Speaker 1: Hello there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share
Speaker 1: another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast,
Speaker 1: hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features
Speaker 1: conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia
Speaker 1: and around the world. In this episode, Michael sits down
Speaker 1: for a chat with Australian author Robert de Sai to
Speaker 1: discuss his latest book, Chameleon as Usual. I'm joined by
Speaker 1: Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode. Hi, Michael,
Speaker 1: Ruby Jones. Hello, So Michael, tell me about Robert Desai.
Speaker 1: Why listeners might be familiar with his work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, listeners might know Desigh from He's had a storied
Speaker 2: career at this point. He's been writing books and essays
Speaker 2: for decades now. He spent about ten years as the
Speaker 2: host of books and Writing on the ABC Radio National
Speaker 2: and people might know him from there, but they might
Speaker 2: also know his books like Corfu or Night Letters. He
Speaker 2: writes these beautiful kind of literary travelogues where ages with
Speaker 2: both his journeys and the stuff he's reading and the
Speaker 2: art he's engaged with. He's funny and free wheeling and
Speaker 2: a little bit peculiar, it has to be said, but
Speaker 2: in ways that are deeply rewarding and so.
Speaker 1: Given he has been in the public eye for so
Speaker 1: long and has written memoirs and autobiographical essays for decades.
Speaker 1: Why is his latest memoir called Chameleon?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Chameleon isn't the first memoir he's written. There's been
Speaker 2: autobiographical strains to a lot of his work, and he
Speaker 2: is someone who is kind of reproducing memoir and identity
Speaker 2: in all kinds of different ways. The metaphor of the
Speaker 2: chameleon in this book is a particularly acute one, though
Speaker 2: he has a line where he says, I've never been
Speaker 2: the man I seem to be. It's a memoir that
Speaker 2: takes in his adoption and is in a way a
Speaker 2: dialogue between Robert de Sai in his eighties and the
Speaker 2: little boy who came to kind of build an identity,
Speaker 2: build a sense of self many many decks decades ago.
Speaker 2: And the interplay between those two is really lovely. He's interesting,
Speaker 2: he's thoughtful, and he's very generous in personal detail. It's
Speaker 2: a great chat.
Speaker 1: Coming up in just a moment. Robert Desaig is a fox,
Speaker 1: not a hedgehog.
Speaker 2: I think maybe the best most logical place for us
Speaker 2: to begin is with memory. Are you a man who
Speaker 2: has a good memory?
Speaker 3: Generally, I have a memory for certain kinds of things
Speaker 3: that come out of me, like those small penance that
Speaker 3: a magician pulls out of a hat. One pulls the
Speaker 3: next one, which pulls the next one, which pulls the
Speaker 3: next one. That's how it works for me. I remember
Speaker 3: certain things. I remember faces very well. I just had
Speaker 3: a visitor here with whom I went to Tunis and
Speaker 3: went to India years and years ago, and he was
Speaker 3: amazed at the way I could remember smells, the way
Speaker 3: that I could remember the music that we heard, the
Speaker 3: way that I could remember the colors that we saw.
Speaker 3: Other things seem to just disappear. I don't seem to
Speaker 3: recall well at all. But memory is it important to me.
Speaker 3: I know that it's a kind of zeitgeisty word. It's
Speaker 3: a word that is popular with people at the moment.
Speaker 3: Memory memoir. I don't think it's my strong point. My
Speaker 3: strong point is to a certain extent, I think making
Speaker 3: up memories, inventing memories.
Speaker 2: It's interesting to me that you don't think it's a
Speaker 2: strong point. When if I think about your body of work,
Speaker 2: the evocation of moments, of sensations, of relationships, of putting
Speaker 2: words to the of one's past. You're the poet laureate
Speaker 2: of that skill set.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you, Michael. I mean, I think I'm good
Speaker 3: at that. I'm good at the moment. I'm good at
Speaker 3: finding the right English word for the moment, but I'm
Speaker 3: not sure that I'm good at looking at the big picture. Really,
Speaker 3: I have to leave it to the reader to do that.
Speaker 3: I decided that it's the reader's responsibility to take further
Speaker 3: and let it in her mind or his mind. It's
Speaker 3: usually her mind, of course, in my case, come up
Speaker 3: with other images, other smells, other sounds. I think, so
Speaker 3: long as I can trigger that, I'm happy.
Speaker 2: So to what extent is chameleon a process of following
Speaker 2: the pulling out of each of those magicians handkerchiefs and
Speaker 2: seeing where it takes you. And to what extent is
Speaker 2: it a directed task of writing? You had an end insight,
Speaker 2: and you were writing towards that end.
Speaker 3: I didn't have an end insight. You know. I wondered
Speaker 3: why anyone will be interested. I'm sure a lot of
Speaker 3: writers think this to themselves. Why would anyone want to
Speaker 3: know this. I love language, I love literature. Are you
Speaker 3: allowed to use such an old fashioned word on this program?
Speaker 3: This is a literary what would you call it? Concoction? Really,
Speaker 3: that's the joy of it. Nobody wants to know about
Speaker 3: my religious beliefs or the first time I was attracted
Speaker 3: to this man or this woman. What they want is
Speaker 3: the words I think they want to float on, the
Speaker 3: language that they think I might come up with. That's
Speaker 3: the only thing I can do. The actual memory itself
Speaker 3: is not so important. It's the language for me. It's
Speaker 3: my all. Really.
Speaker 2: One of the adjectives at being kind to apply to
Speaker 2: the process of reading your works. It is about the
Speaker 2: joy and pleasure in the sentence, in the paragraph, in
Speaker 2: the page, and as a reader, pleasure and joy in
Speaker 2: language and the kind of the great luxury that is
Speaker 2: wallowing around in the articulation of senses and ideas and things.
Speaker 2: That's that's where I want my reading to be. And
Speaker 2: you're a man who delivers that in spades.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm pleased about that. It's what I asked myself. Also,
Speaker 3: is this going to deliver pleasure? Is this going to
Speaker 3: light a fire? I know that's not all for cliche,
Speaker 3: but is it going to light a fire in me?
Speaker 3: I want this book to make me feel more alive,
Speaker 3: not just inform me. When I was young, I was
Speaker 3: very interested in being right. It was very important to
Speaker 3: me to be right about this, about that, about politics,
Speaker 3: about the Soviet Union, about whatever it might be, about
Speaker 3: the existence of God for that matter. Now I'm not
Speaker 3: so interested at the age I am, I'm really more
Speaker 3: interested in being happy, as I think this book tries
Speaker 3: to explain, and not only this book, really being happy.
Speaker 3: It's a very small English word. It's an overused English word.
Speaker 3: It's a word that all sorts of writers have written about.
Speaker 3: This is the important word to me. What makes me happy?
Speaker 3: Something makes me happy. I want to write about it.
Speaker 3: Something made me happy about talking to my earlier self,
Speaker 3: myself that always wanted to be right, not just happy.
Speaker 3: So I wrote this book. It didn't come easily at first,
Speaker 3: and then it just came because I take more joy
Speaker 3: in life now, at the age I'm at than I
Speaker 3: did when I was forty or thirty, or eighteen or nine.
Speaker 3: I just do. I mean, day after day is a joy.
Speaker 2: I do think that that journey from rightness to happiness
Speaker 2: is evident through your work that increasingly that question about
Speaker 2: what it is to live a good life, what it
Speaker 2: is to age well, what it is to have friendships
Speaker 2: of integrity, what it is to kind of be in
Speaker 2: the world comes through again and again. You mentioned in
Speaker 2: that answer the decision to write to your younger self,
Speaker 2: and in particular a younger self under the name of
Speaker 2: Thomas Robert Jones, tell us about the kind of young
Speaker 2: man Thomas Robert Jones was, and what it felt like
Speaker 2: to commune with him.
Speaker 3: Again, there are pictures of him actually in the first
Speaker 3: non academic book that I ever wrote, and this friend
Speaker 3: yesterday was looking at the book and he said, you know,
Speaker 3: these photographs interesting because they make you look Egyptian, which
Speaker 3: is what my adoptive father thought, being a theosophist of sorts,
Speaker 3: that I might have been in a previous life, an Egyptian,
Speaker 3: possibly a Pakistani. I just always think I looked a
Speaker 3: bit Pakistani. When I was young, I was mostly interested
Speaker 3: as a hedgehog. That's what I was in those days,
Speaker 3: in keeping my eyes fixed on the goal. That's what
Speaker 3: I was interested in, in amassing knowledge. Now, of course,
Speaker 3: I am not really a hedgehog. I'm a fox. I
Speaker 3: doubt about all over the place. I fall in holes
Speaker 3: and I scratch myself. I don't get anywhere, really, I
Speaker 3: just enjoy being a fox and being in the world
Speaker 3: and looking at everything and thinking things through a new
Speaker 3: I suppose the adverb anew is important to me. I
Speaker 3: don't know that we learn much that is really new
Speaker 3: in a lifetime. But one looks at things a new.
Speaker 3: And so I look at the world and you. I
Speaker 3: look at sex and you. I look at religion and you.
Speaker 3: I look at self and you. I look at home
Speaker 3: and you. I look at beauty and you. I've known
Speaker 3: about all these things, but the joy about being older
Speaker 3: is that one can look at them a new. Every
Speaker 3: conversation about these things that I have changes my point
Speaker 3: of view, and I see things and new. They are
Speaker 3: not new, but I look at them in you.
Speaker 2: You say that like that might be an inevitable part
Speaker 2: of the human condition. But for a lot of people,
Speaker 2: the older they get, the less capable of that idea
Speaker 2: of a new. They become their orthodoxes harden, their perceptions
Speaker 2: get locked in. They're they're less inclined to read, visit
Speaker 2: old certainties and question them. To be a champion of
Speaker 2: seeing things in you is quite a remarkable and open
Speaker 2: way of being in the world. You don't see that
Speaker 2: as a singular thing in particular to.
Speaker 3: You, no, I mean I don't think about it very much.
Speaker 3: The first name that I had for this book was
Speaker 3: the Balancing Act. I mean, it's a boring name, of course,
Speaker 3: but this book is about balancing, and gradually I come
Speaker 3: to I suppose a way of looking at life towards
Speaker 3: the end, which is balancing on quite a narrow rope,
Speaker 3: not falling to the right or to the left, but balancing.
Speaker 3: And that's what I do. And what I think in
Speaker 3: the morning is different from what I think in the afternoon.
Speaker 3: I don't know if that's common or not. It's the
Speaker 3: way I have come to live, and I think the
Speaker 3: create way. I don't see any point in being alive.
Speaker 3: I'm a privileged person. I'm a middle class person, so
Speaker 3: I can make these choices, but I don't really see
Speaker 3: much point in being alive if I am not creative.
Speaker 3: You can be creative in all sorts of ways, but
Speaker 3: I can only be creative with words. That's the only
Speaker 3: way I am able to do this. I can't really
Speaker 3: be very creative in the garden, or in driving a car,
Speaker 3: or bringing up children, or in painting paintings. Of course
Speaker 3: I am with words. And if you want to be creative,
Speaker 3: you must not see the world in one way. Everything
Speaker 3: must be a dialogue or a polyphonous cacophony that you
Speaker 3: move in and out of. This is the key to
Speaker 3: creativity from my point of view, and this is what
Speaker 3: impels me to write. This is what impels me to
Speaker 3: open my mouth and say a new word.
Speaker 2: After the break, Robert explains why the word tango is
Speaker 2: so important to him and reveals the one thing that,
Speaker 2: by his reckoning, Americans can do better than anyone else.
Speaker 2: If Thomas Robert Jones was a hedgehog, what's the moment
Speaker 2: when that creative imperative took over, when you were able
Speaker 2: to break free and play hardly?
Speaker 3: Was when my wife left me? I think, and I
Speaker 3: disagree with the Pope on this question. I think there
Speaker 3: should be more divorced in the world. People should say
Speaker 3: thank you, it's been special and move on, is what
Speaker 3: my wife said. And I was distraught for some years,
Speaker 3: but she was right. It had been special. It was
Speaker 3: time to move on. It opened me up because I
Speaker 3: didn't have to be anyone for anyone. When I was married,
Speaker 3: I had to be a husband. Ultimately, I don't want
Speaker 3: to be a husband. I want to be a man
Speaker 3: who wears many costumes. So I want to be Harlequin.
Speaker 3: I don't want to be Piero, and the book is
Speaker 3: partly about that. I want to be many colors, and
Speaker 3: I want to be like a chameleon of whatever color
Speaker 3: makes this moment work. I think I had to divorce
Speaker 3: before I could do that. I really do. And I
Speaker 3: think going to Morocco earlier on, long before I even
Speaker 3: got married. So the seed of what I could be
Speaker 3: if I lived a gay life. I suppose to use
Speaker 3: a very simple modern word, something that is closer to
Speaker 3: the core of my being. I don't really believe in
Speaker 3: corese of being, but I can't think of another English
Speaker 3: expression except core of my being. Maybe me stuck with
Speaker 3: these words. I sometimes find myself using the word soul.
Speaker 3: I don't believe in souls, but it's a fabulous word.
Speaker 3: What can I do? I use it.
Speaker 2: If I had to think of a word capturing some
Speaker 2: of these ideas, some of these energies that I would
Speaker 2: think of as synonymous with you and your work. It
Speaker 2: would be dance, and it would be dancing that the
Speaker 2: dance of ideas, the dance of feeling living life as
Speaker 2: a dance seems to me to be something that you
Speaker 2: have articulated better than anyone else I can think of.
Speaker 3: When you've just made me happy, the word tango is
Speaker 3: the really important word for me. I'm hopeless at the tango.
Speaker 3: I've tried to learn to tango. It is too difficult.
Speaker 3: But what is good about the tango is that it's playful,
Speaker 3: but it's also disciplined. There are a few dances which
Speaker 3: are playful and disciplined at the same time at the
Speaker 3: same instant as tango is. You have to sort of
Speaker 3: do the tango to kind of realize quite how disciplined
Speaker 3: and quite how playful it is. It's erotic, of course,
Speaker 3: it's beautiful. Everyone is beautiful when they do the tang.
Speaker 3: Your clothes become beautiful, your shoes become beautiful, your corfeel
Speaker 3: becomes beautiful. Everything is fabulous. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: it is strict. You cannot make a mistake or you
Speaker 3: could practically stamp your partner to death. Tango is the
Speaker 3: important word, and it explains a lot about me, and
Speaker 3: e blains a lot about what I value in life.
Speaker 3: The dance. Unfortunately, at a certain point in your life,
Speaker 3: dancing becomes a little difficult, physically difficult. I don't do
Speaker 3: it anymore. But I used to go to dancing classes
Speaker 3: and they gave me a pleasure that was so great,
Speaker 3: so intense, so penetrating, that I couldn't sleep when I
Speaker 3: came home. And this went on for years. My whole
Speaker 3: body was thrilled to have had the evening I just had.
Speaker 3: It's partly why I enjoy American musicals. I'm not feeling
Speaker 3: very how should we say warmly towards the United States
Speaker 3: America at the moment, because I grew up in the
Speaker 3: Doris Day era, when America was somewhere we all wanted,
Speaker 3: ultimately I think to be now, I never want to
Speaker 3: go there again. But what Americans do that no one
Speaker 3: else in the world can do. Nobody can do them,
Speaker 3: Checks can't do the Bolivians can't do it is write musicals.
Speaker 3: Why do we love musicals because they take over your
Speaker 3: whole body in a way that opera simply doesn't. I
Speaker 3: was watching some Mozart last night. It's dull compared to Oklahoma.
Speaker 3: Oklahoma and even South Pacific just have something that Don
Speaker 3: Giovanni doesn't have. There's a total involvement of every part
Speaker 3: of the body and the mind, and the joy is ineffable.
Speaker 2: And like you're comparing Mozart to Oklahoma, I want Salzburg
Speaker 2: with a fringe on top. It would be the way through.
Speaker 2: I read in an old interview with you that you
Speaker 2: said at one point that you thought, in many ways
Speaker 2: you were a nineteenth century man. Do you do you
Speaker 2: still stand by that.
Speaker 3: I think I am really a nineteenth century man because
Speaker 3: I'm a humanist in a very Turgenevan way. It was Turgenev,
Speaker 3: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, the author of well six
Speaker 3: important novels I suppose in Russian literature, particularly Fathers and Sounds,
Speaker 3: that will be the best known translation in English. Was
Speaker 3: Ivan Turgenev that I wrote my doctorate on. I spent
Speaker 3: several years on Tourghenev. He was the civilized nineteenth century man.
Speaker 3: He was Russian, but he was also German, he was
Speaker 3: also French. I'm not German, but I am Russian, I
Speaker 3: am French, I am English in my mind because Turgenev
Speaker 3: was such an important part of my life at a
Speaker 3: formative time when I was in my twenties. I think
Speaker 3: that that kind of humanist relationship that he had with
Speaker 3: other people, that his characters have with each other, a
Speaker 3: love of the human in the other, is something I
Speaker 3: still aspired to. I think that humanism is probably not
Speaker 3: something that people appreciate so much these days, but I
Speaker 3: can't help it. I feel that I should have started
Speaker 3: loving the human earlier in my life. I tried to
Speaker 3: overcome it. I'm not trying anymore to overcome it. I'm
Speaker 3: trying to appreciate it and to go back to being
Speaker 3: more fully human than I was when I was young,
Speaker 3: and it's the nineteenth century which teaches me to do that.
Speaker 2: Coming back to the idea of the balancing act that typewrote,
Speaker 2: walk that Chameleon represents in many ways, there was it
Speaker 2: did strike me at one point. You make the observation
Speaker 2: that you say, you're talking about your friend and you
Speaker 2: point out that he's at ease in the world, and
Speaker 2: you find yourself jealous at that that you're not at
Speaker 2: ease in the world. You come across as someone at
Speaker 2: ease in the world, and I'm curious that you feel
Speaker 2: that you're not on my own person.
Speaker 3: Man, I'm not at ease in the world, but I
Speaker 3: am envious. I suppose it's the word, not jealous, but
Speaker 3: envious of those who are The character you're talking about
Speaker 3: is Niall, who is the other important character in the book.
Speaker 3: He is an aspect of me. He is my bossier aspect,
Speaker 3: and I have a bossy side to me, a sort
Speaker 3: of finger wagging side. But he's made up. I made
Speaker 3: him up. And then I went to Ireland a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago. I'd never been in Ireland. I never
Speaker 3: wanted to go to Ireland because I thought it was
Speaker 3: priest ridden and i'd read so much John Banville. I
Speaker 3: went that I really liked Ireland, I really like Dublin,
Speaker 3: loved Cork, and I thought, I'm going to go home
Speaker 3: and I'm going to rewrite Nile and make him a
Speaker 3: bit more irish, a bit more argumentative, a bit more
Speaker 3: uh self assured, but a bit more at ease with
Speaker 3: himself in the world, because I realize, still, despite this
Speaker 3: book that you've just read, despite everything that I've done,
Speaker 3: I realize that I am not the kind of man
Speaker 3: that the world admires. I'm just not. I don't know
Speaker 3: if they still admire Robert Mitcham and Tapehunter and the
Speaker 3: other actors who strutted across the screen when I was young,
Speaker 3: and who don't now. It's a much more sort of
Speaker 3: David Bowie era. I suppose that I've lived on into
Speaker 3: but I still do not feel that I am acceptable.
Speaker 3: I throw my hands around too much, I talk too much,
Speaker 3: I move my body too much, I speak a little
Speaker 3: too carefully, and I know that that's not completely acceptable
Speaker 3: to everyone. And so I'm not at ease, but I
Speaker 3: can't do anything about it. It's who I am. I'm
Speaker 3: stuck with it. Self Assured is a different matter. I
Speaker 3: am assured. I suppose that my life has been a
Speaker 3: good one, but I'm not at ease in the world.
Speaker 3: That's the important thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that distinction seems important. That one can be not
Speaker 2: at ease in the world, but in a different way,
Speaker 2: at ease in themselves, that they identify both their advantages
Speaker 2: and their limitations. One of the things that I so
Speaker 2: about Chameleon that I think comes through whether you're having
Speaker 2: conversations with imagine selves or previous selves, or I think
Speaker 2: you touched on it when you talked about what the
Speaker 2: experience of being adopted meant for Thomas Robert Jones. But
Speaker 2: is that you are a writer who and a person
Speaker 2: it seems to me who is singularly open to the
Speaker 2: idea of possibility? Does the question of possibility, the possibility
Speaker 2: of world's lived languages, learned places, travel to is that
Speaker 2: something that has driven you in your life and continues
Speaker 2: to drive you.
Speaker 3: It's why I leave home, It's why I travel, It's
Speaker 3: why I go to India, It's why I go to
Speaker 3: Austria or wherever else I might go. I don't go
Speaker 3: to Austria in order to look at Saint Stephen's Cathedral
Speaker 3: or go to the opera. I go to see what
Speaker 3: is possible in Austria because it's probably not possible in Hobart.
Speaker 3: And that word is a key word to me in
Speaker 3: motivating me to leave home, to open the front door,
Speaker 3: go down the steps and go to the airport and
Speaker 3: get out, to open up possibilities, not probabilities, but possibilities.
Speaker 3: It's the most wonderful word.
Speaker 2: Well, Chameleon made me feel alive to possibility and also
Speaker 2: made me feel a deep sense of joy with the
Speaker 2: words on the page. And I'm very grateful to you
Speaker 2: for joining us today.
Speaker 3: Grateful to you for your questions. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Robert Dessi's latest novel, Chameleon, is available at all Good
Speaker 2: bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening to another special episode
Speaker 1: of Read This. We'll have another episode of Reading This
Speaker 1: to share with you next Sunday. See you then,