second time (naturally) did the richness of this reference strike me. Paolo and Francesca are the adulterers in Dante’s Inferno; they fall in love while reading a love story together about another pair of adulterers — Lancelot and Guinevere. It’s a detail that could be relished on its own for its pleasing symmetries, but Hazzard is always leading us further. Pace Joan Didion, it’s not merely that we tell ourselves stories in order to live; Hazzard shows us that we tell ourselves other people’s stories in order to form our own. She was fond of quoting a line from her friend Graham Greene, that our lives are more influenced by books than people. “It is out of books,” he wrote in “Travels With My Aunt,” that “one learns about love and pain at second hand.”
None of these effects feel at all self-conscious or knowing but full of purity and rigor (she famously revised each page of the novel some 20 times).
Hazzard described reading as “the marvelous adventure of my life.” Born in Australia to a magnificently ill-suited couple (her father was an alcoholic, her mother bipolar), she scarcely survived her peripatetic and “ghastly” childhood. Her formal education ended at 16 — not that it troubled her much. She was already a committed autodidact, and had committed so much poetry to memory that she described herself as a walking anthology. “By the time I was 25, I had emerged from a lot of trouble,” she said. “I had also, more interestingly, lived for appreciable periods in six countries and diverse languages.” She worked for the U.N. and wrote two scathing books about her experience as well as a raft of short fiction.
In her introduction, Lauren Groff also describes her multiple encounters with the book, and how she has come to understand it as a story not merely about love but “more deeply and subtly” about power. But of course, for Hazzard, love and power form an intricate braid. “I never had, or wished for, power over you,” Ted confesses to Caroline, and then clarifies: “That isn’t true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. But not advantage, or authority.” A strange line — enigmatic, honest. Does Caroline understand the difference? Do I? Am I old enough or young enough? It’s a beautiful book, Proust said, that gives us new desires, not merely new answers.
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