THE AGE – May 27 2002
Ginny Dougary

Greengage Harris tweed jacket. Matching-coloured eyes which glisten with merriment as though he is enjoying an ongoing private joke. An imposing nose, flared nostrils over unsensual lips which become coated in white at the corners when he has been talking for too long. Pleasant old-timer’s voice, punctuated by lilting rises; the mellowness of the delivery slightly at odds with the sharpness of his mind. Long, tapered fingers. Not a nail-biter. Clicks them occasionally when attempting to summon a recalcitrant word. Steady hand as he fills our glasses with water. For someone who has suffered from nervy conditions since boyhood – psoriasis, and a stammer that returns at times of crisis – he is strikingly still and self-contained. Hard to prick the mask of inscrutable affability. A hearty laugh which belongs to a larger, thigh-slapping man. Trousers? Shirt? Shoes? Blank.

John Updike, once described as compulsively observant, as though there were something faintly unhealthy about the novelist’s greed for detail, reckons that we all have within us the capacity to make connecting notes between the outward minutiae of a person and what those apparently trivial things might signify about the character. Everyone operates by this shorthand but it is the writer’s job to amplify and orchestrate that process of decoding in order to bring his creations to life in the reader’s mind. Thus Updike, whose microscopic intensity is so extreme it can sometimes seem almost hallucinogenic, will describe at great length the way a woman peels and eats a piece of fruit or the precise way someone performs the tricky task of arranging peas on a fork; transforming the ordinary, everyday act into a sort of symphonic ritual entirely specific to this or that character.

“When you write, I think you draw upon a lot of things you didn’t know you knew,” he says. “We all have an immense reservoir of observation and experience which you try to bring into play when you write. I may be unusual in that I sometimes try to describe the small things, but you hope that even the little detail reveals something about the character and the kind of struggle that’s going on here. There’s the hope that you will take the hitherto unobserved detail and lift it into significance. Lift it into the light.”

Updike has lived in Massachusetts for so long – he and his second wife, Martha, a retired psychiatric social worker, have spent most of the 20-odd years of their marriage in the same gracious white house, overlooking the ocean, not far from Boston – that he could easily pass for a native of the state. He certainly has that New England tilt towards self-deprecation and a generosity of spirit unmarred by gushiness which is so appealing to Old Englanders, but clearly not so agreeable to some of his fellow Americans. “I think his magnanimity is specious,” wrote John Cheever in a letter published posthumously, adding for good measure that “his work seems motivated by covetousness, exhibitionism and a stony heart”. Pretty wounding, particularly since Updike looked upon the older writer as a mentor as well as a friend.

So, in his modest way, Updike draws my attention to his deficiencies as an observer. He says that he’s hopeless, for instance, on clothes – always having to ask his wife what people were wearing, not even able to remember the colour of a woman’s dress. He believes that women are always much better than men at this sort of thing, although some men get it right – “Philip Roth is quite good about clothes, I think, and clothes certainly should be observed. I tend to let the world wash over me, you know, and hope that something has stuck. Like when you go to the beach and find all the sand in your shoe … I’m not very conscious about it.”

I point out that he is, perhaps, a little over-fond of the peasant blouse. Before we met, I’d read the four Rabbit books – with that mounting sense of excitement that I was in the pages of a colossal work, a modern American classic (how could I have not read it before?) – and their novella postscript, Rabbit Remembered, at the end of a new collection of stories, Licks of Love. And my only quibble is that every 10 years – the gap between each Rabbit book – at least one woman gets to wear a peasant blouse, as does one of the female characters in Licks of Love. Now perhaps the peasant blouse is in its own way a timeless classic, never out of fashion (it’s certainly in again now), but… “All right, no more peasant blouses,” Updike says amicably. “Maybe my first wife wore them a lot. I don’t think my second wife does, but I’ll have to ask her to make sure.”

The first book of his I read was the notorious Couples, Updike’s graphic exploration of middle-class adultery in New England suburbia. I got hold of a copy shortly after it was published in 1968, when I was a precocious 12-year-old. “That’s about right on your maturation curve,” Updike grins. At this distance, there’s very little that lingers from what is still probably one of the writer’s most famous novels, along with The Witches of Eastwick, which has been made into a film and a musical … only the vaguest, impressionistic memory of tennis (or possibly golf?) clubs and cocktails and American cars, dinner parties simmering with subterranean tension and covert, joyless sex in what seemed to a prepubescent reader to be rather baffling positions.

Couples was described as a kind of underhand propaganda for oral sex – several publishers declined to touch it – and Updike as its presumed advocate was expected to respond to a battery of embarrassing questions. “You can’t deny that the book is somewhat about oral sex,” he says. “It’s about why some couples link up better than others and it often is perhaps a matter of sexual positions, tastes or whatever. It hardly bears talking about, but it did bear writing about, I thought.”

He had some pretty strong attitudes about women and sex at the time, although his comments may have sounded less shocking then than they do now. He appeared to believe, for instance, that what many women really wanted was to be raped “…and civilised man has lost the ability. Perhaps what goes wrong with some marriages is that you can’t rape your own wife.” When I read this out, there is a little pause and then: “Clearly I was in a different psychological place than now, I guess.”

I wonder whether his views have shifted dramatically in the intervening three decades, thinking that, if so, this must feel like being mugged by your old quote. “I’d be too savvy and too politically correct to say that now, but I do think there’s something in it. I’m interested in female sexuality and what women say about it because – as Freud has been chastised for saying – it really is a mystery that somehow remains a mystery amidst all our shamelessness,” he replies evenly.

“What do women want? They write and read romantic novels in which they are, in effect, raped … yes, carried off and told what to do, as in that French thing L’histoire d’O. There is a masochistic or submissive streak in females. And even a man feels the voluptuous pleasure of having things taken out of your control. Humans beings kind of like that.”

There is a sense in his fiction of Updike pushing himself to a point beyond his own embarrassment. Almost no bodily act is too private to remain unexamined. Both Harry (Rabbit) and Janice Angstrom, the central couple of the quartet, furtively masturbate while the other is asleep. Harry washes his arsehole before going to bed with someone else’s wife who then invites him to bugger her; an initiation which takes on a heightened, almost metaphysical quality not unlike one of D.H. Lawrence’s darkly rhapsodic moments. And yet, unlike Lawrence, there is none of that primal struggle for ascendancy between men and women at the point of meeting: sex, certainly for Rabbit, seems more like a short cut to oblivion than a way of illuminating intimacy. This may partly account for why some women readers dislike Updike’s fiction, although, as Germaine Greer told me in defence of Dennis Potter’s later work – women too often make the mistake of wanting men to write about things the way they’d like them to be, rather than how they are.

For all the boldness and dash of Updike’s work and, indeed, on occasion, his life – as a young man it was brave of him to leave the staff of The New Yorker, where he’d always dreamed of working, to strike out on his own as a writer in the country, with a young wife in tow – there is something distinctly safe and old-fashioned about him in person. He doesn’t have that edge of danger or the bristling energy of older American writers of his stature, say, Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer or even Arthur Miller. He is a Democrat, partly, one suspects, because that’s the way his family has always voted. Divorce for him was a sort of troubled adventure (he once referred to the “racy glamour” of second marriages), since it meant breaking away from the Updike tradition of staying together “no matter how much you fought or were miserable”. His fondness for golf and the church, his loyalty to presidents and those who serve the community, his dismay at the Stars and Stripes-burning protests of the late 1960s which prompted him to flee to London, his belief in hard work and his iron-clad sense of duty to the vocation of writing … these are the strands which appear to be uppermost in his make-up.

The emphasis on sex in his fiction – and Updike does concede that he writes about it possibly to an abnormal degree – may be his only outlet for misbehaviour. When he describes himself as “a very law-abiding, disciplined, docile type”, I ask him whether his years as an enthusiastic adulterer were his one form of rebellion. “Well, writing about it enthusiastically may be the rebellion,” he counters. I had assumed that Updike had some personal knowledge of what he was writing about. “There must be some experience there,” he says, “but probably less than you think. I’m really a sort of sexual innocent, otherwise it wouldn’t interest me, I suppose.”

Isn’t that a bit of a cop-out? “No, I’ve been thinking about it since I’m about to be 70 [his birthday was in March] and I think that’s a very good description,” he says. “I was an only child, which gives you one degree of innocence in that you don’t have the rough and tumble and get to see your sister undressed or any of those little moments that a large family can bring. Raised in a sort of straight, middle-American kind of environment by my parents – although they were, in a way, liberals – but anyway, I certainly think I came to sex later and less ably than many of my contemporaries and most people my age of later generations. So I’ve written about sex because it’s a sort of astonishment to me. Not because I’m an expert, but because I’m still astonished. Astonished that we do this,” his voice lifts with wonderment, “and that people will risk their livelihoods and their marriages. Nothing gets higher priority.”

Updike certainly knows what he’s talking about here since his first marriage eventually collapsed under the libidinous strain of the swinging ’60s and ’70s. Several of the stories in Licks of Love, the new collection, have a strongly autobiographical flavour … the grim challenge of how to exterminate the legions of wild cats on his late mother’s land, lovingly fed by her towards the end of her life; the childhood scene of hearing his mother berate his financially strapped schoolteacher father for borrowing money from a school basketball fund; a two-page tribute to a youngest son, “Oliver”, who suffered most from his parents’ divorce; a homosexual vagrant’s obscene overture and its effect on our protagonist. All these stories, Updike acknowledges, have been carved out of his own life.

Natural Colour – a reference to whether or not the husband’s lover’s red hair is dyed – has a number of devastating lines about the conflicting toll of infidelity … “His own [marriage] was enhanced by his betrayal, his wife and children rendered precious in their vulnerability. Returning to them, damp and panting from his sins, he nearly wept at their sweet ignorance.” In the story, the husband chooses to stay with his wife despite being madly in love with the other woman. “It happens in my fiction, yeah, more than once,” Updike says. So did this ever happen to him? “Yes, I think you could say that,” he says. Does he have permanent regrets about those sorts of decisions? “No, I don’t. Maybe I’m rather deficient in regrets in my life,” he replies. “I’d probably be a better person if I regretted more. But at the time you do what you can and you try to be a good citizen and a decent family member, but I’ve always seen my duty as ultimately to my writing and so I’ve tried to take care of the writer first, I guess.”

There is something about this last statement that is, if not chilly, then certainly somewhat daunting in the absolute, unwavering sense that Updike has of what must take precedence in his life. With more than 50 books under his belt – including poetry, essays, criticism, a memoir, a play and children’s fiction – as well as the stories and pieces he still writes regularly for The New Yorker, he certainly cannot have any regrets about squandering his talent. What I don’t really believe is that the writer is as dispassionate about the more personal aspects of his life as he chooses to make himself out to be.

I had brought up the John Cheever stinger fairly early in the interview, and Updike had indeed been most (unspeciously, it seemed to me) magnanimous in his response. He said he was stunned and shocked when he first read it, but that “there may be something in it. Cheever was a very shrewd guy.” Updike went on to say that, no, he wouldn’t have dreamt of rebuking the man if he had still been alive – “chastisement is no way to treat an older writer” – and then spoke fondly about their trip to Russia at the height of the Cold War – after which Cheever penned his damning comments – and how much he was charmed by him: “John was so funny, so irreverent, so unintimidated by this, what I thought, fairly intimidating surround of totalitarianism … but not John.” I could not help contrasting the mildness of his response with Paul Theroux’s vengeful book when he was snubbed by his erstwhile mentor and friend, V.S. Naipaul.

The comment which seemed to make the strongest impression was the one about his “stony heart”, which is interesting since it is surely about Updike’s defect as a human being rather than as a writer. He says another writer, the late Alfred Kazin, wrote about Updike’s “keen-eyed child’s view of the world, without that element of empathy into adult doings” – which is certainly a less harsh way than Cheever’s of putting it.

Throughout the interview, he circles back again and again to the nature of his heart. He says that he grew up learning to be “tactful” because both his parents were hotheads and his mother, who had dangerously high blood pressure, was particularly explosive: “…and maybe that’s why I developed this coldness – which ties in with the Cheever quote, doesn’t it? – this terrible coldness that” he sounds haunted by himself, “John, who was very perceptive, felt.” Later, when I ask him whether he was flirtatious when he used to drink – he stopped because of the medication he takes for psoriasis – he says, “Yes. Probably. But I was always a kind of controlled drunk when I was drunk. I was always, you know, that cold-eyed guy.”

And, yet, would someone who was so essentially cold have been so tormented by guilt as he was when he eventually did leave his first wife, Mary, and their four children? Would such a flint-hearted soul talk about “having sought in agony for divine reassurance”, as he once did? Even now, when he is, as he puts it, “thoroughly grandparented”, he still says, with the rawness of recent pain, that it’s the worst thing he’s done in his life. His stammer would return, like verbal stigmata, whenever he saw his children. “It’s not as though they were complaining – they weren’t,” Updike says. “It’s not as though they were infants, either. The youngest was 10, the oldest was 18 more or less, and they were … they were all stoical. But, no, I felt rotten. It’s something my father would never have done. And, well, time heals most wounds,” he clears his throat aggressively, “but, yeah, the guilt, some guilt, is still there.

“On the other hand, you’ve got to take the overall picture. I was the person with the cards and so in the end I had to make the decisions. But I think it was … it was not ruinous for anybody.”

He says that he and his wife argued a lot and that although most children are scarred by the divorce of their parents, it’s probably no worse for them than living under the shadow of a bad marriage. “My parents fought,” he says. “My mother talked about getting a divorce and moving with me to Tucson, Arizona.” How old were you when she burdened you with this information? “I would have been maybe between 11 and 12,” he says, and then, seeing my expression, “Wild, wasn’t it? But it was just talk. We didn’t have the resources to do any of that, fortunately. And I loved my town [Shillington, Pennsylvania] and I loved my father and I was pleased that they stayed together.”

The most recent story of his that was published in The New Yorker was about him trying to fathom his parents’ “glue” – a favourite Updike word for describing the chemistry between a couple – “and their courtship because my mother would only talk about it ironically. It’s sort of primal, isn’t it? What made these two people get together, because without them, you wouldn’t be here.”

Linda Grace Hoyer, Updike’s mother, was an aspiring writer herself; one who appears to have been highly competitive with her son. When her only child first met with literary success, she said that she would have been happier if it had happened to her. The New Yorker did run 10 of her stories, after Updike had made his mark there, and two of her novels were published, Enchantment and The Predator – although she managed only to see the proofs of the second book before she died.

Given that he is held in such high regard as a critic, I wonder what Updike thought of his mother’s writing and if he had expressed his views candidly. “I thought she was quite good,” he says. “And she wrote wonderful letters. She would probably have been a better writer if she’d worked less hard at it. But she was kind of inhibited and never really grabbed her own anger – didn’t get at what was agitating her – in the way that a younger woman, a woman now probably would easily. I would give her criticism, although she couldn’t really take it very well. But I was encouraging, and so was my father, and we were all thrilled when she got into print.”

One has the feeling that his mother was permanently aggrieved by the way her life had turned out. Updike’s grandfather lost his fortune in the Depression and his father lost his job as a travelling salesman. In order to get by, his mother took a job in a department store – which must have smarted – and his father taught maths at his son’s local school.

Updike inherited her sense that he was a cut above his schoolmates, whose fathers tended to be tradesmen. “I was very prickly and vain, and believed I was some kind of aristocrat who had been stolen by gypsies,” he says. He may have had private piano and tap-dancing lessons, but the other families always appeared to him to be better off than his own. “Their children all seemed to have more sweaters than I did,” he recalls. “And sweaters was the index of wealth. If you could wear a different kind of sweater to school every day…”

It was his father’s sister, Mary, who sent her nephew a subscription to The New Yorker on his 11th birthday. He was instantly smitten, even at such a young age, initially by the cartoons, since his first ambition was to become a cartoonist. “Aunt Mary and her husband lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, in what I thought was a rather fancy way,” he says. “They drank cocktails and smoked a lot of cigarettes and, yes, I aspired to move to Greenwich and live like them.”

I wonder whether Updike’s mother encouraged him to look upon his father as a slightly inadequate figure? “Yeah, yeah, I think she did, quite frankly. She did encourage me to see him through her eyes. There was something about him which drove her wild. She was a sort of a redhead and had quite a hot temper and … I always thought he didn’t do anything wrong. I thought he was good and kind and taught Sunday school, and did all manner of good things,” he says.

He suffers some guilt, he says, about exposing him in the story My Father on the Verge of Disgrace – but as a child he always felt that his world was about to collapse, and his father would be dragged off to jail, and that he and his mother would be put out into the street with their furniture. He writes about the discomfort of sitting in the classroom in front of his father who was too little of a disciplinarian to control his pupils: “…in my helpless witnessing I was half blinded by impatience and what now seems a fog of love, a pity bulging towards him like some embarrassing warpage of my own face.” But the story ends with a touching reprieve: “Nothing but death could topple him, and even that not very far, not in my mind.”

In the introduction to the handsome Everyman edition of the Rabbit quartet (all four books were published in a single volume for the first time in 1995), Updike writes that Rabbit was “a receptacle for my disquiet and resentments”. Rabbit Angstrom – a sort of angst-ridden Everyman, himself – son of a Lutheran typesetter, who reaches his peak in life as an 18-year-old basketball champ, marries too young (like Updike, who was 21), runs away from his responsibilities with tragic consequences, seems as though he will never amount to anything (and probably worse), maddeningly, frighteningly passive in the first two books, a nebulous drifter through life who only becomes solid in the third book when he inherits his father-in-law’s Toyota franchise, a compulsive adulterer with a fatal junk-food addiction in his final years … well, not quite the alter ego you might expect from a man who as a boy believed himself to be an aristocratic changeling.

What is wonderful about the books, the first one written in 1959 and then published at the cusp of each new decade, Rabbit ageing at the same rate as his creator, is that the characters and their lives seem utterly real, however surreal their circumstances. And more than that, particularly read as a whole, they do what great fiction does, which is to reassure the reader that however grim life seems to be, most of us will somehow muddle through and – if we are lucky – experience the occasional, transcendent glimpse of joy.

The Rabbits continue to repopulate; they must now be in their umpteenth printing, despite the cavils from some critics – particularly in America – that Rabbit is too much of a prole to feel and see as eloquently as he does.

The suggestion seems to be that a Harvard alumnus, who walked straight into a job at The New Yorker, could not possibly divine the inner workings of the average working-class American man. “Well, there might be some truth in what they say, but my defence would be that we all feel a lot, and sense and know a lot of things that we don’t express,” Updike says, “and so what the author tries to do is to put that into words. Undoubtedly I do give Rabbit the benefit of some of my best thoughts and my keenest perceptions because I see no reason in withholding from him any more than Shakespeare withheld eloquence from anybody. You just try to test each sentence as it goes along and if it feels all right to you, you have to go with it and suffer the criticism. Because for me if you work too hard at making him [Rabbit] limited and making him stupid, then you’re not going to engage the reader.”

This mention of Shakespeare reminds me of the ending of Rabbit, Run – the harrowing first book of the tetralogy. (They became more up-beat, as Updike has pointed out, when their author remarried.) Young Janice Angstrom, deserted by her husband, in a moment of drunken haphazardness, drowns her new baby daughter – a tragedy which reverberates throughout the rest of the characters’ lives. “Never hear her cry again,” Harry grieves at the funeral, “never see her marbled skin again, never cup her faint weight in his arms again and watch the blue of her eyes wander in search of the source of his voice. Never, the word never stops, there is never a gap in its thickness.”

Those “nevers”, even as your eyes well up for Rabbit, are an echo of another, more famous fictional loss – King Lear holding the prone body of his most dearly loved daughter, Cordelia, in his arms before he dies of grief. “Yes, it’s a line that you always remember, isn’t it?” Updike asks. “It’s terrifying, that neverness. It takes five [or six, in his case] ‘nevers’ to do it. You fall into it naturally, of course, since that’s what you think about when somebody’s dead. Never, never, see them again. Never get to hear them make a joke again, never…”

If Rabbit was the receptacle for Updike’s resentments, Nelson, the Angstroms’ son, seems to have been the vessel for the author’s sense of parental guilt. Writing about Rabbit Redux, which followed Rabbit, Run and is probably the darkest of all the books, he describes Nelson as remaining “the wounded, helplessly indignant witness. He is ever shocked by ‘the hardness of heart’ that enables his father to live so egocentrically, as if enjoying divine favour.” Re-reading these lines after our interview, I was struck by how much they chimed in with the encircling thrust of our conversation – prompted by Updike’s preoccupations rather than my own.

It is Nelson, he says, rather than his father, who is really the hero of the books: “You’ve seen him first as a very little boy, given one trauma, and then 10 years go by and he gets another trauma … It’s no wonder he’s a little jittery.” When I ask him if there is a direct emotional connection between his authorial investment in Nelson and Updike’s feelings about his own sons as they were growing up, he concedes there is. “I tend to feel guiltier, this is just between us … and your readers, of course,” he adds dryly, “about the boys. I don’t know why. Chauvinism, I suppose. But in this guilt towards the left children, the boys moved me more. Somehow I think the girls understand. Do I think they are more resilient?” he asks himself. “I don’t know what I think. But the two boys have been lightning rods for my feelings of guilt and angst, and so on.

“Maybe it was identification, too. In that I can easily see in them the little vulnerable boy that I used to be and not wanting my parents to separate and just wanting things to go on. That’s what children want. They want things to go on from day to day until they can cease being children and get out.”

It’s a measure of how much I was drawn into Rabbit Angstrom’s internal world that I found the new novella – Rabbit Remembered – something of a disappointment. It felt almost as though Updike had committed a breach of etiquette, to take us back into Harry’s universe when he was no longer there. I found myself missing the way he looked at life; his struggle to prove that he wasn’t altogether past it; his losing battle to control his various appetites. It didn’t seem right for there to be a resolution without Rabbit being part of it. And I felt outraged, on his behalf, that Janice had ended up marrying the man he most despised.

I wonder why Updike felt the need to provide this coda, when he’d always insisted that there would be no more Rabbit books. At first, he seems to imply that he only wrote the novella as a way of filling out half a book of short stories: “And I thought that it would be a discreet way to touch base without going back on this vow that I so solemnly took. It’s really about Rabbit as a ghost, in a way.”

In 1995, the author was clearly beset by intimations of his own mortality: “I had wondered if I would live to the year 2000,” he wrote in the Everyman edition, “for this fresh printing, apt to be the last I shall oversee…” Perhaps he found it a comforting extension of his own life beyond death to have Harry still being talked and thought about 10 years after his coronary coup de grâce. But he also seems to have felt the need to give the story – particularly Nelson’s – a happy ending. “I thought we needed to know whatever happened to Ruth’s child. [In the last book, Harry is convinced that he has a grown-up daughter by the woman he was living with while Janice was pregnant with the daughter they lose.] Yes, I did,” he says. “And I assumed that you all care about Nelson and how he is doing. In the last book he was a not very satisfactorily cured coke addict, so…” So Updike has made amends, while he still can.

He once referred to the bliss of writing. Could he describe that state of being? “There’s the feeling of having written a happy sentence, making a happy connection, of the music beginning to play. And along with that, of describing something well enough that has never been made quite real in words before. But for me the bliss of writing is mixed in with the bliss of being in print. The book itself is where the heavy bliss comes in. The notion that you’ve made an artefact as good as you can make it – flawed no doubt, but as good as you can do for now. And to see it taking its place in the world – that you’ve brought something in that wasn’t there before – I suppose that’s where the bliss lies.”

I wonder, finally, whether it still gives him a kick to see his name in print. “I don’t see it often enough, actually. And I keep seeing words like Upside and Upstate … and all these words take my eye, and I think I’m being mentioned and it turns out to be just some other word that begins with a capital U. So yes,” he smiles, warmly. “I guess I do like seeing it in print.”

THE GUARDIAN – Saturday February 26, 2000
Paul Baldwin

The Guardian writers, Paul Foot and Clare Hollingworth, were yesterday honoured for their campaigning journalism in the annual What the Papers Say awards at London’s Savoy Hotel.

Mr Foot, honoured for his tenacious work on the Hanratty hanging investigation, arms to Iraq and the Bridgewater Three, was named Journalist of the Decade, while Ms Hollingworth, whose exclusive on the defection of Kim Philby to the USSR shook the establishment, was given a lifetime achievement award.

The judges’ citation with Mr Foot’s award, which was presented by the Tory leader, William Hague, read: “At the end of the 1990s we look back and see how many times Paul Foot’s campaigns have made a difference.

“His persistence is a lesson to all journalists.”

Ms Hollingworth, who famously broke the news of the outbreak of the world war two, was called “the doyenne of war correspondents” whose career “reads like a history of conflict in the 20th century”.

The other awards at the ceremony, which will be shown on BBC2 at 5.30pm today, included:

Scoop of the Year: News of the World, for Rob Kellaway’s exclusive on Lord Archer which revealed he had made a false alibi on the night he was accused of sleeping with a call girl and which led to him quitting the election race for London’s mayor.

Newspaper/Editor of the year: The Times, Peter Stothard.

Interview of the year: Ginny Dougary, The Times, for her Michael Portillo interview in which he admitted homosexual experiences.

Columnist of the year: Deborah Orr, The Independent.

Foreign correspondent of the year: Robert Fisk, The Independent.

Critic of the year: A.A. Gill, The Sunday Times.

THE TIMES – March 27 1999
- Ginny Dougary

Not many rock stars write novels and biblical commentaries or give recitals on love at the Royal Festival Hall. But, with years behind him as the ultimate bad seed, Nick Cave has never played by the rules. Ginny Dougary meets the man behind his own myth.

If you didn’t know what Nick Cave does, you would be hard-pressed to guess. In the past couple of years, he has delivered a religious broadcast on Radio 3, contributed to The Times’s Op Ed page, alongside John Major, with a column on what Easter means to him, penned an introduction to St Mark’s gospel in Canongate’s bite-sized versions of the Bible, with writers such as A.S. Byatt, A.N. Wilson, Louis de Berni res, Fay Weldon and Will Self, and been a visiting lecturer at an academy of poetry in Vienna; in three days time, he will be giving a recital on the love song at the Royal Festival Hall, and he is director of this summer’s arts festival, Meltdown, on the South Bank. He has been the subject of a biography, the author of a novel which attracted some glowing reviews, including one from The Daily Telegraph; he has written film scripts and appeared, as himself, in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, and as an actor in a number of less memorable films. It’s an unusual curriculum vitae, especially for a rock star.

Cave appears to have entered the ranks of the great and the good without really trying, and certainly without much fanfare. As a gifted writer with an abiding interest in literature, religion and art, it is perhaps not surprising that Cave has harnessed himself to projects beyond the narrow perimeters of pop. But how many of his fellow musicians could command comparably lofty platforms from which to broadcast their views, or the licence to experiment from within the portals of such august institutions? Cave is not, after all, a well-connected Brit but an Aussie outsider.

What is surprising is that he remains a marginal figure in the music business, albeit mega in those margins. When Cave and his band the Bad Seeds played at the Royal Albert Hall some years ago, both nights sold out; five hours after the box office opened, the tickets for Cave’s solo show at the Royal Festival Hall had all gone. He is – what people often fall back on when describing an artist who is difficult or difficult to place, and Cave is both – a significant cult figure.

But why isn’t he huge? His love songs on The Boatman’s Call, Cave and the Bad Seeds’ most recent album of fresh material, were a revelation to me when I first heard them a few months ago: sweet and melancholy, stripped back to the raw emotion and sung with the voice of a wayward Elvis Presley. I am not alone in thinking they are up there with Van Morrison and Dylan; everyone to whom I’ve played them has the same reaction. “The guy’s a genius!” they say, and “Why haven’t I heard the songs before?” The singer, of course, is partly to blame. He may have appeared on Top of the Pops with Kylie Minogue, for whom he wrote the murder ballad Where the Wild Roses Grow – and what a strange pairing that was – but the success of the single was a commercial deviation for him. He wrote it, not because he wanted a Top 20 hit, but because he liked to play with the tension between the darkness of the material and the lightness which Kylie projects. He is quite clear about his desire to conduct his life and career on his own idiosyncratic terms. In 1996, for instance, he was shortlisted for an MTV Award for Best Male Artist – but asked the organisers to withdraw his nomination. “My muse is not a horse,” he attempted to explain in a letter, “and I am in no horse race and, indeed, if she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel – this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes.” While he clearly had a lot of fun spinning his excuse – he sounds as arch and overblown as the Scarlet Pimpernel – the gesture can hardly have endeared him to the powers that be in the international music scene. Cave’s habit of disappearing in foreign cities for years at a time – Berlin for much of the Eighties; Sao Paulo in the early Nineties – has not helped to build a serious profile in this country. And, of course, there have been some more self-destructive habits along the way.

Our first encounter is in Amsterdam, where Cave is performing in a kind of lit-rock festival at the Paradiso, billed alongside various artists with out-there names like Furry Green Lamppost. The Paradiso used to be a church and is one of the legendary venues, where everyone has played from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols; in the late-afternoon gloom and empty, it looks tarnished and slightly seedy.

On the stage, Cave’s elongated form is hunched over the piano like an up-ended U. He is wearing a skimpy V-neck sweater and with his eyes closed and his face pointed skywards, he could be a 12-year-old boy. Since he is, in fact, 41, in the looks department at least, he is a disgracefully good advertisement for bad living. After an hour or so of faffing around with the sound engineer, Cave comes over to join a group of us.

Away from his piano, Cave towers over us but doesn’t stoop. Walking back to the hotel at some pace, I clock the familiar wings of bat-black hair, the white face, blue eyes and cupid’s pout. In his scuffed shoes, a fake fur collar adorning a long black coat, he has a certain theatrical – Aubrey Beardsley meets Withnail – thrift-shop elegance. His people keep telling me what a great time it is to interview him. Why? He’s so happy. He’s so open. He’s so well. He’s in love.

Before the gig, there is a dinner for Cave and his friends in an old-fashioned seafood restaurant. It’s a strange, slightly strained event. Everyone would like to talk to our host, but since he exudes all the hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie of a Howard Hughes, it does not make for an easy flow of conversation. Among the guests is Cave’s new paramour, Vivienne Westwood’s erstwhile muse, the model Susie Bick – who appears to have made liberal use of her boyfriend’s hair-dye.

Bick is exquisite. She has a porcelain face, phosphorescent green gaze and a breathy, cut-glass little voice – rather like a posh Una Stubbs. With the dansant frock, antique clasp-bag and demure manner, she feels distinctly unmodern. She and Cave sip mineral water and smoke a great many Marlboro Lights. I ask him whether he’s suffering from pre-concert nerves. No, he says,
slightly bullishly. Then he grins and admits, “Well, yes, actually – I am.” Moments later, as if to comfort himself, he folds Susie into his arms and kisses her. We all look away. But for some reason it’s not embarrassing, just rather sweet and unaffected.

There’s a commotion on the steps of the Paradiso, and a sign on the heavy wooden doors informing the crowds that the gig is SOLD OUT. Cave takes to the centre of the stage and starts to read his introduction to St Mark from the small book in his hand. The piece is long but the Dutch tend to speak English fluently, and Cave seems to carry them. As befits a former place of worship, the atmosphere is solemn, even reverential. Of course, it is equally possible that the fans have been stunned into silence by the oddness of this incarnation. Cave’s voice is rising, clear and loud, and his body rocks as he describes his early love of the Old Testament, with its malign God and presence of evil so close to the surface, “you could smell its mad breath, see the yellow smoke curl…” Give him a backdrop of cornfields and a southern twang, and he could be Flannery O’Connor’s crazy-eyed preacher in Wise Blood (a book Cave knows and loves).

And now there are murmurs of recognition and approval from the congregation, as Cave says, “But you grow up. You do. You mellow out… You no longer find comfort watching a whacked-out God tormenting a wretched humanity as you learn to forgive yourself and the world.” In his pre-teen choirboy days at Wangaratta Cathedral, he tells us, he was singularly unimpressed by the Anglican Church: “It was the decaf of worship,” he sneers, “and Jesus was their Lord.” And on he goes, via references to Holman Hunt and the odd Latin and Hebrew quote, to explain how Christ came to illuminate his life – through the Gospel According to Mark – “with a dim light, a sad light, but light enough”… and on and on, accelerating as though wary of imposing upon our patience as he reaches his triumphant conclusion: “Christ understood that we as humans were for ever held to the ground by the pull of gravity – our ordinariness, our mediocrity – and it was through his example that he gave our imaginations the freedom to rise and fly. In short,” he stares out into the dark, “to be Christ-like.” It’s hardly rock ‘n’ roll, but they like it.

Cave may have grown up, but he is still a perverse cove. His desire to move and shock – the function, he believes, of art – remains intact. Perhaps a religious reading is the Nineties equivalent of bashing his fans over the head with a microphone. “To get up and speak about matters like that is pretty much the last thing you can annoy people with,” he confirms. “Because in my business God has a very, very bad reputation. He needs to get a new spin doctor… and I’m the man for the job.”

The rest of the set goes well. Post-Mark, the proceedings still have a gospel feel. The audience mouths the words to the songs or joins in. People sway arm in arm; a number of them weep. As Cave sings his anthem of disappointment “People ain’t no good” – “… It ain’t in their hearts they’re bad/ They can comfort you, some even try/ They nurse you when you’re ill of health/ They bury you when you go and die…” – a young man plucks my sleeve, tears streaming down his cheeks, and tells me how the song speaks straight to him, confronting him with how badly he has treated his estranged brother and how he must make
amends.

When he was a child, Cave tells me back in London, he and a mate would get driven miles out into the bush by his mate’s dad, who would deposit them with a six-pack of beer and a couple of shotguns and instruct them to kill as many living things as they could. The boys were 12 at the time. Cave is the father of a seven-year-old son, Luke, and he’s been thinking that was a pretty rum way to handle kids.

First novels have a reputation for tending towards the autobiographical. The Ass Saw the Angel, Cave’s fictional debut, would not appear to conform to that pattern. It is an extraordinary story – both compelling and repellent – of Euchrid Eucrow, the mute surviving twin of a grotesque alcoholic mother and a sadistic father, who is the outcast and Anti-Christ figure of a warped religious community. It is full of Old Testament imagery welded on to the imagination of a serial killer, informed by a love and knowledge of the literature of the American Deep South. The novel is littered with the carcasses of small birds and creatures, captured or shot, which makes one think that those trips into the bush and the ensuing carnage must surely have made an imprint on the child’s psyche.

Cave’s writing has impressed some of the most respected young guns in publishing. Jon Riley, who bought the paperback rights to The Ass Saw the Angel for Penguin, struggled to persuade his superiors that the acquisition was a good idea. Penguin stumped up Pounds 25,000 for the rights. Since its publication in 1990, the paperback has sold 75,000 copies and continues to sell steadily.

Richard Beswick, editorial director of Little, Brown, whose authors include Beryl Bainbridge and Gore Vidal, says of Cave’s writing: “Most literary novels look linguistically impoverished compared to his. If I’d been publishing fiction at the time, I would have jumped at it.” Instead, he commissioned a biography of Cave: Bad Seed by Ian Johnston, which has also enjoyed healthy sales – about 30,000 copies – since it was published in 1995. “There’s a very good cross-over audience for Cave amongst literate rock fans,” Beswick says, and less reverentially, “There’s also substantial sleaze and some great photographs of him rolling around on broken glass.”

Cave arrives bang on time for our meeting, dressed smartly in a grey suit and white shirt. The rendezvous is in the library – appropriately since much of our conversation is about books and writing – of one of those discreet, old-fashioned hotels which seem to be popular with the rockerati. There is an interesting tension, a word he employs a lot, between his manner: still amiable, as it was in Amsterdam, and his body language, which is guarded. Before we get properly stuck in, Cave tells me about his mental filing cabinet in which are stored all the names of the journalists and critics who have offended him – which is less intimidating than it sounds. What people tend not to get is that Cave is funny, with that laconic, deadpan wit shared by larrikin Australians from Bob Hawke to your outback cattle drover. After his attempts to give me a preview of his forthcoming gig, for instance, he assumes a baleful expression and drawls, “Thousands of people send their tickets back.” Knowing how seriously – and quite rightly – Cave takes his writing, I ask him somewhat tentatively whether he wishes he had been as rigorous in the editing of his novel as he was in his new songs. I preface the question by asking him if he minds me making a comment about it. “Yeah. You can make a comment,” he says darkly, “I’ll log it in there,” tapping his high forehead.

During the years in which he wrote the book in Berlin, Cave’s lifestyle was chaotic, to put it mildly. Rock hacks used to lay bets on who was most likely to die of an overdose on stage first, Keith Richards or Nick Cave. At one particular low point of his addiction, Cave resorted to dealing heroin and was thrown out of the room in his shared apartment when it became a shooting gallery. Writing the novel is what Cave believes kept him from going under. I ask him if there were any times during his work in progress when he wasn’t off his face? “Erm, no,” he says, “but that suggests that you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re wandering around in a stupor. I was taking speed a lot, and the thing about that drug is that it keeps you totally in the moment. It doesn’t allow anything else in. I think I would have written the book any way, I would like to say – and it could well have been a better book. Part of its obsessiveness and the way I was living at that time was to do with that. “Cave’s tiny room was transformed into a sort of fetishistic aide-memoire; the walls were covered with a mixture of religious and pornographic images and a wig of a young girl’s hair. “It became a very similar world to the one I was writing about in the book,” he recalls. “It was very tangible and different, populated with the people that I’d invented. It was a place I retreated into… It afforded me some relief.”

I ask him whether he considers that his writing, his art, is at the centre of his life. “I think that attempting to strive at some kind of happiness in my life is more important,” he says. “And I have to say that I feel happy quite a lot.” Would you say that’s your natural disposition? “No, I don’t think so…” Is it because you’re in love? “Yeah, now I can never remember being sad,” he says, mock-mawkishly. “But even despite all the disasters and catastrophes and the debris around me, I always got my sense of fulfilment from being able to write and come up with things that I felt good about and that if I hadn’t had that artistic endeavour, I don’t think I would have been allowed to survive.” Allowed? He sighs and shifts around in his seat. “Oh no, I’m going to sound like Glenn Hoddle… but I feel I’ve been protected in certain ways by other, other…” he looks into my eyes, “by God.”

So you link your creativity to God?

“Yeah.”

You think it’s a God-given gift?
“Yeah.”

You talk about being in the presence of God. What does that feel like?

“Despite what’s gone on in my life, I’ve always felt it. I just had a different concept of what it was. For a long time I felt it was a malign presence, and now I see Him as benign,” he clears his throat. “It feels like a sense of being protected.”

There is a clear interconnection between the defining patterns in Cave’s life: his drug addiction, his spiritual faith, his belief in his own creative powers, his touchingly transparent desire to hold on to the idea of true love, his attachment to artistic outsiders, and his complicated relationship with his father. There may be an element of self-dramatisation in the version Cave presents of his life story to me, but he seems to think that he was born a bad seed – shall we say – who has had the good fortune to be redeemed by a compassionate God. At one point, he says that if he had discovered heroin when he was a child, he probably would have taken it. He was one of four children, with two older brothers and a younger sister, and discovered that the most effective way of getting attention was to be a troublemaker. It is quite hard to picture him as a choirboy. At 12, he and his gang of friends would drink themselves sick on cheap sherry. At 13, he was expelled from Wangaratta High School for attempting to pull down the knickers of a 16-year-old girl; her parents tried to press charges of attempted rape. By the time he left his new school, Caulfield Grammar in Melbourne, in 1975, Cave had formed his first band, the Boys Next Door, and discovered the joys of shocking his fellow pupils by wearing drag. On to art college, where Cave maddened his modernist teachers by decorating his workplace with prints of classical religious paintings. After failing his second-year exams, he concentrated on the band full time and hung out in St Kilda, the low-life area of Melbourne. By thetime he was 21 – the year of the death of his father – Cave was already injecting heroin and speed. Colin Cave was a teacher of maths and English, and the director of adult education in Victoria. He was passionate about language and literature, and determined to pass that love on to his youngest son. In his Radio 3 broadcast, Cave recalls being ushered into his father’s study to listen to “great bloody slabs from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, or the murder scene from Crime and Punishment, or whole chapters from Nabokov’s Lolita. My father would wave his arms about, then point at me and say, ‘This, my boy, is literature.’” What Colin Cave really wanted to be was a writer himself. His son remembers seeing in his desk “the beginnings of several aborted novels, all neatly, sadly, filed and titled”. When the boy was about 12, his father asked him what he had done to assist humanity. When, stumped for an answer, the son turned the question back on him, Colin Cave took out a couple of short stories which had been published in magazines. “And I shared in his pride as he showed them to me,” his son came to write many years later, “but I noticed that the magazines were of an earlier decade and it was clear that these two short stories were tiny seeds planted in a garden that did not grow.”

Fuelled with enthusiasm, the young Cave went off to write what he admits was bad poetry and worse songs; none of which had the desired effect of pleasing his father. “At some point, we became very competitive. I believe it was when I started to have my own ideas about things, and he wasn’t particularly interested in that,” he recalls. Was that hurtful to you? “Oh yes,” he says. “I just wanted to impress him. I thought that he was what it was all about.” Cave’s behaviour at home and at school – extreme by the standard of even the most difficult adolescent – put further strain on the relationship between father and son. His mother, Dawn, a librarian, whom Cave describes as a “very brave, intelligent, sturdy woman who just gets on with things”, has always been unconditionally supportive of him. His father, in contrast, was not. And although Cave can see, now that he is a parent himself, how unbearable he must have been – “a self-made monster in his very home” – it has taken him a long time to forgive his father for turning away.

Colin Cave died in a car crash in 1978. The news came through when his wife had gone to bail their son out of St Kilda police station, for the umpteenth time, where he was being held on a burglary charge. It is hard to think of a more harrowing context in which to hear of the death of a parent to whom one is unreconciled. “Because I was there with my mother when we heard, it was quite painful and after that I don’t really remember anything,” he says. “I can remember going home in the car with my mother, and then… I don’t remember the funeral or anything that happened afterwards. Pretty soon, I just left. I think the trauma makes you shut down until you’re able to deal with it. Certainly, that’s how it felt for me.

“I think that my father lost out on a lot of what’s happened after his death, and I do feel a sense of regret about that. Considering that all I ever wanted to do was to make him proud of me… He died at a point in my life when I was at my most confused.”

In the years that followed, it must be said, Cave seemed no less confused. Wherever he lived – Melbourne or London or Berlin – he would be accused of glamorising heroin. Inevitably, in such a long interview, we talk about Cave’s relationship – and it seems correct to call it that – with the drug. What really aggravates him is the way society demonises the drug-user. “How are we supposed to look at junkies?” he asks. “As the scum of the earth, so we can all feel better about ourselves? It’s like the sex offender in prison; mass murderers can feel OK because at least they’re not sex offenders. It seems like everyone needs someone under their heel… I was a heroin addict because I couldn’t stop taking drugs. In fact, I didn’t want to stop taking drugs. I liked taking drugs. That’s my own choice, really, and I don’t think I did glamorise it. I wasn’t much of a glamorous figure back then, to be honest.” Certainly, there doesn’t sound anything very glamorous to me about all the times he lay sick and shivering, wrapped up in a blanket on a mattress on the floor. Or the state of mind he must have been in to write lyrics with a bloody syringe while travelling on the London Underground. (He doesn’t much like it when I remind him of that episode either.) And it can’t have been the last word in glamour to have to score in some dive every time you arrived in a new city. Or, indeed, to be a serial overdoser.

It is striking that what he admires about his cultural exemplars – from Van Morrison to the reclusive J.D. Salinger (whom he has invited, in a dangerous fit of optimism, to appear at Meltdown) to the Chicagoan outsider artist Henry Darger – is their refusal to run with the herd. “I think the heroin addict becomes one in order to separate himself from the rest of society,” he says. “It’s a very masochistic act. For a long time it served me well, but there did come a point when it became intolerable. When it became clear to me and a lot of people that it was interfering with things that were ultimately more important to me – like my artistic aspirations.”

There was another impetus. In 1988, Cave was arrested in London for possession of heroin and agreed to undergo treatment for his addiction in order to avoid a prison sentence. He was not incarcerated in Priory-style rehab-deluxe but at a clinic in Weston-super-Mare which he describes as a brutal, shaming place. “I don’t think that just because you take drugs you should be made to feel like a degenerate,” he says, with feeling. When you go into a place like that, you don’t really have much of your personality intact. You don’t go there because everything’s OK.”

As far as the CV goes, Cave endured his two months at the clinic and has remained on the straight and narrow ever since. But there have been various hints to various journalists in the intervening time which suggest that this is not the complete picture. And he tells me that he has been to rehab clinics more to his liking since his sojourn in Weston-super-Mare. It is almost as though it is a point of honour for him not to perpetuate the myth that he hasn’t touched hard drugs in the past decade. Plenty of celebrities wouldn’t feel the need to be so honest, I say, why do you?

“I won’t be bullied into taking drugs or not taking drugs,” he says. “I’m not a repentant ex-drug addict. I feel I have every right if I want to take drugs to do so.” And do you? “I don’t actually,” he says. “I’m not taking drugs at the moment.”

There is only one point during this exchange when my questions seem to upset Cave, and I see now – in hindsight – that the awkwardness of his answers may have had something to do with his struggle to keep on an even keel. He had always hoped to become an artist; painting for him was the pinnacle of the creative ladder and rock music was rock bottom. For many years – but no longer, he insists – he felt like an impostor, a practitioner of an art form he disdained. But when he talks about the artists he admires – the ones he would exhibit if he could at Meltdown – what seems to grip him is the effect on their art as their minds deteriorated. Over lunch, he tells me about Louis Wain, an Edwardian artist whom he collects; a painter of cats in unlikely poses, playing cricket or a church organ, and how as Wain’s psychosis deepened, the faces of his cats began to dissolve and unravel on the page. And of Henry Darger, who was raised in institutions and stayed at home seeing no one and creating a world of conflict between good Christian girls, cut out of catalogues and blown up with a projector, fleeing from anti-Christian forces who are hunting them down. Cave says that what he admires about their work is the excellence of the execution and their “terrible beauty”.

I say that I read somewhere that he sometimes felt the need to take heroin to dampen his creativity, which suggested, intriguingly, that it was his art which was dangerous for his health rather than the drugs. “Well, yes… I go through cyclical periods of being very up and hyper, a feeling of incredible inspiration and a kind of super-capability – and with that comes,” a rueful laugh, “a voice, and it’s my voice, and it observes and chatters away and always has something to say – about doing the dishes, or whatever – and it just rattles on and on. I can feel my whole body changing and it’s exhausting. It also affects my judgment.”

Have you always had this?

“It’s difficult to say, because it’s something that makes itself apparent when I don’t use drugs.”

How about in your teen years?

“No, one of the ways – Oh God – one of the ways I’ve dealt with that in the past is to… I know exactly what will shut it all up. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult for someone who is a junkie to go and take heroin once. So these days, I would try and deal with that stuff in a more appropriate way.”

Like?

“I have to… I have to… ration the kind of things I allow myself to get excited over in order that I sleep, which is the other problem with it. It would seem if I get involved in certain things creatively, it can lead to this sort of cycle… I also go through periods when I don’t do much and don’t feel inspired, and I don’t feel very good during those times either.”

I ask him if he is a manic depressive, and he sighs and groans and rubs his hands through his hair. Why do you think you find this such a difficult area to discuss? “Because,” a long silence, “I’m not sure why.” Because it’s scary? “It is, actually, to be that way. It is quite scary.” Do you think you’re going nuts? “It’s just that I’ve not had much experience with it, and I’m trying to go through it without doing the drugs. I don’t really know if I’m… “I can’t label it, and I don’t want to do endless interviews about being a manic depressive – ‘Are you up or down today?’ If I understood it better and that was the way things were, I could come out and say that I was bi-polar – or whatever they call it. I’m not a doctor or a psychiatrist, but I do know they’re discovering more and more forms of manic depression, and medication to cope with that.”

The most beautiful song for me on The Boatman’s Call is Into Your Arms; the one Cave chose to sing at his good friend Michael Hutchence’s funeral. The first two verses start with the things he doesn’t believe in – an interventionist God, the existence of angels – and the last one deals with the redemptive power of love: “But I believe in love/And I know that you do, too/ And I believe in some kind of path/ That we can walk down, me and you…” Part of the strength of the songs is the nakedness of the emotion, unmasked by metaphor or allegory. It’s all there for everyone to see: his love affair with Luke’s mother, Viviane Carneiro, the Brazilian fashion stylist who was the reason why Cave transplanted himself to Sao Paulo, and its painful end; his doomed romance with P.J. Harvey in West Country Girl, with her black hair and heart-shaped face and broad accent. I wonder, again, why he had felt the need to be so open; to paint the pictures so vividly.

“In order to write a worthwhile love song, it needs to have within it the potential for pain or an understanding of the pain of whatever you’re writing about. I don’t think they allow themselves to be written until I’ve fully experienced what it is I’m writing about. They wait patiently to be finished.” One can only hope, in that case, that the Songs of Susie will remain incomplete. He says, when I ask him, that he has never been married but likes the idea of it. And that he would like to have more children. And that, yes, he is in love and very much believes that she is the one (that he’s been waiting for)… “But I do have a past and I do have recollections of the way things go.” Are you waiting for disappointment? “When things go well, I’m often surprised and expect that it will be taken from me in some kind of way,” he says. “But I’m not feeling like that at the moment. I’m feeling very happy.” I point to the scar on his cheek – which looks like an errant dimple – and he tells me it was an old domestic wound: “I was stabbed in the face with a vegetable knife.” I wonder, thinking about the scar, whether his relationships with women have tended to be confrontational. “In the past, I’ve had extremely volatile relationships in that way… but I think that there have been influences within that – alcohol and drugs – which exacerbate that kind of behaviour,” he says. “What’s going on at the moment is that I really value what is there, and I feel that I have some chance of making it work, which I’ve never really felt before… and with anything of value, you take care.” When I ask him what makes him happy in life, he says: “My son, my work, my girlfriend.” He’s been with Susie, this time around, for six months – and is staying in her Chelsea home until he moves into a house he has recently bought on the river. Luke continues to divide his week between his mother, who lives in west London, and his father – but Cave admits that now he is living with Susie it makes things a bit more complicated. He has another son, Jethro, more or less the same age as Luke, who lives with his mother in Australia. When I ask Cave whether he has a relationship with this son, he says that he does, and that “it’s great” and “he’s coming here, actually, to live for a year”. Will you see a lot of him? “I will, yeah.” So, soon, life is likely to get considerably more complicated.

He says that he’s a hands-on dad and was a great nappychanger. How did you find that? “Interesting. Scary. Overwhelming.” Until recently, when Cave was living on his own, Luke used to share his bed, and now “he’s been booted out of it. So that’s been one of the great wrenches.” He seems to take his parental role pretty seriously; he’s there for the swimming galas, and speech days, and all the cringe-making stuff like the Dads’ Egg and Spoon Race. But what they like doing most together is talking. I imagine Luke lying in bed, struggling to stay awake, while his father tells him stories of far-off places, and good and evil, and bewitching damsels with emerald eyes and ebony hair, who rescue poor travellers who’ve lost their way.

At the end of our lunch – during which Cave eats heartily – he asks me for the time and jumps up, stricken, when I tell him. “Oh God, if I don’t go now I’ll be late for Luke,” he says, looking like the 12-year-old I first saw. “You know what it’s like in the playground; I’m terrified of getting into trouble with the teachers.” His father, I think, would be proud of him.