Book Review: Things I Didn't Know by Robert Hughes - Page 2

In terms of content, Hughes finds something nasty to say about everyone. That includes his apparently inoffensive and beloved aunt Mim and her corgi. It also includes his parents. And yet their values, against which he believes he rebels into an artist, are for the most part left to our imaginations. Apparently they’ve been left to his as well, as he claims to not remember any conversations with his father and doesn’t describe any with his mother.

His critical nastiness isn’t a flaw in itself: what does one expect in a book by a professional critic? What I do carp at, however, is a sin that Hughes doesn’t commit with his critical works on art and history: leaving out context.

In the first two thirds of this book (and parts of the final third) complaints, criticisms, anecdotes and tidbits come thick, fast and outside of any solid structure. There are so many sloppy, out-of-place departures from linear narrative that Katherine Hepburn's Me starts looking polished.

However, from time to time these departures are welcome, particularly when they're not about Hughes, his family, or half-recalled acquaintances. His histories of the Jesuits or early Australian architecture, for example, are fascinating. And once the narrative moves to Europe, both personal stories and digressions become more interesting even as accounts of his life and the people in it become more informative and less defensive and speculative.

Not only that: his prose gets much, much better. The section on the flooding of Florence is so beautifully written, with the right mixture of clear language and shocking images, that it brought tears to my eyes. And his loving descriptions of Spain and Italy in the sixties practically present us with an evaporated paradise.

The weakest part of the last third is his already notorious portrait of his first marriage. He describes it as the union of two ferociously unsuitable people. Only his wife’s unsuitability is on display, however. We are left to guess why Hughes may have been a part of his own marital problems. We get clues from things like an (at best) naïve disgust for the unsurprising difficulties of marriage with a woman introduced to him as “the best fuck in London” and a passing reference to vague plans to run a brothel.

Article Author: Melita Teale

Melita Teale is a writer and media analyst.

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