Carefully crafted clarity

• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Mia Levitin

Collected Stories, edited by her biographer, Brigitta Olubas, contains two previous volumes: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). It also includes eight uncollected stories - among which is the inaugural story, Woollahra Road, about a girl in Depression-era Australia - as well as two unpublished works found among Hazzard's papers after her death in 2016. While the two posthumously-published pieces are, unsurprisingly, not fully developed, the voice is unmistakably Hazzard's, containing her characteristically clever repartee.

Cliffs of Fall features young women exasperated by, but nonetheless beholden to, self-involved men. In A Place in the Country, a woman despairs at the end of an affair with her cousin's husband. "You mustn't exaggerate the importance of this," he tells her, dismissively. The Picnic brings the two together eight years later as each silently reflects on the relationship (while the wife grips a rock, white-knuckled, observing them at a distance). "I think I might rather like to come first with someone - after themselves, of course," muses another mistreated mistress, tethered by inertia to an unsatisfying affair.

People in Glass Houses is a series of interconnected stories, (sometimes considered a novel), satirising life at the Organization - a thinly-veiled United Nations (UN) - with projects like "the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Weapons and Forceful Implementation of Peace Treaties". If Cliffs of Fall deals in the casual cruelties of romantic relationships, People in Glass Houses depicts professional pitfalls: being at the mercy of a boss whom one disdains, a sadistic secretary or the unfair politics of promotion.

With no college education, Hazzard worked at the UN Secretariat in a clerical capacity, which was woefully underpaid and held no opportunities for advancement: "A young woman was given a typewriter and told to shut up," she once said. While she shared her extensive ideological criticisms of the UN in two non-fiction books, Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990) as well as in essays, the stories are humorous, sending up office life and civil service. "Not naturally malicious," she writes of one gossipy employee, "he had developed rapidly since entering bureaucracy."

Hazzard's prose is marked by its precision; she took her vocation seriously, redrafting each page up to 30 times. Her style is often compared to Henry James, and the slowing down of time allowing for the...