Greene on Capri

For anyone who values humanistic traditions, reading the works of Shirley Hazzard is intellectually refreshing. As Geordie Williamson wrote (The Australian, 3/25/16) in a review of her essays, (We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think), an “antiquated world view comes roaring back into view.”

I have found this to be true in all of Hazzard’s books that I’ve read including most recently Greene on Capri. In this short memoir, she recalls the friendship she and her husband, the Flaubert scholar, Francis Steegmuller had with Greene when they were visiting the island of Capri. Greene owned a house there and together they met frequently for lunch and dinner at a restaurant Greene liked.

For the most part, they talked about literature, the books and authors they liked. These conversational rambles during their long meals and walks constitute the heart of the book and bring alive their mutual joy in reading and writing.

Hazzard writes, “Literature was the longest and most consistent pleasure of Graham’s life. It was the element in which he best existed, providing him with the equilibrium of affinity and a life time to the rational as well as the fantastic.”

Greene on Capri is not meant to be a complete portrait of Greene but from time to time Hazzard does reflect on his personality. In The Man Within, Greene wrote: “Always while one part of him spoke, another part stood on one side and wondered, Is this I who am speaking? Can I really exist like this?” Hazzard comments:

“I think that Graham was not simply made up of two persons. Rather, that he gave rein to disparate states of mind as they successively possessed him, putting these to service in his work…with years, however, it had come to prevail for its own sake as a mood of defiance, directed against the tedium of rational existence.”

Elsewhere she notes how little Greene valued contentment “…pleasure could not be an assumption and was not a goal; whereas suffering was a constant, and almost a code of honour. Suffering was the attestable key to imaginative existence.”

Is suffering where writers really belong, what they need to experience in order to write fiction? If we can believe Hazzard, it was for Greene. However, I doubt it is necessary for most writers but perhaps it is why many of them become alcoholics.

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Lang explores the reasons why some authors were destroyed by excessive drinking. She writes: [Eugene] O’Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there’s a great deal of tension involved in writing, you know that. And it’s all right up to a certain age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from drinking.

Shirley Hazzard Ancient Shore

I have always enjoyed the novels and nonfiction works of Shirley
 Hazzard. And I have a bit of familiarity with her experiences
 in Italy, mostly around Naples and on the island of Capri. It was a pleasure, for example, to read her recent work Greene on Capri where she reminiscences about the good times she and her husband Frances Steegmuller had with Graham Greene when he was there. How often do we 
find ourselves in such a lovely place with a charming and knowledgeable person who we seem to get along with so well? 



In their latest book, Ancient Shore, Hazzard and Steegmuller wax 
wistfully about the city of Naples and what has happened to it over 
the centuries and the far from pleasant encounter they had while there 
during a recent visit. The book reminded me, of course, of the many 
summers I have spent in Italy--no less memorable than theirs, although
 they are far more eloquent than I in conveying the remarkable beauty 
and spirit of that country and its people. Here are my favorite 
passages from Ancient Shore.



Life in Italy is seldom simple. One does not go there for simplicity
 but for interest: to make the adventures of existence more vivid, more
 poignant. I have known that country through dire as well as golden
 times and have dwelt in town and country, north and south.
 Whether I wake these mornings in Naples to the Mediterranean lapping
 the seawall or on Capri to the sight of a nobly indifferent mountain,
 it is never without realizing, in surprise and gratitude, that I—like
 Goethe, like Byron—am living in Italy.



It was in reading that one could truly live: in one's mind, in books,
 in the world. A form of pilgrimage.



The variety and interest of existence had struck us, through
 literature, as being more real than our factual origins.



"We change our skies, not our souls." Horace



Literature has prepared us to expect the release of new aspects of ourselves in the presence of the fabled and unfamiliar.



Continuity, the charm and genius of Italy, has taken some nasty
 knocks, at Naples, as elsewhere.



Time is long here, but a town with a volcano is no place to forget
 mortality.



The puritan view that a sense of pleasure cannot be justified amid
 visable affliction is meaningless to Neapolitan—who knows that 
pleasure cannot be deferred for ideal circumstances.



I wonder at the stroke of fortune that first brought me here to live
 in intimacy with this civilized spirit and to share its long adventure.


Italy, which harbors mysteries and arouses imagination, does not
 supply solutions.



…we are encouraged to stop defining life, and to live it. The element
 of chance regains importance; we recover the capacity for
 astonishment, and the gift of taking some things for granted.