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David Harcourt
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Posted: 27 Sep 2006 04:42 am |
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I was interested today to see that there is a Wikipedia article about Peter Robb. It reads as follows:
Peter Robb is an Australian author. He was born in the Toorak [sic], Melbourne in 1946 and spent his formative years in both Australia and New Zealand. Between 1978 and 1992 he spent most of his time in Naples and southern Italy, interspersed with sojourns in Brazil. At the end of 1992 he returned to Sydney. His first book, Midnight in Sicily, was published in Australia in October 1996. It won the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for non-fiction in 1997. His second book, M, a biography of the Italian artist Caravaggio, was published in Australia in 1998. The book provoked controversy on its publication in Britain in 2000. In December 1999, he published, Pig's Blood and other fluids, a collection of three crime fiction novellas. In October 2003, Robb published his fourth book, A Death in Brazil, which was named The Age's non-fiction book of the year for 2004. He has taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland and the Instituto Universitario Orientale in Naples.
I suspect that this article was submitted to Wikipedia by Robb's Australian publishers, Duffy & Snellgrove, who appear to have been looking after him very carefully for several years now. These days, such an entry risks having an official Wikipedia notice like this appear above it:
The creator of or a contributor to this page, Peter Robb, may have a conflict of interest with the subject of this article. Due to issues of maintaining neutrality and avoiding promotional articles, Wikipedia's conflict of interest guidelines strongly advise that editors do not directly edit articles on topics where they have a close personal or business connection. If this applies to your edits, you are advised to collaborate with independent editors via the article's talk page.
A link accompanying the Wikipedia article takes one to an author profile on Duffy & Snellgrove's website. For reasons which I hope will become clear, it's well worthwhile reading both the Robb profile and the interview with him which appears in the same website. This man is an original. Reading about him is like reading about a suicide bomber preparing for an attack. It's hypnotic.
The first point to make about Robb is that he is the author of three books which have been well received outside Australia, but have had a mixed reception in Australia itself (shades of Patrick White). These are:
* Midnight in Sicily ("Simply the best book in English about Italy," said The Economist)
* M, a biography of Caravaggio
* A Death in Brazil
You can read reviews of these books on Amazon.com. Reading between the lines - which of course is no substitute for reading on the lines, I entirely agree - they appear to have an increasingly over-wrought, hot house quality, deliberately calculated (Robb says in one interview that he writes to shock) to win favour with the kind of critic who is susceptible to such prose. They are serious works, untainted by the humour which one finds in writers who have sprung from a similar milieu; writers like Clive James and Germaine Greer, for example.
Robb never had a sense of humour, even as a child.
I was in the same class at school as Robb for about seven years, during which period I cannot recall his ever making a reference to his Australian origins. To learn that he is now an Australian down to his toenails, albeit one who spent a few brief years in New Zealand in his youth, would surprise those who knew him here, I am sure.
Robb was intelligent, precocious, and self-confident. In primary school he became the acolyte of a teacher who took such favourites on skiing trips, and he continued to be a favourite of teachers throughout his schooling. Robb always responded well to such attention, as of course we all would, had we similar powers of ingratiation: how fortunate for teachers that we do not! He went on to study at Victoria University - which I see referred to in a Melbourne Age interview as "the University of Wellington" - and then:
* worked as “a nightclub bouncer in England, a philologist in Finland and a teacher in France”
* “taught English to immigrants and prisoners in Sydney”
* wrote for “ephemeral radical papers” (why the emphasis on their ephemerality, one wants to know, unless it is supposed that this makes writing for them more creditable)
* spent 15 years in Italy, “interspersed with sojourns in Brazil”
* taught at the University of Melbourne, the University of Oulu in Finland ("he even got tenure in Finland - too long to explain”) and the Instituto Universitario in Naples
* wrote a fourth book, about which a Sydney Morning Herald critic has written “one has a sense that, for Robb, too much excess is never enough” (as this quotation appears in the publisher's website it seems, very oddly, that one is supposed to construe it as praise)
Robb's appearance - see the photograph below - has changed so much in half a century that I wouldn't have been able to pick him out in a line-up. In one interview he is described as "a big man" in a context which strongly suggests that this is code for "extremely portly". Nevertheless, two things in particular ring a bell with me:
* The first is that highly-developed sense of humour of his, the one of which there was no trace in the boy, and of which there is no trace in the man (for who with a sense of humour would allow publication of such hilarious piffle as that which appears in the profile in his publisher's website?).
* The second is his interest in and liking for music: as a boy he simply could not see the point of it, and he still appears to have Van Gogh's ear for it - there is no reference to music in any of the reviews of his books, two of which are about Italy, for goodness sake! I will have to get the book about Sicily out of the library to see if I have wronged him.
According to an interview in the Daily Telegraph (UK), the genius manque now "... lives alone in a one-bedroom flat in Sydney, surrounded by 'crates of newspaper clippings, photocopies, books, magazines ..."
According to another interview, no-one else is ever permitted to enter this flat.
No-one.
Ever.
It appears that Robb has no friends worthy of the name, and no life beyond his current attempts to quell raging ontological doubt by composing prose in which there is "never a paragraph like one that anyone else would write" (as one interviewer put it). The same interviewer has related how when he made invited Robb to his house the writer began by rapidly drinking a bottle of wine - by himself - and then stayed on, like an antipodean Hans Christian Anderson battening on a latter-day Charles Dickens, for seven hours, until his host tried the desperate expedient of turning the television set on during a rugby league game. Robb quickly left, saying he had to wash some socks.
Robb has repeatedly stated that he believes that the New South Wales Police have been "after" him for some years. He believes they have shot at his car. He also believes that the New South Wales Attorney-General has taken - or at one point took - a close personal interest in his - Robb's - welfare, intervening to save him from murderous attacks by crazed policemen ...
And so it goes on. These insights into the life of the artist are those which appear in his publisher's website, or in interviews which Robb has given to promote his books.
This, then, is the lily as it has been gilded for public consumption.
How much worse can the reality be?
What unspeakable horrors lie behind the door of the little flat in Sydney, which no-one else may enter?
* Is Robb constructing a shrine to the late Princess Diana, of sainted memory?
* Does he essay forth on moonless nights, a giant figure dressed in women's clothing, to terrify tourists in Kings Cross?
* Is he building a spaceship out of copies of the Sydney Morning Herald, and planning to astonish us all with the story of his journey to the stars?
* Does he ...
But wait, I am at risk here of succumbing to PeterRobbery, a form of literary afflatus which, like fame, is a mask that eats into the face, leaving madness in its wake.
For it would seem that - and this, you understand, is a very superficial judgement, as any impression based on a couple of hours' browsing on the Internet must be - my childhood chum may be, or is on the way to becoming, barking mad.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 27 Sep 2006 08:51 am |
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It took me a while to find for a second time some key references for this amazing story of The Self-immolating Man, but I have now found the source for all of them: an article in the Melbourne Age of 18 October 2003 by Paul Sheehan. See:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/10/16/1065917548251.html?from=storyrhs
Sheehan wrote:
Robb lives in Potts Point, Sydney, in a single-room apartment that nobody is allowed to visit. Not long ago, Professor Derek (Dick) Denton, the founding director of the Howard Florey Institute in Melbourne and medical member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which advises on the Nobel Prize, was standing on the pavement outside Robb's modest brick apartment block, phoning Robb to let him in so he could go to the toilet. No, the professor had to go to a nearby cafe. He would not see the apartment where Robb secluded himself for a year to wrestle with the exhausting burden of making the complicated narrative of this book work.
And again:
When we met for dinner, he said it was the first time in more than a year that he had dined in a restaurant. This is a man who, in his books, lives in restaurants. He must have overdone the seclusion because when he came to my home to do an interview he arrived just after midday, quietly knocked over a bottle of crisp chardonnay, and was still there three hours later when the first guests arrived for my wife's birthday afternoon tea. He moved effortlessly to champagne, blending amiably with the extended family, and was still there at 7.45pm when everyone else had left. It was only when I put on the TV to see how the Swans were doing in their season finale that he decided to make an exit. "I'll just go home and wash my socks," he said.
And again:
While Robb is a character in his books, he draws a veil over his own emotional life, both in his writing and in conversation. Finding whether or not his life has been marked by a great love is like trying to get into his apartment. The door is not open. Instead, he allows his love of beauty and sensuality to express itself through descriptions of food, dining and drinking, which play a central role in his stories. Did I mention that he is a big man?
Yes, Paul. You did.
I think the theme music for this story, when it is eventually filmed by the ABC (as I fervently hope it will be), should be Leonard Cohen's immortal Dress Rehearsal Rag. I wish you could hear the tune as you read these lyrics:
Four o'clock in the afternoon
and I didn't feel like very much.
I said to myself, "Where are you golden boy,
where is your famous golden touch?"
I thought you knew where
all of the elephants lie down,
I thought you were the crown prince
of all the wheels in Ivory Town.
Just take a look at your body now,
there's nothing much to save
and a bitter voice in the mirror cries,
"Hey, Prince, you need a shave."
Now if you can manage to get
your trembling fingers to behave,
why don't you try unwrapping
a stainless steel razor blade?
That's right, it's come to this,
yes it's come to this,
and wasn't it a long way down,
wasn't it a strange way down?
There's no hot water
and the cold is running thin.
Well, what do you expect from
the kind of places you've been living in?
Don't drink from that cup,
it's all caked and cracked along the rim.
That's not the electric light, my friend,
that is your vision growing dim.
Cover up your face with soap, there,
now you're Santa Claus.
And you've got a gift for anyone
who will give you his applause.
I thought you were a racing man,
ah, but you couldn't take the pace.
That's a funeral in the mirror
and it's stopping at your face.
That's right, it's come to this,
yes it's come to this,
and wasn't it a long way down,
ah wasn't it a strange way down?Attached Image (viewed 170 times):
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 2 Jun 2008 03:56 am |
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Interestingly, Robb's entry on Wikipedia has been amended since I wrote this piece. References at the foot of the article to other documents have been deleted.
This is highly unusual.
More usually, articles are extended, where they are amended.
I can only assume that Robb or his publisher came to realise that the interviews referred to in footnotes to the entry about him gave a cumulative portrait of a man who is at least partially demented.
I wonder if he is still hiding in his little flat, skulking behind his piles of newspapers.
Perhaps they will find there one day the body of a desiccated man in a tattered, puce-coloured suit, his bony fingers clutching an empty wine bottle, dreaming whatever dream it is that dead people dream...
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