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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...

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ACT IV: THE END OF ADVENTURE

July 1, 2020 by Joshua Humphreys


The writerly adventures of Joshua Humphreys.


Before moving on to the 18 months which this essay covers I do have to go back six, for it was partly in order to begin a third novel that I hurried to finish and release the second.

In London in 2015 I showed to a friend who had never seen Seinfeld, Seinfeld. After two episodes the thing they thought funniest about it was George’s anger.

Anger as hilarity had never distinctly occurred to me. I had long considered it amusing: Kenny Powers’ tantrums are him at his equal best with his motivational speeches; my siblings and I had spent a childhood trying not to giggle whenever our father flew off the handle to stomp around the house in response to a minor infraction or impertinence. The high points too of Fawlty Towers were built entirely on frustration.

What, I that evening thought, if a comedy novel were based entirely on anger?

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  “Excuse me am I talking to YOU pinhead? Am I?!?”

Before leaving for Thailand I bought a biography of General Patton to take with me and was reading it through my last British days while watching a screaming Costanza in the evening. General Patton, about whom I had known only what was shown in the 1970 film, quickly revealed himself as an exemplar of a man.

A giant of a former, greater, age—a man extinct, the last in a continuous line stretching angrily back to Achilles. Yet he had lived only 70 years ago, commanded in the same war that my grandfather and his brother had fought. What if he were reincarnated, his Nazi-quashing anger pointed down at the pettiness of modernity and at the smallness of our lives?

He would constantly be at GLC levels!


Could their personalities then be combined, the two Georges—Patton and Costanza? Certainly not though in a story about a grumpy old man. That had been done to death.

But what about an angry young man?


Clint Eastwood at 85 had a sound right to complain about exponential change. But a 30-year-old with no justifiable framework for disgruntledness—a person perfectly in his time but in no way of it—supposed to be in the joy-throes of equality and diversity and other ideological slogan-words, but preferring without question what has perfectly fulfilled humanity’s sense of purpose for longer than 2000 years?

These, a host of worthy literary themes: anger, change, nostalgia, action. So a new novel began to grow.


Three months later and I had finished Exquisite Hours and resolved to take the biggest gamble of my life. In Bangkok waiting out a Christmas flight, I looked over the few notes that I had taken for this next novel and knew two things: Melbourne would be the theatre for my main character’s anger, and he needed somewhere and something to contrast it to.

Melbourne being above all tame, I needed somewhere wild. I was in Thailand but that didn’t quite have it. Even its more remote islands are repositories for barbecue buffets and snorkelling parties—hardly wildernesses. I looked on a map and at the countries surrounding me.

Bonobo’s can’t clap.

Vietnam I had been to four times and felt it more rural-industrial than riveting. My brother told me Laos was sleepy. Burma was not then easy to visit and of Cambodia I knew only a recent genocide and its American pounding in their war on Vietnam. Sam told me of Siem Reap’s street parties, its tuk-tuk mafia, its magic mushrooms—and its 1000-year-old temples covered in jungle.

There was even a $4 wooden slow-train that would take me there…
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The author on the ledge of Angkor Wat’s southern library.

With two histories on my lap I rode from Bangkok to the Cambodian border and knew before I had arrived that I had my location. Recent conflict, a habit of cannibalism, belief in magic, and—and this gave me the entire story in a moment—looters.

Thai mercenaries were renowned for crossing into Cambodia and racing to its temple-cities in order to buzz-saw friezes from their place to deliver them to black-market antiquities dealers. My nameless angry young man had his Cambodian vocation.

Protecting what is ancient and vulnerable from what is new and greedy. He would live by and for protecting Siem Reap’s ruins from looters and, torn from those adventures, return home to Melbourne to do anything but that.

‘Angkor, as it stands, ranks as chief wonder of the world today, one of the summits to which human genius has aspired in stone.’

SITWELL

It took all day to get to Siem Reap but the following morning I headed out to its ruins. The vast and quiet tidiness of Angkor Wat, the roots and strangling vines of Ta Phrom—they were spectacularly impressive and immediately I set to work building a story around their forceful preservation, writing in the mornings and carousing in the evenings.

Perpetually hungover, I one morning craved my traditional medicine and remembered that my brother had told me that though he had gotten horrible food poisoning from a Burger King in Phuket he had in fact had the best KFC of his life in Siem Reap. Eager for its fried elixir to impress and cure me I zombied into the only KFC in Siem Reap. 6 hours later, walking from town to my hotel, I started cold-sweating and suddenly could walk no further without throwing up on the street.

Three days of desperate convalescence followed, throughout which I actually thought I was going to die. Were it not for a friend I made there, who works as a tour guide for elderly Danes in Central Asia—and who brought me litres of gatorade and enough drugs to kill all that was evil in my stomach—I might have shrivelled into a diarrheic mummy.

When on the fourth day I could sit up straight and type, I emailed my brother and asked him if he had ever had death-inducing food poisoning. His response was, “Remember I told you about the KFC in Siem Reap!?” Evidently he had in fact had the best whopper of his life in Phuket.

If you take anything away from this essay,
please let it be to not eat KFC in Siem Reap.


When at last I was unchained from the toilet I headed for the final temple on my To-See list. Upon spying Preah Khan’s magnificent eastern entrance through the forest my mouth opened. It did not close until I left the complex, three hours later.

It is, with St Mark’s Basilica, the most exhilarating edifice in the world. Byron might have meditated for a time upon the colosseum and Keats for an age upon his Grecian urn. Neither come close to the philosophical wonder and existential melancholy which emanate from the crumbling stones of Preah Khan—from the turquoise moss and purple-flaming foliage carved upon its columns, from the guardians of holy places serene and ugly in their niches, from the fallen lintels creeping with vine and from the thousand smiling apsaras holding in their hips the rhythmic dance of Siva, destroying and creating in derision at the shortness of human time.

So incomparably impressive are the ancient ruins of Cambodia that I’ve just composed a separate photographic essay dedicated to their splendour, replete with my Siem Reap travel tips: 

Whole Enjungled Cities

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Preah Khan, The Holy City of Victory and Temple of the Holy Sword.

When I returned to Bangkok I was drawn to all the old Southeast Asian travel books I could find and watched over and over again The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Man Who Would be King.

It was adventure the world now lacked.
It was adventure my main character would be living.
It would be the loss of it that he furiously laments when forced to return home.


Back in Melbourne for the three months it would take to properly launch Exquisite Hours, I was dismayed by the still-shrinking smallness and the creeping digitization of existence. I had not been home in two years. In so short a time it had become impossible for a person of artistic temperament to thrive there. So between promoting and signing books I catalogued the grievances which my main character might have against the place.

Having bought myself another season I first returned to Cambodia to further research and build the new book’s story then went on to Vietnam to procure a motorbike and ride the bottom half of the country from Saigon to Hoi An. I rented a house with my brother and attempted to find a balance between promoting past books and writing new ones. It is a balance I still have not been able to reach.

The time needed to devote to making money from writing is now much too great to enable me to write new ones. I have a fifth comedy novel, the purest and funniest yet—veritably a sitcom in prose—ready to write and in the coming months shall have to give up social media entirely in order to write it. With fully the intention of getting that novel published and made into a TV show, I shall in September be moving for one final season, and allowing only those who would become patrons of the arts, patrons of the comedy novel, to be a part of my creative process.

Each day filming videos before working on the new story, I quickly needed to break the monotony of promoting and writing. Quite randomly, running along the beach one day, I had an epiphany. As well as comedy novels, I thought that maybe I could give people what had made their writing possible in the first place: Venice.

I could give them Venice.


Not the Venice of gondolas and gelato and the Bridge of Sighs, but the real, medieval Venice—she whose art and architecture had formed my sensibilities, the artistic and moral lessons derived from her history that had enabled me for so long to wander the world with childish wonder while living and working as an artist.

So I began in the afternoons to formalise what I knew of her, and to turn the city’s palaces and canals into what would become The Stones of Venice Tour.

​’It’s a curious fact that you cannot work out a continuity at a desk—you have to move with your characters.‘

GREENE

Literally pacing back and forth in our Vietnamese front garden, working through the novel scene by scene until it made not just sense but a whole, l came up with a cast of characters for both Siem Reap and Melbourne and set them on their respective adventures.

Writing a book I myself wanted to read, I at every turn sought to inject anger, preposterousness, and audacity, into its story. As well I wanted to explore the idea that “progress” might in fact mean “destruction”, and that in racing to remake the world in the image of our selfishness we might actually be rendering it hostile to true adventure.

So my angry young man was to be pulled out of his Cambodian happiness by news of his father’s grave illness. Returned to Melbourne, he would live in his childhood home before his abrasiveness meant he would have to move into his grandmother’s nursing home.

In need of a fortune to cure his father, his thorniness would render him unfit for employment and while pointlessly applying for a bank loan he would get wind of a stash of gold belonging to Australia’s 40 or so billionaires. Seeing in that immoral wealth an adventure reminiscent of his Cambodian exploits he would resolve to steal it, and would reunite his Cambodian soldiers in Melbourne to do so—all while trying to revive a high-school romance whose intensity he has grossly misremembered.

I carved these adventures into an enclosed and ludicrous narrative and in the process struck upon my main character’s name. Called after that first tragic Greek hero, Hector, his pertinent surname became early in its conception the novel’s title:

GRIEVE.

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The chapter outlines for Grieve, ​worked out via months of literally pacing back and forth.



After three months of pacing I had the entirety of the book’s story and now needed two months to write the first two drafts. This is Bruce Chatwin, he who posited that the ultimate question was the nature of human restlessness:

‘American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travellers and found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions.‘

However beautiful and romantic was Hoi An I needed a change of scenery, and it just so happened that a friend had a spare room in Battersea. So it was back for a London summer, en route to Venice, to start writing Grieve.

Setting to work immediately I wrote its Cambodian open, 18,000 words, in a week. These opening chapters still are my favourite of all the sections in my books. Hector Grieve in Cambodia—gallivanting on horseback, shooting guns, giving martial speeches to his squadron of orphans, drinking hallucinogenic whisky by the bottle, claiming to be the greatest lover that Angelina Jolie has ever had.

As well as my personal favourite of all the section in my books, Grieve’s Cambodian open was also the most meticulously written & laboriously reworked.



There followed one of the most intensively productive periods of work that I’ve ever managed to pull off, and one filled with the same joyless monotony with which Hector was soon having to deal in Melbourne. 

My morning writing routine had been transplanted to a place where I had no motorbike, no beaches, and rarely even the sun. In my afternoons I was reading Osbert Sitwell’s Escape With Me!, Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana, Casanova’s History of My Life—none works that enable one to sit contently inside for weeks on end.

‘Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.‘

PARKER


Luckily I needed this frustrating London modernity as fodder for Hector’s fury. Seamlessly I could transpose self-serve checkouts and parking fines and conversation-in-hashtags from Battersea to Melbourne and in six weeks I finished three-quarters of the first two drafts and took to Venice a 322-page manuscript.

While in Cambodia I had been contacted about my work by a woman who runs Balinese wellness retreats. Inspired by my plan for an art and history tour of Venice she decided to hold a retreat in that floating city and asked if I would incorporate the tour into its programme.

I won’t here go into detail about the psychopathy to which I was there both witness and object, but from its first morning on that “retreat” (an apt Hectorian word) formed the basis of an even newer story—one that would grow so preposterous as to end up practically uncooked as the plot for my next novel.

But, The Stones of Venice Tour!


Each morning rising before the sun and the tourists, I spent a month walking individuals, couples, pairs, groups of friends, around the most beautiful city in the world—empty because of the early start and my long-grown knowledge of its tiniest alleys.

From the city’s beginning as a salt-farming village to its growth by trade and conquest into the richest and most powerful city in the world—to its several apotheoses of glorious art and its constant creative genius, the two-morning tour passed on to dozens of new students the lessons that Venice and Ruskin had taught me.

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An experience that took four years to build and another year to craft, The Stones of Venice Tour ran for the first time in 2016.


As well as having St Mark’s Square at dawn for my office that September, the tour was lauded by several people who took it as the greatest experience of their life.

For me that sunlit Venetian month was both a privilege and a joy. I was able to pass on to so many people what had given me so much delight and nourishment and to revive in them that love of culture which alone makes life worth living.

Presently putting Ancient Greece through the same structural and narrative process, I plan on giving a Stones of Athens Tour next year, and to pass on to those who attend the unequalled philosophy and epic history of what many consider to be the first and highest pinnacle of the human mind and heart.

After Venice it was back to Southeast Asia, first to Cambodia to rewrite Grieve’s opening in situ, then to Thailand in order to fly to Melbourne for Christmas. Bonobo’s won’t clap and spending only two weeks in Bangkok I met an expat who lived in an apartment in my favourite corner of the mega-city, and hearing from him of how easy and affordable it was to do so I sensed a possible change of direction for the coming year.

At home I finished and rewrote Grieve’s much longer Melbourne section and found the book’s epigraph in Byron’s great satirical adventure: “I want a hero, an uncommon want,”—for a hero Hector Grieve was, and in a very unheroic age. I got in contact with some Bangkok real estate agents about maybe renting an apartment there. They sent pictures of condos and most were mouldy and among ramshackle slums and traffic.

But one of them…

One overlooked a canal and two temples, had a picturesque swimming pool, appeared even to have a rooftop garden—and was in my favourite corner of one of my favourite cities. I took the Nietzschean line, the Montrose line—now the Hector Grieve line—and said Fuck it.

I told the real estate agent I would take the apartment, transferred the deposit, and with all the excitement of a chubby child at Christmas I on New Years’ Eve flew to Thailand and was in my new home two days later. January 2017 is the last time I felt this level of enthusiasm for anything.

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The canal-and-temple view to which I awoke each morning. 


Though the apartment was small, 30 square metres, its building rendered the move beyond worthwhile. The view from my bedroom and kitchen was indeed of a winding khlong and of the glittering golden roofs of two temples. The pool was long and all day in the sun and almost always empty of people, and the rooftop! I won’t here describe its splendour but at 40 floors up and looking across at Krungthep and the Chao Phraya river, or back over the canal and its temples, it so drew me that I watched the sunset there every night for six months.

Bangkok then became another corner of the world to which I can always happily remove and one in which I feel at home and am productive.

I’ve spent a full fifth of my last five years there and hope in 2021 to add a Bangkok tour to my repertoire, the history and architecture of that city being equally as fascinating and exquisite as are those of Venice and Athens.

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The view from my rooftop garden, observed every night with pipe, Sangsom, and speaker in hand.


It was in this new Thai corner of my world that I laboured over finalising Grieve’s manuscript. The sun rose on my bedroom window and again I had chanced upon a place perfectly suited to my routine. At a kitchen table acting as my desk I spent two months of mornings rewriting and rewriting and rewriting. (I twirl my pens when I’m working and before moving out of that apartment I had to repaint the kitchen walls to cover the flecks of green ink.)

By midday I could rewrite no more and would walk along my favourite chaotic street for lunch then work in the pool, manuscript pages tucked under my laptop set at its decked ledge, retyping the morning’s amendments.

Then I would walk to the canal, where a kind of gangplank served as my jungled running track, and return in time for 7-11 to start selling liquor (they’re prohibited by law from doing so between 2 and 5pm) then walk 24 flights to the rooftop with a speaker and my pipe to watch the sun set in one of the most consistently magnificent vistas to which I’ve ever lived near.

‘It is meant to be a little quietly facetious upon every thing. But I doubt whether it is not—at least, as far as it has yet gone—too free for these very modest days.‘

BYRON, on Don Juan

In the evenings I read Byron in all his forms and re-read lives of Patton, working towards making my Hector Grieve as effortlessly offensive as possible while ensuring he kept the charm and audacity of which men of his ilk seem uniquely capable. I was struck then, and am still struck now, by a sentiment found in his writings which appears common to most who have reached the pinnacle of their vocation. The following is General Patton:

‘The most vital quality a soldier can possess is self-confidence—utter, complete and bumptious. You can have doubts about your good looks, about your intelligence, about your self control; but to win in war you must have no doubts about your ability as a soldier.‘

While this is F. Scott Fitzgerald:

‘A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It’s an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to-me, nothing-can-harm-me, nothing-can-touch-me.‘

Interchange the word soldier for writer in either and you have, I believe, one of the key lessons by which life must be lived.

By story’s end I had made Hector both a foolish romantic and a 21st-century Robin Hood—and into a much-needed antithesis of modernity.


He has never heard of yoga nor owned a mobile telephone; he believes that what is old should be respected and what is great should be striven for; in the freedom of the individual and that the individual should freely choose noble servitude; he values action for its own sake and questions not why or how he does things. These ideals are found in Nietzsche’s summing-up of the civilization that was disappearing with his sanity, and come more succinctly from General George S. Patton’s mouth 50 years later:

‘War is the only place where a man really lives.’

‘Do not take counsel of your fears.’

‘One has to choose a system and stick to it; people who are not themselves are nobody.’

‘I am sure that if every leader who goes into battle will promise himself that he will come out either a conqueror or a corpse he is sure to win.’

‘Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.’

‘Do your duty as you see it, and damn the consequences.’

‘Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself.’

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The man himself, by my pen transplanted to the 21st century—and not at all impressed by what he finds here. 


I ended up putting one of his lamentations alongside Byron’s as dual epigraphs:

“I am different from other men my age. All they want to do is to live happily and die old. I would be willing to live in torture, die tomorrow, if for one day I could be truly great.”

Though it might sound difficult to make a such a character funny in a comedy novel sense, by the absurd rudeness of Hector’s insults, by his carrying  in a gunless country an antique ivory-handled revolver, by his not giving a flying peacock’s fart for modernity, by his almost 400 uses of the word ‘fuck’—and by the tininess of his fuse and that original Costanza temper—I do believe I succeeded.

Again I commissioned a cover from my brother and asked him to base its style on the Khmer art and architecture found on the temples of Siem Reap—those whose splendour Grieve is forced to leave behind and whose loss he so desperately laments.

That cover, which integrates several elements of the story, is the best thing my brother has yet done for me and here deserves greater attention.
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After much consultation and no small number of brotherly arguments, this was Sam’s initial sketch for Grieve’s cover.

The two dwarapalas, ‘guardians of holy places’, are taken from extant statues, one at Preah Khan and one at Banteay Kdei. The seven-headed nagas on the capitals can be seen on the pediments of Banteay Srei and on the ends of most of the balustrades guarding Angkorian causeways.

The central figure is Hector on Selathoa, his favourite horse, wearing his Patton uniform—modelled on Jacques Louis David’s Napoleon and surrounded by Garuda feathers. The tanks, the tuk-tuk, the Citroen C6, commemorate the book’s opening, in which his squadron successfully repels a Thai tank raid on Angkor Wat. They flank in military uniform Elvis, the name and dress of Hector’s aide-de-camp and closest friend in Cambodia. The five cross-legged soldiers are Hector’s orphans reposed as the rows of monks into the walls of the classical temples.

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Original cover artwork by Samuel Humphreys.
(Click an image to enlarge it.)
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Its purple and light turquoise are very close approximations of the shades which the moss and the lichen at Preah Khan take through the wet season. Had I a home I would have the cover enlarged and mounted on a wall as a testament to Sam’s talent and as a reminder of what now seems a golden era of my working life.

I had to do a visa run from Thailand and went again to Cambodia to give one final touch to the novel’s open and to produce material for the book’s launch inside the very temples in which its action took place. There I loosed Grieve upon the world and opened it to pre-orders. In a week it sold twice as many copies as did Exquisite Hours in its opening weekend—without my having to dress up as a mermaid.

Having launched my career by writing a novel that everyone wanted to read, I had finished and released a book that I wanted to read.


And it too had a place and an audience in the world.

Bonobo’s Don’t Clap. One of the launch videos for Grieve, filmed at Preah Khan, where Hector gives his farewell speech to his men.


The books coming all the way to Bangkok for me to inscribe and then send out to readers, I used the 6 weeks they took to arrive to give a second run of The Stones of Venice Tour and returned by way of Jerusalem.

Coming home to box upon box of unsigned comedy novels, I spent a week numbering and inscribing them and again had to order more to cover a surplus of interest. Thankfully I ended up dressed as a mermaid anyway—reading the book underwater purely out of gratitude to Grieve’s popularity.

There is no conveniently sharp break, as there had been between Grieve and Exquisite Hours, between this book and the next. I had settled into a writing and releasing pattern that seemed as though it had simply become “my life”. Nor was there upon finishing Grieve an overlap in novels needing to be written.

Hector’s story was the last time that my own adventures, and not an ordeal (or indeed several ordeals combined), inspired my work. Its writing seems now, enchained in middle age by a frightened world, to have been a joy rarely afforded most artists. But I felt it to be as such throughout its creation and for that I sit here grateful. I only hope that soon something like a bank vault filled with billionaires’ gold makes itself known to me, and that like Hector the nostalgia for an audacious past inspires me to steal it.

In the wake of the book’s release I was still living in Bangkok and had been slated to work again on a wellness retreat, this time in Bali, for the same deluded guru as in Venice but—

I’ve just realised that I’ve largely omitted my personal life from these otherwise personal essays. I shall give but two amorous details, and in the next essay relay more of the chaos that has been for almost a decade my love life, as the next two books would spring directly from it.

In Bangkok I had gone and gotten myself a girlfriend, a Canadian who lived in Da Nang. Upon learning this, the wellness yogaclown informed me that she would no longer be employing me on her retreat.

Fired for having a girlfriend, in an instant all the personal and spiritual ridiculousnesses of that first Venetian wellness retreat became fair game for comedy novels. The delusion and manipulation that nourish and run “wellness retreats”, which I had hitherto merely stored as terrifying memories, were immediately decided upon as the material for my next book:

The story of a struggling artist unable to make enough money to continue working, employed by a flourishing con-woman whose sageful
masquerading makes her debilitatingly lonely.


But it would be another year,
and the spontaneous germination
of a Shakespearean romcom
—veritably a whole interceding
fifth act of Josh Write Book—
before I would sit down to write it.


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GRIEVE—the story of a hellraising soldier of fortune forced to leave his life of adventure for the frustrations of modernity—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 III — The Author Dressed as a Mermaid

Whole Enjungled Cities — my ode to the ruins of Siem Reap


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


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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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Bangkok!

November 18, 2019 by Joshua Humphreys

The city, I think, to which I have the most unique relationship. (not, my relationship is more unique than anyone else’s—but rather my relationship to Bangkok is more unique than my relationship to any other city).

The first place I ever landed in Asia! The city to which I first fled when I realised that I could be a writer and nothing else! The city that kept drawing me in, day by day, week by week—until I decided to live there for 2017, and which I quickly found supremely amenable to the way I work.

For years I thought I was an oddity, that my love for Bangkok was a defect—WHAT ABOUT EUROPE!? And the reputation that city has among most people! Ladyboys, backpackers, garbage, smog, traffic.

But Bangkok to me is a city of temples, canals, street food, sunsets, harmonious mayhem. It’s a city in which I’ve set sections of 2 of my novels. And it’s a city which continues to enthral and delight me.

Recently I read a book by a similarly afflicted writer (Alex Kerr), and was astounded to find my reservations in the words of another. If only I had listened to myself for the last few years, had backed my own hunch! So I’ve at last admitted it:

I love Bangkok, and it is supremely amenable to my work.

My 2020 is looking like: the biggest New Cavalier Reading Society I’ve ever done. A full, months-long launch of The Creative Art of Wishfulness. Writing a new Comedy Novel. And (with more information to follow) a “Stones of Bangkok” Tour.

It again makes sense for me to move to Bangkok.

And so I shall, and am doing so, in just 3 weeks’ time. Where I’ll begin to research and plan a Bangkok Tour in time for a November-December 2020 season…

Filed Under: Bangkok, Culture, Travel Tagged With: bangkok, thailand, travel

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