Robert Hughes – The Australian Years – Patricia Anderson

For writer and art historian Patricia Anderson, Robert Hughes before his US life and fame is almost another person. His years at Sydney University marked him out and Anderson captures a picture of not only of his burgeoning talent there but also university life in Sydney in the post war years, the birth and death of local newspapers and magazines and the budding Australian art world.Patricia Anderson, whose most recent book is Robert Hughes- The Australian Years (Pandora Press), addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 27 April 2010.

ROBERT HUGHES – THE AUSTRALIAN YEARS

PATRICIA ANDERSON

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, an acerbic-tongued young man with a lion’s mane of mustard-coloured hair, began writing art criticism for some local journals and newspapers. His writing would send a crackle along Australia’s art-world wires and change the tone and substance of art criticism here, which had, up until this time, been a rather gentlemanly and reticent affair. The rest of the art world would become familiar with Hughes when he was offered the job of art critic on Time magazine in 1971.

Why write a book on Robert Hughes when his own memoirThings I Didn’t Know was released in 2006? He was of particular interest to a twenty-six-year old art teacher at Fort Street High School in 1976 who assiduously collected every page he wrote for Time magazine, and was given to quoting him to senior art students.

Some time after 1978, the year I began working in the public programs department of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I remember my pulse racing when a certain film was slated for public screening. This was Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New, which was soon to become a best selling book. All the trade mark characteristics of the man were in place: the fierce intelligence, the bombast, the overwhelming confidence, the unassailable eye, the riveting analogies, the wounding aside, the sniggering dismissal.

In no time at all Hughes had become the world’s most famous art critic. But no-one can claim the post for ever. In recent decades, younger critics, and art historians such as Simon Schama have galvanised the art-loving public’s attention and also, Hughes’ clashes with more contemporary artists, began to make him look not only curmudgeonly, but reactionary. The aging critic’s increasing irritation and disillusionment with the world around him surfaced most tellingly in his book The Culture of Complaint: the Fraying of America.

By 1999, with two books of my own published, and having established and run two art galleries over a fifteen year period. My first gallery was the Contemporary Jewellery Gallery, the second was the Crawford Gallery. With another book: Elwyn Lynn’s Art World almost finished, and another gestating Art and Australia: Debates, dollars and delusions, more by accident than design, I had amassed enough material to write a book about Hughes.

I said recently that writers are like people who hoard pieces of string and plastic bags. They’re reluctant to throw them away, because one day they’re going to be useful, and so it proved with all the jottings, scraps and cuttings on Mr Hughes. I wrote to him suggesting a biography, with a few coy remarks about why I could be a suitable writer. His answer was brief and terse.

At this time Hughes was in Sydney recuperating from his near fatal accident. In summary, he said it would be best for all concerned if I were to look for another subject. I did, however, console myself with the notion that there would never have been a right time to approach him, as he had other plans. How then, to structure this book, which I still planned to write? There was no question of going to America, so it had to have a confined scope and a narrow focus, which turned out to be a blessing. I would write an unauthorised biography and I would remain in an arena I felt confident of addressing with accuracy and some authority — his Australian years.

Australia’s oldest and most venerated art historian, Professor Bernard Smith (who incidentally, had once asked me to write his authorised biography) once said to me that it was entirely possible to admire and respect an individual, without actually liking them. And this is the situation I found myself in, even before I began knitting the fragments of my intended book together. So it comes as a surprise to hear one critic say I have been rather kind to Hughes. I read in this month’s Australian Review of Books, the following words from Daniel Vuillermin: “Hughes named two writers, Peter Craven and Catharine Lumby, who have stood by him, whereas others, he says, have sought to further their careers by denouncing him. To the former small but faithful posse can be added Patricia Anderson.”

Vuillerman thinks I have been overly-admiring. And I am much amused by this. He also thinks my “strict chronological narrative” was a missed opportunity to weave a reading of Hughes’ The Fatal Shore into the biography, when in fact, an analysis of this publication was outside the scope of the book. I thought it was subtle enough, to suggest on the flyleaf, that Hughes’ Jesuit education was an enduring influence on his mindset —providing the scaffolding and some of the psychological underpinning for his first book Heaven and Hell in Western Art and the one he wrote twenty years later: The Fatal Shore — both of which were about perceived evils, crime, punishment and alienation, indeed, being cast out — ideas which, I believe, continue to haunt Hughes to this day.

So when it comes to critics’ reviews, I think all writers can take heart from the comments of Joseph Conrad who once said, he never read his reviews, just measured them, and Kingsley Amis, who said a “misguided” review might spoil his breakfast  — but never his lunch. The careful reader will be able to discern a stealthy analysis of Hughes personality and the defective elements of it, woven through the pages, and I believe only the truly tone deaf — or today’s postmodern PhD candidate — could fail to detect it.

Some important aspects of Hughes’ personality, were best illuminated by the comments of others. For example, painter Donald Friend said in his diaries: “I’m fond of Bob and dearly like his company. But it’s a bloody nuisance when others arrive when he’s here — he bristles, becomes obsessively loquacious … and soon a sort of bitter attacking tone comes in: I think he loves his few friends jealously, so resents the others …”[i]

Judah Waten, writing to his friend, the Melbourne social realist painter Noel Counihan, after the publication of Hughes book: The Art of Australia, said “I’m hardly surprised that Mr Hughes would have a go at you; he isn’t worried by writers but he is worried by painters. As a painter he is a phoney among phonies. Hughes is a bad bastard, a snake in the grass. Make it you business to review his book in Guardian, trim him up in your own style, and make sure he gets a copy. There is nothing he hates more and that is criticism; he’s got a glass chin.”[ii] Hughes’ sister-in-law Dawn Hughes, made a brief and sharp observation: “he was always putting on an act”.

Then there is the issue of Hughes’ narcissism, most especially revealed in his ill-considered television series Beyond the Fatal Shore, where he projected his own personal preoccupations onto the screen of an entire culture. His narcissism was reflected in a desire to throw one’s person across events — like a magician’s cloak — and magically transform them according to one’s own prescriptions : to view them as an extension of one’s self. Hughes’ passionate but fleeting involvement with the Australian Republican movement was an illuminating example of this.

There is also the interesting question of Hughes’ feelings about himself. The fact that America at large, received in the 1990s, exactly the same kind of savage dismissal that was reserved for Australia in the 1960s invites speculation about Hughes’ temperament. Without pushing the observation too far, a deeply-lodged dissatisfaction with the self, regardless of where that self situates geographically, will follow like a shadow. The internalised aversion is projected onto an abstraction — a city, a culture, a country, This was surely true of Patrick White — who incidentally loathed Hughes — and it may also have been true of Hughes.

The main dilemma was how to structure the book. Rushing around, encouraging old associates and enemies (and they were legion) to throw acid and spill the beans would have been too easy, and too clichéd. So would the memories of old girlfriends. One reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald said that Noeline Brown, hadn’t even been contacted by me. This is true. Brown had given such a measured and subtle account of her time with Hughes in her own memoir, that I found everything I needed there.

So I began at the beginning, which is good for fairy tales, good for fiction and of course excellent for biography. Hughes’ great great grandfather, Thomas Hughes, from County Roscommon, boarded The Crusader (Hughes gets this wrong incidentally) in 1839 and arrived in Australia with his wife and three sons in January 1840.

The eldest son John, (Hughes great grandfather) prospered mightily as a merchant and pastoralist. He built Kincoppel in Elizabeth Bay and eight children would be raised there.

One of them, Thomas, who became Lord Mayor of Sydney in 1902, would marry Louisa Gilhooley, the daughter of a doctor from Cork in 1887. These were Robert Hughes’ grandparents.Kincoppel would later be left to the Catholic Church, who ultimately sold it to developers. Apparently Hughes still moans about this generosity today.

Their two sons Geoffrey and Roger were both serving in France in World War I, and only one returned. This was Geoffrey, a distinguished pilot, devoted son and devout Catholic who would marry the English woman Margaret Sealy —and whom Hughes does not do justice to in his own memoir. Robert Hughes was their fourth child.

And here I must say that I was able to have some illuminating conversations with one of Hughes’ brothers, Geoffrey, who made it clear how distressed the family was by the inaccuracies in Hughes’ memoir — about his mother and father — and his ungentlemanly treatment of his first wife.

A good deal of Hughes university time was spent writing scurrilous observations of university life and his favourite cartoon image — and alter ego — was a small smirking devil, who mutated into various guises according the subject of his article.This is one such devil he drew inside the cover of a book – a present to Andrew Riemer, a fellow student and editor of the University’s magazine Honi Soit.

His university years were also spent producing excellent line drawings to accompany his articles for The Observer, a lively polemical magazine started by Donald Horne. It was Peter Coleman, then working for the magazine, whom Hughes first encountered when he came through its doors looking for a job as a cartoonist. Coleman recounts this meeting in his book, Memoirs of a Slow Learner: “Bob Hughes was a tall, blond, buff youth who, adopting the role of impatient and overbearing artist, knocked on the office door to ask … if we could perhaps use an illustrator … freelance … cheap … We took him on.”

But it was art criticism Hughes wanted to write. He soon replaced the hapless Bernard Hesling, whose sharp wit he undoubtedly learnt something from. Most of his early art criticism was unassailable for its aesthetic judgements, but he was notorious for his caustic assaults on painters, especially William Dobell. Some artists — such as Tom Gleghorn — he may even have been envious of, because he was also intent on making his own way as painter. Indeed, I’ve titled one chapter in the book with a quote from Hughes “Painting is my whole life, there is nothing else”. Hughes had heard Gleghorn described as “the bright white hope of Australian painting”, Patrick White had one of his works hanging above his writing desk and Leo McKern had purchased a vast canvas.

When Penguin’s local editor Geoffrey Dutton asked Hughes to write a book about Australian art, it seemed to determine the direction his future career would take, although Dutton’s archives in the National Library, make clear that the book had to be coaxed out of Hughes, chapter by chapter. The discipline of a solid routine, so necessary to the writer, would be provided by the example of Alan Moorehead, who put Hughes up in Italy, introduced him to his publisher and editor in London, and gave him encouragement and advice.

An ABC television program which recorded every moment of Hughes’ triumphant return to Australia in 1972, to present a series of lectures here, provided the perfect ending to my book: At the conclusion of his documentary, Hughes slyly says:

There was an 18th century French aphorist called Chamfort, who once remarked that if you wish to frequent the society of the great, you must be prepared to eat a toad each morning to be certain you will encounter nothing more revolting before the day is through.

I immediately set about looking up Chamfort and this is what I found. The parallels are illuminating. Nicolas de Chamfort was born in 1741 in Paris. His youthful experiences involved living from hand to mouth and frequently accepting hospitality from people who were mesmerised by his youthful vigour, his unstoppable irony and flowing witticisms. He would ultimately make a living from his writing of prize-winning plays, epigrams, comedies, verse, political essays and odes and he became a favourite at the court of Louis XVI, securing some comfortable positions and a generous pension.

When court life became oppressive to him, Chamfort departed, but later returned and was granted another pension from the royal treasury. After an unfortunate love affair, he retired to the country only to be swept up by politics of the French Revolution, to which he devoted his oratorical energies exclusively. The excesses of the Jacobins soured his view of the Republicans and he could not resist a stream of sarcasm towards the new order.

Chamfort was imprisoned, which he found intolerable, and he inflicted wounds upon himself, which he survived but suffered from intensely. His writings have been described as rich and colourful, picturesque, passionate and full of audacity. Among his sayings were: “There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions” and “I have three kinds of friends: those who love me, those who pay no attention to me, and those who detest me” and “Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don’t know, and who don’t know us.”

ENDNOTES

[i] Donald Friend Diaries , Volume 3, 9 Oct 1963, p. 552.

[ii] Letter from Judah Waten to Counihan, 27 September 1965