Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller, University of Chicago Press, 127 pages, $22.50
Here's the challenge I set myself with this book: Can a writer, one of whose works I admire extravagantly, offer me a convincing enough portrait of a city I've never visited to offset my preconceived notions about it?
The writer is the luminous Australian native Shirley Hazzard, author of the justly celebrated 1981 novel Transit of Venus , among other works. (Not enough of them, in my view: She's 78 and has produced but four novels and two story collections. Would that she had just a touch of Joyce Carol Oates in her.)
The place is Naples, which I associate with corruption, street crime, the violent, Mafia-like Camorra (subject of the new film Gomorrah , which gives new meaning to the old phrase, “see Naples and die”), the constant eruptive threat of Mt. Vesuvius, crumbling infrastructure and raw sewage dumped into the Bay of Naples.
Of course, the Bay of Naples is also home to the magical isle of Capri, subject of another Hazzard book about a place I haven't visited. That book was Greene on Capri , and while I was easily convinced by Hazzard's nimble literary landscaping, the chief joys of that book lay in her evocation of her Capri neighbour, Graham Greene. Especially so because she was equally proficient at describing his person and his character, as it appeared to her and her (late) husband, the scholar, translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller.
Steegmuller, who died in 1994, has been resurrected as Hazzard's collaborator. Or at least a long piece has, one he originally wrote for The New Yorker about being mugged in Naples. And a fine and vivid one it is. But, occupying more than a third of the book, it does make this slender volume split; Hazzard's own haunting musings are not new, but a collection of her writings about a city she grew to love while living there as a United Nations worker in the 1950s.
Hazzard's share of Ancient Shore consists of five previously published, but heretofore uncollected, essays on Naples, and perhaps more pointedly, on the meaning of Naples. For her, the experience of the maligned city is the consummation of a once only-imagined pilgrimage, especially from “remote, philistine” (as it then was) Australia. Indeed, one of the essays is titled simply Pilgrimage , a beautiful and suggestive meditation on various forms of journey. For Hazzard, as for so many before her, Italy had been the focus of this longing.
Of course, the purpose of pilgrimage is salvific. The longing journeyer reaches the cherished place/person/thing, hoping, expecting, a new truth, a new vision, a new way of being.
I think that Hazzard understands herself very well. Hers is no tourist's Naples; it's a seeker's Naples, more metaphysical than physical. Which may be why her intoxication with the city shows no signs of abating with the decades.
These small, but in no way slight, essays are lyrical in the best sense, learned, allusive and full of solitary pleasure. Except for one: Writing about a G7 gathering in the city in 1994, Hazzard applauds aspects of the clean-up that world leaders and their entourages demand, but tut-tuts over said leaders' failure to apprehend, or even explore, the decayed glories of the place and the lessons they portend about the impermanence of power. We are all, eventually, crumbling glories.
