Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes
(Harvill Secker, £25)
Robert Hughes's memoir, an account of the years before he went to the US to be the art critic of Time, is a magisterial feat of inquiry, verve and style. In the age of the blog, everyone is a critic and all opinions are equally valid. Hughes disdains this noisy hum: "I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive." This robust attitude has never seemed more necessary.
Perhaps this is why his opening chapter, in which he describes the car accident that nearly killed him in 1999, is so affecting. On a coastal road in Western Australia, Hughes's car collided with another, containing three drug addicts, one of whom later tried to extort money from him. The result was a spectacular mashing of his body (when he saw his car later, he "couldn't see how a cockroach could have survived that wreck"). But he faced down death—or, at any rate, a series of phantasms of "Daliesque vividness"—and his fractured bones were stuck back together. He was then prosecuted for dangerous driving, but the case was thrown out of court.
At this point, Hughes should have returned home to New York, albeit with a pronounced limp. But his tongue got the better of him. He defamed the lawyers who had prepared the case against him, and they sued and won. The Australian press accused him of elitism and racism. Of the first accusation he is undoubtedly guilty. Of the second, he says that he never directed the insult "curry muncher" against a barrister (of Indian origin) and I believe him. The phrase, like the sentiment, is just too dumb.
This book, then, is a settling of accounts for Hughes: I left Oz 40 years ago, and thank God I did. But that doesn't mean it is bitter and mean-minded. Hughes's sideswipes at parochial Australia—that "womb with a view"—are loftily frequent, but the book's centre belongs to the Catholicism of his childhood, which, however thoroughly rejected now, made him the critic he is. Art is so much about the senses—as Hughes points out, this is yet another reason not to trust conceptual art—and the senses were discouraged at his 1950s Jesuit boarding school. Caught reading Joyce, he was sent to Father for punishment; the strap peeked from the sleeve of his soutane "like a snake in a hollow log." As for that other dangerous snake, the one between his legs, this was a "pink alien," and any raising of its head—even by accident—was thought a mortal sin.
Hughes's father died when he was a boy; his English mother followed not so long afterwards, at which point he was free to throw himself into the voluptuous arms of Europe. He pitched up in London in 1964, a 26-year-old "provincial Australian in a place that still tended to look down on Australians." But unable to deliver a book he'd been commissioned to write, he headed for the Italian home of his friend, the historian Alan Moorhead, and this became a base for his studies. He had already published one book about Australian art, yet he had done no real looking. The looking, when he got down to it, relieved him of the religion that had locked the door of his imagination. He stands in front of great oils, and weeps. "I was beginning… to derive from art… a sense of transcendence that organised religion had offered me—but that I had never received."
Returning to London, Hughes found it swinging. He married the "best fuck" in the city, a hippy and future lesbian called Danne, with whom he had a son, Danton. Living with Danne, he writes, was like living with a "deranged alley cat." She slept with Jimi Hendrix, and gave Hughes the clap to prove it. Once he found her hair crispy with—oh, God—another man's emissions. This section of the book, peopled with Connolly and Tynan and hippies, is wonderfully alive. Most delicious is the farcical scene when Time called Hughes to offer him the job of art critic. Miserable at Danne's latest bolting, a stoned Hughes accused his future editor of working for the CIA, and told him where to stick his "job." Luckily, they called back.
Readers who want autobiography always to dish up the mawkish and the too-intimate will be disappointed. The author is an Australian male of a certain generation, and he's not about to let it all hang out. But this is not a dishonest book, nor even a clenched one. The mess Hughes has occasionally made of life only increases your admiration. Away from the life, there are short essays on Leonardo, Piero della Francesca and the great flood of Florence, which remind you why it might be a good idea to re-read (or read) The Shock of the New, American Visions, or The Culture of Complaint. The thing about Hughes is this: whatever he has called his new book, he knows more than most—and is able to tell it better than anyone. Thank God they were able to cut him out of that car in one terrifyingly sane piece.
Robert Hughes's memoir, an account of the years before he went to the US to be the art critic of Time, is a magisterial feat of inquiry, verve and style. In the age of the blog, everyone is a critic and all opinions are equally valid. Hughes disdains this noisy hum: "I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive." This robust attitude has never seemed more necessary.
Perhaps this is why his opening chapter, in which he describes the car accident that nearly killed him in 1999, is so affecting. On a coastal road in Western Australia, Hughes's car collided with another, containing three drug addicts, one of whom later tried to extort money from him. The result was a spectacular mashing of his body (when he saw his car later, he "couldn't see how a cockroach could have survived that wreck"). But he faced down death—or, at any rate, a series of phantasms of "Daliesque vividness"—and his fractured bones were stuck back together. He was then prosecuted for dangerous driving, but the case was thrown out of court.
At this point, Hughes should have returned home to New York, albeit with a pronounced limp. But his tongue got the better of him. He defamed the lawyers who had prepared the case against him, and they sued and won. The Australian press accused him of elitism and racism. Of the first accusation he is undoubtedly guilty. Of the second, he says that he never directed the insult "curry muncher" against a barrister (of Indian origin) and I believe him. The phrase, like the sentiment, is just too dumb.
This book, then, is a settling of accounts for Hughes: I left Oz 40 years ago, and thank God I did. But that doesn't mean it is bitter and mean-minded. Hughes's sideswipes at parochial Australia—that "womb with a view"—are loftily frequent, but the book's centre belongs to the Catholicism of his childhood, which, however thoroughly rejected now, made him the critic he is. Art is so much about the senses—as Hughes points out, this is yet another reason not to trust conceptual art—and the senses were discouraged at his 1950s Jesuit boarding school. Caught reading Joyce, he was sent to Father for punishment; the strap peeked from the sleeve of his soutane "like a snake in a hollow log." As for that other dangerous snake, the one between his legs, this was a "pink alien," and any raising of its head—even by accident—was thought a mortal sin.
Hughes's father died when he was a boy; his English mother followed not so long afterwards, at which point he was free to throw himself into the voluptuous arms of Europe. He pitched up in London in 1964, a 26-year-old "provincial Australian in a place that still tended to look down on Australians." But unable to deliver a book he'd been commissioned to write, he headed for the Italian home of his friend, the historian Alan Moorhead, and this became a base for his studies. He had already published one book about Australian art, yet he had done no real looking. The looking, when he got down to it, relieved him of the religion that had locked the door of his imagination. He stands in front of great oils, and weeps. "I was beginning… to derive from art… a sense of transcendence that organised religion had offered me—but that I had never received."
Returning to London, Hughes found it swinging. He married the "best fuck" in the city, a hippy and future lesbian called Danne, with whom he had a son, Danton. Living with Danne, he writes, was like living with a "deranged alley cat." She slept with Jimi Hendrix, and gave Hughes the clap to prove it. Once he found her hair crispy with—oh, God—another man's emissions. This section of the book, peopled with Connolly and Tynan and hippies, is wonderfully alive. Most delicious is the farcical scene when Time called Hughes to offer him the job of art critic. Miserable at Danne's latest bolting, a stoned Hughes accused his future editor of working for the CIA, and told him where to stick his "job." Luckily, they called back.
Readers who want autobiography always to dish up the mawkish and the too-intimate will be disappointed. The author is an Australian male of a certain generation, and he's not about to let it all hang out. But this is not a dishonest book, nor even a clenched one. The mess Hughes has occasionally made of life only increases your admiration. Away from the life, there are short essays on Leonardo, Piero della Francesca and the great flood of Florence, which remind you why it might be a good idea to re-read (or read) The Shock of the New, American Visions, or The Culture of Complaint. The thing about Hughes is this: whatever he has called his new book, he knows more than most—and is able to tell it better than anyone. Thank God they were able to cut him out of that car in one terrifyingly sane piece.
