Dessaix looks at concept of eternal love

Robert Dessaix's latest novel is about an extraordinary affair that was never consummated.

Marriage is a fine idea, muses Australian writer Robert Dessaix, provided you plan to die young. "Human beings probably aren't meant to stay with one person all their lives; it's probably unnatural ... It's an institution that evolved when we all lived much less long. I'm not sure how well adapted to it we are now."

Dessaix, an articulate, soft-spoken man, offers this not as a trendy piece of high-brow cynicism, but as the fruit of hard experience and much pondering. The end of his own marriage, many years ago now, hit him so hard he tried to kill himself.

"It wasn't so much a desire to cease existing," he comments ruefully, "as to have a long, long rest. Do a Rip Van Winkle. And when you woke up, all that aching, all that pain might be gone."

He was in New Zealand at the time, and, as he drove around the Coromandel one day, it occurred to him that all his problems would vanish if he simply swerved into a power pole. So he did. The Thames power grid was out for several hours, and his car was destroyed, and the only other immediate consequence was a discussion with a local cop, which ended with the memorable line: "Well, you're not a Maori and you're not drunk, so I think we might just forget all about it."

Dessaix's latest book is, among other things, a study of love and relationships. Combining aspects of literary biography, memoir and travelogue, Twilight of Love (Picador, $45) looks at the life and works of the great Russian writer Turgenev.

"Pushkin is the Shakespeare of the Russian language, but after Pushkin, you would have to say that Turgenev's Russian is the most beautiful of any writers, the most honed, the most sensitive."

When you first look at Turgenev's life, he says, the thing that jumps out and hits you is his 40-year relationship with the married singer Pauline Viardot.

"It was an extraordinary affair, an extraordinary romance. He was in love with her, in inverted commas, from the moment he first saw her until the moment he died. The fact that it wasn't sexual is almost an affront to our modern understanding of what love is."

One of the things Dessaix hoped to achieve with the new book was to tease out all the different possible meanings of the word love, and come up with the right language to describe Turgenev's feelings for Viardot.

"Passionate friendship is about as close as I can get. He was a Russian speaker, of course, and in Russian, as in English, the word 'love' simply means too many things, so many things that it's hardly worth using at all. Turgenev himself grew up very confused about what it meant."

Dessaix has himself been in love with language all his life.

Not only did he set out to learn Russian — "as a child I was a bit of a stamp collector, and I wanted to know what that strange script on all the Russian stamps meant" — at the age of 11 he decided to create his own language. "A lot of children do this — not a lot compared to the number who prefer to spend their time playing cricket or beating each other up, but more than you might suppose."

But where most children create private languages to communicate with a close friend or sibling, his was and remains purely private. Fifty years after he first began working on it, he won't even divulge its name. "It starts with the letter K. That's all I ever tell anyone."

Despite having written a very self-revealing memoir, A Mother's Disgrace, Dessaix thinks of some aspects of his life as completely private, and when he wants to talk out loud to himself about these, it's convenient to have a language no one else on Earth understands. "Except for my dog. He's picked up several words of it."

There is a temptation to dismiss the question of what "love" really meant to Turgenev as a dry matter of semantics, but, says Dessaix, that would be a mistake. The ability to speak precisely about our feelings is what lets us conduct relationships honestly.

"I think we don't always want to admit this about the great loves in our own lives, but their nature changes. Different words apply to them at different times. We shouldn't be so lazy as to make do with that one word love, which means not enough and far too much.

"When I say love, do I mean passion? Devotion? Is it actually just friendship? Is it admiration, wonder, lust, desire to possess? Joy in another's being? A search for an ideal of goodness, which I see them as an example of? What I tried to do in this book is gently encourage my readers to be a little bit more daring about how they use English in describing what they feel."

See Robert Dessaix

* Wellington City Gallery (free), ph (04) 801 3987, Monday, July 11, 1-2pm.
* Whare Wananga, Level 2, Auckland Central City Library, Wednesday, July 13, 6-7pm, Book Council members $8, students $10, non-members $12; ph 0800 BK TALK (0800 258 255).
* Time Out Bookstore, 432 Mt Eden Rd, Mt Eden Village (free), Thursday, July 14, 12.30-1.30pm.