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  About the book

  In Lateshows Frank Moorhouse explores contemporary protocols – of family, food and art – looks at the tragic evanescence of technology and investigates meal reform and the science of life.

  We learn of the frustrations of making a film when the director lives in Belgrade. Then we move to the Cabaret Voltaire to discuss Eskimo depression, deflowering, and poetical disputes among the younger bush poets, before extolling the club snack and the cucumber sandwich.

  Lateshows is Frank Moorhouse at his hilarious best.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  THE CLUB

  Contemporary Protocol

  THE MOVIE

  Working With Makavejev

  The Coca-Cola Kid

  THE CABARET

  The Cabaret Voltaire – a fin-de-siècle fable

  The Cabaret Voltaire Annual Report (Established Zurich, 1916: Moruya, New South Wales, Australia, 1990)

  Chairperson’s Introductory Remarks to Annual Report

  The Year’s Activities

  Chairperson’s Address

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright Page

  To Murray and Meredith Sime –

  friends and patrons of the arts

  THE CLUB

  Contemporary Protocol

  Breasts

  Children

  Ideology

  The Rich

  Art

  Economics

  Food

  Detective Fiction

  Late Families, Former Mistresses and

  Breast-feeding, and the Slowing of

  the Fast Crowd.

  I had not seen a child close up for some years, not because of antipathy, but having been for so long a night-clubber and bon vivant, I simply had not come face to face with children in my life, which usually begins with a highball while dressing for dinner, then off to a good dinner, followed by the late show at the club. I get up when children are going to bed.

  Or so I thought.

  I also thought I moved with what was called the Fast Crowd but I have begun to face up to the slowing of the Fast Crowd. My friends now not only move with a more leisurely pace, I observe, but with an undignified lack of urgency, are slower to rise from their chairs, and also, I have noticed, they have begun to procreate.

  The Late Family had arrived in my life. For some of my friends the Late Family had replaced the Late Show.

  I realised this when lunching at the club with a Former Mistress who had with her a very small baby. We had not been together since a year or so earlier when I had experienced for the first time the Lunch Where a Mistress Announces she is to Have a Baby (Not Yours).

  Further, she was, it seemed, breast-feeding the baby. At the table. That too was a first for me. The last time I had anything to do with breast-feeding, I’d been the baby.

  I did at least know that breast-feeding in public was a statement by women about their times but I was not sure whether I was the right person for them to bother with this statement.

  I did not know, I realised, where to look.

  Far from being prepared for breast-feeding in public, I am from time to time still bewildered by male nipples – by what they mean and what we are supposed to do with them.

  I found that I wanted to watch this breast-feeding. I find it fleshly, and, well, primordial. Attractive. I find breasts generally of never-ending appeal, explained, I suppose, by the exciting place breasts had in my very early years, and, I realise, in all subsequent years and stages of life. I seem also to have an exaggerated interest in the bottle and the hip flask. Further, I had always had a very special affection for these breasts of my Former Mistress. I was, though, unsure of what the current rulings were on breast taboo. I know that it is acceptable to be interested in abstracted breasts, say, in a painting. However, I am still working my way through the arguments against abstracted sexuality and gender. The opposition to a Sex Object is still not convincing. I felt that it was probably unacceptable to show too much interest in a particular living woman’s breasts, unless invited. Sometimes I feel, though, that certain clothing contains an invitation to look. I am really very confused.

  I nervously mumbled these reflections on the breast and so on to my Former Mistress while wondering how long I could watch the breast-feeding without it becoming more than ‘natural attention’, given the confusion of my responses both to breast-feeding and to this particular woman’s breasts who was A Former Mistress Now A Married Woman. I suppose I felt that maybe if lunch went well the breasts might also be again a subject of invited interest. Who knows, she might become a Mistress Returned.

  I told her that of all the insults I feared, to be called a ‘perve’ is the most fearful.

  ‘Go ahead, watch as much as you wish – don’t keep averting your gaze with such deliberate casualness,’ she said generously.

  I asked her what was happening with breasts on beaches these days, not having been to a beach since I was eight.

  She said that to expose a breast on a beach was not necessarily to invite strangers to look.

  ‘Women are exposing themselves for their reasons, not yours,’ she said. ‘They want to feel the body in contact with the water and sun – not with the eyes of strangers.’

  Delly, our table attendant at the lunch at the club, who was not averse to joining the conversation of dining members, or for that matter, sitting down with them and playing the fool, said that the beach was a sporting field and everyone on it was a player and everyone could look at whatever they wanted to look at. That was her opinion. Delly tells me that she is post-punk.

  I am happy when table attendants talk to me because I eat alone so often. I find, though, that they do tend to come in and out of a conversation with well-considered ripostes and repartee worked up while they are off in the kitchen. Delly was a mistress of riposte.

  To broaden the conversation I ventured that genitalia were important in contemporary dance because some dance costume and movements emphasised the genitalia so that they could not be ignored. Or was that just me? I was, I said, happy for genitalia to be used explicitly in dance. Anyway, whatever. It was all fine by me.

  My Former Mistress made no comment on this and I could tell she felt that I had perhaps gone a little ‘off’ since she saw me last, that I might have deteriorated in the past year while she had been away having a child and being married and changing into A Former Mistress.

  However, from the nearby table where she was serving, Delly, who had obviously overheard us, called, ‘Yeahh!’, which I took to be affirmation of my comment.

  My Former Mistress said that she was against exposing the full breast while breast-feeding in public and wore clothing which allowed her to breast-feed without undue exposure.

  ‘The feminist militants are saying more than I’m saying,’ she went on. ‘They’re saying that motherhood has to be made an unremarkable part of everyday public life. They refuse to be banished or penalised for mother hood. While I would settle for mothering facilities in public places.’

  That sounded very reasonable to me. I was not perturbed by motherhood taking its place in public life. I worried, though, about noisy children and the opera. I supposed that could be managed. Gags come to mind.

  Delly drifted back and said she thought the uneasiness about breast-feeding in public was that we were facing a raw act of cannibalism.

  I had never thought of it that way.

  My Former Mistress was not as intrigued by Delly’s remark as I was.

  Delly said not to look turned the breast-feeding into an act of voyeurism. Not that she herse
lf had not enjoyed the odd act of voyeurism but that one had to know what one was up to in the games of pleasure.

  ‘I was brought up not to stare,’ I explained to them both.

  My Former Mistress thought that ‘stealing’ sexual sensations from another unconsenting person was perving and an offence.

  Delly said that she enjoyed shoplifting when younger.

  ‘How does anyone know whether you are stealing sexual pleasures or showing natural interest?’ I asked, blushing, I think, because of my secretive responses to the breasts of my Former Mistress.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that it was a serious offence,’ my Former Mistress said winningly. ‘Unnatural incuriosity might be a deeper offence against the natural order. I find nervous glances – such as yours – are very unnerving for me,’ she said, and then added invitingly, ‘Please just look.’

  I decided that breast-feeding by a Former Mistress was a separate category of protocol dilemma, bound to be forever a confusion of secretive and expressed sensations.

  When faced with strange women who were breast-feeding, I thought I might stay with my conservative code, described by sociologist Erving Goffman as ‘civil inattention’, which I take to mean looking without drawing attention to one’s looking.

  The Disciplining of Other

  People’s Children.

  I found recently that Late Families are all about me. My friends, in mid-life, are having children. Some are even two-parent families. Even Former Mistresses are having children.

  ‘We’re in crisis,’ the Late Parent friend said on the telephone to me at the club. ‘We are trying to keep up with our opera subscription even though we now have Tom but our regular baby-sitter can’t make it. We don’t want to miss Kiri in Tosca.’

  I didn’t want them to miss Kiri in Tosca. I like to do what I can to help my Late Parent friends, formerly part of the Fast Crowd, appear at least once a year in public.

  ‘Maybe I could go to the opera for you – I would be better at that than looking after Tom.’ Tom was a girl. An independently minded girl. But from a White Meat Family.

  They said, no, they wanted to go to the opera and would like me to take care of Tom.

  I browsed in Rousseau’s Emile for guidance and then upon arrival I gave Tom a gift, a hand-carved racing car.

  She stared at it, turning it in her hand as if trying to make it fit into the world of toys.

  ‘It is hand-carved. It is Jarrah,’ I said, desperately reinforcing the gift. ‘And gender-distinction free.’

  ‘I hate gender-free gifts,’ Tom said grimly.

  Her mother said to her that I would be babysitting.

  ‘I don’t have baby-sitters, I have companions,’ Tom said firmly.

  ‘It’s hand-carved Jarrah from West Australia,’ I added, trying to convince her of the value of the gift, which was dying in her hands. ‘Hardest wood in the world.’

  ‘What has that got to do with the price of eggs?’ Tom said.

  ‘I don’t know where she picks up expressions like that,’ her mother said.

  Tom then said something in Spanish which she had learned at pre-school.

  Her mother said, ‘Tom, don’t speak in Spanish in front of people who do not speak Spanish.’

  Tom looked at me and said, ‘Does it make you paranoid?’

  I said that after a time it might.

  ‘What’s the book?’ the mother said gesturing at the copy of Emile under my arm.

  I said it was Emile by Rousseau. ‘It was the first child-guidance book.’

  The Late Parents took the book and looked through it. ‘It was written in 1762,’ one said doubtfully.

  ‘I had to start somewhere,’ I said.

  ‘We don’t have a single-book approach,’ she said.

  ‘It is not a racing car,’ Tom pronounced. ‘It’s a rat. And a rotten rat at that.’ She put it down, consigning it, I could tell, to that oblivion into which children can make people and things disappear forever.

  The Late Parents had been gone fifteen minutes when Tom reappeared in the room dressed in a tiger suit.

  ‘What-ho!?’ I said, having never said what-ho to anyone before in my life. ‘Are we a tiger?’

  ‘You don’t talk English to tigers,’ she said, ‘unless you have rocks in your head.’

  I did not know where she would pick up expressions like that.

  Tom growled and then bit me on my leg. It caused pain.

  I suggested that she go back to bed but she said that tigers didn’t obey English.

  I wondered if I could muster any Bengali to instruct her to go to bed.

  ‘Listen to this, Tom.’ I read to her from Emile, while she prowled about the room. ‘Rousseau says that reasoning with children was a passing fashion hardly justified by results back in 1762. Reasoning appears later in children and if employed too early denies the essential childishness of children. Reasoning with children is not true reasoning because children do not understand the premises of the process of reasoning. What works best with children is an appeal to greed or to fear, or bribery. You cannot negotiate with children. What appears as negotiation is a form of oppression or corruption.’

  Tom said something in Spanish and bit me again on the leg.

  They were supposed to be a White Meat Family.

  I tried to find a reference in Emile to disciplining other people’s children but did not.

  She then took my wallet and ran from the room. I followed her and found her putting it in the hand basin and filling it with water. I agreed with Rousseau that it was probably pointless for me to ask her why she was doing this with my wallet.

  I found a length of cord and tied a piece of string to the end of it and then tied the cord to a length of playpen dowelling to make a whip.

  It cracked like a whip, very loud and fearsome.

  I then drove Tom, squealing and dumbfounded, out of the bathroom and to her bedroom. I cannot swear that the cord did not strike her body. I locked the bedroom door. I could hear her whimpering with shock. But she did eventually sleep.

  In the club later, my friends said that it sounded to them as if I might be in trouble when she told her parents.

  ‘These are sensitive times in which to abuse children,’ one said.

  I muttered the words ‘adult abuse’.

  A member of the club who is a professor of law told me that to justify the laying of hands on another person’s child there needed to be a clear and present danger, your reaction had to be immediate, unpremeditated and unexcessive, and must not include revenge.

  Delly, our table attendant, said nor should it leave marks.

  What I had done to Tom, the professor of law said, seemed to meet none of these criteria.

  I showed them my leg. ‘You weren’t there,’ I said. ‘Children have to learn that they live in a world which does not necessarily share the values of their parents.’

  ‘Tell that to the jury,’ said the ex-anti-Vietnam-war poet pest, who somehow got membership to the club when he was fashionable.

  Not a very comforting thing to say to a chap.

  ‘You should have photographs taken of those bites,’ Delly said. ‘It’s your only chance.’

  Delly said that to use violence against children suggested to them that violence is effective.

  ‘It sometimes is,’ I said defensively. ‘We have to show children that their violence is ineffective against our violence. That’s a good lesson for children to learn.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Delly said. ‘I myself have enjoyed a touch of violence in the right place and at the right time.’ She winked and moved off to another table. She said over her shoulder, ‘Remember, don’t leave any marks’.

  The law professor quoted Melanie Klein, saying that violence was present very early in the child without the need of example. Had to do with frustrations with the breast.

  I seemed to be having trouble with breasts in life one way or another.

  I rang the parents next day to see if the
y would be preferring charges. They said that everything was fine. Tom dreamed she was a tiger in a circus who’d eaten her tamer.

  Dinner Table Cursing.

  Being a club man, I rarely go to dinner parties in private homes because they have no menu. That’s not true. Yes, I do enjoy a good menu but I also enjoy the company of friends in their homes. I suppose I am embarrassed because, having lived at the club for so long, I have had no home to which I could invite them in return.

  But I have been tyrannised at dinner parties in private homes by the problem of the political litany. A political litany is where the host or one of the dominant guests begins the evening with a curse against an enemy, usually a political enemy – not as an opening of discussion but as an ignition of the other dinner guests into some sort of passionate political bonding through a cursing of an assumed common enemy. It is taken as inconceivable that anyone would dissent from the litany. We are all expected to curse the enemy. As it goes around the table each guest is required to bring to the table a curse against the enemy or to give bad news of the enemy.

  I do not feel comfortable in these choruses of cursing. Maybe I enjoy cursing a particularly objectionable person whom we all know and despise but not political situations where the contradictions and complexities are more interesting than the political virtue of those present at the table. I often sit there silently disagreeing or silently examining the nature of politics rather than finding any pleasure in the cursing, but to demur or to speak up for the enemy is out of place during a ritual cursing. To refuse to curse is to risk having the curse brought against you.

  In other cultures and at other times, curses were seen to be as dangerous as spears – a curse could blister the skin and cause death, and so on. On the battlefield curses were hurled at the enemy. ‘And he drank the bitter wrath of the dog and the sharp sting of the wasp; from both of these comes the poison of his mouth.’