Fun Times

In the latest issue of the Monthly, in her roundup of Oz lit, Beejay Silcox – one of our best critics, I think, writing for what we might call “mainstream” publications – briefly regards my piece in the same publication about our literature and “moral hygiene”.

I’m all for the engagement, and no less from the author of this beautiful essay published earlier this year. What’s more, I heartily agree with her prescription for “more fun” as a “solution” to the “great deal of dull, didactic fiction around at the moment”.

Goddamn if I can’t agree with more fun, though I suspect we’d falter at the first hurdle: defining what the fuck “fun” is.

For example: I’d consider as great fun Silcox invoking Trump (“his solution was to Make Literature Great Again: a return to the age of the swaggering dick-swinger”) to snidely caricature my despair – if I didn’t think she was so serious.

And when she writes that my use of the phrase “moral hygienists” is “a term that sounds an awful lot like shorthand for too many girls” the die seems cast – this fun lovin’ gal seems damn serious.

“Moral hygienists” sounds like “shorthand for too many girls”? How? Why? Is there a list of codewords on Andrew Tate sub-Reddits that I’ve unwittingly used? On this, I’m genuinely baffled. But I thank our Lord for making me so fun lovin’, or I just might take some offence.

As it is, I tried to have some fun while writing my first and only novel – a weird failure with a few good jokes. It’s called The Speechwriter. As with all my books, I find no fun in re-reading it – so I’ll trust my earlier judgement that it’s not worth recommending.

Anyway, I’ve thought about all this because, funnily enough, Silcox is the “bright and literate mind” that “expressed itself with a solemnity perfectly incongruous with the book itself” referred to in the essay below – that is, a fun essay about a fun book I wrote.

At least, I think it is.

As for Norman bloody Mailer – it’s neat to assume that he’s my chauvinist cult-hero and “solution” to our cultural inanity. Apparently, it’s not enough to declare him an abusive clown of unreadably baroque gibberish.

Oh, well. Go have fun. To that end, Silcox recommends reading books about “creature fuckers [&] gender-queer sea monsters” while I recommend reading that quote.

And the following:

“But he never reckoned with the big, meaty, maggoty question of why it’s happening. Why contemporary writers might feel compelled to try to clean up a big fucking mess.”

Is it always and irrevocably the writer’s job to solve social problems – and clean up its “big fucking mess”? And is that instinct unique to Our Times?

No – and fucking no. But here, Silcox seems to betray sympathy with the dogmatic artist. But we have too many, and they’re awful. And that goes back some fucking way. Try reading Tolstoy’s Resurrection. Today, we laurel sub-sub-Resurrections.

Anyway – all this is prelude to the re-heating below of, yes, a fun essay about a fun little book about which Ms. Silcox was largely right – if not in her seriousness of tone. But I’ll sooner forgive her solemnity than my haphazard plotting.

Enjoy.

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The following was published in The Monthly in October last year.

Such was my commitment to chronicling human depravity that friends made a small industry of jokes and parlour games around it. Some kept a tally of the times a crisis hotline number was included at the bottom of a story of mine. Others kept score on the use of the word “squalor” but abandoned the project when it hit three figures. A couple would jokingly guess the subject of my latest piece before opening that morning’s paper, their speculations an improvised fever-dream about our suburban Gothic. Child, 12, arrested for smuggling chimp spleens in dead father’s pockets.

So where, on this scorched earth, was my own humour and silliness? Though I possessed some, it was rarely found in my writing, and goddamn if this didn’t seem like a significant personal denial.

Perhaps I was abnormally serious as a child, if my early indignation about whaling, acid rain and the South-East Asian heroin trade was anything to go by. To help purge these public evils, I wrote bad poetry. But not only that. Inspired by the vast volumes of juvenile detective books I read, I established my own private eye agency and dedicated myself to cleaning our streets of filth. Petty vandalism, and the loose, likely slanderous rumour that my neighbour was growing a small crop of dope, consumed most of my time. It didn’t matter a lick that I didn’t know what marijuana looked like.

It may or may not be significant that my parents’ interest in supporting my heavy reading habit was undermined by their poor scrutiny of the books they bought me. Stanley Elkin’s very funny, and very adult The Magic Kingdom – a black comedy about a man, grieving his young son, who takes seven terminally ill children to Disneyland, which some critics described as “diabolical” and “perverse” – was gifted to me when I was 10, I suspect because a cursory glance of its blurb yielded the words “kids” and “Disneyland”.

My reading this book was unlikely to have scarred me, simply on the grounds of incomprehension. Even today I can barely understand him. An idol of many authors I love, I want very much to like Elkin myself, but I trip frequently over his eccentric syntax, and there’s only so many times I’m prepared to chip a tooth trying to get to the punchline.

My parents had also noted my enthusiastic reading of the Adrian Mole books and presumably assumed their author, Sue Townsend, exclusively wrote young adult fiction. And so it was that, at the age of 10 or 11, Rebuilding Coventry came into my possession – a feminist picaresque about a woman who flees to London after accidentally killing a neighbour. I knew something was wrong when my teacher asked to borrow the book after I was finished.

Now, I did have some things to be serious about – old chestnuts such as sexual abuse and my father’s advanced cancer – and perhaps my concern with the spearing of whales and drug trafficking was merely an acceptable sublimation of unacceptable anxieties. Hey, it’s possible.

Anyway, I’ve distracted myself from martyring the public absence of my silliness. To this end, some years ago, I decided to revive an un-produced comedic screenplay I’d written in Canberra about a departmental speechwriter. But this time, I would turn it into a novel. Having chronicled a little human depravity, comedy seemed a nice change. So too the freedom of fiction. But the writing of comedy proved harder than any writing I’ve ever done, or likely will ever do, and the freedom of fiction could often seem overwhelming – a blank map upon which I would have to impose a coherent topography.

The typical journalist exaggerates both their understanding and the general comprehensibility of reality. Nonetheless, real stories about real lives, however complicated by imperfect information, offer some kind of shape to a story – a vertebra, at least, if not a full skeleton. Even if we accept that a common instinct of the hack is to impose a neat and antiseptic “narrative” upon the messiness of reality, a good amount of interviewing and the excavation of relevant materials will still provide some comforting guidance to the writing of a nonfiction book.

With the novel, though, plotting became a desperate improvisation – not unlike my career or the youthful investigation of bins I suspected of being dented by local goons.

Let me briefly describe my novel to you because, having seen the royalty cheques, I’m confident you’ve never heard of it, much less the sick adventures of its hero, Toby Beaverbrook. The Speechwriter comprises Toby’s memoirs, written from prison and subject to the interruptions of his violent cellmate, and concern his transformation from weird kid to pretentious idealist to a speechwriter for the prime minister, who’s secretly engaged in a criminally anarchic experiment.

I had the unfashionable idea of writing an antic entertainment – one that had no interest in profundity, good taste or patient characterisation. No, this was to be a celebration of silliness, surrealism and lyrical dick jokes. Despite its earthier ambitions, I still thought it a worthy addition to the canon of political scatology, but perhaps the bestiality and machine-gun profanity alienated a few critics.

Critical indifference was largely manifest in abject silence, but the few reviews that did appear weren’t pretty. Psychic fragility forbids my returning to them, so I depend here upon a (conveniently) imperfect memory. I might add that the same fragility also forbids my ever re-reading my own book, and so, prevented from comparing notes, I must assume here that the critics might’ve been right about a few things.

Now, there is no profit to be had for the writer in criticising his critics – none. But let me do it anyway. One review was written by a bright and literate mind, though one that expressed itself with a solemnity perfectly incongruous with the book itself. Another, written in what I can only describe as a state of extreme moral agitation – not unlike my early sonnets about acid rain, to be fair – all but accused me of perversity and reckless indifference to the State of Politics. I recall the heat of the anger, as I do the critic’s suggestion – intended as the final nail in my coffin – that the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, would love my book.

Now, dear reader, this comment misunderstood us both. To think that Scott Morrison might cheerfully finish a book that includes a character called Bessie the Hermaphrodite Eel is wishful thinking. And to think that my commitment to high farce and poop gags made me a moral cousin to the eerily vacant but aggressively sly Scott Morrison was a peculiar conflation, and one which betrayed the critic’s ignorance of my other work: for at least 12 months before The Speechwriter’s release, I was a chronically verbose sufferer of Scott Morrison Derangement Syndrome.

The fact that no critic drew attention to, much less celebrated, my Dr. Seuss scene told me that something was wrong. Here, Dr. Seuss reinvents himself as a crime reporter in Los Angeles who, despite desperately wanting to change careers, just can’t shake his distinctive rhyme from his copy about murder. I’ll die proud of that one, and can only assume that, with enough time, critics will tearfully admit the failure of their instruments.

For now, though, I can only submit to that stale but still relevant truism that the receipt of comedy is ultra-subjective. God knows I sweated that fact as I saw how absurd and idiosyncratic my comedic muse was. Requiring a mascot that would reflect Perth’s parochialism, I’d settled upon a physical monument of some sort. But drifting off to sleep one night, swallowed by that gorgeously strange twilight of consciousness, the words “Bessie the Hermaphrodite Eel” came to me, and I laughed. My laughter was all the proof I needed. I’d learnt earlier that week in a nature doco that most eels were hermaphrodites and it became glued to something deep and inscrutable. But how could I guarantee that anything born from such weird swamps might not appear like the sick rantings of an infantile weirdo?

Well, hell – I couldn’t.

Anyway, unread and critically unloved, I was surprised to learn that I’d been shortlisted for the Russell Prize for Humour Writing – awarded only every two years, unlike the more profligate Nobel Prize, and, until recently – when Victoria instated a similar award named for the late, great John Clarke – the country’s only prize for funny writing.

I’m aware that raising this fact here might appear like a bitter flex – vindication for my previously misunderstood genius. And it is. I have enormous respect for writing awards and their unimpeachable judgements, and it’s rare that I find one that I won’t apply for. Priesthoods upholding meritocracy, that’s what I’ve always said.

Anyway, at the time our home was being ripped up. We’d just purchased it – our first and only – and had called in some blokes to inspect the unnervingly spongy area before the shower that had somehow escaped the attention of the man paid good money for the home’s inspection before our purchase. I possess very few skills, none of them practical, but I do know that the tiled floor of a bathroom should not have the same feel as a mud cake.

Well, one thing expensively led to another. In removing the tiles, a hole was revealed that could’ve easily swallowed my daughter. The rotting was extensive: this place of water was never properly waterproofed. To do so now would require the wholesale restoration of the room.

It got worse. After some time beneath our house, the plumbers emerged incredulous. They had bad news: the installation of our sewage pipes, if not criminally negligent, was damn close. Naturally, we didn’t like the sound of this: after the deposit, we had fuck all money left. They asked, with surprising delicacy, if we’d experienced any resurgence of foul water. We had not, though we’d only just moved in and, as it was, only a few days later our toilet would start filling over with the devil’s filth. Further inspections revealed a code-defying collusion with our neighbour’s system that would complicatedly tie our bad fortunes to theirs and vice versa.

Less than a week after those blokes came to look at our spongy floor, our local council had approved the closure of our street so that great machines could rip it up and our home be properly connected to the sewer system. We were now renting the Airbnb next door so that we might have a place to shit.

Things had escalated. Expensively.

It was around this time that I learnt I had won the Russell Prize, and the $10,000 that generously went with it. This was, of course, thrilling, even if this recognition of my filth would immediately go to the men improving the transfer of my family’s. Easy come, easy go.

Now officially recognised as Australia’s Funniest Writer, I was invited to the Sydney Writers Festival to accept my crown. I was happy to do so, and grateful to leave a situation where I had to go to another house to shower or shit.

Feeling electric and ready to riff brilliantly on the origin of my talent, I assumed the stage at the country’s largest writer’s festival before a decent crowd of at least two dozen indifferent retirees and fielded questions from a host who kept calling me Michael. Nonetheless, I gave my electricity, my revelations, my whole damn soul – and afterwards generously signed the books of two women at their request.

It was all rather intoxicating, as I’m sure you can imagine, though not sufficiently intoxicating to make me forget the weight of my crown. Those TV producers will be calling any day now, surely.

And I’ll tell you something else. Besides the generous money, bestowed by the late Peter Wentworth Russell, I was left with a lovely symmetry: the careful work of making diarrhoea funny was now helping pay for the remaking of my home’s poo-poo pipes.

My third book, Sirens, was released in May. Go on, have a look.