Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  They regret that children cease to be philosophers and stop asking existential questions such as, what is the difference between a weed and a rose?

  They believe that delightful children have their creativity schooled out of them or beaten out of them by the cruel vicissitudes of capitalist life to end up as adult dullards.

  What is so good about childhood that we should retain it?

  Bruno Bettelheim states that in the eighteenth century children and adults played identical games. That there was once not a great difference between adult and child hood recreation.

  Barrie describes the state of childhood as being ‘gay, and innocent and heartless’.

  However, on closer analysis, the so-called creativity of childhood is really only cute misunderstandings, cute misuse of vocabulary, and cute ignorance which is elevated to the ‘philosophical’ by giving it an enriched adult context.

  Their artwork is more clever conformity to presented models (how could it be anything else?) than it is the expression of a lived interaction with an artform, with a human event or an inner life, which is the occupation of the adult artist.

  Peter, having avowed never to be a man and refusing to take on the responsibilities of adulthood, is confronted by Wendy, who then asks him: ‘But where are you going to live?’

  Peter Pan earlier in his tale claimed that he lived ‘second to the right … and straight on till morning’.

  I know that address.

  Towards the end of the book he tells Wendy that even he is thinking of settling down, ‘with Tink in the house we built…’

  I am at a loss to explain how he came to raise the home loan (and I would be curious to know what interest rate he got) or where he found the skills to ‘build’ a house with Tink.

  I suspect Tink’s parents supplied the funding and did much of the work on this alleged house.

  It may come as a surprise to some to learn that I have lived with Tink, and believe me, ‘house’ or ‘household’ are not words which I would use to describe her way of life.

  She lives more in a nook or cranny, usually in a five-star hotel or in the style of a five-star hotel.

  Tink is not a homemaker by nature.

  Tink isn’t too good on storing things away in their appropriate places or categories, or in finding her keys (she calls room service to help her find things), which brings us to the most eyebrow-raising part of the Peter Pan story.

  ‘I thought all the fairies were dead,’ says Mrs Darling, casually.

  What a horrible thing to say. It is the sort of thing I would expect from Mrs Darling.

  Most of that which we claim to ‘know’ is what we wish to be true.

  Wendy, however, disagrees with Mrs Darling about the extinction of the fairies.

  ‘There are always a lot of young ones,’ explained Wendy (one of life’s know-alls), ‘…the mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls, and the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are…’ (in 1911 the allocation of the colours blue for boys and pink for girls had not been established).

  Where Wendy gained this arcana is itself a mystery. Wendy does not convince as someone who has ‘knocked around’, so to speak, or to have had much contact with those clubs where one meets the sillies who are not sure what they are. And what jolly clubs they are.

  There may be more to Wendy than the book tells us.

  To put it bluntly, yes some of us don’t know what age we are, and along with Peter Pan, find it an uncomfortable question.

  Our parents had clear ideas of how to behave and how to dress at any given age (and had firm ideas about how we should also dress and behave ‘for our age’).

  For many of us living now, the world has fewer expectations and guidelines about age-appropriate conduct. The bewildering reality is that we feel we are different ages in different moods and in different company.

  We sometimes feel a different age to the age we know we look. Although the ‘age’ we look varies from day to day according to how we feel about ourselves and whether we’ve lost the keys.

  There is the truth that chronological age is not accurately reflected in behaviour or achievement, nor evenly reflected through the population of any given society or in comparison among societies.

  It has to be remarked that the Peter Pans of the world are sometimes in relationship with the child within them, but often also with other children.

  Interestingly, Wendy condones this relationship. She says that, ‘When Margaret [Wendy’s child] grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn: and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.’

  Whether a girl child can ‘mother’ a Peter Pan, and how much mothering Peter Pan really wanted and whether that was what he was in it for, is the subject of another essay.

  At the Clinic the debate goes on.

  Our interim position is that we believe people should firstly recall that their age is forever changing, moment by moment, and that it is, strictly speaking, fallacious, in this sense, to see oneself as any given age.

  Elizabeth Bowen in The House in Paris has a character say that for much of our life after the late twenties, we have ‘a special age of our own’ which we remain for many, many years.

  To illustrate this I told the Clinic about going to a village behind Sausalito in California where all the old beatniks go to die.

  You enter a dim bar and see slim women in black tights with hair to below their buttocks, and men with long hair and headbands, dressed in jeans and handtooled riding boots, playing pool, drinking beer, playing bongo drums, reciting poetry.

  As your eyes adjust to the dark you see that they are not teenagers but old men and women in the same dress, creakily doing the same things, trying to live the old life of the sixties. It was not an exhilarating sight. They live locked in one age.

  I am fond of quoting Dante, who said that we are all our ages within one.

  All our ages within us must have their performance, their finery and array, and their accomplishment, sometimes in the blending of our ages, sometimes in age-disparate sexual relationships, sometimes in revelry, in masque, sometimes in parody, sometimes even in premature mellowness (playing an older age), sometimes in nostalgia, sometimes in a happy regressive sojourn, sometimes in the voluptuous and illicit revisiting of another age in sexual play, sometimes in the imaginative amplitude of intimacy.

  APPENDIX

  Cuisine Cruelle

  Compiled by Chef Bilson and the Duc

  THE DISHES described here are some of the highlights of the 1000 Great Restaurants of Europe Tour.

  Also included are a few of the Duc’s favourite recipes, which illustrate the dark side of the haute cuisine of his decadent aristocratic tradition, a noble tradition which rises above so many of our fashionable and petty inhibitions about food to reach that higher state of honour among living creatures and humans which acknowledges the great fundamental truth that all living things are one, and that in our eating of them we become one with them, to ultimately rejoin the earth as dust and to be rejoined with the atmosphere as the air we breathe and so continue as part of the grand molecular cycle of existence.

  Unfortunately we have lost the recipe for ragoût using ovarine, that is the unlaid eggs extracted from the hen.

  BISOUS À L’ASPIC (KISSES IN ASPIC)

  Chilled aspic is one of the pleasures of the European summer. The aspic should quiver. It can be served on plates resting on crushed ice. As you know, aspic is made from reduced animal stock, i.e., the juices of animals. Wine and liqueur may be added to the stock. Bisous à l’aspic is made from the cheeks of a calf (bisou = kiss, hence the joke—the French custom of kissing both cheeks as a sign of affection).

  Take a calf, slice off the cheeks. Dry your tears. Dice the meat. Place in chilled dish. Cover with aspic.

  TERRINE CHASSE-MOUCHES (FLY-SWAT TERRINE)

  This is made from the tail of the cow. Take one cow. Remove the tail. Re
move the flies. Remove the skin. Chop into thin slices and follow instructions as for any old-style terrine.

  THIS RECIPE IS FROM PABLO PICASSO

  He said, ‘Aimer les choses et les manger vivantes’ (What I see and like, I devour). His words reminded me how, in the old madder days, there was always someone whose dinner party trick was eating flowers from the flower arrangements. I have had reports from Australia that people eat nasturtium flowers with their salads.

  OX À LA FICELLE (OX WITH STRING)

  Take four servants and an ox. Tie a piece of string to each leg of the ox, have the servants lower the ox into a large pot of boiling water containing a carrot and an onion. Boil for twenty hours while holding the string.

  TRUITE AU BLEU (BLUE TROUT)

  ‘Ruling a large kingdom is like cooking a small fish,’ said Lao-Tzu. Handle the fish carefully but with a very firm grip, and avoid any killing until it becomes necessary.

  The trout should be kept alive until the last minute. Kill the fish with one blow to the head. Do not wash the fish or scale it. Pour boiling vinegar over the fish, the skin of which will then turn blue. Use wine vinegar of high quality, never white vinegar. Then cook the fish in a stock without boiling.

  SMALL BIRDS À LA LUCIEN TENDRETFOR EATING ON A JOURNEY

  Net, do not shoot, two or three bécasses (woodcock) and feed them on Armagnac for a few days to soften their bones. On the day of the journey kill the birds and place them under your hat or beret on your head. By the end of the day the birds will be nicely cooked by the heat generated by the head and captured in the hat. The hat can be taken off on the train or aircraft and the birds eaten with a good red wine.

  FILETS DE LIÈVRE EFFILÉE (FLAYED HARE)

  Blanch a two-kilogram live hare. Skin and eviscerate. Poach the hare in a court bouillon made of Cabernet franc and perfumed with three large truffles and a ham hock. Cook at 80°C for three hours and then remove the hare and hock from the court bouillon to cool. Strip the flesh from the bones and pull into string-like pieces. Repeat the process with the hock. Cut the truffles into julienne and mix with the shredded meats. Reduce the court bouillon to one litre. Add half a bottle of Château d’Yquem and three egg whites, bring to the boil and strain through muslin.

  Lightly pack the mixture of truffle and hare into a terrine, pour in the cool court bouillon until it reaches the rim and then retire to a cold place to set. Best eaten cold.

  JAMBON D’OIE AVEC SA SAUCISSON SANGUINE (GOOSE PROSCIUTTO WITH BLOOD SAUSAGE)

  Take a large goose, immobilise it with fencing wire and then bruise the breasts by first plucking the feathers to expose the skin and then beating firmly with a patterned meat mallet. When the blood vessels are showing signs of lividity, smother the goose, slit the throat and collect the blood. Season the blood with salt, quatre épices, garlic, one third the volume of clotted cream, half a cup of chopped blanched spinach and some minced fat. Add a little cognac and then fill the washed large intestine of the goose with the mixture. Hang the sausage for two weeks in a cold airy space.

  Have the goose plucked or skinned. Remove the still-warm breasts and legs from the frame and salt them with a cup of fleur de sel seasoned with garlic, star anise and juniper berries. Scent the mixture with fresh thyme and bay and rub into the meat. Leave overnight in a cool place and then wipe the salt from the goose, wrap in gauze and hang with the sausage.

  If you have problems with the procedure ask your butcher to do it for you. She will be familiar with all the techniques used in this recipe.

  To serve: thinly slice the breast and arrange on large unpatterned plates with some quartered figs. Grill the sausage over a slow fire and serve with searingly hot mustard and a quince chutney.

  ELEPHANT TRUNK STUFFED WITH WILD TURKEY

  A favourite of the Obote tribe, who were much admired for their baking skills in the early sixties when Chef Bilson was accumulating techniques that he used later in his career.

  Cut off a five-foot length of elephant trunk. Cut one foot from the narrow end of the trunk and discard (unlike other noses, the elephant’s narrows at the end rather than broadens and contains inedible and aesthetically displeasing material). Season three wild turkeys with black African pepper, chillies, ginger and garlic. Stuff the seasoned turkeys into the trunk and secure at both ends with barbed wire. Half fill a 6 ft × 3 ft × 4 ft deep pit with river stones and moisten with three pounds of napalm and light with a flame thrower. When the flames have died down place the trunk on top of the hot stones, cover with wire netting and then use a front end loader to fill the pit with earth. Leave to cook for twenty-four hours and then uncover and serve in slices with baked yams.

  The experience of eating this dish is characterised by Chef Bilson as a textural one, and allows, as with so much of his cooking, the prime ingredients to speak for themselves rather than being disguised with continuous innuendos of high-falutin, inter-cultural comparisons. The dish finally stands or falls on its ethnic base and not on inappropriate references to western cuisines.

  The cooking methods described by Chef Bilson used those resources that were readily available at the time. The clever cook may have to improvise if living outside Africa, although the method as described by Chef Bilson is still in common use in Africa up to this very day. Gastronomic academics will be aware that the method was adapted for use in Vietnamese cooking and was used up until the early seventies when it was discontinued, although the method is still used in some small pockets of Burma and Laos. It is perfectly acceptable to substitute Asian elephant’s trunk for African, although the turkey should be substituted by duck as the Asian trunk is significantly less capacious than the African.

  Acknowledgements

  This work originally appeared in the Sydney and Adelaide Reviews and has been rewritten and edited for publication as a book.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Michael Vanstone, editor of the Sydney Review from 1989–94, who died from leukemia. I wish also to acknowledge the editorial synergy of working not only with Michael, but with Christopher Pearson, founder and editor of the Adelaide Review.

  Both these editors offered the space and, through the subtleties of editorial invitation and interaction, caused me to explore passageways and particulars of my writing and my imagination which might not have otherwise been explored.

  Michael was, and Christopher still is, an inspirational editor.

  Suzanne Kiernan, now editor of the Sydney Review, carries on this tradition of editorial finesse.

  I wish to thank Linda Funnell, my editor at Pan Macmillan, for sensitive advice on the unravelling and reconstruction of the various demented logics at work in this book.

  Special thanks to Tony Bilson, Executive Chef at the Treasury Restaurant, Sydney Intercontinental Hotel (not associated with Bilson’s Restaurant).

  Notes

  1 Paul Fussell, The Boy Scout’s Hand Book.

  2 Sources: INSEE (the French bureau of statistics) and Project Monica, World Health Organisation.

  3 I have a portable desk. In conversations with very old peasants in the estaminets of my village in France, I was told that much variation occurred both in law and lore about what was ‘mobile’ and what belonged to the land—what was permanently attached to the earth. We have laws today about ‘fixtures’ in rented houses. In the Middle Ages some dwellings were considered mobile along with stock, household goods, weapons and bees. Fruit trees which could be uprooted and carried were sometimes considered ‘mobile’. Anything that could be blown by the wind was mobile.

  Phil Patton, in his book Made in USA, argues that this American preoccupation with mobility, the need to be able to move quickly, lies behind the design of many American ‘portable’ products.

  He traces it back to Thomas Jefferson’s mobile ‘lap-top’ writing desk. Jefferson designed his mobile desk and had it made of mahogany, about the size of an attaché case. It has a drawer in the side, the width of the case, with compartments for an ink well, pens, paper and wr
iting materials.

  A wooden flap can be opened so that the flat surface of the case can be used as a writing surface or the flap itself can be fixed at an angle to provide a sloping writing surface or book holder.

  The portable desk could comfortably be used on the lap and Jefferson used it for fifty years.

  It has no handle and was probably carried under the arm.

  Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence on it. He envisioned the desk being carried ‘in the procession of our nation’s birthday, as relics of the saints are in those of the church’. It is not.

  Jefferson had other portable desks made. These contained document copying machines, including an early use of carbon paper to make copies.

  He also used a polygraph, a machine which controls a second pen which mechanically replicated the document he was writing.

  My own portable desk was designed by Kurt Geiger of Italy. It is a leather-covered wooden box also the size of an attaché case.

  It is known as a ‘roll top’ because it has a rounded top, a lid, which looks like a cottage loaf and folds back to present a cave-like inner compartment inside the lid.

  In this compartment I have a pewter echidna that my French translator Jean-Paul Delamotte gave me, and a small bronze sleeping cattle dog, given to me by sculptor Ester Belliss, who lived at Pola Fogal when I used Pola Fogal as a retreat.

  There is a square squat Virginia shot glass from Norfolk, Virginia (where I once had a nervous breakdown), from which I sometimes have a shot of bourbon at the end of the day while contemplating my day’s work and the evening’s gaiety.

  I have a clock which tells me what the time is any place in the world.

  I have an intimate photograph of my dear friend.

  I have a small adjustable brass magnifying glass which has three legs and which I can rest on a photograph to study it in magnified detail by putting my eye down on the brass rim of the magnifying glass and moving the magnifying glass about. It is something like a jeweller’s glass (to be honest, I have no real use for this instrument but I like the look of it and idea of having instruments which potentially allow me to extend my vision).