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Expatriates of no country : the letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene

Hazzard, Shirley, 1931-20162024

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"Shirley Hazzard left Sydney at age 16 without completing her formal education. Fiercely intelligent and instinctively intellectual, she undertook a project of self-education, through extensive and passionate reading. Once established in the metropolis of New York, her marriage to the Flaubert scholar, translator and biographer, Francis Steegmuller, was marked throughout by the couple's commitment to what Timothy Duffy has called "the highly idiosyncratic and individualized traditions of literary amateurism and belles-lettres." Shirley Hazzard died in 2016, at age 85, an acclaimed novelist. Donald Keene served as an intelligence officer in the US Navy during the World War II. His first assignment had been to interrogate Japanese prisoners in Honolulu, and in the course of this exercise he discovered the prisoners' diaries. After reading the diaries of poet Jun Takami, Donald drew on Takami's observation of "the deep civility of the Tokyo residents and their concern for each other's welfare" and cited Takami's words, "I want to live with these people. I want to die with these people" as motivation for his decision to move to Japan in 2011 in the wake of the tsunami. Donald Keene died in 2019, at age 96, an acclaimed scholar of Japanese literature. Their correspondence gives the larger story of this compelling connection, these distinctive worlds. In Keene's case there is the larger story of responses to the experiences of war, how his intense sympathy for the soldiers' stories and those of their families informed his scholarship, and beyond that his understanding of the globalizing world. For Hazzard, the letters reveal her extraordinary apprehension of place, the minutiae of the physical world, of weather, the seasons, of local life, and of the reading world that underpinned all this. The letters trace the tenuous lines of expatriate connection (he lived much of the time in Japan, she on Capri), with all their serendipity and their capacity to displace but also to return readers to earlier or imagined scenes through the labours of erudition. The book will provide a frame and context for the correspondence and aims to bring new readers to and new appreciation of the work and achievements of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene"-- Provided by publisher.