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Robin Blake on Frank Moorhouse, Slightly Foxed 78,-Emery-Kelen

In Love with the League

I once had what I thought was a pretty good idea for a spy novel set in the 1920s. The hero would be a shell-shocked war veteran who winds up in a clinic in Switzerland being psychoanalysed by someone vaguely like Carl Jung. A fellow patient is an attractive woman working for the brand-new League of Nations in Geneva and, as they start an affair, he discovers she – and the League – possess a secret on which the future of world peace hinges . . . I was vague on the details.

It felt less like a good idea after I’d outlined it to a friend. He looked incredulous. ‘You want to set a thriller in the League of Nations? Where’s the excitement in that?’

The League grew out of the trauma of Passchendaele, Verdun and Gallipoli at the urging of the US president, Woodrow Wilson, with the objective of calming everybody down and making all future wars unnecessary. Wilson, however, couldn’t persuade his own Congress to let America join, leaving the League largely to a handful of more-or-less two-faced British and French statesmen.

It settled into what had been a grand hotel, the Palais Wilson, in harmless, neutral Geneva, where representatives of forty-two nations enjoyed a beautiful lake view as they wrestled with the status of questionable territories (the Saar, Danzig), border disputes (Albania, Colombia/Peru) and former German and Turkish colonies (Palestine, Lebanon, South-West Africa). But, although small triumphs were achieved, the grand plan to superannuate international warfare was a disastrous flop. All too often the League looked like a dog chasing its own tail.

Where, indeed, is the excitement in that?

But sometimes a dull dog has a fascinating inner life, and it took the enterprise and talent of the Australian novelist Frank Moorhouse to illuminate the Jungian shadow of the League of Nations. His Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000) form an epic diptych of over a thousand pages, set entirely in the League betwee

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I once had what I thought was a pretty good idea for a spy novel set in the 1920s. The hero would be a shell-shocked war veteran who winds up in a clinic in Switzerland being psychoanalysed by someone vaguely like Carl Jung. A fellow patient is an attractive woman working for the brand-new League of Nations in Geneva and, as they start an affair, he discovers she – and the League – possess a secret on which the future of world peace hinges . . . I was vague on the details.

It felt less like a good idea after I’d outlined it to a friend. He looked incredulous. ‘You want to set a thriller in the League of Nations? Where’s the excitement in that?’ The League grew out of the trauma of Passchendaele, Verdun and Gallipoli at the urging of the US president, Woodrow Wilson, with the objective of calming everybody down and making all future wars unnecessary. Wilson, however, couldn’t persuade his own Congress to let America join, leaving the League largely to a handful of more-or-less two-faced British and French statesmen. It settled into what had been a grand hotel, the Palais Wilson, in harmless, neutral Geneva, where representatives of forty-two nations enjoyed a beautiful lake view as they wrestled with the status of questionable territories (the Saar, Danzig), border disputes (Albania, Colombia/Peru) and former German and Turkish colonies (Palestine, Lebanon, South-West Africa). But, although small triumphs were achieved, the grand plan to superannuate international warfare was a disastrous flop. All too often the League looked like a dog chasing its own tail. Where, indeed, is the excitement in that? But sometimes a dull dog has a fascinating inner life, and it took the enterprise and talent of the Australian novelist Frank Moorhouse to illuminate the Jungian shadow of the League of Nations. His Grand Days (1993) and Dark Palace (2000) form an epic diptych of over a thousand pages, set entirely in the League between the mid-1920s and 1945. It is not (or not primarily) a spy story but a doomed romance. A young Australian girl, Edith Campbell Berry, comes to Geneva and falls in love with her employer. The love object however is not a person, it is an institution: Edith falls head over heels for the League of Nations itself and, as the two novels progress, we follow that love’s course through delight, disappointment, furious rows, betrayal, reconciliation and, at the end, tearful annihilation. It all begins in a sunburst of hope. Taking up her post at the start of Grand Days, Edith fully expects to change the world, while opening herself to all the experiences of a modern self-actuating woman. ‘She believed that she and the others at the League were a new breed dawning. She did not think that being in her mid-twenties was too late to refashion oneself, while still keeping a grip of political realism.’ That last proviso turns out to be one of the novels’ keys. Although there is plenty of humour, both broad and subtle, in these books, Moorhouse avoids the easy path of lampooning the League of Nations as a futile talking-shop, as many contemporaries did.

Like leaves in Vallombrosa, Tobacco in Virginia, Like monks on Monte Rosa, And chiefs in Abyssinia, Like banditry in China, Or Turkomen in Khiva, Like herring in Loch Fyne are Committees in Geneva.

The satirist’s point would be quite lost on Edith Campbell Berry. She revels in committees as parlour
games where each person’s contribution was their throw of the dice, from which followed certain moves around the board. For her, committees were the Great Basic Unit. When you understood the workings of a committee . . . you understood the workings of an empire. Of course there should be a place in administration for dashing individualism and grand leadership but in her experience it was never a bad thing for lofty plans to be brushed down and combed by the committee.
The world’s addiction to war is not the only item on the League’s agenda. There are also knotty social issues, most of them still with us – the rights of women and refugees, racism, modern slavery, drug trafficking, decolonization, world health. Edith often finds these matters reflecting back on herself and her personal relationships. So, just as the League grapples with questions around overpopulation and eugenics, Edith must consider the implications of her use of a contraceptive device that she gets by mail order from Germany. The moral equivalence of public policy and personal life is a recurrent theme. In one episode Captain Strongbow, an American charlatan, persuades Edith to parade through the Geneva streets dressed as a cowgirl, as an advertisement for his idea of a ‘world police force’. She surprises herself by getting a strong kick out of this extrovert display but she also discovers that ‘good ideas were sometimes propounded by people who were not always personally sound and not always decorous’. Another insight comes to her in a jazz club where a black musician, Jerome, explains the wordless singing called scat: ‘scat is the sound you speak when you are not speaking’. Tipsy on champagne she makes a series of connections ‘where sound became music; where music became jazz; where jazz became poetry; where poetry became scat singing; where scat singing became meaning’ and suddenly she is thinking about international communication across language barriers. ‘My God! It’s a new parlance!’ Later in the evening, alone with Jerome, Edith uses her own mouth in a way that is also other than speaking, and an equally ‘new parlance’. So the path of Edith’s sexual education is tracked in parallel with her growth as a diplomat. As she develops and changes Edith sees how relations, whether international or interpersonal, depend on ‘civilized tenets’, that is on comity, and on protocol which is ‘formalized goodwill’. Treaties are really only the same as handshakes, deals based on trust. But ‘when the trust has gone so has civilization’. She also learns about the worm that eats into and destroys this trust: the principle of rebus sic stantibus (‘things thus standing’) by which a treaty can be broken when its background conditions may have shifted. Hitler invades the Rhineland on this pretext. Edith finds the same tactic being used – by herself and others – in her own private liaisons. The most significant of these is with an older Englishman at the League, the suave and worldly-wise Ambrose Westwood. They meet and flirt on the train on their way to Geneva and later embark on an affair that will be the most important of Edith’s life. It is also the most unusual, since Ambrose turns out to enjoy putting on Edith’s clothes and soon leads her into an unsuspected network of crossdressing and gender fluidity alongside, and sometimes overlapping, that of the dull dogs of the League. A man writing about the perceptions and feelings of a strong female protagonist needs to be, in a literary sense, a cross-dresser himself. Some culture warriors would use the term ‘cultural appropriation’ for male novelists who do this, which would seem to judge Flaubert, Thackeray or James Joyce rather harshly. To me Frank Moorhouse’s heroine is as fully realized as Madame Bovary, Becky Sharp or Molly Bloom. Edith is a devoted self-observer, constantly cross-checking her intimate thoughts and reflections as they change and contradict each other. In the beginning she has a private range of social responses, ready for use in any given circumstance, which she calls her Ways: the Way of Companionable Directness, the Way of the Silent Void or, when the situation gets out of hand, the Way of Cowardly Flight. But she draws less and less on these Ways as she gains confidence, and then something of Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm develops in Edith. She is an organizer, increasingly driven not by instinct but by an enquiring rationalism. She is open to new experience, whether sensual or intellectual, but is increasingly possessed of a beady eye for humbug and bad faith. Another protagonist she reminds me of is Harriet Pringle in Olivia Manning’s Balkan and Levant trilogies (see SF nos. 63 and 64). Frequently buffeted by world events and troublesome personal relationships, both women guard their integrity and dignity as best they can – and do not always succeed. While Grand Days plays out in the jazzy 1920s, Dark Palace deals with the League’s second, gloomier decade. Edith and her colleagues now face a string of international crises – Abyssinia, Spain, the aggression of Nazi Germany. The outbreak of the Second World War leaves the still new Palais des Nations (which has replaced the Palais Wilson) stripped down to a skeleton staff who go on issuing reports and statistics for a world that is no longer listening. There is real pathos in this.
Edith stopped at the Council Room and looked in at the green covers fitted to the round dais and benches, where once five hundred delegates had gathered. She glanced at the murals, ‘The End of Pestilence’, ‘Strength’, ‘Law’, ‘The End of Slavery’, ‘Solidarity of Peoples’, ‘The End of War’. All closed now. All unseen and unbelieved. The murals spoke only to themselves.
After the war, a conference is called in San Francisco to institute a new world body and Edith and her remaining colleagues stand ready to be integrated into what they expect to be the ‘New League of Nations’, this time boosted by the United States as a member. To their shock and pain it doesn’t work out like that and they and the League are cruelly consigned to the dark and ignominious dustbin of history. When the despairing Edith asks Ambrose, ‘Did we waste our lives at the League? All those words we wrote and spoke?’ he can only answer, ‘There is no one to tell us whether we did, or did not.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 78 © Robin Blake 2023


About the contributor

Robin Blake’s latest novel Hungry Death came out in 2022.

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