Backlisted - The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Episode Date: February 22, 2016

Author and playwright Alice Jolly joins the Backlisted crew to discuss The Great Fire by Australian author Shirley Hazzard. Also, AA Gill and Spike Milligan have been Read This Week, and why it might be too late to start listening to jazz in your 50's. Timings:3'04 - Puckoon by Spike Milligan10'49 - Poor Me: A life by AA Gill17:53 - The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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$49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. I told you about my first ever meeting of the management executive of Wolster with Alan Giles and I happened to be sitting next to Alan and I told him this can this be it's very bad Alan had written at the top of his piece of paper

good morning, everyone. This is a man who left nothing to chance. You know. That's like my husband who writes at the top of my shopping list, take list. Does he? Does he? I'm sure it's a shock to discover.

I'm a late comer to the world of lists. But, you know, as you get older you just do forget things, I used to think I had a really brilliant memory and would never forget anything but I just don't know whether it's just age and there's more lumber in the old storeroom or whether you really do start

to lose the plot, I don't know but I can go to the shop now and come back and have literally forgotten the one thing, the chicken that I'm go to the shop now and come back and have literally forgotten the one thing, the chicken that I'm supposed to buy. We have the tradition now on our shopping list in the Miller family of also having a pseudo list, where what we do is we try and meal plan for the week ahead, but both of us feel resentful about having to do that.

So we write things on Friday, potluck. feel resentful about having to do it. So we write things on Friday, pot luck. The resentment's important. The boys, this is how it was tragic, he said, why don't we have a list on the fridge of things that we need? And I said, because then I would feel my life was a meaningless, empty void.

And I would not be able, I just, you know, I couldn't live with myself. What's important, boys, yeah. But then you wouldn't forget things. And I said, I know't live with myself. What's important? What's important, boys? But, Dad, but then you wouldn't forget things. And I said, I know, you're right. What's important is the illusion of spontaneity, Dad. Otherwise, one might as well just give up. I like that.

That's a really brilliant idea. Have a list and then just write silly things on it, like, who cares? Yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. As usual, we're gathered round the kitchen table of our sponsors, Unbound, the website where readers and writers come together to make great books. I'm John Mitchinson, long-time denizen of the world of books. You're a denizen now. Excellent.

That's what it says on my page. It does. And I'm Andy Miller. I'm the author of the year of reading dangerously. Hello, everyone. And as usual, we're joined by the author and flanner, Matthew Clayton. Hello, Matthew. Hello, everyone. This is Backlisted, as you know, where we aim to give new life to old books. We've been described as like a radio show, but better, a brilliant listen, and the literary goon show. Thank you, mother. All of which, in their own way, contain a grain of truth.

Every week, we're of course joined by an esteemed guest. This week's guest is Alice Jolly, novelist and playwright, and author of the brilliant memoir Dead Babies in Seaside Towns. And her book choice this week is The Great Fire by Shirley Hazard. But first, let's start as we always start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. Andy, what have you been reading? OK, well, long-time listeners to Backlisted will recall... There are such things. ..will recall that on the last podcast

we talked about David Bowie's list of 100 books. Indeed. And I highlighted three particular titles from that list that I decided that I would read, and I've been reading... Is that because you'd read less than the rest of us on the list? I'm... I'm... Führer. Führer, the rest of us on the list? I'm... Fewer. Fewer, sorry. Fewer. I'm coming to that, Matthew.

You've been reading up, haven't you? You've been trying to catch up. Also, Matthew, I hadn't read fewer than you. Really? So let's just remind people of that. I shouldn't have said that, should I? So I've been reading the first... It's not a competition.

Slap down. It's not a competition, of course. I've been reading the first... It's not a competition. Shut down. It's not a competition, of course. I've been reading the first of those three books, which was Pacoon, Spike Milligan's first novel, which was first published in 1963. He didn't publish another one until 1987. Can you remember what it's called? No, I can't.

I didn't even know he'd written another one. What was it called? He wrote two further novels. No, amazing. It's called The Loony, the the 1987 one completely passed me by but parkoon how many copies do you think parkoon has sold um 55 000 higher a hundred thousand it has sold in excess of six million copies no six six million copies of Pacoon were sold. And I was one of them.

I got given it for Christmas in around about 1973, 74, with that very same jacket that you've got on that, that paperback over there, visual gag for all of you listening. And I remember absolutely loving it because he was my kind of hero when I was growing up. I'm just going to read the foreword because it's very, very brief and it will

relate to other things we talk about this week. This is what Spike Milligan wrote on the SS Canberra in the Indian Ocean. What was he doing there, do you know? On one of his rest cures I think. This damn book nearly drove me mad.

I started it in 1958 and doodled with it for four years. I don't think I could go through it all again. Therefore, as this will be my first and last novel, I would like to thank those who helped me get it finished. First, I want to thank me. Then Paddy, my wife. Without her, for certain reasons, this book would never have been completed. I also thank my family for eternal encouragement. Harry Edgington, my old army pal, who cheered me up when I was down. Gordon Lansbury, who told me the novel was funny

when I thought it wasn't. My three children, Laura, Sean and Silo, who think I'm good, quote, all the time. To Patrick Ford, the man who sold me good wine, Mrs Jolly, who typed it, and the human race for being the butt of all my jokes. Genius. Isn't it it great isn't it? Brilliant

This was published in 1963 and David Bowie as a Goons fan probably would have read it then when he was 15 or 16 and really I have to say 15 or 16 is probably the optimum age to read this book and why it seems to stay with people If you look at the reviews on Amazon

it's one after another saying this is the funniest book ever written. This is the funniest book ever written. And is it? I can remember almost nothing. Sort of vaguely set in Ireland, I remember. Yeah, it's set in 1924. It's about an Irish village called Pakoon,

which during the partition of Ireland is split in two by the Boundary Commission. But I mean, the thing about it, if ever a plot were just pretext, that's what this is. It's a lousy novel it's a terrific book it's a lousy novel the thing i loved about it i'm not going to read loads of bits it is very very funny but it also has some brilliant milligan-esque darkness in it yeah there's beautiful aphorisms which are like something out of Schopenhauer. Life is a long, agonised illness only curable by death.

I mean, it's beautiful. He did have demons, let's be frank. He did, yeah. Anyway, I'm just going to read this little bit, which is both funny and you'll see. Spike was not afraid to paint it black. The two men climbed to the lip of a hill and peered cautiously over. A fine sight met their eyes, gleaming white in the morning sun were the tents of that nobly need society, the Scouts. It was the Ulster Annual Jamboree. For weeks past, hundreds of spotty-faced

herberts, with yodelling voices and chin fuzz, had tied three million knots, started 10,000 twig fires and completed 600 leaf shelters. Perfect training for round about 3000 BC, but bloody useless in the 20th century. Where were their Geiger counters? Their strontium detectors? Their books on how to bury 10 million incinerated children? Be prepared!

Ha ha! You know, that's quite dark. And for me, the pleasure of the book, the humour of it doesn't really come from, as you might expect in a novel, character or situation, though some of the farce elements maybe do, but from Spike clearly struggling with it, trying to amuse himself while writing it.

And lots of the gags are linguistic ones or subversions of cliches or set phrases as he goes along that you feel he's just in that kind of quicksilver way has followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole rather than deliver you a satisfying novel. You know,

better to be amusing than to be perfectly formed, I think. But his memoirs, you know, that Rommel, Gunner Who, and Adolf Hitler, My Party and His Downfall, I mean, they were like that too. There's just a lot of brilliant observation of army life. There's like seven volumes of those.

Yeah, I mean... And they were all bestsellers as well. Yeah. So that's book 30 on my Bowie checklist. I'm reading English Journey by J.P. Priestley. That's the book 31. So, Mitch, I'm coming for you. I'm coming for your 35.

I'm loving this. This challenge. I'm going to have to go back and start competitively reading in the opposite direction. It's worth saying there's a great telegram just before Peter Sellers died that he sent to Spike saying, I want to get back together again.

I want it to be like the old days. It's a really beautiful, short telegram. But I mean, I'm not sure how well... I mean, it's this eternal problem of how well does comedy age, whether the goon shows now are as hysterically funny as, say, my dad's generation or Prince Charles. Yeah, I mean, Prince Charles for me, that's what I think of the goon show.

I immediately associate it with Prince Charles and I don't think Prince Charles' taste in comedy is probably going to be mine. And I remember thinking that when I was a teenager as well. Yeah. And it was definitely the Goons was too far back for me to go. Have you ever read Roger Lewis's incredible book, The Life and Death of Peter Sellers? No, but I mean, I sort of am aware of it. What a but i i mean i sort of i'm aware of

it it's what a book i mean i'm going way off piece now but what a book that is that is the most if roger lewis for some reason is listening to this i i say this in the most affectionate and praiseworthy terms i can that is the most ill-tempered intemperate biography I've ever read. It's full of footnotes where Roger Lewis simply rages at Peter Sellers for being such an arsehole. He clearly began the biography thinking, oh, this will be quite fun. Peter says he seems like a funny guy.

And by the end, it hates him. You know, it was a terrible... I mean, I remember the movie, The Seller's Biopic, which actually was really good. But what a terrible, tragic, miserable life he had for all the money. George Best times ten.

Where did it all go wrong? And speaking of George Best times ten, what have you been reading? Well, I've been reading because declaring an interest, I had to interview him, which I have done several times on stage, A. A. Gill's memoir, Poor Me, A Life, which is essentially, it is an autobiography,

but it is also really an account of the half of his life, the first 30 years, although, as he pointed out in the interview, he didn't start drinking when he was sort of a baby. But half of his life, he was a serious drunk, and the other half, he's not been. He's obviously known as a very, very successful columnist and has a reputation for being uncompromising in his views. And I have to say it is a remarkable book.

It's remarkable because the story is remarkable. How do you go from being as bad a drunk as he was? And he was serious, kind of, you know, DTs. It's a terrible thing where he has to have his morning drink. His shakes are so bad in the morning he was. And he was serious, kind of, you know, DTs. It's a terrible thing where he has his morning drink. His shakes are so bad in the morning, he has to put his arm into a sling to hold it steady enough to pull something into a cup. And there's a fantastic passage that I was just looking at before

where he's suffering from the DTs and he sees a toad crouching in the middle of his flat. And he, you know, because it's a genuine vision, he kicks it with his toe and it turns out to be a real toad. And he said toads are notoriously choosy about where they live, he said, but the flat he was living in was so disgusting and algae ridden that it walked across half of Wandsworth looking for a place where it could hang out.

But it's full of, you know, if you like Gil's writing, which on form I do, there's some fantastic, his description of the book, I think, it's almost as good as a blurb. This isn't going to be my debauched drink and drug hell. There will be no lessons to learn, no experience to share. There won't be handy hints, lists, golden rules. You'll find no encouragement for those who still stagger. That's Gil. fat girl squealing no no no as her hand shimmies up your shirt that's gill and i have to say i published him 20 years ago and i always wanted him to write a proper book yeah he's such a good

journalist so good on the short sprint yeah yeah we'd commissioned a book about england called the angry island which was almost a good book almost a great book i think this comes as close as as you get to the to, really good. There is stuff in here about, you know, his brother was a Michelin-starred chef who disappeared. There's stuff about his father, his relationship with his parents. His father directed Civilization. It's wonderful. I'm just going to crave an indulgence for one little passage

because he's obviously very, very good on food. That's what he writes about. And I guess that's what people know him for. But he's got such, very good on food. That's what he writes about. And I guess that's what people know him for. But he's got such an interesting take on it. I mean, the connection with his brother. His brother was a chef. So food is an important thing to him. Now, of course, I'm not going to be able to find the piece.

Ah, here it is. Here it is. Love this. He said, one of the great misconceptions about dinner is that nice people make good food. I mean, I'm not sure I entirely agree with it, but he goes on to talk about it in such brilliant, and he's a really, really, really good cook, and he writes about food wonderfully. But it's a wounded, I think in bits, really quite profound book.

It's brilliant on the drinking. It's brilliant on how good, how strong you have to be. There's a great story in there. He says, you know, if you're talking about willpower and alcoholics lacking it, he said, just think about an 18-year-old addict who probably needs to raise between 80 and 100,000 pounds a year in order to maintain their habit. They have to do that on their own, doing things that are illegal with absolutely no help, but almost everybody around them telling them what a useless piece of shit they are. You know, if you could bottle that, he said that would be, you know,

you'd have a nation of entrepreneurs instead of just a nation of staggering drunks. I was really interested about what you were saying a moment ago about this being like a proper book. There's an interesting topic, this, about the barriers that there are to journalists writing good books. Because my experience over the years, I've worked with quite a few journalists on books, and sometimes they deliver great books and sometimes they don't. And I always feel there are two things that choke them. The first thing is the book is legitimacy.

Yeah. Okay, so they get the fear. But the second thing is they're really good at, clearly they're good at writing pleasing sentences yeah but they're also they also tend to deliver chapters which are all the exact same length which are hermetically sealed from one another because they're so used to turning in pieces on deadline right that don't actually add up to a book they add up to a series of pieces and i would say and we all say this,

I mean, I would probably have made this book a little shorter because I think there is a couple of things that you feel are added in towards the end. There's a very short chapter on his interesting relationship with religion, which probably doesn't quite fit. I mean, I actually think the narrative when he's writing about drinking

and then how drinking, kind of the addiction to drinking, kind of gets changed. I mean, the core of the addiction to drinking kind of gets changed he i mean the the core of the book is really about him wanting to be an artist and deciding that he was never really going to be a good enough artist to do that but he discovers words and he becomes even though he's profoundly dyslexic he becomes a very very good writer but you're absolutely right and i think that's been the problem with his previous books i mean you know he says somewhere he quotes cyril connelllly as saying that literature is is something that you again you know you read more more than once whereas journalism is consumed in the instant yeah and I think there is that sort

of sense with journalists that they're so good at they are so good at deadlines and they're so good at turning stuff in and and being interesting about whatever they're being told to be interesting stringing into into a meaningful hole is difficult. But this is definitely the one, I think, where he's come closest to that. And there are some really haunting passages in the book. And he's very, you know, as I say, it's disarmingly

honest. And the basic story is a remarkable one. How do you go from being a really kind of serious drunk to a very successful journalist? I picked it up in Hatchards a couple of weeks ago and did that thing of... So Hatchards is in between our office and Soho

and if you're walking into Soho for lunch and you're early, I'll always go into Hatchards or Waterstones and you'll pick up a book and sometimes you just want to read that book and I spent ten minutes kind of reading a little bit from every chapter to try and digest that bit and not be late for lunch. and I spent ten minutes kind of reading a little bit from every chapter to try and digest that. And I'd be late for lunch.

You know, I loved it, and I thought I'd just, I had that immediate hit of this is a book I'm going to really enjoy reading. I mean, I'll give you one last. I mean, when he's good on a one-liner, I mean, this is just him on snobbery, which he's very good on. Snobbery is like peeing in your own pants. For a moment you feel relieved and a warmth, but everyone can see you've done it

and you're left feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable. We've talked about books enough, now for some capitalism. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security. Meeting friends a world away? You can use your travel credit. Squeezing every drop out of the last day? How about a 4 p.m. late checkout? Just need a nice place to settle in? Enjoy your room upgrade.

Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Summer's here, and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. YMX.ca slash YMX. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Yes. A day of sunshine? No. A box of fine wines? Yes. Uber Eats can definitely get you that. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. Product availability may vary by regency app for details. In addition to the book that Alice has chosen for us to all read and talk about, that sense of the Great Fire being rooted in Shirley Hazard's

personal experience. There are, as she says, strong autobiographical elements in this book. And yet, journalism it ain't. You know, it's a highly sophisticated, partial novel. Before we go around, do you think you need to know anything about Shirley Hazard before you read The Great Fire? No, and actually more than that I don't think it seems an odd thing to say that it actually even matters what The

Great Fire is about and I don't think it even matters who the people in it are because it's not it's not about plot and it's not about character the characters are actually unmemorable in all honesty and yet you know you think well does she even like this book I mean it's not about character. The characters are actually unmemorable, in all honesty. And yet, you know, you think, well, does she even like this book? I mean, it's definitely in my top ten all-time favourite books. Yeah. And yet, I think one of the things about very good books, actually, is it's very hard to put your finger on exactly where the greatness of them lies.

And also, I think what you were saying about Pakun was very interesting. It actually tends to be that the books we think are very great books, we can also see really quite big flaws in them. And I once read a review of a John Fowles book, which I thought, yes, that's absolutely spot on. It applies to this. And this reviewer said, do you know, I'd rather read John Fowles getting it wrong than anybody else getting it right.

And with Shirley Hazard, you know, it's like rereading this book actually I can as I say it's not plot or character neither are really that great in all honesty and yet the language of the book is so extraordinary

that you don't care you really don't care I'm going to encourage me to show my hand go on Andy so you love the book yes I absolutely love the book Matthew did you like the book I'm going to... Encourage me to show my hand. Go on, Andy. Go on. So, look. So, you love the book. Yes, I absolutely love it.

Alice loves the book. Matthew, did you like the book? I loved the book. John, did you like the book? I also loved the book. And also, I know less about Shirley Hazard, apart from the fact that I vaguely picked up that she was married to Francis Stigmaler.

I don't really know that much about Francis Stigmaler. It didn't really help. I have facts. He's married to Shirley Haslip. So I came with no structure of anything. And I have to say, I was pretty blown away by it as well. I think, in a way, emboldened as you are. I've yet to show my hand. It made me think a lot again about fiction

and what makes fiction so extraordinary. Characters who are not that interesting, not not that exceptional and a plot, to be honest, that I was thinking this would make one of the world's dullest movies because there's a lot of letters in the book and a lot of what passes between the main characters is not when they're all in the same room together. So, Andy,

unveil. Okay, so I do know a little bit about Shirley Hazard and I did come to the book knowing a fair amount about Shirley Hazard. And I have to say, there are things I did really like about it, but there were also things I was quite sceptical about. And as we go along, I feel emboldened to touch upon those, because you said there are flaws in it. There are a couple of things that made my teeth itch,

which we can talk about as we go along. We do this thing on Backlister where we read out the blurb on the back of the book. So I'm just going to do that. As you say, this is the blurb on the back of the British edition of, the current British edition of this book. But you've got another blurb. I've actually got two blurbs. You'll see why I've got two blurbs when I read the first one.

Okay, here we go. Twenty years in the writing The Great Fire is a triumphant novel of lives shadowed by war and redeemed by love In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe people must reinvent their lives and expectations and learn from their past to dream again A man and a woman seek to recover

self-reliance and tenderness struggling to reclaim their humanity I actually think that's quite good seek to recover self-reliance and tenderness struggling to reclaim their humanity. Um, you know, that's... I actually think that's quite good. I mean, I can see, it wouldn't surprise me if it doesn't sell a book. But actually,

it does explain that in a way the story of the central two characters, which actually is just live and war, which isn't really very original, but there were all these other stories woven into it and obviously the great fire is the second world war and it's all these people trying to rebuild their lives and also all these people so confused because after all it should have been a great moment you know great britain was victorious and the empire was still standing and we were victors. And there's all these people realising that victory

just hasn't given what it promised at all. One of the things I was really impressed with in the book is the presence of death, illness and deformity throughout it. Characters remember awful injuries that have happened to themselves and other people. Characters die, no spoilers, remarkably regularly and quickly in this book. remember awful injuries that have happened to themselves and other people characters die no spoilers remarkably regularly and quickly in this book almost like the characters are caught in a kind of post-traumatic moment of trying to understand what the great fire was second world

war and what it might lead to next yes i think it's a huge sort of book of trauma and also dislocation and fractured lives. And one of the things about it is it moves from place to place continually and people are just forever saying goodbye to each other in rather traumatic ways. And you realise that, yes, that was the character of that time, that people's lives had become sort of scattered around the world and they'd lost half the people that they loved

and it was incredibly difficult to begin to sort of put it back together. So I'm just going to read the American blurb now because it has some names in it. Aldred Leith, military hero and son of a famous novelist, has come to Eastern Asia to observe firsthand the subject matter of a book he intends to write. There he meets Helen, the teenaged daughter of a local Australian commander, and becomes captivated by her ability to live vicariously through literature.

Despite their differences in age, the two gradually are drawn to one another. Both must heal from the recent global horrors before regaining the capacity to love. Now, that's a great blurb. I think it's definitely a better but it's a bit more helpful isn't it and in terms of the discussion for any for anyone listening it's given them something to hang their hat on do you want to alice just give everybody a sense of the story of the book just because i think that is in it kind of is important even though we've said

that characters don't matter and the plot doesn't matter but i think just some sense that it is as you say it's it's it's the other thing that i just want before i forget this because as you were talking about that there's also it's not just the shadow of one war it's the the strong belief that another one is about absolutely is about to start it's almost like all the certainties have disappeared and although the the peace for, you know, there's a, Aldred, the main character, and his friend, Peter, both, I think, have say at various points that the peace is not really kind of the boredom of peace is not really working for them either. But there is as the book develops, there's a strong sense that the what I guess we would now call the Cold War was actually going to end up with military with China, with Russia and America, that there was going to be,

you know, that hostilities had only really stopped for a small amount of time. There's a lovely phrase from a review of The Great Fire. We should just say in something that The Great Fire, Shirley Hazard's fourth novel, and it won the National Book Award in, it was published 2003, won the National Book Award 2004. There's a lovely phrase in a review by Adam Mars Jones, which

I feel sure is going to become a euphemism on Backlisted in future episodes. He says, the Great Fire has a narrative that is beautifully managed, but lays no claim to momentum. Now, Alice, this is exactly what you said. The plot is secondary at best yes which is fine

in literature I have no problem with that at all but yes but there and there were all but what there are is all these amazing sort of vignettes these little scenes of certain characters who've been affected by the war in one way or the other. But what's so wonderful is that they kind of appear and you have this little story. And then sort of quite randomly, they're gone. And in, you know, the more sort of the novel now we see an awful lot of, everything's got to pay off. You know, if you're being told about something, there's a reason you're being told about it.

And it's going to come up again later. Lots of stuff in this just comes up. And it's an amazing little scene in itself, which is so perfectly put together. And you feel not as though you've read it, but as though you've lived through it. But then it's gone and it doesn't ever come back again. It's not a constructed plot in that kind of way. But I just find that such a huge relief.

Yes, I agree completely. And the way characters represent particular strands of experience after the war and wondering what will happen next. I don't want to give a spoiler, but the character of Exley, what happens to Exley is particularly bleak and just left. Is there a clue in his name? Yes. Sort of. We're trying not to do spoilers, but I mean,

I think it is important to say that the core of the book is badly handled. Could have been quite tricky, couldn't it? I mean, it's a man in his mid-thirties who falls in love with a teenager who is, I think, 16 at the beginning of the book, and only just 16 at the beginning of the book. So just 16 at the beginning of the book

so as they always used to say queery taste and what I felt was that is the kind of the overarching and as Alice has said there are lots of other characters and you're you know you're built up a sort of a kaleidoscopic sense of lives that have been fractured by war but that is the one that holds the whole book together. And for quite a large chunk of the book, Aldred Leith, Major Leith, the character, and Helen, who is the girl, they're not in the same space together.

Although I have to say, when they are in the same space, the initial, the falling in love bit is pretty beautifully handled, I thought. Very sensitively done. Yeah, but it's also interesting, because when they write to each other, they've all got the same voice. And actually the dialogue at the end, you know, have dialogue between two 17-year-old girls. And you've got

to say that there are no 17-year-old girls even in 1940. I wanted to punch my own face off during the dialogue. The dialogue was one of the things I really struggled with. Well, you see, I just didn't care because I love Shirley Hazard's voice so much that I'm completely happy for all of her characters.

And also it felt to me like, you know, when people talk about Graham Greene, who of course actually was a friend of Shirley Hazard's, they talk about Greenland. Well, to me, there's Hazardland, you know, that you've just entered the land of this book where people speak in this extraordinary heightened way. And to me, I just completely accept it. Although when I take a step back, I am thinking, oh, yes, I'm surprised an editor didn't have a bit of a go about that one. I thought there was something she did, which I really liked. I mean, the tenses do shoot around as well, which usually gets a big black mark because you.

But what she does is she she'll have a character say something and then in the same sentence you're getting the interior backstory you know what's behind the the the line of dialogue is reproduced almost immediately which means that you're sometimes i found myself having to reread um passages of dialogue several times to to work out what was being said and what wasn't being said. But actually, I did sort of feel that that was kind of... That's pretty brave.

I mean, you know, we get so used to now sort of Hemingway-esque staccato dialogue to have that sort of interiority kind of put on the page in that way, which is why I think it would make such a ghastly movie. Well, it's drawn, you can see stylistically as well. I think she writes in a way which which is why I think it would make such a ghastly movie. You can see stylistically as well. I think she writes in a way which is

evocative of both the Greens, no relation, Graham Green and Henry Green. There's an interesting fusion of the... Because Graham Green is a great one for giving you a line of dialogue and a paragraph of thought to accompany it.

And she was great friends, as you said, Alice, with Graham Greene. She wrote a memoir called Greene on Capri, which is a fascinating book. And she said she believed Greene was simultaneously a brilliant writer and a monster. You know, unreasonably that as they can be so i'm i'm interested because as i say i came to it with no particular fact me up andy is what i as well give me give me a bit give me a bit of background about i mean i i want to ask alice too about whether where this falls you've read presumably other shirley hazards um yes have. And it is interesting because The Transit of Venus, there are, again, a lot of similarities that make you think,

yes, this all came from her own life because it's a very, it is that similar world and lots of sort of similar things about the book. But again, you don't think, oh, wait a minute, this is all a bit too similar to something else I've read. You just accept that this is her world and i think there is also that thing of saying that actually pretty much all writers in a sense only have one story and their one story relates to some huge and horrible loss and as quite a young woman she did have this appallingly dislocated life caused by the war and it's obvious that in her writing she circles that again and again

in different ways. But why not? Because it makes a fantastic book. She says, I think, that the transit of Venus contains a portrait of her mother. She's quite open in saying, and that the great fire, Helen in the great fire, is her. Yes, I get it.

She's quite open about saying that. Because she had a relationship with an older officer, didn't she, when she was quite young? I think so, yes. So I'm just going to read a brief paragraph written by the editor of this book, a book called We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think, which is a newly published book

of Shirley Hazard's essays edited by Brigitte Olibas and she wrote this introduction. Actually, it's terrific. I'm just going to read this short paragraph so people can get a place, if they don't know who Shirley Hazard is, get a sense of her. She's born in 1931. Shirley Hazard stands as a distinctive, even idiosyncratic figure

in the New York literary scene she inhabited from the middle of the 20th century. Her significance as a literary author is by now well established. A claim such as that made implicitly by the publication of this collection that she might also be viewed and valued as a public intellectual rests on the basis of her distinctive life and associations as well as her fiction. She left her native Australia in 1947 as a very young woman without having completed completed a formal education, and wound up in New York, where she worked in a relatively lowly capacity for the United Nations from the early 1950s. After resigning her post there to write full-time, at first mainly short fiction for the New Yorker, she published a number of acclaimed novels. In the early 1960s she met and married the Flaubert scholar Francis Stigmuller, and the couple lived part of each year in Naples and Capri and part in Manhattan, where their extensive circle of friends and

associates included many of the significant literary figures of the time, including those known as the New York intellectuals. She published two books of short stories in the 1960s and then four novels, The Evening of the Holiday in 1966 The Bay of Noon in 1970 The Transit of Venus in 1980 and The Great Fire in 2003 which as we said won the National Book Award She also published a book about Graham Greene we've talked about that

and she published two books about the UN and actually her work she's almost a whistleblower before that term exists in this sense at the UN. She is the person who outed Secretary General Kurt Waldheim as someone who had, let's say, an appalling war record. And reading about her, clearly her life has been an attempt to balance out the desire to both read, reading is a very big thing for her, and write, and also perform public duty. She saw her work at the UN as very important.

And her archive, there are 30,000 letters or something in her archive pertaining to the UN. To me what's interesting in that biography is the huge gaps between the novels. You know obviously it's known that she took a very very long time to write a novel but I must say that you can you can feel that in the book because it reads almost like poetry. It's incredibly condensed the amount she sort of gets into a paragraph and often if you look on a sentence by sentence basis the sentences are doing incredibly different things one after another so that it should just read like a huge jumble, but actually because it's so finely balanced and it all has this amazing kind of falling cadence

and this incredible nostalgia to it, it kind of works fantastically, but you almost feel it shouldn't. This is Aldred Leith, who's the main character, and he had a brief first marriage, which was one of those wartime marriages which didn't work out because the people largely were just never in the same place. And he goes... A theme of the book.

Yes, exactly. Nobody's ever in the right place. And he looks back on meeting this woman he married to. He met her briefly in London for the purpose of signing the divorce papers, but actually strangely finished up going to bed with her, although they then get divorced. This is a little bit about that. He says, O Mora, he'd said, our strange story,

and she had shed silent tears, not intended to change things. Her arched throat and spread hair, and the day dying in the wet window. The marriage was dissolved, evaporating along with its memories and meetings, and the partings of war. The letters increasingly laboured, the thoughts, kisses, regrets.

The lawyers were paid. The true marriage, indissoluble, was simply the moment when they sat on the rented bed and grieved for a fatality older than love and it's just extraordinary isn't it it's just like reading poetry it's just fantastic he later writes in his journal about the relationship with moira um that you know they'd achieved ritual fulfillment he said it is the incompleteness that haunts us, which is kind of, you know, the book, I think, is full of really remarkable writing and not just remarkable. I mean, there is some brilliantly descriptive writing.

There's a passage I marked out later, much later in the book about a log pile, which is just, you know, when you it's not often you get you you get in novels a kind of precision of description. This, just a little bit here, it's about wood that is being brought in when he's back in the UK. And it just, the scrubby bark coruscated, or the smooth angular pieces like bones, forms arched and grooved like a lobster or humped like a whale, dark joints to which foliate adhered like bay leaves in a stew, pine cones and a frond of pine needles still flourishing on the hack branch,

and the creatures that inched or sped or wriggled out, knowing the game was up, slugs, pale worms, tiny white grubs scurrying busily off as if to a destination, an undulant caterpillar and an inexorable thing with pincers. Or the slow slide of an unhoused snail, the hodmodod as they called him here, revisiting the lichens and pigmentations and fungoid flakes that had clung to his only home. Freckle growths, dusted seemingly with cocoa red berries, globules of white wax wet earthy smell, forest smell

the implements set aside the elder that's the end of it but it's just, that's pretty mesmerising stuff I was mesmerised too by the oft-remarked upon velvet tones of John Mitchinson there just go and read one, it's so brilliant the off remarks upon velvet tones of John Mitchinson there. Just go and read one just a little bit. It's so brilliant.

It's the first kiss of this teenage girl with an American who she doesn't fancy. And without going into it, but this is her reflection on this first kiss. This then was the florist reality, a brute fact, to which loving kindness was simply, or not even, a preliminary. There had been a screen between her and this. Reality was a wet thing, a wet thick thing, alive in her mouth. It seemed to her something that dogs might do. Yeah. That's great.

I think that's extraordinary because there's an incredible brutality altogether in this writing, although it's all sort of so middle class and so educated. There's a real brutality. Look, you know, I'd also like to add that although this... I have no problem with writers writing dialogue which isn't like dialogue that people would actually speak. OK, I just found the similarity of the dialogue to the prose to be distracting. i didn't find it

distracting at all i just coasted straight in there and i what you said earlier alice really rang true with me that you entered hazard land like greenland whatever it's kind of um i went into the book and i was really felt transported by it and it really took me back to the books i read when i was in my early 20s and I realized that I read a lot of romance and actually this is what this is what this book is well thank you and I think this is what this book is and it's a it's a there's a romance at the heart of it like there's a romance at the heart of lots of Hardy novels or you know lots of them lots of things I read at that age that particularly you're particularly kind of sensitive to were you a teenage thomas

hardy fan i absolutely was yeah makes note i went to a fantastic talk at the british library last year about wit in literature and the importance of wit in literature and the panel which includes said several um sages uh said well who is that is there any writer who writes without wit at all? And it was agreed that Thomas Hardy was. Which might explain why he's not my favourite. But I respect that. That's interesting.

You're not a Lawrence fan either. Now, there's also a thing that we should talk about. This book won the National Book Award. This novel won the National Book Award. It was published in. This book won the National Book Award. This novel won the National Book Award. It was published in 2003. It won the National Book Award in 2004. And in 2004, at the ceremony in 2004, Stephen King, the author Stephen King,

also received a Lifetime Achievement Award. And there was a bit of a fracas around this occasion because Stephen King, when he accepted his Lifetime Achievement Award, gave a speech in which he made a perfectly fair point that how unusual it was for a writer like him to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award when it was normally given to more literary writers and he said, you know, who's going to be here next year?

John Grisham? I don't think so. Which is a fair point, but perhaps made with rather poor timing or ill grace. And when Shirley Hazard took to the microphone to accept her award for The Great Fire, she delivered an impromptu speech in response to Stephen King. And we have a little clip of that speech now. And we're going to listen to it. It's a couple of minutes, but it's fantastic. So let's give it a listen. I want to say in response to Stephen King

that I do not, as he, I think, a little bit seems to do, I don't regard literature, which he spoke of perhaps in a slightly pejorative way, I don't regard the novel, poetry, language written, I don't regard it as a competition. It is so vast. We have this marvelous language. We are so lucky that we have a huge audience for that language.

If we were writing in High Norwegian, we would be writing in a great ancient language, but we would have mostly reindeer for our readers. And I'm not sure that that's the ideal outcome. But we have this huge language, so diverse around the earth, that I don't think giving us a reading list of those who are most read at this moment is much of a satisfaction because we are reading in all the ages which have been an immense inspiration and love to me and it's such an excitement and I can pick up also I can I can take one of the ancient

poems of our language and feel so excited and moved and even sometimes terrified by it that it seems very immediate to me and I don't I don't see this thing as something we should read this or we should read that. We have mysterious inclinations. We have our own intuitions, our individuality towards what we want to read. And we developed that from childhood, I think. We don't know why. Nobody can, thank God, nobody can explain it to us. Drops mic, has it out. Brilliant. I mean, it's brilliant.

So inspiring to listen to, I think. Yes, and she says no one can explain it to us in the way that I feel that I can't explain quite what's so extraordinary about this, but there is something. And I think that's what fiction does, kind of, you know, more than almost anything else, because I would would you know very few books i read now i don't like books about war and i don't like books set in the far east and

this book is a book about war set in the far east also she's i did love this novel and i think i think i would go back and there's so much going on yeah it is a book i would i would read carefully i think she's too yeah it's taken 20 years so this isn't she's just not she's not slapping these paragraphs now she's so good at evoking this ispping these paragraphs down. She's so good at evoking. This is the thing I did love. She's so good at evoking place and drawing landscape incredibly carefully. You really got the sense of it. You know that she rewrote.

Did you know this? She rewrote the ending of The Great Fire when reviewers' copies had already been sent out. Amazing. I've got a quote from her. She says, I found what I wanted for the last sentence as the publisher's courier came to the door to collect the page. That's after the end of 20 years. Speaking as a publisher, that's, yeah. Oh, no, Shirley, no.

Alice, have you got another? I have, and I think what you were saying about the sense of place, to me that is what the book is all about, and what I think is completely extraordinary about it is the way that it's both epic and miniature you know you have this huge sense of the far east and you feel as though you're there but it's also all about these specific rooms where things happened in their specific atmospheres and this is Peter Exley's room at the barracks in Hong Kong and we talked about about him earlier and about people who are going to survive

through all of this and people who may just, who although they're not the victims of war, actually they are. And this is just his room. There were smudges of squashed insects with adhering particles. Damp had got at the quicksilver of a long mirror on a mahogany stand. On the wall by the other bed, pinups were pinkly askew, and lettered signs carried insults, facetiously obscene. Gloom without coolness, the mirror, unreflecting, was like the draped pelt of some desiccated leopard.

There was a sentry here of obscure imperial dejection, a room of listless fevers, of cathard, ennui, and other French diseases, the encrusted underside of glory. And that last sentence to me actually is what the whole book is about, the encrusted underside of glory. She has a fantastic, there's a thing that she, she gave an interview to the Paris Review, and she says in that that both the transit of venus and the great fire testify in different ways to a world trying not to go to pieces under

its burden of modern experience and that's actually that's one of the things that's wonderful about the book that although it's set in a particular time and a series of places, and it's very evocative of that time and those places, that sense of the world still being in turmoil as it tries to come to terms with modern experience is the thing that I think is brilliantly done, the connection with the personal and the political. Yes, yes. And there's another wonderful bit where she sees the sort of,

he sees the Japanese prisoners of war, and they're meant to be feeling superior to them because, after all, they're the victorious nation. And yet he says that he can't set aside the nagging humanity of things. And again, that was a key phrase to me, that there's an awful lot of sort of nagging humanity in the book, just the sadness of these small details of things that kind of catch at the heart, and which are there even you know even though um this is a time that people should be feeling things are going pretty well in a sense yeah some bit of the book is set in new zealand and i have to say it's having lived there growing up

there nothing nothing captures new zealand better than this this sentence for any New Zealand listeners. A hemisphere of skies and seas, a world of that, with the land a mere crumpled interruption. It's just a wonderful idea of the Pacific Ocean and then this little, you know, as it were, a land a mere crumpled interruption. I mean, it's good stuff. Matthew, can you give us a link, however tenuous, to the crumpled interruption? A crumpled interruption from Matthew Clayton. That's how I've always wanted to be introduced.

So I'm going to loop back to something you said earlier about the difference between journalism and literature. And I guess when I read this and the first thing i knew about it after i'd consumed the book was that it had taken 20 years to write it's an incredibly long time and so i kind of looked into that little bit and discovered that what had happened was her her husband had been ill so she'd been looking after her husband for a long time. Then after he died, again, she had stuff to kind of tidy up to do with his life. And I was wondering about Graham Greene, because Graham Greene famously, was a friend of hers and famously wrote 500 words a day and would stop at 500 words a day. As soon as he hit that, he would kind of give up.

As soon as he hit that, he would kind of give up. And so I was looking at what's a normal daily word count that an author produces. What's the going rate? What should you be going for? Andy, if you're writing, how many words a day do you have? You know, Graham Greene is a great idol of mine and a hero of mine. And actually, I do tend to write. If I can get 500 words out

and i and i stop great green used to say that he would stop wherever he knew what he was going to write the next morning so he knew where what he never left it thinking for i've got nothing you know he knew where he would pick up the thread the next day Hemingway did something similar Hemingway had a thing where he said that he would always stop before he ran dry so he'd always stop knowing that he had a little bit of juice left to start up with

and Trollope would write something like 3,000 words a day and never rewrite which explains a lot he did 3,000, he did 250 words every 15 minutes, was how he gauged whether he was... Whereas I don't actually, I hardly write anything. It's all rewriting.

Because I can write incredibly fast. I've written a draft of a novel in three months. But then I did spend eight years rewriting it. So I think I'm certainly not making any claim to be anything like Shirley Hazard, but that thing of just going over sentences again, and mainly that's what I'm doing. No, and that's really true, Alice, isn't it?

The process of writing at that level is about accumulating enough words to get to the point where you can start getting rid of the bad ones. You know, the editing is where the writing happens. Yeah, it's the long letter short letter thing i'm sorry i didn't i'm sorry i actually didn't send you a short letter i didn't have time but you teach you teach creative writing alice so what do you give students advice on this on on you know the without getting into the do you use a typewriter or a word processor question

but do you give advice on sort of word count or just say you know you just have to find that out for yourself i think the advice i give um and probably somebody like shirley hazard wasn't doing it this way at all is to write that very quick first draft and just to keep going and not allow yourself to stop however bad it gets because then you have the whole kind of shape of the thing and then you can take it all to bits but somehow i i have to get that whole thing down to begin with and so i'm always saying people they should do that but actually for some people it is the wrong advice because some people just write perfect sentence after perfect sentence and then they never rewrite anything yeah different way to do it vonnegut described the two types of writing he did a graph which was to do with them how big would the novel be if it

took you 20 years and you wrote 500 words a day? Well, I can tell you how many words you wrote a day, which if you divide it up, that's rather unfairly... Well done, Stato. Rather unfairly... Go on. 12.9. But the thing is...

That gives us all hope. It does give us all hope. How carefully selected is every single word in this book? You see, I think some of these sentences... We've got all the words, we're just trying to get them in the right order. It could have taken a day to write some of those sentences, couldn't it? Actually, yes, I'm adding to that by saying that's a bit of praise right there. You know, the thing that I was reading earlier,

that she talks about how literature is finding the right word in the right context, in the right balance to all the other right words you've selected. That's one of the strengths of her writing here, I think. You know, finding Le Mot Just, even if it takes 20 years and she averages 12 of them a day. 20 years, and she averages 12 of them a day. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got Bill Deeds, who's a journalist that I adore. I think he's a wonderful writer. And he said that when he was at his best,

he was 1,000 words in 100 minutes. That was what he did. That was what he aimed for as his journalistic standard. Michael Holroyd, who did the biography of... What's he called? George Bernard Shaw. He worked out that George Bernard Shaw with his secretaries could produce more words in a day than Michael Holroyd could read. Really? There's a brilliant piece by Keith Waterhouse

where he talks about his writing routine and how it dovetails with his drinking routine. I remember, what's he called? Pete, Pete, Pete, never mind. J.G. Ballard was a thousand words a day and he qualified by saying, even with a hangover. But I think that advice is if you want to write a novel you just do you do have to just get on with it don't you and get it down but i think it's also the way that this written is written it's a kind of incredible compliment to the reader because it is in a way worth saying you are worth this much and actually you know as writers we do ask a lot from readers we want them to pay for our book and spend two or three days of our life which we're not going to get back reading it.

And so when you read something like this and it's also it's a level of craftsmanship. And with any very great craftsmanship, what you feel behind it is this huge kind of passion, a passion to get it absolutely right. And as a reader, you do just feel kind of tremendously grateful because it is as though she has done this almost for you personally to get this absolutely right and also to take you to this place and and to give you this experience as though you're living through it yourself it's a huge gift i i was really struck by her um i thought you you you'd like to know this alice that although i may not read another of her novels next week, that I read her interview with the Paris Review and she talks at the end of that about books that she loves.

And she's so enthusiastic and so persuasive. And she talks about Great Expectations. I think that's her favourite novel. And she talks about Wide Sargas, I think that's her favourite novel and she talks about Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rees another great novel and she talks about, and then out of nowhere she plucks

a novel called The Small Back Room one we should do which I have ordered a copy of, purely because of that recommendation I thought, okay, that's a lovely little thing. And the Peser Powell and Pressburger film. It was made into a Powell and Pressburger film starring David Farrow.

It's about a bomb disposal guy. It's an extraordinary book. So, Matthew, will you be reading more of Shirley House's work? Absolutely, yes. John? Certainly. I mean, I think we also ought to say, just for the romantic

Matthew's already confessed, this is a very, as love stories go, this is a pretty extraordinary love story, I think, beautifully handled. So I mean, it's not just, you know, what a lovely sentence. You do end up, despite what

we've said, you do end up, I think,'ve said you do end up i think giving a damn about what happens to the characters and yeah yeah and it's a proper and it is a proper grown-up work of fiction i mean i i will i would i think transit of venus is probably the one i would i would look at next yeah i'm definitely will read uh more shirley hazard and i'm particularly looking forward to reading reading green on capri which apparently people tell me isn't really about green not surprisingly because i think her work is as i said never about people it's about the place and i would love you know if somebody doesn't travel much at the moment i would love to to um read that but when i was young um when i really loved a writer i used to think well i must save up some of the books you know i've been saving up quite a lot of forster for years

and then i suddenly thought the other day is actually what am i doing this for you know i could be i could be dead in three years, so I might actually just get on and do it now and not save them up anymore. You might end up not really enjoying them as well. I always think that. I've got a friend who's saved up jazz. Tony Morrison?

No. No, the whole of jazz. The whole of the musical form. Yeah, the musical form of jazz. How old is your friend? My friend Geoff, he's 50-something. There's time to go, Jeff. There's time to go.

They're still making it, you know. He's like George Bernard Shaw. God, not more. Well, that just about wraps up this edition of Backlisted. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks to Alice Jolly, to Matthew Clayton, and thanks once again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter at BacklistedPod, on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod, and on our page at the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk.

Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, from Andy, goodbye everybody, and from me, goodnight. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes

of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.