Chameleon by Robert Dessaix review – a dazzlingly beautiful mix of sex, travel and intimacy
Dessaix writes with a fun, free-wheeling, excited energy and it's infectious. 'Even today, at 80,' he writes, 'I sense a failure on my part to see life as an endeavour rather than a frolic, an endless outing with friends'. He threads together memories from across a long life – he was born in Sydney in 1944, and currently lives in Hobart with his partner, Peter Timms – while always remaining rooted in the present.
At the core of this work is the question of what it is to be an authentic, real man: 'At every point in my life, what passersby would see, if they cared to stop and take a look, was some sort of shadow play about being a man: a sensitive man in particular, a man with feelings. Behind the screen the puppets were up to all sorts of tricks.' The motif of puppets returns again and again: a rich concept for Dessaix that speaks to his conception of how we perform our identities, 'this pantomime of masculinity … Even this morning, when I popped into the grocer's, the show, I noticed, was still running. I have never been the man I seemed to be.'
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From his position, late in his life, Dessaix does not bemoan this performance – as he writes: 'I don't suppose anyone ends up exactly as he or she hoped to be.'
In musing on this question, Dessaix examines characters as diverse as Lawrence of Arabia, John Cheever and Aldo Busi, as well as a range of books and fictional characters like Andre Gide's The Immoralist, Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe (from The Sportswriter) and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom (from Ulysses). It was illuminating to read about the impact of fiction – both writers and their words – on a life. It's something we often see in memoirs, of course, but Dessaix's way of looping around and around his literary and fictional heroes sheds so much light, both on these figures and on Dessaix himself.
For Dessaix, visiting Morocco in the early 1960s for the first time was a life-changing event. 'What did happen in Morocco […] – without fanfare, not in a rush – was this: something in me began to shrink into the shadows while something else was sparking into life in the light. Shyly, I turned to face it. This was the real start of a gentle, sweet debauchery, I suppose.' This 'slow turning' is into a full recognition of his self: his masculinity and his sexuality.
Dessaix's writing has its greatest depth and richness when he talks about homosexual sex in the Arab world. He is ebullient on the impact of experiences, of all kinds of intimacy, in places like Morocco or Tunisia (particularly Morocco: 'Skin me and that's what you will see: Morocco.'). He never writes explicitly about the kinds of sexual encounters he has; it's more about the sort of permission and acceptance he finds in those places.
Describing a huge swath of territory, 'a burnt-yellow belt that stretches (in my head) from Morocco to India and then, these days, a whole lifetime later, down into the pullulating green of Java and Sulawesi', Dessaix writes: 'What is liberating about the attitude to sex in this zone is that you may take pleasure in sexual intimacy without feeling any need to change your identity.' Despite describing an experience that contradicts our present understanding of restrictions on homosexuality in the Arab world, this distance between sex and identity is what Dessaix finds so attractive and informs how he wants to live his life.
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Dessaix proclaims that he wants these sexual partners to be his 'brothers'. To him, it's not an exploitative relationship; he mentions Edward Said's concept of 'orientalism', but thinks it irrelevant, despite clearly describing a privileged touristic experience. He always has the ability to escape – as a visitor, one can come and go as one pleases. Having the mobility of being able to head for the deserts of north Africa 'whenever my own life is killing me' did make me feel uneasy about the power dynamics Dessaix describes, despite how liberating they were for him.
But it's the humour and energy of his writing style that most propelled me through these pages. At times it's pure whimsy: 'Even at 10 I knew hair made promises,' he writes of a boyhood crush. He can evoke past crushes with a rare poignancy: 'Getting these letters from Ahmed was oddly like smoking: I was always pining for the next one, often thinking of little else, yet each letter, to be absolutely honest, was a faint – wispily faint – disappointment.' His writing is sophisticated and funny, and Chameleon is a rich and entertaining education on a man's life; a detailed map of the literature, ideas, and places that shaped him.
Chameleon by Robert Dessaix is published by Text Publishing
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Spectator
7 days ago
- Spectator
How my family loved – and lost
As the Telegraph moves slowly towards Arab ownership – 15 per cent to start, and who knows what in the future – I must declare my interest. I'm a Berry, the daughter of Michael Berry, who founded the Sunday Telegraph and became Lord Hartwell, and granddaughter of William Berry from south Wales, who bought the Daily Telegraph in 1928 and became Lord Camrose. They owned and ran it, hands on, for a big part of the 20th century – 58 years. My mother, Pamela Berry, daughter of F.E. Smith, Lord Birkenhead, was the political hostess who wielded the Telegraph soft power. My brother Adrian Berry was the paper's science correspondent and covered the first landing on the moon. I fancy that the princesses of the Emirates may be intrigued to hear about the gilded and protected lives of the women of that 'old' western family back in the 1940s and 1950s. As young girls or women, with or without our parents, my sister and I would invariably be met wherever we went abroad by a Telegraph correspondent. There was even a Heathrow correspondent, whose main job was to look out for celebrities. He once dashed on to a bus taking passengers to board the plane to Paris to make sure I was safely on it, aged 15. It was like having your own private embassy network – except that the journalists were far more fun than smooth diplomats. Some of them also acted like surrogate parents. I remember in particular Geoffrey Myers, the Paris correspondent, crouching down in front of Montmartre so that I could steady my camera on his shoulders for a long exposure shot, and taking me to Molière plays, explaining the 17th-century nuances. Alex Faulkner in New York would invite me to family supper and advance money from the till if I was short at the end of the month. My grandfather Bill Berry was a case – almost – of rags to riches. He was the son of a station master, albeit one who became an alderman, and then mayor, of Merthyr Tydfil. Aged 13 and ten months he joined the local paper as a boy reporter, in knicker-bockers like Tintin. At 17, he became its managing editor. Then at 19 he left for London to seek his fortune, which he got. As he died in 1954 I hardly knew him, but hearing about his first ventures gave me a window to his strange personality, his staid nonconformist background vying with buccaneer and impresario. He was keen on physical stuff, and early on bought a magazine called Health and Strength, promoting it personally with muscular stunts. He then started another, Boxing News – a world first, he declared – for which he toured the country with a group of performing boxers in the back of a lorry which converted into a miniature ring. Eventually, after years of climbing the greasy pole, he and his younger brother Gomer bought the Daily Telegraph in 1928, after the tiny Sunday Times in 1915, and the Financial Times in 1919. How they raised the money for any of these national papers was a mystery, although NatWest was more accommodating in those days. There was some cash in the background through Bill's elder brother, in his association with the wealthy Lord Rhondda, and there was a partnership for a while with Lord Iliffe, but it was nowhere like enough. My father Michael could never get to the bottom of it. They bought the Telegraph for the equivalent of £3.8 million, compared with the £500 million it is selling at today. They also built the huge building in Fleet Street for the Telegraph almost immediately, in Egyptian-inspired art deco, with splendid lifts. One of our collective family memories is of straining over the massive Egyptian parapet on the first floor, outside the editorial rooms, as we used to gaze down at the great processions passing eastwards along Fleet Street, such as Churchill's funeral, or Diana's wedding. There were Edwardian oak-panelled rooms on the proprietors' fifth floor, which had its famous little lawn on the balcony. People used to say it was cut with scissors, but it actually had its own tiny mower kept in the secretary's cupboard. Camrose, as he had by then become, and usually flanked by Michael and the heir, my uncle Seymour, entertained senior editors at lunches in the dining room. Malcolm Muggeridge left an amusing snapshot of him in those days: he seemed to have morphed from the Welsh impresario into a sort of 'superior gentleman's gentleman'. But 'Mr William', as he was still known to the staff, was not that smooth; he was wont to stalk into the newsroom armed with page proofs, saying tersely: 'A lot of corrections here.' Sometimes he could be autocratic. My shy and mild-mannered father was startled, a while after he had taken over the day-to-day running of the paper, when Mr William leaned across the desk and said: 'You should slap the news editor's face!' In 1932, a few doors along Fleet Street, the Egyptian palace was joined by the equally massive shiny black hulk of the Express. This was the domain of Lord Beaverbrook –immortalised by Evelyn Waugh in Scoop as Lord Copper – who was a friend and protector of my mother from her childhood. I think my father was rather jealous of his hold on Pam. The Beaver, as he was known, had been an intimate friend of her father and had stepped in to rescue the family after F.E. died in 1930 leaving them penniless. She reciprocated not just with affection, but also used to feed him salacious stories unsuitable for the Telegraph, with a special conduit to 'Chilly Charlie' – Charles Wintour, the editor of the Evening Standard, father of the much more famous Anna. Michael seemed either complicit or unaware of this, but he used to quote the Beaver as saying: 'I'm really just an old concierge. I like to know what's going on.' Both the Berry elder sons had been trained for the Telegraph by long apprenticeships in the north. But by the time of Camrose's death, my uncle Seymour had taken to drink and Michael inherited unexpectedly as editor-in-chief, leaving Seymour a sleeping partner as chairman. There was always tension between him and Michael partly because of that, and partly due to a long-standing quarrel my mother had with Seymour. Fights between the brothers on the fifth floor became so noisy and embarrassing for Michael's secretary that she got a baize door installed for her office to block them off. After Michael took over, Pam's reputation as a political hostess helped raise the profile of the Telegraph's proprietors. Her focus was not on the Lady Londonderry style, of brokering elegant compromises in drawing rooms – although Macmillan accused her of fancying herself as Lady L – but that she brought together Telegraph journalists with senior politicians who might not otherwise meet socially, in the stratified days of the 1950s and early 1960s. Although all her life she herself had mixed with the grandees, first accompanying F.E. to glittering parties as a precocious child, she seemed to have absorbed the experience with a feisty attitude, and set out to make Tory politicians feel lucky to meet the journalists, not vice versa. This made for stimulating journalism but sometimes provoked fury, as she wrote gleefully to her friend Nancy Mitford: 'Did you like Peregrine Worsthorne's attack on the poor gvt? They were all furious… like a bunch of bullfighters boo-hooing and saying they don't like the sight of blood.' She was also accused, with some justification, of wielding 'petticoat power', of influencing Michael's editorial policy about Anthony Eden during the Suez crisis, and even – more debatable – of driving Eden to the brink, which ended in his resignation. My parents had to put up with constant complaints from political friends, who were often to become ex-friends, about the Telegraph's 'unhelpful' or 'disloyal' attitude on various issues. There was a teleprinter in our house which used to rattle out columns and news stories, so that Michael would be forewarned of the angry calls which might come in. I remember him on the phone saying soothingly but stubbornly: 'I assure you this has been very carefully researched…' (news) or 'I assure you it will be written in the most sensitive way' (gossip). He became a press baron in his own right in 1968, an unexpected Labour accolade from Harold Wilson after the founding and success of the Sunday Telegraph, but was thankful that Pam did not live to see his failure – as he felt it – of losing the Telegraph papers in 1986 to Conrad Black.
Edinburgh Reporter
03-08-2025
- Edinburgh Reporter
Fringe 2025 – Between the River and the Sea ⭐⭐⭐⭐
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has generated no shortage of competing and conflicting narratives and part of the potency of Yousef Sweid's one-man play is that, by dint of his family's multi-faceted background, he is able to bring many of them together. Sweid, 49, a Palestinian-Israeli Christian living in Berlin, has two Jewish-Arab children through his two Israeli-Jewish ex-wives. As he explains: 'We are a completely normal family; an Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, Austrian, Romanian, Christian family.' After opening against a soundtrack of a demonstration, courtesy of the Israeli-Brazilian sound designer Thomas Moked Blum, and brandishing a few banners ranging from 'Stop the Islamic terror', in Hebrew, and 'Israeli apartheid' to 'From the river to the sea. Christians, Jews and Muslims will live in peace and harmony', Sweid relaxes into storytelling mode. As a child in the northern Israeli city of Haifa, he was called the Israeli Jewish-sounding Yossi by his Jewish friends at kindergarten and school and introduced himself as such to his Jewish acquaintances, only reverting to Yousef when he studied theatre at Tel Aviv University, where it was trendy to have Arab friends. He says he didn't know he was Arab until a four-year-old Jewish boy at kindergarten called him 'a stinking Arab'. Likewise his father, Sliman, whom he impersonates as an affably shouty, lecturing 'baba', was called Shlomo by his Jewish friends. There's a warm, witty interplay between the two of them, relayed via phonecalls as his father has decamped to Canada, just as there is between him and his teenage son, for whom he assumes a more measured demeanour. Sweid's sensitively relayed sexual fantasies with Carolin, whom he met at a Christian youth group in Haifa, and a more lascivious relationship with Shani, whom he fell for while apple-picking at a kibbutz in the Golan Heights close to Syria, bear testament to the uncertainties inherent in his chameleon character as he writhes around on the stage angsting over how best to present himself to them and their families. Yet it is his son's simpler, idealistic fantasies that lift the play into the stratosphere where hope for a peaceful co-existence between people of different faiths resides. The conflict, where it does feature, is often in the context of Sweid's attempts to define his identity and his place in the world, such as in his description of different types of Palestinians. 'I'm a Palestinian Israeli.' 'You're not a Palestinian-Israeli; you're a Palestinian with an Israeli passport,' he interjects as his father. 'There are Palestinians in Gaza who are starving to death, Palestinians living in Canada… I prefer to call us Arabs, not Palestinians. We are the ones who weren't kicked out [of Israel in 1948],' he continues. The human cost of the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023, also feature movingly, while referring to Israel's war with Hamas, he says: 'I don't know if you would call it like that any more.' It's an evocative, nuanced and, at times, darkly humorous performance, co-written by Isabella Sedlak, the director, in which the Arab language – 'it's delicious', says Sweid – has to contend with a downside. As Sweid quips sardonically to his son – who queries whether, given his mixed identity and the conflict he is 'lucky' not to live in Israel – he is 'half-lucky and half-screwed… Here [in Germany] they will fear you because you're Arab and hate you because you are Jewish.' One quibble: it could be argued, not unfairly, that there's a theatrical elephant in the room, insofar as in a play that is about people of different backgrounds living together (or not living together) in peace and harmony the main character's two interfaith marriages have broken down and there's no attempt to examine why. On the face of it, it's not a great advert for peaceful coexistence. But perhaps, as Sweid says on several occasions, it's complicated. Between the River and the Sea Zoo Southside Until Aug 13 (not Aug 10) Like this: Like Related
Evening Standard
25-07-2025
- Evening Standard
Herbie Hancock at the Barbican review: unpredictable, entertaining and ageless
Things got funky, finally, when he strapped on his white keytar and the first few bars of Chameleon, that landmark of jazz funk fusion, exploded into the hall like confetti from a canon. Leaning back to fire off riffs with one hand, Hancock traded licks with Genus then — as the groove gathered space turned to Loueke and danced, the two of them bunny hopping, doing star-jumps, as the packed auditorium cheered and Hancock finishing the night with an arm-wheeling leap.
