Cash is king, Cash is clay
This is not about George Looney: "The pleasures of piety are infinite and exquisite and probably nowhere more easily had these days than in the rock 'n' roll business, or in Hollywood. On record, and on stage, and up there on the big screen, people are not only encouraged but also handsomely rewarded for being morbidly fascinated with themselves, with their every movement, their every utterance, with the tiniest flicker of an eyelid or the slightest suggestion of a thought — a self-regard and obsession with the self usually only available to religious novitiates, madmen or very young children."
No, it's not about Clooney, it's about Cash: "The father, of course, the Abraham, or at least the son of the father, the Avraham ben Avraham Avinu, the Charlton Heston of redemption rock, is Johnny Cash, a man of intense spiritual certitude, and enormous wealth and fame, who, in death as in life, remains an example of what it might mean to live as a Christian in an age of celebrity and superabundance: his aims were high and lofty; his life was an absolute mess."
This is writing and observation of a very high order and it comes from the pen of Ian Sansom in the London Review of Books, where, in a review titled "Very like St Paul", he pronounces on "The Man Called Cash: The Life, Love and Faith of an American Legend" by Steve Turner. Sansom is simply superb here:
So how did Cash become a saint and a hero? How on earth did it happen? It helps that he's dead, of course, death being pretty much guaranteed to increase anybody's chances of immortality: when he's dead and gone, there'll doubtless be glossy magazine features on the enduring legacy of James Blunt. You can't rely on death, though, to do all the work for you. During his lifetime it certainly seems to have helped Cash that he was ruthlessly determined in pursuit of his goals. In the kind of sentence that might be found in any book about any so-called artist, Turner writes: 'Cash clearly felt that he was a misunderstood man — that Vivian not only didn't understand the demands of his work but couldn't accept his mercurial artistic temperament. June, on the other hand, he felt loved him for who he was.' We've heard that one before. After years of anguish, Cash eventually left his first wife, Vivian, with whom he had four daughters, and married June Carter in 1968. In his autobiography he recalls an incident backstage when June offered to iron his shirt: 'I jerked off the shirt and threw it to her. She ironed it, and I went on stage in a nicely pressed shirt. Thus began her lifelong dedication to cleaning me up, and my lifelong acceptance of that mission.' Never mind Lives of the Saints; the esteem and assurance of heaven should surely go to the wives of the saints: the list of angelic long-suffering wives, if not endless, is certainly extensive, and June Carter had a headstart on most of them as she'd already been married twice, and she played autoharp.
And now, a memorable, humane finale that shows deep reverence and understanding for the subject matter:
You can hear that same quality in Cash's voice — a determined and yet tentative quality, as though he were almost apologising for singing — if you go right back and listen to his first single, 'Hey! Porter' (released in 1955, with 'Cry, Cry, Cry'), or to the second single, 'Folsom Prison Blues'/'So Doggone Lonesome' (which reached number four on the Billboard country chart in 1956), or indeed if you listen to his very last album, American IV, when his voice is almost completely gone, and yet there it is — he still has it — on 'The Man Comes Around'. Like reading Hardy, or Blake, or Larkin or other brilliantly skilled technicians, you listen to it and you think: 'I could do that.' But you can't. It's an illusion. In the notes to his 1977 album The Rambler, Cash writes: 'Loneliness is real, the pain of loss is real, the fulfilment of love is real, the thrill of adventure is real, and to put it in the song lyrics and sing about it — after all, isn't that what a country singer-writer is supposed to do, write and sing of reality?' It is, and he did, and it's not as easy as it looks. Even more difficult to live it.
Ian Sansom is an exceptional critic.
