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A Memoir
Knopf
September 2006
On Sale: September 19, 2006
416 pages
ISBN: 1400044448
EAN: 9781400044443
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Robert Hughes has trained his critical eye on many
major subjects: from Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
(Goya) to the city of Barcelona (Barcelona) to
the history of his native Australia (The Fatal Shore)
to modern American mores and values (The Culture
of Complaint). Now he turns that eye on perhaps his
most fascinating subject: himself and the world that formed
him.
Things I Didn’t Know is a memoir unlike
any other because Hughes is a writer unlike any other. He
analyzes his experiences the way he might examine a Van Gogh
or a Picasso: he describes the surface so we can picture the
end result, then he peels away the layers and scratches
underneath that surface so we can understand all the beauty
and tragedy and passion and history that lie below. So when
Hughes describes his relationship with his stern and distant
father, an Australian Air Force hero of the First World War,
we’re not simply simply told of typical father/son
complications, we see the thrilling exploits of a WWI pilot,
learn about the nature of heroism, get the history of modern
warfare — from the air and from the trenches — and we become
aware how all of this relates to the wars we’re fighting
today, and we understand how Hughes’s brilliant anti-war
diatribe comes from both the heart and an understanding of
the horrors of combat. The same high standards apply
throughout as Hughes explores, with razor sharpness
and lyrical intensity, his Catholic upbringing and Catholic
school years; his development as an artist and writer and
the honing of his critical skills; his growing appreciation
of art; his exhilaration at leaving Australia to discover a
new life in Italy and then in “swinging 60’s” London. In
each and every instance, we are not just taken on a tour of
Bob Hughes’s life, we are taken on a tour of his mind — and
like the perfect tour, it is educational, funny, expansive
and genuinely entertaining, never veering into sentimental
memories, always looking back with the right sharpness of
objectivity and insight to examine a rebellious period in
art, politics and sex.
One of the extraordinary
aspects of this book is that Hughes allows his observations
of the world around him to be its focal point rather than
the details of his past. He is able to regale us with
anecdotes of unknown talents and eccentrics as well as
famous names such as Irwin Shaw, Robert Rauschenberg, Cyril
Connolly, Kenneth Tynan, Marcel Duchamp, and many others.
He revels in the joys of sensuality and the anguish of
broken relationships. He appreciates genius and craft and
deplores waste and stupidity. The book can soar with
pleasure and vitality as well as drag us into almost
unbearable pain.
Perhaps the most startling section
of Things I Didn’t Know comes in the very opening,
when Hughes describes his near fatal car crash of several
years ago. He shows not just how he survived and changed —
but also how he refused to soften or weaken when facing
mortality. He begins by dealing with what was almost the
end of life, and then goes on from there to show us the
value of life, in particular the value of exploring and
celebrating one specific and extraordinary life.
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