Loose Living (6 page)

H
ERE
,
IN
the bleak whiteness of the European winter, curled up in the old farmhouse reading curious ancient tomes by candlelight, with the warm, steaming farm animals snorting and rooting in the barn, their elemental odours rising from the fermenting straw, the sheep huddled together in their fold, birds hungrily scratching in the barnyard, a maid blowing on her frostbitten hands as she hurries to join her companions in the warm servants' cottage, a villager cutting branches for firewood and another driving his laden donkey, I lose track of time.

Surrounded by hectares of virgin snow, I even lose track of the tracks.

I have moved from the Quartier Maroc while remaining in reduced circumstances. I work on a pig farm now, as well as continuing to teach Minor Characters at the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus.

At the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus I have been asked this year to teach a course in Traditional Masculinity.

They say that it is because I am Australian.

On the other hand, I think that it could be a huge joke on me. A hoax, one of the many I have had to endure at this intellectual cesspit. I said at the staff meeting that I rather thought of myself as being an
arrogant, brittle, elegant, urbane male in the French manner of the court of the
ancien régime
, than in the style of the traditional Australian male.

They raised their eyebrows with amused condescension.

Anyhow, I teach colourful swearing, accurate spitting, nasal passage clearing by hawking-and-spitting, walking with your hands in your pockets (‘pocket billiards'), throwing knives at trees, opening beer bottles with your teeth, blowing your nose by closing one nostril with the pressure of a finger, whistling with the little fingers in the corners of the mouth, sly winks, hitting below the belt, contemptuous smoking, blowing smoke rings, wolf whistles, and how to cheat at poker.

The course was proposed by the feminists on the staff. The feminists here fear that the women's movement has succeeded too well and gone too far.

They complain that the European men around the place are insipid and demoralised. French men try to use the feminine form in French as often as they use the masculine.

They are always competing among themselves to put on the apron and do the washing up after morning and afternoon tea.

They fuss about.

‘It is all very well,' I said, ‘to choose me because I am an Australian man, but I'm not feeling that macho myself lately.

‘Why don't you get the feminist maverick Camille Paglia to do it? She says she is in favour of incest
and sadomasochism, unequal power relationships in sexuality and all that tough stuff, and knows much about masculinity in all its variation.'

I, myself, have forgotten a lot. Although, to be precise, Camille is more inclined towards the hermaphroditic. I am too. I am better at teaching Sissies and Sooks. But it is not true, as the ‘Australian' media insists on repeating, that I claim in former lives to have been ‘a girl, a bush, a bird and a fish'.

That is not what I said. I said that sometimes I feel that I turn into the winds, into water, into earth and into a star.

And this doesn't happen every day. Sometimes I'm a plant.

Whenever I am teaching Hermaphroditics I always try to bring home to my students that being passive isn't such a bad thing. While I do not stress this, it is the case that being the passive one isn't as powerless as it might seem (unfortunately)—that is, in the big picture. Anyhow we're not talking power. We're talking fun. There is delicious victory about the passive position, the giving up of your self absolutely, being disgustingly lost and powerless, and its erasure of any nobility.

The only thing one could say is that it is one's passivity that engenders all that action around you and about you.

I already teach Fitzgerald's
Tender is the Night
(only the Minor Characters—Senor Pardo y Cuidad Real and his homosexual son Fransisco, and the Von Cohn Morrises, the Australian kleptomaniac and his parents).

It is a twelve-seminar series conducted under the title ‘Dr Diver's patients—how good a doctor was he?' (pages 267, 268, 269, 272, 273, 274, Penguin edition).

Tender is the Night
(1934), apart from being an allegory of sleep—the characters lead a life of rest-less, dream-like idleness—is, frankly, an incest success story.

Nicole was her father's lover and in the end she is released from the impact of this through a sexual relationship and marriage with her psychiatrist, Dr ‘Dick Diver' (I play this name for sniggers from my repellent students. It's the only register of humour they understand).

She is even well enough to go to Daddy's
Girl
with Dr Diver.

It is he who is, in turn, ruined.

Nicole records his end: ‘…his latest note was postmarked from Hornell, N.Y., which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.' Hornell=Horn Hell? Yes? Snigger, snigger.

My point is that these days in the Concerned Magazines and Concerned Books we hear only the unhappy incest stories. Yet Colette says she seduced her son and Anais Nin says she seduced her father. Neither son nor father have complained.

Goethe loved his son sexually. Thomas Mann had the hots for his son and went after the neighbours' boys as a displacement.

It seems that, statistically, incest in one form or another is so common that it might as well be accepted as the norm.

Perhaps if it were accepted as the norm that would remove much of the trauma. It's worth a try. As the psychiatrist Otto Rank said, ‘The incest fantasy dominates the unconscious psychic life of normal people determining their social and erotic orientations.'

I wouldn't know about that but it adds to the argument.

And Paglia says, ‘Incest is sexual dissent.' (Who's doing the dissenting and from what?) On second thoughts, perhaps this is an idea ahead of its time. Best left alone for now.

Honestly, when I think about it, the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus has the sickest syllabus in Western pedagogy.

I was pleased to see that Camille Paglia teaches ‘sleek ness' as a hermaphroditic motif, that is, the uses of intense heterosexual glamour. I was even interested that she mentions Michael Wilding as an example (page 533,
Sexual Personae
). I would also nominate him for sleekness.

I like her description of the style of sleekness: ‘the flowing hyacinthine hair of the beautiful boy traps the beholder's eye, a portent of future enslavement'.

I'd rather teach enslavement than masculinity.

Unlike Michael, I was never sleek. At Wollongong Tech we admired slickness more than sleekness. But I was never slick either.

Slickness is the aesthetic and stylistic converse of sleek ness. Slick guys were a bit oily, sly-winked and spat well. Always had a condom or two and a packet of fags about their person. They never used them in those days, the condoms, but they had them about their person. Probably still the way. I wouldn't have been caught dead with a condom about my person for aesthetic reasons.

Slick guys had pointed shoes and never wore school uniform. I wore nothing else but school uniform—the cleanest, neatest, most debonair school uniform.

I wore it charmingly. I had no wish to be slick but I did believe that the school uniform could be worn with particularity and with swagger.

Paglia, in her discussion of sleekness, says that Cary Grant's evening pumps in
Indiscreet
(1958) are astoundingly narrow. Elongation is something she admires in these sleek men.

However, at Wollongong slick guys' pointed shoes were essentially useful for kicking someone who was on the ground. Occasionally that was me.

As part of my masculinity program at the Ecole I have introduced the grouse and pheasant hunt on sports afternoons for this wintry time of the year.

I don't mean the British driven shoot, I mean stalking and hunting.

In Europe, the UK and US, there is more wildlife than at any other time this century. An example: in the US there are now estimated to be four million wild turkeys whereas at the turn of the century there were
about half a million. As for white-tailed deer, there are now about twenty-six million in the US whereas at the turn of the century the estimate was about half a million.
⁶

There are about fourteen million hunters in the US.

In my hunting course, I make the sandwiches. We eat pheasant two-handers. These consist of two large slabs of bread, toasted. One slice is thickly buttered, with water cress pushed into the butter with the palm of the hand. The other slice is smeared thickly with chutney and slices of cold pheasant are packed into the sandwich.

It's a good thing to slip into the pocket of your Barbour when spending the day with one of those small syndicate shoots where each gun brings his own nosebag.

I told my group this week that I could remember when a Master of Foxhounds was seated above a knight. They were very impressed. It is the only thing I've said which has made any impression on them. I think I am rising in their estimation, about which I couldn't give a fig.

They seem only to be impressed by snobbery. I have taught them to be contemptuous of what R. W. F. Poole calls the New Countryperson ‘in Laura Ashley prints, with hand-painted Honeybee Cottage house signs, leaded windows, and a Deux Chevaux or polished Range Rover with Greenpeace stickers'.

I teach the students how to make Mazawatte Tea (gin and cider in proportions according to taste) for their hunting flasks.

Winter hunting season is a fine time of the year, brisk with great woodfires and roving gun-dogs, the rubbing of our boots with bear's fat, taking out my stout Purdey twelve gauge with its custom-made stock from its custom-made pigskin gun-case (the only one of my possessions which I have not pawned)—an ideal gun for an unpractised hand, by the way—the comparison of guns and cartridges, and getting down the old leather game-bag.

We stamp our booted feet in the snow.

I believe I cut a fine figure in my leather jerkin with velvet cuffs, khaki gaberdine plus-fours and check socks, tweed hat with cock-pheasant's feathers.

It brings tears to my eyes as I also recall duck hunting with C—— P—— and M—— V—— at Delamere and Victor Harbor.

O
DDLY, THE
Duc and I have become closer since his stroke and his urgent request for me to return to the
château.

Boy! Was I relieved when the Duc's helicopter landed on the playing fields of the Ecole des Beaux Arts Perdus and I saw his emissary carrying the Duc's emblazoned message satchel.

You should've seen the faces of the other staff. I think that I proved to them once and for all, and conclusively, that I was a cut above them.

I attend the Duc daily and try, as best I can, to make up for my past misdeeds by reading Montaigne aloud to him.

The Duc, you will not recall, returned to find the west wing burned down and other sundry damage done to the
premier château
, especially to the wine cellar and the armoury. He then learned that I had not in fact written a word of my fabulous and much touted book.

Both of these shocks caused him to suffer a stroke, and he asked that I leave for a time of penance.

We now live equidistant from the villages of Damville, Orgeville and Bulle. I am quite a distance from Ardon at present. But quite close to Binges.

I find if I go to Binges I never get to Ardon. Binges is in the direction of Damville and Orgeville but you can't get to both in the same day. I often go to the villages of Misery and Tears, spending the day in one and before bedtime in the other.

What gave me great satisfaction is that the butler's brother, that little rat, remains at the ruined
château
to participate manually in the repairs while the rest of us, the Duc, myself, several musicians and the domestic staff (but none of the aristocratic younger set), live at the second
château
in Normandy.

The Queen of Commas, that self-serving pest, is also working at laying bricks to rebuild the medieval watchtower at the old
château.
That's justice, given that much of the disastrous high jinks there was at her instigation and came from people forever Slipping Something into My Drink.

But the surprise arrival of the grim-faced Australianness Auditor has caused me considerable embarrassment and has again put my place at the
château
in jeopardy.

His request to see my new book led, of course, to the exposure of my pathetic lie. There was no book.

I had lived a grand life in Europe and had slid into a life of profligacy.

He also went through my earlier books on what he called ‘a retrospective audit' to determine their current literary value.

While I sat patiently, but fearfully, on a stool nearby
(as instructed), he read his way through my books, every now and then grunting with displeasure.

After a number of days and nights of reading, he pushed his glasses onto his forehead and, rubbing his eyes, turned to me and said, ‘Oh dear, oh dear.'

He shook his head.

He took back my Australianness quill, writer's smock, top hat, gold watch-chain and national badges of honour.

I have never before seen such a look of contempt on the face of another human being.

Almost certainly, he said, if I did not return to Australia before the next full moon I would be imprisoned on an island off Balmain.

Quelle horreur!

In preparation for my return to Australia to face charges, everyone here is fussing around me, busy packing, making clothes for my inevitable appearances at Nite Spots, trying to get the horrendously embarrassing stains off my dinner suit for my appearance before the tribunal, and so on.

Ruefully, I had to say no to taking the Duc's black Arabian stallion and explained the quarantine requirements to him. I assured him that there would be other means of dignified transportation. The same went for the huge hamper of gift cheeses which the estate
fromagerie
had prepared.
Dommage.

I argued that I should not take too many personal servants because I would be teased about it back in Australia, with its egalitarian and casual approach to life.

Later that week, when the Duc had regained his composure, he wanted to hear more about ‘the casual approach' in Australia. I laughed.

‘But the French invented the political concept of
égalité
,' I gently reminded him, making a guillotine-like chopping action with my hand.

He began to twitch horribly and I realised that I had made what the French call a
faux pas.
I recalled that his ancestors were not keen on the political concept of
égalité.

I rushed to get him a calming glass of champagne, half of which he drank and the other half he absorbed through his chin. I let the subject of
égalité
drop.

One morning, not long after, the Duc came out to breakfast on the balcony with a copy of the
New Yorker
in his hand, spluttering with rage. Or what I took to be rage.

I put a spoon in his mouth to be sure that he hadn't swallowed his tongue.

I was relieved that it was not me that he was raging against for once. He showed me the offending piece by Louis Menand on kissing, which again ultimately led us back to the Australian dogma called ‘the casual approach'.

The Duc's badly shaking hand tried to point to a paragraph in the article but his hand moved like a magnetically disturbed compass and I had to guess what it was that was agitating him.

I took it that it was the piece which said, ‘One of the important social services the movies have performed
over the years, for example, is the instruction of generations of interested pre-adolescents in the mechanics of kissing…'

I couldn't at first understand the reason for the Duc's agitation. It was rubbish, of course, but the
New Yorker
is not as naggingly edited as it once was.

Oh, then it came to me. Of course, the Duc was agitated about Hollywood's belief that it had invented the ‘French kiss' (which is beyond the reach of the camera, anyhow).

I patted his back and said that I agreed with him and he calmed down, grateful that I had understood.

Although I fear there was something to do with the World Trade Organisation and protection of the French film industry in his point which I missed.

Throughout breakfast he would pick up the magazine and grunt, or what I took to be grunts, and move his tongue lizard-like, which was reminiscent of the movement of the tongue in a French kiss, which I am sure was not intentional, because in his case it was a manoeuvre to collect straying saliva, some of which strays very widely indeed.

I told him that in my childhood and youthful experience, if two sets of lips come anywhere near each other they did not need American movies for guidance.

And what quality of guidance was it? The films show very little about kissing. The kissing, as the Duc would have argued had he been able to complete a sentence, is what happens out of sight of the camera and in
subtleties which movies can never capture, to do with saliva and surfaces, dry and wet and infinite subtleties of labial and bodily alignment. A kiss involves the whole of the body, how the two bodies are coming together below and around the kiss, sponsored by the kiss.

In Wollongong there was more to kissing than Hollywood seemed to know. Perhaps I boast.

The only thing I learned from Hollywood movies about kissing is that the woman, if she is truly passionate, lifts one foot off the ground and bends the leg to the knee so that the calf of the leg is horizontal to the ground. The girl's shoe should also partly leave the foot. I was forever trying to see if this was in fact happening to the girl I was kissing but it is difficult to see while
in the kiss.

I told the Duc the only other thing I can remember learning from Hollywood was how to sit on a chair in the reverse position.

I should not have said this.

He spluttered again and I moved away slightly, shielding my face with my hands from the saliva spray, but not as to be noticeable and impolite. I seemed to be again getting off to a bad start.

The Duc wrote on a piece of paper that to sit on a chair that way was an abomination.

‘But why?' I asked. It seemed such a little thing, and when we were kids we considered it rather jaunty.

He said that it was typically American. They were too casual. They disrespected life as they disrespected the chair. I do seem to recall that my parents said they
feared I might ‘break' the chair but perhaps it was that I was breaking the decorum of the chair.

I rushed to say that I was now against sitting on the chair backwards and I said that this was just my complaint about Australians—their so-called ‘casual approach'.

At first, this casual approach came from being unsure about what to do. So yobbos set out to create a social setting in the New Countries where, seemingly, there were no rules of dress or behaviour or conduct. Hence ‘easygoing'.

Of course, it became in itself a graceless rule-bound setting which pretended to be otherwise. Firstly, to not-be-casual became an offence and then to be ‘incorrectly' casual also became an offence.

The difference between this casualness and formality is only that the casual rules come from fad and the championing of the undifferentiated, the gross and the crass.

The rules of formality, at best, come from consideration, discernment and taste.

Casualness as a doctrine had moved from its original insecurity and an all-embracing comradeship to being a pugnacious punishment of good taste or of personal difference.

‘
Exacte
…' said the Duc, ‘…
ment
,' managing to get one word out for the day.

Bravo, Duc.

I seem to have said the right thing for once.

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.