Memoir: In his revealing memoir a plain-speaking art critic once again tells it like it is.
In May, 1999, the art critic Robert Hughes, born in Sydney but resident in New York, crashed outside Broome, Western Australia. The driver and passengers of the other car were out of hospital in weeks; Hughes's horrific injuries took years to fix.
His physical suffering, however, was nothing compared to the mauling he got from the Australian media when he appeared in court, charged with dangerous driving. By the time the trial finished (it cost him $250,000 and he pleaded guilty), he had been widely slandered as a racist.
Understandably, Hughes now asked himself if he really wanted to stay a citizen of the nation whose press had lied about him. In order to answer the question he decided to investigate all his interactions with Australia and Australians over the course of his life and write up what he discovered. Things I Didn't Know is the product of that process.
His Hughes ancestors were Catholic merchants from Co Roscommon who emigrated to Australia in the 1840s. They weren't convicts; they were socially ambitious and, within a generation, they had become (which delights the contrarian in Hughes) anti-Irish republican, pro-British, Imperialist warmongers. The only bit of their Irishness that the Hugheses kept was their Catholicism.
The writer enjoyed the standard Jesuit education: on the one hand, beating and sexual shame (but no abuse), and on the other, a literary education of breadth and depth which included lashings of Joyce.
School was followed by university, literature and then architecture, neither finished, which in turn were followed by journalism. Australian art - this was the 1960s - was just becoming fashionable and Allen Lane commissioned the 22-year-old Hughes to write The Art of Australia (still in print). Alan Moorehead, writer of The Blue Nile among other classics, advised Hughes to go to London, promising help. Hughes went, wrote Heaven and Hell in Western Art, was headhunted by Time magazine, and moved to New York, where he's been ever since.
Hughes is not a storyteller, though he has a story and he tells it. What really interests him, though, is what has made him the critic that he is and what he thinks about the culture. What made him holds few surprises. Joyce, as mentioned, was the great formative influence (helping him to untie the bindings of Catholicism) followed by Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, who taught him to write clearly and avoid mystification. After that, the great influence was the works of the Italian Renaissance, which Hughes saw in Italy thanks to Alan Moorehead.
As for his opinions, there are page after page of them here. They are often funny, always concrete and usually surprising. Some chosen at random: Kenneth Clark was a genius and to denigrate him as a toff is fatuous. Robert Rauschenberg is the greatest post-war American artist because he made possible just about everything achieved by the painters in the US who followed him. Given a choice between, say, the low art of Robert Crumb or the high art of Cy Twombly, it's got to be Crumb. The contemporary art world is a saturnalia of phonies and fashion victims for at least 95 per cent of the time. And so on.
NOW, AS HAS often been said about those who peddle opinions for a living, they are just that, opinions. Why should we take them seriously? Of course that has always been the popular riposte to people such as Hughes, which those who don't know how to beat him in an argument trot out. Actually, there are two very good reasons for taking his opinions seriously and they are everywhere in this book.
One, he is not an amateur, he is a professional. He has devoted his life to thinking about art and culture. He knows of what he speaks and this book shows you the educational process that made him what he is. Even the most sceptical reader must close this book knowing that, if nothing else, he has studied his subject.
Secondly, he is prepared to bare all before the reader. He tells you a great deal, much of it incredibly personal (his account of his disastrous first marriage is especially honest), which then allows the reader a way of understanding the private humus from which his opinions spring. I can't think of a single critic who is as candid as Hughes is about himself, save Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise, which is clearly the model for Things I Didn't Know.
In this, the early 21st century, the visual arts - having superseded literature - are the western world's dominant high-end art. The world of art generates fabulous amounts of capital, as well as being craven and corrupt, rotten and louche. Never before have we so needed a Virgil to guide us through the inferno, and how fortunate we are to have in Hughes someone to do this for us, a plain-speaking critic who tells it like it is and like he himself is, too.
As for whether to stay Australian or not, Hughes comes to no conclusion. Perhaps by the time he got to the end of his book, he realised there were more important things to worry about, or perhaps, the book being so wide and rich and deep, he had simply forgotten why he'd started, not that that matters a jot. It's the journey, not the arrival, that counts here, and the pleasure, along the way, of this writer's brilliant company.
Carlo Gébler is a writer. His play, Silhouette, recently played at the Tricycle Theatre in London as part of How Long is Never, an evening of short plays exploring the situation in Darfur, western Sudan
Things I Didn't Know By Robert Hughes Harvill Secker, 395pp. £25