Poor Hazel, it’d been a rough afternoon, as had my morning with Christina Stead, whom I’d interviewed in 1980. Mine ended a bit better if for no other reason than that Christina Stead was not pressed for time as Beauvoir had been – quite the opposite; the sorrow of Stead’s last years was a great loneliness when she returned to Australia after decades away. I interviewed her in Canberra, at University House where she was living. Her room was bleak, with institutional furniture and not much other than books and a bottle of vermouth to mark it as hers. When I packed up my notes and turned off the cumbersome tape recorder, to my surprise she invited me to lunch in the bistro downstairs. It was a bright, wintry day, and after the dim light of her room the gardens were dazzling: fresh air, silvery leaves, carp lazing in the pools. Over a bottle of wine something real happened between us; fleeting, but real. During the interview in its formal stage she had railed – as Beauvoir had not – about all the young women turning up to pump her for something – what exactly did we think she could give us? – when we could be writing our own books. Why does anyone want to know about the life of a writer? she asked in just about every interview from those last lonely years back in Australia, and before she died in March 1983, in a small hospital just up the road from where I live now, a piece of information I find oddly uncomfortable, I don’t know why. At the interview, I’d ploughed gallantly on, and she scowled, her face a dangerous red. When I asked about first being published, she found the question ridiculous. It was irrelevant, she insisted, nothing to do with writing at all. It wouldn’t have mattered a jot if all her books had ended up in a trunk under her bed. Really? Really. I didn’t believe her, but I was hardly going to say so, and I was far too – what, polite? girlish? cowed? – to challenge her. I went on down the list and it wasn’t much better. Hence my surprise when she suggested lunch. Wine? After that, definitely.
So, she said with a big, open smile, now it’s your turn. What was I doing here when I was clearly English? (I always sound more English when I’m nervous.) What had brought me here? So I told her about Nick, and a marriage made too young, and being the wrong shape for England, or that’s how it’d seemed growing up, and the liberation of discovering a place like Papua New Guinea, and coming here to Australia, alone, confused, not knowing what to do, whether to stay, to accept the offer of a place at ANU, here in Canberra where we were eating lunch, or limp back to England. What decided you? she asked. For Love Alone, I said, and I told her of the bleak days, alone in Sydney at the beginning of 1972, when I’d found her novel in a second-hand shop in George Street. I was staying in a cheap place up behind Central Station, near where Teresa Hawkins worked in the office of a factory, saving for her fare to London. I told her how I lay on my bed and read, how I walked for days, following Teresa’s footsteps out to Watsons Bay, to the university, to the Quay. If Teresa could make the journey in that direction, I could make it in this direction. It was she – you, I said, into that ferocious gaze – who gave me the courage to stay. Her rheumy old eyes glistened with tears, and she leaned across the table, her hand on mine, and said, That’s the best thing anyone can say to a writer. To move someone, that is what matters. Otherwise, she said, one’s books might as well stay in the trunk under the bed. I grinned at her, and there was nothing shame-faced in her response: a laugh, more wine in our glasses. There’s nothing more irritating than interview questions, she said again. Why didn’t we just read the novels; that’s where the life is. Yes, it is, Hazel and I agreed, especially in her case – but the point of interest for us, the fascination we shared, was for the ‘unpruned, tangled past’, as Hazel would later call it, and its pruned re-emergence in the masks of fiction or memoir, and the inevitable slippages into, or out from under, the mythologies a writer creates for herself, or are created around her. For us, the life and the work were not so easily disentangled. In fact, it was the tangle we liked – and that we lived. It would be the foundation of the four major biographical works Hazel would go on to write, starting with Christina Stead, which was published in 1993, three years after Poppy. And for me, too, it was a starting point, albeit contradictory, as I set about untangling my mother’s life, and its tangle with my own.
It was with Hazel more than anyone else that I talked about the written life, the biographical life. Sartre called it the biographical illusion; for him and Beauvoir a central tenet of their philosophy was that ‘a lived life can resemble a recounted life’. Could it? What would it mean to live life as if it were recounted, or with the recounting always in mind? Wouldn’t that be as bad as an all-observing, judging god? I was sceptical, thinking sequentially that the recounted life came after – but I didn’t then understand the fundamental premise of existentialism: the challenge to create meaning from the meaninglessness of existence. If there is no God – the secular starting point – then it is for us – for ‘man’, and woman too – to find truth in the face of uncertainty, or worse, and create meaning in our own lives. ‘Man is responsible for what he is,’ Sartre famously wrote. ‘We are alone, without excuses.’ That is why moral conduct matters. Otherwise it’s nihilism, as Nietzsche warned, or the rule of might, as in the occupation of Paris Sartre and Beauvoir lived through, or – in our case in the twenty-first century – the reign of unbridled capital and the flourishing of religious fundamentalisms: debased certainties in a world of uncertainty.
For Beauvoir, the challenge of creating moral meaning in her own life meant truth-telling, responsibility-taking, a life lived to an intellectual and ethical standard – which made some sense of the biographical illusion. It wasn’t that we should, or could, live a recounted life, but we could – and should? – live with an awareness of how we would answer, not at the gates of heaven, but to history, to the world we leave, and to biography. Or fiction – which is where the conversation joined with my, and our, conversation with Helen Garner. Would not the three of us agree, as Hazel wrote in her prologue to Christina Stead, that ‘turning life into story is one of humanity’s enduring pleasures’? She read to us from Stead’s 1936 novel The Beauties and Furies long before she quoted this in print: ‘The true portrait of a person should be built up as a painter builds it, with hints from everyone, brush strokes, thousands of little touches.’19 This could have been Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, trying to find the structure for her painting to hold together the many brush strokes.
Fifty years later, it could be Helen Garner finding the right form to hold together the small moments, the flicker of eros, as she’d put it, those tiny moments of connection, or disconnection, that can turn a life, a friendship, a love affair. She’d published The Children’s Bach, a near perfect novella, it’s been said, in 1984, the year after Christina Stead – and also Rebecca West – died, the year Poppy died, two years before Beauvoir joined Sartre in Montparnasse Cemetery. If I mark everything by death, it’s because during those years I did, and now, looking back, I can see that those years in the house on the corner spanned a decade in which the generations shifted forward, a decade in which the mothers died, the literary mothers and, in my case, an actual mother as well. If I were writing as a historian and not as myself, a participant, I’d say that those three books – The Children’s Bach, Poppy and Christina Stead – published within a decade of each other, marked a shift about more than just us. But this is a memoir not a history, and at the time I’m not at all sure we understood the significance of what we were doing as women, as writers, as part of a generation that was reframing the way we write the lives of women. It was not a perspective that we had then, or could have; we might think of Virginia Woolf in history, but not of ourselves, our own biographical illusion; we were living day by day, as one does in life not fiction, and the conversations at the table were as likely to be about our encounters with men – not just lovers, but the world of men that we saw all around us – as about literature – more probably, given the turbulence of our own lives of love, a sphere in which we were not doing so well at forging a new path.
Why was it,
Sophie asked only this year, that our generation of feminists – clever, able women who had never known war or hunger and had had all the benefits of a university education – made such a hash of it with men (and women too, often enough)? It’s a question we’d also asked in the house on the corner. Although Helen was about to embark on a third marriage, it remained to be seen, when she left the house on the corner to live with Murray, how two writers would live, and work, alongside each other. For Hazel and me, the messiness of it was more obvious as we negotiated our uneasy love affairs from the not entirely easy bastion of our own rooms. Hazel was another one who was tall and elegant, but despite her casual flair with clothes, she was very different from Sophie: different angles, different colouring. Men were drawn to her but they were also alarmed by her, not a good combination for an equal relationship. Men can like the idea of a prestigious or celebrated woman – it reflects well on them – but the reality can leave them feeling secondary. Helen knew it. Hazel knew it. Sophie knew it. So, in a muddled, contradictory way, did I, though it’d be a few years yet before I’d be attracting attention for anything I’d written. One of the reasons we, or at least I, loved Lily Briscoe was that she could, and did, ‘feel violently two opposite things at the same time’, such were the complexity of things. Merely watching a young couple in love – well, supposedly; they thought they were and everyone else did too – she experienced that rush of feeling at its beauty, its excitement, even while thinking it the ‘stupidest, the most barbaric of human passions’, that can turn a young man ‘with a profile like a gem … into a bully with a crowbar’.
Yet, she said to herself, from the dawn of time odes have been sung to love; wreaths heaped and roses; and if you asked nine people out of ten they would say they wanted nothing but this; while the women, judging from her own experience, would all the time be feeling, This is not what we want; there is nothing more tedious, puerile, and inhumane than love; yet it is also beautiful and necessary. Well then, well then? she asked, as if in an argument like this one threw one’s own little bolt which fell short obviously and left the others to carry it on.20
Lily Briscoe would have done better at our table than where she was, at Mrs Ramsay’s pre-war table, at least in terms of this conversation. We threw down our bolts and caught them and ran, and while we never solved the conundrum, the ambivalences were bracing; sparks flew around the room, the light poured through the doors; a bowl of flowers on the table, bought by Helen as she walked down King Street on her way from Murray’s flat to her desk upstairs at the house on the corner.
But the question remained, and so did the quandary. Was it our fate as the second sex? Was it the legacy of our 1950s mothers, and their unhappinesses? Was it some self-defeating aspect of the female psyche? Were we, as Beauvoir said of women, impeding our own independence? Was Christina Stead right in For Love Alone that without a man, even (or perhaps especially) a clever, able woman like Teresa Hawkins will fear the loneliness of being forever alone, yet once she secures a man, she’ll fear that this is all she’ll ever have, and freedom will never have seemed so sweet? ‘When you get what you want, you don’t want it,’ Marilyn Monroe sang in one of the first films I watched, aged eighteen, at a smoke-filled fleapit in Oxford, holding hands with Nick as we sleepwalked our way towards marriage. Or was it, as Sophie would say, that we lived in houses designed for a family of the pared-down, nuclear variety that had become the norm when most of Sydney’s housing stock was built? Sophie put the break-up of her Charlie relationship down, at least in part, to the move from collective living in north London, ‘with an Asian shop on the corner reeking of halal meat, discarded vegetable baskets in the street’ to a house in Captain Cook Crescent, Canberra, ‘one of the most planned, homogeneous cities in the world’. It was hard to meet people, to escape, to dream, ‘to build a life of one’s own’ she wrote in Inner Cities. ‘I felt I had become the suburban wife. My centre slipped away.’21 Even in inner Sydney, the house on the corner and every house in the street, and the house Sophie moved into at Bondi, and every house in that street, were designed for a standard-shaped family: lounge, dining and kitchen, two beds or three, a bathroom upstairs if you were doing well. The small and singular flat into which I moved to on the hill behind Bondi wasn’t much better, for it too existed in a sea of suburban houses, each with its own lawn and barbecue.
Would our lives have been different in the great cities of Europe? Sartre and Beauvoir lived in hotel rooms and studio apartments in the same or nearby buildings; how much was that part of their story, never forced into the strictures of houses like ours? Beauvoir eventually tired of the hotel rooms and the colour of the walls which, unlike in our houses, could not (or not easily) be changed. She bought her first apartment in 1955 with the money from the Prix Goncourt, which she won for The Mandarins. It was in the cream-coloured building in Rue Schoelcher, opposite Montparnasse Cemetery, where Hazel interviewed her in 1976. I wish I’d had the sense to ask Hazel what it looked like inside: what colour the walls, how easy the chairs? And the desk I’ve seen in photos, had it been tidied for the occasion? How did the light fall? It is not easy to tell from the photograph in Tête-à-Tête. When Beauvoir stood up, were the photos of her men on the shelf above her desk at eye level? Did she see them every time she stood, or were they high enough, outside the arc of light from the lamp, for her to live around them without feeling their gaze?
Hazel came back from Paris to finish her thesis in Sydney, and it was sometime in the early 1980s that I met her, and our conversation began. It was only ever a temporary return, and by the time she was writing Christina Stead she had moved to Melbourne, where the housing stock was no better than here in Sydney. She was teaching at Deakin University, which meant driving to Geelong most days, which meant speeding fines, which meant installing a gadget in the car that beeped nastily when she overshot. Oh how she hated it. I drove with her on visits to Melbourne and she’d swear when it beeped, and switch it off, then back on, swear and sigh, and laugh (sort of) and ask when she was ever going to get out of the place. She hated Deakin’s ugly buildings and she hated the system of research points that rewarded a scholarly article in an academic journal over a biography, even one as acclaimed as hers. The irony was that while Christina Stead didn’t do much to get her ahead here, academically speaking, it enabled her move to a fellowship at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, where she began her work on the African-American writer Richard Wright. It was the first step in her move to the States. She never came back for more than a visit. It wasn’t simply that she disliked Australia; there were people she liked, even loved here, and some of them were at Deakin. When I said I’d found Australia a place of freedom after growing up in England, she was astonished. For her, the reverse was true. She’d been snatched from the hazy nostalgia of a childhood she remembered as free, for strictures that deeply offended her. She was hauled up before the headmistress of her Adelaide primary school for not wearing gloves. Gloves! At nine years old! Not good for any but the most respectable of childhood spirits, and damning for Hazel. Her spirit was profoundly cosmopolitan. Mine’s not. I travel, move around, more than I like – it’s the condition of our age for people like us – but ever since I left the country of my birth where I never felt the right shape – and also suffered indignities to do with gloves and the world’s ugliest school berets – I’ve been seeking somewhere I could fit, somewhere I could call home, if only a house on the corner across the railway line at the back end of Newtown, with its cafés and bookshops on the long street down to the university. I still dream of that house, and when I do it is as full of absences as it is of presence, for the household we created there was always reshaping itself by the gaps left at the table when people moved, reshaped themselves in other houses, other cities, other countries.
Writing this, I can hear the elegiac tone to my words. Hazel died in New York in 2011, of a series of cerebral haemorrhages as a result of an infection she didn’t know she had, or not until too l
ate. She fell on the floor of the apartment where she was living alone in the midst of a great city. Another one dead at fifty-nine. How long she lay there before she was found, I don’t know, or for how much of that time she was conscious. For those of us who heard the news after she was found and taken to hospital, it was shocking in its suddenness; for her my fear is that it was slow. It’s only now, thinking back to the last time I saw Hazel, that I’ve finally read Tête-à-Tête, her book about Beauvoir and Sartre. It came out in 2006 when my mind and my days had become re-entangled with Papua New Guinea. I’d recently returned there after an absence of thirty years, and my life was arcing that way. Beauvoir seemed impossibly distant, not exactly irrelevant, but right then, after decades of writing (and reading) about the lives of women, I was frankly not that interested. I was interested in Hazel, of course, but not, then, in Beauvoir, let alone Sartre. Being in New York, Hazel was geographically distant, but she remained not only a friend, someone I cared about, but a figure who inhabited my internal landscape. She came to Sydney for the writers’ festival when Tête-à-Tête came out. Read it later, she said when we had dinner at the hotel where she was staying. We could see down the harbour and over the lights of the city. There was a gaudiness to the room where we ate food that looked more than it was. Even so, she said, she was glad to be here, in Sydney, more than she expected; it was a kind of homecoming, but it wasn’t home. Was anywhere? It certainly wasn’t where she wanted to live. That was New York. She talked about the pleasures of the libraries in New York, and I amused her with the vicissitudes of research when it came to PNG. It was only in the most oblique way that we spoke of writing about race, which seems, in retrospect, now that Hazel is dead, another missed opportunity. I suppose we thought there’d be years ahead in which to talk; that night nothing was urgent, and so we slipped back into the then essential talk, which now seems peripheral, about our lives with men. Both of us thought that something might have been resolving; we each had a new man, we each thought that maybe this time the cross-currents of love and independence could flow more harmoniously. But no story ends happily ever after and Hazel’s last love affair didn’t – which was why she was in an apartment alone in Manhattan when that infection hit her brilliant brain.
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