Dr. Paul Monk on the Nature of Autobiography and Memoir

 

Transcript below ^_^

 
 
 

Dr. Paul Monk on the Nature of Autobiography and Memoir
11 November 2025

[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 0:13)

Welcome back to another episode of Bloom, a conversations podcast where we talk about anything and everything with interesting guests. And I'm again lucky to be joined today by Dr. Paul Monk, a writer and poet based in Melbourne. Paul, welcome.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (0:13 - 0:21)

Thanks, Nick. It's great to be back, and I look forward, if I may say so, to the conversation we're about to have today.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (0:22 - 1:09)

And that conversation will be about the question of autobiography and memoir. So back when we did our first podcast together in 2018 on The Secret Gospel According to Mark, which was a biography of your dear friend and mentor Marco Lachlan, brother Marco Lachlan, I joked in that episode that one day I would write your biography. I never got around to doing it, at least in the last eight years or seven years.

 

But I think you're about to start embarking upon the project of writing your own autobiography. Could you talk a bit about why you want to do this at this stage of your life now? You're about to turn 70, and what's prompted this sort of desire to tell your own story?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:10 - 5:08)

Yeah, that's a good question. So the response that occurred to me when you phrase it, as you did, that some time ago you talked of perhaps writing my biography one day, and I might respond by saying that does not then occur to me, if anybody's going to write my biography, it better be me. For two reasons.

 

One is that I wouldn't want people to miss things that I regard as important. And I think the interpretation that I place on many of my experiences only I can testify to. If in the light of what I write, someone then took it upon themselves to say, but there's another way to look at this life, and they write a biography, whoever it might be, then it's up to them.

 

So one prompt for writing an autobiography is the thought, what if I die without writing one, and then somebody else gets access to my papers and becomes familiar with my various writings and decides to write the story of my life, what would they write? Just to answer that question almost, I need to write an autobiography, it seems to me, of some form. But the larger aspect of the question is, is it something I think I would want to do anyway?

 

And that is because I'm familiar with some classic autobiographies and with many lives that have been written as biographies, where you think, I wonder what it felt like from inside that life. In addition to that, there are fictional autobiographies. I don't mean by that that people wrote autobiographies in which they just make stuff up.

 

What I mean is, for example, I, Claudius, and Claudius the God by Robert Graves is literally, in a double sense you might say, a classic autobiography, except that Robert Graves puts that story into the mouth of the Emperor Claudius. And around the same time, a little bit after Graves had written I, Claudius, Marguerite Yourcenar wrote a book called Memoirs of Hadrian, where she had the Emperor Hadrian supposedly writing his memoirs. And in both cases, they did such a good job that as Peter Everett, in a biography of Hadrian a few years ago, wrote that Memoirs of Hadrian was so well written that many people thought it really was the Memoirs of Hadrian, that it was accurate.

 

And he said, it isn't entirely accurate, and I feel there's a need for a scholarly biography to set the record straight. Now, heaven forbid somebody reached that conclusion about an autobiography I might write, though it's clear that anybody writing my biography would see my life differently to the way I see it. That just goes with the nature of the case.

 

But there's a third reason I'd like to write an autobiography. We, in Western civilisation at least, dating back to Greek philosophers, have a tradition in which, as I believe it was Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living. Now, since most lives are not closely examined and don't result in autobiographies, you might say, well, that's questionable or unfair.

 

But I've imbibed that idea, and I've throughout my life given a lot of thought to how am I living, what am I doing, how am I going, what does it all mean? And it seems to me that flowing out of a lifetime of doing that, an autobiography is a natural way to try and pull things together and say, well, I have lived an examined life. And I'd like, therefore, to reflect not only on that life itself but on being human.

 

In other words, there's something in the way I reflect on my life, the way I examine my life, which I hope will be both of interest and perhaps value to others. And then the final reason is, as you rightly say, I'm approaching 70. I'll be 69 in just over a month now.

 

So by the end of next year, I'll be 70. Three score years and 10.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (5:08 - 5:09)

Your biblical allotment.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (5:09 - 5:55)

It's exactly so. And a perfectly respectable age. I mean, until very recently in historical terms, essentially in the last half of my life, or the second half of the life I've lived so far, 70 has come to seem relatively young to die.

 

Historically, it was a good age to reach at all. Some people exceeded it, but the life expectancy was much lower than it is now. And so as I approach 70, I think, look, I might, if favoured, and if I look after myself, live until 90.

 

Many people do now. But I can't guarantee that. And I've had a lot of illness in the last 20 years, and I've got illness at the moment.

 

So I can't count on living another 20 years and say, oh, I'll be fine, and I'll write my memoirs from my early 90s. No, I think it's time to write them now.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (5:56 - 6:05)

And you could always release a second and third edition for each additional decade that you do and keep on living. So you can always update things with extra chapters and sections.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (6:05 - 7:00)

Well, particularly if, let's say I write the memoir I propose, which we'll talk about in a moment, and it was well received. Then 10 years from now, if all is well, I might say, oh, well, I've done a lot more living since then, and I've also changed some of my views, and so I might write another volume. And that's actually what Simone de Beauvoir did.

 

I read her four-volume autobiography when I was an undergraduate student. I was studying French history. And I found her autobiography deeply absorbing.

 

So this is four substantial books, the first of which is called Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, the second of which is Prime of Life, the third is Force of Circumstance, and then she added a fourth, All Said and Done, when she's getting on in years. That's to some extent a model for what I'm setting out to do, but there are others, and we can talk about those as we go.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (7:01 - 7:41)

Well, we might jump into that now and have a talk, basically, about how you see the nature of autobiography as such. We've talked about, over the years, different ones that you've read, the different stages of your life. Lance Armstrong, for instance, when you were grappling with cancer and this question of resilience.

 

You mentioned the fictional autobiography with I. Claudius and Robert Graves, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others. And of course, you've written a biography for Brother Marco Lachlan, as you mentioned before, and as was the subject of our first podcast.

 

But if you were to distil the different natures and approaches of autobiography, how would you do so? And what are you seeking to emulate as well in your own?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (7:42 - 11:10)

Yes. I think the first thing I would say is that, in a sense, we all craft a kind of autobiography for ourselves as we go. We don't write it, and most people wouldn't attempt to do so.

 

But the thing about being human is this quite uncanny sense of self. As far as we're aware, animals of every other stripe don't have that kind of self-consciousness. It varies in degree, of course, among different genera and species.

 

But primarily, animals live. We are, in a sense, you might say, condemned to think about how to live. That's a different thing.

 

And we often get very tangled up. And the more complex and informationally dense our societies become, and they've become colossally so, the more challenging that task is. And it might be said that one reason why so many people, so many young people in contemporary advanced societies, as we call them, let's call them complex societies instead of loading the word by using advanced.

 

So many young people find themselves bewildered, depressed, uncertain about where to go, uncertain even depressed about what they see as the future, daunted by all the comparisons to be drawn between their perceived selves and other selves. That's a lot to cope with as a human being. In an earlier form of society, you didn't have those problems.

 

It was clear what your lot in life was pretty much, or what your opportunities were, what the daily round consisted of, that your parents did things if they were peasants, or for that matter, aristocrats, which pretty much were likely to be your lot unless you managed to get a break. And if you tried to make a break, there was still a limited range of possibilities and you could change your arm. Famously, for example, until the early 20th century, if not later, if you came from an aristocratic family that was starting to see its wealth melt away, or if you were a second or third son in an aristocratic family, so primogeniture meant you wouldn't inherit the main fortune, you had two options for a dignified career.

 

One was to become a soldier, an officer, and another was to become a priest. We live in a society where all that's more or less gone out the window, and it's not at all clear how to choose a career, whether that career will itself last, how you can progress in it, how you can be nimble on your feet. That's a big challenge.

 

So I say all that by way of, as we were driving a peg into the ground and saying, so the navigation of life as a self is fundamental to what we are as human beings, especially in the 21st century. And so by writing an autobiography at the age of 70, in which I chart the course that this particular self has taken, will I hope not only be satisfying for me to round out my life and think, well, this is who I've been, this is my self, but I hope, will, because of the reflections I intend to offer in this work, be of interest and assistance to others who read it and see, okay, that's a way I could think, that's the way I could approach, that's a lesson I won't have to learn the hard way, all these kinds of things.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (11:11 - 11:43)

But it's an interesting kind of circular reasoning though, isn't it? Because why does a life have to mean something? Why do we have to almost justify and construct a retrospective meaning out of the various twists and turns of fate and our own decisions?

 

What actually is the end point of doing an autobiography? You've just articulated one in the sense of trying to create meaning for yourself, but also for others. But I mean, the broader question is why not simply just live and experience and get on with life as obviously the great overwhelming mass of humanity does?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (11:44 - 13:42)

I wouldn't say that they do. I would say that for the most part, either they try and do it privately without really having the impulse or the capacity to give it coherent shape, or they flounder around. They try and get on with life, but they're often puzzled and even bewildered by the apparent lack of meaning.

 

This is not simply true of, let's call them, ordinary people. It can be true all the way to the top. So it's notorious that many people can make fortunes and feel that they're frauds or that their lives are empty and unhappy.

 

They can get to the top of the political tree and find, well, what was this all about? I mentioned to, when we're setting up this particular interview, a line from one of the Roman emperors, one of the greatest and most daunting of Roman emperors, Septimius Severus, who ruled from 196 to 211 AD at the height of the Roman Empire. And to take power, he had to very actively do that, and he had to defeat and did in battle two formidable rivals.

 

And then he ruled the empire for many years. The point is, he ruled for a considerable period and he died in his bed. He wasn't murdered like most emperors.

 

But he is notorious for having said, Omnia fui, sed nihil expedit. I have been everything, meaning king of the world, as it were, and it amounts to nothing. And ever since I read that many years ago, I thought, what an amazing verdict from somebody who has climbed from provincial life, he was from Africa, to become emperor of the greatest empire the world had ever seen at its height to rule unchallenged effectively for 15 years, to leave the empire to his sons, and yet think that's all bullshit.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (13:43 - 14:02)

And what does he mean by that, though? You know, what does it actually mean? Does that mean in terms of the grand scheme of the universe?

 

What's his imprint in the universe? Does he mean that, you know, all his achievements and contributions will be lost to the sands of time? Like that Ozymandias poem, I think we quoted in another interview.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (14:02 - 14:42)

His, the beauty of the situation, we don't know, because he didn't write an autobiography. He didn't reflect on how he'd achieved what he had and why at the end he thought it amounts to nothing. Why would somebody reach that exhausted, gloomy conclusion, nihilistic conclusion, right?

 

I mean, many people get defeated in their efforts of various kinds. Nobody had defeated Septimius Severus, no one. And yet he thought it amounts to nothing.

 

It would be lovely to know why, it seems to me. One would wish that he'd written an autobiography, but we don't have one.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (14:43 - 15:07)

And of course, in writing biographies, people tell a particular story. They seek to create a, I guess, a narrative about their own life for their internal purposes, but also to project, I suppose, a narrative or a story for others and for the public and for posterity in many ways. And in doing so, there are necessarily parts of their own story which they leave out.

 

Is that something you're conscious of in approaching this memoir that you're seeking to produce?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (15:08 - 16:45)

Yeah, it very much is. And the first, you might say the first objective lesson in that problem occurred to me when I wrote, as you remarked earlier, the biography of Mark. Because I realised, though he supplied me with remarkable journals and with correspondence and documents of all the necessary kinds, I realised, first of all, there's no conceivable way to put in all the details of Mark's life.

 

What does that idea even mean? All the details, like what he ate every day for his 80 years? That would be absurd.

 

His daily routine over decades of his work? All the people that he knew? Do I have to interview everyone?

 

What would that mean? It clearly was an incoherent idea. So in short, in order to write a story about somebody, you have to select.

 

You have to leave stuff out. Not because you're trying to distort the story, but because it is impossible to put everything in. You must select.

 

It therefore becomes a question of, well, what are the criteria of selection? And you have to give that some thought. It's not obvious.

 

Who should you interview? Which aspects of his life should he highlight? Should you highlight?

 

By use of what details do you highlight it? There then comes, but only then, the question, are there things which you discover, or in the case of an autobiography, which you're aware, which you remember, that you're not comfortable including? That then becomes a challenge.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (16:45 - 16:50)

This is the whole warts and all approach as well, right? So including the parts of our lives which are not all sunshine and roses.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (16:51 - 17:48)

Exactly. And I would be the first to confess, as it were, that my life has by no means been all sunshine and roses. And I would think it fatuous to set out to write an autobiography that just said, I've had the most wonderful time, and everybody's been good to me, and I've been so successful, and I'm really proud of my life.

 

None of those statements is true. I have, in some respects, had a fortunate life. I've certainly had an interesting life.

 

I've kept thinking all the way. I've had to reinvent myself several times, but I certainly haven't had a perfect life, and I don't intend, in writing an autobiography, to distort that story. But let it be said that just as with Mark, I couldn't conceivably put in everything, and putting in everything is actually an intrinsically incoherent idea.

 

And no one would read it. No one would read it. There'd be no point in reading all this detail, right?

 

And that raises the most interesting questions about the very nature of narrative and biography and autobiography.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (17:49 - 18:27)

But also the line between fiction and autobiography, or nonfiction. And you are a writer and a poet, and you've produced works of fiction too, but this sense of, as an authorial technique or a narrative technique, literary technique, the reliability of the narrator. How can we as the audience, or even you yourself, in terms of be sure that what you're saying is what actually happened, or is the case?

 

I mean, yeah, this idea of self-deception, as well as, I guess, trying to confect or confabulate a narrative which you would want others to receive or be recorded for posterity. I mean, it's quite deep.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (18:27 - 19:57)

Absolutely. In fact, that prompts a remark. I don't know how many of our listeners, or whether you, for example, have ever seen a film starring John Cusack called High Fidelity.

 

But High Fidelity is one where he's a man who's probably around 30 or a little older, perhaps. And he tells us a story about the five biggest bust-ups he's had in relationships since he was at preschool. And he embarks upon a project then to find the girls that he's infatuated with over those years and see how their lives have turned out, and above all, what story they have as to why the relationships broke up.

 

And what he discovers as he goes is, first of all, that they all have a very different story to what he thought was the truth about why the relationships didn't work. And he's really glad he didn't end up with any of them because he doesn't much care for them when he meets them again. It's a very entertaining film, actually.

 

And I, in writing autobiography, I'm very aware that there have been many relationships, many infatuations over my 70 years. I can't possibly put them all in. It would become odious after a while.

 

So the question is, well, which ones and how do I tell those stories? And would the women in question, many of whom now, of course, are decades older than they were when I was interested in them, would they say, yes, that's what happened? Or would they say, no, no, that's not what happened at all?

 

[Nick Fabbri] (19:58 - 20:23)

It's a really interesting challenge. It is. And it begs that question from, I think, a German, maybe Prussian, historiographer we brought up before this interview started, Leopold von Franke, who said that the effort of history or the endeavour of history is to actually understand what actually happened, usually from the documents, right?

 

So you go and you assess, you might be doing other primary source investigations, etc., but by its very nature, history is always contested, right?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (20:23 - 21:18)

It not only was contested, but the documentation is always and sometimes drastically limited. So Leopold von Franke was a 19th century historian. And what was starting to accumulate by the time he was writing were national archives, princely archives.

 

There was increasingly universal literacy. So the idea of being able to capture and document what happened seemed much more plausible than it had for a long time. But you only have to go back to almost any period of history.

 

Classical history is my favourite case because these things stand out in retrospect. And you realise that, first of all, the record is mostly missing, actually, right? I mean, even where histories were written during, let's say, the period of Roman Empire or in the case of Thucydides or the Peloponnesian War.

 

Herodotus. No, no.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (21:19 - 21:23)

No, Thucydides and Herodotus being those sort of classic, sort of ancient classical stories.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (21:24 - 22:53)

Yes, yes, yes. And pointedly, and this is a very long-running discussion, was Herodotus an historian or an ethnologist? And he tells fables and he indulges stories that serious historians, and Thucydides is certainly one, would say, well, it's puffery and nonsense.

 

He concentrates very sternly, Thucydides, on trying to figure out what exactly did happen and how would we know? And he says, I had to subject testimonies that I came across to the severest test because people who'd apparently witnessed the same events would give very different accounts and so on. And this is pathbreaking.

 

This is the first time anybody on record had done this. But to come back to the fundamental point, we now know, at least this is a scholarly estimate, that of all the books written in classical antiquity, Greek or Roman, whether histories or biographies or literature or drama or whatever else, philosophy, something like 99% are gone, lost, destroyed, moulded away, burned. That's a staggering loss, right?

 

And what it means is that we can more or less piece together a coherent account at the top end, you know, the captains and kings kind of stuff of what happened. But there are lots of uncertainties. There are lots of gaps.

 

And once you get down below the top level, even though modern archaeology has been able to piece together stuff that even Thucydides didn't know, there are still many, many gaps.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (22:54 - 23:26)

But that has epistemological significance in terms of what we actually know today about our past and our heritage, our roots, and I suppose how the world today came to be as it is. But there's also, on the other side of the coin, almost like an ontological significance there as well. I mean, these things still happened.

 

It's just that they weren't recorded. So in the non-observability or non-recordedness of them, you know, they still did happen, but they almost don't have an ongoing impact because you can't interrogate them, you know, refer back to them.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (23:26 - 24:31)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, I've been reading lately, I think you mentioned him briefly a moment ago, a book by James Lacey, who teaches the U.S. Marine War College in the U.S. The book's called Rome, The Strategy of Empire. And I know my Roman history fairly well.

 

I'm still learning new things from reading his new book. And above all, what strikes me as I read this, perhaps in part because I'm thinking of writing an autobiography, is the number of individuals that he mentions of whom all we really know are their names and the basic, you know, realities of what they achieved. Otherwise, it's next to nothing.

 

We don't know about their personal lives. They didn't leave autobiographies. There aren't biographies of them written.

 

And yet, clearly, they played dramatic and prominent roles. And these are generals or candidates for the emperorship or consuls or whatever. Below that level, there were huge numbers of people who lived in the Roman Empire as soldiers, as slaves, as engineers, as administrators.

 

They're all gone. We don't have records of their lives.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (24:31 - 24:33)

Just passes into oblivion, ephemerality.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (24:34 - 24:45)

Yeah. We don't even know their names, mostly, right? Overwhelmingly.

 

Think of the backbone of the Roman army for hundreds of years were the centurions. We don't have a single autobiography by centurion. Not one.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (24:46 - 25:14)

Right? I suppose the question I keep going back to is, you know, why does it matter? Because the works they rendered, the lives they lived, still happened, right?

 

And they were still, you know, human beings in the fullest sense of which you are. Why does it matter if things aren't recorded? And I suppose, in a way, is autobiography just an attempt to fight back against our inevitable mortality and the entropy of our physical existence?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (25:15 - 26:31)

In some respects, it is. But if that was all it was, it would probably be a self-defeating exercise. I think there are, therefore, dual aspects of writing an autobiography.

 

One is that, as I remarked earlier, you are a self coming to terms with having been alive, of being conscious, of having done things, and wondering, have I done the right things? Have I done enough things? Have I done them as well as I could have done?

 

What have they meant to others? How would I know? What do I remember?

 

What do I want to share with others, those who know me and those who never did but might through this book? Those are all the prompts, right? And most people won't do that for several reasons, among others, that they actually, to put it bluntly, can't write to save themselves.

 

And that's true of most people, even where they're basically literate. The idea of writing a serious autobiography would daunt them. I know people who say this to me.

 

I'm in the fortunate position, I think, that the one thing I'm really good at is writing. And I've had an interesting life. And I don't feel daunted by the idea of setting it down.

 

I feel attracted to it for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (26:31 - 27:21)

Yeah. And it recalls, in my mind, that stunning opening line before the film Troy, 2004 film, I think attributed to Odysseus. It says, men are haunted by the vastness of eternity.

 

And so we ask ourselves, will our actions echo across the centuries? Will strangers hear our names long after we are gone and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved? And this is an opportunity for you, I suppose, to crystallise your imprint on the universe and set it down for future generations to understand and appreciate, not out of a position of anxiety, but perhaps with a desire to be conversant with future generations and also to connect yourself with the great past of Western Civ and the histories that have come before you, which has so animated and moved you throughout the course of your life.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (27:22 - 28:45)

Yeah, I agree. And I do feel, and I didn't always feel this way, I do feel now at this point in my life and have for some years, that I have managed to become part of that great tradition. Whereas when I was younger, I wanted to become part of it.

 

I feel now that I'm there, I am part of it. And so my standards of comparison for what I have or have not achieved are people whose work, whose writings have survived and are generally admired, and against whom I compare myself, both for better or for worse. And there are some of them, obviously, of whom I'm still in awe and think, well, I haven't achieved what they've achieved.

 

And that's not a matter of forbiddenness or regret, it's just a matter of awe of their achievement. There are others whom I would have felt that way about years ago, and now I think, no, I've achieved as much as them. I'm comfortable about that.

 

It doesn't mean I don't admire them anymore. But there's so much to think about there. And there are some of them that I wish had written autobiographies because others have written biographies of them.

 

Let's take at random Percy Shelley. He wrote poetry, he wrote essays. He didn't write an autobiography, and it would have been very interesting to know.

 

But of course, he died an untimely death at 29, and he might have written an autobiography if he'd managed to live as long as I have.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (28:46 - 29:36)

One thing we remarked upon again before going live with the recording session was just the way in which our self-perception and our mostly universal sense of ourselves, because we live in our own minds and our own perceptions, is so radically different to the different glimpses that other people get from various parts of your life. So you might have friends from school who know a particular part of you, or university or work or various pursuits or stages of your life as well, relationships. They see one part of you, right, and have an impression of you in your own story.

 

But really the totality of it is so much more that it almost necessitates an autobiography to actually get on the record who you were. Again, to go back to that quote, how fiercely you loved and how bravely you fought. I think it's really affirming to sort of tell your own story because you get the full picture.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (29:37 - 31:09)

Well, at least a stab at it anyway. And I should have said earlier, because I know that quote that you shared with us, that famously, and this also is in the film Troy, Achilles was told by his mother, you have a choice to make. You can stay at home and not go to the war.

 

And if you do, you'll marry. You'll have a good marriage. You'll have children.

 

The children will love you. They'll have children. Those grandchildren will love you.

 

And you'll die and be honoured for a few generations. Then you'll be forgotten. The alternative, the other choice is go to war and you will win undying glory, but you will die young.

 

And he chooses to go to war. Now, that's only the first phase because he became so famous through the writing of Homer that for centuries after that, the greatest conquerors and generals thought, who is going to be my Homer? It's all very well to achieve things, but if nobody writes about it, it'll be forgotten.

 

Alexander the Great felt that way. Caesar felt so much that way, that being a competent writer, he wrote accounts of his conquests and of the civil war in order to be on the record. I think that's very interesting.

 

It's all very well to be Achilles, but unless there's a Homer. But suppose, at least from a literary point of view or the world of ideas, you're a kind of Achilles and then you write an autobiography. Well, if you're a decent writer, that's better than hoping somebody else will write something.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (31:11 - 31:37)

And so you also mentioned a couple of other writers who have influenced you and I guess your approach to autobiography. And one of them was Marcel Proust, who wrote In Search of Lost Time. How has that influenced and shaped your approach to writing your own story?

 

Because that was of course 4,000 pages long or it's famously impenetrable and dense. How are you preparing to make this a snappy and digestible read?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (31:38 - 34:37)

I'm not sure it will be snappy, but I hope it will be digestible. And the thing about Marcel Proust is for the very long time, I knew that In Search of Lost Time, sometimes translated as Remembrance of Things Past, was a famous novel that a lot of people didn't read because it was formidably long and many of the sentences in it, notoriously sinuous and lengthy. And then in 2014, 15, 16, when I was stricken with metastatic melanoma and I was under drug treatment and I would get very tired and I'd have to rest, sometimes had to sleep for 12, even 14 hours a day, I decided I'm going to read In Search of Lost Time while there's still time.

 

And I read every word of the 4,000 pages and I thoroughly enjoyed it. And like any book, of course, not to mention one as long as that, there are parts of it where it gets a bit slow, there are parts of it where it seems a bit detergent, but overall it's a stunning literary achievement. And the longest single sentence that I came upon and I marked it up was 90 lines, but all in perfectly grammatically balanced prose, which is extraordinary.

 

And when you think that this is a man who, in his 40s when he's writing this, is suffering from a lung disease that would finally kill him, so he's chronically short of breath, and you think, how did he even read aloud such a sentence? Well, he didn't sound record it, so it probably didn't matter quite so much. But to go back to your question, the beauty of that book and the thing that is loved by those who now include me that have read it, is that it's a profoundly meditative reflection on the very idea of self, the very idea of what does life amount to, what does it mean?

 

And Proust did not have, other than this piece of work, a famous life, an adventurous life, a life of travel or power or wealth or anything else. He was able to live quietly because his parents had some money and he spent the last decade of his life writing this interminable novel, most of which wasn't published till after he died. That's what he did.

 

That's who he was. He didn't travel widely, far less widely than I've travelled. He didn't do most of the things I've done.

 

And so I think to myself, I love the way he went about this, the reflectiveness, the colour, the detail. I want to write something, broadly speaking, like that, that will be experienced not simply as, oh, this is what Mark did, because if it was just a factual record, it's banal at the end of the day, but rather something that people will say, this is just a beautiful thing to read. It's so full of beautiful reflections and expressions and turns of phrase and the stories are wonderfully well told.

 

That's where he inspires me.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (34:38 - 34:57)

And in a sense, you've already tried to do that through your writing when you produced Darkness Over Love, which was kind of like a semi autobiographical, in a way, rendering of your relationship with Claudia and various things you were going through at the time in terms of basing the characters on, as Pris did, a fictional stand-in for their own person.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (34:58 - 36:46)

Yeah. It's an interesting question there because this takes us back 15 years and more now when I first started writing that. And I said during our recent interview about poetry that Claudia had been a great catalyst to my writing and poetry and to my sense of myself.

 

And then she had decided she had to go home. She had to go back to Venezuela. And I was grief-stricken and I wrote a set of poems called the Neruda Variations.

 

It was the Neruda Variations that turned out to be the seedbed of Darkness Over Love. And it was to be a novel, not an autobiography. But like many a first novel, it was strongly shaped by autobiography.

 

And I gave fictional names to myself, Fenimore Monaghan, and to Claudia, Margarita Henderson Mendoza. And she was a music therapist based in the Canary Islands with European clients. And I, that is Fenimore, was a kind of polymath living at a fastidiously ill-described place called the ends of the earth.

 

And he was a philosopher and he wrote notable books of philosophical reflection which had a global readership. And it was about their relationship. Now, I never got to finish that as a novel.

 

And I won't slow us down here by going into detail about it. But I learned a lot in that novel about myself, about writing literary fiction. And I agreed, or more precisely, Claudia agreed with me years afterwards that it was a prolonged, a sustained attempt to dynamically reframe who I am for myself.

 

So it was a kind of proto-autobiography through a fictional means.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (36:46 - 37:58)

Yeah. And one thing that occurs to me as we've been having this discussion, and I just want to sort of round out this first part of the interview or conversation with a couple of reflections. And the first is that this noun called somda, which is the realisation that every passerby that you see in the street or sitting across the table from you has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

 

And I think in producing, you know, the physical work of the autobiography and publishing it, it throws into high relief, you know, the complexity and fullness of individual lives, right, in a manifested physical form, which can theoretically sit on a bookshelf. We're so, too often in life, we're overly preoccupied with ourselves, our own problems. We think on ourselves far too much and not enough on the world and not enough on other people.

 

And perhaps in joining that kind of class or community of people who have written autobiographies and contributed to the literature, as we said before, it is an encouragement to delve more into the complexities and richness of other people, right, and to value each other.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (37:59 - 38:16)

Yeah, it is a paradox, right. So in a sense, by writing an autobiography, you are remaining very much in your own head. But precisely because you do it, other people who read it can say, this is what the world looks like from inside another head.

 

And it can enhance their capacity to empathise with others.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (38:16 - 38:20)

Yeah, it's an exercise in connection and empathy ultimately, that's what I was trying to say. Yeah.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (38:20 - 40:34)

And I would say in that regard, that I've become perhaps capable of writing a worthwhile autobiography in part because I've had to work very hard at intimacy. I've never been, in my view at least, just as it were inside my own head, confident of my capacity to establish intimacy with others, particularly with women. But over the last, what would now be more than 20 years, two relationships in which I've had to work unusually hard to understand the other, to establish a real bridge and a real intimacy.

 

Those two are Claudia and Rachel. I have achieved a remarkable degree of intimacy and it's registered in the poetry I've written. It's registered in how they communicate with me now.

 

And that's been a very enriching experience. And finally, of course, as I said earlier in this interview, we are even, and not least inside our own heads, not unitary selves. We debate with ourselves.

 

Everybody does this, right? And so by writing an autobiography, you set out hopefully, fruitfully and successfully to have a dialogue with yourself. Your rational self, your executive self is challenged by various memories, haunting or overwhelming.

 

This is a way of coming to terms with that. You are prone to encounter in others attitudes towards yourself for better or worse, which you find askew from the way you see yourself. Writing an autobiography is a way to come to terms with that.

 

You know that there are various standards abroad in your own society, in the broader civilisation, in the world at large, concerning what it means to be human, what counts as a life well lived. And you have a chance in an autobiography to address those things in earnest and measure yourself against appropriate standards. I think all of those things make the exercise worthwhile, if you feel up to it.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (40:34 - 41:28)

Yeah. And I think I've quoted this before in another interview, but there's a lovely quote from Michelle Welbeck's submission where he says, even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. And so in producing an autobiography, let alone any other work, I really love that notion you kind of spoke about before about intimacy through language and vulnerability and honesty of expression.

 

I think it's an incredible exercise to go through as part of that process of living an examined life. And the final thought and reflection I want to conclude this part of the conversation on was going back to that quote from Septimius Severus, who ruled the Roman Empire for 15 years, where he said, I've been everything, but it has amounted to nothing. Do you feel in an affirmative sense that your life has amounted to something?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (41:28 - 43:35)

I do. I do. And the fortunate thing, I think, is that I've so often been disappointed in my dreams and ambitions that, at least as I would see it, I haven't been allowed to develop an egotistical sense of overachievement.

 

I've been humbled by what I've been through. Life hasn't been easy. The prizes didn't fall my way even when perhaps they should have done.

 

And I've been driven back upon myself to interrogate myself. Who am I really? What am I up for?

 

Am I any good? What do I do next? What does it make sense to do?

 

And I have, through good fortune as much as hard work, I have therefore moved in a number of different spheres of life. And I think that I have achieved worthwhile things, which is very different from saying I'm a great man. It's not the same thing at all.

 

I mean, I worked in intelligence and it was acknowledged. I was a very good analyst, but I didn't become head of intelligence, you know, and I don't work in that sphere at all anymore. I haven't for many years.

 

I've achieved what I think are two quite remarkable loving intimacies in recent years, but they're not what most people would consider conventional or highly romantic or, you know, they're, I would say, they're not Mills and Boone stories, you know, they're complex stories, but they're rich experiences. And I feel fortunate for having had them. I've had the freedom due to my failure, as it were, to break through in the various ways I attempted for 30 years.

 

I've been driven back upon myself, but that's given me the freedom to read far more than most people find the time to who are successful and to think about world history, about philosophy of life, about global affairs, about love and meaning and even illness and recovery. And that has been a very rich experience.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (43:35 - 43:58)

Fantastic. I'd love it if you could talk a bit about the structure of the memoir that you're hoping to write over the next few months and even the next year. How does it look in terms of the different chapters?

 

Are there main thematic headings and things? And perhaps we can go through a couple of the key stories and vignettes that will constitute your life as it's been rendered onto page.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (43:58 - 46:19)

Sure. As the first thing that springs to mind when you ask that question about structure and planning is that I've got in mind a trilogy. And given my love of The Lord of the Rings, it seems almost as though this is a subconscious Tolkienian instinct to write a trilogy.

 

But it certainly wasn't a conscious plan. It's just that my life seems naturally to break in a number of phases. And so it might be three books or it might be one longish book with three parts.

 

But the way I envisage those three parts is that the first will be about my family background, my childhood and upbringing, my schooling, my early ingenuous religious beliefs up to the end of my undergraduate degree. And I see that as a complete phase for two reasons. One is that it sort of hangs together as a story.

 

And the backbone of it, looking backwards at least, is this link to Tolkien. And I'm thinking of calling that first part or first volume Dreaming of Elrond. Right.

 

Because from the time Kathleen read The Lord of the Rings to us when I was 10, as we had discussed, I wanted to be Elrond. I wanted to be that kind of guy. And when I left school and started at law school, part of what troubled me was I could see that I could work, I could succeed at law.

 

I had the ability. That was not in question. But what kind of person would I be?

 

And I saw myself as becoming some kind of suburban solicitor or corporate lawyer or even QC and working very hard, having a big house, maybe a beach house, a wife, kids, et cetera. But who would I be? And it wasn't clear to me who I'd be.

 

And I thought I could have a midlife crisis thinking I've done all this, but what does it amount to? It's almost harks back to what we said about Septimius Severus, right? And so a pivotal point in that story in the first volume will be I've gone through all of that.

 

I've left school. I've started law school. And then on the 4th of July 1975, I wrote a manifesto for myself about the kind of person I wanted to be.

 

And I dropped out of law school that afternoon. It was the most radical and in some ways reckless decisions I've ever made.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (46:19 - 46:21)

Your own independence day, July 4th.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (46:21 - 47:34)

Yeah. It was a complete coincidence it was the 4th of July. It was a Friday afternoon and I was just sitting in the bowels of the library at Monash with an economic history essay to finish.

 

And I was suddenly stopping and thinking, at the end of the day, I was approaching the end of the day, why am I here specifically? I've never really thought it through. I don't really know who I am.

 

I don't know any lawyers. I have only the vaguest ideas of how to turn this into a career. And I wrote down on a piece of paper, which I really wish I'd kept, but I didn't, or at least not for very long, that I wanted to be a liberally educated person with a mind of my own.

 

I wanted to be widely travelled. I wanted to be worldly. And I wanted to be somebody who could generate poetry in my life, make my life poetical.

 

I wanted to learn how to love. I wrote all that down and I dropped out of law. And I spent two years out.

 

I began to try and lay the foundations for that. I took up bodybuilding. I took up piano lessons.

 

I started to build a library and read like there was no tomorrow. Then I decided I want a liberal arts degree and I want to study those subjects which would enable me to get that liberal education. And I did an honours degree and I worked very hard at that.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (47:34 - 47:36)

And you went to Melbourne University, sorry?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (47:36 - 47:48)

I went to Melbourne University rather than Monash. And primarily because it was a sandstone university. It was more my idea of what a university should be like.

 

I had found the physical environment at Monash alienating.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (47:48 - 47:54)

I think people still do in the kind of the brutalism of that Clayton campus. Yeah.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (47:54 - 48:23)

And also it was still a long way from home in Ngunnawading to get to Melbourne University, but you just went there by rail and tram. It was pretty straightforward. Monash wasn't as easy.

 

And of course, a different kind of personality would have said, what I need is a car and bugger the brutal campus. I'm in there to get a degree, you know, but I wasn't really that kind of person. I was, I wanted to be a poet after all.

 

I was somewhat of a dreamy individual and I wanted to read books and that was my priority, not getting a car.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (48:23 - 48:49)

And it's not just about the books though. It's of course the beauty of the architecture at Melbourne, the, I guess, the conviviality and the sociality of the Carlton campus as well with it's, it's so much more designed architecturally just in terms of the urban design, the streetscapes for young people to spend a lot of time with each other, which is what university is about in terms of an education and your own development.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (48:49 - 51:33)

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you've done a master's degree at Oxford and to me, I had in my mind's eye, the university is Oxford University, maybe Cambridge, but that kind of university, you know, and it's a notoriously widespread meme, you know, that, that is university, Oxford.

 

And Melbourne University was the closest it was in Melbourne to that kind of university because of its sandstone buildings and the fact that it went back to the 19th century. So I went there, I did a liberal arts degree and I worked very hard to shape it to the ends I had in mind. And I worked so hard that I barely had a social life, to be honest.

 

Um, all I really did was study, exercise in the gym every day, um, and, uh, work at part-time jobs in the summer, even during term to make ends meet. And I, but I got the degree I was after, and it seems to me a natural breaking point at that stage to say, well, I'd got to there. And then the question was, well, now what do I do?

 

And volume two or part two becomes the next phase in my life where I, I aimed after, uh, a, uh, a very significant meeting with an American scholar who was in residence at Ormond college where I did my honours degree, I did my honours year. Um, and we can come back if you wish to that conversation I had with him, but it, it, um, prompted me to think, all right, now I've got my liberal education. I'm going to the U S to do graduate studies.

 

I'm getting to Wall Street to get a merchant banking. I'm going to cut a dash, going to be a man of the world. Um, only to discover that while I was offered positions at the Fletcher school, where he was at Harvard at Princeton, because I'd, I'd got outstanding results in a graduate records exam, but it was going to cost me 20,000 US dollars for the first year at any one of these places.

 

That's the equivalent, um, of about a hundred thousand dollars today. My parents had nine children and, and, um, my father ran a school cleaning company. There was no way they could back it.

 

And I had no money at all. And I learned for the first time in my life, the sobering lesson that you can have all the ability in the world, but if you don't have money and if you don't have sponsorship, there's some things you simply can't do. This was one of them.

 

Um, and, uh, so I, I faced a turning point in my life. I had to either fall back on a limited career and say, this is not possible. Like maybe you could have taken up teaching or something.

 

I could have become a history teacher in a school here in Australia, or maybe gone back to law, but that was years of further undergraduate study. And I thought, no, I'm going to find a way forward in this field of international relations. And so I went up to ANU and they offered me a scholarship to do a PhD in international relations.

 

And so begins that second phase.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (51:33 - 52:29)

Um, and before we dive into phase two and your, your work in international relations and doing a PhD up in Canberra, the Australian national university, I'd love to sort of go back a bit to the early stages of what you call phase one or dreaming of Elrond, um, from the first section of your memoir to be, you mentioned you were one of nine children and that's obviously partly part of the reason why, you know, your family couldn't afford, as many obviously can't, to send you abroad for graduate studies and things.

 

That's a very big family to be a part of. And I understand you're a classic sort of, um, Catholic family as well, quite conservative in, in orientation and bearing and, and the lifestyle, um, you've often compared to living in the shire as if you were a hobbit in a previous podcast we did, living a simple, honest sort of life in the suburbs. Would you want to talk a bit about your early family background?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (52:29 - 55:12)

Yeah, sure. Uh, I, um, I can't help remarking at this juncture, um, regarding family background, that two of my sisters have done a lot of spade work to put together the family history, the family tree, my oldest sister and my youngest sister, as it happens. And when I wrote to my oldest sister recently saying, I'm going to embark on autobiography and I want to sit down with you and go over in some detail, the, uh, the family tree that you've pieced together over the last 45 years.

 

Um, and some of the anecdotes that go with that family tree. And she said, Oh, look, I wouldn't bother. When I read autobiographies, I find that all the stuff about family background, it's just, it's largely a waste of time.

 

And I just want to get into the life of the individual. And I said, but I'm not asking your opinion as to whether I should talk about the family. I'm going to do that.

 

I just want some details from you. I think that, you know, it's, it's a very Australian story. My family background, um, uh, you know, before my generation, nobody in the family had gone to university, right.

 

They were all good, honest, hardworking, practical people on both sides of the family. Uh, and my sense for years now has been, I don't know enough about my own family history. And I know not nearly enough about Australia's history.

 

I've always been interested in the outside world and I've always taken Australia, um, largely for granted. Australia is free, prosperous, spacious. What was not to like?

 

I'm interested in, in Europe, in Asia, in North America, in Latin America. Um, and so one of the reasons for going into family background in the autobiography is to attempt to do justice to the realities of my actual background. Much as I talk of dreaming of being Elrond, I am in reality, an Australian intellectual sprung from a family that were not intellectuals.

 

They're perfectly intelligent, competent people, but they weren't highly educated. And in fact, I don't think any of them really travelled abroad. Um, neither of my parents went to university.

 

They were good people. They were unassuming people. They married very young.

 

My father was 21. My mother was 19 and they had six children in 10 years. And, uh, one of the photographs I will definitely include in the biography is a picture, um, a photo taken in 1965 of the two of them standing, looking, looking tanned and relaxed and as happy as they'll get up at a, at a beach house down in the Mornington Peninsula with six children under 10.

 

Unbelievable. It's unbelievable. You know, why aren't they looking overwhelmed and haggard?

 

[Nick Fabbri] (55:13 - 55:21)

But it's so different to what family life is today where people can't afford to have kids until the mid to late thirties. And if they have kids, it'll be one or two.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (55:21 - 56:43)

Exactly. Exactly. So that's another reason to tell the story.

 

And I should add, um, we'll get to the Catholicism thing in a moment, um, that they raised nine of us. We were never short of what we needed. We were all loved.

 

Um, the monk family home, as I learned, uh, as I got older, was seen as a wonderful place by our cousins, by our school friends, you know, and my mother was the heart and soul of that. She's now 92. She's still around.

 

She's still full of laughter. Um, and generosity. And, um, that's something I want to do justice to, but also to her family and my father's family.

 

My father's father, my grandfather died when he was only 44. Uh, I never met him, but he's been a patriarchal figure in the family for good reasons. You know, he was seen as a larger than life figure.

 

He, he was, uh, with the AF, the Middle East during the war. Um, he was an officer. Um, he spent time in Gaza running training for Australian troops.

 

He fought at Al Alamein. Um, he founded a company, um, and came back from the war saying the future is plastics, you know, and his funeral was big. He was highly respected in the community.

 

And a lot of people came to the funeral. I, of course, wasn't there because he died in 1950. I was in Bourneville 56.

 

I want to tell that story.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (56:43 - 57:05)

Yeah. And how do you tell that story? I mean, coming back to the question of the archives and the historical documents and evidence as a, as a historian yourself, what are you relying upon?

 

And when you talk to your sister about wanting to get more information about certain things, how are you planning to actually undergird your memoir with, you know, sourced, um, you know, documents and evidence?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (57:06 - 58:52)

Uh, well, the important thing is, and this in a sense taps into what my older sister was saying, that this is not a whole book about my family. And so it will be a matter of outlining the family history and accounting for my family roots and perhaps my, in a fundamental sense, my character and upbringing and telling some anecdotes that provide a bit of colour. Um, and, and for example, one of those will be that my maternal great grandmother, um, pardon me, uh, uh, Ellen Whiten was her name, left an impression on my mother when she was a little girl that she still speaks about as being a highly intelligent woman.

 

But, um, but she, um, left nothing. Ellen Whiten left nothing behind in writing. So we don't know how she saw the world, how she experienced life, what she thought.

 

And my mother often laments that. Right. And I think that is a short story, but it's worth telling.

 

Right. And there are many other such anecdotes, which I would like to include. And they flow into the fact that on both sides of the family, my forebears were Catholics.

 

Um, and my mother and father grew up very Catholic, not in a sense of being reactionary or narrow-minded or puritanical. It was just a way of life. Right.

 

They, they believed particularly my father, the doctrines of the church, they were good servants of the church. My father was very active, uh, and constructive parishioner, for example. Um, and as a result, I grew up in a very Catholic environment.

 

And for the first nine years of my life, that was pre-Vatican II or Vatican II. So it was old Latin Catholicism.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (58:52 - 58:54)

But you're Irish Catholic as well, right? So your family's from Ireland?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (58:55 - 59:12)

Uh, Ireland, Scotland, England, and Norway, actually. So, um, it, it's not just Irish. And in fact, my mother's side were the Irish and, uh, her maiden name was Fitzgerald and Fitzgerald's, uh, not strictly speaking Gaelic Irish, they're Norman Irish.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (59:12 - 59:13)

Right.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (59:13 - 59:31)

And, um, so there's lots of stories along those lines. And the Norwegian angle was on my father's mother's side, and they were seafarers from Norway. They're sort of modern Vikings in a manner of speaking.

 

And that's a charming story. My sister, my older sister went to Norway to find members of the Orma family.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (59:31 - 59:31)

That's amazing.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (59:32 - 1:01:07)

It's, it's, it's good stuff, you know? Uh, and I think, why would I not tell some of those stories? Right.

 

But it has to channel this being an autobiography into, so what does this mean in terms of who I am and how I was born and where I was born and all that? So that's within the first chapter since we get to that or maybe the second chapter. And, um, and I've said to you, uh, you know, you know, a podcast about Tolkien, for example, that I, I felt, um, the older I got looking back, uh, as though my upbringing not only was, uh, well, not only was my worldview and sense of self shaped by the Lord of the Rings, but once I had read the Lord of the Rings, I thought I've grown up in the Shire in a sense.

 

Right. Uh, and, um, in both positive, as it were in negative respects, it was a little community. It was very functional community.

 

It was a down to earth community. The parish I lived in was an unusually good parish. Um, when I was little and, and the parish priest was a classic worker priest.

 

He was a, a man of very interesting character, very committed to the church and the parish. And, uh, um, uh, and I enjoyed, uh, the Catholic childhood, you know, it was still Latin and, and Easter and Christmas were big solemn ceremonies and there was a very good choir and music. Um, at school was very Catholic and they had a big fete each November and we would all eagerly look forward to it.

 

It was a, it was a, it was a great event. The rhythms and colour of feast days, Lent and Advent was serious, you know.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:01:07 - 1:01:26)

Yeah. So different to contemporary times, but a lot of people, when they talk about their Catholic upbringing, they often will reflect in harsh terms saying it was oppressive or something. Did you ever find the, I guess, the inculcation of what you're describing as quite a natural, um, ethos to be overbearing or oppressive?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:01:27 - 1:03:26)

Um, not particularly, and certainly not in, in early life. Like as a, as a little boy, as a primary school boy, it just was life, you know, and it was agreeable in most respects. And my, my parents, you know, loved, um, uh, the ceremonies, you know, Easter and Christmas.

 

And, um, they made a special effort to make Christmas fun and generous, you know, and we all looked forward to Christmas presents under the tree, all the traditional things. And we, we did, um, give up things during Lent and we didn't eat meat on Fridays. And, um, and we did observe feast days and holy days and so on.

 

And, and I don't recall having any objection to any of that as a primary school boy. When I got to secondary school, that gradually began to change for two reasons. I was reading increasingly substantial and serious books about, let's call it the real world, the outside world.

 

And secondly, I was entering puberty and suddenly sexuality became an issue. And that's where it collided a bit with Catholicism because Catholicism was very conservative as it has remained when it comes to sexuality. And it wasn't something that was talked about at home in any meaningful way or really at school.

 

And I was myself, not somebody who messed around after school with maids or played football. I was a very bookish boy and, and sexuality became a problem. I didn't know what I was supposed to feel or do or be.

 

Um, and, uh, although I was an outstanding student at school and I did drama and debating and public speaking and so on, I, I couldn't figure this thing out. Uh, and so that led to a bifurcation in high school and later high school where the serious part of me, the intellectual side of me, the quiet withdrawn part of me really seriously thought, you know, I could become a Jesuit. I, maybe I should become a priest or go into a monastery.

 

And my parents encouraged that. They thought this was a lovely idea.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:03:26 - 1:03:27)

Monk by name.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:03:28 - 1:05:14)

It turned out, but well, in part by nature too, I mean the bookishness, you know, this is close to this and reflectiveness. Yeah. Right.

 

But fundamentally the rock that that collided with apart from substantive intellectual questions about religious belief was sexuality. And I thought, I can't, I cannot figure this out and I must. And I'm, you know, I was absolutely right in that deduction.

 

I think had I followed a strictly Catholic line and said, I'm renouncing sexuality, I'm embracing chastity. I would have been a bit of a mess that to be perfectly honest. And, and this is one of the challenging issues to discuss in autobiography, not in inordinate or gross detail, but you know, that that's something I had to do.

 

But, but the other thing, and this pertains to the schooling was that precisely because I took these matters seriously and I read church history and I read a bit of philosophy and theology, and I would ask very frank questions in religion class. And if I'd been at a Jesuit school, I might've got serious answers. I was at Christian brother's school and I got frankly stupid answers.

 

Dogmatic or superficial ones? Patently silly. I mean, I'll give you a couple of examples.

 

And, you know, these are good anecdotes for the autobiography, but for example, in year 10, one of the Christian brothers was talking about hell and damnation in very, you know, doctrinal terms. And I raised a hand and I said, well, I understand that in the third century, the mystic and theologian Origen speculated at the end of time, even Lucifer and his fallen angels would be forgiven in a general reconciliation. And he turned around with some wits and said, where did you learn about Origen, young monk?

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:05:16 - 1:05:18)

And you'd done your own reading on the matter?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:05:18 - 1:05:53)

I had, I'd been reading church history and, you know, or the following year, there was another Christian brother who in religion class said, you know, the heathen Turks almost overran Europe and the Mediterranean basin in the 16th century, but the Lord worked a miracle at the Battle of Lepanto and they were turned back. And I raised a hand and I said, well, it wasn't exactly a miracle. Here's what happened in the battle.

 

This threw him. And, you know, it was clear that nobody else in the class had a first idea about what the Battle of Lepanto was. And so he was thrown by the fact that I could describe in detail what actually happened.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:05:53 - 1:05:54)

From the galleys on the ocean.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:05:54 - 1:06:53)

Yeah. And this kept happening. Right.

 

And finally, in year 12, the religious coordinator got all the year 12s together and said, people have been asking untoward questions in religion class. I would say I was exhibit A. The heretics.

 

Well, he didn't use the word heretic, but he said, this is a Catholic school. We assume that all of you who come here are Catholics and we're not here to defend Catholicism. We're simply here to teach it.

 

And so I raised a hand and I said, you know, when you say that you assume we're all Catholics, what exactly do you mean? He said that you believe every item of the creed that you recite at mass on Sunday. Now, I'm not sure how many people regularly went to mass on Sunday, but I said, well, for example, resurrection of the body.

 

He said, most certainly. I said, well, I guess I'm not a Catholic. Now, I was the prize student at the school.

 

I was the golden head boy. I was vice captain. I was, I became ducks that year.

 

I was the champion debater, public speaker, act, everything. So nothing happened. Had I been somebody perceived as a troublemaker or stirrer at school, I might've been expelled for that.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:06:53 - 1:07:43)

Wow. Yeah. Right.

 

And what seems to be recurring, at least in these foundational years, is a sense of you interrogating fundamental beliefs about what you want and whether what you want is okay, or whether what you're prescribed is the paths you're prescribed to follow are indeed authentic ones for you, not only with law school and the decision to drop out and study, stitch together a liberal arts education, but also with your Catholicism, you know, and your career choices and things like that.

 

Where does that instincts for individuality and authenticity come from? Do you see it having a connection to the seeds that were planted with the year five teacher reading the Lord of the Rings and inculcating that sense of wonderment through Elrond and this idea of a bigger world that's out there to discover beyond the shire or?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:07:43 - 1:10:23)

I'm sure that played a role, but I would say that two more important things played into this. The further I went in secondary school, the first was that my parents were both people of great integrity. And so was I, right?

 

It's just that in order to be a person of integrity, given what I was learning, mostly on my own time, I couldn't just go along with beliefs that baffled me or with teachings that didn't make sense or which I felt very uncomfortable about. And the second thing is that, as you're aware, throughout secondary school, indeed, starting from late primary school, I was reading completely serious, you know, political biography, history, et cetera. And I was getting a view of the world, which prompted me to ask a lot of searching questions.

 

And I asked those questions and I wanted real answers. And one of the anecdotes that I look forward to telling, sympathetically as it were, is one day, I was probably only about 18 or 19 years old, I think, but I'd probably left school. And I was having a discussion with my father in the kitchen while mum was preparing dinner.

 

And the three of us were there, no one else. And my father, of course, who hadn't been to university and was a devout Catholic whose view of the world had been strongly formed by Bob Santa Maria in the National Civic Council, always tended to fall back on a limited set of anecdotes about why he saw the world the way he did. And I finally got frustrated with him in that conversation.

 

And I said, why do you accept so many things without questioning them? And he said quietly, because I'm a humble man. And I said, well, I'm bloody well not.

 

Right? I wasn't going to settle for pat answers that didn't make sense to me. I was going to keep asking questions.

 

And the things I'd already been reading in secondary school are not the kind of things he'd ever read. We were already in different mental worlds. And at the point when I said, I'm bloody well not, my mother turned around from the stove and smiled quietly and said, yes, we can see that.

 

And she, of course, and this is an important part of the autobiography, her sense of humour, her interest in history, in church history, in poetry, in opera, in classical music, none of which she had the opportunity to cultivate and develop in any depth because she had raised nine children, were imparted to me. I've inherited all these things from her, clearly. I might say that I've inherited my quiet temperament, my integrity for my father, my good manners, but the real characteristics that have driven me and inspired me, they're from mum.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:10:25 - 1:10:50)

They're really beautiful reflections on your parents. So thank you for sharing. And there's so much to unpack and so much to say in the first volume alone.

 

So why don't we, as you alluded to just before this, we did the deep dive into your childhood and family background. Why don't we jump into that second volume, which takes off when you just moved to Canberra to take up your PhD in international relations at the ANU.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:10:50 - 1:16:26)

Yeah, it was, it felt like at the time, a real break, a step forward, breaking boundaries, or to use the language of the Lord of the Rings, crossing the Brandywine to explore some of those white spaces. And I went up to ANU conscious of two things. This was the kind of thing I wanted to do.

 

I wanted to transcend the social background and its limitations from which I'd come. But I wanted a serious career. I wanted to be able to earn an income, and I wasn't confident that the PhD would give me that.

 

Whereas the degree at the Fletcher School would have enabled me to do units in economics and international law, and to meet all sorts of interesting people, and bid for jobs on Wall Street at a good rate of pay. It wasn't at all clear that the PhD from ANU would serve any of those purposes. And I remember saying this to Bruce Miller, my professor there, Big Miller, they called him, J.D.B. Miller, who has since died. I expressed this concern almost on day one, and he said to me, oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that. I don't even have a PhD, and look at me, I'm a professor. And I didn't get into an argument with him about that, but I thought, on the spot, it's all very well for you to say that, but your career goes decades back when the world was a different place, right?

 

But at any rate, I didn't think I had much of a choice. I couldn't get to the Fletcher School or Harvard or Princeton. The PhD was going to be a bigger ticket than anything else I thought possible, so I got stuck into it.

 

And... And what was the PhD topic on? Well, he said to me, you know, don't feel as though you have to jump straight into a topic, think about it for a while, read around, and then come up with an idea.

 

I did exactly that, and I'll never forget reading a book called The Challenge of World Poverty by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, and in particular, a footnote in his book in which I discovered an individual I'd never heard of called Wolf Latijansky, who was a Ukrainian immigrant to the United States in the 1920s, who was an agricultural scientist, and who wrote in 1950, after Mao had won the Civil War in China based on a peasant insurgency, that if the U.S. was to head off similar insurgencies around the developing world, it would have to find a way to export its own agrarian tradition of 40 acres and a mule, or an Asian variant thereof.

 

And I thought straight away, this is the hook, this is my point of entry. And so I wrote out there and then that afternoon a proposal for a doctorate, and the chapter headings on what is the American agrarian tradition? Was it exportable?

 

If it was, in theory, was an attempt made in practise? And if an attempt was made, with what degree of success? And if it was not the American agrarian tradition, what did that imply about the U.S. challenge in the Cold War in dealing with actual or potential insurgencies? The case studies that I decided would be Vietnam, which was an obvious one, and then the Philippines and El Salvador, where in both cases there were civil wars based on peasant communist insurgencies. I put this before Bruce Miller, and he not only approved it, but said, why don't you add India as a case study? And I said, no, no, no, it's already very ambitious, India is a whole other world.

 

I did a bit of reading along the way about peasantries and land reform attempts in India, and notably in Kerala, but that was never going to be part of the PhD. So this was a big topic. And when I gave my statement of intent, that is outlining before senior scholars what I planned to do, one of them, who was a specialist on the Philippines, said, Paul, this is not a PhD you're setting out to do.

 

This is a life's work. It's a seriously ambitious topic. Which it could have evolved into.

 

It could have evolved into, except that I had my eye on a different prize. I wanted a PhD, I wanted to learn about the Cold War for real. And I wanted to learn about these particular things.

 

How did the US government tackle this scale of challenge over the whole Cold War? It was a big undertaking. And I think I mentioned earlier that when I went to a woman college for my honours year, one of the people I met there was Ralph King.

 

And at the end of that year, Ralph won a Rhodes scholarship to go to Oxford and to do a DPhil in international relations. And so three years later, when I was doing my own PhD and I was on fieldwork, which we'll come back to in a moment, I made a point of calling in on Oxford to catch up with Ralph. And he said to me, and I'll never forget this, because here I was thinking, well, he's got the Rhodes scholarship.

 

He's at Oxford. He's getting a DPhil from Oxford, for heaven's sake. That's going to be a meal ticket.

 

Mine, not so sure. But he said to me in private, you did what we should all do. You chose a really ambitious topic, and you're chewing it up, breaking new ground, travelling the world.

 

I chose a safe academic topic, and I'm bored shitless by it. I thought, wow, I would never have anticipated that. As it happens, though, it was a good meal ticket.

 

He's had a very successful career as a DFAT officer, as a diplomat. And we're still friends. But to come back then to the fieldwork, so 18 months in, they say, right, well, you can now do fieldwork.

 

And fieldwork clearly had to centre on the United States. It was about the United States. But I'd never been abroad before.

 

I'd never done fieldwork. I'd never worked in US archives. I'd never been to places like the Philippines or El Salvador, needless to say.

 

And to be honest, my supervisors were of no use at all. So I had to make this up as I went along.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:16:26 - 1:16:31)

In terms of stitching together the different countries you'd go to, the case studies, people you'd interview, archives you'd visit, is that the guidance you were looking for?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:16:31 - 1:16:45)

How to work in archives. I'd never worked in archives before. I mean, I'd done an undergraduate degree in Melbourne.

 

And here I was going right around the world and spending months in US archives. And I'd never been there before. How do you do this?

 

Well, I had to find out for myself.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:16:46 - 1:16:47)

And put together the funding for that as well.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:16:48 - 1:17:40)

There was barely enough funding. So I had a scholarship, which was really barely enough to get by on. And they gave me an airfare, around the world ticket, economy class, of course, and $1,700.

 

This, mind you, was 40 years ago. But $1,700 to supplement my scholarship, which is a negligible, more or less a reasonable amount. And there was no way I could have completed my fieldwork on the money provided.

 

And I had to borrow money from my parents, who didn't have a lot of money. So that was a challenge. But all of that said, I had the most extraordinary time.

 

I mean, and I do remember taking off on fieldwork at the end of August 1984 to fly first to Honolulu. And I punched the air as I took off. I thought, yes, this was what I wanted to do, right?

 

To break new ground, to cross the brand new line, right? I'm on my way to Rivendell.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:17:40 - 1:17:43)

Yeah. And what was your itinerary? Where was the first stop?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:17:43 - 1:18:19)

The first stop was Honolulu, University of Hawaii. And I had a remarkable time there, and I had an unforgettable love affair there. And I want to tell that story.

 

It's a very touching story. And I've still got wonderful letters that I received from Valerie for years afterwards that I never saw once again in the Philippines, of all places. But then I went to Los Angeles, and then down to Mexico City, and then to El Salvador, and then back to Mexico City, and then back all the way up the West Coast to Seattle.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:18:19 - 1:18:26)

Yeah, in the 80s, El Salvador and Central America was full of genocides going on and a lot of political violence as well.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:18:26 - 1:19:27)

Absolutely so. And in fact, the person through whom I set up my visit to El Salvador was Colonel David Weigelstein, who had been US chief, US military advisor in El Salvador the previous year and was back at the US Army War College in Pennsylvania by then. And I wrote to him saying, I'm doing this PhD.

 

Do you think it would be viable for me to visit El Salvador? And if so, how should I go about this? And he wrote back and said, you definitely should go.

 

You arrange to get there. I will arrange for you to be accommodated and for interviews and so on. And the person to get in touch with is our public affairs officer in the embassy.

 

And so I did that. And they put me up at the Sheraton Hotel. And they facilitated visits to the embassy and interviews with people.

 

And so I had a very interesting time in El Salvador.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:19:27 - 1:19:41)

I can't even imagine coordinating it because today, it's so easy with email and digital communications and things. Pen and paper type letters take months to get back to you. I mean, it's hard to put a forward agenda together, let alone a safe and productive one.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:19:42 - 1:20:45)

And yet, not only did I do that, but of course, everybody used to do that in those days, right? You didn't think, oh, if only we had email. You just took these delays for granted, right?

 

But that was extraordinary. I almost got to visit Nicaragua, but I couldn't quite swing it. I wanted to stop over in Yucatan in Mexico.

 

I wanted to visit Chichen Itza. I couldn't afford it. But I did see some of Mexico City for a couple of days each way.

 

I stayed with a member of the Australian embassy there and his wife. They were very good hosts. And then, as I say, I went back to the US and I spent months in US archives and interviewed scholars and bureaucrats and people in USAID, CIA, Pentagon, RAND.

 

This was wild. And the single most notable thing I discovered, and there are many anecdotes I can tell to buttress this in the autobiography, was that here I was, 18 months into a big topic from a standing start, and I knew more about the history of these things than almost anybody interviewed. It was astonishing.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:20:46 - 1:20:51)

About the institutional history of the CIA and things you mean and US work in Vietnam.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:20:51 - 1:22:14)

Yep. And the reason I discovered eventually was because, I mean, each of these people could tell me interesting things about their personal experience. But if you went back more than five years before any given one of them had been in the country in question, Vietnam, the Philippines, El Salvador, they had no idea what had happened, what US actions had been, what had happened inside the country.

 

And to give you a simple example, I found Robert White, who had been appointed by Jimmy Carter as ambassador to El Salvador when the civil war broke out there in 1979. And I asked him, when you were asked by Carter to go down there, did you dig into the archives to get the history of the problem? And in particular, did you find or did any of your stuff bring to your attention a report in 1960 from the USAID's Public Safety Division on internal security and repression in El Salvador?

 

And he said, we didn't have time to dig in the archives. We had a job to do. Right?

 

He didn't know. When I told him what was in that report, and specifically the recommendation of that report, that the US backed the hardliners to buttress their paramilitary organisation, their interrogation organs, and that the man who should head this organisation, Chetty Medrano, who had run death squads in the 1950s, should be made head of this organisation, he had no idea. I was the graduate student.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:22:14 - 1:22:27)

He'd been the ambassador. Is that because they don't take the time or they don't have the inclination to actually go and do deep background historical research? Or is it just that they're swept along by the events of the day?

 

They're obviously working and they're flat out all the time.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:22:27 - 1:23:38)

He was a good man. He did his best. But this was an endemic problem.

 

And the best formulation I've seen, and I'll certainly draw attention to this in writing all this up, was by Daniel Ellsberg, who of course is famous for leaking the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War. He was a very bright guy. He died a couple of years ago.

 

Very good analyst, worked for Rand and the Pentagon at a very high level, had top-level security clearances. But gradually, in the course of a decade, he decided the U.S. was not only fighting a war badly in Vietnam, it was fighting a wrong war. It shouldn't be fighting that war.

 

And he tried to figure out, so how do we get into this? And why are we fighting this war badly? And one of his central conclusions was that the problem was that the U.S. government, in various situations in which Vietnam was a notable one, starting ignorant, did not, would not learn. There were a whole set of institutional anti-learning mechanisms that guaranteed unsuccessful and counterproductive behaviour. And this began with the lack of institutional memory at any level. Those were stunning words, and I found that that had been true in all the case studies I was looking at.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:23:38 - 1:24:05)

Yeah. And it's interesting, throwing into the next chapter, which we won't go into just yet, but where you actually developed a business around critical thinking skills. But in the interim, so following on your field work and the amazing nine months you spent travelling the globe and doing research for your PhD, did you cultivate a desire to then go and join a big bureaucracy like the CIA and work in intelligence or work in foreign affairs?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:24:06 - 1:25:43)

I didn't have the option of going to work for the CIA, but I did think that having done this PhD, I badly needed a job. I took six years to do the PhD. It was a claim by its examiners.

 

This is an absolutely first-class piece of work, but I had no money and I was burned out. I had glandular fever, as it turns out. And I thought, well, A, I've got to have a job.

 

B, the most natural place to go while a PhD is being examined is the defence department. Assuming a PhD goes through, I can then transfer to DFAT and become a diplomat. I could work in the intelligence community or maybe chance my arm and if I can get a good post go to the US and turn it into a book.

 

So I put in the application and I was interviewed by three perfectly sensible defence people and they very quickly offered me a job. And they said, but of course you'll need to have a negative vetting interview, a security interview. That's not a problem, is it?

 

I said, no, no, no. I've got no scallops in the closet. I've done nothing but study for 13 years.

 

Well, the security people have other ideas and this is a doozy of a story. Right. And the simplest way to encapsulate it is to say that that year, 1988, I was tutoring at Melbourne University in Australian politics for a woman who was an avowed communist and whose objective, as she explicitly stated before the course began, was to indoctrinate the students, to radicalise them.

 

And I didn't toe the party line. I wasn't prepared to play that game. And at the end of the year, she made clear, as she put it to me, that you realise there's no possibility of you getting this job again next year.

 

And I said, that's fine. I'm heading to Canberra to work in the defence bureaucracy.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:25:43 - 1:25:45)

Why is that? Because she said...

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:25:45 - 1:27:23)

Because I was not a communist. I wasn't prepared to engage in what she called radicalising the students. And since you ask, I mean, there's a wonderful story, I think, that goes with that, which is that the very first lecture, after she'd said that this is the objective, she invited in as a guest lecturer to these first year politics students, a man called Lloyd Churchward, who's almost certainly, as we would say, gone to God, right?

 

He's long dead. He was very old and blind by then, or clinically blind. And she said, this is the great Lloyd Churchward, emeritus professor of politics, who in years to come, you'll feel very privileged you got to hear him speak.

 

His subject was social class, and his lecture was essentially as follows. There are three theories of social class, two objective theories, and a subjective theory. The subjective theory holds that you're a member of a social class, if you happen to think that you are.

 

But this is self-evidently incoherent, so let's not even bother going there. The two objective theories are those of Weber and Marx. Weber's theory of class, I find hard to understand even in English, so let's talk about Marx.

 

Marx, he extols, is the great theoretician of class struggle. And Lenin, he then goes on to say, is the great practitioner of this, the great emancipator, the great visionary. This is 1988, all right?

 

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. And I listened to all of this, and the very next session, I had my first tutorial with a dozen students. I simply began by saying, that lecture was a disgrace.

 

Any emeritus professor of politics who says to a class of first years that he finds Weber hard to understand even in English should have lost his job decades ago. Let's start again, shall we? That's the standard.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:27:24 - 1:27:25)

Let alone the endorsement of Lenin.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:27:26 - 1:27:54)

Yes, exactly so. That was the climate I was in. Surely, though, that your record of anti-communism would have endeared you to the security vetting agency?

 

They didn't see it that way. So in the same week, the very same week, she says to me, there's no possibility of you getting this job again next year. Plainly because I wasn't literally toeing the party line.

 

Three days later, I get a call from Defence saying, you've been denied a negative vetting clearance. Have you any idea why? And I said, no, not off the top of my head.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:27:54 - 1:28:04)

It's quite a low bar as well. I mean, negative, there's negative vetting, negative vetting two, and then positive. It's not like you were having the ruler run over you to any extraordinary degree, you know?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:28:04 - 1:28:32)

No, well, this is quite a story in itself, right? This will take up at least a chapter in that volume, the second volume. But to cut to the chase, it turns out that the person who interviewed me for the negative vetting clearance drew the conclusion for some bizarre reason that I was a communist.

 

So in the same week, you get a lecturer saying, she's not going to employ you again because you're not a communist. And a security vetting officer saying, you shouldn't get a job with the government because you're a communist. This was hysterically funny from a detached point of view.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:28:33 - 1:28:35)

Kafka-esque in a way, isn't it? Yeah, it was certainly not.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:28:35 - 1:29:21)

In the bureaucracies. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't feel funny at the time.

 

It was Kafka-esque. And then, I mean, I don't have much detail to go into, but the long and the short of it is that the Defence recruitment people went into bat for me and said, you can't deny this guy clearance. He's our prize recruit.

 

And security said, well, we have. So bat out. And the recruiter said, we're not going to bat out.

 

We want this guy. So either you give us a very good reason, or we appeal over your head to the Secretary of Defence. You choose.

 

And the long and the short of it was that they gave me a second interview with a different interviewer, and I got the clearance. And then I get up there a month after everybody else, and rumours arrive that I had difficulty getting clearance because I was a communist. A mole in the nest.

 

I was, yeah. You can't win on this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:29:22 - 1:29:25)

It's a sort of... A stench or something that sort of follows you. Everything's wrong.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:29:25 - 1:29:25)

Yeah, where there's...

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:29:25 - 1:29:26)

There must have been something wrong.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:29:26 - 1:29:53)

Because where there's smoke, there's fire, right? Yeah. So this is a long story.

 

But the end point of that story, 18 months later, is that I finally got a positive vetting clearance after a lot of drama to work in Defence. And the guy who headed the US and Global Affairs section wanted me because I'd done the PhD that I'd done. But he was overruled.

 

And a high-level ruling, he subsequently told me, had been made that I was never to be allowed to work on the United States as long as I was in the Australian government.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:29:53 - 1:29:55)

Seriously? For security reasons?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:29:56 - 1:30:00)

I'd been digging into the US and the Cold War and the way it worked.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:30:00 - 1:30:08)

But because he wanted to produce a work of original academic literature that advances the debates and our understandings of history and international relations.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:30:08 - 1:31:47)

Exactly so. And as a citizen of a Western democracy, how did we, broadly speaking, led by the US, fight the Cold War? That's what I wanted to understand.

 

Why was there a Cold War at all? What were the wellsprings of it? How did we think it through?

 

Was counter-insurgency successful? If not, why not? These are the questions I asked.

 

And what are the lessons for future conflicts or strategic contests? Exactly so. And in fact, this is jumping way ahead to volume three.

 

But when the Iraq War was about to start in 2003, I wrote a piece, came out on day one, in which I said there's been passionate debates about whether invasion of Iraq is justified. Here's how it plays out. There are three basic grounds for objecting to it, that it's illegal, that it's immoral, and that it would be stupid.

 

And I said, when you look at it closely, the moral and legal cases are actually moot. The strategic one hangs on the following. If the US moves in, and its allies, and overthrows Saddam and occupies the place, but then gets bogged down in prolonged and bloody urban guerrilla war, this decision will look stupid.

 

That was published the day the war started. Cassandra, you've proven right. And in fact, earlier than that, after 9-11, immediately after 9-11, I wrote an essay in a financial review, in which I said we would be wise to assume that the people who have perpetrated this attack have thought several moves ahead.

 

And what they want to do, in the spirit of Che Guevara, who had said in the 1960s, we need to create two, three, many Vietnams to bog down and exhaust the United States, is to draw the US into an overreaction and a series of unsustainable military commitments. Well, how about that?

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:31:47 - 1:31:59)

Yeah. But this is precisely the sort of mind that any recruitment within the Australian bureaucracy should have wanted on the desks, doing good analysis for Australian governments, and by extension, the Western alliance.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:31:59 - 1:32:15)

Exactly so. And I think that's demonstrable, but I reached the conclusion by 1995 that the Australian government actually didn't want me. And I wasn't going to put up with bullshit and suppression, so I walked away.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:32:15 - 1:32:21)

Even though you were in a prominent role as head of China analysis in the Defence Intelligence Organisation?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:32:21 - 1:32:46)

When I'd entered and they refused to put me, not that I'd lobbied for it, the head of the section had done so, but they wouldn't put me on the US, and said, we want you to work on East Asia. This is 1990. And I actually thought, fine, that's where I can carve out a career.

 

So here's another attempt to get into a mainstream career path. Ross Garno had just published his book, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy. I read it, and I thought, I'm going to make a career on East Asia.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:32:46 - 1:32:49)

It's a great vision for the country, Australia's engagement in Asia, you know?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:32:49 - 1:33:48)

Yeah. And he was right that we've boomed in terms of economic relationships with Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, right? And so I threw myself into that.

 

I read furiously, I networked furiously. I got promoted rapidly. After two years, I was head of Japan and Korea's desk.

 

And two years later, again, head of the China desk. And I was acknowledged as very good. So much so that at one point, I was told by the deputy director, would you be prepared if we post you to go to London as an exchange officer?

 

And I said, yes, I would. And then it didn't happen. And I said to him six months later, so what's going on about that London posting?

 

He said, we can't afford to not have you here on East Asia. Well, that's sort of flattering. But then I said to them, all right, we're going to need top flight China analysis indefinitely.

 

If you will get me language training and a country posting, I will become your gun analyst on China. You know I'm very good at analysis, but I don't have the language. I don't have country experience.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:33:48 - 1:33:59)

And what does a language posting look like? They basically put you up in Shanghai or Hong Kong? The language training will almost certainly take place in Hong Kong.

 

Basically, your sole focus is to get fully proficient in the language.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:33:59 - 1:34:03)

Yeah. And then go and practise it in Beijing as a staffer in the embassy.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:34:03 - 1:34:03)

Fantastic.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:34:04 - 1:34:37)

Right. That's what I asked. And they said no.

 

And they said, we don't send civilians to China, so we can't give you a country posting. The natural answer would have been to say, no, we don't send civilians, but DFAT do, and we'll cut a deal with them. Yeah, it's quite common.

 

Right. But they wouldn't. And secondly, they said, if we trained you in Mandarin, you would just go and work for a merchant bank, and we would have done our money.

 

This is 1995. And I said, so you're telling me that for fear that I will leave, you will not develop me to a standard of excellence, essentially? So I said, bye-bye.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:34:37 - 1:34:38)

You left anyway.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:34:38 - 1:34:40)

I left, precisely for that reason. Right.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:34:40 - 1:34:45)

I would have, for the- Not an easy thing to do, having done your PhD and having done five or six years there.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:34:45 - 1:34:55)

And having become head of the China desk, clearly being acknowledged. I'm known as Mr. Korea, even in DFAT, for my work. And yet they wouldn't develop me, and DFAT wouldn't have me at all.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:34:55 - 1:35:01)

So feeling thwarted and kind of stifled, you decided to walk out and leave?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:01 - 1:35:02)

I thought, there's no future here.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:03 - 1:35:05)

But where did you go to? Did you have something lined up after, or?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:06 - 1:35:12)

No, I didn't. And that was a mistake. It was a bit like dropping out of law school.

 

I just, I thought, I'm going to just, I'm going to reinvent myself. There's no future here.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:12 - 1:35:14)

Step off into the void.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:14 - 1:35:34)

Well, I had attempted, and to some extent, to be fair to the guy who said, you'd just leave us and work for a merchant bank. I had been cultivating Bill Overholt in Hong Kong, who was head of Asia Research for Bankers Trust, and he wanted to hire me. And if he had, if his bosses in New York had approved his decision, I would have been on 12 times the salary I was on in Canberra, in one jump.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:35 - 1:35:37)

Sounds pretty good to me. That would have transformed my life, right?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:38 - 1:35:50)

And Bill, I really got on well with, right? And then his bosses said, no, you're not an economist. Forget it.

 

And Bill was not an economist. And he knew me. He wanted me.

 

It didn't happen. And this was one, as you can see, a series of frustrations.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:35:50 - 1:35:54)

Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely, it's critical stages as well.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:35:55 - 1:36:14)

And I'm in my late thirties. I didn't have time to piss far around. And so I left, and it turned out badly in the short term, even the medium term.

 

And I had to leave Canberra and return to Melbourne. There was no future in Canberra.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:36:15 - 1:36:29)

And I think one positive thing in a way that came out of it was that you were able to care for your father in the final years of his life though. And you wouldn't have been able to spend as much time with him had you been up in the bureaucracy in Canberra.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:36:29 - 1:37:17)

I would say nothing of Hong Kong. I mean, if, you know, this is the irony of the way life works. If I'd gone to the Fletcher School and done what I'd planned to do and gone all straight up, I'd have done swimmingly well, and then been on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre in 2001.

 

And sliding doors. If I'd managed to get to Hong Kong in 1995, I would have been on a good week at fascinating, stimulating work, terrific pay. And I would not have been in a position to do other than briefly visit my father as he died or go to the funeral.

 

All right. Instead, I cared for him. I slept so mum could get some sleep.

 

She would sleep at the front of the house and I was at the back of the house with dad. I would sleep on a mattress on the floor. I would get him up at 3am to empty his bladder and put him back to bed like a child and go back to sleep like I was his mother.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:37:18 - 1:37:36)

It's humbling in a way. And you've spoken about that before, about the learning and the growth and the wisdom that comes from not everything in life working out, but you having to sort of take a seemingly like a backward step when not being on that sort of golden staircase to success, fame, fortune, impact.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:37:37 - 1:38:26)

And, you know, we talk about religion in terms of my general background and the way I walked away from Catholicism or religious vocation. But it's important, I think, and I've believed this for a very long time, to get beneath the question of doctrine and declared belief to the fundamental question of psychologically, morally, socially, what's going on that constitutes religion. And in the case of Christianity and in its own way Judaism, the underlying human impulse is a search for metanoia, a search for transcendence over the banal, the fallen, the sinful, the guilt-ridden, the empty.

 

And I was forced to look for that in the late 90s because I had hit the wall. Nothing that I had tried, despite my obvious abilities, had worked out.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:38:26 - 1:38:37)

Yeah. Not romance, not career. Existential.

 

You feel empty and it's all come to naught. Absolutely. You don't have the rock of your faith and your Christian belief to fall back on.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:38:37 - 1:39:34)

So what do you fall back on? I had everything that I might have gleaned from faith because I'd understood what was really going on, right? So it was not a matter of believing some doctrine or believing that there's a life after death.

 

It was a matter of metanoia right here and now. And it seems to me a radical reading of the New Testament says that, in a lot of ways, that's what was really going on for people. Not necessarily that they saw it that way.

 

That's what was going on. That's what St. Paul was about. And so I was humbled.

 

I'd been cast off my horse, so to speak. And it's not that I found Jesus. It was not explicit religious language that happened.

 

It was the humbling, the searching of myself, my soul, the feeling, as I said to my mother, I feel like the prodigal son. You know, there's an available story that you two have been generous to me and I've tried everything. I've borrowed money from you.

 

I've clearly done well. And yet here I am.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:39:35 - 1:40:06)

It hasn't worked. Almost like if you go back to the Old Testament, the book of Job, about constant affliction and feeling of everything you've built being ripped away from you and the future denied you that you ought to have had. And yet the famous, I suppose, lesson of Job is that he doesn't curse God despite his misfortune and so on.

 

He just maintains a faith, although yours is absent of the religious dimension, perhaps a faith in life and a faith in living well despite it all.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:40:06 - 1:41:50)

I wouldn't say faith, actually. I wouldn't use that word. I had to dig deep to get back on my feet, like I'm a soldier in battle.

 

You know, I'm winged or a comrade has been shot. What do I do? Well, I could yell about it being unfair.

 

I could despair. I could shoot myself. I could run away.

 

But there are better alternatives, courageous alternatives, right? And this is what I was searching for. And, you know, to round out Volume Two, as it were, I would say at the invitation of my younger sister, Jane, with whom I'd always been close, two things happened in 1998 that began to turn the situation around.

 

One was that she invited me out to her place every Friday evening to share a meal with her little family and to read to her young sons. And I read The Lord of the Rings to them. And it was a remarkable experience for all concerned.

 

At the same time, at her suggestion, I did something called the Landmark Forum. And people who are listening to this may or may not be aware of Landmark Education Corporation and of the forum. And I know it's been much debated.

 

Is it a cult? Is it a dodgy organisation? All I will say is that I found the programme very stimulating.

 

I kept detailed notes about it. I wrote about my perceptions, my experiences. And it did start to turn the situation around for me from the point of view of what I used earlier with regard to Christianity and my background, metanoia.

 

I got to see myself differently in a liberating way. And it was around that time then that a couple of things happened that Volume Three will unveil.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:41:50 - 1:41:58)

And so you mentioned that the first volume was called Dreaming of Elrond. Do you have a working title briefly for what Volume Two might be called?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:41:59 - 1:42:38)

Yeah, I'm thinking of calling it The Gnomes of Russell Hill. And gnomes there, of course, might be taken to mean garden gnomes. And in one sense, it does, because I found so many people who were, frankly, inadequate.

 

They were very poor analysts. They were bureaucrats. They were careerists.

 

And it was a shambles. I did not come, really, I would say, to respect the system of defence and intelligence that I found. There were some good individuals, and some of them I'm still friends with.

 

And I won respect for my abilities. But I couldn't find a career path forward. And I didn't like most of what I saw.

 

I was, frankly, scornful of all of the analysis I saw.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:42:38 - 1:42:43)

Right, right. So gnomes in another way, being small and...

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:42:44 - 1:42:50)

Yes, yes, gnomes in that sense. Gnomes is another word, of course, for people in the secret world. So they were both.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:42:50 - 1:43:09)

Indeed. Right, so the third volume. We're here, third and final volume.

 

And notwithstanding, there might be a fourth and fifth, depending on how things go. But this is entering, I suppose, around the age of 40. You've got to reinvent yourself again.

 

You're back in Melbourne. Obviously, you've been there to look after your dying father.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:43:10 - 1:43:12)

Who died in 1997, I should add.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:43:12 - 1:43:12)

Right.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:43:12 - 1:43:23)

I gave the eulogy at his funeral and the keynote to my address to a packed church, to my astonishment. There was 600 people there. And I said to them, and elaborated on this, my father was a good man.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:43:27 - 1:43:32)

And that's all we should hope to be ultimately, isn't it? In the final calling of it all.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:43:32 - 1:44:08)

It means a lot more than piling up money or exerting power or bullying other people to get to the top of the greasy political pole or whatever. He was a good man. He was a humble man, as he himself had said.

 

And I said to him, as I remarked earlier, well, I'm bloody well not. And I wouldn't say now that I'm a humble man in that sense. I insist on asking questions, and I won't settle for nonsense.

 

But I don't think I'm an arrogant person. What was your father's name? John.

 

So my grandfather's Percy Maxwell Monk. My father's John Maxwell Monk. I'm Paul Maxwell Monk.

 

Very good.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:44:09 - 1:44:25)

But I think the turning point, as we've talked to, comes through your college friend Tim Van Gelder and his proposal to start up a critical thinking consulting firm, which sparked off a really a bit of a renaissance in your life.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:44:26 - 1:46:45)

Yeah, it did. And Tim, I may have remarked earlier, like Ralph King, was somebody I met at Ormond College. So the chance factor, the sliding doors factor, of having chosen to go to Ormond in 1981, and it may even have been, I'd have to check this with him, at his suggestion that I do that, because I may have met him.

 

But I honestly can't remember without checking. But at any rate, I'd met him there, and we'd struck a rapport, and we'd stayed in touch. And I'd visited him in the US in 1984.

 

He was doing his PhD over there in philosophy. And in 1996 or 7, around the same time that I left government in disarray, he left the United States, came back to Australia, thinking, I've got to reinvent myself, because I thought I could be a great philosopher. I don't think I can.

 

I'm a good philosopher, but I'll never be a great one. And I've got to figure out, well, what do I do for a career? So we were in some ways at similar points in our lives.

 

He's younger than me. By 1998, I'm 42. He would have been about 37.

 

And he asked me for a coffee one day, and he said, look, Edward de Bono has made millions. He's made a fortune peddling ideas that no one in cognitive science even finds interesting. There's really good work in cognitive science.

 

What if we took that good work and took it to the market, right, for corporate clients, government clients? And we talked about this, and I thought, well, that sounds interesting. And at least we can do no holds barred analytical work and instructional work, whereas trying to do that in government had been frustrating and unrewarding.

 

And who knows? We might make millions, right? At least we could make a good living.

 

And as I've often rightly remarked to people, well, we did for about 15 years make a good living. We never made a lot of money for a variety of reasons. What this meant was a new opening, right?

 

It was not the kind of opening I'd sought to engineer for the previous 20 years, but it was an opening. And we got on well, and we did innovative things, interesting things. And ironically, given my security vetting history and my disgruntlement with the Australian government in the intelligence world, the first client was ASIO.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:46:46 - 1:46:46)

Mm-hmm. How about that?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:46:48 - 1:47:53)

And it's because an old colleague of mine from ANU, who had worked in the intelligence world for years and had a lot of respect for me, rang me up and said, Dennis Richardson, then heading ASIO, wants me to design a new six-week training programme. For intelligence analysts, could you and Tim design, say, four days on critical thinking? And I said, I reckon we can.

 

So we drew up a programme for four days, sent it to him. About a fortnight passed, and he got back to me. He said, well, I developed a six-week programme, including all of your stuff.

 

I put it in front of Dennis, and he looked at it. He saw your work, and he said, that's what I want. More of that.

 

Forget the rest. And so we then got to run not a six-week programme, but a full week programme for ASIO analysts. And Dennis said, I want every member of ASIO, all the staff, to do this course.

 

He wanted, he said very candidly, I think intelligently, not to suddenly turn them all into expert critical thinkers, but to change the conversation within the organisation as to what constituted good thinking. That was savvy.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:47:54 - 1:48:02)

Because often they'd be doing analysis, but not thinking about how they do it and how it could be done better. It's that sort of meta approach to learning, right? Precisely so.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:48:02 - 1:48:26)

We had a very interesting time designing courses. And we made a good team because Tim was the theoretician, right? And he'd studied, and he'd taught critical thinking.

 

And unlike me, he was also tech savvy, and he conceived the idea and then did the design for a software programme that we could use to run facilitated workshops and training workshops.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:48:26 - 1:48:27)

The rationale.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:48:27 - 1:48:59)

Yeah, rationale and then decisive was the final product. In fact, reasonable was the first, then rationale, then decisive for what it's worth. I was the content specialist.

 

So if you wanted a case study, I'd analyse case studies, right? And so we looked at the Cuban Missile Crisis. We looked at the Kennedy assassination.

 

And so these were all really interesting case studies. Or we looked even in terms of training hypothesis testing at the Great Dying, the Permian mass extinction, and hypotheses regarding why did this happen? What's going on?

 

This was all really interesting stuff. And I was the content specialist.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:48:59 - 1:49:23)

Around the time of the tech boom as well. So the internet's coming on stream, software and computer technology is developing. You're sort of there at the beginning of the wave, as they say.

 

But at the same time, you also had a bit of a flourishing as a writer. You took on work with the Financial Review, publishing essays almost weekly in the FinRev. You had been doing, I think, through the 90s, other stuff in print as well?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:49:23 - 1:51:12)

I'd done some in the 90s. In fact, even when I was in DIO, I regularly wrote book reviews and occasionally opinion pieces for the Canberra Times and the Melbourne H. This probably would have been prohibited in our time.

 

But instead, it just added to my standing, I think, as an intellectual. And there was finally a deputy director at DIO in my last year there, who I think took a bit of a set against me. But in particular, he pulled me up on this.

 

And he didn't say that this is unacceptable and you're fired. He said, you know, you shouldn't have been writing like this. And I said, well, none of your predecessors had a problem with my doing it or anything I wrote.

 

And he says, well, I do. And they should have. And he said, so from this point forward, effective immediately, you're not to publish anything without my explicit permission.

 

And you're to run drafts of anything you're writing past me. And I said, well, we need to understand one another here. If you're saying I should avoid writing in the press about anything to do with my professional work, I understand.

 

But I don't. I write about films. I write about philosophy.

 

I write about biographies of people like Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein. That's got nothing to do with my duties here. And I frankly don't see, did you have any role in interfering in that?

 

And he said, my instruction stands. And I said, well, then I'd like to see the small print regarding my rights and responsibilities. He said, you can look that up.

 

But my instruction stands. Goodness. Right.

 

And he said, you need to understand that you're not an intellectual, you're a civil servant, and you're not entitled to hold and express views that haven't been cleared by a public relations department. To which I responded, I'm sorry, I disagree. I am an intellectual.

 

And I'm here because I believe I have something to offer. If I was to conclude that what I have to offer is not wanted, I will not be staying.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:51:13 - 1:51:34)

It's an indictment on your former workplace, but also validating in the sense that you found a work environment with Tim and at Austhink where you could actually have the headspace to ascend and to be a full self and to be an intellectual as well as being a businessman and a facilitator and a coach.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:51:35 - 1:53:10)

In fact, it enhanced my reputation. I got a national reputation as an essayist through that work with the Financial Review. I have a very good relationship with the editor of the FinRev, the Friday Review.

 

Hugh Lamberton. And he had me writing on anything I was all fit to do. And so I wrote about all sorts of things.

 

And as a result, two books came out of those essays. One a book on China. Thunder from the Silent Zone.

 

Published in 2005, the first edition. Second edition in 2023 with a new preface. And the second, The West in a Nutshell.

 

30 essays on the origins and nature of Western civilisation. So that was not wasted work. And I got a lot of praise for that.

 

In fact, one of the many anecdotes around that was that Jeff Raby, when he was appointed our ambassador to China many years ago, was about to depart a week or two away from leaving. And his EA rang me up and said, Ambassador Raby would like to take you out for dinner. He's coming to Melbourne.

 

Would you accept my invitation to dinner? I said, absolutely. I'd known Jeff when in government.

 

And so we sat down to dinner at a good restaurant. And he leaned across the table and said, I can't emphasise too much how I look forward to your essays and the financial review on Fridays. They're so well informed.

 

They cover so much ground. And they saved me from reading all sorts of books that I would like to read, don't have time to read. But you read them and understand them.

 

And I said, that's very sweet of you to say that. He said, no, I really mean that.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:53:11 - 1:53:38)

And I thought, this is really nice. I think a lot of people would feel the same. You've read your works over the years.

 

And I think when you put out that volume of collected essays, opinions, and articles, opinions, and reflections, you've had a lot of feedback from people saying that they have admired your work from afar. You know, I have, friends of mine have. And I make me wonder why you didn't sort of try to become a full-time writer or a Bloomsbury essayist, as you put it.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:53:39 - 1:54:55)

Oh, it's funny you should use that term. Because as I think you know, in the foreword or the preface to the Western in a nutshell, I tell an anecdote without naming Ralph about how he'd asked me before he headed to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, what's your dream at this point about how you'd like to end up in life? The kind of person you'd like to be, you know, when all's said and done?

 

I said, oh, well, you know, because at this point, I was still having to get to the Fletcher School. I said, I want to end up a merchant banker and move among the movers and shakers. How about you?

 

And he said, I'd like to be a Bloomsbury essayist. And I commented in that preface, as fate would have it, he had a very successful career as a diplomat, and I ended up the Bloomsbury essayist. Yeah.

 

Right. But your question prompts a remark. Because just as Tim and I set up Austin, and we were starting to do this work with ASIO and other clients, two things happened in rapid succession.

 

The first was that Claudia, who had been lecturing in Mexico, arranged with Tim to fly into Melbourne to do our JFK workshop and explore the possibility of graduate studies at Melbourne University in philosophy. And I was the one that was agreed who would go and meet her at the airport. And we hit it off on day one.

 

And six months later, we were married.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:54:55 - 1:54:56)

Wow.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:54:56 - 1:56:34)

She lived with me for the next three years. And so this was a big change in my life. And we'll come back to that in a moment.

 

The second was that she got, at the end of 2004, the year she flew in, she got offered a double scholarship to do a master's by research in philosophy at Melbourne University. It's really a feather in a cap. And I had arranged to marry her.

 

And then I was told I had a melanoma. And this threw everything into a tailspin. Where was this going to go?

 

Would I survive this? Where would it leave Claudia if I didn't, or if I was chronically ill? What about the business, right?

 

And so I'm just getting on my feet again. I've got this wonderful new partner. And suddenly, everything's in jeopardy.

 

Cruel twist of fate, isn't it? Well, yeah. And there'd been a few, right?

 

So again, the challenge is, well, there's what's so, and there's how you respond. And I remember very well the day I was told by my GP that I had melanoma. He was pale.

 

He knew where this could go and thought probably would. And he said, you must be feeling panic-stricken. And I said, not at all.

 

No, we'll deal with this the best way we can. We'll cross each bridge as we get to it. That's the way I genuinely felt.

 

I didn't feel panicked. I didn't feel anxious. In fact, I even said to Claudia when the thing occurred, well, you know, many of the poets and musicians and others whom I most admired died young.

 

It's sort of romantic to die young. And it's getting a bit late in the day. If I'm going to do it, I better get on with it.

 

And she said vehemently, it would not be romantic. It would be terrible.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (1:56:36 - 1:57:00)

Claudia was really the one who gave you licence to become a writer and a poet, as we've remarked in a couple of separate podcasts. And is that where you sort of feel like you're full of self? You know, you had dabbled in it, obviously doing writings in the press and things came into light though through Claudia and the subsequent couple of decades after meeting her.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (1:57:00 - 2:01:22)

Yeah. Yeah, it did. I mean, she is a terrific person and she's full of energy and vision and thoughtfulness.

 

And she was drawn to me because she admired what I'd already achieved, what I was doing with Tim. And in fact, and this is certainly a story I'll tell in Volume 3, we went for a walk one day and we disagree about exactly where we're walking and which direction, which is strange. But we agreed that the walk happened and that she said what I can remember.

 

And that is, she turned to me and with complete ease and self-confidence, with a kind of smile, she said, there's something I have to say to you. And that is that I'm Alma Maler. And I know a genius when I see one.

 

You're going to be doing some really interesting things in the next few years. And I want to be part of it. And I was blown away.

 

I thought, what an amazing pitch. And for those who don't know who she was, Alma Maler was a famous beauty 130 years ago in Vienna. And she probably could have had her pick of men.

 

And she rather fancied Gustav Mahler, who was 20 years older than her. But he was the maestro of the Vienna Opera. And she set her sights on him, wiggled her bottom at him, so to speak, and won her man.

 

And they married. And then, as with many marriages, it didn't turn out as happily as she would probably have dreamed. He was very absorbed in his work.

 

He wasn't a great, passionate lover. He was very much in his own head. And she ended up taking other lovers and then leaving him.

 

He was heartbroken, actually, by that, because in his own way, he did love her. And she famously married two other men and had other lovers in between, as Tom Lehrer famously sang in a satirical song. And so I thought, and she's saying, I'm Alma Maler.

 

And I'm thinking, so am I Gustav Franz Werfel, or who am I in your beguine? But she had a gift for insight and, you might say, aphorism, and two had a catalytic and lasting influence on me. The first was one day, I'd say about 2005, maybe 2006, I met her after work one day coming out of the office.

 

I had a suit and tie on. I was carrying a briefcase. And she said to me, you look like a businessman.

 

I said, well, I am a businessman. And she said, no, you're a writer and a poet. That was how she saw me.

 

And that was seen through the facades of my efforts to be a businessman. And the third volume is called A Writer and a Poet for precisely that reason, that she, I think you even used this phrase yourself, gave me the licence to say, that's really who I am. Yes, it is.

 

The deepest and most authentic self. Exactly so. And in the years since then, starting with that catalytic impact, that's who I've become.

 

And that's why the third volume has that title. But the second thing she said has to do so with the idea of autobiography, which we're speaking of here. And that is when she said to me, with a smile again, do you realise that we are living a story that has not yet been written?

 

In other words, we're the authors of our own story. And when I visited her, because we parted after three and a half years, she went back to Venezuela with my agreement, though I was Greece stricken. She felt she just had to go back to be herself.

 

And I ultimately, and in fact, from the start, was very supportive. In wanting her deepest happiness. I mean, you would obviously, right?

 

I said exactly so. I said to her, listen, if you believe, having thought about it, that to flourish, you need to go back to Venezuela, then that's what you should do. And I love you, and now I want to see you flourish.

 

And I said to her, you know, my favourite tag about what love is, and I think I've said this to you in one of our prior podcasts, is St. Augustine's remark, that the definition of love is that you say to the other person, you enact in regard to the other person, volu utsis, I wish that you may be. Right? That's to love another.

 

If you don't love a person, you use them up, you disregard their inner self, their flourishing, whatever, which happens grievously often. But I was clear that that's what I wanted. I wanted to see her flourish.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:01:22 - 2:01:22)

Yeah.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:01:23 - 2:01:27)

And she has. She's done magnificently back there, in all the circumstances.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:01:28 - 2:01:42)

And the relationship has changed over the course of the subsequent decades, where you're still companions, right? So you talk all the time, you share everything with each other. We're closer.

 

Travel and virtual means when you're not together.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:01:42 - 2:02:03)

Yeah. There are a lot of stories to tell in that regard. And some of them, as I think you're aware, are told in the poems I wrote for her in the first part of The Three Graces.

 

But we are now closer as two human beings, more trusting, more affectionate, more grateful for the other's being and love than ever. I think that's one of the great achievements of my personal life.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:02:03 - 2:02:03)

Yeah.

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:02:03 - 2:02:57)

And it's a story well worth telling. And in fact, in 2016, when I visited her in Venezuela, I said to her, we were walking in a public square in Caracas, and I said, you know, someday perhaps somebody will write a story about us. And I might call the book The Mentor and the Muse.

 

And she said to me, Frodo, which has, of course, been her nickname for me from the start, Frodo Baggins. She said, Frodo, what you don't understand is the book's going to be about me. You'll probably get mentioned in it, but it's going to be about me.

 

And I laughed, and I gave her a hug, and I said, I hope so. That's a wonderful idea. I hope it is.

 

And then in 2019, when I again visited her in Venezuela, she invited me to sit in on a class, an MBA class she was teaching for the biggest business school in Venezuela, IESA. And she didn't introduce me to the class as her husband. She said, Paul is my best friend in the whole world and my mentor.

 

That's high praise.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:02:57 - 2:03:15)

Yeah. But in important ways, she has been a mentor to you as well with regards to encouraging your writing and poetry. And a lot of the cycles of poems and poems that you wrote for her ended up constituting what became The Three Graces.

 

So do you want to talk about some of the key works you've written in recent years?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:03:16 - 2:05:17)

Yeah. Well, that one was certainly a big breakthrough, right? And we'll probably conclude with what came afterwards, right?

 

Although we discussed that in the podcast on poetry. But Claudia and I travelled a lot. And we've actually, we realised, been to every continent, at least briefly, other than Antarctica.

 

We've been to Israel. We've been to Morocco. We've been to many parts of Western Europe.

 

We've been to the United States, Boston, Washington, New York. We've been together to Argentina, to Panama, Venezuela, of course. You know, I've been also to Peru, to...oh, we've also been together to the Dominican Republic. We've both been in Brazil, but not together. So there's a lot there. But when we went to Morocco together, two things happened.

 

One is they wouldn't let her in because she had a Venezuelan passport and they have a regulation. Essentially because 7 million people have fled the Maduro and Chavez governments in Venezuela and people don't want refugees flooding in. So never mind that she had a U.S. and EU passport and that she was with me and I could vouch for her, pardon me, but she couldn't get in. And so I had to put her on a plane back to Madrid at midnight. A bit of a drama. But we handled it.

 

I proceeded to do my fieldwork in Morocco. And when I was about to fly back via Singapore, I suddenly had this almost visceral sensation that I was a dam of poetry about to burst. And that's what happened.

 

Over the following year, I wrote well over 100 poems, more than I'd written in all the years prior to that. And they were all addressed to Claudia, but they included all sorts of poems. I wrote poems about my early life, about my early reading, about my education, about our travels, about our relationship.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:05:17 - 2:05:24)

Touches on that idea of different modes or forms of autobiography we mentioned at the start of the conversation, doesn't it?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:05:24 - 2:09:01)

And also, of course, I had by then written, but not finished, Darkness Over Love. And when I said to her, I think what it is, even incomplete, is a massive psychodynamic attempt to reframe my sense of self. And she said, yes, I agree.

 

Right. And she's also sent me a couple of times in recent years a photo of the cover of that book, which, of course, she has a copy of, and said, why don't we finish this story? Why don't we finish this story?

 

And did a lovely way to phrase it. And as much as any single incident, I think what encapsulates the progress we've made as two human beings, I would say man and wife, except that we don't cohabit. We don't have a child.

 

We don't have a sexual relationship. But she said to me, we'd been in Spain and Switzerland, and we were about to go separate ways. At the airport in Geneva, she said to me, Frodo, I'll name again, I intend to live until I'm 92, and I want you along for the duration.

 

And I said, well, that's a very sweet thing to say, but I'd be 104, and I'm not really sure you'd want me around. That's charming. And so to round out, because I think we probably need to do that now, and briefly, because in the poetry podcast we've just done, we go into this in detail, but what followed The Three Graces, substantively, was just a continuing outpouring of poetry.

 

And from July 2021, all of it was for Rachel. And that has felt like the culminating experience of my life, so far at least. And I give credit, as I've said to Claudia, for urging me to embrace being a writer and a poet, but I never imagined that this would occur.

 

It came seemingly out of the blue. And it came because she, as she herself has put it, that is Rachel, had admired my work, including my essays in the press, for some time before venturing to get in touch and saying, you're a damn fine poet. I want a poem.

 

And this has led to another extended exercise in love and intimacy at a distance, because she has not been with me. She's on the other side of the world, like Claudia. And I've had to work very hard at, so who is this person really?

 

How does her mind work? What does she really want? Does she understand the poetry?

 

Answer, very much so. Is that the only thing she wants? Well, yes.

 

But above all, she wants poetry. She wants a poetic intimacy. And although it's been tough not being able to, you know, in a normal sense, be with her, dine with her, sleep with her, kiss her, look into her eyes, hold her hands, I've had, for that very reason, to work very hard at thinking with all integrity, what is it that I really want ultimately?

 

And the answer, going all the way back to my manifesto, is I want authentic love and profound, poetic intimacy. And we have developed that. And that's extraordinary, right?

 

And so we're now at a position where I've got two big books of poetry for her, which I hope will be published next year. And I think this, partly for that very reason, is the point at which to write an autobiography.

 

[Nick Fabbri] (2:09:03 - 2:09:34)

And as a closing message, how would you kind of seek to encapsulate the, I guess, the overall, how would you weigh up and assess the overall breadth and depth of your life? You know, you've just sort of done a speed run through, basically, every single phase of your life and a couple of the key moments of things. Well, how would you like to be remembered from someone who reads this autobiography in a year or two years' time?

 

And how would you like to be thought of and sort of acknowledged as?

 

[Dr. Paul Monk] (2:09:36 - 2:11:33)

I think one could answer it in a number of ways, but what springs to mind, and therefore for present purposes, this is the way I'll put it, is that I measure myself, I think I said something like this earlier, against the lives, the achievements of figures past. And they principally consist of poets and philosophers. Philosophers.

 

So how do I stack up against Percy Shelley or Lord Byron? How do I stack up against, say, Barack de Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche? Even to ask that question, even to feel that that is a natural question to ask, tells a lot about how I've come to see my life.

 

And what I can say is I know their life stories. I know their achievements. I acknowledge their achievements.

 

I have actually travelled further, read more widely, written a greater variety of work, and written a calibre of work as good as anything any of them produced. It would be fatuous to say that if I couldn't justify those claims. I could quite comfortably do so.

 

I think that's remarkable. And that's not something I'm boasting about. It's something I'm actually astonished and grateful for.

 

And it's at that level that I now conduct my friendships, my two intimate relationships with two remarkable women. I write my love poetry in that spirit. And I feel that whether I overcome my present medical challenges and live another 20 years, or whether I write the autobiography but then go over the waterfall, I have lived a worthwhile life.

 

I'm grateful for the life I've had. And I rejoice in the work I've written. Thank you, Paul.

 

Might not want to talk to you today.

Nick Fabbri