4. Questions of scale: a term in Geneva, starting in 1926

Grand Days begins on a train.  Edith Campbell Berry is travelling to Geneva to take up a modest position in the headquarters of the League of Nations, the hope of the world after 1918.  She shares lunch on the train, the rest of the trip, and many later days and nights with Ambrose Westwood, a doctor, a British Major, and a somewhat more senior employee of the League.  Two thumpingly thick books later, they share the misery of rejection as the League is replaced by the United Nations, on American soil this time, the League’s achievements virtually ignored by the new creation.  Edith Campbell Berry has put two decades of her life, her highly developed working methods and diplomatic skills, into an organization that the world has chosen to forget, but Frank Moorhouse has brought it to life again in Grand Days and Dark Palace, two books that summate his long-term fascination with conferences.  It might be said that Moorhouse specialises in bringing together the public and the personal, and it seems to me that his greatest strengths and his greatest limitations as a writer join at this very point where public and private encounter each other. [read more]