March 12, 2025 • 28 mins
Tasmanian writer Robert Dessaix is a man of many talents when it comes to the written form – from travel memoir and fiction to biography and philosophy, he’s done it all. He became a household name for many listeners to ABC Radio following a long stint hosting the beloved show Books and Writing. Now, at 81, Robert is back with a new memoir. This week, Michael is joined by Robert for a conversation about memory, dance, and being a chameleon.
Reading list:
A Mother’s Disgrace, Robert Dessaix, 1994
Corfu, Robert Dessaix, 2001
Twilight of Love, Robert Dessaixt, 2004
Chameleon, Robert Dessaix, 2025
Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico, 2025
You can find these books and all the others we mentioned at your favourite independent book store.
Socials: Stay in touch with Read This on Instagram
Guest: Robert Dessaix
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thomas Robert Jones just appeared out of nowhere at Crown
Street Women's Hospital in Sydney and was sat up by
Tom and Jene Jones in nineteen forty four, and they
brought me up as theirs. But the wonderful thing about
being adopted is that you are free not to be
(00:21):
Thomas Robert Jones if you don't want to be the
way people whose parents are their birth parents are not.
And one of the first things that my biological mother
said to me when she met me is if i'd
kept you. I was by this time about fifty years old,
probably forty five years old. She said, I would have
(00:44):
turned you into a real man. She did not approve
of homosexuality. Of course, if I had kept you, you
would not have some program that nobody listens to on
the ABC. You would have had a proper job, a
man job. And I thought, yes, I'm lucky. I was
(01:05):
adopted by Tom and Jane Jones, and I'm free. I
can concoct a self, and I can change that self.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's the voice of the irresistible and incomparable Robert de Sai.
You may have read one of his many books. He's
written travel memoir fiction, biography and philosophy. You may know
him from his long stint hosting ABC Radio, nationals, books
and writing. He is, any way you look at it,
a key figure in Australian public intellectual life, a big thinker,
(01:35):
an inveterately playful, thoughtful contributor to the culture. His latest
memoir is called Chameleon. It's a memoir of travel, art, ideas,
and love, and amongst other things, it's a conversation with
Thomas Robert Jones, the boy he was when he was
adopted as a child. The idea of the chameleon is
(01:57):
central to this book. I mean, let's face it, is
there an animal that more captures the imagination or is
more useful for metaphor than a creature that can change
its appearance for protection and self preservation. It's a good
fit for an adopted boy who has spent a lifetime
working out how to be in the world, incopting yourself,
(02:18):
creating an identity, and having the freedom to play with
that identity, to twist and turn and change as required.
It's an account, as we've come to expect from Robert
Dessay's body of work of travels taken, art, consumed, and
words spun. We kind of expect writer's memoirs to show
us how the person became the writer, and then the
(02:40):
writer produced the words. But when you're dancing with Robert Desai,
it's never that linear and adventure words make the person
the writer writes themselves into being. I'm Michael Williams, and
this is read This the show about the books we
love and the changing selves that lie behind them. I
(03:06):
think maybe the best, most logical place for us to
begin is with memory. Are you a man who has
a good memory? Generally?
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I have a memory for certain kinds of things. They
come out of me, like those small penance that a
magician pulls out of a hat. One pulls the next one,
which pulls the next one, which builds the next one.
That's how it works for me. I remember certain things.
I remember faces very well. I just had a visitor
(03:39):
here with whom I went to Tunisia and went to
India years and years ago, and he was amazed at
the way I could remember smells, the way that I
could remember the music that we heard, the way that
I could remember the colors that we saw. Other things
seemed to just disappear. I don't seem to recall well
(04:01):
at all. But memory is it important to me? I
know that it's a kind of zeitgeisty word. It's a
word that is popular with people at the moment. Memory memoir.
I don't think it's my strong point. My strong point
is to a certain extent, I think making up memories,
(04:23):
inventing memories.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
It's interesting to me that you don't think it's a
strong point when if I think about your body of work,
the evocation of moments, of sensations, of relationships, of putting
words to the ephemera of one's past. You're the poet
(04:46):
laureate of that skill set.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Well, thank you, Mike. I mean I think I'm good
at that. I'm good at the moment. I'm good at
finding the right English word for the moment. But I'm
not sure that I'm good at looking at the big picture. Really,
I have to leave it to the reader to do that.
I decided that it's the reader's responsibility to take what
(05:11):
offer further and let it in her mind or his mind.
It's usually her mind, of course, in my case, come
up with other images, other smells, other sounds. I think,
so long as I can trigger that, I'm happy.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So to what extent is chameleon a process of following
the pulling out of each of those magicians handkerchiefs and
seeing where it takes you. And to what extent is
it a directed task of writing where you had an
end insight and you were writing towards that end.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I didn't have an end insight. You know. I wondered
why anyone would be interested. I'm sure a lot of
writers think this to themselves. Why would anyone want to
know this? I love language, I love literature. Are you
allowed to use such an old fashioned word on this program?
This is a literary what would you call it? Concoction? Really,
(06:11):
that's the joy of it. Nobody wants to know about
my religious beliefs or the first time I was attracted
to this man or this woman. What they want is
the words I think they want to float on, the
language that they think I might come up with. That's
the only thing I can do. The actual memory itself
(06:32):
is not so important. It's the language for me. It's
my all.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Really, one of the adjectives I be inclined to apply
to the process of reading your works. It is about
the joy and pleasure in the sentence, in the paragraph
in the page and as a reader, pleasure and joy
in language and the kind of the great life that
(07:00):
is wallowing around in the articulation of senses and ideas
and things. That's that's where I want my reading to be.
And you're a man who delivers that in spades.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Well, I'm pleased about that. It's what I asked myself. Also,
is this going to deliver pleasure? Is this going to
light a fire? I know that's all for cliche, but
is it going to light a fire in me? I
want this book to make me feel more alive, not
just inform me. When I was young, I was very
interested in being right. It was very important to me
(07:33):
to be right about this, about that, about politics, about
the Soviet Union, about whatever it might be, about the
existence of God for that matter. Now I'm not so
interested at the age I am. I'm really more interested
in being happy, as I think this book tries to explain,
and not only this book, really being happy. It's a
(07:55):
very small English word. It's an over used English word.
It's a word that all sorts of writers have written about.
This is the important word to me. What makes me happy?
Something makes me happy? I want to write about it
something made me happy about talking to my earlier self,
(08:18):
myself that always wanted to be right, not just happy.
So I wrote this book. It didn't come easily at first,
and then it just came because I take more joy
in life now at the age I'm at than I
did when I was forty or thirty or eighteen or nine.
(08:40):
I just do. I mean, day after day is a joy.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I do think that that journey from rightness to happiness
is evident through your work. That increasingly that question about
what it is to live a good life, what it
is to age well, what it is to have friendships
of integrity, what it is to kind of be in
(09:08):
the world comes through again and again you mentioned them.
That answer the decision to write to your younger self,
and in particular a younger self under the name of
Thomas Robert Jones, tell us about the kind of young
man Thomas Robert Jones was and what it felt like
to commune with him.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Again. There are pictures of him actually in the first
non academic book that I ever wrote. And this friend
yesterday was looking at the book and he said, you know,
these photographs interesting because they make you look Egyptian, which
is what my adoptive father thought, being a theosophist of sorts,
(09:47):
that I might have been in a previous life, an Egyptian,
possibly a Pakistani. I just always think I looked at
a Pakistani. When I was young. I was mostly interested
a a hedgehog. That's what I was in those days,
in keeping my eyes fixed on the goal. That's what
(10:07):
I was interested in, in amassing knowledge. Now, of course,
I am not really a hedgehog. I'm a fox. I
doubt about all over the place. I fall in holes
and I scratch myself. I don't get anywhere. Really, I
just enjoy being a fox and being in the world
(10:30):
and looking at everything and thinking things through a new
I suppose the adverb a new is important to me.
I don't know that we learn much that is really
new in a lifetime. But one looks at things a new,
(10:52):
and so I look at the world and you. I
look at sex and you. I look at religion and you.
I look at self and you. I look at home
and you. I look at beauty and you. I've known
about all these things back. The joy about being older
is that one can look at them a new. Every
conversation about these things that I have changes my point
(11:15):
of view, and I see things and you they are
not new, but I look at them and you.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
You say that like that might be an inevitable part
of the human condition. But for a lot of people,
the older they get, the less capable of that idea
of a new They become, their orthodoxies harden, their perceptions
get locked in. They're they're less inclined to revisit old
(11:44):
certainties and question them. To be a champion of seeing
things anew is quite a remarkable and open way of
being in the world. You don't see that as a
singular thing in particular to.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
You, No, I mean, I don't think about it very much.
The first name that I had for this book was
the Balancing Act, and it's a boring name, of course,
but this book is about balancing, and gradually I come
to I suppose a way of looking at life towards
(12:17):
the end, which is balancing on quite a narrow rope,
not falling to the right or to the left, but balancing.
And that's what I do. And what I think in
the morning is different from what I think in the afternoon.
I don't know if that's common or not. It's the
(12:39):
way I have come to live, and I think it's
a creative way. I don't see any point in being alive.
I'm a privileged person. I'm a middle class person, so
I can make these choices, but I don't really see
much point in being alive if I am not creative.
You can be creative in all sorts of ways, but
I can only be created with words. That's the only
(13:03):
way I am able to do this. I can't really
be very creative in the garden, or in driving a car,
or bringing up children, or in painting paintings. Of course,
I am with words. And if you want to be creative,
you must not see the world in one way. Everything
(13:23):
must be a dialogue or a polyphonous cacophony that you
move in and out of. This is the key to
creativity from my point of view, and this is what
impels me to write. This is what impels me to
open my mouth and say a new word.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
After the break, Robert explains why the word tango is
so important to him and reveals the one thing that,
by his reckoning, Americans can do better than anyone else.
(14:05):
If Thomas Robert Jones was a hedgehog, what's the moment
when that creative imperative took over, when you were able
to break free and play hardly.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Was when my wife left me. I think, and I
disagree with the Pope on this question. I think there
should be more divorced in the world. People should say
thank you, it's been special and move on, just what
my wife said. And I was distraught for some years,
but she was right. It had been special, it was
(14:41):
time to move on. It opened me up because I
didn't have to be anyone for anyone when I was married.
I had to be a husband. Ultimately, I don't want
to be a husband. I want to be a man
who wears many costumes. So I want to be harlequin.
(15:06):
I don't want to be Piero, and the book is
partly about that. I want to be many colors, and
I want to be like a chameleon of whatever color
makes this moment work. I think I had to divorce
(15:29):
before I could do that. I really do. And I
think going to Morocco earlier on, long before I even
got married. So the seed of what I could be
if I lived a gay life. I suppose to use
a very simple modern word, something that is closer to
(15:52):
the core of my being. I don't really believe in
cause of being, but I can't think of another English
expression except core of my being. I mean me stuck
with these words. I sometimes find myself using the word soul.
I don't believe in souls, but it's a fabulous word.
(16:13):
What can I do? I use it.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
If I had to think of a word capturing some
of these ideas, some of these energies that I would
think of as synonymous with you and your work, it
would be dance, and it would be dancing that the
dance of ideas, the dance of feeling, living life as
a dance seems to me to be something that you
(16:37):
have articulated better than anyone else I can think.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Of when you've just made me happy. Because the word
tango is the really important word for me. I'm hopeless
at the tango. I've tried to learn to tango. It
is too difficult. But what is good about the tango
is that it's playful, but it's also disciplined. There are
a few dance which are playful and disciplined at the
(17:02):
same time at the same instant as tanger is. You
have to sort of do the tango to kind of
realize quite how disciplined and quite how playful it is.
It's erotic, of course, it's beautiful. Everyone is beautiful when
they do the tang. Your clothes become beautiful, your shoes
become beautiful, your coffeel becomes beautiful. Everything is fabulous. But
(17:26):
at the same time, it is strict. You cannot make
a mistake, or you could practically stamp your partner to death.
Tango is the important word, and it explains a lot
about me, and it explains a lot about what I
value in life. The dance. Unfortunately, at a certain point
(17:49):
in your life, dancing becomes a little difficult, physically difficult.
I don't do it anymore. But I used to go
to dancing classes and they gave me a pleasure that
was so great, so intense, so penetrating, that I couldn't
sleep when I came home. And this went on for years.
(18:13):
My whole body was thrilled to have had the evening
I just had. It's partly why I enjoy American musicals.
I'm not feeling very how should we say warmly towards
the United States America at the moment, Because I grew
up in the Doris Day era, when America was somewhere
we all wanted, ultimately, I think to be now. I
(18:37):
never want to go there again. But what Americans do
that no one else in the world can do. Nobody
can do them, the Checks can't do the Bolivians can't
do it is write musicals. Why do we love musicals
because they take over your whole body in a way
that opera simply doesn't. I was watching some Mozart last night.
(19:00):
Doll compared to Oklahoma. Oklahoma and even South Pacific just
have something that Don Giovanni doesn't have. There's a total
involvement of every part of the body and the mind,
and the joy is ineffable.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
I like you're comparing Mozaut to Oklahoma. I want Salzburg
with a fringe on top.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
It would be the way through.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
I read in an old interview with you that you
said at one point that you thought, in many ways
you were a nineteenth century man. Do you do you
still stand by that?
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I think I am really a nineteenth century man because
I'm a humanist in a very Turgenevan way. It was
Turghenev the Russian right, the author of well six important novels.
(20:03):
I suppose in Russian literature, particularly Fathers and Sounds. That
will be the best known translation in English was Ivan
Turgenev that I wrote my doctorate on. I spent several
years on Tourghenev. He was the civilized nineteenth century man.
He was Russian, but he was also German. He was
also French. I'm not German, but I am Russian, i
(20:26):
am French, I am English in my mind because Turgenev
was such an important part of my life at a
formative time when I was in my twenties, I think
that that kind of humanistic relationship that he had with
(20:47):
other people, that his characters have with each other, a
love of the human in the other, is something I
still aspired to. I think that humanism is probably not
some that people appreciate so much these days, but I
can't help it. I feel that I should have started
loving the human earlier in my life. I tried to
(21:10):
overcome it. I'm not trying anymore to overcome it. I'm
trying to appreciate it and to go back to being
more fully human than I was when I was young.
And it's the nineteenth century which teaches me to do that.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Coming back to the idea of the balancing act that
typewrote walk that Chameleon represents in many ways, there was.
It did strike me at one point. You make the
observation that you say, you're talking about your friend and
you point out that he's at ease in the world,
and you find yourself jealous at that that you're not
(21:54):
at ease in the world. You come across as someone
at ease in the world, and I'm curious that you
feel that you're not on.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
My own person. But I'm not at decent in the world.
But I am envious. I suppose it's the word, not jealous,
but envious of those who are. The character you're talking
about is Nile, who is the other important character in
the book. He is an aspect of me. He is
my bossier aspect, and I have a bossy side to me,
(22:23):
a sort of finger wagging side. But he's made up.
I made him up. And then I went to Ireland
a couple of years ago. I'd never been in Ireland.
I never wanted to go to Ireland because I thought
it was priest ridden and I've read so much John Banville.
I went there. I really liked Ireland. I really liked
Dublin loved Cork, and I thought, I'm going to go home,
(22:47):
and I'm going to rewrite Nile and make him a
bit more irish, a bit more argumentative, a bit more
self assured, but a bit more at ease with himself
in the world, because I realize, still, despite this book
that you've just read, despite everything that I've done, I
(23:07):
realize that I am not the kind of man that
the world admires. I'm just not. I don't know if
they still admire Robert Mitcham and Tab Hunter and the
other actors who strutted across the screen when I was
young and who don't now. It's a much more sort
(23:32):
of David Bowie era. I suppose that I've lived on
into but I still do not feel that I am acceptable.
I throw my hands around too much, I talk too much,
I move my body too much, I speak a little
(23:52):
too carefully, and I know that that's not completely acceptable
to everyone, and so I'm not at ease, but I
can't do anything about it. It's who I am. I'm
stuck with it. Sel for sured is a different matter.
(24:14):
I am assured. I suppose that my life has been
a good one, but I'm not at ease in the world.
That's the important thing.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, that distinction seems important, that one can be not
at ease in the world, but in a different way,
at ease in themselves, that they identify both their advantages
and their limitations. One of the things that I so
love about Chameleon, that I think comes through whether you're
having conversations with imagine selves or previous selves, or I
(24:52):
think you touched on it when you talked about what
the experience of being adopted meant for Thomas Robert Jones,
is that you are a writer who and a person,
it seems to me, who is singularly open to the
idea of possibility. Does the question of possibility, the possibility
(25:13):
of world's lived languages, learned places, travel to is that
something that has driven you in your life and continues
to drive you.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It's why I leave home, It's why I travel. That's
why I go to India. That's why I go to
Austria or wherever else I might go. I don't go
to Austria in order to look at some Stephen's Cathedral
or go to the opera. I go to see what
is possible in Austria because it's probably not possible in Hobart,
(25:48):
and that word is a key word to me in
motivating me to leave home, to open the front door,
go down the steps and go to the import and
get out, to open up possibilities, not probabilities, but possibilities.
It's the most wonderful word.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Well, Chameleon made me feel alive to possibility and also
made me feel a deep sense of joy with the
words on the page. And I'm very grateful to you
for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Grateful to you for your questions. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Robert Dessai's latest novel, Chameleon, is available at all Good bookstores. Now,
before we get out of here, I wanted to tell
you what I've been reading this week. I am not
one of these people who makes grand proclamations about my
ability to read an entire long list for a prize,
(26:49):
but the International Book a Prize this year has an
absolutely delicious list of twelve books, and I'm two or
three in. So I'm going to share those ones I've
read with you over the next few weeks. And off
is Vincenzo Litronico's Perfection. It's translated by Sophie Hughes from
the original Italian and it is a weird, starchy, fascinating book.
(27:11):
It's about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin. Their
names Anna and Tom, and they are just going through
the motions. Their apartment is very nice, everything is good.
They're kind of late capitalism personified. But they're disaffected and
they're empty. The publisher calls it a sociological novel about
the emptiness of contemporary existence, and it's hard to go
(27:34):
up on that. I do recommend it nonetheless. As long
as a sense of existential holiness is what you're looking
for this week, you can find it and all the
other books we've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore.
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends about it and rate and review us.
(27:54):
It helps a lot. Next week I read this. I'm
chatting with Tanzanian born Noble Prize winner Abdul Razak Gerner.
He's seventy six, and he's still finding new things to say.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
The loveliest thing and most wonderful thing I can feel
as a writer is to say I haven't said this yet,
and I haven't done that yet, and I haven't done
the other yet so it's not only what's there is alive,
but the anticipated next parts are also already kind of
like stirring.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Read.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the
general support of our A group. This show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited
by Posing mckayey. Thanks for listening, See you next week.
Thomas Robert Jones just appeared out of nowhere at Crown
Street Women's Hospital in Sydney and was sat up by
Tom and Jene Jones in nineteen forty four, and they
brought me up as theirs. But the wonderful thing about
being adopted is that you are free not to be
(00:21):
Thomas Robert Jones if you don't want to be the
way people whose parents are their birth parents are not.
And one of the first things that my biological mother
said to me when she met me is if i'd
kept you. I was by this time about fifty years old,
probably forty five years old. She said, I would have
(00:44):
turned you into a real man. She did not approve
of homosexuality. Of course, if I had kept you, you
would not have some program that nobody listens to on
the ABC. You would have had a proper job, a
man job. And I thought, yes, I'm lucky. I was
(01:05):
adopted by Tom and Jane Jones, and I'm free. I
can concoct a self, and I can change that self.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
That's the voice of the irresistible and incomparable Robert de Sai.
You may have read one of his many books. He's
written travel memoir fiction, biography and philosophy. You may know
him from his long stint hosting ABC Radio, nationals, books
and writing. He is, any way you look at it,
a key figure in Australian public intellectual life, a big thinker,
(01:35):
an inveterately playful, thoughtful contributor to the culture. His latest
memoir is called Chameleon. It's a memoir of travel, art, ideas,
and love, and amongst other things, it's a conversation with
Thomas Robert Jones, the boy he was when he was
adopted as a child. The idea of the chameleon is
(01:57):
central to this book. I mean, let's face it, is
there an animal that more captures the imagination or is
more useful for metaphor than a creature that can change
its appearance for protection and self preservation. It's a good
fit for an adopted boy who has spent a lifetime
working out how to be in the world, incopting yourself,
(02:18):
creating an identity, and having the freedom to play with
that identity, to twist and turn and change as required.
It's an account, as we've come to expect from Robert
Dessay's body of work of travels taken, art, consumed, and
words spun. We kind of expect writer's memoirs to show
us how the person became the writer, and then the
(02:40):
writer produced the words. But when you're dancing with Robert Desai,
it's never that linear and adventure words make the person
the writer writes themselves into being. I'm Michael Williams, and
this is read This the show about the books we
love and the changing selves that lie behind them. I
(03:06):
think maybe the best, most logical place for us to
begin is with memory. Are you a man who has
a good memory? Generally?
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I have a memory for certain kinds of things. They
come out of me, like those small penance that a
magician pulls out of a hat. One pulls the next one,
which pulls the next one, which builds the next one.
That's how it works for me. I remember certain things.
I remember faces very well. I just had a visitor
(03:39):
here with whom I went to Tunisia and went to
India years and years ago, and he was amazed at
the way I could remember smells, the way that I
could remember the music that we heard, the way that
I could remember the colors that we saw. Other things
seemed to just disappear. I don't seem to recall well
(04:01):
at all. But memory is it important to me? I
know that it's a kind of zeitgeisty word. It's a
word that is popular with people at the moment. Memory memoir.
I don't think it's my strong point. My strong point
is to a certain extent, I think making up memories,
(04:23):
inventing memories.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
It's interesting to me that you don't think it's a
strong point when if I think about your body of work,
the evocation of moments, of sensations, of relationships, of putting
words to the ephemera of one's past. You're the poet
(04:46):
laureate of that skill set.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
Well, thank you, Mike. I mean I think I'm good
at that. I'm good at the moment. I'm good at
finding the right English word for the moment. But I'm
not sure that I'm good at looking at the big picture. Really,
I have to leave it to the reader to do that.
I decided that it's the reader's responsibility to take what
(05:11):
offer further and let it in her mind or his mind.
It's usually her mind, of course, in my case, come
up with other images, other smells, other sounds. I think,
so long as I can trigger that, I'm happy.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
So to what extent is chameleon a process of following
the pulling out of each of those magicians handkerchiefs and
seeing where it takes you. And to what extent is
it a directed task of writing where you had an
end insight and you were writing towards that end.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
I didn't have an end insight. You know. I wondered
why anyone would be interested. I'm sure a lot of
writers think this to themselves. Why would anyone want to
know this? I love language, I love literature. Are you
allowed to use such an old fashioned word on this program?
This is a literary what would you call it? Concoction? Really,
(06:11):
that's the joy of it. Nobody wants to know about
my religious beliefs or the first time I was attracted
to this man or this woman. What they want is
the words I think they want to float on, the
language that they think I might come up with. That's
the only thing I can do. The actual memory itself
(06:32):
is not so important. It's the language for me. It's
my all.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Really, one of the adjectives I be inclined to apply
to the process of reading your works. It is about
the joy and pleasure in the sentence, in the paragraph
in the page and as a reader, pleasure and joy
in language and the kind of the great life that
(07:00):
is wallowing around in the articulation of senses and ideas
and things. That's that's where I want my reading to be.
And you're a man who delivers that in spades.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Well, I'm pleased about that. It's what I asked myself. Also,
is this going to deliver pleasure? Is this going to
light a fire? I know that's all for cliche, but
is it going to light a fire in me? I
want this book to make me feel more alive, not
just inform me. When I was young, I was very
interested in being right. It was very important to me
(07:33):
to be right about this, about that, about politics, about
the Soviet Union, about whatever it might be, about the
existence of God for that matter. Now I'm not so
interested at the age I am. I'm really more interested
in being happy, as I think this book tries to explain,
and not only this book, really being happy. It's a
(07:55):
very small English word. It's an over used English word.
It's a word that all sorts of writers have written about.
This is the important word to me. What makes me happy?
Something makes me happy? I want to write about it
something made me happy about talking to my earlier self,
(08:18):
myself that always wanted to be right, not just happy.
So I wrote this book. It didn't come easily at first,
and then it just came because I take more joy
in life now at the age I'm at than I
did when I was forty or thirty or eighteen or nine.
(08:40):
I just do. I mean, day after day is a joy.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I do think that that journey from rightness to happiness
is evident through your work. That increasingly that question about
what it is to live a good life, what it
is to age well, what it is to have friendships
of integrity, what it is to kind of be in
(09:08):
the world comes through again and again you mentioned them.
That answer the decision to write to your younger self,
and in particular a younger self under the name of
Thomas Robert Jones, tell us about the kind of young
man Thomas Robert Jones was and what it felt like
to commune with him.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Again. There are pictures of him actually in the first
non academic book that I ever wrote. And this friend
yesterday was looking at the book and he said, you know,
these photographs interesting because they make you look Egyptian, which
is what my adoptive father thought, being a theosophist of sorts,
(09:47):
that I might have been in a previous life, an Egyptian,
possibly a Pakistani. I just always think I looked at
a Pakistani. When I was young. I was mostly interested
a a hedgehog. That's what I was in those days,
in keeping my eyes fixed on the goal. That's what
(10:07):
I was interested in, in amassing knowledge. Now, of course,
I am not really a hedgehog. I'm a fox. I
doubt about all over the place. I fall in holes
and I scratch myself. I don't get anywhere. Really, I
just enjoy being a fox and being in the world
(10:30):
and looking at everything and thinking things through a new
I suppose the adverb a new is important to me.
I don't know that we learn much that is really
new in a lifetime. But one looks at things a new,
(10:52):
and so I look at the world and you. I
look at sex and you. I look at religion and you.
I look at self and you. I look at home
and you. I look at beauty and you. I've known
about all these things back. The joy about being older
is that one can look at them a new. Every
conversation about these things that I have changes my point
(11:15):
of view, and I see things and you they are
not new, but I look at them and you.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
You say that like that might be an inevitable part
of the human condition. But for a lot of people,
the older they get, the less capable of that idea
of a new They become, their orthodoxies harden, their perceptions
get locked in. They're they're less inclined to revisit old
(11:44):
certainties and question them. To be a champion of seeing
things anew is quite a remarkable and open way of
being in the world. You don't see that as a
singular thing in particular to.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
You, No, I mean, I don't think about it very much.
The first name that I had for this book was
the Balancing Act, and it's a boring name, of course,
but this book is about balancing, and gradually I come
to I suppose a way of looking at life towards
(12:17):
the end, which is balancing on quite a narrow rope,
not falling to the right or to the left, but balancing.
And that's what I do. And what I think in
the morning is different from what I think in the afternoon.
I don't know if that's common or not. It's the
(12:39):
way I have come to live, and I think it's
a creative way. I don't see any point in being alive.
I'm a privileged person. I'm a middle class person, so
I can make these choices, but I don't really see
much point in being alive if I am not creative.
You can be creative in all sorts of ways, but
I can only be created with words. That's the only
(13:03):
way I am able to do this. I can't really
be very creative in the garden, or in driving a car,
or bringing up children, or in painting paintings. Of course,
I am with words. And if you want to be creative,
you must not see the world in one way. Everything
(13:23):
must be a dialogue or a polyphonous cacophony that you
move in and out of. This is the key to
creativity from my point of view, and this is what
impels me to write. This is what impels me to
open my mouth and say a new word.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
After the break, Robert explains why the word tango is
so important to him and reveals the one thing that,
by his reckoning, Americans can do better than anyone else.
(14:05):
If Thomas Robert Jones was a hedgehog, what's the moment
when that creative imperative took over, when you were able
to break free and play hardly.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
Was when my wife left me. I think, and I
disagree with the Pope on this question. I think there
should be more divorced in the world. People should say
thank you, it's been special and move on, just what
my wife said. And I was distraught for some years,
but she was right. It had been special, it was
(14:41):
time to move on. It opened me up because I
didn't have to be anyone for anyone when I was married.
I had to be a husband. Ultimately, I don't want
to be a husband. I want to be a man
who wears many costumes. So I want to be harlequin.
(15:06):
I don't want to be Piero, and the book is
partly about that. I want to be many colors, and
I want to be like a chameleon of whatever color
makes this moment work. I think I had to divorce
(15:29):
before I could do that. I really do. And I
think going to Morocco earlier on, long before I even
got married. So the seed of what I could be
if I lived a gay life. I suppose to use
a very simple modern word, something that is closer to
(15:52):
the core of my being. I don't really believe in
cause of being, but I can't think of another English
expression except core of my being. I mean me stuck
with these words. I sometimes find myself using the word soul.
I don't believe in souls, but it's a fabulous word.
(16:13):
What can I do? I use it.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
If I had to think of a word capturing some
of these ideas, some of these energies that I would
think of as synonymous with you and your work, it
would be dance, and it would be dancing that the
dance of ideas, the dance of feeling, living life as
a dance seems to me to be something that you
(16:37):
have articulated better than anyone else I can think.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Of when you've just made me happy. Because the word
tango is the really important word for me. I'm hopeless
at the tango. I've tried to learn to tango. It
is too difficult. But what is good about the tango
is that it's playful, but it's also disciplined. There are
a few dance which are playful and disciplined at the
(17:02):
same time at the same instant as tanger is. You
have to sort of do the tango to kind of
realize quite how disciplined and quite how playful it is.
It's erotic, of course, it's beautiful. Everyone is beautiful when
they do the tang. Your clothes become beautiful, your shoes
become beautiful, your coffeel becomes beautiful. Everything is fabulous. But
(17:26):
at the same time, it is strict. You cannot make
a mistake, or you could practically stamp your partner to death.
Tango is the important word, and it explains a lot
about me, and it explains a lot about what I
value in life. The dance. Unfortunately, at a certain point
(17:49):
in your life, dancing becomes a little difficult, physically difficult.
I don't do it anymore. But I used to go
to dancing classes and they gave me a pleasure that
was so great, so intense, so penetrating, that I couldn't
sleep when I came home. And this went on for years.
(18:13):
My whole body was thrilled to have had the evening
I just had. It's partly why I enjoy American musicals.
I'm not feeling very how should we say warmly towards
the United States America at the moment, Because I grew
up in the Doris Day era, when America was somewhere
we all wanted, ultimately, I think to be now. I
(18:37):
never want to go there again. But what Americans do
that no one else in the world can do. Nobody
can do them, the Checks can't do the Bolivians can't
do it is write musicals. Why do we love musicals
because they take over your whole body in a way
that opera simply doesn't. I was watching some Mozart last night.
(19:00):
Doll compared to Oklahoma. Oklahoma and even South Pacific just
have something that Don Giovanni doesn't have. There's a total
involvement of every part of the body and the mind,
and the joy is ineffable.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
I like you're comparing Mozaut to Oklahoma. I want Salzburg
with a fringe on top.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
It would be the way through.
Speaker 2 (19:30):
I read in an old interview with you that you
said at one point that you thought, in many ways
you were a nineteenth century man. Do you do you
still stand by that?
Speaker 1 (19:41):
I think I am really a nineteenth century man because
I'm a humanist in a very Turgenevan way. It was
Turghenev the Russian right, the author of well six important novels.
(20:03):
I suppose in Russian literature, particularly Fathers and Sounds. That
will be the best known translation in English was Ivan
Turgenev that I wrote my doctorate on. I spent several
years on Tourghenev. He was the civilized nineteenth century man.
He was Russian, but he was also German. He was
also French. I'm not German, but I am Russian, i
(20:26):
am French, I am English in my mind because Turgenev
was such an important part of my life at a
formative time when I was in my twenties, I think
that that kind of humanistic relationship that he had with
(20:47):
other people, that his characters have with each other, a
love of the human in the other, is something I
still aspired to. I think that humanism is probably not
some that people appreciate so much these days, but I
can't help it. I feel that I should have started
loving the human earlier in my life. I tried to
(21:10):
overcome it. I'm not trying anymore to overcome it. I'm
trying to appreciate it and to go back to being
more fully human than I was when I was young.
And it's the nineteenth century which teaches me to do that.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
Coming back to the idea of the balancing act that
typewrote walk that Chameleon represents in many ways, there was.
It did strike me at one point. You make the
observation that you say, you're talking about your friend and
you point out that he's at ease in the world,
and you find yourself jealous at that that you're not
(21:54):
at ease in the world. You come across as someone
at ease in the world, and I'm curious that you
feel that you're not on.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
My own person. But I'm not at decent in the world.
But I am envious. I suppose it's the word, not jealous,
but envious of those who are. The character you're talking
about is Nile, who is the other important character in
the book. He is an aspect of me. He is
my bossier aspect, and I have a bossy side to me,
(22:23):
a sort of finger wagging side. But he's made up.
I made him up. And then I went to Ireland
a couple of years ago. I'd never been in Ireland.
I never wanted to go to Ireland because I thought
it was priest ridden and I've read so much John Banville.
I went there. I really liked Ireland. I really liked
Dublin loved Cork, and I thought, I'm going to go home,
(22:47):
and I'm going to rewrite Nile and make him a
bit more irish, a bit more argumentative, a bit more
self assured, but a bit more at ease with himself
in the world, because I realize, still, despite this book
that you've just read, despite everything that I've done, I
(23:07):
realize that I am not the kind of man that
the world admires. I'm just not. I don't know if
they still admire Robert Mitcham and Tab Hunter and the
other actors who strutted across the screen when I was
young and who don't now. It's a much more sort
(23:32):
of David Bowie era. I suppose that I've lived on
into but I still do not feel that I am acceptable.
I throw my hands around too much, I talk too much,
I move my body too much, I speak a little
(23:52):
too carefully, and I know that that's not completely acceptable
to everyone, and so I'm not at ease, but I
can't do anything about it. It's who I am. I'm
stuck with it. Sel for sured is a different matter.
(24:14):
I am assured. I suppose that my life has been
a good one, but I'm not at ease in the world.
That's the important thing.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, that distinction seems important, that one can be not
at ease in the world, but in a different way,
at ease in themselves, that they identify both their advantages
and their limitations. One of the things that I so
love about Chameleon, that I think comes through whether you're
having conversations with imagine selves or previous selves, or I
(24:52):
think you touched on it when you talked about what
the experience of being adopted meant for Thomas Robert Jones,
is that you are a writer who and a person,
it seems to me, who is singularly open to the
idea of possibility. Does the question of possibility, the possibility
(25:13):
of world's lived languages, learned places, travel to is that
something that has driven you in your life and continues
to drive you.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
It's why I leave home, It's why I travel. That's
why I go to India. That's why I go to
Austria or wherever else I might go. I don't go
to Austria in order to look at some Stephen's Cathedral
or go to the opera. I go to see what
is possible in Austria because it's probably not possible in Hobart,
(25:48):
and that word is a key word to me in
motivating me to leave home, to open the front door,
go down the steps and go to the import and
get out, to open up possibilities, not probabilities, but possibilities.
It's the most wonderful word.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Well, Chameleon made me feel alive to possibility and also
made me feel a deep sense of joy with the
words on the page. And I'm very grateful to you
for joining us today.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
Grateful to you for your questions. Thank you very much.
Speaker 2 (26:26):
Robert Dessai's latest novel, Chameleon, is available at all Good bookstores. Now,
before we get out of here, I wanted to tell
you what I've been reading this week. I am not
one of these people who makes grand proclamations about my
ability to read an entire long list for a prize,
(26:49):
but the International Book a Prize this year has an
absolutely delicious list of twelve books, and I'm two or
three in. So I'm going to share those ones I've
read with you over the next few weeks. And off
is Vincenzo Litronico's Perfection. It's translated by Sophie Hughes from
the original Italian and it is a weird, starchy, fascinating book.
(27:11):
It's about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin. Their
names Anna and Tom, and they are just going through
the motions. Their apartment is very nice, everything is good.
They're kind of late capitalism personified. But they're disaffected and
they're empty. The publisher calls it a sociological novel about
the emptiness of contemporary existence, and it's hard to go
(27:34):
up on that. I do recommend it nonetheless. As long
as a sense of existential holiness is what you're looking
for this week, you can find it and all the
other books we've mentioned today at your favorite independent bookstore.
That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it,
please tell your friends about it and rate and review us.
(27:54):
It helps a lot. Next week I read this. I'm
chatting with Tanzanian born Noble Prize winner Abdul Razak Gerner.
He's seventy six, and he's still finding new things to say.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
The loveliest thing and most wonderful thing I can feel
as a writer is to say I haven't said this yet,
and I haven't done that yet, and I haven't done
the other yet so it's not only what's there is alive,
but the anticipated next parts are also already kind of
like stirring.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Read.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
This is a Schwartz Media production, made possible by the
general support of our A group. This show is produced
and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans
and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited
by Posing mckayey. Thanks for listening, See you next week.
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