Letters from Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene

Usami, Izu Peninsula
November 26, 1980

Dear Shirley and Francis,

My thoughts have been very much with you as more and more reports come in about the earthquake in southern Italy. Of course, I know that you are not there, and that is a relief, but I’m sure you must have friends in the vicinity, and (though the reports in the Japanese press have not mentioned Capri) your house may also have been damaged. I hope that the tragedy, unspeakable as it is, has at least not directly affected you.

I am writing from my room in a building overlooking the sea. It is dusk and the mountains are dark against the bluish-gray sky. It is one of the loveliest places in Japan I know and I have bought a tiny apartment on the ninth floor of a building recently erected on one of the hills overlooking the bay. Today has been clearer than I have ever seen it here. The islands that are normally concealed by mist, sea-spray or whatever it may be, are clearly visible even now. But there is a terrible irony in all this: Japanese seismologists have predicted that the next major earthquake in Japan will be here.

I knew this, of course, when I bought the place, but a combination of oriental fatalism and occidental conviction that such things would never happen to me persuaded me to yield, against advice, to its temptations of having this view available whenever I wanted it. (Now that it is darker there are lights in pockets of the hills, and a train like an immense glow-worm is curling around the bay far below) but the news from Italy has made my gesture seem more foolish than even fatalistic.

My stay in Japan has been enjoyable on the whole, though I discovered that this was the year when, for totally different reasons, friends I had been accustomed to seeing every week became relatively inaccessible, putting me more on my own resources. I had a glorious week in Peking at the end of October that I will tell you about—if you wish, when I return to New York. I plan now to be back on January 18, and I’ll get in touch with you as soon as the worst of the jet lag is over. I look forward very much indeed to seeing you again.

Last night there was a gathering in commemoration of Mishima’s death, exactly ten years ago. I was called on to “say a few words” and to my surprise and consternation I almost broke down, and could hardly keep speaking. What extraordinary things have happened to our friends!

Warmest wishes, Donald

New York
December 26, 1980

My dear Donald—

Your letter took long to come, and arrived only just before your lovely card. I reply with some feeling—not exactly trepidation—of anxiety that I so much want to make known to you how your letter moved me, and may not be able to do that as I wish. First, your thought for our thoughts in the Italian tragedy, which in fact never leaves my imagination. And then your depiction of your own setting, which made your mountains present to me, also in the atmosphere that flows from a loved place. We have spoken about these things, and I remember your saying—writing—in your “Meeting with Japan” that you came to depend on Japan for your happiness and thus to be sure that Japan could console you also for unhappiness. There are many for whom such a place does not exist even in fancy, and part of my own conscious joy in merely being in “my” chosen land is the sense of luck that Flaubert describes on the Nile: of gratitude that one is able to realize all this and look on with that awareness. I think that you, like me, came to this after you were quite grown up, and having enjoyed other places meantime, though not with this particular calm exultation. In my case, the sense of place was scarcely existent in childhood, and was perhaps saved up for the intensified adult pleasure later on.

I have been thinking about going back to Naples and trying to “do something,” perhaps to write an article to draw particular attention to some aspect and so on. We left just before the catastrophe happened. My first impulse was to go back. But Francis is so much against this and indeed I doubt I could be useful. So for the present the idea is in abeyance. Also, it’s true that what I want most—and not just selfishly, or at least the selfishness is not in the simplest form—is to get on with my new work. So here I am, in the coldest days yet known to me in NY, going through the usual Christmas hurly-burly, etc. Of course there are many pleasant things—most of all seeing friends, and then expecting your arrival in three weeks or so (and I hope this letter will get to Japan before you leave). An English friend, Bruce Chatwin (wrote a book about being in Patagonia) was here briefly and particularly asked if we would arrange a meeting with you whom he greatly admires. He is returning to NY in February. He is a charmer and quite a fascinating person, more like a phenomenon that used to exist than a modern man. He is about forty, looks younger, was Sotheby’s youngest director ever at about twenty-four, but bolted from that to “travel” in the old way, for adventures of the mind as well as eye and body and, as Custine said, “to visit other centuries.” Well, will “get hold of him” when he returns (a baleful expression that, I always think). Tomorrow night we are going to Les Carmelites at the Metrop. Opera—a work that by no means meets Ivan’s conditions for suitable opera, but an impressive one I think. Yes, what extraordinary things have happened to our friends, as you say. Ivan’s death remains an unresolved event and—for that and other reasons—unabsorbed in the way that such sorrows usually are. Once in a while it comes over me quite freshly that we shall never meet again, and the same protest rises up at a mindless tragedy. There was an article here on the anniversary of Mishima’s death—I kept it, and shall show it to you if you would be interested. Yes, emphatically, we would like to hear about your time in Peking. Having suffered from homesickness for the east since I left it over thirty years ago, I find it curious that I quite fear any return there. Yet I find I return to it increasingly in my writing.

About the world, the less said the better. We have been in touch by phone with our Neapolitan friends—all intact, but of course greatly distressed by the misery surrounding them. A poor man with large family, whom I have known since 1956, wrote me just now that they survived “con l’aiuto del Signore” the terrible experience, including the worst earthquake, which struck their house and “ci ha costretti, io e tutta la famiglia, a passare cinque notti di terrore e paura, all’addiaccio e in mezzo alla strada.” Well, we have both—you and I, I mean—chosen the earthquake zone. Thank you for asking about Capri—there, they had only “fright,” no damage. It would be a severe fright too, if one thinks of all those teetering crags that are the Caprese landscape.

The usual—or worse than usual—politics go on, and the inexorable false declarations by politicians. Do you remember, in War and Peace, in the phase when Prince Andrei takes up a position on a govt committee and runs around seeing “important” people, how he notices in passing that he did the same thing more than once that day????

Let us meet soon—shall be in touch on your return. We must have a quiet evening here, and “laugh about things that are grave in the suburbs.” Thank you again for your beautiful letter. With warmest new year greetings from us both, and with much affection from Shirley.

New York
November 7, 1982

Dear Donald—

The day after my return we did an adventurous thing for New Yorker stick in the muds—hired a car and went to the Botanic Garden at the Bronx to see a beautiful display of chrysanthemums in the conservatory there, prepared for the past eighteen months by a Japanese chrysanthemum expert—I feel the inadequacy of that designation, but know no western term for this poetic vocation. Of course these flowers ceased to be chrysanthemums in our sense. Odd for me—having just come from the Italian Day of the Dead: Tutti Santi is a tremendous day in Italy, and remains a focus on ancestor worship in a manner often moving and beautiful. Millions of chrysanthemums are taken to cemeteries throughout Italy, people often traveling long distances to visit graves. (Profanely I may add that it is a fine opportunity to get into churches often closed at other times, and to see pictures one otherwise has to get special permission for. In Rome last Monday—the day of the holiday—I profited somewhat from that, and in the course of it heard at least one quite delightful sermon. A day of splendid warm weather, at noon the entire populace of Rome appeared in the streets well dressed from church and a sort of decorous festival took place—rather like Easter Sunday—with large family lunches in restaurants outdoors etc. Even allowing for advantages of climate and temperament, a marked contrast with, say, an English public holiday in a large city …)

However, I intended to say that a present of a bunch or plant of chrysanthemums in Italy is not well regarded: tantamount to saying, Drop Dead. The flower has that rather sacred function of remembering the dead, and can’t be thought of as cheering up a living-room.

Please, when you have a moment, let us know about yr expected return to NYC … With much affection from us both—Shirley.

Tokyo
December 7, 1982

Dear Shirley,

Having just typed the date, my mind flies back to December 7, 1941. I had just gone with the Japanese friend to Staten Island, and when we returned on the ferry boat to the Battery, a newsboy was hawking the New York Inquirer with the headline “JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOR.”

I remember that day very clearly, even to the faces of some of the people in the subway. But I am hard put to explain why I have not written you during the past month. I have been busy, of course, but I never take that as an excuse for not writing. I have certainly thought of you and Francis often enough, but I suppose that I have not written chiefly because I have been reluctant to reveal the awful truth that I may not return to New York at all in 1983. Normally I would be returning in January, but this will be my thirteenth year teaching without sabbatical leave (as opposed to unpaid leave). Unlike full-time teachers, who get a sabbatical leave every seventh year, I get mine in the thirteenth year. When I made the decision to stay in Japan for the entire time I thought with delight of seeing the spring in Japan for the first time in almost twenty years. (I did not go to Japan in the spring when I had my last sabbatical leave.) I thought with even greater pleasure of the immense amount of work I would be able to accomplish during the unbroken period of eighteen months. I did not sufficiently think of how much I would miss my friends in New York. Nor, alas, did I anticipate the number of distractions that have effectively kept me from doing my work. That is the unhappy truth that has kept me from writing you. Of course, it would not be impossible to fly back to New York. There are cheap plane tickets on airlines you have not heard of, by circuitous routes over the South Pole or possibly the Gobi Desert. But I have irrevocably let my apartment in New York for the spring, and it would be strange and perhaps unpleasant to be in New York and unable to get my own books or rummage through bottom drawers for papers I stuffed away when I left.

I enjoyed your account of Roberto Pane leaping from his chair in indignation over the book on Bernini that failed to treat the Counter-Reformation. Somehow I recalled a poetry reading given by Giuseppe Ungaretti in New York (at Columbia). I had met him the day before at a party, and found him so extraordinary that, although my Italian is really restricted to what people say in Verdi operas, I persuaded myself that I would understand him. I might have, but he began the lecture with a burst of uncontrolled rage because, on visiting the Museum of Modern Art that day, he had discovered that there were no paintings on display by an artist (I unfortunately forget who it was) whom he admired. I was struggling desperately to follow what was being said, but all I was really aware of was that something unspeakable had happened. Almost as bad as not giving the Counter-Reformation its due!

I am glad that you liked Kawabata’s novels. The Master of Go was Ivan’s favorite, and probably was Kawabata’s own. Unlike Ivan, however, I’m unable to figure out the simplest puzzle, ever, and I could neither follow nor ignore the moves in Go. I shall re read it, after what you have said.

All my best to you and Francis for Christmas. As ever, Donald

New York
January 19, 1983

Dear Donald—

My own recollection of “JAPS ATTACK PEARL HARBOR” was riding on the top of a bus, home from school outing with my “best friend,” a pigtailed blonde who now has grandchildren, and seeing the poster “PEARL HARBOUR, MANILA, DARWIN BOMBED.” I wonder if this is accurate—whether they were all bombed in the same day—or if I have telescoped a couple of days together in my mind. But that is what I recall. It was a blazing hot day, & the “feeling” of the day is very strong to me. I was nine. I was a generation older when another moment arrived, in 1945, a winter morning when I was dressing to go to school and heard on “the wireless” that the atomic bomb had been dropped. Many episodes from the war are very clear to me, in their atmosphere as well as the facts. I remember for instance picking up the afternoon newspaper in our driveway and reading that the German armies were “ten miles from Moscow.” And, earlier, “HITLER’S DEPUTY FLIES TO SCOTLAND.” All the time of the blitz is v clear to me. Then, Australia was having constant adventures, unlike its old self: Japanese submarines blown up one night in Sydney Harbour, Americans in uniform by the tens of thousands; tremendous wartime shipping—which we were forbidden to mention, although we could sail around and around all the ships and wave to the unmentionable sailors … Near the end of the war, the delirious welcome to the British fleet, Mountbatten’s excursions over aircraft carriers, battleships. The Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, unmentionable too, had been in the harbor—they had been unattainable legends until then. Soldiers in battle dress from the jungle (Australian battle dress made a wretched showing beside the Americans …), with dark yellow or green faces from “atabrine.” What times we have passed through and somehow survived.

I wonder what happened to your Japanese friend after his return with you from Staten Island.

I shld confess right away that I could not possibly follow the game of Go in the novel. But I didn’t find it necessary. This no doubt would rightly be scorned by those who care deeply that the full meaning of the novel should be present; but since I thought the book marvelous in any case, I don’t feel too badly. I urged it on Francis, who read it at once and, when he put it down, said, “A masterpiece.” I too shirk puzzles, although I proudly claim skill with the London Times crossword, the only crossword I ever do. It is witty and literary, and only occasionally unfairly obscure I think. However, at first untutored glance I think it must seem insane.

I met Ungaretti when he was at Columbia. It was at dinner at the Breunigs. I had a delightful time with him, but felt I could not establish any real rapport in so short a time, or in the way I would have liked … I wonder who the painter was whose exclusion from MOMA so infuriated him?—Morandi? De Chirico? De Pisis? Guttuso? … It wld be interesting to know. At present in NY we have the Vatican treasures (well, a small portion of them) about to break on us. Many delightful things have presented themselves this winter—we went to a supreme Lucia di L., Sutherland and Alfredo Kraus. One of the most beautiful evenings I’ve ever spent. Last night we went to the ballet (the formless Don Quixote), first night; Nureyev was stupendous—even the NY Times admits it this morning. One sees that he is older, yet the incredible feats and the magic take place. Afterwards we were asked to a party for him at Sardi’s (not our usual existence I assure you), and had a good time: it is nice to see the young dancers, still beautiful off stage. Many other things done, also some work. F.’s Vol II of Flaubert’s letters has had a fine reception—he is glad to have the new printings as he catches many graves turned into acutes etc.

I wonder if you ever read Montale? His poetry is difficult, but there are some moderately good translations. However, the essays—recently translated in a large selection and published here—are full of highly intelligent and thoughtful observations. He is one of the few people who seem to write dispassionately and with strong opinions on the “dehumanization of art,” which becomes a preoccupation to me. I wonder if art will go on in any recognizable form, and if so will there be anything other than “mass art.” I scarcely believe there will; but one hopes to be disappointed in such pessimism. In an interview, Montale remarked—of all the rationalizers of why contemporary art necessarily takes its current forms—“I do not deny that they must follow such paths; I only deny their right to call themselves free men.”

Like many cultivated Italians, he often—though not always—got off the track when he commented on foreign life & art, and especially when he incorporated such comments into his poems. Someone (a lesser figure by far, at least to me) who gets hopelessly bushed when he sets foot abroad is John Updike: his writings set in Italy for instance set one’s teeth on edge. Thus I wonder what you may have thought of his article in last week’s (3 Jan) New Yorker on Tanizaki and Soseki? It may be that Updike is better in Japan than elsewhere, but his “European” writings cause me to doubt … A propos, Mr. Stephen Shaw from Kodansha International sent me a translated novel I’ve not yet had time to read: Child of Fortune by Yuko Tsushima. When I suggested he should send one also to Updike, he forwarded me another copy, and I’ve sent it on accordingly. I wonder if you know this writer, and what you think of the book if so?

All publishers pronounce this “a bad time” to publish. Yet, in twenty years of producing books, I’ve yet to hear from a publisher that it was “a good time” to publish. There has always been a dire reason why one was publishing at just the wrong time. Yet books have gone on and lived a life of their own.

“Things” in the world of course seem as if they could scarcely be worse, and no doubt that is in many places true. However, I remember one brilliant Sunday morning in London when we were walking through Belgravia to visit—I think—my mother in a nearby hotel—about a dozen years ago—and we took conscious note of the fact that this was all possible: beauty, civility, some relative degree of liberty, decency, justice, absence of fear. And that historically it had come about against the odds. To manifest themselves against the odds is perhaps in the nature of civilised things; although the groundswell producing them is long and arduous, they have a freakish existence too, an element of almost constant surprise.

In mid-March we are off to Italy for just a month. At San Carlo at Naples, there is a production of Mussorgsky’s Salambô; and we also take a little trip down to Reggio Calabria to see “the bronzes of Riace”, those colossal Greek 5th c. B.C. statues found in the sea a few years ago, now restored and on view to an astounded public (which we hope will not have arrived in late March; although by Easter the crowds will presumably re-emerge). All thrilling.

Much affection, and we do hope to see you sometime during 1983. … We wonder when your publication date is? I wish I knew the appropriate Japanese expression for trois fois merde, or Auguri—as ever—Shirley

New York
January 20, 1983

Dear Shirley,

Today I emerged unscathed from what the Japanese call ningen dokku, which means literally a “human dock.” This neologism refers to the practice of having a complete medical examination that requires one to spend at least two days in the hospital while every conceivable test is performed, and it owes its peculiar name to the analogy between the services performed at the hospital and the rather similar services performed on a ship in dry dock. This is not a bad example of how the Japanese have expanded our poor old English language in a manner that would surprise Dr. Johnson. Anyway, the worst feature of my present physical condition is a tendency to stooped shoulders, an occupational hazard with writers, I am told. I was particularly pleased that there are no conspicuous signs of old age creeping over me. There is still much work for me to do—or at least I think so.

I had a three week vacation in India and Thailand, returning to Japan on the tenth of this month. I enjoyed the sunshine and the heat. Unlike my previous visits to that part of the world, I was not bothered by the oppressive humidity. In fact, I was there during the one month or possibly six weeks of the year when the weather is hot but comfortable. In Bangkok I met a friend who was in New York last year, and to my surprise I received the enclosed photographs of Francis, taken at the annual festivities of the American Academy. Somehow, if one put that scene into a novel, no one would believe it: I just happened to meet someone in Bangkok who just happened to be carrying around some colored photographs of Francis Steegmuller.

Shortly after my return to Tokyo I had a telephone call from Kazuo Nakajima, the friend of Bill Weaver. He was to return to Italy in a couple of days, but we arranged a meeting and spent a most agreeable two or three hours in conversation. Just imagine teaching Japanese in Venice! Why didn’t I think of that? I have visited Venice several times, briefly each time, but it just becomes more and more beautiful in my memory. It occurs to me that this is just the opposite of Proust’s experience; his Venice was above all the Venice he could not visit, and the impossibility of going there made it seem so incomparably beautiful. But my Venice is one above all of silence, broken only by the occasional vaporetto, a city of human beings rather than of means of transportation.

Speaking of Proust, I have slowly been making my way through the new translation by Terrence Kilmartin. I find it quite wonderful, much better than my recollections of Scott Moncrieff, and really not very different from my recollections of reading the original. But, naturally, even more than the ease and grace of the translation it is the book itself that overwhelms me. Each page brings a new discovery—and I thought I knew Proust well.

On the plane going to India, believe it or not, I read Villette, which you once recommended. I thought that with the exception of one chapter which baffled me, the book was remarkably good, perhaps the most effective portrayal of desperate loneliness that I have ever read. The one chapter is towards the end, a dreamlike sequence in which Lucy creeps out of the house at night and makes her way to the center of the city where she sees almost everyone she knows, overhears their conversations, is even waved to from a carriage. It reads exactly like delirium, but the next chapter makes it clear that everything actually happened as described. And the mystery of the ghostly nun seems curiously unworthy of the book. Having said what no doubt many others have also said, I must add that I am most grateful to you for having called my attention to a book that moved me more than any novel of that period. It baffles me now why no one before you ever mentioned it to me.

All good wishes for what is still a relatively new year! Yours, Donald

From Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene, edited by Brigitta Olubas, to be published by Columbia University Press this October.