Nick Cave and Nabokov - You can always trust a murderer for a fancy prose style

I came to love Nick Cave embarrassingly late. Sometime in the very early 90s a music journalist, whose name now thankfully escapes me, described him as a fourth rate Leonard Cohen.  And as free thinking was something that this poor autodidact felt that he couldn't afford, I took that assessment as gospel, not bothering to give Cave any kind of fair hearing.  

It was a lyric from 'The Mercy Seat' that allowed me to wisen up.  That song, the story of a man awaiting imminent execution in the electric chair, crackles with violence, madness and Old Testament wrath.  There was nothing fourth rate about it.  It grabbed you by the intestines, twisted, and did not let go.  Cave, playing the part of the condemned, spat out the words as if he himself was the 'dead man walking'.   

And the mercy seat is waiting

And I think my head is burning

And in a way I'm yearning

To be done with all this measuring of truth

An eye for an eye

And a tooth for a tooth

And anyway I told the truth

And I'm not afraid to die.

That Johnny Cash, a man who knew prison first-hand, chose to cover the song was vindication enough for me. Convinced, I began to devour Cave's back catalogue.  There are few finer records than The Boatman's Call: at times weary and cynical, at others impossibly romantic, and finally descending into self-loathing and repulsive misogyny, it is an incredible hymn to a doomed love affair.  Yet despite my conversion I still remained sceptical about the other mediums that Cave worked in.  What was it that caused me to forgo a trip to the cinema to see his documentary 20,000 Days on Earth last year?  I had opened some of his novels on occasion, finding the prose overwrought and dense. A whiff of pretentiousness perhaps? Maybe it was that. Still, last week, there it was on Film4, starting in ten minutes. 'Why not!' I thought.   

Yes, that is Kylie in the back seat. Ray Winstone pops up in the passenger seat.

For a rock-documentary - although that label is clumsy, as it is much more ambitious than that - it was revealing, particularly in its insights into Cave and the creative process.  One scene seemed to hold the key to much of what attracts me to his music.  Cave, whilst talking to a psychoanalyst tells of an incident when he was about nine years old where his father, sensing a nascent creativity and love of words in his son, read aloud the glorious opening passage to Nabokov's Lolita. Any excuse, of course, to quote it in full:

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

Beyond the irony of an image of a young Australian boy in short trousers, listening rapt to a father quoting the greatest opening to a novel ever, I love this anecdote. Was it here that those seeds of artistic counterpoint were planted (I'm avoiding the obvious with great difficulty)? To take the most abominable crimes, couple them with the most astonishing language, and through that alchemy forge something jaw-droppingly beautiful? It's telling that Nick's father chose not to introduce his siblings to Nabokov. It wasn't just a parent’s desire to impress his own cultural persuasions onto his son; rather a father sensing that here was something special, and perhaps sinister, to nurture: a talent for character, language and unfettered imagination.  The music would come later. But first, the father's tender, but also troubling gesture.     

Cave's psychotic death row narrator, seeing Jesus's face in his soup, is just one character in a gallery of extreme outsiders. Listen to his Murder Ballads, an whole album of reimagined fiends; wince with delight at the Gothic venom that oozes out of every bar of 'Red Right Hand'; and my favourite - any expression of goodness brutally undercut and rendered impotent in the macabre lines "I swear I made every effort to be good to her / I swear I made every effort not to abuse her" - in 'Do You Love Me?' But always, like Humbert Humbert and his 'fancy prose style', these villains go about their cruel business with the souls of poets. You condemn, feel queasy and then recoil. But you fire up the track again, or take the book lovingly down from the shelf and re-read (as Nabokov declares 'one cannot read a book: one can only reread it').        

This is not to say, that without Cave's initiation into great prose and wretched pederasts, that there might have been no dark baroque musical masterpieces to follow, but rather, that if we delve a little, we can find fascinating precursors. Lolita is clearly a huge one for Cave. It remains his favourite book, and I'm now looking forward to another rereading of it, this time keeping half an eye (and a full ear) out for any of Nabokov's 'unfettered howls' that have escaped into the songs.  

I love how Auden's poems are providing a resting place for a clock

As for Cave's ventures into other artistic areas? Well, the documentary - again, beware of that constrictive pigeon-hole - was superb. It did help that it was accompanied by Nick Cave's latest album Push The Sky Away, a deceptively laid back and underrated joy; and Brighton, Nick's adopted home-town, looked glorious in all its Greenesque seediness. Cave's novels? Not yet. I've still - embarrassingly - not got around to reading Nabokov's Ada. Let alone rereading it. That must come first.