The Best Australian Essays 2015 (10 page)

It's galling to lie in bed for weeks, absorbing the results of someone else's mistake. But the old man was right – convalescence does focus the mind. I was halfway through my first year of university and until then I'd been drifting along a bit. For quite a while I'd been thinking of myself as a writer, but I hadn't knuckled down the way I'd planned to. I was in danger of becoming a bit of a pretender. Before the accident, there seemed to be plenty of time in which to find my way. But now I thought differently. Suddenly time was precious. So once I'd recovered I went to work, and by the time I graduated I'd written three books. Havoc, it seemed, had leant in and set me running.

But I hadn't emerged unscathed. Everyone told me writing was a hell of a way to make a living, and I took them at their word. Indeed, it was hard to think of a vocation more uncertain or less likely, but I always figured I could supplement my income with physical labour: work the deck of a cray boat or sign on as a brickie's labourer. (After all, bricks seemed to run in the family.) But in the wake of the accident my back was never the same. And my fallback plan was shot. Now, if I couldn't rely on my wits alone I was buggered. And in this sense I think the prang was a gift. It shaped my life, which is to say, of course, that it bound me. In physical terms I feel this physical legacy every morning when I wake – that stiff and fluky back is the only thing I regret. But thanks to the accident I was goaded into beginning what I'd dreamt of doing since I was ten years old. Because of that one sudden moment I went harder at the writing game than anybody could believe, myself included. It was as if I had Robert Johnson's hellhound on my trail.

V

As a teenager I flirted with death. It was an irrational impulse, but a powerful one. Risky behaviour of all sorts gave me a buzz. I particularly enjoyed shallow-water apnoea diving, especially under low-slung limestone reefs. I'd crawl into underwater ledges, some of them hardly wide enough to accommodate my body and my snorkel, and I'd crab and crawl my way through the gloom, backing myself to find a slim hole through which to shove my snorkel before my lungs gave out. I got myself into situations that give me the cold sweats when I think of them now. But when I emerged into full daylight and fresh air, half poisoned with carbon dioxide, I knew I was truly alive. And the feeling was blissful.

I suppose that by the middle of my adolescence I'd come to feel safe enough to take such risks, even to need them somehow. Of course, the safety I felt was illusory. I'd buried a few memories by then and told myself a few lies.

Those years and that impulse are long behind me. But some of my friends still have that old craving for danger. As they like to say, when you're safe you think you know yourself, but
in extremis
who are you really? By and large, this is not a question that troubles me, because, thanks to my history, I know. And it's odd the extent to which your body remembers things your mind hides from you.

In my experience, at moments of extremity, you often become a person you know very well indeed. Whether you're confronted by a kid who's choking or by an adult in distress in the water, you follow a pattern, a script almost. Events swoop down upon you, unexpected but somehow not strange. The sudden, skin-prickling proximity to havoc is creepily familiar. And sometimes its arrival is no real surprise at all. Survivors of family violence talk about being able to sense the approach of savagery. Regular victims become hyper-vigilant. They feel the approach of trouble like a sudden change of air pressure. If you're attuned, whether you're in a volatile kitchen, a rough sea or out on the open road, you can see things coming unstuck before they begin to happen, and it's an eerie feeling. The problem is that although you may know how trouble begins, you can't predict where it will go or how it will end.

After havoc recedes, the mind often lets the detail slip. And that can be a mercy. But the body remembers. When you're tumbling, out of control, upside down along a dirt road, you think calmly, weirdly,
Oh, this again
. Pressed to the seabed by tonnes of roiling whitewater, you catch yourself thinking,
Ah, I know how this scene goes.

The sudden moment can come and go in a searing flash. Or it can settle in to become your day. You're driving home from the city one day and a pillar of dust rises at the bend and you see the wrecked vehicle and the blood streaming down the door and the familiarity of the tableau turns you into an automaton. There's a small girl running barefoot down the highway. In the blood-spattered van a driver lies crushed at the wheel. You know what this is, how it goes. You just don't know how it ends. And as if you're reading from a script you get out of the car. For some reason you have time to note that a Winton always wears thongs to a crisis. You commission your eldest child as you were once drafted yourself, and when the hysterical girl is safe in his care you do what you can to keep her mother alive until help arrives. There's petrol everywhere. In the summer heat the smell of all that dark, viscous blood is foul. You crawl in through the broken windscreen and register the asymmetrical intimacy of the wreck and it's frightening how calm you are. You're certain that if the woman doesn't go into cardiac arrest before the ambulance arrives she'll lose her arm anyway. It doesn't look anything like an arm any more and she's turning puce as you watch. There's nowhere to tie her limb off but she's holding herself together by instinct somehow and all you can do is keep her conscious, so you talk until help arrives. You say the kindest things, the brightest things you can summon. And no one comes. You consider dragging her out and driving her in yourself, but you know the odds. The nearest hospital is an hour away. You have a car full of small children. You think of your father whispering to teen-aged boys at the roadside as they died in his arms. You wish someone else would come along and delete you from this scene.

Afterwards, despite the happy outcome, you are, of course, a fucking mess. What you have been, all through your moment of extremity, is a casual-sounding robot. The state you've been in is probably nothing short of hysterical. Maybe
that's
who you are.

VI

Being a copper's son, I've always got one eye out for trouble. I can't help it. But I don't go looking for it any more. These days I crave stability. I don't like surprises. I know folks who say they love a surprise, but I've travelled with a few of them and I know otherwise. Four seconds of unscheduled plummeting in a commercial aircraft and they're wailing for their mothers. Me, I savour routine – I thrive on it. But I'm conscious that despite its virtues and comforts, the predictable life has its own dangers. Just as an ecosystem requires cataclysmic disruption now and then, the mind and body need a similar jolt. Communities need this too. Eventually a state of seamless predictability – a life without wildness – is a kind of sleepwalking. It attenuates the senses, blunts the imagination. Nobody has written about this mindset better than J.G. Ballard. In his novels he seems to suggest that where there is no wildness humans will create it. The characters of his masterpiece,
Crash
, having all but lost the capacity to feel, resort to participating in spectacles so shocking and lurid they offend every sense back to life. For them, there's nothing left to feel but the grotesque and perverse. All other signals have grown too faint.

I don't think humans have achieved Ballard's dystopian state of anaesthesia quite yet. But in the most prosperous enclaves, humans have already come to believe they've domesticated chaos. Despite having developed social sensitivities that border on the neurasthenic, they've worked up an aesthetic weakness for the gothic and lurid. No longer living at the mercy of nature as our ancestors did, we live as if all wildness has been brought to heel. People have a kind of agency their forebears could not imagine, and on the surface this appears to be freedom without consequence, which is, after all, the consumer ideal. When we set out on a journey we assume we'll arrive intact and on time. We press a button or swipe a screen and receive exactly what we're expecting. The ping of a communications gadget gives us a measurable endorphin shot.

And when we don't get what we anticipated, our reaction is outsized – instant rage. Any interruption to service is received like a blow to the head, an insult, because the consumer is groomed to expect evenness. Such flatness of expectations infects culture, too. Predictability has become a cinematic virtue and a default expectation in literature. In an environment where wildness is largely unknown, a sudden turning can provoke irritation. The editor of a New York magazine once respectfully rejected a story of mine on the grounds that ‘the shark attack came out of nowhere'. The implication was that such an event, insufficiently foreshadowed, was so unlikely as to seem improper, a thought I hold on to some days as I bob about in the surf.

For many, certainty has become the new normal. But it's an illusion. Like it or not, as the song has it, trouble is ‘laying and waiting on you'. Each of us wades in the swamp of everyone else's actions and intentions. We'll forever be vulnerable to havoc. And no amount of insurance, risk management or technology will keep it from our door. You might not have sharks in your neighbourhood, but there'll always be a catastrophic diagnosis in the wings, or a financial crash, or just some moron running a red light.

*

My old man survived his career in havoc. He did his thirty-three years and got his long-service medal. He's retired now. He rode motorbikes until he was in his seventies. When I was in my twenties, he took me for a spin, though I needed some convincing. Afterwards he said I was a rotten pillion passenger, that it was like carting a hairy coffin.

And now I've been a writer longer than he was a copper. Both of us have tried to avoid trouble, and yet it's been our business. Without strife, the cop and the novelist have nothing to work with. Perhaps it's morbid to view your life through the prism of violent events, to feel yourself shaped by accidents. Safety is a great gift. Maybe it's disrespectful to feel the interruptions to it more vividly than the long and peaceful interludes in between. But to be afraid is to be awake. And to exist at all in this universe is to be caught up at the scene of an accident, perhaps the happiest accident of all. By now we know how that scene goes. We're just not sure how it ends.

The Monthly

Bibliomancer: Nick Cave, Writer

Gerard Elson

In 2003 the
Wall Street Journal
published a story about Chris Johnson, a Minnesotan schoolteacher with a roving appetite for culture and an efficacious memory. While reading the Englishlanguage translation of
Confessions of a Yakuza
(1991) – the Japanese physician Junichi Saga's document of his guileless bedside conversations with a dying gangland killer – Johnson felt the peculiar stirrings of deja vu. Several turns of phrase were familiar to him; some he could even cite verbatim before his eyes had scanned them on the page. He had never read them before – he had heard them, drawled. He knew them as lyrics. He had heard them sung by Bob Dylan. They were lyrics from the songwriter's album
“Love and Theft”
(2001), whose title's puckish aspect was suddenly thrown into relief.

Nick Cave – songwriter, composer, novelist, screenwriter – has never been oblique about his own tendency to crib, quote and rework his influences. By his own admission, not all of these borrowings are conscious. Early in the filmmakers' commentary track for the DVD release of
The Proposition
(2005) – the searing ‘Outback western' Cave scripted in a reported three-week sprint of inspiration for his friend and lasting collaborator, the Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat – Cave addresses a line of dialogue. ‘Australia. What fresh hell is this?' grouses Ray Winstone's gruff civiliser, the English expat Captain Morris Stanley, as he surveys the singeing redness out his window. ‘I totally blame the script editor for not getting that out – if we had one,' Cave deadpans. ‘When I wrote that, it felt familiar.'

The line ‘What fresh hell is this?' is how Dorothy Parker – poet, short-story writer, critic, withering wit – is said to have responded to the ringing of her doorbell.

While it has long been a cliché to call a popular songwriter ‘literary', Cave may be unique in how
aggressively
literary he can be. Dylan, David Bowie, Patti Smith, Kate Bush and John Darnielle are all songwriters whose lyrics are strewn with references to – and quotations from – literary sources both canonical and obscure. Yet their erudition rarely, if ever, comes off as combative. Cave's can. Like many of the young demagogues among the initial post-punk movement that had fertile nodes in Britain, the United States and Australia in the late 1970s, the young Cave waved his wit as both signal fire and piked head. An unspecified wrath worked in his early lyrics with a scathing humour to court the cool and comprehending, and disaffect most everyone else.

In ‘Wild World', a Birthday Party standard first released in 1983 and now found on the 1989 compilation
Mutiny/The Bad Seed
, we encounter the following lyric:

It is replicated here just as Cave sings it on the studio recording. The printed lyric omits that insistent final line that so hammers home its two-fingered precocity – a precocity owing to the recondite knowledge required to decrypt the verse.

In classical Greek drama, a
strophe
is the initial part of an ode that the chorus chants while traversing the stage. Metrically identical to the strophe, the
antistrophe
is chanted by the chorus when performing the movement in reverse, returning whence they came. Cave's lyric is therefore parodic, but esoterically so. It is this latter quality that makes it not a parry, but a flèche. It is the 25-year-old Cave – head aswirl with the sundry random data that is the autodidact's harvest – promenading his impressive intellect, stag-like, to issue an ultimatum to the listener: you either get the gag, or else you piss off and listen to Foreigner.

The lyric's meta-joke – substituting the implementation of a lyrical device with its own critical term; demanding, in effect, a niche sophistication of its audience – is by far a more aggressively alienating gambit than the sonic dissonance, four-letter words and sanguine subject matter that typified both the woozy-thorny post-punk of the Birthday Party and the feral early output of the band that emerged from its collapse: Cave's improbably robust abettors, the Bad Seeds. But in this, the young songwriter was perhaps too clever by half: the provocation would have been lost on anyone who lacked the specialist knowledge to distinguish it.

A liberal littering of ten-dollar words is often the only impediment a reader will need to meet before deeming a book too difficult, too wilfully opaque to persist with. It follows that any work that chooses to adopt a sprawling vocabulary as part of its aesthetic risks daunting or repulsing less persistent readers. In his lyrics and novels, Cave long ago established himself as an unrepentant word nerd. Who but an artist with Cave's long history of logophilia could conceivably sermonise amid the rock'n'roll maelstrom of ‘We Call Upon the Author' from 2008's
DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!!
– like a slam poet Jesus atop a mount of crumpled drafts – ‘Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can't fix!' without seeming insufferable? Were it not for the lyric's self-effacing yet earnest edge – one gets the sense that Cave himself clings to it like a mantra – it might have landed with a plangent thud.

One secret to Nick Cave's success: his willingness to risk failure, ridicule or censure in following his most preposterous-seeming instincts all the way down the uncertain road to fruition.

*

In 2007 the Victorian Arts Centre in Melbourne hosted
Nick Cave: The Exhibition
, a fascinating
Kunstkammer
mined from the Nick Cave Collection that laid the artist's imaginative life bare. In this eclectically decorated space, Cave's private collection of cat paintings by the English artist Louis Wain could be considered beside tiny framed cameos of Marilyn Monroe and Bela Lugosi, early Birthday Party gig posters, tacky religious knick-knacks, sketches, photographs and more. Of particular interest was Cave's dictionary of interesting words. Painstakingly scrawled in Cave's own hand, it is the battered testament of his lifelong love of language – The Book of Nick.

In his songs and novels, Cave often constructs formidable edifices of words, perhaps fearful of Evelyn Waugh's admonition that ‘one's vocabulary needs constant fertilising or it will die'. Language is the primary apparatus by which we apprehend the world; a richer vocabulary arguably enables a more nuanced interior life. For the psychologically fraught figures that people Cave's lyrics and books – and indeed, perhaps for Cave himself, considering his own well-documented struggles with manic depression and substance abuse – a virtuosic command of language may be the obdurate claw by which one retains their grip on reality, however feeble, in the face of immediate abasement, or the yawning indifference of the cosmos.

In a 2009 interview with
thelondonpaper
, Cave cited literary stylists Vladimir Nabokov and Martin Amis as crucial influences. ‘It's not particularly fashionable,' he said, ‘but I love that heady, slightly hallucinatory style of writing, where no one just gets up from the table.'

No one just gets up from the table in Cave's songs, much less his novels. His first,
And the Ass Saw the Angel
(1989), was written by its heroin-addicted author over three gruelling years in a West Berlin loft. It was first published when Cave was thirty-two years old. Being the life story of the vilified mute, Euchrid Eucrow, a young man of increasingly frayed lucidity who relays his hillbilly-inflected narration (‘Ah' substitutes for ‘I' etc.) while being consumed, boa-constrictor-slow, by a bog, it is set in the fictional southern American valley of Ukulore, a cloistered agrarian crucible of hateful sectarian fanatics. In evoking the early 1940s period of its setting, the petty, pervasive small-mindedness of the Ukulites, Euchrid's deranged subjectivity and the book's intermittent tenor of Old Testament intensity, Cave plumbs the darkest crannies of our language. There are an estimated 250,000 distinct words in English; across its 300-ish surprising and, yes, slightly hallucinatory pages,
And the Ass Saw the Angel
might contain about a fifth of them: words like ‘paludal', ‘embranglement', ‘erumpent' and ‘fremitus' appear on every page.

‘You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,' quips Humbert Humbert at the beginning of
Lolita
(1955). Cave's second foray into novel-writing,
The Death of Bunny Munro
(2009), proves the observation can extend to writers like Cave who have frequently essayed them, too.

Although still distinguished by a certain performative loquacity, the prose of
Bunny Munro
is as bath foam to its predecessor's rich molasses. Gone are the dense tracts brimming with artful yet archaic locution. By comparison,
Bunny Munro
is a romp. In it, Cave revels in language, rather than striving to wrestle it into submission. Nearing age fifty-two at the time of publication, he had relaxed into his vocabulary.

Like the emasculated males who leer and lust and whip themselves into states of psychosexual tumult in the songs that surrounded its release – namely, from Grinderman's
Grinderman
(2007) and
Grinderman 2
(2010) albums (sample song titles: ‘No Pussy Blues', ‘Worm Tamer') and the Bad Seeds'
DIG, LAZARUS, DIG!!! –
the travelling cosmetics salesman Bunny Munro is the perfect product of an image-saturated modern world that habitually presents women as products, playthings and prizes for men. He is, in short, a sex fiend – an avatar of the wretched sort of maleness which Valerie Solanas takes aim at in her misandric tract from 1967,
SCUM Manifesto
:

Inadequate, repulsive Bunny lapses into frequent reveries of Avril Lavigne's vagina and wanks into a ‘cum-encrusted sock he keeps under the car seat'. He letches onto bored, middle-aged MILFs, fucks friend and prostitute alike and, abhorrently, ogles his wife's breasts through the gossamer of her negligee when he finds her lifeless body dangling limply from the security grille in their bedroom. He is, by any standard, a beast. Only imminent death bestows Bunny the self-awareness to reflect, ‘I just found this world a hard place to be good in.'

As in
And the Ass Saw the Angel
, Cave's predilection for vivid description is in diabolical evidence throughout
The Death of Bunny Munro
. The book contains a sustained gag between author and reader wherein Bunny never simply ‘closes' or ‘shuts' his flip mobile phone. Rather, he ‘tongs' it, ‘clamshells' it, ‘castanet[s] it closed'.

A brief, early chapter finds Bunny cruising the Brighton seafront, eyeballing the ‘delirious burlesque of summertime'. In its single-minded resolve to test the limits of an enlightened readership's goodwill, all the while gussying up its rampant scopophilia in mellifluous wordplay, the passage finds Cave at his most hilariously puerile:

It continues:

One suspects Cave could have written a Homeric epic that simply detailed Bunny, the human hard-on, navigating the town in rut. This kind of descriptive depletion, where a miscellany of similar but intensely individuated subjects are enumerated, is something of a Cave hallmark. In a novel, this practice can seem self-consciously avant. It is a predilection Cave shares with Roberto Bolaño, one both men may have inherited from that greatest of literary list-makers, Jorge Luis Borges. In Cave's case, though, there is no metafictional monkey business at work, only the compulsive's desire for exhaustiveness and the logophile's love of
ludere
.

It is in this vein that
And the Ass Saw the Angel
gives us Euchrid's droning catalogue of celestial bodies:

Several of Cave's lyrics are built upon the affective power of accretion, too. After its ageing performer-narrator fortifies his ego by repeating the mantra ‘I must above all things love myself', ‘No Pussy Blues' from the
Grinderman
album launches into a riotous recount of the waning lothario's efforts to seduce an indifferent fan. ‘I played her guitar by the hour,' he laments. ‘I petted her revolting little Chihuahua. But still she just didn't want to.' The pile up of preposterous courtship rites deftly sketches a portrait of masculine entitlement, built absurdly upon that shakiest of foundations: the male ego.