Grand Days

by Frank Moorhouse

  She had no intention of becoming a loose woman, and she considered that perhaps carnal experiences with three men before marriage was the boundary line between a modern woman and a loose woman.

  She wrote down on a fresh page the word ‘Intimacy’ and then ‘(i) bizarre (ii) decorous’. Maybe these bizarre places she’d visited were good to visit but could not be encompassed as part of, or within, an orderly and natural life. She’d tried to tell Florence that was why they were on the Continent, to go off the rails a couple of times. But truth be known, she could not really account for that tumble into the outlandish in Paris or the nature of her carnal life with Ambrose.

  But anyhow, it all belonged to her youth which was rapidly passing.

  She decided to add ‘Youth’ to the heading ‘Intimacy (i) bizarre (ii) decorous’. She inserted the names of ‘the men so far’ in the section called Youth and then ruled a line. She then added ‘(iii) married’.

  She stopped then, realising that she had no rules for the handling or classifying of carnal experience. Proceeding from the mild to the stronger? As with the eating of cheese? It certainly had not happened that way. What, indeed, were the ‘stronger’ experiences? Nor did she have a life plan about what she expected from carnality. Indeed, she did not have the knowledge with which to make such a plan, although she certainly had more knowledge now than when she’d arrived on the Continent.

  Thinking of Robert Dole and about finding herself in bizarre carnal places was not, though, why she was in Chamonix. Or not entirely. That was an altogether different question to mull, requiring, she reckoned, its own week-end. A week.

  She turned the page, deciding that ‘Intimacy (i) bizarre (ii) decorous (iii) married’, was a subject for another time.

  She wrote: ‘How should we live?’

  Robert Dole both unnerved her and heartened her — heartened her by his persistent interest in her but that same interest unnerved her, so that sometimes she wished he were not in the same room, be it committee room, conference hall, or café. That he was not there watching her from a distance. She hadn’t spoken directly to Robert Dole about civilised tenets but his bent, private smile to her when she had mentioned civilised tenets in the club that night, and his parting comment, meant that she’d better work out what she meant by civilised tenets before she raised it again in front of him.

  Edith decided that she saw the word as ‘civil-ised’ and wrote it down that way. She recalled her Latin — civicus, civilis, civis, civilitas — civilian, civility. The relations between the state and its citizens and the way citizens behaved towards each other. Especially the way strangers behaved to each other.

  Urbanity. The real test, though, of our political urbanity might be how we handled those who disliked us. How we could continue to work with, and be sociable with, people we knew disliked us. That was the test.

  In talking of civilised tenets, she had not meant simply what the League was ‘for and against’. She’d been caught out before on that. War, yes, but what if it were a League of Nations militia which waged the war? Opium, yes, but some of them dabbled with the smoking of opium. Liverright was fond of saying that because a thing was bad on a large scale it was not necessarily bad on a personal scale and that one’s personal conduct didn’t change a thing in these matters. That one could enjoy what one believed should eventually be forbidden or erased from human conduct. Obscene publications were an example — Ambrose with his strange collection which she’d found alluring when she’d dipped into them. Traffic in women and children — oh yes, they were all against that, but she knew some took advantage of the situation as it was at Geneva’s ceinture de chasteté. And how could one explain the remarkable demand for the reports of that committee which had sold better than any other reports of the League? What about the Molly Club? She supposed that was a private matter and hurt no one, even if indecency of behaviour was involved.

  It was time to stop going to the Molly with Ambrose, even if, against her better judgement, she’d been back only a couple of times since the incident.

  What are the values to be pursued?

  Are some choices, some values, not available at some times?

  Maybe the difference between a brutish and a civilised person was that a civilised person in times of strife or war might take an uncivilised action but it would be with reluctance. The civilised person would be aware that they were crossing a border. She knew from League reports and from accounts of history, that all people had the potential for villainous behaviour. She was not certain within herself whether she knew yet how to discern inherent evil. Working for the League had not given her the experience in discerning evil that she might have had in other places.

  The best political arrangements were those which did not place ordinary people in situations in which they had to make difficult choices, because often they would choose badly and behave badly. She was also sure that people needed to be given time to study and think about politics.

  Formalities and procedures were the wisdom of human organisation and were in themselves civilising instruments. She knew that now. When she was younger she’d opposed all red tape. Not any more. Red tape was often just a way of causing a pause in the impatience of things so that everything could be properly checked and considered. She realised that when enthusiasm and dedication had been expended, an organisation had to leave in their place a bureaucracy. She’d also come to know, sadly, that idealism did not ensure that things were done well or efficiently.

  The League had the task of making the manners of the world. To create the conditions which allowed people to behave well. To remove those conditions which coarsened people, making it easier to be civilised. She wrote that down.

  She remembered a picnic back home, beside the Clyde River, on her first vacation from university in Sydney when her friend George McDowell had said that most of the formalities of life were there to overcome the problem of human nervousness, that people were shy of each other. ‘Remember,’ he’d said, ‘that at most times, nearly always, everyone is nervous. In crisis, doubly so.’

  She confessed then that she was addressing herself to Robert Dole. Not writing to him but ‘addressing’ herself to him, using him as a hypothetical opponent. He wasn’t much use as a hypothetical opponent because he’d changed to being this new something-else, smiling at her privately from across rooms. She pushed him aside.

  After her second Scotch, finding herself staring at the page, Edith decided to leave the loftier categories and think of the more everyday civilised tenets. She suspected that others had done the work of the loftier tenets and that she would come to their thinking in the reading and learning which still lay ahead of her. She doubted that it was her destiny to elucidate these things.

  She was then conscious of a distinctive sadness which she had not experienced or identified before. It was the sadness of knowing that one would never be ‘a great thinker’. She thought she might have liked to be that but deep in her heart she knew she wasn’t. She felt she had a chance still to become ‘great’ in other ways but not as a thinker. She saw around her at the League how the unrealistic striving for greatness of this philosophical sort when one did not have the capacity, developed into a hell of self-deception, posturing and ridicule. She prayed she would never fall into that delusion. Which didn’t mean that she couldn’t find her own pattern of connections and insights, for her own pleasure, and perhaps for the enlightenment of others. But erudition either made itself known in conduct and action or it gave to one’s life private meanings. An erudite person wasn’t someone who could ‘quote’ or who could pass examinations.

  The first of her civilising tenets was the competence to be able to — she was going to write ‘to make colloquy’, but it was more than that. It was to be able to discourse without guile and without rancour. It was not only avoiding what Dr Johnson called ‘talking to win’. She was talking about discourse which was conducted with a generous capacity for concession. She knew that some argued that advance
ment in thinking could only be through conflict — the holding of position followed by the conflict and then, the moving on to a third position. Well, there were times when she forgot her tenet of conversational calmness and became heated. Or as Ambrose would say, ‘a trifle shrill’. But conversation should be as quiet and as calm as a library.

  As George had pointed out to her, making generous allowance for nervousness and the mistakes of nervousness — even in statesmanship — was part of being civilised. She knew very well that nervousness made some very clever people seem awkwardly voiceless and she knew that the very eloquent did not always truly know, but were simply very plausible. Some people caused her to talk stupidly, even when she agreed with them. Mrs Swanwick, an English delegate, was one of those sorts of people. She knew now to avoid them, or if she couldn’t avoid them, how to remain silent. Mrs Swanwick caused her to talk against herself.

  Yes, conversation and the conduct of conversation was the pivotal part of all civilised life. Conversation had ultimately to do with politics. She believed that the League of Nations would bring about a new way of people talking to each other. David Hunter Miller said that already the conference had replaced the diplomatic note. That the League was a continuous conference. She was learning, though, that a political negotiation was different from a conversation.

  Conversation was sometimes an ‘event’. Like going to the theatre. Wine was good because it contributed to people being decent in conversation. Up to a point. Of course, conversation could be just a way of touching someone, of being with someone, and content didn’t matter then. Somehow she felt that gossip was good, despite its sometimes scandalous and political purposes. She thought she knew when it was being used as secret mail to circulate political and professional mischief and when it was simply a harmless revelling in human imperfection, a revelling in the relief that no one was perfect. Gossip showed that life was not the way that formality, convention and manners pretended. Truth — telling about the world, if not about the person under discussion, occurred in gossip but it was also to be found in the obverse of gossip — in the exchange of confidences. The exchange of confidences was sometimes a form of courage. Florence would never experience that courage and its rewards, although maybe she was the sort of person who inflicted its punishments.

  How did you avoid the errors that came from being young? She supposed you could avoid some by imitation of older models, by having wise mentors, and through reading — borrowed, but provisional, wisdom. She wanted to know what it meant to be forty or sixty or whatever. Ambrose said the only advantage he could find in being older was that he was better at guessing the time and the temperature. She talked with older people. She would like to talk more with Under Secretary Bartou and get to know him. She was talking more with Dame Rachel too. Or Dame Rachel was going out of her way to talk more to her. Why weren’t the wise things of life self-evident?

  She needed to manage her ignorance with more flair, to conduct her ignorance gracefully in conversation. She needed to be able to talk well on a subject in which she was ignorant, to be able to turn her ignorance into a graceful accessory to conversation, not by make-believing that one knew, not by pretence, but by revealing her ignorance in an interesting way. She tried to talk about the philosophical difficulties and the working difficulties of finding information and of testing it — the whole difficulty of ‘confidently knowing’. She was a believer in statistical investigation to reduce the bumph and the theoretical waffle of life. She had nothing but scorn for those who dismissed statistics as another way of lying. They were people overprotective of their theoretically dressed-up prejudices. Dole believed in statistics. He said statistics would be the news of the future.

  She was learning that curiosity was a great resource and one of the higher traits of character, although she was still aware in herself of the unwillingness of the mind to move from where it was secure out into the darker waters and to enter, with happy curiosity, into its ignorance. Especially when she was engaged in public conversations.

  In her case, being graceful also meant learning to make grace from her unfinished self, from her provincial inexperience with life, from the gaps in her sensibilities.

  Edith turned to a new page of the creamy paper.

  She would leave ‘colloquy’ for now. She would like to join a Society for the Study of Conversation if one existed. Maybe she’d start one.

  The detail of one’s life.

  To be able to shape the detail of life, if not into a work of art, then at least to make of one’s life a work of conscious arrangement. As William Morris said, ‘Have nothing in your home you do not know to be useful and believe to be beautiful.’ Although she would have to say to William Morris that she had a few things in her rooms which were just curiosities. And one monstrosity — the Wilson chair with its fourteen adjustable positions, well, eight, really; she said fourteen as a joke. That may have to go. She found some hotel stationery in the desk drawer and began a list of mundane things to do when she went back to her rooms in Geneva. She wrote down a reminder to have all her clothing thoroughly cleaned. She found that how one’s clothes smelled to oneself was important.

  The French had taught the world that the arrangement and design of food was important. The arrangement of appetite, the ordering of competing appetites. She supposed the English middle classes had also introduced the notion of disciplining and withholding the appetites, of withholding the lesser appetite for the enjoyment of the greater. She supposed arranging the appetites was connoisseurship. Too often, though, some of her friends just withheld, postponed indefinitely whatever challenge of appetite they feared, and hence the challenge of some of life’s pleasures. Or did some of the challenges of life and of appetite have to be let pass?

  On the question of good taste, she had dilemmas. Somehow good taste in Australia was so much easier because the choice, say, of tea, was so much more limited. She even thought that in Europe there were more colours to choose from, but that couldn’t be correct. She had discovered that Europe had not only more options but also more ways of deciding which options to take. She no longer thought that good taste was intuitive.

  Maybe good taste and good living were about making good choices within what was materially available to you, within your assets and within your learning to date. She believed that it had to be an act of personal ‘creation’, a fashioning of self. You had to make choices, too, which combined with other earlier choices and choices to come. Although, maybe you didn’t know the pattern in advance, more that it shaped up as the result of all the decisions you made. It was both. It was a matter of interacting parts. You began with a vague blueprint from your mother and father and then life presented you with options. You made choices which reshaped the blueprint and so on and on. But that could hardly be called a ‘plan’.

  She firmly believed that what you surrounded yourself with and exposed yourself to helped to make you, although it didn’t always seem obvious how it made you or into what.

  She hadn’t yet got straight in her head where people fitted into the blueprint. Did one ‘collect’ friends as one did objects? Were those you gathered around you really ‘gathered’ or did they just happen? Did you make the best of what was available? Friendship was trickier to make than gardens or a collection of objets d’art. She supposed that in the case of her rejection of Florence, she was beginning to make choices.

  She felt that you had to have friends and family in your life to be truly fulfilled, or if you did not have family you could have vocation and friends, or if you did not have vocation she supposed you could have a cause, or public life, or maybe even a recreation or hobby would do. She wondered whether Robert Dole was interested in these lines of talk, the knowing of one’s preferences about tea? She thought she could argue the importance of this with him.

  If only she could get her preferences straight. She had to be able to see where those preferences came from. Oh, of course, as Liverright or Caroline would be quick to point out, t
hey came from her ‘class’. Where had her class got them? From the heightened life experience that good income offered? From the education which her class had offered to her? And how to explain differences of opinion and taste within her class?

  Edith wished the dinner chime would sound.

  She began to draw up a list of the tendencies in her taste.

  The Aesthetic of Happy Latency. She believed that Miss Dickinson’s chair had a happy latency which would sponsor a chain of other cheerful and assertive details. Likewise, those things she had gathered around herself in her rooms and, to a degree, in Ambrose’s apartment. A central object which suggested others which might join it.

  The Aesthetic of the Elemental Surface: say, in the choice of stone against concrete — she brought to mind the rage for concrete and a house in Paris which she’d been shown, decorated on the outside by concrete in the shape of tree branches. She had been appalled by the use of concrete to imitate nature. Why not grow a vine? She did not believe that concrete trees were the future. The natural spoke of connections directly with the lair and the hunt, the earlier days of the race. For these reasons she liked leather and fur and burning wood fires which reminded her of the days when the race lived closer to the animal kingdom. She liked a city to have places where animals and birds and plants could exist as a reminder of nature. She believed that more animals should be allowed to roam the streets. Not savage animals, but certainly wild ones. Deer, for example. She opposed those who argued that trees had no place in the streets of a city. She liked to eat dishes which were made from animals and birds and to wear clothing made from the fur and the leather of animals. She felt that a person should know the skills to catch the living things that they ate, even if it were no longer practicable for all people to exercise these skills. She had only ever shot one rabbit.