| Chapter : | Introduction |
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inheritances and its modernity; the protagonists are motivated by the question of how to make sense of the social and aesthetic drives of the postwar nation, such as sexual freedom, the Italian film industry, affluence in the face of the immense aesthetic storehouse of Italy’s cities, towns, houses, rooms, and the overwhelming poverty and struggle that continue to make up daily life for its citizens. As Gioconda explains to Jenny in The Bay of Noon:
“In the war we all had to choose, there are no hypothetical positions left to be taken. In this country, everything has been demonstrated. That’s why the talk is often about trivialities—who has the malocchio, who is stingy, who is homosexual; whereas in other countries, people can go on talking out their moral positions on the assumption that they will never be called on to live up to them by sacrificing their means, or their standing, or their children, or their lives.…”
Another time she told me, “I think that’s why films were such a big thing in Italy after the war. It was something fresh, untainted—an art whose practitioners hadn’t as yet disgraced themselves.” (145–146)
In January 1963 Hazzard met the man who became her husband—eminent literary translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller, twenty-four years her senior—at a party given by their mutual friend, writer Muriel Spark, at the Beaux Arts Hotel in New York. The recent biography of Spark by Martin Stannard describes the meeting and includes a photograph of Spark’s apartment, her own windows marked in pen, with a flourish: “The Scene of the First Encounter between Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller by Muriel Spark. (Her best book ever).” Hazzard has recollected the meeting in terms familiar from her fiction:
I noticed Francis, whom I’d never met, as he entered the room. He was, and is, very tall; he was very serious, even austere; and he was wearing a fawn-coloured greatcoat, a sort of British Warm, which he has to this day.… It was a singular moment: colpo di fulmine—a lightning bolt. In any case we sat down in a corner together and