Nick Cave was born near
Yarraoonga in North-Eastern Australia in 1957. His first
band, The Birthday party, built an international reputation.
He left Australia to live in London and subsequently Berlin
where he became a part of the burgeoning rock scene which
then included: Nina Hagen, Lene Lovich and Blixa Bargeld.
His current band is Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and their
new album, The Good Son, has just been released.
Cave recently turned his talents to writing, not lyrics or
poetry, but a full length novel, And the Ass Saw the
Angel A picaresque story set in a mythological valley
based on Cave's perception of an American South he has never
visited. Its hero is a hunchback mute with the most woeful
face in the world.
Lindzee Smith: And the Ass Saw the Angel-your first novel-was it as good for you to write as it was for me to read?Nick Cave: It was a very solitary project. It was quite exciting to do that.
LS:It never lets up. You think it must relent, particularly the language, but it just doesn't stop. It's such an intense experience. How did you write it?
NC: I was primarily concerned with the language. I felt I had a decent story. I wanted the book to have a voice that was recognizable (as mine) in the same way as Nobokov has his. I wanted the style to be quite unique.
LS: Which it is.
NC: There are a number of voices in the book: first person narrative by Euchrid, third person authorial voice, quotations from the Bible, either real or ersatz, constant changes in tone or approach to language, depending on who is talking. When I first started the book, there were certain elements I wasn't interested in writing about. When you read a novel, you have to wade through the setting up of the scene before the story starts. So I wrote a long prologue. It has no action. It includes documentary, poetry, maps and charts. Once this is done, the actual story begins. The voice then changes between the narrator's truth and Euchrid's delusionary truth. The final book is Euchrid's book which runs to the climax.
LS: During Book II there are several "Lamentations" - yet another form.
NC: It's basically Euchrid in woe with the world.
LS: After reading the book, I still didn't have a good physical picture of Euchrid. I know he's mute. I know he's malformed in some way. What's he look like?
NC: He's based on the singer of The Reels. Do you know Dave Mason? He's slightly hunchbacked, a queer face, a lot of teeth, big smile, long greasy hair. Euchrid has the saddest face in the world - which Dave has.
LS: Is the book an allegory?
NC: No!
LS: We shouldn't be searching for meanings beneath...
NC: There are certain parallels to different things, which are either evident or not. The book, to me, is quite mysterious. A lot of things are hinted at that aren't disclosed in detail. I'd like the book to remain that way.
LS: I constantly thought of parallels_ Spencer, Swift, Tristram Shandy, Fielding. Painters, too. How does Hieronymous Bosch strike you as a parallel? The Garden of Earthly delights?
NC: These kinds of parallels are all relevant, but Bosch certainly wasn't in my mind at the time.
LS: I'm pursuing this to give the readers some idea of the texture of the book. The visual texture is so rich, so dense, so resonant of Bosch - vermin, snakes, crows, rats...
NC: Rather than Bosch, I'd prefer to say that if there were certain images that I used when I was writing the book, they would be Julia Magaret Cameron's photographs - I put one on the cover of the book.
LS: Tell me about her.
NC: An English photographer around 1880. One of the first photographers to do Biblical portraits, photographs of people in Biblical costumes with props. Bronwyn Adams, from the band Crime and the City Solution, gave me a copy when I was beginning the book and it had a big effect on me. I had a lot of her photos around me. I was looking a lot at pornographic photos, too. I'm trying to describe what was around me in my room. There weren't any Bosch paintings up there.
LS: We'll throw out Bosch then, eh?
NC: I'm glad these images came up in peoples minds. They are all relevant, if not to me.
LS: On theme seems to be the beauty of things perceived as ugly.
NC: The things that are ugly are supposed to be ugly. I'd hate to think that the book was only about ugly things. It's about innocence as well - the beauty in that. There's a cartoon image to many of the characters - Beth, who I see as the idealized young girl, perfect and innocent, seen through the obsessive eyes of Euchrid. I hope they've written without ugliness.
LS: You talk about the trilogy: the harlot, the child saint, and the custodian angel.
NC: Basically, Beth is the collective sin of the valley, the spawn of the harlot, and all the men who've been with her.
LS: The harlot has to be purged for the rain to stop?
NC: That was Poe's idea.
LS: But the rain does stop?
NC: A year later. When Beth arrives...
LS: Do you think the women gets a raw deal in your book?
NC: I think everyone gets a raw deal.
LS: The portrait of Euchrid's mother is so abrasive.
NC: She's quite a real character for me, even thogh she's very extreme in what she does. She's based on very real characters I used to know. Certain characters in the book are based on different characters throughout my life. Some, from my school days, are petty revenges that I'd like to get off my chest. I did those quite consciously, and took a lot of delight in doing them.
LS: Like Alfred Jarry did with Ubi Roi.
NC: There are scenes that aren't in the book where characters die in different ways. In the first draft, which was much longer, everyone basically died. This didn't make for a very good story.
LS: I'd like to ask you about the deep South because the main voice has a definite Southern drawl.
NC: These are romantic notions I've had as somebody who's never been to the deep South. I don't see my songs as being Southern. It would be wrong ad a bit stupid to think that they were. It's just a mythological territory I've devised as a stage where a lot of my songs and this book operate. There's Australia in there. It's a composite world.
LS: The religious group in the book, the Ukulites, reminds me of the Amish of Pennsylvania.
NC: The Ukulites are based on a real life sect called the Morrisites. When the Mormons came to America, there was a guy, Joseph Morris, who had many revelations and went to the Mormon leaders and disclosed these things. They excommunicated him. He took a band of his followers to a place called Weeber Creek and set up a sect. He became more and more obsessive, walking around in a robe with a gold sceptre and a crown on his head. Eventually, a sniper shot and killed him. The Morrisites took this as a further justification of their faith. It's not known if this was done by insiders or vigilantes who were killing Mormons all over the place.
LS: The Australian/American fusion is intriguing. You're convinced you are in America, then words like joker, blood oath, and the like leap out at you from the page.
NC: Maybe to an Australian, they do. The book is not meant to be an authentic Southern novel. I wanted it to be ambiguous.
LS: Can we talk a bit about the Bible?
NC: Well, I read the Bible when I wrote this book.
LS: "A chilly thing, the Bible, sometimes" is a quote from Euchrid. What's your take on it?
NC: For me that's a fairly accurate summation. When I began writing, the Old Testament fascinated me. I was pushed over into the New Testament, which I instinctively ignored, until I began reading it and found it incredible. The basic figure of Christ I find to be quite haunting and some of the scenes in the New Testament are the most evocative and haunting I've ever read. There's a scene which I find so beautifully written and I can't do justice to describe it...a scene of Christ walking through a crowd, and a young girl, who has had an issue of blood for thirteen years, walks through the throng and takes hold of the end of Christ's robe. He stops the crowd and says, "Why did you touch my robe?" She shrinks back, "Itouched it because I've had this issue of blood". And Christ heals her. I found this to be very powerful. These stories run throughout the New Testament and have a very different flavour from the Old Testament. There are some incredibly subtle stories there which I think are brilliant.
LS: Are you talking about the Bible as poetic fiction?
NC: That's the way I approached it, originally. You can't look at the Old Testament in any other way. You can't believe it as gospel truth. But the New Testament came to affect me. In some cases, quite worringly so. I don't feel the same way now, but when i was writing the book it had a strong influence.
LS: I felt some kind of ecstasy was driving the book along.
NC: I wrote in a very disciplined manner, really considered. I wrote with a pen first and organised each sentence to the very best I could, and then typed it out and worked on the next sentence. In the actual realisation of the story, in terms of the character, I found myself more and more obsessed with Euchrid. More and more becoming his character. There was a definite change in the way I related to other people. The book, which I had to do in four-month chunks, and then go off with the band, the more I became involved and obsessed and like him in my habits: more and more reclusive. It became like "method writing."
LS: You become the character and the character becomes you.
NC: I had this situation in Berlin when I wrote this book. I had this room which was so pungent with obsessiveness toward the book. In ways which you can understand. It was very insular. I can't talk about this too much in that it opens up lots of things I don't really want to talk about. It was a very obsessive period for me.
LS: I'm really impressed by the use of language. The book reads like a long lyric sheet from one of your albums. The son "Mercy Seat" - the driving insistence, it's relentlessness - driving, driving, driving. The book has a similar quality. Can you see it as a long song? You constantly work with onomatopoeia, alliteration - other poetic devices.
NC: I can't help but do that. I've been writing songs for a long time and I definitely have that feel with words. I understand that that might be difficult to tolerate over a long period of time. I enjoy books that are written in a matter of fact, unpretentious style. At the same time, I wanted to write a book with my own voice. The whole process of writing a song is very different, very different.
LS: About the language. Joyce in Finnegan's Wake was perhaps the master of creating words which were not real but had their own reality. That's a contradiction, but you know what I mean. I found myself running to the dictionary early on in your book to check, then I got tired of it. It was not necessary.
NC: I wanted to create an alien language. That was one of the reasons I made Euchrid a mute. He didn't use language to communicate. Language was an abstract to him. Although he would not know these words, I wanted his way of speaking to be difficult for the reader to understand. There are some words that aren't "true" words. There's a lot of obscure arcane language too. Hopefully, I used these words sparingly enough that they don't interfere with the flow of the story.
LS: You planning another book?
NC: I hope so, yes.
LS: So writing goes on as usual.
Lindzee Smith