Shirley Hazzard grew up in Mosman - at present, the sixth wealthiest postcode in Australia - in a house with views of Middle Harbor. Sebald, Anne Carson, and, yes, Shirley Hazzard. I apprenticed myself to Annie Ernaux, W.G. This, in its own way, was an extension of Mehta’s model of the amanuensis: apprenticing until you can stand on your own two feet. Geoff Dyer wrote for The New Statesman in 2004 of returning to Hazzard twenty-three years after his first reading, and finding in her work the feeling that he had been “destined to read the book at this moment.” Michelle de Kretser wrote in her 2019 book, On Shirley Hazzard, of returning to Transit as having felt “like a blow to the breastbone.” Hazzard’s husband, Francis Steegmuller, commented, “No one should have to read it for the first time.” When I reread Transit, I was just beginning to write my first novel, and because I often felt adrift and afraid, I looked for other writers who could instruct me in who I was. That people fall in love with the writing of Shirley Hazzard only on the second read has been so oft repeated that it’s tantamount to cliché. It was only on returning to it, after Mehta’s comments, that I was startled by the beauty and subtlety of her prose, the depth of her subject matter, and the delicacy of her sensibility. I had first read Hazzard’s most famous novel when I was in university, but it hadn’t made much of an impression. Not long after I started working at the bookstore, with Mehta’s comment still percolating in my mind, I had reread the novel myself. The book was easy to find, as I had put it on prominent display as a staff pick. Adoration spread by word of mouth and New Yorkers -often young women - arrived looking for The Transit of Venus, her 1980 novel of two orphaned sisters leaving Sydney to live an attenuated melodrama in mid-century England and New York. Hazzard passed away in 2016, and whether it was related or not, 2016 was the year I noticed an uptick of interest in her work. I did not end up becoming Mehta’s amanuensis, and soon afterwards I got a job at McNally Jackson Books, where I would work for six years. It would be a fine thing to do, as an Australian woman living in New York, with literary aspirations, to model myself after Shirley Hazzard. His great friend Shirley Hazzard had been an amanuensis in her youth, he said. He said there was a great tradition of young literary women working as amanuenses to distinguished male writers, and, detecting my accent, he said I must know of the finest female writer with whom I shared citizenship. He asked to hold my hand – he said it helped him connect with people – and explained that he was looking for “an amanuensis.” I would take dictation, assist with his manuscripts, that sort of thing. Mehta, who became blind at an early age after a bout of meningitis, entered the room with some ceremony ten minutes later, and commenced a discussion of the position. The woman who led me into a sitting room told me that the man in question was Ved Mehta, a writer I had never, at that point, heard of before. The job listing had not specified who I would be assisting, but it was clear to me once I entered the lavish, overly gilded apartment, that it was somebody very grand. I had moved to New York the year before, and I needed work. In February of 2014 I arrived at an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, to interview for a position as an ‘Editorial and Personal Assistant’ listed on Craigslist.
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