Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist B ...

Humanism, moreover, provides an internationalist optic in Hazzard’s political writings—in particular, her trenchant and meticulously researched critiques of United Nations policy and practice, which might at first seem an odd complement to her refined fiction. These works present two substantial arguments: first, that the US government’s post–World War II McCarthyist policies had indelible effects on the UN’s structure from its inception, inhibiting the effective prosecution of its international responsibilities; and second, that this structure itself facilitated the cover-up of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s Austrian Nazi Party affiliations (Hazzard was the first writer to air these claims publicly, in articles dating from 1980). Her argument is that the core failures of the United Nations derive from the inclination toward parochial and national rather than international public interest, constituting a failure of the UN’s internationalist charter. It is here that the connection between Hazzard’s political writing and her literary fiction becomes apparent: in the conviction that the ethical drive of the modern world must find its compass in the expanded geography and cultural mobility of the cosmopolitan. This conviction allows the very possibility of human agency in the novels while working to define the limits of national political influence. In this way, the statement from The Transit of Venus’s heroine, Caro Bell, that “London is our achievement. Our career for the time being” must be read not simply as an ironic comment on the social and imaginative disproportions of the colonialist globe but also as a literal landmark within the mobile and cosmopolitan geography of late modernity. An understanding of the profound importance of this kind of mobility and the ways it informs Hazzard’s political and intellectual groundings is thus a priority for reading her work in any depth or complexity.

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney on 30 January 1931, the second daughter of Reginald Hazzard, of Welsh background, and Catherine Stein Hazzard, whose background was Scottish. Her parents had met in Sydney while both were employed by a British firm involved in the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1920s, and they remained in Sydney after marrying. During the war years, Reginald Hazzard worked for the