ROBERT DESSAIX The Time of Our Lives. Reviewed by Ann Skea
In The Time of Our Lives Robert Dessaix ponders approaches to ageing, and does so with ‘unending playful curiosity’.
Robert Dessaix is 76 years old. Not quite spry enough to join the middle-aged hotel guests dancing to boom-box music by the lotus pool of his Indonesian hotel – ‘I know my limits’ – but alert enough to admire the 25-year-old wellness instructor in his clinging T-shirt and shorts. At the same time, he finds the scene disturbing.
He notices how the dancers lose themselves, ‘like kids at play’, but it reminds him of the gym he used to go to, where everyone, ‘without exception’, looked anxious: ‘What were they fighting against? Flabbiness? Obesity? Heart disease? Stress? What?’ His friend Sarah, who is of similar age to him, knows the answer: ‘It’s death they’re afraid of – or at least dying.’
Much of this book reflects Dessaix’s musings on this as he discusses it with various ageing friends living in different countries around the world and sees how they live their lives. When Sarah meets him for breakfast at their Indonesian hotel, she tells him:
‘You can try and look young forever … like Jane Fonda and whatshername from … you know …’
‘Joanna Lumley.’
‘It’s the names that go first, isn’t it. Nouns come next, apparently. Yes, her. You can try to die young as late as possible, in other words…’
‘Did you just make that up?’
‘No. Or you can do what you’ve done.’
Dessaix, according to Sarah, has failed to grow up in the first place. This sets him puzzling over a more personal question. What does she mean? As always, his musing and puzzling take him all over the place and involve people alive and dead. This includes friends who are happy at whatever age they have reached; the anthropologist Ernest Becker, who has written that the ‘immortality project’ is doomed from the start; Ogden Nash, with a pithy rhyme summing up the dilemma of nonchalance; Nietzsche, who believed in the playful child hidden ‘in every genuine man’; Andre Gide, whose sex-drive took him frequently to Morocco ‘to purge his mind and body again’; Diana Athill, who lived and loved to the age of 101; and many more.
As far as conclusions go – and Dessaix’s musings are open-ended – not growing up amounts to being childlike, not childish. It is the ability to play, as Lewis Carroll did in his nonsense rhymes, John Cleese did in his clowning, and the Goons did in The Goon Show. One of his female friends describes the freedom of playing with her grandchildren. Dessaix’s own playing, he decides, is travel, language learned just ‘for pure pleasure’, intense conversations with friends, and dancing.
Gay ballroom dancing, by the way, is the most exuberantly joyful thing I have ever done in my life …. We weren’t there to master the art of ballroom dancing, we were there to enjoy ourselves enormously, although we did make some effort to get the footwork right. We rhumba’d and cha cha’d, we waltzed and foxtrotted, we jived and tangoed for two hours each week with only a short break for tea and cake. The lesbians brought the cake.
(I did ponder the adherence to conventional gender roles suggested by that last sentence.) Typically, for Dessaix, the tea break allows for a philosophical discussion with another man about the difference between happiness and contentment, and he explores this further and in detail for the rest of that particular chapter.
What has partly focused Dessaix’s contemplation of death and dying is the situation of his partner’s mother, Rita. Chapters describing their visits to her as she lies rambling and failing in St Ursula’s Grange nursing home appear throughout the book. Her situation is distressing and, for Dessaix, thought provoking. To him, Rita seems to have had no inner life, a situation that he finds desperately sad. ‘How can anyone contemplate old age and its discontents without an inner life?’ he wonders. Rita seems not to have needed one, which he finds hard to understand. Yet even in these chapters Dessaix’s wit and humour lighten the mood.
Dessaix’s musing covers emptiness and nothingness, religion, Nirvana (as he climbs the stupa at Borobodur), God, the attraction or otherwise of various countries, music, art, and whatever else happens to crop up in his varied travels. Literature, and authors like Turgenev, Chekhov, and Dostoyevsky, are frequently in his thoughts. At one point he comments on Edward Said’s theory of ‘Late Style’, and describes this as ‘fragmentation and loss of interest in continuity’, ‘an irascible opposition to established conventions’, and ‘inwardness rather than history’. In many ways this describes Dessaix’s own late style, although his personality, wit and humour hold the book together. It helps that he has decided that at his age ‘nobody cares if you are keeping to the rules or not’:
Until you’re well into middle age, your self-esteem is constantly being threatened, you are forever wondering whether or not you are measuring up, or whether you should care about the fact that you obviously aren’t … Not even (probably) your own mother cares if you’re keeping to the rules. Apart from your mother and those with a vested interest of some description nobody is even thinking about you at all. So take a deep breath and rejoice!
Although he is ‘careful’ about where he says that he finds Samuel Beckett ‘teeth-grindingly boring’, he obviously feels free to say it to his readers.
Time of Our Lives is, by turns, philosophical, down-to-earth, sad and funny. For Dessaix, an abundant inner life is what will sustain us ‘right through to the end’ and it is:
… something which happens when we open up to what surrounds us and then dance it, speak it, write it, sing it, love it, turn it upside down and inside out behind our eyes.
It is shaped, he says, ‘by an unending playful curiosity about the world’, and this is exactly the approach he demonstrates in this book.
Robert Dessaix The Time of Our Lives Brio Books 2020 HB 256pp $32.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (//ann.skea.com/) are archived by the British Library.
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