Writing about the United Nations: Shirley Hazzard’s Humanist Politic
Although New-York-based Australian-born author Shirley Hazzard is best known for her literary fiction, she has also been, throughout her writing career, a forthright commentator on political affairs, or what she calls “public themes”. In addition to her four novels and two collections of stories, she has published two monographs on the United Nations: Defeat of an Ideal in 1973 and Countenance of Truth in 1990. Informed by insider accounts as well as published records, these works document two major claims: firstly that the US government’s post-war McCarthyist policies had indelible effects on the UN structure from its inception, inhibiting the effective prosecution of its responsibilities, and secondly that the very structure of the UN facilitated the covering up of Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s WWII Austrian Nazi Party affiliation. The argument of both books is thus that the core failures of the United Nations derive from the structural preferment of parochial (national) over cosmopolitan (international) public interest. In this sense, they share with Hazzard’s fiction an internationalist optic and an overt commitment to humanism as cultural imperative. This paper will examine the convergences between Hazzard’s UN writings and her literary fiction. It will argue in particular that the contrary pull of public and poetic responsibility that Hazzard identifies in Milton’s essays on Church corruption structures a similar sense of the work of the writer herself, an alignment of the ‘public themes’ of political critique and commentary with the work of literature.