One of the more interesting sessions (and there were many) of the 2010 Adelaide Writers' Festival was Kerryn Goldsworthy's conversation with writer Robert Dessaix.
Kerryn's introduction outlined Robert's extensive writing career as academic, broadcaster and fulltime freelance writer,
to which Dessaix replied he had little sense of himself as a writer. More to the point, he felt that in the living of his
life he constantly encounters chasms ... 'and since I can't leap chasms any more I have to fly across them with the
only sort of wings I can possibly think of, the wings of words.'
'You're a literal flyer as well,' Goldsworthy remarked, 'a compulsive traveller. Why do you travel? Your reasons for
travelling seem very different to me from most people's.'
'Well there's a one-word answer: I travel to be transported.'
'But I have a more complicated answer. I think that we go on vacation, which is slightly different, in order to escape either the banality of our lives – our everyday lives, the every-dayness of our lives, the domesticity of our lives – or else the clogged nature of our lives.'
'But we travel, it seems to me, for another reason. And that's why I think travel is a very particular word. I travel to find somewhere where I find myself interesting.'
'I do not find myself interesting in Devonport. And I apologise to any Canadians in the audience but I do not find myself interesting in Calgary. I do find myself interesting in Hobart but ... here's a thing ... I do not find myself interesting in New York.'
'I think inside every one of us there's a conversation going on. There is a table, and there are four, five, six people – voices – sitting around the table. And this conversation can either be joined or not joined. And when it comes to somewhere like New York ... New York is a sort of yuppy upstart at the end of the table who won't shut up, talking a hundred and one different things at once.'
Whereas Paris, Dessaix observed, is in a completely different category – a dowager louche – and as such is always welcome at his table.
'And Paris is not a comment on New York. It's a comment not even on me, in a sense, it's a comment on the conversation that I think is going on inside me. And that's why I do not say "New York is not interesting". I say, "I do not find myself interesting in New York." And I actually think we live with people because we find ourselves interesting with them.'
Goldsworthy wondered how one might live 'a good life'. 'In your books on both Gide and Turgenev you said they'd lived, by their own lights, good lives. Could you maybe enlarge on that a bit? What's a good life?'
Dessaix suggested if he knew the answer, he might have stopped writing. 'I write in order to discover anew each time. The French speak of 'a beautiful life', and I think that's what I'm trying to live. I'm not really trying to live a meaningful life any more. Once I was; I mean really I was, in my twenties and thirties. I've given up on meaning – except in little capsules of meaning – but I would like to live a beautiful life. And so in my books I try to look at what it felt like to live different kinds of lives.'
Gide was a homosexual man, Dessaix continues, who also lived and adored his wife through forty-three years of marriage until her death. 'He was passionately in love with her. Turgenev fell in love with an opera singer and stayed crazily in love with her for forty years; again, without any physical involvement.' This fascinates me, Dessaix adds, admitting he's always interested in learning of the ways people love. 'I know that the way people love on "Home and Away" could not be the end of the story, it can't possibly be. And all those young people in the Toyota ads who leap in the air and feel that they know what it might mean to love ... from my point of view are trapped inside a cage that at least to me seems rather small.'
Goldsworthy switched to the topic of Robert Hannaford's 'Blue Jumper' portrait of Dessaix. 'I think it's a very
good portrait,' Robert responded. 'It caught something, and that's what you want. He caught not just the way I looked,
he caught more than the moment.'
Goldsworthy wondered whether he saw something in himself within the Hannaford portrait that he hadn't recognised; perhaps
an unfamiliar self?
'Yes. I saw a precariousness in me that I hadn't realised was so obvious.'
'You were very unwell as I recall during that period of your life so perhaps he caught that fragility?'
'Yes, but I'm obviously much unweller now!!!'
'We're all older than we were Robert.'
'Yes, yes.'