Shirley Hazzard’s Republic of Letters

In writing about the novelist Shirley Hazzard, one should probably begin with a poem. After all, this is someone who said that poetry not only “opened [her] mind and [her] heart” but “changed the facts of [her] life,” too; someone whose early encounter with the poetry of Thomas Hardy was a literary coup de foudre (late in life, she would recite “After a Journey” and, as a friend recalls, “The distance between the poem and its meaning to her . . . seemed to collapse altogether”); someone who, in order to express her disgust with Richard Nixon, wrote his initials in the margins of Byron’s Don Juan next to many lines, including, “An orator of such set trash of phrase, / Ineffably, legitimately vile”; someone who struck up a friendship with Graham Greene when, sitting by him at a cafe in Capri, she provided him with the last line of Robert Browning’s “The Lost Mistress.”