The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  The sense of the immense load of work that is required from anyone taking on the job of writing a biography of a major public figure has stayed with me. I never read La Nauze’s book on Deakin—the idea of it seemed too heavy—but despite his weariness with the demands of it that particular Monday morning it must have turned out to be a beauty, because Allan Martin, the biographer of Robert Menzies, whose two-volume biography I have read and who knew what he was talking about, said that La Nauze’s Deakin, which appeared in 1965, ‘established a standard of excellence in Australian political biography not subsequently matched’. I was relieved to read Martin’s words, and felt glad La Nauze had beaten his octopus. And I took his advice to heart. The idea of writing a biography scared me, and I have stayed well away from attempting it, though I have a number of friends who have succeeded eminently as biographers. Hazel Rowley was foremost among them.

  She was a very special friend and a greatly admired writer and scholar who often complained bitterly to me from La Nauze’s Monday morning position, but who also, like John La Nauze, was sufficiently passionate about and committed to her subjects to go on wrestling the beasts and to finish her work at a level of excellence that is bewilderingly fine and for which it is difficult to find comparisons. Reading biography remains one of my favourite things to do. I’m presently reading Josyane Savigneau’s biography of the French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, and it is enriching my life, just as Yourcenar’s own work has done. Indeed, Yourcenar’s masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian, is surely the most inspired and perfect blending of the three arts of biography, memoir and the novel. I can say, and often do, with serious and genuine gratitude, thank god for biographers.

  On Friday, 8 August 2003, at a little after noon, I was having lunch with the eminent Melbourne editor and writer Hilary McPhee in Mario’s cafe on Brunswick Street in Carlton. Predictably, I suppose, among the things we talked about were books that we admired. We weren’t talking about the latest books or even books that had been published recently. We were talking about books which had left a deep impression and which had remained with us over the years. Hilary told me that, in her opinion, one of the great Australian books was Hazel Rowley’s biography of the novelist Christina Stead. It had been published by William Heinemann in 1993 to rave reviews. Had I read it?

  No, I hadn’t, I was ashamed to admit. Straight after lunch I walked down to the Brunswick Street Bookstore and asked for a copy of Rowley’s biography of Stead. I was told it was out of print. So I walked on a bit further to the Grubb Street secondhand bookshop. I found a copy on the shelves in pristine condition and bought it for twenty-five dollars. Hazel’s first book, Christina Stead, was published by William Heinemann in 1993, ten years before my conversation with Hilary and twenty years before now. Twenty years? Is it a long time? It depends. I was in a restaurant in Norwich last year having dinner with a bunch of writers. We were attending a conference and festival at East Anglia University. Michael Ondaatje arrived late and stood at the door looking around the restaurant. Michael and I became friends in 1993 and had not seen each other since except for a brief stay I made in Toronto. He spied me sitting in the far corner from the door and came over and grasped me in his bear hug and kissed me firmly on the cheek, his own bristly cheek reminding me of my father’s kiss. When we drew away, I said: It’s twenty years, Michael! As if I’d said, It’s a lifetime. He replied at once with great force and emotion. Twenty years is nothing, Alex! It was a poetic claim and its truth struck me to the heart. So twenty years then, this year, since Hazel’s first great book, Christina Stead, came out to rave reviews with William Heinemann Australia. For those readers whom that book impressed, twenty years is no time at all. Great books, like great friends, leave an impression that refuses to fade with the passing of time. Michael was right.

  I took Hazel’s Stead home with me, from Grubb Street that day ten years ago, Hilary’s warmth of feeling for the book still fresh with me, and I read it at once. Later on in the year, around late November (I’ve no diary entry for the exact date) Jason Steger, the literary editor of the Age asked me for my list of the books I’d most enjoyed reading in 2003. I was grateful Jason didn’t object when I asked if I could write about one out-of-print book. Here’s what I wrote. It appeared in the Age on 13 December 2003 (I’ve kept a copy of it pasted inside my copy of Hazel’s book):

  Hazel Rowley’s 1993 biography of the Australian novelist Christina Stead is for me one of the great literary biographies of all time and must be counted among Australia’s intellectual treasures. I read it the first time with greedy, engrossed application and a fiercely selfish need to be left alone with it. It is written with an enormous scholarly sweep and the dramatic drive of a novel. Hazel’s Christina Stead is as central to the richness of our literary life as David Marr’s great biography of Patrick White. In both cases subject and biographer are ideally matched—indeed almost dangerously so in Rowley’s case, for there is a sense here that the biographer finds something central to her own life in the life of her subject and shares with her subject something of the same vulnerabilities. Get it from your library if you can’t get it in a bookshop. For, ridiculously, sadly, it’s out of print. Our gutted literary culture.

  Louise Adler, bless her heart, has since then of course brought this splendid book back into print, a publishing act of faith that thrilled and delighted Hazel and lifted her morale and energies at a time when she was feeling particularly beleaguered.

  I had never met Hazel when I wrote that piece for the Age and had no expectation of ever meeting her. I knew by then that she lived in New York and spent as much time as she possibly could in Paris. A friend of Hazel’s sent her a copy of what I’d written and Hazel wrote me a letter via my publisher. I wrote back by email. And so began an email correspondence that over the years until her death must have run into many thousands. You are my hero, Hazel said in her letter. I thought I was forgotten. It wasn’t a bad start to what became the most magically trusting epistolary friendship I’ve ever had, or am ever likely to have. For nearly eight years we wrote to each other almost every day. Nothing was too private or too sensitive for us. No momentary rage too fearful not to be included in the moment of its white heat. We excluded nothing. We felt safe with each other.

  It is not necessary, and can be, I believe, damaging, to try to understand love—indeed, understanding is, in my opinion, a vastly overrated thing when it comes to our motives and emotions and to art and life generally. Although we had never met, Hazel and I trusted each other completely and wrote to each other with a freedom and energy I’d never experienced before in writing letters—emails were our letters, of course. Email, after all, has made the quill redundant. We didn’t write scrappy little grabs just because we were using this instantaneous medium, but respected both the language and each other and wrote decently, with thought, with reflection, and with enormous enthusiasm about everything that deeply and shallowly concerned us. I’ve included an exchange between us that took place very close to the time of Hazel’s death. We knew nothing about death at that stage. Death was far off. Hazel and I had often spoken of how she would survive me by many years. I was supposed to go first, indeed long before her.

  Sent: Friday, February 11, 2011 7:42 PM

  Dearest Haze,

  Here you are again! Boldly centerfolded in the Age two weeks in a row. This time it’s you more than the book. My god, if this book doesn’t sell bucket loads here it won’t be for lack of backing from Louise and Jason Steger. I don’t think I’ve seen Carey get this much Age space two weeks in a row—and I have gone nowhere near it.

  Congratulations! This must surely make up a bit for the down shit you’ve been experiencing over there. You come out of it boldly and vigorously and as one of us who has made it strongly into the front rank in New York. I hope you are thoroughly pleased and your morale has received a jolt upward. And a great photo. The one of you striding through the park that you sent me.

  Your appearance at the Wheeler will
be packed.

  I have to make a pie for Rick and Meg Amor for lunch. But I couldn’t wait to tell you this great news.

  Enjoy!

  Love and hugs,

  Alecko

  Hazel responded the following morning, Saturday, 12 February:

  Alecko,

  I love your enthusiastic emails. I got one from Louise Adler this morning too. She’s ecstatic! I can’t get on to the damn thing online. Don’t know why not. Glad you told me which photo it is. Louise just said it was a lovely photo. (Yeah, carefully culled.) I DID see the review in today’s Australian, which is muddleheaded, but very positive. It’s wonderful for me, this reception, you’re so right. It means so much to me. The shit here has been heartbreaking. So this is just fucking wonderful. I told you, didn’t I, that I am thinking of coming back to Australia in three years or so. It has suddenly become an immensely appealing thought.

  Everyone I know and their dog is coming to the Wheeler Centre! I tell them that you and I are having dinner together.

  Amazing really. It all seems quite unreal.

  I’m off this weekend to the Hudson Valley to give a talk at a little place called Kinderhook, staying the night at a friend’s up there. Old house etc. Should be great fun. Snow on the ground.

  Good Lord. I leave in two weeks, you know. I have to start getting out some summer clothes. I’m as white as hell, of course. And thin.

  This business has done nothing for my appetite.

  Must get on with things. Hope you’re still writing in white heat. Thanks so much for the beautiful message.

  Much love,

  Hazel

  Hazel’s sense of home was about as conflicted and elaborate as my own. She loved to remind me that she was born in England, was spiritually at home only in Paris, and was just as uncertain of finding herself at home in Australia as I was at the idea of ever finding myself at home in England. Something of this was recorded in her books. Her biographical notes were different for each book and for each edition of each book. She never quite settled on which country was her home country—perhaps because none really was. There were also political reasons for these variations in her biographical notes. For Richard Wright, her truly great biography of the African American novelist whose work seems to be little known here, she and her publishers considered it politic to leave out any reference to her English origins or to refer in any direct way to the fact that she was a white Australian, and instead to emphasise her American connections, which were considerable. No author photo was included with this book for the same reason. ‘How in hell did you happen?’ the Chicago sociologist Robert Park once asked Richard Wright. This is quoted in the blurb of Hazel’s biography of Wright. Robert Park might as well have asked this question of Hazel Rowley, and of many writers who often appear among us, arriving from the most unlikely origins, and going they know not where. The first subject of Hazel’s work, Christina Stead, like Hazel herself, was only truly at home within the borders of her work; for the rest she was an uncertain nomad. Hazel might have been writing of herself when she says in Christina Stead:

  In her autobiographical piece ‘Another View of the Homestead’, which told of her four-month return to Australia in 1969, Stead played down the ‘going home’ aspect and portrayed herself—in strikingly Nietzschean terms—as a wanderer. She was enthusiastic about being ‘a temporary citizen of a flying village with fiery windows, creaking and crashing across the star-splattered dark’. She made clear that ‘home’, for a traveller like herself, was only ever a temporary arrangement.

  After her return to Australia, Stead never wrote again, only letters to friends, but continued to hope, Hazel tells us in this moving passage in her book, that she was not finished with writing yet. In writing about Stead, Hazel was writing about a kindred spirit.

  In my faulty memory—and whose memory isn’t at fault?—Hazel and I met only once. When I made this claim recently, Hazel’s oldest and closest friend, Lyn Buchanan, reminded me that I had met Hazel on another occasion. Lyn was right; there had been one other occasion. But still my obstinate memory makes its claim that we met only once. I suppose it’s more literary, more to the story’s liking, to have it this way, more easily part of the fictional narrative of my life that I like to cherish. I once wrote a piece in which I claimed to favour the mask of fiction as a vehicle for my truths over the bare-faced facts of memoir. Once again, it is Marguerite Yourcenar who has the beautifully simple insight to accompany this idea when she says ‘eventually the mask becomes the real face’.

  The meeting with Hazel I like to refer to in my memory as the only one that ever took place was at the Sydney Writers’ Festival a few years ago. We had lunch together at a table by the water in the sun with Drusilla Modjeska and Rai Gaita, both much-loved friends. We were to meet again at the Wheeler Centre, where I was going to chair a celebration of her wonderful books. We were to have dinner together afterwards. We both said we must keep it to just the two of us for this dinner, as it might be our only chance to ever sit together, tete-a-tete, and talk our beloved talk. We never had that dinner. Hazel died on the 1st of March. I still struggle to believe she is dead and is not somewhere between New York and Paris, the eternal wanderer. Her silence makes no sense. So I have returned to her books and I find her in them.

  When our friendship began in 2003 Hazel had published two grand and very powerful biographies. The second, Richard Wright: The Life and Times, was published in 2001 by Henry Holt. The appearance of this book was overshadowed by the events of 9/11. The two African American critics who reviewed the book were exuberant in their enthusiasm for it, though it remains little known here in Australia. When I hear Australians lamenting the intellectual insularity of the Americans and the French I think of this and of how unconscious we can be of our own insularity.

  When I met her, Hazel was working in a new direction. She had swerved away from the traditional form of the great scholarly biography and taken a new path. She was writing about a great relationship rather than a great individual; Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre was a study of the relationship of these two giants of French culture and literature. In the book Hazel stares squarely into the private lives of this legendary couple, and she does so without making any moral judgments on their behaviour. Like all the great writers, Hazel leaves moral judgment to her readers. The book was published in the USA by HarperCollins in 2005. Hazel posted me a copy on publication, inscribing it: For Alex, far away soulmate, with love, Hazel Oct 2005. She included with the book a postcard. I still have it. It is a picture of the terrace of a Paris cafe, two vacant chairs and a little round table. We are not sitting there together talking the talk. But we might have been. And perhaps we were in spirit.

  Tete-a-Tete is not a study of the thought or the writings of Beauvoir and Sartre but a ground-breaking excursion into the formidably difficult business of making a portrait of greatness and genius linked to the intimate lives of her subjects. Hazel understood that this was the challenge of this book and it is why she considered it an advance on her previous work. The intimate lives of their subjects are not easy for biographers and historians to get at convincingly. But in Tete-a-Tete Hazel gets there with the narrative power of a novelist. This is not a book that can be described by the usual conventions of biography. As Barbara Ehrenreich said of it, ‘Tete-a-Tete has just about everything: sex, philosophy, politics, and the world’s most unconventional love story. Hard as I tried, I could not put it down.’

  Like most writers, when Hazel had finished a book, she struggled with the business of settling on a subject for her next. The worst time, in many ways, for any writer is just after a book has been finished. You have lost your anchor. Almost lost your job. You may easily lose your faith altogether in the entire process of writing. Who, after all, needs another book? Haven’t we got enough yet? You’ve been made redundant until and unless you settle firmly on a new subject for your next book and get going with it. With Tete-a-Tete Hazel had succeeded in find
ing her way through the conventional expectations of publishers and readers of biography and had elaborated, with intelligence and imagination, a new sub-genre of that grand species. How to continue after doing something like that was the big question facing her. The subjects that Hazel took on, from the beginning with Christina Stead, were all of the first order of importance to the cultural record. She didn’t go for little-known or unknown people. Nor did the existence of several, or even a hundred, previous books about her subject daunt her. She wrote about her subjects because she had fallen in love with something about them and their lives. And in the end she didn’t write unless she believed she had something new to say about them.

  With Tete-a-Tete Hazel had found a new way of approaching her already world-famous subjects, and with her new way she had found a new readership. It wasn’t a form she was going to give up easily. Franklin and Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage, continued along the path she had set out for herself. In October 2010, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Franklin and Eleanor in the USA, Hazel posted me a copy with the dedication: For Alecko, my inbox mate and inspiration, with love, Hazel, New York Oct 7, 2010. I’d become Alecko by then and she had become Azelle. She couldn’t wait to enjoy the enthusiastic reception that was waiting for her and her book here in Melbourne. She had a bit of a fever but couldn’t bear the thought that if she went to see her doctor he would tell her she couldn’t fly. So she didn’t go to see her doctor. She was fifty-nine and scared as hell, not of dying, but of growing old. I used to tell her it was great fun, being old—so far. Her tragic death in mid-flight affected a great many people. For me it is an enormous personal loss. But we are here this evening not to lament her loss, but to celebrate her, her courage, her success and her wonderful contribution to our cultural life, and to commemorate these things with our words, our thoughts, and with the award of the Hazel Rowley Fellowship. It is the love for Hazel of her sister Della that has brought this award into being. It is a wonderful thing to have done.