Some poetry books are delightfully serious, and some are seriously delightful. Hamish Trumble’s Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams occasionally manages both, running the gamut from a raconteur’s amusing ire to an almost Seuss-like take on Aesop.
Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams—or LHDBD, as I’m going to call it, because despite possessing the vaudevillian glamour and glib memorability of all the best book titles, it remains something of a handful to type repeatedly—does exactly what a retrospective should. It looks back while tripping forward; despite how that sounds, the movement is more allegro non troppo than pratfall.
The works, according to Trumble, “represent a lifetime of toil in the salt mines of literature”. That this was a salt mine well stocked with both the canon of English literature and its more celebrated outliers becomes apparent from even a brief perusal of the introduction: a potted account of Trumble’s life in letters, from the lofty halls of Jesus College, Cambridge, to the smoke-filled dives of Fitzroy, to the elegantly crumbling book palace of Mr Booksy-Wooksy’s—an eclectorium in Kongwak, South Gippsland, whose vanilla- and patchouli-scented stacks Trumble calls home. The salt mine also appears to have been well supplied with good coffee, aperitifs, tempting comestibles and excellent company. Sentence me at once, Mr Stalin.
This particular salt mine has resulted not in the melancholic Eastern European handwringing and moral contemplation the metaphor suggests, but in a ready mix of ire and amusement, stemming from—Trumble claims—both a hatred of poetry and a rejection of the novel.
Having failed to gain admission to the higher realms of page-based literature, Trumble decided to pursue poetry as performance—not the dire autobiographical trauma-dumps and political didacticism of spoken word, but rather, entertainment –a somewhat discomforting commodity in live poetry’s decrepit and echoing halls.
We’re glad he did, because what has arrived upon the page is no mere transcription with all the enlivening expressive flourishes excised. Paper, of course, unless arranged origami-wise, can rarely carry a flourish. Instead, we find gloriously idiosyncratic and amusing turns that stand on—or perhaps more accurately, stroll down—the sweeping stage scenery of life itself.
Such a voluminous retrospective—collected works, selected works, something in between, perhaps more sedimentary (I said sedimentary, not sedentary) than the usual poetic agglomeration—is a little too broad for comprehensive review. So here we will sample, appreciate and comment the way a moth does: flitting randomly, but always drawn to the light.
Appropriately, we begin at the beginning, with Trumble’s dreams. At once groundedly biographical and amusingly pop-cultural, they run the gamut from encounters with hypercritical Japanese drag queens to the physics of tram-cornering through sites of American crimes against humanity; from the savage joys of lounge-room all-in wrestling, to more nefarious figures, such as Jeff Kennett and other redundant curiosities of Australian politics. Dream-like, certainly, but inflected with an element of wry, comforting nostalgia.
Trumble is part raconteur, part flâneur. We have the wool pulled over our eyes as we window-shop through his life. He decries the novel as a redundant form—or rather, one whose glut has rendered any further addition superfluous. Yet with its chronological progression, chapter-like sections, consistent voice and reflective reminiscence, perhaps Trumble has committed heresy against his own credo. As readers seek and assemble a unifying meaning, we experience something not entirely unlike a novel, albeit one bearing the hallmarks of late modernist experimentation.
Or perhaps I’m reading too much into it.
Occasionally it is like being given a wedgie by your most erudite literature professor: painful, embarrassing and amusing for all concerned, but still educational. It’s as though Monty Python had taken honours in Classics and English Literature rather than remaining purely sophomoric.
My beard will be all things to all men
My beard will tell a thousand tales like Victor Hugo’s beard
My Beard Joyeuse (p. 35)
Perhaps the best summation is Trumble’s own, from his dream of the land of the enormous turnip:
Your walls are paper
Like obscure poems
Last Night I Dreamed a Dream of Japan (p. 37)
This is a book of flimsily elegant paper walls, that occasionally sets your ribs to shaking with the force of an 7 megawatt earthquake. Earthquakes aren’t measured in megawatts? Besides the point. And for the piece of resistance (as the French say) you must see Random Thoughts While I Swim Laps (p.135) –which I have seen performed in a now demolished public library. It is a wonder.
My favourite section has to be Trumble’s Bestiary. It has the wit of Aesop, the tomfoolery of Spike Milligan, does not balk at the mythical, and employs a rhyme scheme that falls somewhere between Seuss and McGonagall, with a little good-natured Rum Tum Tuggery thrown in.
Here’s an example:
Sphinx
Conviviality Intoxication
As I went reeling home one night
I came upon a sphinx.
I said to myself, “Oh deary me,
One or two too many drinks!”
But sphinx was grand, she held my hand
And helped me on my way.
“There’s plenty of time, my friend,” she said,
“You’ll keep for another day.”
(p.216)
The socially framed meaning of the beast in question has all the hallmarks of divination – I can see these pages as a tarot-style deck, used to plumb the depths of Jungian predilections, though perhaps a prognostication more pleasantly inebriated than as per the Sibyls, ecstatically intoxicated. And whilst not quite bearing the hopeless, timeless grandeur of Shelley’s Ozymandias, still it remains animated by some of the same sentiment in a more succinct and jolly package—and with an illustration to boot. Each entry in the Bestiary comes with its accompanying doodle, and there are numerous others scattered throughout the volume for the reader’s amusement.
What else is there to say? If you don’t know Trumble, get to know him here. The performance is well worth the ticket price. Better still, visit Mr Booksy-Wooksy’s Famous Book Emporium in Kongwak and see whether he will perform a piece as recompense for your purchase. I’m sure he will oblige. And if not, blame me.
Rating: Three espressos and a Tim Tam.
