The Life And Near-death Of Robert Hughes

The Age

Wednesday November 10, 1999

PETER WILMOTH

IT IS confronting to see a man who has always to the world appeared big and unbreakable hobbling down a corridor on crutches and in such obvious pain. But a sense of relief kicks in when you realise the new Robert Hughes is not all that different from the old one, and that his tentative progress to the top of the stairs is so he can call down for a chilled bottle of wine to be brought up to his bedroom.

``People say `what a terrible piece of bad luck'," Hughes says of the car accident in Western Australia on 28May, when he came perilously close to being killed. ``But I don't see it that way. I just think I was inordinately lucky to have survived it.

``If it had been a couple of inches to the left or right, I could have ended up as a blind, paraplegic eunuch. There was no damage to my spine or to my eyes or to my brain or to my balls, and these are the essential components of a critic's activity. I feel as though I've been handed something on a plate, namely the rest of my life."

It is unsurprising to hear Hughes, now 61, talk with the same punch, color and dark humor that characterise his writing. Of the shocked reaction to his accident, he says: ``I think there may have been a few artists who were rather relieved."

Hughes imagines the New York painter Julian Schnabel, of whose work he has been hilariously dismissive, ``hearing the glad news and rather slowly dancing a hornpipe".

``I think there was a certain amount of schadenfreude floating around in New York," he smiles.

We are talking amid the cool privilege of Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull's harborside house, where Hughes, who is Lucy's uncle, has been convalescing for the past few months.

On Sydney Harbor, small boats are buzzing around, their hulls slapping the cobalt water. Sydney has turned on a day of sufficient nonchalant perfection to tempt even the most committed expatriate to come home.

Hughes has needed all the R&R he can get since his rented Nissan ploughed head-on into a Commodore carrying three passengers on the Great Northern Highway. He now faces a charge of dangerous driving.

Miraculously no one was killed and Hughes' car did not, as he feared, catch fire from the petrol that was leaking from it as he lay trapped, waiting for the jaws of life to rescue him.

In an article for Time magazine, his employer of 30 years, Hughes listed his injuries. Under the impact, ``bones may not just break, they can explode, like a cookie hit by a hammer, and that's what happened to several of mine ... below the right knee, the tibia and fibula shattered into half a dozen pieces. The right femur broken, the ball joint at the hip damaged. The elbow of the right arm crushed. Several ribs snapped, their sharp ends driven into the lungs. Collarbone and sternum busted. A few picturesque cuts and some bruising to my liver and heart."

``I didn't think I would ever walk again, quite frankly," Hughes now says. ``The doctor who did the operation was tweaking my shin, saying: `It's knitted really well, I'm glad we didn't have to take it off.' I said: `You mean you were thinking of it?' I'm glad they didn't. I was wondering what sort of peg leg I could get."

His rehab has been slow but sound. He spends time at a ``pool of tears", a warm-water bath to improve muscle tone.

``It's a bunch of old ladies and a clapped-out old art critic," he says. ``Actually, I've seen people in there I vaguely remember from Sydney University."

Hughes would like some calm in the next little while. ``I've had a lot of shit the last four years," he says, speaking, not only of his accident but the ``ferocious nervous breakdown" he suffered in 1997 while writing a book to accompany his TV series American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America. ``The thing I'm so deeply relieved by is that, somehow or other, more or less by flying on a wing and a prayer, I managed to get through it."

Hughes has lived fast and tempted fate - riding his motorcycle as a youth (``Powerful bikes aren't much fun unless you're riding it right on the edge of control"), smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for several decades, and walking the streets of New York after publishing his sometimes excoriating art reviews in Time. He can now say he has gone as close as a human being can get to being killed and escaping.

He remembers nothing. ``It was whited out. There is this phenomenon called post-traumatic amnesia, which just means you forget what happened. I guess it's one of those mechanisms by which the mind protects itself. I still have no recollection of it ... I thought perhaps meditating on it and ... trying to surprise some hidden memory, I might catch it and retain it. But no.

``The last thing I remember is getting out of the car, closing the cattle gate which gave access to the 13-kilometre track which ran down to the Eco beach resort, getting back in the car, turning left on the Great Northern Highway and accelerating. And that's all I remember. You don't like the idea of there being some part of your memory or experience that can just be erased like a cassette."

No one knows how one will deal with enormous trauma. Hughes' response, as he was being helped from the scene, was to inquire about the fate of the huge tuna he'd caught that day, which lay on the back seat of what he's called the Japanese car that folded around him ``like crude origami". He wanted the fish for sushi that evening.

``I just didn't know how badly I was hurt," he says. ``I didn't know whether I was going to eat dinner that night. For all I knew I was just sort of stunned."

But he was aware enough to fear the car blowing into a ``gasoline fireball", which, as he wrote, ``dissolves your more commonplace troubles - money, divorce - and shows what you really want to live for".

He kept thinking ``I want to live, I want to live".

``I just want to keep on being here and not there," he says. ``I thought a lot about Doris, my girlfriend. I thought, `My God, I couldn't bear to die and leave her."'

Sadly, Hughes' near-death experience was unleavened by any unearthly intervention. ``There was nothing that happened which might have suggested to me that I was wrong in being an agnostic, shading strongly towards atheism," he says. ``I just had these staggeringly powerful narrative hallucinations, which are still with me now.

``I hallucinated that I was in a madhouse in Seville and I was being kept there by Goya and his delinquent friends who were making my life utterly miserable and putting fetters on my feet, which turned out to be this brace I had to wear."

When he asked for a pen and managed to scribble a note in Spanish that he was ``dissatisfied with these accommodations" and wished to move to the Seville hotel at which he normally stayed, ``it caused great merriment and some puzzlement".

Like any true writer, Hughes will not waste the experience and will nearly immediately begin his book on the accident.

``A theme I really want to explore is the way in which an extremely, to put it mildly, vivid experience like this can be apparently remembered quite differently by different people. I seem to have had memories of it of the utmost intensity which, when I ask witnesses, then turn out not to be true. Why did I make these memories up for myself? It wasn't a desire to lie."

What re-assessments has he made?

``It forces some re-assessment when you realise that you're mortal. Some of us remain delayed teenagers until something really catastrophic and life-threatening happens. In my case ... this sounds very banal, it made me realise that I just did not have any time to waste, that I must not concern myself with the trivial, and triviality includes having too many attachments to secondary things. First of all, concentrate on doing what I enjoy, and secondly, not put things off."

Not putting things off includes making his way gingerly back to New York in a few weeks to do some ``housekeeping": his divorce (from Victoria) is being enacted, he wants to re-unite with Doris (``the girl I love") and start work again. After the book on the accident, Hughes will complete his biography of the great Spanish artist Goya and, critically, write the memoir he never thought he'd write.

``I had to think whether I wanted to write a memoir or not and I concluded that I do," he says. ``It's incredibly boring recovering from an accident of that magnitude. Every part of you hurts. Or almost every part. If you move some part that doesn't hurt, it will make the other parts hurt. You lie there and think, `What am I going to do when I get out of this?' There's gotta be something that I can write which will make up for this unspeakable tedium."

His latest book, A Jerk On One End (subtitled Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman), is a lyrical meditation on why the sport is addictive and what one can learn from it (it taught Hughes to observe).

``It's my main contact with nature," he says. ``I used to enjoy hunting small game, but I do that less and less now. I know there are going to be people who would like to shoot me for saying this, but I really enjoy the masculine camaraderie of fishing. I like fishing with girls, too."

In the book, Hughes for the first time dips his toe into personal memoir, writing about his father who died when Hughes was 12.

``That's the first time he's ever appeared in anything I've written. What worries me about writing memoirs - and I thought of this a lot when summoning up at least part of the ghost of my father - is that at this distance you can never be certain whether you're making it up or not."

From the unique viewpoint of the Turnbulls' house, Hughes has during his rehabilitation been able to watch the republic debate pan out and, with it, the workings of a man he does not admire, the Prime Minister, John Howard.

``He used those two great Australian locutions which people always drag out when they want to denounce someone they think is intellectually pretentious, `so-called' and `self-appointed'," Hughes says. ``He referred to me as a so-called, self-appointed cultural dietitian, by which I suppose he meant cultural diagnostician."

How does he reflect on the Prime Minister's failure to apologise for the Stolen Generation? ``I think it is a failure of imagination. I don't think of Howard as being a virulent racist at all. But he's very much a man of his own time and class. I suppose we all are to some extent. I still have difficulty reminding myself that he is exactly the same age as I am, because I think of him as being rather older, on the cusp of being a contemporary of Robert Gordon Menzies almost.

``I think he is unable, except under great pressure and with great difficulty, to perform any acts of political and moral empathy. Howard knows perfectly well that he himself does not hate or despise Aborigines and he was not responsible for endorsing the kidnapping of the children. But nevertheless these things indisputably happened. They didn't happen during his prime ministership, but they're not just a blemish on Australian history ... They represent an enormous moral failing, and I think it's perfectly possible to say this without courting being accused of lack of patriotism."

Hughes will take his seemingly indomitable spirit into his continued rehab. He says he will no longer take a moment of life for granted. The world can take heart that one of the great Australian minds remains with us. As a friend of his said in one of the 1000 letters, cards and e-mails Hughes received: ``Take courage: you cannot eradicate bad weeds."