The Transit of Venus — Shirley Hazzard (1980)
Shirley Hazzard writes vividly of young women in affairs with married men, engaged men, older men. In The Transit of Venus, she writes dialogue, internal and external, so well that sometimes I did not want to keep reading, because I knew the outcome of one affair or another would end badly. I wanted to shout out to the women, “don’t do it, not him!”
My sample size is small. I read and reviewed Hazzard’s slim 1969 novel, The Evening of the Holiday, which featured a young single English woman on holiday in Italy in an affair with an older married man. It was a beautiful and simple narrative of an older man’s search for someone or something to energize his middle age malaise, and the young woman’s ambivalent acquiescence to the man’s overtures.
The Transit of Venus is much more ambitious, and complex, and revolves around the lives of two Australian sisters, born in the mid-1930s, orphaned, who move to England as young women, and of their lives and loves through the 1970s. The language is dense with color and intense meaning, with three or four similes or metaphors on each page, and with obscure words every couple of pages that I had to look up in the dictionary.
Hazzard makes a slow reader even slower, as lines are read and re-read to make sure they are understood. The words are so rich and evocative that you want to savor every allusion. She likes to make decisive statements to lock in a change of perspective, a hidden desire, a decision, often triggered by only a key phrase in a snippet of polite conversation. Here, there is an educated, good-looking, kind, young married couple, Ted and Margaret, in which the husband secretly and impossibly loves, unrequited, another woman:
He said [to his wife], “If you knew your beauty.”
Even the cat listened. Margaret said, “If I did, what then?”
“You’d set the world swinging.”
They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.
Or here, in just three consecutive paragraphs on a single page, the reader can see the dense, vivid imagination of Hazzard, describing the internal and the external:
She wished to rise to some solitary height. From ignorance she had an unobstructed view of knowledge – which she saw, on its elevation, stately, pale, pure as the Acropolis…
…The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping…
A bark, a bell, a farmer calling in an animal, a baby’s wail. These were the only sounds, but they struck eternity. On the hillside below them, a door standing wide on the yellow light of a shabby hall was a declaration of peace.
The women are of an earlier era. The men pursue, while the women are passive, silent, knowing what is to happen, waiting for the brush of hands, waiting for the kiss, waiting to decide until the last moment whether to respond to the touch. Late in the novel, in the 1970s, there is a one-night stand, that Hazzard dismally contrasts with an earlier time:
A generation earlier and this episode would have had to mean something to her. She would even have had to pretend it meant something to me [the man]. That deception is the one thing we are being spared.
There are cads aplenty, often men of means, of manners, debonair. Men who are a “catch.” But, woe to the man who does not know how to end an affair in a way that affords some measure of dignity to the woman. Our main character, Caroline, is self-sufficient, smart, handsome, and finds herself, repeatedly over many years, in the orbit of the most educated, urbane, well-read, polite, self-centered, handsome man to be imagined by a once poor and neglected orphan. Hazzard finally dispatches him with a marvelous 2-page description of his departure from Caroline on a foul, wretched, crowded, litter-strewn NYC subway car of the 1970s:
These [riders] might have been the founders of a new race that disdained expression and was indifferent to cruelty or compassion, or their own disease. If, here among them, Paul fell dead on the dirty floor, he would be no more than an obstacle to the exit.
This novel is a marvel of the senses, of dense description of controlled emotion. It makes no compromises of convenience for the characters or the readers. It demands close attention. It also demands a second reading to appreciate the clues to its ambiguous and unexpected conclusion.
I think I will expand my sample size of Shirley Hazzard. I wonder whether she will claim, again and again, the territory of a smart pre-feminist woman who impassively receives the attentions of a man who desires to consume her intelligence and vulnerabilities.
Bob Fall 