3. The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard

The Bay of Noon, by Shirley Hazzard, 1970, MacMillan & Co; pictured, Penguin paperback, 1982.

Possibly the best living writer born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard was lost long ago to a larger world that saw her finally wash up in New York and win the National Book Critics Award for her 1980 novel The Transit of Venus. I first encountered her through her almost mystically sparse, and yet damnably romantic, The Great Fire (2003), and like that novel, The Bay of Noon yearns to evoke an age of emotional and physical displacement, the haunted epoch after World War Two, in which the world is being tethered together in tighter bonds by modernity and yet still riddled with fault-lines between cultures and individual humans. In The Great Fire, the blasted wasteland of Hiroshima was both symbol and nullification of symbolism, an undeniable remnant of extermination that both dwarfed and yet gave a strange new urgency to the problems of those individual humans in reinventing the future. In The Bay of Noon, the city of Naples serves a similar purpose, as evocation and avatar of the expanse of history.

The Bay of Noon tells a wispy, and yet highly involved and detailed little story, and tops off at about 145 pages. It is a study of a quartet of people, which eddies and then resolves without resolving, a choice that concludes with more force then a less skilled writer could deliver. It accounts a year or so in the life of Jenny, whose name is actually Penelope, but she had been misnamed on a refugee ship taking her to South Africa to wait out the war. Employed as a translator and typist by NATO, she had come to Naples in the vanguard of a party of military personnel, her early arrival lucky as it gives her a chance to slip the net of the billets, and find her own lodgings, finally ending up in a seaside apartment. Engaged in some sublimely boring but time-demanding work, translating endless amounts of material to prepare a port that will see the construction of a major NATO base, Jenny is far more interested in engaging with the city. Armed with a letter of introduction from a friend who works at Ealing Studios to a woman novelist, Gioconda, whose first book had been made into a highly successful neo realist film, Del Tempo Felice, she hesitantly calls the lady up, hoping to make a useful local acquaintance.

Gioconda proves a brilliant, intriguing, but lonely and disaffected woman, all too eager to gain a new friend, and she and Jenny become steadfast companions. Gioconda’s lover, Gianni, the film director who made Del Tempo Felice, is the man Gioconda credits with saving her life, in some vague, non-melodramatic fashion. As the histories of the two females resolve out of the murk of the past, Hazzard etches a picture of provisional emotional states. Jenny was happy to flee buttoned-down post-War Britain, but her more immediate motive for taking the job is that she had fallen in love with her brother, and her staidly bourgeois sister-in-law had unconsciously encouraged the passion. When Jenny realised that she lacked stable ground under her feet if this situation were to blow up, she looked for the first exit on hand. Gioconda is haunted by the death of her great love, a young painter, who had been a discovery of her father, an eminent History professor. The painter has sat out the war as a conscientious objector, but died some time after VE Day, when his boat struck an unrecovered mine, a late victim of that war. Now, tethered by real ardour to Gianni, but faced with a romantic life that cannot resolve itself into an accepted form, she becomes increasingly nervous and finds herself acting out almost embarrassingly stereotypical scenes. The last major character is Justin P. Tulloch, a Scottish marine biologist working out of the Naples Aquarium, but initially sponsored by Whitehall, an intelligent, but coolly withdrawn, glibly discursive man who courts Jenny without any apparent intent.

Hazzard’s concerns are generational, inevitably and even willingly dated, and yet her sensibility is similar to a writer like Doris Lessing, with the same efforts at achingly precise charting of divides between men and women, in a context of post-War rootlessness, and turns retrospective flavour into an asset; it is precisely about the nature of recalling the past and watching it turn into present that is the key-note of The Bay of Noon. Sharing a biting precision in bottling secondary figures, Hazzard’s a more convincingly sensual writer and a less forceful conceptual thinker than Lessing. Sentence for sentence, there aren’t many modern writers who can stand up to her, especially in conjuring epigrams that are biting, cynical, and suggestive of deep hurt. Try, for instance:

“Edmund would assure himself that my disappearance was the best thing for everyone – it is what people always say when they have arranged something exclusively to suit themselves.”

Or:

“Thus, gratefully, he renounced uniqueness for a textbook anonymity.”

Hazzard’s prose is usually at its most lethal when describing the provisional psyche of provincialism or military men, like the patronising, xenophobic Colonel who is Jenny’s supposed superior:

“When I joined (the mission) I knew nothing of the professional soldier in modern times. Seething is the word I find for them: so many of these people, particularly the officers, were perpetually seething – with fury, with fear, and with the daily necessity of striking out before they could be felled by inapprehensible foes. Of this seething, their profession was but a logical extension. (In fact, their attitude to their authorized enemies – Soviets, socialists, and agitators of all breeds – was tinged with a wistful worship. ‘Catch them putting up with a mess like this,’ or ‘They wouldn’t tolerate this set-up for a second.’)”

Gianni presents himself to Jenny as a conceited, opinionated man of the world, offending her when he tries to kiss her in the ruins of Herculaneum because it’s the expected thing. He’s stringing Gioconda along with several other women, and has a wife and kids tucked away somewhere. The actual man takes some time to resolve, first glimpsed by Jenny when Gioconda rejects his request for her to move into his Rome apartment. When she actually sees that apartment, Jenny is dismayed because it indicates a man of a different sensibility to the one he projects to his women. This comes after a disastrous trip where Gioconda follows Gianni to Tangiers on a film shoot, the fractious results of which Gioconda describes with the words “You can imagine,” –

“At this ‘you can imagine’, with its first reference to my own idea of Gianni, its first suggestion of culpability, I felt the compunction one feels when one has ultimately converted – corrupted – another to one’s point of view at the expense of some deep conviction of their own. With this phrase Gioconda acknowledged no only my reservations about Gianni, but their validity as well: there was no gratification in getting my own way; only, much graver, more crucial, the pang at her surrender.”

Such is the way of things in a novella where Gioconda assures Jenny that love, being the most conditional thing in the world, can alter with minute gestures, and that her love for her brother will recede, in time, not in status, but like a landmark in the distance; such indeed is how the narrating Jenny regards all these scenes. Both the processes involved in moving on from a situation, a temporary state of things, and how that situation lingers, affects, determines actions in the future, are the tale’s crucial ideas; how nostalgia can weave itself around the most painful moments in life.

The irony that slowly becomes apparent is that Jenny has skipped out from one situation with the threat of real incest and stumbled into another, albeit only metaphorically, as the go-nowhere romance of Jenny and Justin (the aural and visual similarity of the names of all four major protagonists is obvious) segues into a psycho-sexual train wreck where, whilst Jenny is stricken with jaundice, Justin and Gioconda skip off to Seville for a romp whilst a distraught Gianni comes to Jenny for comfort, which he finally gets. It is, as Jenny immediately identifies, more an expression of frustration on Gioconda’s part than a real break, and she, taking an offer to move on with the report to Washington, advises Gianni to go and fetch Gioconda back.

Hazzard excels at reversals of expectation that don’t try too hard to amaze, as when Jenny introduces Justin to Gioconda, with Jenny assuming the meeting to be a crashing disaster, only for Justin to muse on the "remarkable" lady shortly after. It's a moment that’s vital and predicative of what eventuates, and yet only announces itself as a slyly comedic punchline. Likewise Gianni’s resolution from an almost caricatured Italian macho to an intriguing figure pauses to acknowledge that he’s aware of, and likes, his assumed character. Gianni in his fullest realisation is a tender, leonine presence, who can’t entirely countenance being one of those “reformed characters” and give up his wayward, authoritarian masculine ways. In contrast, the humorous but artfully deflecting professional cynic, Tulloch, “seemed fictitious, a sort of sub-plot, something that had no existence other than to augment her experience and mine, to contribute to our legend. He himself had strengthened this impression by the defences – of language, of manner, of making love – he had constructed’ had become their victim, like those heavily fortified towns that invite their own downfall by suggesting that there is something within to assaulted.”

Hazzard’s sensibility is too mediated and textured to favour thematic propaganda or bourgeois exoticism; it’s true, we cling to exotic places, the uncommon experience, and fondly recalled friendship. Her characters have the certain flesh of real people, even if they dance around each-other without really engaging in such a way that would make for a great, rather than a very good, work of literature. Gioconda can act recklessly and Gianni can look like a hero, and then reverse roles. Jenny watches and absorbs with youthful, not entirely wise eyes, so that her wiser older narrator can make that sense of altering perspective, rather than mere incident, the important realisation.

Hazzard’s theory that life tends to revolve around the same constant reference points, in different scales of relationship, is born out in its repeated motifs. The novella’s finale counterpoints two journeys: that of Jenny and Gianni leaving Naples and travelling north, so she can take a ship from Genoa and he can fetch Gioconda from Nice, and then, many years later, Gioconda’s return, when she make the passage from Naples to Capri by hydrofoil. This is a ride that she feels cheats her, in stripping her of the anticipated, rightful, becalmed pace of the old ferry, of the proper chance to gather her thoughts and steel herself before encountering Gioconda again. Likewise, the eerie opening report of a plane that crashes on Vesuvius in a fog that takes days to clear, which, when it does, reveals that the searchers had been looking in the wrong place, anticipates the almost tangential revelation of Justin’s fate in a plane crash that Jenny learns of in the newspaper after many half-hearted stabs at locating him. The volcano itself becomes an emblem, of emotional volatility, naturally, but also in the threat of perpetual stasis, of becoming locked, like the victims of Herculaneum, in the same eternal poses flight and fear. The tension between eternal stasis and eternal movement, in essence equal forms of death, hardly resolves; it’s the tension that sustains its characters, who lives explicitly counter the more commonplace mode of life that people are adopting, clinging to the provisional, flavourless, history-lacking world of the military base and its bland, boxy structures, and even blander, boxier personnel.

The Bay of Noon is not a tragedy; in material a little sex farce, in effect a work of meditative near-poetry, it may be said to tell a story about what happens between stories. In the past lie events such as Jenny’s hopeless passion and Gioconda’s wartime travails, and in the future, Jenny’s marriage and settlement in some unspecified but hopefully organic way of life, and Justin’s mysterious fate. The city, Naples, imbues it all with a gauzy romanticism, its reckless, history-laden structures and mossy air of weary and yet every-youthful experience. Jenny’s final journey to Capri offsets an earlier incident that Gioconda had remembered, of walking into a New York art dealer’s and seeing a painting by her dead lover for sale, a pure shard of the past stabbing into the present, where Jenny’s journey is forced to take on the tasteless quality of tourism.