Jon Bauer

An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow

The world goes round Repins, the murmur goes round Lorenzinis,

at Tattersalls, men look up from sheets of numbers

the Stock Exchange scribblers forget the chalk in their hands

and men with bread in their pockets leave the Greek Club:

There's a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can't stop him.

The traffic in George Street is banked up for half a mile

and drained of motion. The crowds are edgy with talk

and more crowds come hurrying. Many run in the back streets

which minutes ago were busy main streets, pointing:

There's a fellow weeping down there. No one can stop him.

The men we surround, the man no-one approaches

simply weeps and does not cover it, weeps

not like a child, not like the wind, like a man

and does not declaim it, nor beat his breast, nor even

sob very loudly – yet the dignity of his weeping

holds us back from his space, the hollow he makes about him

in the midday light, in his pentagram of sorrow,

and uniforms back in the crowd who tried to seize him

stare out at him and feel, with amazement, their minds

longing for tears as children for a rainbow.

Some will say, in the years to come, a halo

or force stood around him. There is no such thing.

Some will say they were shocked and would have stopped him

but they will not have been there. The fiercest manhood,

the toughest reserve, the slickest wit amongst us

trembles with silence, and burns with unexpected

judgements of peace. Some in the concourse scream

who thought themselves happy. Only the smallest children

and such as look out of Paradise come near him

and sit at his feet, with dogs and dusty pigeons.

Ridculous, says a man near me, and stops

his mouth with his hands, as if it uttered vomit -

and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand

and shake as she receives the gift of weeping,

as many as follow her also receive it.

And many weep for sheer acceptance, and more

refuse to weep for fear of all acceptance,

but the weeping man, like the earth requires nothing,

the man who weeps ignores us, and cries out

of his writhen face and ordinary body

not words, but grief, not messages but sorrow,

hard as the earth, sheer, present as the sea -

and when he stops, he simply walks between us

mopping his face with the dignity of one

man who has wept, and now has finished weeping.

Evading believers, he hurries off down Pitt Street.

I made a speech at the launch of the Sleepers Almanac (short story collection) and some have said lovely things, so I thought I'd append it here.

You'll have to voice it in your head in that speechy way.

Have you ever had that moment on a dance floor where, mid-boogie, you look around and think, what the hell are we all doing? I had a moment like that when I was thinking about tonight. All these have been designed, printed, bound, cut, driven thousand of kilometres around the country; put online, all for short stories. The Minister is here. There’s (one, two, three, ten thousand people…)

So since it’s why we’re here, what is a short story?

In 2006 I’d been writing just two years. My family and friends were pushing me to submit my work but I was waiting. Mostly I thought I wasn’t quite good enough yet. But sometimes I wondered if I might just be scared of rejection.

Nevertheless, I was writing story after story as a way of practising. Not caring if they were perfect, caring only that they had a line, a paragraph, an idea in them I could be proud of. And all stories have that.

As a naive writer I wandered round the outside of the Melbourne writing world, wondering how you got in. I found and devoured a Sleepers Almanac, looked at the submission guidelines and sat back at my writing desk, and thought, at last.

It was another year of hard work before I did finally send my first story off, to The New Yorker.

Which is perhaps the first thing a short story is, it’s ambitious. Getting a narrative off the ground, up to cruising altitude, and safely back down again on such a short airfield is Top Gun hard. Short stories are the wafer thin Swiss watch of the writing world. All the mechanisms of a novel but in a triumphantly elegant package.

Not just ambitious, a short story is also hopeful. If you’re doing it right, you’re taking a truth of your own, turning it into characters, putting those characters in a plot unlike your own, but trying to have it all still resonate the bit of you that sat down to write in the first place. A bit like redecorating your front hallway through your letterbox, that.

Which must make a short story a marker of perseverance, or perversity. So important to you is that truth that you resist all the easy distractions of modern living. You work at this literary contortion act alone. You send it out along with all those other competing truths in the world, foolish or courageous enough to ask an editor-stranger if, out of all the others, they could please love it too.

And who could possibly love your story like you love it. Blind to its frailties. Loving it the way your gran wants you to love her incontinent poodle; like your dad loves his crusty towelling dressing gown; like your brother’s guitar playing or your girlfriend’s parallel parking.

And so in that way, a short story is a bridge – between the disguised innards of its author to the innards of a reader. Because if you get it right, and we only manage that from time to time, you get to plant your insides in another person. So much so that they recognise your truth as their own.

I had a woman tell me on election night that she plans to have a line from my novel tattooed on her body.

But short stories are mostly unrequited, foolish, devil-may-care. Because you can’t be sure if they will be accepted, often they’re not. They get sent back to you with scabby knees and grazed elbows.

Or if accepted, readers flick over them. They miss your truth – mangle your plot. You had a story in the last Almanac didn’t you, they say at a party. It was about talking dogs, wasn’t it. Sleeping horses, actually. Yeah, I read half that one.

After the New Yorker rejected me, the Almanac was next. Mainly because since attending one of their launches and looking at their submission guidelines it became clear to me that what I would be submitting to was a fresh-faced meritocracy.

What can be more important to our writing ecosystem than something which says to a burgeoning writer, there is nothing stopping you being published but what happens between you and your writing. Not your name. Not your CV. Not your reputation. A proper publisher which says if you write a great story, we’ll publish it. Actually, we’ll champion it. All a writer need do then is practice. And god knows you need that struggle to be all there is, because that struggle is struggley enough as it is.

Without the sense that merit alone is enough, a writer looking to climb the ladder will see only one rung, the top one. Who would begin climbing?

I wouldn’t be writing now if it weren’t for strategic encouragement when I was beginning, and I wouldn’t be writing now if I didn’t have a faith in writing that is sometimes just as blind as Grandma’s love for her poodle – if I too didn’t mind that while licking my face, my story’s tongue might stray into my mouth.

And I might not be writing now if there weren’t an Almanac – a precious combination of reputable and fair.

I got my first ever acceptance email whilst on holiday in Turkey. Me and my then girlfriend were travelling the awful Black Sea coast – her driving was driving me up the wall; people on the filthy beaches would finish their drink or cigarettes and throw them in the sea; at the day’s end we’d try to find an unsqualid place to camp, and howling wolves would wake us terrified in the night.

But for three weeks after that email telling me Sleepers had accepted my story, I was transcendentally happy. The Black Sea coast became an eccentric heaven. We weren’t down and out, we were free. And was it me, or had her driving improved?!

And so the definition of a short story is not a short story. They’re an opportunity to practice quickly a craft that takes years – a lifetime – to never quite perfect. They’re an opportunity to let out that which brims painfully or deliciously full inside you. But, more than that, if you’re in here, it means you managed to really capture that feeling, that brimming. Here it is translated into print, where this physical artefact of your uncertain toil makes a very certain sound indeed.

But more amazing still, it means that what sat you down to write and rewrite will make its way into others. In the comfort of their own anywhere, people will be able to pat your inner poodle.

And so on a night like tonight a short story is a community. A celebration. No wonder there’s ten thousand of us gathered. I salute all the writers in this edition; all those who’ve been published here before; but most of all, those of you who will be one day. In whatever form.

As for Sleepers. Amazing design. An amazing eye. PASSION. Pioneer spirit. The decency to be decent in the way you carry yourselves and your trade. The guts to run a meritocracy even though a more cynical approach could sell you more copies. The courage to choose this over a safer career.

Sleepers is already a benchmark in this country, I recognised that years ago. I also recognise that this wonderful rung on a difficult ladder is rising fast, but not losing its values along the way. It’s taking Australian literature up with it.

You make it seem possible. You make it seem worthwhile. You make it feel amazing. For that, every aspiring writer should thank you. And so will every reader.

I got a beautiful postcard in the post today from the UK. In the below image, Watts wanted to paint on a universal theme. And explained that hope need not mean expectations. Suggesting rather the music which can still come from the remaining cord on the lyre. 

Perhaps that's why she's blind. Without expectation. And having to crane in close to hear the few sounds remaining to her.

In classical mythology, Pandora opens the box that dispenses disease and pain to the mankind. Hope alone remains inside.

It's amazing how precious a thought from another can be. How little we do it now with the advent of email. But how beneficial to my day it is to get such a missive.

Sharing it here.

I read Lunar Park. I read American Psycho, twice (nobody talks enough about how funny that book is. The actual violence in it was often superfluous, though the threat of it wasn't.)

I went to see Brett speak on Friday night and was nervous, since I knew he'd basically refused to take the spoonfuls of question his last interviewer had been trying to feed him. I was worried it would be some obstreperous, self-important display of ego. And in some ways it really was that.

Ellis is an eaten down human. Confusing to watch. I laughed once, not that he wasn't funny more often than that, but I was too transfixed by his performance to take the time out to register my reaction. I was too busy trying to put my finger on him.

He seemed contrived and held, and yet was genuinely nervous and overwhelmed. He seemed cold and aloof, and yet quite genuine and warm.

The audience was not like any writing event audience I'd ever seen – except maybe the Dave Eggers audience – only a smattering of grey heads but mainly young hipsters with lit-up pockets. (The questions made me wish the audience had more grey hair, though. Banal, self-important, “Can I take drugs with you, Brett?”) Generally they lapped him up. Famous people are too-often applauded for not being kind. Not something I subscribe to. The more your renown the more you need to uphold decency.

Not that you have to be nice. Let's not have people be nice. Kind, yes. Decent, yes. But nice, no. Nice = dull. Brett wasn't nice. He skirted kind and strayed beyond it at times. Like when he asked the chair if his laugh was real. 

Like most people in the audience I was watching the chair too to see how he coped with such a tough but important gig. Brett barely listened to his questions. He often barely answered them. And like some in the audience I was questioning too whether the chair was over-laughing. Probably out of relief that the evening had just hit some sort of success. Probably it was a laugh that gave him the opportunity to release some tension.

Cruel to ask him though, mid-laugh, if it was a real laugh. In front of everyone. That is a moment in which you are putting yourself squarely first, if you so blatantly out someone

I still like Brett's writing. But sense from that talk that he doesn't like his latest novel, and that TV and film is more alluring to him now.

I like Brett for his brains. His humour. And his strident disregard for the rules. His ability to not have to play the game. Even if at the end of the night I wasn't sure I liked Brett.

But what was I expecting? His writing is funny, cruel and self-obsessed too. It refuses to adhere to the social conventions. And even if that is what makes it great, even if that is what makes it alive, it is not necessarily what makes its creator that.

It must be a hard burden to carry, that the things most difficult to live with are what make you so applauded as a writer. And especially hard to live with if he really is going into film and tv, since the conveners of those media are rather more controlling and careful than publishers. 

He might find himself stymied, even if his temperament might suit that world. So that I'm betting we'll see him returning to the dying realm of the book.

The book's out. It moons at me from shop windows as I trenchcoat my way round town at night. When I see it, it's like a girl I once loved who is now on a poster. Or a mannequin in a shop window. A familiar distance. It kind of looks sad in that darkened bookshop. Although I always grin back at it.

The reviews are coming in and are all, except perhaps The Age, glowing. I'm top of the sales charts through Readings, but I know that's probably a short-lived blip.

So now what? 

I can't go on waiting to see what'll happen. At some point I have to slip into an inner state of normalcy. But it's hard. Because even if I'm not being interviewed all the time, or as if anything much is really different, there is still this sense that a part of my innards are caught on a hook.

It's hard not to watch, intent, seeing what will happen. Except the truth is, nobody will know if this book is successful for about a year yet. Word of mouth takes time, international deals take time. It's not a swing at a golf ball or a shot on a pool table. Books are slow motion.

But the interior feels high speed.

I know what most writers would say: Write another.

But they'd also agree that it's hard to write a novel in this sort of headspace. Short stories, yes. I'm writing them. But a novel... Plus I'm supposed to be moving house.

The most interesting part of having a book out at last, is that in some ways it lives up to the hype, but in others, it no way does. Because it can't live up to that unwittingly hopeful bit of you that thinks it will change things.

When I get a book published...  That's how the daydream begins. Or, When I find the right partner...

The bit of you that invests bits of you in things not part of you, that's the part that makes all this a touch existential. A touch sad.

And yet we go on investing that bit of ourselves, because life doesn't feel right when we have to keep that bit in.