Star-Crossed

By Patricia Blake

THE TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard Viking; 337 pages; $11.95 " Venus can blot out the sun," the heroine of The Transit of Venus cries out, racked by her unremitting passion for a man who repeatedly abandons her. Astronomically, the observation is inaccurate. Still, there can be no doubt that Shirley Hazzard's Venus has eclipsed other recent efforts to illuminate the unending agonies of obsessive love. "The tragedy is not that love doesn't last," says another of the novel's sufferers. "The tragedy is the love that lasts."

Venus has the oddly elusive flavor of a 19th century novel. The two central characters, seemingly so genteel, are an unlikely pair to wash up on the wilder shores of love. Grace and Caro Bell are sisters, beautiful and well-bred, with neither property nor prospects. Orphaned young in their native Australia, they emigrate to England in their early 20s, accompanied by their half-sister Dora, who is both incubus and guardian. To the touch, the girls' surface is all coolness; the heat seems to have been drawn out of them during their struggle against Dora's ravenous self-love.

Among Hazzard's many strengths as a novelist, none is more dazzling than her ability to display the inner world of her characters in a few lines of lucid, supple, periodic prose. In Grace and Caro, "a vein of instinct sanity opened and flowed: a warning that every lie must be redeemed in the end . . . In their esteem for dispassion they began to yearn, perverse and unknowing, towards some strength that would, in turn, disturb that equilibrium and sweep them to higher ground."

Hazzard's sense of place is equally unerring. Born in Australia and currently dividing her time between Capri and New York City, she selected Italian backgrounds for her two earlier novels, The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, and for several of her short stories. Even more pungent and persuasive, however, are her evocations of Australia and of English middle-class society in The Transit of Venus. Of Grace and Caro's Australia, Hazzard writes: "To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed by waves of a raw, reminding humanity."

In flight from this barbarism, the two sisters alight at an English country house in the early 1950s. Grace soon slips into a conventional marriage. More independent, Caro aspires to a career in a government office. But when two men enter into Caro's orbit, they create a conjunction that would dismay an astrologer. The first, Ted Tice, becomes obsessed by Caro. He sees his attachment as an "intensification of his strongest qualities, if not of his strengths: not a youthful adventure, fresh and tentative, but a gauge of all effort, joy, and suffering known or imagined. The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping."

Hazzard does equally well describing Paul Ivory, who becomes the undeserving object of Caro's lifelong love. "In its subtlety and confidence Paul's physical beauty, like his character, suggested technique. As some fine portrait might be underpainted dark where it showed light, or light where dark, so might Paul Ivory be subliminally cold where warm, warm where cold . . . Similarly, his limbs might seem the instruments or weapons of grace rather than its simple evidence. Paul's attenuated fingers turned up at their tips with extreme sensitivity, as if testing a surface for heat."

The fastidious Caro, who has up to now recoiled from physical contact, makes love with Paul, at once and without reserve. It was a "suspension of will," that was itself "deeply willed." The act takes place at Avebury Circle, the prehistoric site in southern England, consisting of a ceremonial circle of boulders, much like nearby Stonehenge. The similarity may offer a clue to Hazzard's literary lineage, one of several she has scattered throughout her book as moral points of reference. For Hazzard seems to be recalling the last scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, following Tess's crime of passion. Fleeing to Stonehenge, Tess lies down upon the "stone altar" as her beloved Angel kneels beside her. In the Hardy novel the altar at Stonehenge works as a potent metaphor for a woman's martyrdom and apotheosis in the name of love. Hazzard evidently means her image to do the same.

Later in her book, Hazzard pays more direct homage to Hardy. A decade after Caro's encounter at Avebury Circle, when she is married to someone else, she comes across a poem of Hardy's, and weeps:

Primaeval rocks form the road's

steep border, And much have they faced there,

first and last, Of the transitory in Earth's long

order; But what they record in colour and

cast Is--that we two passed.

The Transit of Venus is constructed like a journey. Caro's passage through life --Sydney, New York, London and Stockholm--is charted in terms of the detours she takes around her passion for Paul. When her attachment to Paul ends, she moves on to meet Ted Tice's old "desire and foreboding" in a final flight that is doomed, as are all Hazzard's voyages of love.

Only Grace stays put, confined by marriage to a lecher as priggish as any who ever appeared in 19th century English fiction. The story of her breakout is a masterly set piece. Unlike Caro, who made love among the megaliths, Grace touches hands with her physician-lover as they examine her son's X rays. Their unconsummated affair is mired in the mundane; yet, the couple perceive their encounter as grand passion. Concludes the doctor: "It was like Paolo and Francesca." Still, when Grace's children and even her appalling husband renew their claims on her, she lets her lover go.

"Grace . . . forty-three years old, stood silent in a hotel doorway in her worn blue coat and looked at the cars and the stars, with the roar of existence in her ears. And like any great poet or tragic sovereign of antiquity, cried on her Creator and wondered how long she must remain on such an earth."

Venus had once again completed its transit. -By Patricia Blake

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