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Joshua Humphreys is a writer of comedy novels, plays, ​histories, sarcastic letters to yoga instructors & long and deceptive lists about what he writes...

Exquisite Hours

Il Furioso

August 29, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys

by Joshua Humphreys

COMEDY NOVELIST | GALLIVANTER | BONOBO

Comedy novelist & giant Venice nerd explores the life and work of Tintoretto, nicknamed "Il Furioso"—The Furious One—and especially his masterpieces in Venice's Scuola di San Rocco.

THERE ARE only four buildings worth getting to know in Venice—the Basilica, the Ducal Palace, San Zanipolo, the Scuola di San Rocco. In the first may be seen its soul, in the second its mind, the third its heart.


Only in the fourth do you see all three.


Its façade was begun in 1515, when the Scuola was the second poorest of Venice’s scuole grandi—benevolent fraternal societies. Instantly regretting that they had spent so much money on their fancy new building instead of investing it in their future, they were in 1527 hit with a stroke of luck.

San Rocco—St. Roch—is what’s called a plague saint, prayed to by individual and state alike to heal the sick and deliver cities from epidemics. And in 1527, a severe outbreak of plague hit Venice. The number of private donations to the Scuola from people hoping to protect themselves from disease rose to its highest level ever, and they were able to finish their building.

What you are looking at was built by plague.

What kind of a building did plague build in 1527? It has codussian windows but there are no Venetian gothic elements—though it’s still not perfect Renaissance, as not symmetrical. Once they have finished the outside, the scuola decides to decorate the inside, and they hold a competition to see who is going to paint it for them.

450 years ago they called for submissions for sketches of a painting to be done for the ceiling of their Great Hall—the room at the top right of the façade. Artists have a month to prepare their drawings; Salviati, Zuccari, Veronese all submit entries.

The night before the competition is to be judged and the winner announced, one Venetian painter, who has obtained by bribery the ceiling’s measurements, talks his way into the scuola and has his finished painting put in place.

The school, almost angry, and the other painters definitely so, denounced him and his entry. ‘We-a were meant-a to only submit a sketch-a!’ This artist replied that it was simply his way of working and that he knew no other method. He won the commission.

His nickname was Il Furioso. The Furious One. His birth name was Iacopo Robusti. Everybody, and we, call him Tintoretto.

Comedy novelist & giant Venice nerd explores the life and work of Tintoretto, nicknamed "Il Furioso"—The Furious One—and especially his masterpieces in Venice's Scuola di San Rocco.

Born in 1518 as the first of 21 children, Tintoretto at 15 was apprenticed to Titian—56 years old—and lasted ten days: Titian knew he would be no pupil, and dismissed him. After eight years in the studio of an unknown artist he emerges wielding one of Venice’s most unique brushes. He later placed over the doorway of his studio in Cannaregio his artistic motto, his personal synthesis: ‘The design of Michel-angelo and the colour of Titian.’

In 1546 Tintoretto painted for his parish church three of his greatest works, taking the commission for two of the paintings—the Worship of the Golden Calf and the Last Judgment—on a cost-only basis, simply to get his work out there and to make himself better known.

Ten years after the sketching competition, the scuola put out tender for the main room, the largest. Tintoretto says he’ll do the whole thing, three paintings a year, at cost price—if they give  him a  pension  of 100 ducats for life. And so they do.

He paints the whole upper room over the course of 15 years and ten years later again, (after working on and in the Doge’s palace, including painting the largest canvas in the world) Tintoretto, now the greatest master in Venice, paints for the Scuola di San Rocco their lower room.

So we have, in one building, the middle and most vigorous and powerful years of an artist’s life, and the most polished end of a genius’s career. As well, we have, in my opinion, the greatest painting on earth—and you are about to look at it.

But as you walk in, you have to make me a promise: that you will keep your eyes to the floor. You promise? Good. Now pay your 10 euros, the most valuable you will ever pay, and walk to your right and you’ll see in the corner of your downcast eyes a staircase. Go up it, and keep your eyes down! And as you hit the landing, cast your eyes down AND KEEP THEM DOWN! Veer left until you are almost at the back wall. Keep your goddam eyes down!

Then, turn to the end of the room from which you have just walked, with your eyes down!

And look up…

The entire room is Tintoretto. Later Tintoretto.

Above you, scenes from the Old Testament. The largest panels—episodes from the return of the Israelites from Egypt to Israel. Directly overhead, the Striking of the Rock; in the centre, the Raising of the Brazen Serpent; at the front of the room, the Descent of Manna.

On the walls are scenes from the life of Christ, not in chronological order, and nobody knows why. To your far left, a nativity (with Tintoretto’s only peacock—see this essay’s header), then a Baptism, a Raising of Lazarus. And at the front left of the room, its darkest painting, The Agony In The Garden.

Do you know the story? The night before he was to be crucified Jesus went into the garden of Gethsemane with three of his disciples and prayed to be released from his fate. An angel appeared to strengthen his mind, before he finally accepted that it was not his will that was to be done, but God’s: NON SICVT EGO VOLO, SED SICVT TV. Remember the central archway of the basilica? ‘Not as I will, but as thou wilt,’ FIAT VOLVNTAS TVA—Thy will be done. And he went out of the garden, where he found his disciples asleep and said, ‘Peter, are you fucking serious—you couldn’t watch over me for half a goddam hour?’ And while they were sleeping—see to the left—the police come to arrest him, and the next day he was tickled to death / crucified.

Tintoretto’s nickname—Il Furioso—came from how quickly he worked. Remember his painting-in-a-month, not a sketch-in-a-month? Ruskin got close enough to this Agony in the Garden to claim that the brushstrokes are so big that it might have been painted with a broom.

Now walk back to where you turned around and return your eyes to the floor. And get ready.

In Ruskin’s ‘Venetian Index’ he describes every single painting worth seeing in Venice. But there is one which he refuses to even touch upon: 

I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator; for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise.


It is in the next room.


See the room in the corner there, far left as you came up the stairs? EYES DOWN! Walk towards it. As you step through its doorway, EYES DOWN! you may look up at the wall in front of you.

I shall do a little explaining, and then tell you why this is such a brilliant painting. But first—what others have said about it, and about Tintoretto.

Ruskin, on seeing this crucifixion for the first time:

I never was so utterly crushed to the earth before any human intellect as I was today—before Tintoret. … He doesn’t seem to be able to stretch himself till you give him a canvas forty feet square—& then, he lashes out like a leviathan, and heaven and earth come together. Just imagine the audacity of the fellow.

I felt only that a new world was opened to me, that I had seen that day the Art of Man in its full majesty for the first time; and that there was also a strange and precious gift in myself enabling me to recognise it, and therein ennobling, not crushing me.

Though he didn’t very much like Il Furioso, Vasari still saw fit to call him ‘swift, resolute, fantastic and extravagant—and the most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced.’

His more sympathetic biographer, Ridolfi, wrote, ‘In their multiplicity and singularity Tintoretto’s inventions are impossible to explain. … His brush was a thunderbolt that terrified everyone with its lightning.’

Henry James on Tintoretto and his works in the Scuola di San Rocco:

We shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area an equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it and dense and difficult to breathe. … It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality.​ … ​Before Tintoretto’s greatest works you are conscious of a sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas. In the memory of vanished hours so filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have always a terrible standard of enjoyment.

‘There is too much going on in this picture,’ said Wagner, and even David Bowie had an opinion on him: ‘Tintoretto built his career as a proto rock star.’ Cezanne:

Tintoretto, Rubens, they are what it means to be a painter. As Beethoven is the musician or Plato the philosopher. Chaste and sensual, brutal and cerebral, wilful and inspired, I think he must have known everything except sentimentality, that Tintoretto, everything that creates joy and torment in man. Look at me, I can’t talk about him without trembling.

Sit down. Stay a while. This painting gets better and better with every second that you stare at it.

So why is Tintoretto such a genius? I thought you’d never ask.

Look upon his Crucifixion. It is from 1565, almost exactly the mid-point of his career and life.

The sky—‘When the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth,’— is dark and a storm has appeared. Yet the Venetian silks upon these Venetian Romans and Venetian Jews shimmer all. In what light? That of the Christ’s areolas.

Sorry—in that of Christ’s aureole.

Then, Tintoretto’s work transcends time. What was Palm Sunday? The day of Christ’s return to Jerusalem at the head of a procession of his followers, all of them holding palm fronds, Jesus riding an ass.

Behind the man being crucified on the left—a donkey on Golgotha, eating—can you see?—dry palm fronds. Everything is come full circle. The end is as the beginning, the beginning a prophesy of the end. Turn around. A coincidence, you think, that the only painting you can see in the other room is of Christ’s birth?

‘The most extraordinary brain that the art of painting has ever produced.’

Though neither the ass nor the light from Jesus’ halo are realistic, neither are they false. They are part of what Ruskin called the Imagination Penetrative— the artist suggesting more than he has actually put on the canvas. By Tintoretto’s conception, through his imagination, they represent the essence of the Crucifixion, and so they are true.

The power of every picture depends on the penetration of the imagination into the TRUE nature of the thing represented. In the Crucifixion the imagination annihilates locality, and brings the palm-leaves to Calvary, so only that it may bear the mind to the mount of Olives.

But it gets even better.

Christ in the centre of the painting is already up. He has, though he’s still alive, been crucified—it’s in the past. To his right, our left, the good thief is being crucified. The soldier is in the motion of reaching his right arm around to grab the rope and pull the second crucifix into place. It’s the present, what’s happening now. And to Christ’s left, the bad thief—resisting his fate—is having the nail-holes drilled into his cross. He will be crucified.

Tintoretto paints for us, in a single static moment —past, present, and future. His work transcends time. If we let it do its work on our imagination, which in turn forces our imagination to do its work on it, the painting becomes a vivid and tumultuous widescreen film. Not for nothing did Sartre call Tintoretto the first movie director in history.

Look to the right of the room. See the sculpted Crucifixion there? What’s the biggest difference between this figure of Christ, and Tintoretto’s? See his arms: the sculpted Christ creates a gap from the crosspiece, his shoulders are drooping—as is natural for a man who’s been nailed by his hands and then raised upright. But Tintoretto’s Jesus?

His arms are level with the crosspiece. Jesus is robust, alive, Herculean—spiritual force overcoming worldly power. At least six hours into his Crucifixion and he is as calm and alert as ever and looking down about him. And his legs? Look at his left knee. He looks as though he’s about to step off the cross, down into the Scuola di San Rocco—and his shoulders: though his hands are nailed down he looks like he’s pulling them forward—determined to step down into Venice, into this very moment, and stand before you.

Tintoretto’s Jesus is not just for 1st-century Jews, it is for Venice, now: all the participants, and the many many spectators, are in Venetian dress. But it is not alone for 16th-century Venetians. He is stepping down into the room. It is for your now, this very moment: Christ is crucified, but lives.

‘A sudden evaporation of old doubts and dilemmas…’


Beyond all analysis, and above all praise.


When eventually you’ve finished in this room, you can go back downstairs and see Tintoretto’s other, most finished, paintings in the Scuola, those illustrating the life of Mary.

The Annunciation is closest to the entrance, behind the ticket booth; an Adoration, The Flight into Egypt, the Massacre of the Innocents. Enjoy especially the action and the magical realism of the first and last of this left-hand wall.

And then you may walk out of the Scuola di San Rocco, and be sure that you have just witnessed the height of Venetian artistic power, the darkly shaded fruits—mental & spiritual—of  400 years of struggle, growth, and of mastery.

Ruskin (sick of him yet?) said:

​The moment when, in any kingdom, you point to the triumphs of its greatest artist, you point also to the determined hour of the kingdom’s decline.

So you can be sure too that you have passed beyond, without perhaps being able to see it, the commencement of the decline of Venetian power.


The 16th century is that which transforms entirely in soul, heart, and mind.


For while Tintoretto has been furiously painting, Venice has been transforming, exerting, bankrupting—and utterly exhausting—herself.


And for that essay, I shall ask you to meet me at the Great Gate of the Arsenale…


J.H., Venice, August 2020


‘Il Furioso’ is both a chapter in & episode from:

IMAGINED TREASURES — my splendid history of Venice

THE STONES OF VENICE TOUR — An adventure through 1000 years of history, art, & genius.


J O S H W R I T E B O O K | The writerly adventures of Joshua Humphreys


Filed Under: Author, Books, Culture, Exile, Exquisite Hours, freedom, History, Italy, joshua humphreys, joshua humphreys author, joshua humphreys writer, The New Cavalier Reading Society, The Stones of Venice Tour, Travel, Venice, Writer, Writing Tagged With: art, australia, author, christianity, jacopo comin, john ruskin, joshua humphreys, joshua humphreys author, joshua humphreys venice, the author in venice, the scuola di san rocco, the stones of venice tour, tintoretto, tintoretto's crucifixion, venezia, virtual travel, virtual venice

ACT III: THE AUTHOR DRESSED AS A MERMAID

May 25, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys


The writerly adventures of Joshua Humphreys.


‘For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.‘

HEMINGWAY


Something beyond attainment. 

Dramatic perhaps, but only after writing the first comedy novel did I realise the uniqueness of what might be written. I had had my Venetian lightning bolt; I shortly would carve out a novel even more intensely itself, and begin a quest still incomplete:

To write the funniest novel ever written.


In Harry’s Bar, having grossly underestimated the price of a bellini—when the bill arrived to frighten me I looked around the room and thought, “If I really wanted to, could I get someone else to pay it for me?” 

My instinct was to look to the women and, being naturally a storyteller, I knew any attempt would involve an elaborate and amusing story. In an actionless instant a character was born almost perfectly suited to a comedy novel: a young man who travels the world lying to women.

The writerly adventures of Joshua Humphreys—a comedy novel conceived in Venice, and at Hemingway's favourite bar.
A comedy novel conceived in Venice—and at Hemingway’s favourite bar.

Where would the young man go? Why was he travelling? Why did he lie? After years of my own wandering I knew that he would, as all of us are, be searching the wide world for a home. But not just any home—my character’s search would be for paradise. Currently my own was in Southeast Asia. What was the Eastern equivalent of our Eden? Shangri-La, which sounded to me like the name of a hotel. And so it was, in Bangkok. 

Severely nostasialgic, I would fly to Thailand to research this novel about a lying lothario before going to Hanoi to buy a motorbike. With only my savings I was again to move to Vietnam to write a book.

On the flight from London to Bangkok, typing so furiously that the woman in front of me kept turning around to ask I stop kicking her seat, I realised that no decent person would enjoy a novel about a young man lying to women—and no sane person would write one.

Several drinks into the flight I was given another, much warmer, lightning bolt.


They would read about a beautiful young woman, who travels the world lying to men.


So was reborn in a winged flash my main character. I saw her completely—aloof, sighing all over the world in her search for a home, lying to men as one after another they confessed unwelcome love for her.

Somewhere from Swift I knew a rare quote pertaining to lying.

‘As universal practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even from those who were most celebrated in that faculty.’

My beautiful young woman would not just be any liar, she would be truly great at it, celebrated—telling fibs so big, so fanciful, so elaborate that she would rank beside Costanza and prove Swift finally wrong—lies their own justification because so much fun to tell—and even more fun to read.

I had only to choose where she travelled to and where she ended up. Most people for some reason wish to live in New York: her story would begin in media res on her way to Manhattan. Stateside, Mormons think Jackson County, Missouri is the location of paradise—another candidate for a chapter. Naturally she would travel to Eden’s antithesis, for which Bangladesh might stand. Venice, where her story had been conceived, was then the chief sanctuary of my own heart.

There I would have my main character long to be, there she would meet her false-speaking match, and there she would fall in love. 

The central section of the book would be set in Venice.

The bridge in Venice where my main character would later sit in silence and ask, 'Do you ever think that the music we listen to is the soundtrack to our lives?'
The bridge in Venice where my main character would later sit in silence and ask, ‘Do you ever think that the music we listen to is the soundtrack to our lives?’

‘First, then, that happy shore, that seems so nigh, 
Will far from your deluded wishes fly; 
Long tracts of seas divide your hopes from Italy…’

DRYDEN’S Aeneid

In Bangkok I walked into the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel and was amazed. I told the front desk I wanted to set part of a novel here and they gave me a guided tour. Hearing the naga fountains, watching the river of kings, touching their khmer lintels on display—after another week in Bangkok I was hooked on the art, the temples, the colour, the energy.

Then to Hanoi. I found a decent motorbike and in three weeks rode it a thousand kilometres, into the mountains then down to Hoi An. En route I discovered a new and strange delight.

The province of Nam Dinh was the first to be Christianised and its paddies and riverscapes are dotted and stuck with churches modelled on the baroque cathedrals of Spain and France. Rice farmers labour before slender steeples, fishermen row in the shadows of bell-towers, fish-sauce makers stir squid in tubs beside bombed-out naves. I have never seen anywhere like it, and I return, flabbergasted, as often as I can.

The beautifully strange church-and-paddy landscape of Nam Dinh, Vietnam.
The beautifully strange church-and-paddy landscape of Nam Dinh, Vietnam.

While riding south I searched for my main character’s literary precedents. Quite accidentally I found the grand-daddy of narratives involving exiles seeking a home. Written rather a while before my own lifetime, as I rode to Mai Chau and Ninh Binh I read Dryden’s translation of The Aeneid, story of Aeneas—serendipitously named. 

As Virgil’s protagonist sailed from Troy to Sicily to Carthage, mine flew from New York to Bangladesh to Bangkok. As Aeneas reached Rome so would my Anaïs at last make it to Venice.


I had her name.


Returned to Hoi An, I had only to write her story.


‘Any audience, as a rule, goes for a fast number.’

ELVIS

INTERVIEWER: If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?
WODEHOUSE: I’d give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed.

‘Write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is your style.’

FITZGERALD

‘I rather feel that the less writers are always examining themselves in that sort of way, the better. I don’t think you ought to be thinking, Well, am I writing like this? Or writing like that? I think you just want to try to write as well as you can. It’s above all a question of instinct.‘

POWELL

I settled immediately into my writing routine. Rising with the sun; a pre-work stroll around my Vietnamese fishing village; weaving the making of coffee into my morning and smoking happily my pipe—as I each day began with pen and paper before switching to my laptop once the words flowed—until soon after midday the 3000 words were done.

I gave Anaïs the kind of now-extinct spunk that drove Billy Wilder’s dialogue. I laced the plot with Eastbound-ish jokes and inserted Danny McBride as a character. I read and reread Evelyn Waugh. I rewatched obsessively The Hangover 2 as I put Anaïs through the Bangkok ringer. And realising more and more what the book might become—remembering that comedy films are 90-minutes long—as I wrote her story I really went after speed. 

"What, it's a bag of Fanta?!" Scientifically two of the funniest movies ever made, I learnt and took much from the pace and compactness of The Hangovers.
“What, it’s a bag of Fanta?!” Scientifically two of the funniest movies ever made, I learnt and took much from the pace and compactness of The Hangovers.


Through Waxed Exceeding Mighty I had ‘Light & Excellent’ over my desk. I now added ‘Swift & Exact’ to my creed: nothing superfluous, just the story of Anaïs’ search for a home—no second-guessing my style or descriptive accuracy, whatever I thought, onto paper—those apparently exceptional & unimportant things—and I could take them out later if they did not follow Vonnegut’s Rule.

In 100 pages Anaïs went from Hong Kong to New York to Missouri to Bangladesh to Bangkok. She had 5 men confess their undying love, rufied two of them, and had been chased, felt up, and kidnapped. Delightedly she arrived in Venice and the city, the world’s most beautiful, I in no small task had to write from memory.

When selecting the smaller backdrops for the shimmering calm of her Venetian love affair, the most redolent passage I knew on Venice described the precise location in which I wanted Anaïs’ first show of genuine emotion to take place. 

It is Henry James, talking of time spent in the Scuola di San Rocco:

‘In the memory of vanished hours so filled with beauty the consciousness of present loss oppresses. Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known them once is to have always a terrible standard of enjoyment.‘

The book’s title chosen and the Venice section written, I knew I would have to return to Italy to ensure that the book did the city justice.

The Scuola di San Rocco, where Anaïs would be humanised, and cry—and from a description of which the book's was taken.
The Scuola di San Rocco, where Anaïs would be humanised, and shed her first tear in years—and from a description of which the book’s title was taken.

Anaïs had met her false-speaking match, she had fallen in love, and her magnificent lies had begun to catch up with her. Now she and her love interest would, according to the fate of their story, attempt to found a home together in—

I had no idea. I only thought as far ahead as Venice. But as my main characters floated in stolen boats down hidden canals I (and they) knew they could not live there. Where should the last third of the story take place?

Before leaving London I had met a girl and, knowing that I was going to Vietnam to write this book I could but say to her that if she visited me there, and it went well, I should visit her in turn. So it was back to Europe.

With 3/4 of the novel finished I went again to Venice and spent a month rewriting its central chapters. I returned to London and had my old job pay my rent—and had Anais and Octavian attempt too a new life in Battersea.

‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. … Life holds the mirror up to Art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction.‘

WILDE

As summer quickly dove away and the end of the year and my birthday approached I vowed not to be working in a pub beyond 30. This book was, after all, a damn sight above my previous effort—absolutely it would be able to support me.

The nostasialgia began gnawing at me again, though this time not for Vietnam, but for Bangkok—the city I had spent merely a few research-filled days in.

Soon the nostasialgia ruined my relationship with the girl for whom I had come to London. In my spare time I was reading histories of Thailand, daydreaming of heat and jungle and road trips, and could find no enjoyment in the domestication which Boris Bikes and Battersea brunches really are.

Strangely it was the same ordeal through which I was putting Anaïs.


Life was imitating art was imitating life. Anaïs too, after years of adventuring, had had to resign herself to gardening and baking—even to jogging—and I had modelled their flat on the one I now moved hastily out of. 

I returned to Bangkok and as I rewrote the manuscript really dove into the place: histories of Thai kings, hours searching for obscure temples, days walking through its old town, dusks discovering its khlongs and jungled remnants.

The Creative Art of Wishfulness features Phra khanong canal. Quintessential Bangkok, and later Godfrey Lackland's running track.
Phra khanong canal. Quintessential Bangkok, and later Godfrey Lackland’s running track.


In my building’s pool I wrote an essay, my first, on the concept of “The Comedy Novel”. Combining the elegant literary novel with the films and sitcoms that we can all quote by heart, the comedy novel was both literature for those who didn’t read and comedy for those too uptight to laugh.

In writing the essay I was fine-tuning the concept of the comedy novel as I wrote one. Daily I would pace up and down the pool and elucidate its definition, clarify what such a thing ought to be—then quickly dry myself off and return to the manuscript to cross out what was insufficiently amusing, intensify its comedic elements—’up the funny’ to as close as possible to a laugh a page. 

By September the manuscript was finished and I again submitted it to UK literary agents. Though they had ignored Waxed Exceeding Mighty they could not possibly look past this. Surely the tagline would sell itself: “A beautiful young woman who travels the world lying to men.” The opening was almost the funniest part of the book. They would be drawn in, hooked, and see that a new thing had been born.

For my 30th birthday I flew back to Italy, to Venice and Rome, and while strolling along the riva degli schiavoni I got an email from a literary agent. He loved the book and wanted to take it, and me, on. They were human beings after all, and actually received what was submitted to them! Selah in the fucking valley!

He gave me a three-year timeline for the book’s appearance on store shelves. I remember it vividly: I leaned against the outside wall of the hotel in which Anaïs stays in Venice and my heart sunk.

I was out of money. I would return to Bangkok destitute. I wanted to live off my writing and defined the profession as such. In the three years it would take to get properly paid for my work I would do what? Again it seemed that it was money that made writers and not the other way around.

I had vowed on leaving London that I would not bartend past 30. On the night of that birthday I swore to the Trastevere fountain in which I had once frolicked with a Californian girl that I would henceforth live only off being a writer. I had sworn all over the place, and, seemingly, had oathed myself into a corner.

One of several Italian fountains in which I had frolicked over the years, and that beside which I swore that after 30 I would live only off the proceeds of my brain.
One of several Italian fountains in which I had frolicked over the years, and that beside which I swore that after 30 I would live only off the proceeds of my brain.


I saw rising before me a classical discrimen, a Greek kairos—those critical and opportune moments when the achievements of a lifetime might hang in the balance.

‘quin agite et mecum infaustas exurite puppis. 
Come then, and join me in burning these accursed boats!’

VIRGIL

I had two choices. I could play their game, quietly, and accept three years as the interval before which I would be properly paid for my work. In the meantime I could frig myself. Or perhaps work as a florist—flourish gaily as a truck driver. Then when my time came and the gatekeepers told me they were ready for me now, I could take the place so generously allotted to me on their bookshelves.

Or, I could tell the agent to make sex to himself and do it all on my own.

I had two thousand Australian dollars to my name and a new and hilarious novel in my pocket. I also had years of reading behind me that all pointed to one worthy course of action.

“If you will it it is no dream,” said Theodore Herzl. “Be rough, unswayable, and free,” said William Shakesepare. “A life not willing to sacrifice itself to what makes it meaningful is not worth living,” said Jan Patocka. “He either fears his fate too much who dares not put it to the touch, to win or lose it all,” said Montrose.

“IF!” wrote General Patton, whom I was reading as research for the next novel, “every leader who went into battle promised himself he would come out either a conqueror or a corpse, he is sure to win.”

So I swore a third time, on a bottle of Sangsom: I would come out of comedy-novel-writing a conqueror or a corpse.

I burned the boat and told the agent to make sex to himself.


No thing but a readership would support me now.


My two thousand dollars would buy 200 copies of this new novel. If I could somehow release the book myself, and sell those 200 copies, I might not come out of this a corpse.

I emailed my mother and asked if she would by any chance like to fly me home for Christmas—and could I stay for a few months while I figure out my next move? I commissioned a cover from Sam, combining in a small way Thai and Venetian art. It shows the elephant from the old Thai flag standing in a gondola, bordered by Lai Thai and kranok.

I ordered a proofing copy to Melbourne and returned home for Christmas.

A Thai elephant in a gondola, surrounded by the corbelling of a patera—decorative elements from the book's cover art by Samuel Humphreys.
A Thai elephant in a gondola, surrounded by the corbelling of a patera—decorative elements from the book’s cover art by Samuel Humphreys.

I spent two weeks rewriting that copy for speed then ordered another. I rewrote that from feeling, and when the next copy arrived, and came out of another rewrite with minimal green-pen scars, the book was ready to be loosed upon the world.

The 4 proofing copies had cost 8% of my net worth. I had $1840 to my name: 184 copies could be ordered. One hundred and eighty-four copies of Exquisite Hours needed to be sold in order to save me from becoming a corpse.

My travels having amassed a larger social media following, I publicised this rewriting process, kept secret its cover, and compiled into a soundtrack the music already woven into the book’s narrative. For two months tiring myself with the work of preparing a novel for publication, I at last revealed the cover and posted that the book was available for ordering and went, exhausted, to bed.

That night I dreamt that Ernest Hemingway and Michael Jordan both told me that—no, I’m kidding. There’s no romanticisation about what I do.

But I did wake up to find the 184 copies—those books that had literally bankrupted me—had sold. I had gotten the money back, the gamble had paid off, I would not have to return to floral truck-frigging.

PayPal withdrawals then took 3 days to transfer and I had even to borrow the money for brown wrapping paper and twine—from the very girl I once knew whose biography informed elements of Anaïs’ own. I spent a delirious weekend inscribing and signing and wrapping books and on Monday we strutted triumphantly into the post office.

The last track on the book’s 19-song soundtrack is I Can Hear Music by The Beach Boys. Made-up Michael Jordan dreams aside, when my friend and I placed the several boxes of books on the counter the song playing from the overhead speakers ended and on came I Can Hear Music by The Beach Boys.

In the very act of sending out copies of a novel containing the line, “In an ordered universe there are no coincidences,” she and I looked at one another and were both riddled with goosebumps.

Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, The Rolling Stone, and Billie Holiday—the soundtrack to a comedy novel.
Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, and Billie Holiday—soundtrack to a comedy novel.


‘To me, the most valuable capital a writer has is time. Time to write, time to learn his craft, time to get better. Money exists to protect that time. … Money exists, in my world, to buy me another season.‘

PRESSFIELD

As I publicised the signing process more people had placed orders for the novel than there were copies of it. At first I thought to refund their money and apologise—it was, literally, unfortunately, an edition of only 184. But then I realised that I could put the book on back-order, and sell even more?

I had saved myself from prostitution—sorry. I had gone all in and saved myself from destitution—why not go all out and sell enough copies of this book to enable me to write the next one? 

Shortly there came direct feedback. Very slightly nervous that I was overestimating myself, reviews started appearing—reviews that were overwhelmingly good. What a feeling that was. Starting out as a stand-up, one has laughter as an instant feedback mechanism: you know if what you say is funny and instantly if you are any good. It was the only thing I missed in comedy that writing could not provide.

Just as even Anaïs had eventually cried, so could I now have done. I was making money as a writer and readers loved my work. Who needed literary supplements in tabloid papers to tell one that one could write? I had readers, genuine and avid readers, reading my work—and laughing.

The comedy novel had been born, and it had come into the world spitting out its milk from laughter.


That new aim took root: to spread the word of this novel’s hilarity and gain for myself the only thing I truly wanted—another season. 


So I dressed up as a mermaid.

Tying an incident in the book's story into its promotion, I literally dressed up as a mermaid (and Braveheart & Tobias Fünke) and Exquisite Hours launched my career.
Tying an incident in the book’s story into its promotion, I dressed up as a mermaid (and Braveheart & Tobias Fünke) and Exquisite Hours launched my career.


Why a mermaid? I thought perhaps the best way to promote the book might be to read from it, and Anaïs at one stage lies about having worked as a mermaid. Logically, if I was going to read from that section, I should be dressed as a mermaid. Right? Right.

I started posting the book’s reviews, would refuse to sleep until 10 more copies had been ordered—literally I sang for my dinner—and after clogging my parents’ kitchen table for 2 months with red novels I had done it.

I had bought myself another season.


I professed then, and still profess now, the desire for no wealth but the freedom to entertain. Now that I had it—enough money to write another novel, freedom to entertain the very readers who made possible that freedom—I would not suffer from Fitzgerald’s regret:

‘What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.‘

Exquisite Hours was as close to a Comedy Novel as I could then get. Consummately it was The Hangover meets Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway giving a piggy-back ride to Will Ferrell—P.G. Wodehouse cross-dressing with Monty Python. 

I had tried for something beyond attainment and the book’s readers had pronounced it as close to my aim as possible.

To many it was, outright, the funniest book they had ever read.


I had found my line. The comedy novel was my immediate duty—I would not relax, nor ever
look back. And, having written a book that everyone wanted to read,
I could now write the book that I wanted to read.

In my imagination there had been for six months a new character. Riding around on horseback in one of the wildest places on earth, I wanted his new story to
take place among the 1000-year-old jungle-temples of Siem Reap.


A career launched and another season gained,
I could return to Cambodia to write the
hilariously furious adventures of
one very angry young man.


comedy, novel, joshua, humphreys, anais, spencer, wanderlust, writer, melbourne, venice, bangkok, hilarious,

Exquisite Hours—the story of a beautiful young woman who travels the world lying to men—is available direct from its author, who occasionally refers to himself in the third person.

At its lowest price, and inclusive of shipping, you can purchase a copy directly from Joshua Humphreys [ here ].

And do feel free to contact him (or even me) with questions about writing, about Venice, or about any of the above, at: pigeonry@joshvahvmphreys.com


READ MORE:

Act II — The Author in Vietnam

Act IV — The End of Adventure


J O S H W R I T E B O O K | The writerly adventures of Joshua Humphreys


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