Grand Days
Page 62
For the foundations of my fiction, I had been using material in Geneva from the League of Nations archive at the Rockefeller Library. I worked under the guidance of the remarkable Swedish archivist, Sven Welander, to whom I owe a very special debt. He directed my attention to the career of a young Canadian woman, Mary McGeachy, who joined the Information section in the twenties. As I read the flies, mostly unopened for fifty years or more, her life in the Secretariat began to fill my mind and to inform my book as I wrote it. Although I did not use her directly as a main character and the book is not her life story, Mary McGeachy did become a guiding spirit for the book.
My preoccupation with her life led me to make enquiries about whether she had deposited her personal papers with another library. The papers weren’t in the National Library of Canada and two Canadian historians with an interest both in the period and in women’s studies couldn’t help me.
While I was working at the archives in Geneva, I began visiting the French town of Besançon. On my second visit to Besançon I met, by chance, a Canadian couple, Donald and Flora Harris, of London, Ontario, who were on vacation in France. Naturally, I talked about my project and mentioned my preoccupation with Mary McGeachy.
They became curious and said that they had lived next door to a Don McGeachy in London, Ontario, about twenty years before. We agreed that it was possible that this was the same family. Eventually the address of Don McGeachy was passed on to me and I wrote to him about my project. Almost a year after my chance meeting with the Canadians at the dinner party in Besançon, a letter came from him saying that he had discovered that Mary McGeachy was, in fact, alive, and was living in upstate New York, aged ninety-two.
She was, as far as I could ascertain, the only living survivor of the Secretariat from those earlier days of the League, from among the band of officers, who came to Geneva for this great experiment. Mary McGeachy was living with her adopted daughter, Janet Holmes, and her son-in-law, David, in upstate New York. I went to Keene Valley where they lived, and I spent days talking with Mary McGeachy. Mary McGeachy died on 1 November 1991.
I came across some lines from a poem by Stephen Spender which I think are a just description of Mary McGeachy and her fellow officers:
… they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.
I thank Jacqueline McNaughton who led me to her relative in Paris, Marceau Hautrive, aged ninety-four who worked as an interpreter with the League in 1920.
I refer readers who would like to know more of Edith to my book Forty-Seventeen which deals with her much later in her life. George McDowell features in The Electrical Experience (Angus and Robertson).
The title of the episode ‘Cry Me a River’ is taken from the title of a song written by Arthur Hamilton.
The episode ‘Confidence and the Giving of Confidences’ loosely adapts sections from the book, The Peacemakers, by Alice Ritchie, Hogarth Press (1928) — the most interesting English language novel to have come out of the League period that I have come across. I would like to pay tribute to her. I am grateful to her sister Trekkie Parsons for other valuable information.
I want to thank the following people for help with research and other matters related to the book: Senator Patricia Giles who gave me accommodation and assistance in Canberra during my research there; Tim and Julie Baker; Brian and Suzanne Kiernan; Meredith Sime; Judy Rymer; Annie Hollander; Rob Crooks, for accommodation in Washington; John McManus and Professor Bruce Johnson who helped as music consultants; Norma King, Nowra Red Cross; Richard Hall, whose background in politics and whose fine library and memory assisted me; Don Anderson, one of my kitchen critics who looked after the home front; Jenny Carleton, who carried my computer 20,000 kilometres; the editor of the Sydney Review, Michael Vanstone and the editor of the Adelaide Review, Christopher Pearson who were, in their own inestimable way, honourable patrons of the project; Errol Sullivan, of Southern Star Films who showed faith; Gilles and Carla Brepsant of Geneva who helped me in those first few weeks in Geneva with accommodation and guidance, along with Shelagh Rogers who helped with curses, French, and companionship; Kasia Koralewska-Skibinska and Leshek Skibinsky, of Geneva for advice and friendship; Simone and Jean-Pierre Rosset, who helped with accommodation; Bernard Zumthor, Conseiller en conservation du patrimoine architectural pour la Ville de Genève; and Bernard Erbeia and his wife Miriam, of Geneva, for arranging for me to see the Palais Wilson.
To Besançon I owe a special debt. I spent two years in this beautiful Renaissance city writing my book and while there I was warmly welcomed and helped by many people who opened their libraries and homes to me. I especially wish to thank Roslyn Young who was not only one of my French teachers, but whose personal generosity helped me and the book in many ways. I also thank my other French teachers, John Olsen, Suzette Lachaise, and Christiane Rozet. I thank Dr Danièle Olsen (who occasionally looked after my health), Donna and Alain L’Hôte, Dr Pierre-André Peuteuil (who was my consultant on psychiatric matters) and his wife Nancy, and Lois Rose, Debbi Hicks, Glenys Hanson and Christian Bastian. I thank Isabelle and Philippe Dubois at La Chamade, my favourite restaurateurs, in whose restaurant I wrote some of the book and who put up with my poor French and who saw me in many moods.
I wish to acknowledge assistance and encouragement, in many forms, from the Australia Council, especially Max Bourke, the Literature Board, the Australian Film Commission, the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Army, and Qantas.
I appreciated the advice and work of Professor Martin Dubin of Northern Illinois University and of Anique H. M. van Ginneken, both specialists in the League of Nations. I am grateful for the information and courtesies extended me by fellow writer and child of the League days, Lady Wallinger (formerly Stella Zilliacus).
I wish to acknowledge the valued support and guidance of my editor at Pan Macmillan Australia, Jane Palfreyman, and to thank the managing director of Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia, James Fraser, who showed faith and came to the rescue a number of times during the writing of the book. I want to also thank my editor at Pan Macmillan UK, Georgia Garrett, for her commitment and editorial advice.
I appreciate the special commitment brought to the book by my UK agent Derek Johns.
In 1986 I was awarded the Sir Harold White Fellowship at the Australian National Library to study the library’s holdings of documents and personal papers connected with the League, especially the papers of John Latham. This was of immense value to me and as the first fiction writer to receive the Fellowship I am especially grateful to the trustees of the Fellowship and to the Library. The Library assisted me in finding my way into the project and in planning its future directions. I especially wish to thank John Thompson, Indulus Kepars, Pam Ray, William Thorn, and the Director-General, Warren Horton. A number of other libraries and librarians helped me with the book. They are the Rockefeller Library in Geneva; the library of the Institute for the Study of International Relations in Geneva; the Fisher Library at the University of Sydney; Wolfson College Library, Oxford; Rhodes Library, Oxford; the American Library in Paris; and the Université de Franche-Comté library in Besançon, France.
Military and diplomatic officers also helped me. To inform myself on matters of international organisation, I visited the multinational peace keeping force in the Sinai Desert in 1982. There I was helped by troops from the Australian, Fijian and Swedish contingents especially Lieutenant-General Fredrik Bull-Hansen, Lieutenant-Colonel Jim Sanday, and Captain Steve Meekin. I went to Lebanon during the siege of Beirut and owe special debt to members of the Israeli Defence Forces and the Christian Militia Forces Lebanese. As an accredited writer, I observed the dramatic 1986 renegotiation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty in Geneva, mixing then with the various delegations, and I also observed the General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna again with contacts with the delegations. Captain Peter Bartu of UNTAC in Cambodia also helped. During the de
velopment and writing of the book I was the guest at a number of embassies and thank the following ambassadors, spouses and staff for their hospitality and advice: Owen Harries and his wife Dorothy, Gough Whitlam and his wife Margaret, Peter Curtis and his wife Chantal, Kim Jones and his wife Elizabeth, John Rowland and his wife Moira, Richard Butler, Mark Pierce in Israel, and Gregson and his wife Maria Edwards in Vienna.
Two people generously offered to read the book in manuscript as specialist readers and gave very valuable advice: Carol Miller, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, who also shared her work on Dame Rachel Crowdy and the League of Nations with me, and Owen Harries, editor of National Interest and a former ambassador to Unesco.
I thank my lawyer Nick Dettmann, and his wife, Carol Dettmann (who in 1969 edited my first book, Futility and Other Animals), and who have been friends, patrons and advisers. I owe much to my agent, and friend of many years, Rosemary Creswell, and her associate Linda Funnell, who both gave a high level of personal, technical and creative help above and beyond the role of their office. I thank Murray Sime who has been my friend and exasperated financial adviser over a number of years. He was steadfast during the writing of this book. I thank Susie Carleton, faithful patron and friend.
I pay tribute to Jean-Paul and Monique Delamotte of Paris, who facilitated, encouraged, accommodated, and tolerated me during the different European parts of the making of this book, and who, when I was younger, gave me my first deep introduction to France and who have continued over the years to guide me in my enjoyment of France.
I pay tribute to my mother and father who lived through the historical period of this book and who have helped me with their recollections and by just being, inescapably, representatives of that time.
Finally, and especially, I would like to pay tribute to Christine Allsopp who shared with me the experience and difficulties of writing this book, in Geneva and Besançon, and who helped and supported me in many, many ways.
FRANK MOORHOUSE
April 1993
Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator, and became a full-time writer in the 1970s. He has written fiction, non-fiction, screenplays and essays, and edited many collections of writing.
Forty-Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in The New York Times and was named Book of the Year by The Age and ‘moral winner’ of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier’s Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.
Moorhouse has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Futility and Other Animals
The Americans, Baby
The Electrical Experience
Tales of Mystery and Romance
Conference-ville
The Everlasting Secret Family and Other Secrets
Forty-Seventeen
Dark Palace
Cold Light
OTHER BOOKS
Room Service
Lateshows
Loose Living
NON-FICTION
Days of Wine and Rage
Martini: A Memoir
COLLECTED WORKS
Selected Stories (also published as The Coca-Cola Kid)
FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS
Between Wars (feature film)
Coca-Cola Kid (feature film)
Everlasting Secret Family (feature film)
Conference-ville (telemovie)
Time’s Raging (with Sophia Turkiewicz, telemovie)
The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (docudrama)
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Version 1.0
Grand Days
9781742752693
Published by Random House Australia 2011
Copyright © Frank Moorhouse
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A Vintage book
Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by Pan Macmillan Publishers in 1993
First published by Vintage, an imprint of Random House Australia, in 2000
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry
Moorhouse, Frank, 1938-
Grand days/Frank Moorhouse
ISBN 978 1 74275 268 6 (pbk)
League of Nations - History - Fiction.
Man - woman relationships - Fiction.
Women diplomats - Fiction.
A823.3
Cover design by Gayna Murphy
Cover photograph © Condé Nast Archive / Corbis
* This description is based on the work of Catherine Pastuhova, in the book The International Secretariat by Egon F. Ranshofen-Wertheimer, and draws from the book Yes, and Albert Thomas by E. J. Phelan, from The Guide to the Archives of the League of Nations (1919–1946) and on my personal experience with the archives of the League.
* Actual person