It has been clear for a long time that the late works of any artist differ from those of the rest of their career. There is a freedom from the necessities of form. A desire to shuck off tradition also mingles with an ability to use and enjoy a particular sense of fragmentation on the brink of nothingness. This occurs in no other period of creative life.
Robert Dessaix’s memoir is a fine example of this phenomenon. At 80, Dessaix faces himself and his approaching end, ostensibly examining his past decisions and deceits with honesty. There are abrupt changes of perspective and digressions – and it is a vagrant book – but there is a strange coherence at the edge of dissolution.
While working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dessaix presented the flagship Books and Writing radio programme for a decade, interviewing every well-known author working in or visiting the country. His novels, memoirs, books of travel and biography made him a well-known public figure, as did prizes and festival appearances. For many Australians, Dessaix remains the face and voice of literature. He is also homosexual and HIV-positive.
Chameleon is written in the first-person, but it is not a monologue, though the reader might very well consider it to be a very adept public performance. Several interlocutors appear, with their own back-stories – a long-term lover, a close friend, family members, acquaintances. It roves globally from Australia to North Africa, then Moscow in the former USSR and back again to Australia. Each section has its own focus.
Dessaix was an adopted child, renamed Robert Jones. His upbringing was liberal, his experiences wide. Growing up on Sydney’s North Shore, there were early explorations of other religious and immigrant cultures. He attended the Australian National University in Canberra, majoring in Russian, and subsequently spent time teaching in the USSR. Eventually, he worked at the Australian National University on his return.
Dessaix married Lisa but it was not a lasting relationship. “It was Lisa who panicked first, not me,” he writes. “It took her the usual seven years to make a break for it.” Looking back, he reflects, he cannot blame her. Although he was adoring, he “must have been a second-rate or even third-rate lover …” He had “no idea about giving pleasure”. He had also discovered another life, discreetly seeking gay encounters through advertisements in the back pages of more liberal newspapers.
For a sharply observant man, Dessaix has often been curiously imperceptive about some aspects of himself. The plot of Chameleon – in as far as this series of digressive explorations has a plot – is a slow-motion journey in self-discovery. While there is a lover of many years, Peter Timms, and walk-on parts for the semi-famous, such as Czech novelist Milan Kundera and Italian author Aldo Busi, the major focus is Dessaix. He is the perfect performer, just as he is a skilled and pleasurable writer to read. His authorial voice charms – and disarms.
As he relates in the book, in 1966 aged 22, he arrived in Morocco en route to the USSR and “the lights came on”. The landscape existed in whites and blues, the desert seared the eyes, human shadows and their movements were alluring, as were the prospects of sexual encounters loitering perceptibly on the margins.
Historic background on the place of the “Orient” in Western imagination, including the translations by Sir Richard Burton – The Arabian Nights to The Perfumed Garden – provide Dessaix with an entry point. It is this “Morocco” section of Chameleon that contains some of his more evocative writing – secrets behind glances, and dawn skies over desert mosques. It is a place he feels he can “just be in an uninterpreted, uninterpreting, unmediated sort of way”.
His fascination with North Africa was lifelong and it appears here in many guises, always sensual, brilliantly coloured and overwhelming. From his first visit, Morocco has preoccupied him enough to be the subject of many subsequent books, particularly Arabesques, his study of the French writer André Gide and Gide’s own obsession with the region. Part-travelogue, part-biography, part-autobiography, Arabesques, with its oddly mirrored self-reflections, remains Dessaix’s best work.
Chameleon is an intimate book, seemingly confiding, but ultimately a reader is forced to consider the myriad Dessaixs that have been revealed during its course – and how they relate to each other. There is the curiously prissy younger self, Robert Jones, to whom the text is addressed. Then there is the vastly experienced older Robert Dessaix, part-adventurer, Orientalist, part-raconteur and actor.
The book appropriately concludes in the green room of a theatre, as present-day Dessaix nervously awaits an appearance at a literary festival.
Yet by the end, we still do not know quite who Robert Dessaix is – did we ever? Does he? As to whether we have even glimpsed the figure behind these characters, it is left to every reader to decide.
Chameleon, by Robert Dessaix (Text, $45), is out now.
