| Chapter : | Introduction |
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dreaming indeed that idealism was the last thing that was wanted there. (Garrett 38)
Hazzard was employed at a menial level: “When asked about her role in the UN, “‘ I typed,’ she said. ‘I was still typing when I had the exalted title of administrative assistant in development programs’” (Robertson 19), and she has written trenchantly about the organisation’s continuing failure to recognise the skills of its female employees. In cultural and imaginative terms, too, this time was a period of lack: “I lived an obscure and penurious life in New York for several years, working at the UN … a very deprived life … a starvation diet” (Garrett 38). Hazzard first visited Italy with the UN in 1956, spending a year with the international mission to supply the peacekeeping force set up to send equipment to the UN forces during the Suez crisis. During this year based in Naples, she also travelled within Italy and began to spend time at the Villa Solaia near Siena, in the home of the Vivante family, “who had been resisters during the war. For some years afterwards their only means of subsistence was taking in lodgers, who joined the circle around matriarch Elena, a poet and painter, and her husband, a philosopher” (Crawford 12). Hazzard has described how, under this influence, she began to embrace vital and humanistic rather than survival values, finding the experience transformative in its effects on her aesthetic, ethical, and imaginative life: “From the first day [in Naples], everything changed. I was restored to life and power and thought” (Wyndham 30).
In Italy, the mysteries remain important: the accidental quality of existence, the poetry of memory, the impassioned life that is animated by awareness of eventual death. There is still synthesis, rather than formula. There is still expressive language. (O’Grady 8)
During this period Hazzard began to write. Her first story was published in The New Yorker in 1961 and after signing a first reading agreement with the magazine shortly after, Hazzard was able to resign from her position at the United Nations.