With fallen bushrangers and diggers the stuff of national legend, Australia knows how to celebrate heroic failure. Who better than an Australian, then, to resurrect one of last century's most godforsaken flops? Championed by Woodrow Wilson to foster world peace after World War I, Geneva's League of Nations was steamrollered by war, and died with barely a whimper in 1946. As a Nowra, New South Wales, schoolboy studying the League a few years later, Frank Moorhouse, now 61, found it "pretty bewildering that the world, having had one dreadful war and having set up an organization to negotiate peace, should fail so absolutely."
Moorhouse's boyhood bewilderment has, five decades on, given rise to his literary masterwork. After 14 years of toil, the writer has completed his fictionalized chronicle of the League: 1993's Grand Days gave life to its buoyant hopes; now Dark Palace (Knopf; 678 pages) makes its failure felt anew. Totaling 1,396 pages, his Palais des Nations novels have ambition and scope to match the League's. And during nearly a decade of research, which saw Moorhouse immersed in the Swiss archives' 12 km of files, his task seemed just as colossal. "It was very much like airborne landing," he says. "It was a lot of work in the dark."
Bringing light-and sparkle-to the League's bureaucratic labyrinth is Edith Campbell Berry, Moorhouse's fictional heroine. Thanks to her, what could have been a somber literary journey becomes a witty, chattering page-turner. Introduced in Grand Days as a 26-year-old traveling from Jasper's Brush, N.S.W., to take up her position in the League's internal administration (division 1, class B), Edith is presented as a savvy force of nature: "She decided to try her most difficult way, the Way of All Doors, which required her to try to be adept at talking of all things with all people." A decade later, in Dark Palace, "The world was not changing in quite the way she had planned " With Japan's invasion of Manchuria, the League's disarmament program has stalled, and Edith's marriage is unraveling, " but she did, she hoped, change the world a little as she passed through." As a roving trouble-shooter and chef du protocole, Edith is the League, with all of its flaws and delusions.
That the organization was relegated to the dustbin of history so soon after World War II was perhaps for good reason: While initiating the collective action that paved the way for the United Nations, the League proved ineffectual in the face of the Nazi blitzkrieg. But through Edith's eyes, we are made to care about the League again. Even when the world body is paralyzed by fear and factions, Edith can't help but act: there's always a disarmament-conference seating plan to fine-tune, a League flag to hoist, a call to Britain's foreign secretary warning of Nazi atrocities to make. She's like a dashing, sexy Madeleine Albright.
Her spirit gives this creaking organization life, as does Moorhouse, who writes with panache. A master of discontinuous narrative in books such as The Americans, Baby (1972) and The Electrical Experience (1974), here he captures history's grand sweep in a series of piquant short stories, jump-cutting from the lofty to the erotic to the comic, blurring public and private lives. After Edith first commits adultery with her cross-dressing lover Ambrose Westwood, "They talked of the affairs of nations." Hilariously, when rumors circulate about her drinking, Edith submits to the psychiatrist's couch, where she takes on the weight of the world: "I fear trouble brewing in Spain. Germany and Japan have left the League. Everything's going wrong." Then, after the League has become but a barren symbol on the eve of war, she spurns her estranged husband's offer to father a family: "She had tendered her resignation from motherhood."
It's only toward the end of the book that Moorhouse runs out of puff. For a woman so good at juggling allegiances and cutting to the quick, it's almost inconceivable that Edith should be locked out of the 1945 San Francisco Conference that ratifies the charter of the new United Nations. Here Dark Palace grinds to an inevitable halt. But then Edith, like Moorhouse, was up against the immovable weight of historical fact. The League collapsed and so, too, must she: "Events had decided the day: not them."
Like its predecessor, Dark Palace is much more than a historical fact-finding mission. For Moorhouse, "it was a way of getting back to knowing something about my parents and their generation," he says. Where The Electrical Experience celebrated the small-town entrepreneurship of his father, who ran a farm equipment company in Nowra, the character of Edith Campbell Berry allowed him to explore aspects of his mother, a former Country Women's Association state president. "That was a voyage of self-discovery," says Moorhouse, "discovering my female persona and working with that. I'd been brought up as a real Aussie boy in a family of older brothers. And I shed some of that."
With Edith, Moorhouse gets under a woman's skin. "She's a rickety inner person, so you get that fantastic self-doubt and deliberation and Oh my God, is this the right thing?' before she strides boldly off," says the novels' editor, Jane Palfreyman, publisher of Random House Australia. "Women adore Edith for that reason." Edith also has a rich erotic life. Her desire to be a citizen of "the country of lost borders" is not confined to the League. In the boudoir, her persona merges with that of her rouged, jewel-bedecked lover Ambrose, while at Geneva's decadent Molly Club, the two inhabit a world of ambiguous sexuality. "The imagination is a wonderful tool for crossing borders," says Moorhouse, "for entering, seeing and knowing."
If this fluidity is what makes his writing so distinctive, it also provided a problem for the judges of Australian literature's premier Miles Franklin Award in 1994, who ruled Grand Days ineligible for consideration because its subject was not Australian enough. "It was like saying For Whom the Bell Tolls isn't an American book because it's set in Spain," says the author, still smarting at the memory. "It was an absolutely unsophisticated decision."
Certainly not one Edith would have made. With her take-no-prisoners approach to international diplomacy ("[former U.N. arms monitor] Richard Butler's a bit of an Edith in his way," quips Moorhouse), she's also a citizen of the world. "The flag will fly," she proclaims, seizing the day at the New York World's Fair after doubts are cast about the League's future. With Dark Palace, Moorhouse, too, transcends his nationality, with a literary achievement that flags a writer of the world.