Loose Living (9 page)

A
LTHOUGH
I had been striving to avoid it, I was forced to describe to the Duc how differently children eat in Australia to the way they eat in France.

‘In Australia,' I said in a low voice, holding the Duc's bitterly cold hand, ‘the Rules of Eating seemed to have collapsed.'

I have never seen on the Duc's face, or the face of any living person, the look of consternation which I now saw there displayed.

Though the Duc still has little control of his facial muscles or the movement of his eyeballs, it was still a contortion more fearful than any I had ever seen before.

So alarmed was I, that I rang for Cognac.

Holding the Duc by both elbows, while the butler poured the Cognac into the Duc through a silver, medieval mouth-funnel, I apologised, saying that I was sorry to convey to him this sad news.

The Duc, recovering his composure somewhat, bravely pressed me to continue. He stuttered out that he must face the truth about the masses. His ancestors had failed to do this and had lost their heads.

I was then given cause to consider whether the look of consternation which I had just observed was
a ghostly manifestation of the historic psychic trauma of the guillotine striking the neck of his ancestors (for indeed, that is what it reminded me of) but dismissed this as too far-fetched.

I described to the Duc how, when recalled to Australia, I took two five-year-olds to a Chinese restaurant. The Duc then stopped me and recollected the wonderful occasion when I had taken him to a Chinese restaurant in Paris and where he had seen the Yum Cha Maids whipped for returning to the kitchen with uneaten dishes.

I did not consider the way the Duc dwelt on this memory as particularly seemly but he is generally a kindly old man and his life as an aristocrat has not been easy.

I interrupted him to say, ‘If I may continue, my Duc? One of the five-year-olds refused all the dishes on the menu and instead ordered “noodles with nothing”, and the other ordered prawn cutlets but then ate only the batter and left the prawns.'

I begged the Duc not to ask me, at this point, to explain what prawn ‘cutlets' were and what part they played in Australian life.

The children left most of the food uneaten and played Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys in the restaurant at large.

The restaurant staff had to forcibly return them to the table, where I sat with my face against the coolness of the ice bucket, suffering as I was from a sick headache.

In my childhood, I told the Duc, we ate at a table on grown-up chairs and we were expected to ‘eat what was put before us' and we were not allowed to leave the table until we had eaten everything on our plates, especially, for some reason I never understood, the ‘green' vegetables.

No one ever said to us, ‘Eat all those white vegetables.'

During the days that I was caring for these two five-year-olds I was able to observe their grotesque tastes.

One ate the chicken skin but not the flesh. One insisted on a sandwich filled with ‘the outside leaf of a cauliflower' (I swear to God!).

They both ate something called Coco Pops. The Duc stared uncomprehendingly at me. I explained that the children had told me that Coco Pops was ‘a breakfast cereal made of delicious puffed rice with natural cocoa containing five vitamins and iron, low in fat—just like a chocolate milkshake only crunchy'.

The children, however, ate them without the milk and at all times of the day. One drank only what he called ‘hospital formula Sustagen, twenty-four per cent protein, eight per cent fat, sixty-eight per cent carbohydrate'.

The Duc shook his head as I told of the strange tastes and food knowledge of these children.

When I say ‘shook his head', I mean that he literally flung his head from one side of his neck to the other with such force that he would stagger first to the right and then to the left, often taking two or three staggering
steps, sometimes colliding with furniture. That is what I mean about the Duc ‘shaking his head'.

I said that as children, we always asked permission to leave the table.

We folded our serviette before leaving the table and inserted it in our personally initialled serviette ring.

We placed our knife and fork at half-past six on the plate. We washed our hands, removing any dirt from under the nails, both before and after a meal. We did not burp. We did not play intergalactic wars with our food. We were not permitted to have dessert before main course, let alone four desserts instead of a meal. We thanked our mother for preparing the food. We said grace, thanking God for our food and for our mother and at the same time prayed to win at marbles.

We did not read at the table.

We spoke when spoken to. We did not offer, unasked, elaborate and fanciful explanations for simple natural phenomena.

We did not eat between meals.

The Duc managed to stutter out that in his day the Rules of Eating in France also included knowing the names of all the dishes and the regions from which they originated and being able to identify all the sauces. The Duc said proudly that by the age of five he knew the names of 200 cheeses. By the age of ten he hunted his own game, albeit with a full mounted entourage.

He said that he ate in restaurants quite commonly as a child but was brought up to always shake the hand
of every other patron in the restaurant upon arriving and leaving.

He had never played Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys in a restaurant.

I then came to the difficult part of my story about the Australian children. Whispering to the butler to hold the Duc firmly in a protective embrace, a human straitjacket as it were, I told the Duc that one of the five-year-olds had proclaimed himself a vegetarian.

As I expected, the Duc had a paroxysm resembling a fit which, despite the embrace of the butler, carried both the Duc and the butler crashing out of the French windows onto the snowy lawn.

I began to doubt the wisdom of my telling him of my Australian experiences.

Upon being helped up from the snowy lawn, the Duc fumed that a citizen could not be a vegetarian in France until reaching the age of twenty-one and then had to have a declaration signed by two doctors. Privately, I doubted this but said nothing, feeling it better to leave him with his comforting misconceptions.

I said that I wouldn't continue with my account of the eating behaviour of Australian children because of the strain it was causing the Duc, which was, in turn, causing me much distress and not a little damage to the
château.
But he insisted on hearing more.

I told the Duc that I explained to the five-year-old vegetarian that there is no real biological distinction between animals and plants—they are part of a
spectrum of life and at the centre of the spectrum there were animal-like plants and plant-like animals.

The Duc then spluttered out, ‘All flesh is grass,' quoting, I recognised, from the book of Isaiah.

‘Yes,' I said, applauding the Duc for the aptness of his remark. The butler also nodded and discreetly clapped.

The five-year-old vegetarian had replied that if that were the case he swore to me that he would eat only pasta and Coco Pops for the rest of his life. He would refuse to eat any living thing, plant or animal.

Furthermore, he would report me to Captain Planet.

I tried to explain the cycle of nature from plankton through to little fish being eaten by bigger fish and how at death we return to the soil and atmosphere as molecules which in turn became plant and animal molecules. I said that we were all a single cycle of changing molecular matter. He seemed adamant about not having anything to do with the cycle of nature or any part thereof.

I told him that I supposed he could resign from the cycle of nature if he so wished.

I couldn't help but privately agree with him while feeling sorrowful that he should be excluding himself from the infinite and manifest joys of participating in that cycle. I refrained from outlining the pains of the cycle.

They both asked for plain bread and butter sandwiches from which they ate only the centre.

I told the children that if they didn't eat their crusts their hair would not be curly.

They said they did not wish to have curly hair. They saw nothing particularly attractive about curly hair.

‘And anyhow,' one said, ‘it is a dietary myth that bread crusts make your hair curly which was invented by parents who wished to entice their children into eating mouldy old crusts of bread.'

I said that he was quite wrong. It was not a dietary myth invented by parents but a nutritional fact. Because of the baking process, the crust contained many vital elements not found in the rest of the bread. So there.

They simply turned to each other and rolled their eyes.

I further added that ‘curly hair' was a synecdoche for A Good Life.

I admitted that the preoccupation of parents with the consumption of the bread crust as healthy and obligatory was curiously mirrored by the removal of the crust from sandwiches on Special Occasions.

It is as if, on Special Occasions, we were excused from eating the crust. I agreed with them that this is something of an admission by the adult world that the crust, even if healthy, was not particularly appetising.

I told of my early childhood experiences in Australia with bread. In my childhood bread had more rules about it than any other food (for reasons which escape me). Perhaps the Rules of Bread had to do with the metaphorical weight we give to bread, as in the ‘staff of life', cast not your bread upon the waters, the loaves
and fishes, we live not by bread alone, knowing which side your bread is buttered on, and so on.

Anyhow—in my family the Rules of Bread were as follows:

The bread was bought from a baker who carried the bread to the house from a horse-drawn cart in a bakers' basket and placed it in the bread compartment built into the side of the house.

The bread was taken from this compartment by the kitchen maid.

At meal times the loaf was placed on a bread board on the table and sliced with a bread knife. The slices had to be just so. Picking the hot fresh bread from the centre of the loaf was an irresistible temptation for a child and punishable by death.

For reasons which elude me, this fresh crust, that is, the first outer slice of bread, was highly prized but not so the crusts (the other ‘crusts' were the crusty frame of the slice of bread).

It was unacceptable to treat the crust as a separate gastronomic entity by spreading butter along the inside of the crust, something which I found particularly delectable (despite it being proscribed) and which is delectable because of the combination of butter and the aforementioned constituents of the crust.

The butter was transferred from the butter dish by the butter knife to the edge of the plate—never directly to the bread and never with the plate knife.

The bread was buttered with the plate knife from the crust evenly inwards to the centre, but there was
some thing called ‘having too much' butter on the bread.

I do not know who set the amount of butter which was considered ‘correct' for a slice of bread (I suspect that it is the same Authority which sets all limits in life). I only know that it was less than I considered desirable. I liked my butter spread thickly and suffered severe deprivation throughout childhood for which I have more than amply made up.

If something was to be added to the bread and butter such as jam or honey there was also some decreed amount beyond which it was ‘too much'.

Looking back over my turbulent and varied life I can see that seeking ‘too much' or asking too much was to become a guiding maxim of my life.

Our bread was then cut into two triangles. Working-class people cut their bread into two rectangles. Small children had their bread cut into four rectangles or four triangles.

One did not eat the slice whole. I was to find that Americans ate the slice whole but that was later, around the time I began sitting on the chair back to front, wearing a baseball cap, chewing gum and saying ‘that's rich'.

The loaf had to be eaten whether stale or not and was never wasted. It could be used as toast or, failing that, it could end up as an atrocious dish without a name, made of bread-sugar-and-hot milk, or bread and butter pudding, which was also an atrocious dish, regardless of being sweetened with Golden Syrup.

Stale bread, thinly spread butter and these two dishes were some of the reasons I listed in my declaration to my family when I left home at thirteen, never to return.

The Duc and I then sat in the sad silence of Jeremiah for the rest of the day.

When I say ‘sat in silence' I mean that the only noise was the strange eruptions of gas, saliva and food which came from the Duc's mouth from time to time, and the swish of his riding crop as he lashed out at whatever maid happened to pass too near. A practice I deplore.

Maids should always stay their distance.

T
HE INVITATION
for me to join the Montaigne Clinic for Civilised Disorders as Gregarious Fellow came as a proud surprise and finally attested to how I'd risen in the estimation of all Civilised People.

It was with sadness that I said farewell to the Duc, the three-fingered maid, the musicians, the head huntswoman, the butler's brother, Lord Malicious (who does not wish to be mentioned in this book), the Queen of Commas and the Queen of Commas' dopey boyfriend, who all came across from the old
château
to farewell me. The butler's brother put on a great act of ‘counting the silver'. It went on a little too long and a little too seriously for my tastes.

Over the years which I have been with the Duc and his entourage, we have had our disagreements, but we
were all companions dedicated to fun and games on the Great Journey.

The Duc made a moving speech (in all physical senses of the word ‘moving', mouth, eyes, ears and every muscle of his body—but at least he rose to the occasion, again, in every sense of the word ‘rose'—his twitching and his spasms sometimes taking him high out of the chair and off the rostrum).

In his speech, he said some things which I will always remember.

He said that as far as revolutions were concerned, and I take it that he had in mind the French Revolution which he fears may happen again, he said that he would always work against it, and then added grandly, ‘but I should like it to happen in spite of me.'

And then he turned to the gathered staff, peasants, townspeople and scholars of the region and said, ‘Remember that someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.' He then hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks.

Upon my leaving the
château
, the Duc insisted on riding beside my train for some distance, which was not, in my opinion, a good idea.

I doubt that the horse had seen a railway line or a train before, and the Duc himself seemed only to have the vaguest knowledge of the mechanics of rail transportation. Needless to say, a number of times he and his horse careered, as it were, off the side of the train, and then, for a short distance, impeded the train's movement by riding ahead on the track in a
stumbling fashion, despite the blowing of whistles.

Eventually a bridle or some part of the tackle must have become tangled in the train's workings, and while leaning out the window, I was startled to see the Duc and the horse being dragged behind the train—a rather frantic and sweaty horse it was too, involuntarily still with us, at 160 kilometres per hour.

I had the train stopped and the Duc and his horse were freed.

I last glimpsed the Duc, strapped in the contraption we had made to keep him upright on horseback since his stroke, riding away on his pitch-black Arabian stallion (glittering somewhat with sweat and with a few rub patches on his flank), the Duc's noble head and long-barrelled Martini-Henri rifle in its leather gun bucket silhouetted against the alpine landscape as he made his way up the trail.

I imagined him riding proudly through the villages which were situated on his land and in my mind's eye I saw the peasants lining the streets, caps off, waving and cheering him, for he was much loved by his people.

He would then meander back to his
château
and its quiet, forgotten way of life from times long past, with the quaint, gentle, squabbling rhythms of its hours and days,
les très riches heures du Duc de Berry.

There in the train which was to carry me to unknown and challenging encounters, I wept silently into my beret.

Life does not necessarily have to ‘go on'. However, I had been invited to join the Montaigne Clinic by
Dr Bri colage to specialise in disorders of Interlocution, Dining and Congeniality (I pointed out to them that I am unqualified to practise in Cohabitation).

Dr Bricolage unspecialises in bits and pieces, notions, stray thoughts and icons, and had convinced the convocation to invite me after having heard from the Duc of my thoughts concerning the Rules of Bread and other Disorders of contemporary life.

The Clinic concerns itself with the curing of faulty restaurant conduct, conversational disorders, lost decorum, bad manners, and other minor plagues which reduce the quality of amicability.

During my interview with the convocation I pointed out that in some parts of the Anglo world the toasted bread slice was buttered and then cut into four slices which were latticed, slice by slice. In some families these slices were called ‘soldiers'. The crust-free, butter-soaked, inner slices were prized.

However, my first treatise at the Montaigne Clinic was to talk about the gastronomic tyranny of ‘too', as in ‘too much butter', when applied by adults to children's eating tastes.

I had failed to see just how ideological ‘too' is in both the French and English languages. What a rotten little word it really is. It is not only a gastronomic tyranny, it implies that the person who uses the word ‘too' knows the secret quantities which are ‘correct' and that the person they are addressing does not. That they are privy to the wishes of the Gods or to a profound puritanical wisdom.

We find it in the arts as well, as in ‘F—— M—— has too much acclaim for his work' or ‘F—— M—— wins too many prizes'.

As if anyone in the arts could ever have too much patronage or too much attention. As if anyone in the arts could have too much reward.

It implies there are immutable rules of restriction not only about these matters but about all things in life, which are set by an unquestionable authority.

It is the beginning of a puritanical degradation of life and indoctrination for a life of constraint. It was directly challenged by Oscar Wilde in his epigram that ‘nothing succeeds like excess' and William Blake, who said the road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom (and of course our beloved master, Montaigne, himself once said, ‘And there is no way of life so foolish as one that is carried out by rule and discipline. If he [a young person] takes my advice, he will often plunge even in to excesses … ').

But more than that. It leads to ideas of inauthentic or transgressional states of existence, as in ‘too late' or ‘too early' or ‘too loud'.

These are seen as disrupted states; if you find yourself in them, you are made to feel out of harmony with existence.

It is an attempt by our self-appointed masters to crush our appetite for the abundant and supple life. To crush the Oliver Twist in us.

I remember some time ago, as newly elected President of the Society of Authors, a reporter rang for
an interview and Sophia Turkiewicz, with whom I was living, answered the telephone.

In my absence, the reporter asked her if she could tell him what my policies were as the new president. She said she believed that, firstly, I intended to free the slaves.

She could have added that my policy in the politics of the art world has always been simple. It is ‘more'.

This is not original. When the US Senate investigation of the American trade union movement asked John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers of America what his union policies were, he too replied, ‘More.'

Dr Prodigalement and his staff here at the Clinic are working on the Wilde and Blake epigrams and researching their scientific basis. I drew their attention to the statement of John L. Lewis and they have included this in their research program. I hope to be able to join them in some of their experiments.

As Gregarious Fellow at the Montaigne Clinic I am required to be a restaurant habitué and, in the same way as a priest, never to become part of a household. I must renounce ‘home' and all its comforts.

In many ways the Rules of my life are very similar to the vows of a priest, yet in other ways nothing could be further from the life of a priest.

Paradoxically, I am most ‘at home' in a restaurant. No, this is wrong—more precisely, I like being in a restaurant because it is where I feel deliciously not-in-any-way-shape-or-form ‘at-home'.

I most enjoy eating in those restaurants where I am likely to see people I know, or vaguely know, and thus
ingratiate myself and so advance my interests in the Ghana gold float or whatever. Restaurant eating also allows for very limited social contact and gives that sense of social accomplishment which one gets when, having been obliged to telephone someone with whom you do not wish to speak, you find to your relief that you have reached their answering machine.

You can thereby discharge your social duties without any contact at all.

Having few genuine friends in life (for obvious reasons), I also like talking with restaurant staff about food, wine, gossip, news and life, because they must listen courteously.

I recently realised that I also like being in restaurants because it frees me from the Rule of Eating which says you should eat everything on your plate.

In childhood it was to teach the sinfulness of waste—and in the conventions of home dinner parties, in most cultures, not to eat substantially of the food put before you is seen as an insult to the household and its hospitality.

I have long admired those nonchalant types who can, without guilt or explanation, leave food on their plates.

As a young man on a Very Important Date, I remember being speechless with admiration when I was dining with Maryanne Grimes, who was one year older than I, and she ordered a dozen oysters and ate only eight.

When questioned by the waiter as to whether there was anything wrong with the oysters, she replied that
she felt like eating only eight oysters, however because the restaurant insisted on serving oysters by the dozen or half dozen she was forced to leave four.

Because of her efforts, it is now possible in the best restaurants to buy oysters singly.

Part of my work at the Clinic is with people with public eating anxiety. I have always been saddened when I see people with restaurant anxiety. Intriguingly, restaurant anxiety is not cured by eating frequently in restaurants. I have observed it in those who go often to restaurants.

One of the anxieties which we have examined at the Clinic is the They Have Forgotten Us anxiety.

This is a dreadful foreboding that the serving staff have forgotten entirely that you are in the restaurant. The terror of having become invisible. The terror that you may be dead.

It is closely related to the They Are Deliberately Ignoring Us anxiety.

It can express itself also as That Table Over There Came in After Us and is Being Served Before Us.

Our studies show that these anxieties are found in those people whose mothers indulged them with on-demand breastfeeding.

It is true that some restaurant staff do develop the unseeing gaze. When the head waiter at the Algonquin dining room died, George Kaufman's comment was, ‘How did God catch his eye?'

This paranoia can be connected to ideas of unworthiness—that we don't deserve to eat in such a
fine place, that we and our companions are not worthy of the restaurant and consequently are being justly punished by being ignored.

This particular anxiety is expressed in the insecurity of the complaint, ‘This restaurant is Up Itself '.

Because of my privileged upbringing and the prerogative of being able to pursue one of the leisurely avocations, I myself am sometimes accused of Being Up Myself.

It is a curious Australian practice to be always on the hunt for people who are Up Themselves. I have mentioned this to the Clinic and much clinical interest in it is being taken at one of our labs.

This Doesn't Look Like What I Ordered: in cases of this anxiety the Clinic recommends pliability. The problem arises in an unfamiliar restaurant because it is difficult to pre-visualise the appearance of the meal.

The This Doesn't Look Like What I Ordered anxiety is related to the recent discussion of recovered memory in childhood abuse cases. The discussion is about whether something really happened to us in childhood or whether we have fantasised some experiences stimulated by the probing of psychologists or social workers.

There are idealised or fantasised dishes which we believe we have eaten in the past or wish we had eaten in the past, and some of the restaurant eating experience is related to a search for the Dishes of Fantasy and Desire.

Again, you may have ordered the dish at some other time in some other restaurant or even in the same restaurant although from a different chef, but rarely
will it ever come looking as you remember it. Even fish and chips can look different. (And what, by the way, is ‘a serve of chips'? How many chips are in a ‘correct' size serving?)

It is even true of so-called regional dishes. These can be prepared differently in different parts of the same region.

The other contributing factor is that palate and visual memory are faulty. We sometimes have an imaginary dish in our heads.

The wish to have our palate expectations met is understandable and perhaps the trend to international standardisation of food outlet, menu and portion is an attempt to overcome this anxiety. Yet standardisation con tributes to this anxiety by creating uniform expectations (although it is a little known fact that, to the discerning, Big Macs, Kentucky Fried Chicken and other such mass-produced ‘international' foods do vary from outlet to outlet, and from country to country).

Why Have They Given Us This Table? This is a feeling that, because you are unknown at the restaurant, the maître d'hôtel has placed your party at the worst table in the restaurant, near the lavatory or the swinging door to the kitchen, and that they keep their best tables for their regulars.

They do. Our advice is to become an habitual customer. This is a fine status to have in life. It could very well be the purpose of life.

I Should Have Ordered What You're Having (or How in God's Name Did I End Up With This and
What Is It?). This is a feeling of inadequacy when faced with a menu and a sense of inferiority before the knowingness of your companion(s).

It comes from the childhood anxiety that the Other Child or the Parents got more, or got a better part of whatever food is being served. This was, without exception, true of my family.