The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard: A jewel of a coming-of-age drama

But there are other elements that underpin her lack of renown. Hazzard was a writer slightly out-of-step with the late 20th century. Her short stories and her first two novels are often described as Jamesian, and, indeed, her graceful, epigrammatic prose, always technically and morally exacting, has much more of an affinity with the style of 19th century writers than the work of many of her contemporaries. And, like their creator, Hazzard’s heroes and heroines seem to have been flung out of an earlier era; ‘modern romantics’ is how Zoë Heller describes them, people – again, like Hazzard herself – ‘who cleave to high feeling and high seriousness in a world largely hostile to their idealism’. So, too, is Hazzard tightly tethered to a particular moment in 20th-century history that, as she unhurriedly put pen to paper, was already slipping further and further into the past. The Second World War was her great subject; not so much the conflict itself, but rather the bitter-tasting, fractured aftermath of this colossal and terrible schism that tore through the 20th century, uprooting lives ‘like a great syphon that sprayed human beings all over the globe’, as she described it in The Bay of Noon. Her characters are struggling to make sense of what’s been lost, but in shouldering ‘the huge disillusion of a ravaged world’, they’re also trying to find purchase in a future that feels impossibly tenuous. In an interview in the Paris Review in 2005, Hazzard goes as far as to call her final two novels explicitly ‘anti-war’, in that each ‘testifies in different ways to a world trying not to go to pieces under its burden of modern experience

Born in Sydney in 1931, Hazzard was removed, both geographically and temporally, from the Second World War, but her entrance to adulthood coincided with its immediate aftermath; the traumatic devastation of which she encountered with her own eyes when, en route to Hong Kong in 1947 – where her father was to take up his position as Australian trade commissioner – she and her family visited the ruins of Hiroshima. This was a watershed moment in the then 16-year-old’s life. The break from the parochial Australia of her childhood introduced her to the possibilities of a wider, more multicultural world, and henceforth she would strive towards cultivating an entirely different kind of life for herself.  

More immediately, she was encountering first-hand, and for the first time, the devastations of war, which explains the dance between promise and horror that infuses The Bay of Noon, The Transit of Venus, and The Great Fire. Each book is a different take on a young woman’s sexual, emotional and intellectual awakening amongst wreckage and uncertainty. Speaking on the Backlisted podcast in 2016, the author and playwright Alice Jolly explained that to read the Australian writer’s work is to enter ‘Hazzardland’ – a reference, I suspect, not only to the extraordinary language of Hazzard’s prose, which is heightened to something almost incantatory, but to the emotional landscape of these novels. Hazzard’s characters all live emotionally precarious lives in materially precarious times.  

This is painstakingly but sensitively evoked in The Bay of Noon, which is set in post-war Naples, in a world that’s very much structured by the bureaucratic and organisational aftermath of the war. Although not as ambitious as the novels that follow it, and perhaps therefore somewhat maligned by comparison, Hazzard’s second novel is still incredibly accomplished; a jewel of a coming-of-age drama. It’s the story of a young, unworldly and impressionable Englishwoman – christened Penelope and known as Penny, but mistakenly renamed Jenny when she’s evacuated to Cape Town as a child – who arrives in Italy as a translator working with NATO. Like so many of her generation, Jenny is used to being buffeted by the winds of history, and is left more than a little damaged as a result. Following the early death of her mother – a woman ‘depleted’ by the deprivations of wartime existence – she relocated from South Africa to Italian Somaliland to keep house for her older brother. His marriage then occasioned the siblings’ return to England, from where Jenny needed to escape because she was in love with him – a fact that, even after all these years, she admits with a strangely naïve honesty.  

Reminiscent of Hazzard’s description, in the Paris Review, of her understanding of how the ‘private wars’ of her parents’ marriage played out in tandem with the ‘global one’, these little hand-grenades of intimate trauma in Jenny’s life detonate against the backdrop of international conflict. Jenny is used to the story of her early ‘uprooting’ being met with expressions of anguish in others. Yet, as she observes, ‘although the sufferings of children are the worst, being inextinguishable – children themselves seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.’ The Bay of Noon recounts just one such ‘drama of the grown-up world’, a landscape within which ‘strands of love’ wind their way, ‘entangling, strangling, wiggling’, between people across a crowded room.  

When it comes down to it, the plot of The Bay of Noon is not especially complex. Jenny is looking back on her year in Naples, remembering her imbroglios with an older Italian woman named Gioconda; Gioconda’s married lover, Gianni; and her own beau, Justin, a rather dour Scots marine biologist she meets through her work. That this ‘game of sexual musical chairs’, as J. D. McClatchy describes it, descends into a tale of betrayal comes as no surprise, so for me to divulge that here doesn’t count as a spoiler. No true admirer of Hazzard’s work reads it for her plots; it’s not that they aren’t successful, it’s more that they’re the least of the attractions on display. Instead, one reads Hazzard for the beauty of her prose, and the steady, studied poise of her syntax. The reader is thus left with the impression of a series of beautiful vignettes, explained perhaps by Hazzard’s illuminating confession in the Paris Review that, to a certain extent, she ‘see[s] life as “occasional” or “incidental”, with episodes starting out from the dailiness of things’.  

Inspired in no small part by her own youthful experience in Italy – while working for the UN Secretariat in New York in the 1950s and following a painful break-up, Hazzard took a secondment post in Naples for a year, which ignited her life-long love affair with the country – first and foremost The Bay of Noon is, in Hazzard’s own words, ‘a love letter to Naples’, and she evokes the city here with the hazy, somnolent quality of a rich and captivating dream. That applies to both the city Jenny gets to know – its ‘assets […] so secret, they give the impression of having been deliberately concealed; lodged away, for the most part, in malodorous side-streets, embedded in some squalid recess, they partake of the city’s poverty’ – and that which she’s told about: in blackout during the war, but lit by the eruption of Vesuvius behind it, ‘the entire region irradiated with a red glow […] It was real hell we were in,’ Giaconda tells Jenny, ‘bathed in red, overhung by a sky of ash, smelling of fire and brimstone.’  

Later in life, Hazzard and her husband, the biographer and translator Francis Steegmuller (who’d been left extremely well-off following the death of his first wife) split their time between Manhattan’s Upper East Side and homes in Capri and Naples. ‘Going to Europe was about as final as going to Heaven,’ reads a line in The Transit of Venus, its heroine Caro’s experience of reinventing herself once she arrives in the northern hemisphere clearly inspired by the author’s own makeover: ‘A mystical passage to another life, from which no one returned the same.’ In real life, Hazzard would revisit Australia, but never properly return. Her past really was a foreign country; by then, she belonged to America and Europe. It might not be her most accomplished novel, but nothing she wrote seems quite as close to her heart as the world she captures in The Bay of Noon. 

‘TBR: The Booker Revisited’, is an editorial partnership between The Booker Prize Foundation and Lit Hub. 

Lucy Scholes is a critic based in London and Senior Editor at McNally Editions