Hello there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm back to share another episode of Read This, Schwartz Media's weekly books podcast, hosted by editor of the Monthly Michael Williams. It features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. In this episode, Michael sits down for a chat with Australian author Robert de Sai to discuss his latest book, Chameleon as Usual. I'm joined by Michael to tell me a little bit more about the episode. Hi, Michael,
Ruby Jones. Hello, So Michael, tell me about Robert Desai. Why listeners might be familiar with his work.
Yeah, listeners might know Desigh from He's had a storied career at this point. He's been writing books and essays for decades now. He spent about ten years as the host of books and Writing on the ABC Radio National and people might know him from there, but they might also know his books like Corfu or Night Letters. He writes these beautiful kind of literary travelogues where ages with both his journeys and the stuff he's reading and the
art he's engaged with. He's funny and free wheeling and a little bit peculiar, it has to be said, but in ways that are deeply rewarding and so.
Given he has been in the public eye for so long and has written memoirs and autobiographical essays for decades. Why is his latest memoir called Chameleon?
Yeah, Chameleon isn't the first memoir he's written. There's been autobiographical strains to a lot of his work, and he is someone who is kind of reproducing memoir and identity in all kinds of different ways. The metaphor of the chameleon in this book is a particularly acute one, though he has a line where he says, I've never been
the man I seem to be. It's a memoir that takes in his adoption and is in a way a dialogue between Robert de Sai in his eighties and the little boy who came to kind of build an identity, build a sense of self many many decks decades ago. And the interplay between those two is really lovely. He's interesting, he's thoughtful, and he's very generous in personal detail. It's a great chat.
Coming up in just a moment. Robert Desaig is a fox, not a hedgehog.
I think maybe the best most logical place for us to begin is with memory. Are you a man who has a good memory?
Generally, I have a memory for certain kinds of things that 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 pulls the next one. That's how it works for me. I remember
certain things. I remember faces very well. I just had a visitor here with whom I went to Tunis 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 seem to just disappear. I don't seem to recall well 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, inventing memories.
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 of one's past. You're the poet laureate of that skill set.
Well, thank you, Michael. 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 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.
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? You had an end insight, and you were writing towards that end.
I didn't have an end insight. You know. I wondered why anyone will 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, 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 is not so important. It's the language for me. It's my all. Really.
One of the adjectives at being kind 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 luxury that 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.
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 not 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 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 very small English word. It's an overused 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, 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. I just do. I mean, day after day is a joy.
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
the world comes through again and again. You mentioned in 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.
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, that I might have been in a previous life, an Egyptian, possibly a Pakistani. I just always think I looked a bit Pakistani. When I was young, I was mostly interested
as a hedgehog. That's what I was in those days, in keeping my eyes fixed on the goal. That's what 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 and looking at everything and thinking things through a new
I suppose the adverb anew 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. 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, but 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
of view, and I see things and new. They are not new, but I look at them in you.
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 orthodoxes harden, their perceptions get locked in. They're they're less inclined to read, visit old certainties and question them. To be a champion of seeing things in you is quite a remarkable and open way of being in the world. You don't see that as a singular thing in particular to.
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. I mean, 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 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 way I have come to live, and I think the create 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 creative with words. That's the only 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 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.
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. 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?
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, is what my wife said. And I was distraught for some years, but she was right. It had been special. It was 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. 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 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
the core of my being. I don't really believe in corese of being, but I can't think of another English expression except core of my being. Maybe 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. What can I do? I use it.
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 have articulated better than anyone else I can think of.
When you've just made me happy, 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 dances which are playful and disciplined at the same time at the same instant as tango 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 corfeel becomes beautiful. Everything is fabulous. But 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 e blains a lot about what I value in life. The dance. Unfortunately, at a certain point 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. 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 never want to go there again. But what Americans do that no one else in the world can do. Nobody can do them, 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. It's dull 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.
And like you're comparing Mozart to Oklahoma, I want Salzburg with a fringe on top. It would be the way through. 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.
I think I am really a nineteenth century man because I'm a humanist in a very Turgenevan way. It was Turgenev, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev, the author of well six important novels 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 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 humanist relationship that he had with 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 something 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 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.
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 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 my own person.
Man, I'm not at ease 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 Niall, 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, 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'd read so much John Banville. I went that I really liked Ireland, I really like Dublin, loved Cork, and I thought, I'm going to go home and I'm going to rewrite Nile and make him a bit more irish, a bit more argumentative, a bit more uh 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 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 Tapehunter and the other actors who strutted across the screen when I was young, and who don't now. It's a much more sort 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 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. Self Assured is a different matter. 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.
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 about Chameleon that I think comes through whether you're having conversations with imagine selves or previous selves, or I think you touched on it when you talked about what the
experience of being adopted meant for Thomas Robert Jones. But 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 of world's lived languages, learned places, travel to is that something that has driven you in your life and continues to drive you.
It's why I leave home, It's why I travel, It's why I go to India, It's why I go to Austria or wherever else I might go. I don't go to Austria in order to look at Saint 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. 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 airport and get out, to open up possibilities, not probabilities, but possibilities.
It's the most wonderful word.
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.
Grateful to you for your questions. Thank you very much.
Robert Dessi's latest novel, Chameleon, is available at all Good bookstores now.
Thank you so much for listening to another special episode of Read This. We'll have another episode of Reading This to share with you next Sunday. See you then,