Robert Dessaix’s voice is as distinctive as a fingerprint and his dazzling flights through fiction and memoir distinguish his writing in Australian letters. What Days Are For: A Memoir, published in November, is classic Dessaix and does not disappoint. Despite its clinical backdrop, it’s an intimate fireside chat, blazing and crackling — and I was warmed.
Dessaix nearly died on a Sydney street in 2011 and in What Days Are For he tells the story of his brush with death from high in a hospital room in Darlinghurst. Like an actor delivering a soliloquy, he declaims on a multitude of topics, making insightful observations spiked with sharp wit.
Of course Dessaix does not really write this book from his hospital room with the beepers, cannulas, gerberas, man in the next bed’s penchant for the Eucharist, penetrating smells and multiple cups of tea with two biscuits. Yet, one of the book’s greatest strengths is its immediacy: We are with Dessaix in the thick of his illness and privy to his stream of consciousness and philosophical ponderings. Or so he (magically) makes us believe.
If you are a Dessaix fan like me you will know that the man has his obsessions. And this answer from a Q&A on the Random House website will give newer readers some insight into what these obsessions are and have been.
‘I started writing fairly late in life — my first real book came out when I was fifty — by which time a certain distillation of themes had taken place in my mind. I had moved away from causes, ideological arguments and the search for meaning, towards something more to do with beauty and what the French call une belle vie — usually translated as the ‘good life’ but actually ‘a beautiful life’. I want to know what might give someone with my background a sense of living a good — that is, a beautiful — life. And intimacy is always a part of that — finding new ways to be intimate with friends, and with those I love, with my own thoughts and feelings, perhaps even with my readers — or at least ways of encouraging them to explore intimacy for themselves.’
What Days Are For continues his tussle with these themes.
Have you had a good day?
In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, the paramedic asks Dessaix if he has had a good day. It is later, in his hospital bed, that Dessaix chances upon Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Days’ in David Lodge’s novel Deaf Sentence.
The poem’s first two lines are, ‘What are days for? / Days are where we live.’
Dessaix describes the impact of his encounter with Larkin.
‘Larkin has just looked me straight in the eye and said: forget years, forget lifetimes and the shapes they’ve taken on, it’s a succession of days you live in, so make sure they’re good ones, be happy in them as they pass, one after the other, that’s the point.’
Dessaix was diagnosed HIV positive in 1994 and this means death has been lurking in his life for some time. The killer chest pain that floored him a block from his Sydney hotel brought it closer again and raised the question: ‘If I only have so many days left, how do I make sure they’re the best they can be?’
As Dessaix said in 2012 in an interview with Gail Bell in The Monthly, ‘When you are starting to count your days, and perhaps you only have two left, you become interested in days. I want to get out a magnifying glass and examine each one. I want to find my own answers to the question: is this a good day? It’s not as easy as it seems, it takes you down a peg. A day doesn’t have to be grand. I don’t have to be writing a ninth symphony, I can be patting my dog.’
Similarly, in What Days Are For, he writes, ‘I want to know the good ways to be old, there must be good ways, and also how to die — what days are for, in other words, when you’re old and death is in the offing. I’d like to know more about good ways to be idle, too.’
If all this sounds a mite dreary and monochromatic — don’t despair. Dessaix ruminates on spirituality, language, travel, childhood, friendship and gay marriage — poking fun, probing, skimming and skipping — with the captivating touch of a dragonfly rather than a grim reaper’s depressing heft.
Intimate friendship
At 71, Dessaix gives mumbo jumbo short shrift and allows himself a couple of grumpy-old-man rants. He rails against the modern world with its careless chatter and tweeting and lack of intimacy. A generation ago, he said, the average American had 5.6 intimate relationships — now the average was ‘apparently just above zero’. Dessaix has more than 5.6 intimate (irreplaceable) friendships and is glad of it. Friends come to his bedside and sit in companionable silence or converse quietly. Other visitors he notes are less comfortable with the contact; the close encounter with a human at risk.
Dessaix’s riffs on religion and spirituality will no doubt raise a few hackles — so here’s a grab. ‘How outmoded it all seems now, this interest in radical spirituality … Nobody could care less about this sort of thing nowadays when bushwalking or a bit of homeopathy is about as “spiritual” as most people seem to get.’
Dessaix grew up in Lane Cove and one of my favourite quotes from this book is about his former suburb and Jesus: ‘Was Jesus nice? Not really, when you read between the lines, not in a Lane Cove sense.’
Other titbits that made me smile include:
- His description of the nurse with ‘the continuous eyebrow’.
- Him saying that when he was young and his longing first reached fever pitch, threatening to derange him, ‘in the nick of time [it] was turned into typing’.
- How in the midst of his heart attack he still notices the paramedic’s ‘glossy, muscled forearm’.
- Him saying ‘It’s … been voguish for a long time now to talk about “living in the moment”. I can see why goldfish might take to this idea but it strikes me as a witless approach to passing time for humans.’
A Mad Affair
Prior to his heart attack (and being paddled back to life twice in the ambulance), Dessaix had travelled north from his home in Tasmania to attend readings of his play, A Mad Affair, which was in rehearsal at NIDA in Sydney. ‘But of course I never saw it, I only saw the DVD later,’ he said.
The play revolves around the unrequited longing of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. And, as Dessaix says in What Days Are For, ‘While it’s love that tends to hog the limelight these days (and not just Great Loves, either, but any kind of sexual entanglement), it’s infatuations, crushes and fleeting obsessions that are usually much more memorable — at least in my experience.’
Dessaix nevertheless told ABC’s Books and Writing program presenter Michael Cathcart that Peter Timms (his life partner) is the hero of the book — and there is heartfelt homage here in Dessaix’s expression of gratitude and admission of need. Peter hates flying but does it to be near Dessaix, who is deeply appreciative of his partner’s sacrifice.
‘To say I “love” Peter is to miss the point. We continue each other, that’s what we do. He’s not another me, I am violin to his cello,’ he writes.
Prompted by death’s proximity, this is really a book about life and how to live; how to suck the marrow from days; how our nation should start the conversation about how to grow old in Australia in a good way. Instead of being maudlin, it has an air of theatricality and celebration — and I think it is more potent because of it.
We want a happy ending and when Dessaix gives us one we’re glad.
As he writes, ‘Narrative itself is such an optimistic form, you keep turning the pages (or writing them), one after the other, “time and time over”, in the hope of something transforming happening. Isn’t that it? In the hope of a transforming answer to your particular questions.’
What Days Are For is a treat — wise, beautifully written and full of delights.
Drop the right hints and you might find some narrative transformation under your tree this Christmas.
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