In a recent blog post for the London Review of Books, Inigo Thomas writes about Robert Hughes, whose writing I first encountered when I was, I suppose, twelve or thirteen. My mother was devouring The Fatal Shore, Hughes’s history of Australia’s convict era, and I can remember being impressed by some passages she read me, though I didn’t attempt any of Hughes’s books until I rattled through Culture of Complaint a decade later.
Then I was especially struck by his line, apropos of politically correct language, that ‘We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.’ More than a few times I’ve wrestled with the implications of this. In my mind those words stand as the archetypal Hughes judgement, perhaps alongside his claim elsewhere that, in the form of artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved’.
There are some amusing and interesting details in Inigo Thomas’s blog. He mentions that when Hughes became the art critic of Time in the 1970s the magazine had a circulation of 20 million. He also reports that when Time’s editor Henry Grunwald called Hughes to offer him the job he said, ‘We’d like you to join us.’ Grunwald was drunk and forgot to say where he was ringing from; Hughes interpreted ‘us’ as the CIA and hung up.
For the blog, see http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/12/16/inigo-thomas/heaven-and-hell-and-robert-hughes/
