Columbia
Review by David Starkey
Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene are far from household names. Granted, Hazzard was the author two widely acclaimed novels—The Transit of Venus (1980), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fire (2003), winner of the National Book Award—and Keene’s scholarship on Japan and Japanese literature is well-known to English-speakers interested in those subjects. But when assessing Expatriates of No Country, we must admit that the letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller this is not.
And that’s okay. The fact that the two writers are friends primarily because they write letters to each other means their correspondence is lively and full of pertinent information. There are no footnotes referencing, say, an obscure volume of Latin poetry or a rarely mentioned third cousin. In fact, there are no footnotes at all. Instead, news about literature and conferences and trips and politics zips past, and no doubt some of the book’s streamlined readability is due to Brigitta Olubas quiet and expert editing—there are a lot of ellipses in Expatriates of No Country, replacing, one feels sure, excess and irrelevant information.
Hazzard and Keene met in New York while attending the memorial of a mutual friend, Ivan Morris, a scholar of Japanese literature. The first letter was from Keene to Hazzard on January 31, 1977, while he was still in Manhattan, but the following letter, from Hazzard to Keene, isn’t dated until August of the following year. Hazzard alludes to several phone calls they have had in the interim, but the long gap between letters is normative in this two-hundred page book that covers thirty-one years of writing. Indeed, in one letter Hazzard describes herself as “the world’s worst correspondent.”
Three locations are especially important: New York, where the two sometimes crossed paths, and Italy and Japan, Hazzard and Keene’s respective expatriate homes. Hazzard was born in Australia and Keene in Brooklyn, but they are indisputably creatures of their adopted lands. Much of the time they are catching each other up on the happenings in Naples and Capri, or Tokyo and its environs. They exchange news about recent publications and travels, with a modest dollop of literary gossip: the book’s chief interest is in how they attempt to keep each other engaged, often through praise of the other’s work. In a 1996 letter, for instance, Hazzard compares her efforts as a writer of fiction with Keene’s attempt to write a biography of the Emperor Meiji in Japanese: “I feel like the life of a novelist, writing in one’s own language, is a sinecure.”
Hazzard, whose memoir Greene on Capri (2000) vividly evokes Graham Greene as an expatriate, is especially good at describing her life in Italy. “What a wonderful country it still is,” she writes in 1999. After living there for decades, she remains intrigued by Italian regions she has yet to visit, “packed with works of art—a famous Duomo, churches, what one can in Italy off-handedly refer to as ‘the usual.'” Hazzard has a more active social life than Keene, who tends to dwell on the many scholarly projects he is involved in. Fortunately, his low-key sense of humor enlivens many of his letters, as in this one from 2003 when he says of a series of lectures he recently delivered in Osaka: they “were not my best, but the standard in Japan is rather low and that makes my lectures seem better than they are. Or perhaps the standard is low everywhere.”
In some regards, I suppose Expatriates of No Country, a book about two deceased authors published by a university press, is primarily of interest to scholars, but even without the fireworks of love and sex, the relationship between Hazzard and Keene is quietly intense. The last letter in the book, from Keene to Hazzard, was written in Tokyo and is dated July 21, 2008. Hazzard died in New York eight years later, while Keene died in Tokyo in 2019. Hazzard struggled with dementia in her later years, but as I turned the final page, I found myself wishing that there had been just one more benedictory missive between the two of them: something simple, saying goodbye.
