As Hazzard prepared to leave, she discreetly supplied the missing words.
He was with a companion to whom he started to recite "The Lost Mistress" by Robert Browning - "Mere friends are we -well, friends the merest / Keep much that I resign" - but stalled at the concluding lines. In the late 1960s, while she and her husband were wintering on Capri, Hazzard found herself sitting near Greene in a cafe. The third significant encounter was with Graham Greene. " The couple were married before the year's end, and sustained what appears to have been an exceptionally happy union until Steegmuller's death in 1994, aged 88. "To think, I might not have gone! This accidental factor that governs all our lives. "It was an extremely cold night," she says. Then, in 1963, at a party given by Muriel Spark full of New Yorker folk, she met Francis Steegmuller, translator of Flaubert's letters and biographer of Cocteau and Apollinaire.
I sent it to the New Yorker absolutely cold, not even bothering to keep a copy." Maxwell replied with a cheque and a note whose contents Hazzard relates tenderly: "Of course we'll publish your story." The tale, "Harold" - it is in her collection Cliffs of Fall - became the first of many of her works of fiction and non-fiction to appear in the magazine. One was with the New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell, to whom she sent a short story in the first year of the decade. M eetings with three men changed Shirley Hazzard's life in the 1960s.
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