Loose Living (13 page)

In conclusion, the Clinic agreed with Walter Kendrick in
The Secret Museum
: ‘Pornography names an argument not a thing.'

A
DREADFUL
uproar has broken out at the Clinic over the question of what was once known as the Peter Pan ‘complex'—is it a neurosis or is it another example of the wonderful theatre of the personality? Of the transmutability of self? The ever-dazzling ability of the self to outmanoeuvre time, age and the trammels of the more timid conventions of conduct.

Some journalists, in their profiles of successful men, especially, disdain the Peter Pan complex and try to place people's behaviour by age. They are often glad that Peter Pan figures are at last changing into ‘proper adults' or at least losing their Peter Pan image, or they worry that some are not losing this image.

Roman Polanski ‘has at last begun to look his age'.
Saint Laurent is ‘more of a baby than a youth'. Both these examples are from the
New Yorker.
‘Sting (Gordon Mathew Sumner) is middle-aged,' a journalist gloats in
You
magazine.

Journalists seem overly pleased that Polanksi has been stopped from involving himself with thirteen-year-old girls and has married.

Journalists have become the Conduct Prefects, running hither and thither to find those who are not Behaving Themselves. I talk not of the criminal code but of other behaviour, such as ‘being your age'.

At the Clinic we have broken into two warring factions. Dr Débauché strongly defends the artistry involved in developing a Peter Pan complex, while Dr La Barbe defends maturity and its attendant responsibilities.

‘All children, except one, grow up,' says J. M. Barrie in the book
Peter Pan
(1911).

Barrie says in the book that mothers do not wish their children to grow up.

Evidence of this can be seen in the Maori film
Once Were Warriors
, where the mother is advised by her woman friend to ‘take a chainsaw to the apron strings' of her ‘soft' eleven-year-old boy.

Peter Pan himself claims that he did not have a mother.

Not only had he no mother, but he had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them ‘very over rated persons'.

Two issues concern the Clinic:

What, these days, is the appropriate behaviour and appearance for any given age, and do Peter Pans have a legitimate place in our
fin-de-siècle
society?

When asked his age, Peter Pan found it was not a happy question…

He told Wendy that he did not really know, because ‘I ran away the day I was born'.

So did I, figuratively.

Dr Débauché argues that in his reply Peter Pan is stating that he avoided not only ‘growing up' but also avoided assuming any given ‘age'.

Peter Pan said he ran away because he ‘heard father and mother … talking about what I was to be when I became a man'.

The Clinic queries his reply to this question. Earlier, Peter Pan said that he ‘had no mother'.

Perhaps he meant that he had ‘no mothering'.

One can have a ‘mother' but escape ‘mothering'. Especially in these times of day ‘care' and other parking stations for children.

In other generations the time given to ‘mothering' has varied. I do not seem to recall any mothering at all.

Curiously, Adorno points out that in mythology, the heroes who represent the emancipation of the human from fate always lost their mothers.

Peter Pan lived with ‘the lost boys'—children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to Neverland to defray the expenses.

They are children who are freed of adult supervision.

‘The children who fall out of their perambulators' are neglected children, under-socialised children who probably grew up with an attention deficit.

Some of the lost boys (and girls) become decadents and puddle along in debauchery and flighty irresponsibility but are generally OK.

Some are more than usually creative but it is my experience that they are not to be relied upon to help with the assembly of IKEA furniture.

In 1911, they would say of someone who was not particularly diligent about maturity and its responsibilities that he ‘jumped on the back of the wind a lot'.

Peter Pan could ‘jump on the back of the wind'.

Jumping on the back of the wind isn't all that easy, either.

‘I don't ever want to be a man,' Peter says to Wendy with passion. ‘I don't want to be a man … if I was to wake up and feel there was a beard!'

I disagree with some at the Clinic who believe that in this statement Peter Pan was referring to waking up some fine morning and feeling a beard on the person beside him.

I believe that he meant that he would hate to awake and find that he, himself, had grown a beard.

I commiserate with Peter Pan and the question of beards. I am one of those men who does not rejoice in their beard or the growth of hair on the body.

I argue that he was not wishing to be ‘a silly who does not know what he is', as Wendy would put it.
He was wanting to avoid not
gender
, but adulthood as
defined by his times.

Wendy attempts to coax Peter to adulthood. ‘Peter,' said Wendy, who is described in the book as
the comforter
, ‘I should love you in a beard.'

‘Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man,' replies Peter.

I have always found the ‘keep back, lady' statement by Peter Pan as being uncharacteristic. This, in my experience, is not the talk of a fairy.

Perhaps Peter did not want to enter manhood because he was tired of having a doctor holding his balls and asking him to cough.

To return to the issues. The unfaced question which wanders through the thinking of our society, and which is tearing apart the Clinic, is of what is maturity constituted and, together with this, the value of ‘keeping alive' the child within, and whether this is possible.

Some people believe there is value in holding on to the ‘childlike' capacities and bemoan the loss of them in their own children or in themselves.

Why do so many parents see the drawings of their children, for instance, as a supreme act of creation? Some parents even praise ‘traced' drawings, which were forbid den in my childhood as fraudulent.

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.

Cuisine
Cruelle

T
HE 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
(K
ISSES 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
(F
LY-SWAT TERRINE
)

This is made from the tail of the cow. Take one cow. Remove the tail. Remove 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
(O
X 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 TENDRET
FOR 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.