Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene are far from household names. Granted, Hazzard was the author two widely acclaimed novels — The Transit of Venus (1980), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Great Fire (2003), winner of the National Book Award — and Keene’s scholarship on Japan and Japanese literature is well-known to English-speakers interested in those subjects. But when assessing Expatriates of No Country, we must admit that the letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller this is not.
And that’s okay. The fact that the two writers are friends primarily because they write letters to each other means their correspondence is lively and full of pertinent information. There are no footnotes referencing, say, an obscure volume of Latin poetry or a rarely mentioned third cousin. In fact, there are no footnotes at all. Instead, news about literature and conferences and trips and politics zips past, and no doubt some of the book’s streamlined readability is due to Brigitta Olubas’s quiet and expert editing — there are a lot of ellipses in Expatriates of No Country, replacing, one feels sure, excess and irrelevant information.
Hazzard and Keene met in New York while attending the memorial of a mutual friend, Ivan Morris, a scholar of Japanese literature. The first letter was from Keene to Hazzard on January 31, 1977, while he was still in Manhattan, but the following letter, from Hazzard to Keene, isn’t dated until August of the following year. Hazzard alludes to several phone calls they have had in the interim, but the long gap between letters is normative in this 200 page book that covers 31 years of writing. Indeed, in one letter Hazzard describes herself as “the world’s worst correspondent.”