I said that this deceptive casualness was never more apparent than in the US where the rules of casual dress were excruciatingly finely tuned among all strata—the sophisticated, the moneyed and the popular styles.
In the forties, the American writer Edmund Wilson was noted to have worn a button-down Oxford shirt on the beach, which was taken as evidence that he didn’t know how to dress or that he was resisting the casual doctrine.
And, by the way, you don’t wear socks with your Sebagos while in the Hamptons.
The Duc is always interested, although with some consternation, by how we eat in Australia, the casualness of it.
It is so vastly different to the way we live at the château (two hours for breakfast, three hours for lunch, and five hours for dinner), so consequently I was able to engage his attention, if his staring fixedly into space was, in fact, evidence of an ‘engagement of attention’, by telling him of the first time I ate camembert after a childhood which had known only Kraft cheddar. A cheese I loved at the time. (I’d have to reassess it now in the light of my rich and extensive experiences with cheese, gender and life.)
I owe the experience of my first camembert (and this is a true story) to Adrian Rawlings, whom I salute as a bon vivant and one of life’s great voyageurs.
I was on my first visit to Melbourne. A group from Sydney’s bohemia known as the Push had gone to Melbourne to meet up with our equivalent there. I was in my early twenties.
We were being guided by Darcy Waters, who had not himself been to Melbourne since the First World War. He was dismayed to find that old cafés, coffee-houses and billiard salons had disappeared. John Wren did not answer his telephone.
We eventually joined up at whatever hotel in Carlton was then in favour. That night there was a party and, much to my astonishment, one wall was decorated with covers and copies of little magazines in which I had published my short stories—at that point, maybe six.
It was the first time I had found evidence that I had a readership, let alone a readership in another city. It was such an unexpected tribute and I remember being flushed with pleasure, or with whatever.
Maybe I was a little giddy, because I met another young writer (who, in deference to his family, will remain unnamed) and we talked together much of the night and we danced together.
This was the first time I had danced with a man.
We also did other nice things with each other, one or two which were for me a first time but that is another story.
It was one of those parties where guests went to sleep in whatever part of the house they eventually fell, and woke up next morning in baths, armchairs, on the floor or in vacant beds or not-vacant beds.
The household would gradually awake after the sound of the first tap being turned on. The first flush of a toilet. The first smoker’s hawking cough.
As we pulled ourselves together on this bright Melbourne Saturday morning, Adrian Rawlings, being the senior ranking bohemian present, suggested we go to Jimmy Watson’s for brunch.
We went down to this renowned Carlton restaurant and found a table in the sunny courtyard. Adrian decreed that we should have only a camembert fermier and a light red Victorian wine, which he ordered.
I had not even heard the word camembert before. Or fermier.
It was perfectly ripe, just beginning to run, with a spirited nose and at the right temperature. I had never experienced such a perfect commingling of wan sun, of cheerful restaurant noises, of hangover lassitude, of the Victorian wine, and night flavours (the particular night flavours of my night), together with the elemental pungency of this remarkable cheese (having unexpectedly stayed in a strange house without my toothbrush, my mouth had none of the ‘hygienic’ sterility of toothpaste to spoil it).
The nameless boy with whom I danced, etc., and with whom I ate camembert for the first time, jumped to his death from a window the next year from a high-rise building in the central business district.
Now occasionally when I taste a camembert which is at a particular temperature, has the same spirited aroma, is with the right wine, when I feel a certain strength of sunlight, I am visited by a sombre but not joyless mood and that occasion in Melbourne returns to me and I taste again one of the true beginnings of my adult life.
I finished my recollection and we sat in a still, pensive silence, or what I took to be silence on the Duc’s part but which could have been a coma.
The servants, who often gather around when I am talking, sighed at the poignancy of the story—the meeting of my youthfulness with camembert, with sophistication and with death.
The Duc did become nobly animated and clapped, or what I took to be clapping—his hands did not quite meet—and he ordered the musicians to play the drums slowly and to play the fifes lowly.
We all sat there on that chill Normandy morning, each in his or her own thoughts as the elegiac music carried across the winter fields to where the peasants were already at work hoeing.
I could tell that my story had set the day right and I was again, for a time, in the Duc’s favour.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
What is the
CONSPIRACY
behind nature charts?
BACK HERE in Australia I reported to the Ministry of Australianness to answer the charge of Having Been Away Too Long.
As one of the investigating officers said to me, ‘People visiting you in France reported that you were showing signs of refinement.’
I intend to call witnesses and fight these allegations.
I was sent on a De-Overseasing Course in the Flinders Ranges.
I had to relearn how to eat meat pies without spilling sauce or meat on the toes of my shoes.
It is a matter of remembering that the rigidity of the pie depends on the ring of reinforced crust and that you must keep this in place as long as possible by eating into the pie towards the centre. You should also bring into play a liquid reduction technique by slurping the liquid out of the pie at every bite.
As most of us discovered in our Australian childhood, the whitish, almost soggy, soft-cooked pastry of the pie tray is the best part.
It is not only the best part but it is the point of weakness in the pie structure where all hell can break loose if you don’t watch it.
I believe that it is possible to eat a pie not only without spilling gravy onto the toes of your shoes, but also to avoid any flake of pastry landing on clothing or on the floor. Some people leave a dandruff field of crust around them.
To use the aluminium foil dish as a safety net, or as a catching tray, is prissy.
I hold that leaning forward while eating a pie is inelegant and shows lack of confidence. I also have a belief from childhood that you should be able to eat a pie regardless of how hot it is.
The trick is in the cooling of the first contact with the hot gravy. This is done firstly by blowing, loudly and obviously, and then by bringing a flow of saliva to the front of the mouth as a barrier to the hot gravy and as a way of diluting the incoming heat, again with as much saliva noise as possible.
The Adelaide pie with peas is another problem and another dish requiring another essay.
I had to do all the other Australian tests such as throwing a knife and making it stick blade first into a tree, singing the Aeroplane Jelly song, telling farting jokes with sound effects, stealing drinks from the minibar of hotels, and ducking out on the tip in restaurants.
I was jeered at when I inadvertently dressed for dinner, appearing without jeans or the T-shirt inscribed with the message ‘I don’t give a stuff’.
I was mocked when I ate the head meat of the crab. I spent the night in the guard house for that.
The next morning at the confession session I had to admit to the Unrepentant Marxist Inquisitors that the French have placed too high an ideological expectation on cheese as a means of social transformation.
I received much abuse when I admitted having eaten cheese made from human breast milk at a rather strange little dinner party whi
ch the Duc organised in Beaulieu with his personal entourage, but that is very much another story. For this, I nearly spent another night in the guard house.
On the fourth night I said bugger this for a game of soldiers and went over the fence and got on to a plane to France.
On my return to France, pale and shaken, the Duc met me with the four-in-hand and a nurse.
With great consideration, I was helped into the four-in-hand and a finely woven cashmere travelling rug was spread over my knees. A silver travelling cup of Cognac was handed to me and some coulibiac of salmon.
I thought the Duc looked much recovered from his stroke, although during the journey back to the château one of his muscular spasms hurled him on to the lead horse and he slipped down under its hooves.
No harm done. A good trample does us the power of good from time to time. Especially when done by high heels, although in my experience horses’ hooves will do. Please check with your doctor before undertaking these forms of exercise.
So here I am back in France at the Duc’s deuxième château in my high-winged Colloquy Chair with its gout rest, watching the autumn leaves falling to reveal the centuries-old skeleton of the tree branches, what Marlowe rather banally called ‘the wondrous architecture of the world…’, waiting for the snow, listening to the bop of shotguns as the villagers go after partridge, pheasant, hares and so on which the Duc’s staff will prepare for dinner.
As I looked out at the landscape from this mountain château I told the Duc that I did not join in the general acclamation of the panorama as seen from a high vantage point, commonly encouraged by ‘look-outs’ or viewing platforms.
I argued that the high-vantage panorama which most people enjoy is lordly—a distanced and organised relationship. The Duc seemed puzzled by this as best he could and struggled to imagine how the world looked to those who were not ‘lordly’. (This problem reminded me of when I first began to play chess with the Duc. He pointed out that for me it was a game but that he, himself, was a chess piece. It obviously gave the game a different emphasis for him.)
I said that I thought most people needed to be able to see defined zones in nature—zones of horizon, a defined ‘fore’ ground and ‘middle’ ground and a sky ‘line’.
Often other reassuring natural boundaries or lines are present. This gives the viewer control because the lines of nature thus perceived carry the suggestion of mapping—the navigational capture of nature.
I, myself, receive much stronger sensations from immersion in the forest, that is, by plunging in and being enveloped.
It is a confrontation with Gothic nature and a surrendering to its prickly, existential embrace.
You need to have a strong personality to expose yourself to such sensory impact and I count myself as being one of the fortunate few in this respect, and whenever I have described my approach to nature to Europeans, I notice that I rise in the listeners’ estimation.
However, the Duc simply dribbled what I took to be a reply.
I told him that I am curious about the fashionable predilection for nature wall charts which are, again, at the other end of the spectrum from the panorama but show the same human need for organisation in nature.
These nature charts or tabulations of fauna and flora in their various categories—shellfish, bird life, mushrooms and so on—are now produced throughout the world, especially by National Park authorities.
An old man in the nearby village estaminet tells me that these charts have a long history (there is always someone around in this country to tell you that whatever it is ‘has a long history’).
He remembers them at least as far back as the fourth century. They were used to identify plants, especially for pharmaceutical purposes (the charts were called Herbals) or for gastronomic reasons, but also, he thought, as pattern books for tapestry designers. I rather enjoy the company of tapestry designers.
What is our interest today in wall charts of nature?
The only time I have offered a gift and had it refused was when I offered a chart of The Mushrooms of East Coast Australia to the then editor of the Sydney Review, and he refused it on the grounds that literal identification of common objects was not the purpose of art nor of decoration.
Teaching aids, he said, were not his idea of a gift at all. Or any kind of aids. It gave me cause for thought. I realised that he was recalling Paracelsus, who said that to explore nature one must read her books with one’s feet (mit den Füssen ihre Bücher treten).
When we put up the chart of all the sea-shells of the east coast of Australia, we are, figuratively, garnering or amassing them, and we feel as if we at last know the extent of the boundary of that particular small world.
We are given existential relief from the discomfort of living in an endless and unknown universe.
Michael Levey reminds us that maps began to be used as interior decoration in the 1500s. I think that maps probably gave this existential relief even more potently back then.
Now we can look at the chart and believe that what we see there on the chart is all that there is to see when it comes to sea-shells or whatever.
Furthermore, there are their names, common and Latin. If we went on picking up different shells, ultimately we might have them all.
At this point of existential relief the usefulness of the chart ceases. I suspect that the charts are also a gesture towards ‘green guilt’, a guilt some people feel when they do not know the names of plants and insects and birds.
As though remembering the names of the plants and birds is somehow more courteous.
As visual ‘collections’ the charts can offer only tepid collector-satisfaction. The charts are, after all, only an illustration of a collection, not really a collection.
The charts could be used as an aid to the collector who goes out and seeks the sea-shells or whatever in nature. The collector then experiences perhaps an instant of exhilaration followed again by the almost immediate emptiness of completion, of having finished the game and finding him or herself with a pile of silly shells which mimic the now pointless wall chart.
The act of mounting the charts on the wall is also followed by an emptiness.
I, myself, have experienced this.
I intended to mount charts which I have bought but I do not seem to have got around to it. In my mind’s eye I see them as decorating my gun and tack room. Something in me holds back. They remain with the other items of my life which I intend one day to ‘frame’, my birth certificate, my IKEA speed assembly certificate.
They would then become, perhaps, recognition aids for my hunting, or emblematic trophies, or may even be defensible as thematic and atmospheric decoration.
The capture of nature in wall charts is ultimately too removed and too effortless to be gratifying. ‘One must read her books with one’s feet,’ etc.
That’s right, isn’t it, Duc?
Duc?
It may be going too far, however I cannot help but think that there is an echo of medieval magic lurking in these charts.
We are getting a medieval thrill from having nature ‘exposed’, revealed and placed within human purview.
In the medieval sense, these wall charts of nature are a mutiny in the face of the mystery of divinity rather than a celebration of it.
With these charts we are dabbling in necromancy and other dark arts.
If we can capture and display, as a trophy, all the categories of nature, we can also do the same with the divine and with other dark secrets of life.
They are charts of secrets and consequently they still have the dwindling remnants of the medieval. They are like pages from the Magia Naturalis (1551) or from De historia stirpium commentarii (1542).
I could see that the Duc’s credulity was being stretched here. The Duc had made a grimace or what I take to be a grimace.
It could be that he is smiling, and I will not press the point.
To conclude, I have heard people say that the beauty of these nature charts is that they c
elebrate the variety of nature, e.g., ‘Gee, see how many different sorts of parrots there are!’
This may be something to be made aware of but to use it as a justification for a permanent display on our domestic walls is unconvincing.
Behind all this there is a propaganda purpose for these charts.
They are produced to create an ‘awareness’, especially among children, of the ‘bountiful wonder of nature’ and as such, serve the new religions of nature which lurk within the otherwise sound sections of the green movement.
The other propaganda purpose is to boast of the natural ‘riches’ of Australia to attract tourists.
In France the charts tend to be propaganda to remind people of the abundance of, and to encourage the enjoyment of, foods—cheeses, apples, mushrooms (and to warn of lethal kinds).
Maybe the Australian fishery charts have this in mind, also.
The nature charts are saying that we should admire these creatures and protect them on the bizarre grounds that they are varied and that they are colourful.
‘Protect’, in a simple-minded green sense, means that they shouldn’t be hunted or eaten. Which the Duc and I believe is nonsense.
The message of these charts, as ever, is in the eye of the beholder.
Chef Bilson and I, for instance, would look at them as culinary guides for parrot pie.
The Duc, who was, as it turns out, not asleep, seemed to understand exactly what I meant and twitched with an agitated excitement and called for his chef and his head huntswoman.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Difficulty in EXPLAINING
how the Australian
household WORKS
THE DUC was, as ever, curious about the way Australians live and especially the domestic relationship between the sexes. When I say curious I should elaborate.
The Duc expresses his ‘curiosity’ by coming very close to the face of the person to whom his curiosity is directed.
When I say close I mean skin to skin. He stares into the eyes of the person from whom he is trying to solicit information. It is not a socially comfortable closeness but because I am beholden to him for his generous patronage of my leisured life in the arts, I have to put up with it, feudal though it may be.
Loose Living Page 8
