The Best Australian Essays 2015

by Geordie Williamson

  ‘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:

  Despising his highly inadequate self … desperate to attach himself to any female in dim hopes of completing himself, in the mystical belief that by touching gold he’ll turn to gold, the male craves the continuous companionship of women. The company of the lowest female is preferable to his own or that of other men, who serve only to remind him of his repulsiveness.

  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:

  Groups of scissor-legged school-things with their pierced midriffs, logoed jogging girls, happy, rumpy dog-dog walkers, couples actually copulating on the summer lawns, beached pussy prostrate beneath the erotically shaped cumulus, loads of fucking girls who were up for it – big ones, little ones, black ones, white ones, young ones, old ones, give-me-a-minute-and-I’ll-find-your-beauty-spot ones, yummy single mothers, the bright joyful breasts of waxed bikini babes …

  It continues:

  Bunny hits the horn at a couple of surprisingly hot dykettes, who flip him the finger, and Bunny laughs and imagines them dildoed up and going for it; then sees a knock-kneed girl in pigtails licking a red-and-blue striped stick of Brighton Rock; a girl wearing something unidentifiable that makes her appear as though she has stepped into the skin of a rainbow trout …

  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:

  … wild meteors, blood-blown moons, suns and molten planets, butchered asteroids, berserk comets, luminary clusters, gaudy wreaths of stellar motion, green nebulae, gaseous nebulae, white and spiral nebulae, hairy stars and fireballs, shimmering sun-spots and solar flares, blinding flaculae, floccule, and day-stars …

  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.

  Elsewhere, the enigmatic narrator of ‘Hiding All Away’, from the Bad Seeds’ astonishing 2005 double album, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, recapitulates the trials of his questing lover, who searches the sea, a museum, a cathedral and the hall of fame for her man. Along the way her search is frustrated by a host of predatory authority figures, some of them violent, all of them male: a sadistic high court judge, a group of leering policemen who ‘rub jelly on their sticks’, a celebrity chef, her own doctor. Assault stacks upon tribulation for the woman to such an effect that when the lyric’s climactic foretelling of a war ‘coming from above’ arrives, one has the sense that this world may deserve its bleak fate.

  The same album is home to Cave’s most genius ‘list song’: the ecstatic plea for divine inspiration, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’. Its writer-narrator, words ‘vibrating in [his] head’, lies in bed, chastising himself for his inability to write. He knows full well how many great works have been authored under duress:

  John Wilmot penned his poetry riddled with a pox

  Nabokov wrote on index cards at a lectern in his socks

  St John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box

  And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote ‘Chinese Rocks’

  Again, the effect here is cumulative: the narrator’s inadequacy becomes our own as the examples mount. Pulverised not only by a consciousness of the greats, but also the unstimulating nature of his own circumstances, he has become depressed. Where is my life-threatening illness? he seems to entreat. Where is my reason to write? But then there’s Nabokov, comfortably domesticated, working away on Pale Fire. He is the narrator’s own Remiel, angel of hope: proof defiant that even when the muse is MIA, hard work can still beget good work. Soon the narrator becomes galvanised by the can-do ethos of punk: ‘So if you got a trumpet, get on your feet, brother, and blow it.’ By the song’s end, he has made peace with relative mediocrity:

  I look at you and you look at me and deep in our hearts we know it

  That you weren’t much of a muse, but then I weren’t much of a poet

  What is important, it seems, is making the effort – of knowing you have put in the hours.

  Nick Cave: The Exhibition revealed Cave as an obsessive chronicler. Amid the mélange of 25-year-old shopping lists, countless scrapbooks and discarded lyric sheets, there was also Cave’s ‘Weather Diaries’, diligently kept since the turn of the millennium.

  Cave’s zeal for itemising, for ingeniously articulated variation, can breed work that at times feels inspired by some kind of Oulipo-like obstruction. It is in ‘Babe, I’m on Fire’, the ultimate song on the Bad Seeds’ 2003 album, Nocturama, that this penchant of Cave’s finds its most extreme expression. In thirty-eight verses (not inc
luding choruses) and across nearly fifteen minutes, Cave seems to respond to the challenge: exhaust cliché, originally.

  A sample verse:

  The Chinese contortionist says it

  The backyard abortionist says it

  The poor Pakistani

  With his lamb Bhirriani says

  Babe, I’m on fire

  We also meet an ‘unlucky amputee’, a ‘fucked-up Rastafarian’, a ‘menstruating Jewess’, a ‘Jungian analyst’, ‘Picasso with his Guernica’, a ‘Christian apologist’, a ‘hymen-busting Zulu’, ‘García Lorca’, ‘the old rock’n’roller with his two-seated stroller’, ‘the man from the Daily Mail with his dead refugee’ and a ‘doomed homosexual’ with a ‘persistent cough’ – among many, many others.

  The song is significant not only for its length. (It is the longest song in the Cave canon, outlasting even the brutal narrative of ‘O’Malley’s Bar’ from the Bad Seeds’ 1996 album, Murder Ballads.) In its delirious cherry-picking of racial and cultural stereotypes, prominent historical figures and characters plucked right out of the headlines, the song ushered in a new phase in Cave’s writing: after years of stubbornly resisting the sweeping current of modern life, Nick Cave was at last implanted in the Information Age.

  *

  ‘My God is the God of Walkers,’ writes Bruce Chatwin in In Patagonia (1977). ‘If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.’ For a time, the characters of Nick Cave’s lyrics walked, hard. The dark Romantic vignette ‘Loom of the Land’, from Henry’s Dream (1992), tells the burgeoning courtship of a young man – ‘a boy of no means’ – and his delicate lover as they walk ‘hand upon hand’ in bitter cold. There is an erotic union, and a whispered promise. The song’s parting image is dreamily metaphysical: suddenly, it is winter no more and the young sweethearts drift in mutual solitude – perhaps forevermore – ‘across the endless sands’.

  While that song’s young lovers may have no need of god – they have found all the meaning they need in each other, at least for now – the same cannot be said of most of Cave’s peripatetic characters. The gigolo-boy of ‘Do You Love Me? (Part 2)’ from the Bad Seeds’ 1994 album, Let Love In, wanders desultorily as his few coins ‘jingle-jangle’ in his pocket. He is on the beat again, but the life has taken its toll: the city is ‘an ogre squatting by the river’ that ‘gives life, but it takes it away, my youth’. Prematurely jaded, he sees in everything the Grand Guignol: the streets crack and swallow him, depositing him in a smoky cinema with walls and ceiling ‘painted in blood’ and upon the screen a death plays out. He may not find god, nor outpace his need to, but he does find the john he needs in order to add to the coins in his pocket.

  Similarly hellish imagery abounds in one of Cave’s great walking songs: ‘Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry’ from Henry’s Dream. This song’s narrator recalls navigating a monsoonal apocalypse in process, tortured by the memory of a deceitful lover. He abandons sensibility in a bordello ‘where wet-lipped women with greasy fists / crawled the ceilings and the walls’. Then things turn positively Boschian as Cave’s word rush hits fever pitch:

  Favelas exploding on inflammable spillways

  Lynch-mobs, death squads, babies being born without brains

  The mad heat and the relentless rains

  And if you stick your arm into that hole

  It comes out sheared off to the bone

  A recurrent trait of these songs of restless souls on the move is collapse: environmental, spiritual, social, psychological. Hoping to elude private entropy, their characters put foot to terra firma, only to find their distressed psyches have infected the exterior world – or perhaps it is the other way around. ‘Darker With the Day’ – one of Cave’s most unsung minor masterpieces – is also concerned with the breakdown of meaning and order, yet occupies a less hysterical register – mania has been traded for a sinking hopelessness. The closing song of 2001’s No More Shall We Part finds Cave weirding his own experiences of emerging from rehab, looking for ‘an end to this, for some kind of closure’. The narrator visits a church (the experience is unnourishing), then continues on his way, dismayed by the sights that surround him:

  Amateurs, dilettantes, hacks, cowboys, clones

  The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts

  With their building blocks and their tiny plastic phones

  Counting on their fingers, with crumbs down their fronts

  He is engulfed by a cultural decay that is dispiritingly prosaic. Even cataclysm is decidedly listless when it comes:

  Great cracks appear in the pavement, the earth yawns

  Bored and disgusted, to do us down

  While driving with his sons by Hove’s shoreline in late 2010, Nick Cave lost control of his car and collided with a speed camera. All three were unharmed. In ‘Mermaids’, a voyeuristic reverie from the Bad Seeds’ 2013 release, Push the Sky Away, Cave drolly draws upon the experience to stress his wistful narrator’s shortcomings:

  I do driver alertness course

  I do husband alertness course

  I do mermaid alertness course

  While the notion of ‘husband alertness course’ is a great, self-deprecatory gag, there is a very real failure here: solipsism. But beneath the defeatism, there is the wish to improve – to become more outwardly attuned.

  *

  In recent years, the walking song has been superseded by a newer vehicle for Cave’s social observations: the ‘driving song’. Given Cave’s post-millennial interest in the data blitzkrieg that defines the current epoch, an increase in spectatorial velocity makes sense. The cocoon of the car – where the world wheels by, a phantasmagoria out the window – evokes the condition of the net surfer, too: historically significant events and profound encounters blur remotely with a vast corpus of inanities and trivialities to create a juggernaut of stimuli, wherefrom no fast meaning may be mined. In ‘Abattoir Blues’, Cave captures the plight of the modern individual enmeshed between so much warring data in a single lethal couplet:

  I went to bed last night and my moral code got jammed

  I woke up this morning with a Frappuccino in my hand

  Cruising in his car with his lover, the song’s melancholic narrator is ‘drifting down into the abattoir’. Cave’s lyrics abound with references to social degeneration. Some of this is incremental and seems almost ordained:

  Slide on over here, let me give you a squeeze

  To avert this unholy evolutionary trajectory

  And:

  Everything’s dissolving, babe, according to plan

  Other lyrics evoke sudden catastrophe:

  My heart it tumbled like the stock exchange

  As in Cave’s walking songs, an ambiguous relationship is established between the self and the world: which inflects which?

  Mass extinction, darling, hypocrisy

  These things are not good for me

  The song’s final verse finds its rueful narrator lamenting his own failures as a partner and a man:

  I wanted to be your Superman but I turned out such a jerk

  Push the Sky Away gave us what is arguably Cave’s ‘Desolation Row’, the febrile odyssey that is ‘Higgs Boson Blues’. Over a long, hot night, its narrator sets out in his car for Geneva, Illinois. He seems to have conflated the city with its namesake in Switzerland. The latter is home to the Large Hadron Collider, designed to test the existence of the Higgs boson – the socalled ‘god particle’ that was the long-conjectured lynchpin in physicists’ explanation of the universe. Along the way, he sees blues musician Robert Johnson at the crossroads with the Devil. Blues apocrypha tells that Johnson bartered with Lucifer for his talent, parting in the bargain with his soul. Still, from his cynical modern-day vantage, the narrator is not sure who gets the better deal:

  Robert Johnson and the Devil, man

  Don’t know who’s gonna rip off who

  He drives on. There is a detour to Memphis’s Lorraine Motel where time stands still; Mar
tin Luther King Jr was assassinated here in 1968. The narrator seems to hear the great man’s ghost speaking down the decades: ‘Hear a man preaching in a language that’s completely new’. A gunshot resounds, and the delirium escalates; the narrator is back on the road, tired witness to a starburst of jumbled modernity: cultural imperialism, AIDS, Muslim–Jewish antipathy and Miley Cyrus are all cited. The song’s ragbag of references – obliqued by Cave’s wordplay – and its narrator’s book-ending claims of insensibility (‘Can’t remember anything at all’) imbue it with an oracular dimension, at once summative and prophetic.

  On this latter quality the song has already made good – twice. In light of the controversy Cyrus incited with her twerking performance at 2013’s MTV Video Music Awards, the lyric ‘Hannah Montana does the African savannah’ now seems visionary. But perhaps more uncannily, Cave has told in interviews how an excited assistant raced into the studio after the band had laid down the song. ‘That thing you’ve been singing about, the Higgs boson?’ they said. ‘It’s just been announced: they’ve found it!’