Evening of the Holiday (S Hazzard)

11.11.06
Outside my window a woman in black – ski pants, straight hair, sun glasses – holds pink flowers while seated on the stone fence of the chiropractor’s garden opposite; she looks out of frame, down the road to where her lift will soon appear.

How does the writer choose the scene – in The Evening of the Holiday each chapter is mostly one scene, the same characters developing their relationship, or themselves, or neither. A striking feature of Chapter 11 is that Sophie is not one of the characters that appears on the page. Tancredi seeks out her lately sick Aunt Luisa whom he has known his whole life, he wants a particular type of conversation, self affirming in a time of some doubt; but the main event is Sophie’s absence – for in this part of the book she is otherwise never sighted without Tancredi also present, if not physically then front and centre in her thoughts.

Even in the relaxed almost ponderous first half of the novel (Tancredi circumspect, tired, a little cynical, seems no longer fully alive, and Sophie too young to be said to have yet lived a real life; the two of them effably drifting into a relationship that has little to offer either) Hazzard makes incisive readings of her characters’ half-conscious motivations and self mis-understandings.

She is also, almost offhandedly, concerned with the poetry of things – the fountain, the fresco, the shape of the square. And she regularly pulls you up with a jarring turn of sentence, a kind of prose enjambment: ” the intricate lasting nature of any form of love”; or ” she seemed to him (as women often did) like a piece of important information he must acquire.”

It is entirely predictable that this is the moment that Tancredi will first experience the sadness of, or even nostalgia for, the end of a relationship which has not yet reached its middle. But how he does so is not so predictable. Speaking to Luisa – who tells him what he wants to hear rather than what she acutely observes, and relates only to us – he tells of a father who avoided failure by magnanimously withdrawing his superior being from any competition or ambition. He is conscious of his appreciation of Luisa, playing the role of sage, not quite counsellor, who never disappoints as others do by revealing their own pride or ambition. His happy snap memories from an otherwise ordinarily unhappy childhood: the piercing memory of his sister’s ‘pliant beauty’ unknowingly destined for ‘ nervous spinsterhood’. The unbearable memories of things ‘ utterly and unthinkingly past’. His mind in memory: ‘ how shall I bear this later on’.

~continued 2 May 2007
Chapter 12 ends the sense of wandering ponderousness. “For the first time he sincerely wondered what she thought of him – that is, as distinct from what she loved in him.” Did he insincerely wonder this before? Or does sincerely here mean ‘with full attention’ in an almost Buddist sense? But then to be wondering, perhaps almost splitting hairs, over what she thinks of him and what she loves in him? Yes at one level Hazzard merely observes that love is blind, people are capable of at least obsession with part of their being and at the same time able to see what they like (and by implication like less) about the loved one; indeed there are probably things almost but not quite the same which they both approve and disapprove of. But nevertheless there is something clinical in Tancredi (and so too in Sophie, and many other characters in Hazzard). This kind of analysis suggests affinities with Iris Murdoch, where the tone of the novels is markedly different, although if that is so Hazzard belongs to a philosophy based on intense observations left to resonate unresolved rather than one of piled up syllogisms, albeit syllogisms in search of easier questions to answer.

Indeed just now and again a Hazzard witticism has an air of Iris Murdoch not really trying: this one in particular seems an easy mark: “Sophie’s mother having at an early age observed the consequences of strong feelings had prudently excluded herself from an encounter with them.” It is perhaps more than what it seems – a mirror of Tancredi’s ambition-avoiding father?

continued here