“Vibrations in the Universe”: Dylan Tells His Own Story
YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT ME WITHOUT THAT YOU HAVE READ A BOOK BY THE NAME OF “THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER,” BUT THAT AIN’T NO MATTER. THAT BOOK WAS MADE BY MR. MARK TWAIN, AND HE TOLD THE TRUTH, MAINLY. THERE WAS THINGS WHICH HE STRETCHED, BUT MAINLY HE TOLD THE TRUTH.
—MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT AGE OF HISTORY WE WERE IN NOR WHAT THE TRUTH OF IT WAS. NOBODY BOTHERED WITH THAT. IF YOU TOLD THE TRUTH THAT WAS ALL WELL AND GOOD AND IF YOU TOLD THE UN-TRUTH, WELL THAT’S STILL WELL AND GOOD. FOLK SONGS TAUGHT ME THAT.
—BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE
Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, was published on October 5, 2004, classified by his publisher as “biography.” Readers soon realized they were dealing with anything but a biography in the traditional sense. Dylan’s life seems almost impossible to contain or set in any category—we see only what he lets us see. The five chapters of Chronicles take the reader through selected periods of Dylan’s life, in a style that is delightful, lively, and clear, and that filters the autobiographical through the artist’s creative imagination. The book covers only a tiny fraction of the enigmatic life of Dylan. In reality, it’s more like a play, in five acts, but with constant flashbacks, fast-forwarding, inventions, and falsehoods. The structure is elegant: Chapters 1, 3, and 5 read like the truth, while Chapters 2 and 4 read somewhat like fiction, and as Dylan says, “that’s still well and good.” Time is rarely linear, and particularly within those more imaginative second and fourth chapters a sense of the surreal predominates. Incongruities and deliberately chaotic juxtapositions abound, to hilarious and hugely pleasurable effect. This is not an autobiography in any sense of the word.
Chapter 1, “Markin’ Up the Score,” opens with a conversation between Dylan and Lou Levy, of the Leeds Music Publishing Company. Dylan does not give dates here or anywhere else in the book, but the scene must belong to late 1961, after John Hammond, “the great talent scout and discoverer of monumental artists,” as Dylan put it, signed him on with Columbia Records, thus setting in motion the public career of the twenty-year-old. Similarly, other chapters focus on Dylan’s story at other very specific moments in his career, again without any linearity, and maintaining silence on much of what Dylan fans would like most to hear about—the astonishing music from 1965 to 1966, the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975–76, the Christian years of 1979–81. The fluid treatment of time in Chronicles: Volume One is reminiscent of his practice in many of his songs, a deliberate frustrating of attempts to impose temporal order on his world.
Instead, Chapter 3, “New Morning,” sharing its title with Dylan’s 1970 album, starts with the twenty-seven-year-old Dylan returning from Hibbing to New York and reuniting with his wife and children—he never names them, and in the real world “my wife” in Chapter 3, Sara, is a different human being from “my wife” in Chapter 4, Carolyn Dennis. The year must be 1968, since he had gone back to Minnesota that year for the funeral of his father, Abe Zimmerman, who died on June 5. A prominent theme of the chapter is a songwriting collaboration with poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish, also librarian of Congress under FDR. Dylan and MacLeish didn’t quite see eye to eye on the songs Dylan had delivered, and Dylan ultimately realized the project wasn’t going to work, but their encounter gives him the opportunity for some fine writing, descriptive vignettes of “Archie’s” place in rural Conway, Massachusetts, with lively conversation between the two. At one point, MacLeish asks Dylan if he has read Sappho and Socrates (meaning Plato, presumably, since Socrates left no writing). “I said, nope I hadn’t and then he asked me about Dante and Donne. I said not much.” The talk then turns to a topic familiar from the Rome press conference of 2001 and the draft of “Changing of the Guard” (111):
MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet and that my work would be a touchstone for generations after me, that I was a postwar Iron Age poet but that I had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era.
Their conversation, or at least Dylan’s reconstruction of it, was heading back in time, and soon enough he had returned to Homer, the father of Western literature, the poet whom in the Rome press conference of 2001 Dylan had labeled as belonging to the Golden Age (112): “MacLeish tells me that Homer, who wrote the Iliad, was a blind balladeer, and that his name means ‘hostage’”—both details true enough. Whether or not Dylan was recalling a conversation from more than thirty years earlier, the presence of Homer has more to do with his literary and artistic activities of 2004.
Chapter 4, “Oh Mercy,” jumps to 1989, in another finely crafted section of writing, much of it clearly made up. In the May 23, 2011, issue of Rolling Stone, writer Andy Greene quotes critic Clinton Heylin’s reaction to this chapter:
“As far as I can tell almost everything in the Oh Mercy section of Chronicles is a work of fiction,” Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin recently said. “I enjoy Chronicles as a work of literature, but it has as much basis in reality as [Dylan’s 2003 film] Masked and Anonymous, and why shouldn’t it? He’s not the first guy to write a biography that’s a pack of lies.”
The book is best seen as reality filtered through the three ingredients of creativity, in the memoir as in his songwriting: “creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination.” Take, for example, his descriptions of singer Fred Neil, who ran the daytime performances at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, where Dylan was a regular after he arrived in New York City in January 1961. In a 1984 interview, Dylan described Neil: “Fred was from Florida, I think . . . and he had a strong, powerful voice, almost a bass voice. And a powerful sense of rhythm.” In Chronicles, Neil has become something else, something larger than life:
He played a big dreadnought guitar, lot of percussion in his playing, piercing driving rhythm—a one-man band, a kick in the head singing voice. He did fierce versions of hybrid chain gang songs and whomped the audience into a frenzy. I’d heard stuff about him, that he was an errant sailor, harbored a skiff in Florida, was an underground cop, had hooker friends and a shadowy past. He’d come up to Nashville, drop off songs that he wrote and then head for New York where he’d lay low, wait for something to blow over and fill up his pockets with wampum.
Dylan writes of how Neil let him treat himself to “all the French fries and hamburgers I could eat at the Café Wha?” and he gives a similarly penetrating sketch of Norbert the cook, who used to leave a “greasy hamburger” for Dylan and falsetto singer Tiny Tim, who also performed at the club:
Norbert was a trip. He wore a tomato-stained apron, had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of claws—thought of himself as a lady’s man, saving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy and visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. The kitchen was like a cave bored into the side of a cliff.
Dylan’s imagination and his creative, vigorous writing again and again transform these figures. Most of them were dead by the time Chronicles was published, so Dylan has a free hand, turning the Village into a carnivalesque museum, capturing that moment when the fifties turned into the sixties and the Beats gave way to folksingers. In the first two chapters of the book, Dylan digs these characters up and gives them new, tragic, heroic, surreal roles. The effect is not unlike that in the great song “Desolation Row”: “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood” off “sniffing drainpipes and reciting the alphabet”—and all the other masks and disguises that song creates. Dylan’s memory of detail is clearly formidable, but so are his imaginative and creative powers and his way with words.
THE LOST LAND
Which brings us to what may be his greatest creation in the book, the biggest whopper of them all. Dylan’s flair for language and literature brings us to two interesting characters, Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel. It’s hard to know what to make of this remarkable couple, who appear in the second chapter, a section of the book that conjures up myth and fiction, a world outside its historical time, but one that in Dylan’s “autobiography” is set in that historically frigid 1961 winter in New York City. The opening line of this chapter, “I sat up in bed and looked around,” faintly recalls the opening of “Tangled Up in Blue”: “Early one morning the sun was shinin’ / I was layin’ in bed.” Only in the book, “it was midafternoon, and both Ray and Chloe were gone” (26). Night owl Dylan is a newcomer to New York, and he is crashing with Ray and Chloe, a colorful couple who some readers and reviewers believe are fictional, although rumor has it that Dylan, when questioned about them, has answered that they are real—for what that is worth, and not that it matters.
Why did Dylan call Chapter 2 “The Lost Land”? In part I suspect because for everyone the land of our youth is indeed lost, gone by the time we reach a certain age, along with the people who inhabited that land. So a land lost in time makes sense for a chapter recollecting those days, more than forty years before the book came out. But the phrase conjures up other possibilities, the mythic lost lands and utopian places set off from the world, the city of Atlantis beneath the sea, the Tibetan valley of Shangri-la, El Dorado, city of gold. Then there is Land of the Lost, the TV series that Dylan’s children could have watched when it ran from 1974 to 1976 as their parents’ marriage was falling apart. The show’s dinosaurs, lizard-men, and friendly primates might have provided a welcome distraction. Whatever the meanings of the lost land, it is a memorable land, to say the least.
Dylan points us to this tradition, underscoring the mythical, when he talks about the writers whose stories attracted him even before he started plumbing the rich depths of folk song (39):
In the past I’d never been that keen on books and writers but I liked stories. Stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote about mythical Africa—Luke Short, the mythical Western tales—Jules Verne—H. G. Wells. Those were my favorites but that was before I discovered the folksingers.
These authors are the early-twentieth-century creators of various lost and nonexistent lands, the lost world of Tarzan, mythical places of Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Island of Doctor Moreau. The title of Chapter 2 of Chronicles perhaps puts us on notice about the genre we are about to read. Fact or fiction, or something in between?
Ray and Chloe’s apartment, in which Dylan wakes up in the opening words of “The Lost Land,” is said to be in Tribeca, in a building “near Vestry Street below Canal,” close to the Hudson River. This will allow Dylan to walk over to the window and look out “into the white, gray streets and over towards the river.” Dylan also describes the apartment as being on the same block as the Bull’s Head, “a cellar tavern where John Wilkes Booth, the American Brutus [again those Ides of March via the chief assassin of Julius Caesar], used to drink.” Dylan claims to have seen Booth’s ghost in the mirror at the tavern. In reality, the Bull’s Head, now closed, was well north of Canal, almost three miles away from Vestry Street, at 295 East Avenue. It would seem that Dylan needed the tavern to be close to the apartment for the purposes of the story and its drama. This too could be a lot of bull, but it makes for good reading.
Aside from giving Dylan a place to stay, Ray and Chloe seem to have had no real part in the life that Dylan was leading or people with whom he was associated in the Village, but they come alive through Dylan’s descriptive language and dramatization. Dylan describes Ray as being “like a character out of some of the songs I’d been singing,” ten years older than Dylan—making him all of thirty. Dylan writes (26):
he was like an old wolf, gaunt and battle-scarred—came from a long line of ancestry made up of bishops, generals, even a colonial governor. He was a nonconformist, a nonintegrator and a Southern nationalist. He and Chloe lived in the place like they were hiding out. . . .
His “nonintegrator” status is picked up on later in the chapter when Dylan talks about the preaching of the man who had “been ‘expelled with gratitude’ from Wake Forest Divinity School” (27, 77):
Ray was a Southerner and made no bones about it but he would have been antislavery as much as he would have been antiunion. “Slavery should have been outlawed from the start,” he said. “It was diabolical. Slave power makes it impossible for free workers to make a decent living—it had to be destroyed.” Ray was pragmatic. Sometimes it was as if he had no heart or soul.
And later:
He wasn’t somebody that would leave any footprints in the sand of time, but there was something special about him. He had blood in his eyes, the face of a man who could do no wrong—total lack of viciousness or wickedness or even sinfulness in his face. He seemed like a man who could conquer and command any time he wished to. Ray was mysterious as hell.
According to Dylan, they both had jobs, Ray in a tool-and-die factory in Brooklyn, Chloe as a “hatcheck girl at the Egyptian Gardens, a belly-dancing dinner place on 8th Avenue” (26). She too sounds like someone who could have been in a Dylan song: “Chloe had red-gold hair, hazel eyes, an illegible smile, face like a doll, and an even better figure,” a little reminiscent of Ruby in the 1986 song written with Sam Shepard, “Brownsville Girl”: “Ruby was in the backyard hanging clothes, she had her red hair tied back. . . . Brownsville girl with your Brownsville curls / Teeth like pearls shining like the moon above.” This is in sync with the narrating voice of this chapter of Chronicles, a voice that like its author seems to belong back in the sixties, or even further back in time, maybe the forties, right out of a Raymond Chandler novel.
Ray and Chloe are often away from the apartment, which allows Dylan to take us on tours of the various parts of the place, with “five or six” thematically populated rooms. The detail is exquisite, suggestive either of a photographic memory, unfading across all the years, or something else, namely fiction—or a combination of fact and fiction. As with his songwriting, anything goes.
THE GUN ROOM
Dylan describes one room in the apartment as being full of guns:
There were different parts of guns—of pistols, large frame, small frame, Taurus Tracker pistol, a pocket pistol, trigger guards, everything like in a compost heap—altered guns . . . guns with shortened barrels, different brands of guns—Ruger, Browning, a single-action Navy pistol, everything poised to work, shined out. You’d walk into this room and feel like you were under the vigilance of some unsleeping eye.
In these descriptions, Dylan is exercising his surreal sense of humor in an absurdist listing of thematically connected objects. This delight in lists became a trademark feature of Dylan’s brilliant satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, which ran from May 2006 to April 2009. On the show, Dylan treated listeners to an expert, thematically arranged journey through folk, blues, jazz, country, and popular song of every variety. In Episode 1.11, “Flowers,” DJ Dylan treats listeners to one of these lists:
Tonight we’re going to be talking about the most beautiful things on earth, the fine-smelling, colorful, bee-tempting world of flowers, the Bougainvillea, the Passion Flower, the Butterfly Clerodendron, the Angel’s Trumpets, the Firecracker plant, we’re going to be talking about Rosa rugosa, the Angel Face, All that Jazz, the Double Delight, the Gemini [Dylan’s zodiac sign] and the Julia Child, we’re going to be talking about the Knockout Shrub, the New Dawn, the Mr. Lincoln—and that’s only the roses—we’re also going to hit on the Silver King, the German Statis, the Globe Thistle and the Joe Pie Weed, the Violet, the Daisy, the lovely Chrysanthemum, the Arrow and the Tansy, we’ll be hitting on the Bachelor’s Button, the Coxcomb and the Lion’s Ear, the Love in the Mist and the Victoria Sorghum [laughs],—I just made that one up—we’re going to be talking about “Flowers,” on Theme Time Radio Hour. (58)
THE TOOL ROOM
Back in Ray and Chloe’s apartment, another room turns out to be a workshop, with “all kinds of paraphernalia piled up” (58):
There were some iron flowers on a spiral vine painted white leaning in the corner. All kind of tools laying around. Hammers, hacksaws, screwdrivers, electricians’ pliers, wire cutters and levers, claw chisels, boxes with gear wheels—everything glistening in the backlight of the sun. Soldering equipment and sketch pads, paint tubes and gauges, electric drill—cans of stuff that could make things either waterproof or fireproof.
Here is yet another list, creating an image of a room overflowing with metalworking tools and gadgets, Dylan delighting in the detail. Dylan is knowledgeable about such metalworking matters. I suggest we’re no longer in the tool room of Ray’s Tribeca apartment, but rather in a version of Dylan’s art studio in Los Angeles that has merged with whatever the reality was in Ray’s workroom in 1961. On November 17, 2013, an exhibit of Dylan’s metal sculpture was put up in the Halcyon Gallery in London and fans discovered that he had for many years been soldering and welding scrap metal objects—car parts, lawn mowers, chains, iron wheels, and so on—into artwork, particularly ornamental gates.
Dylan picked up these skills long before 2013. He has an uncredited cameo in the 1990 movie Catchfire, in which he has a brief encounter with hit man Milo, played by Dennis Hopper, who is looking for Jodie Foster, in the role of electronic artist Anne Benton. She has witnessed Milo’s killing of a rival and he is on her trail. Hopper also directed the movie, which he disowned, releasing a cable television version under the name Backtrack. In a scene more or less gratuitous to the plot, Dylan is in a workshop sculpting wood with a chain saw and displaying his metal sculpture. Going even further back, and in real life, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first real girlfriend and Muse in New York, recalls Dylan’s woodworking skills in her autobiography, A Freewheelin’ Life, published in 2008. After Dylan had bought a secondhand TV for the apartment on Fourth Street, she writes, “The TV never really worked very well, so Bob took it out of the cabinet and used the wood to build a decent coffee table and better shelves.” Such things don’t happen without some training.
At that point, Bob Dylan was only two years out of high school, and he presumably picked up these skills in Hibbing, where carpentry and metalworking were of immense importance for employment in the mines, but were also available as electives. On December 14, 1956, the middle of Dylan’s sophomore year, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, contained an article “Metal Arts Class Trains Students in Use of Machine, Hand Tools,” with detail that shows where it all likely started:
Students thus far have produced a wide variety of machine and hand tools, including belt sanders, vises of various kinds, smooth planes for wood working, and a drill press. They have also made repair parts for lawn mowers and tractors, each student grinding his own bits or cutting tools.
If, as seems likely, Ray Gooch’s tool room is really an allusion to Dylan’s own sculptural activities, it is worth adding a further detail from the imaginative mind of Bob Dylan. In episode 21 of Theme Time Radio Hour, “School,” aired in the fall of 2006, the year Modern Times came out with the lines from Roman poet Ovid, DJ Dylan seems to be back in Hibbing: “there are many different kinds of teachers,” he says, naming only two, “there are Latin teachers, shop teachers.” We know the name of his Latin teacher; perhaps he also picked up some skills in metal arts or the woodworking shop.
As Dylan wrote, “Ray was as mysterious as hell.” So is Bob Dylan, and one senses a “transfiguration” here, a term we’ll return to soon. Dylan and Ray both work with metal. Ray’s girlfriend Chloe was working at the Egyptian Gardens, whereas Sara Dylan, before she met Dylan, had worked as a model and Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. And before that, Dylan’s first-known New York girlfriend, Avril, whose apartment he shared in 1961, was also a dancer. Talk about parallel lives. In Chronicles, the stream of consciousness continues into the next room.
THE LIBRARY
Ray Gooch’s library is the room in “The Lost Land” that Dylan gives the most attention. Before entering the library in this chapter, he explains his own place in the history of songwriting (34–35):
Songs were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality, some different republic, some liberated republic. . . . I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was. Nobody bothered with that. If you told the truth that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well that’s still well and good. Folk songs taught me that.
This is an important moment in the book, where Dylan admits that the boundary between truth and untruth in his mind, and in his art, is indistinct. The fact that Dylan provides this signpost right before entering the library is clear indication that his creative imagination was at the wheel, just as much as his actual memory of the books he may or may not have seen in that room. Dylan describes finding himself in this library “looking for the part of my education that I never got.” And a little later (35–36):
The place had an overpowering presence of literature, and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.
We know that this is an exaggeration, and that Dylan’s cultural mind was hardly “black with soot” when he arrived in New York in early 1961, at the age of nineteen. We know that he’d taken B. J. Rolfzen’s poetry classes at Hibbing High, and it is interesting that he claims to have “read [in Ray’s library] the poetry books, mostly. Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe.” But of other books that he here comes across, Dylan says he’s only browsed through them, rather than read them: “I would have had to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that.”
What were the actual titles in that library, whether real or imagined? At the top of Dylan’s list, receiving three mentions in two pages, is the ancient Greek writer Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which Dylan refers to as The Athenian General. He gets the title wrong, but no matter, for he captures the relevance of the Greek historian (36):
It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides talks about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be changed in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.
Clearly Dylan has dipped into Thucydides, as we can see from similarities between his description above and Rex Warner’s Penguin translation of one of the most famous passages of History of the Peloponnesian War (1.22):
It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.
Thucydides was very much in the air in 2003 and 2004, when Dylan was writing Chronicles and the United States was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reading Thucydides then would indeed “give you the chills,” as it did for Dylan. The Greek historian had said of the unwise decision of the Athenians to invade Sicily in 415 BC: “The result of this excessive enthusiasm of the majority was that the few who were opposed to the expedition were afraid of being thought unpatriotic if they voted against it, and therefore kept quiet.” Dylan, writing at the time of our own wars, seems to have been thinking precisely of passages such as this, and about the relevance of the history of ancient Greece to modern America, for more than a decade, as in a 1991 interview, the second year of the First Gulf War:
A college professor told me that if you read about Greece in the history books, you’ll know all about America. Nothing that happens will puzzle you ever again. You read the history of Ancient Greece and when the Romans came in, and nothing will ever bother you about America again. You’ll see what America is.
History is always about the place of the past in the present time, and in 1991 and 2004, the time of Gulf Wars I and II, Dylan was connecting America and the ancient Greeks and Romans. He does so in these pages of Chronicles that do not name any book but give an example of how the Greeks dealt with occupation in the same area where the United States currently found itself:
Alexander the Great’s march into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that he never had any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything.
It is hard not to take this as surreal advice emerging from the surreal world that is “The Lost Land.”
Thucydides’s contemporary Sophocles, the writer of tragedies, is also there in the library, again with a wrong title, as is Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman historians, though he wrote histories, not “lectures and letters to Brutus.” “The Twelve Caesars” of Suetonius, the other Roman historian on whom Robert Graves based his novel I, Claudius, is also there. Ray’s library also contained the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “the scary horror tale”—not a bad description of a work that depicts how human bodies are transformed into trees, birds, flowers, and various kinds of beasts.
Beyond the Greeks and Romans, Dylan expands his range of literary references. From the thirteenth century he mentions Dante’s Inferno, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Machiavelli’s The Prince, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Milton’s poem “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.” He moves on to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with “Gogol and Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo and Dickens,” books on Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, on Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and on Sigmund Freud, “the king of the subconscious.” But nothing he mentions is in chronological order. Everything is jumbled up, Ovid next to the “autobiography of Davy Crockett,” Rousseau’s Social Contract next to Temptation of St. Anthony. This mixing up helps lend the whole catalog an air of pure stream of consciousness, with a delectable juxtaposing of these daunting and frequently off-putting titles in the lively, contemporary voice of Bob Dylan, resulting in an incongruity essential to his humor. Thucydides “could give you the chills,” “Materia medica (the causes and cures for diseases)—that was a good one,” “The words of ‘La Vita Solitaria’ by Leopardi [nineteenth-century Italian poet] seemed to come out of the trunk of a tree, hopeless, uncrushable sentiments.” Joseph Smith “pales in comparison to Thucydides.” “Albertus Magnus was lightweight next to Thucydides,” with a play or joke on the meaning of Latin magnus (“big”): “a lot of these books were too big to read, like giant shoes for large-footed people.” “In the end,” Dylan writes, “the books make the room vibrate in a nauseating and forceful way.” Ray Gooch’s library reflects the creative essence of Dylan’s mind, unfettered by catalogs or by order, and getting to the heart of who he is artistically.
Still in the library, on page 45 of Chronicles Dylan writes, “Invoking the poetic muses was something I didn’t know about yet.” He may not have known about that in 1961, but by 2004 things had changed, as he had been reading and drawing from the classical texts. The most famous encounter between a poet and the Muses is in the Greek poet Hesiod, from the eighth century BC, whom Dylan was quoting in the Rome press conference in 2001 when he discussed the Iron Age and the Golden Age of Homer. There he also mentioned the memoir he was working on. The Muses tell Hesiod what he should learn from them: “We know how to speak many false things that seem like the truth, but we also know, when we choose, how to sing the truth.” Like Dylan, they knew the truth and untruth, and both are fine.
That is what was going on in the description of Ray Gooch’s library, and it is also what is going on in Dylan’s songwriting, right up to the epic 14-minute, 45-verse song “Tempest,” from the 2012 album of the same name. This song is really the culmination of his songwriting. There is truth in it, indeed in its opening words of the second verse, “’Twas the fourteenth day of April,” the day in 1912, one hundred years before the album came out, that the Titanic hit the iceberg that sank it early the next morning. That’s a truth, as is the fact that John Jacob Astor IV, wealthiest of the passengers, went down with the ship. “The rich man, Mr. Astor, kissed his darling wife,” goes the verse. Everyone else in the song is made up. Wellington, who “strapped on both his pistols”; Calvin, Blake, and Wilson, who are “gambling in the dark”; Jim Dandy, who gave up his seat to the “little crippled child”—on the album it was Jim Backus, the actor who played Thurston Howell III on the 1960s TV series of a different shipwreck story, Gilligan’s Island, another lost land—“Davey the brothel keeper,” all of these are untruths. And that too is all well and good, all part of the song that becomes in our memory this newly empowered version of the sinking of the Titanic. Go back to the folk song “The Titanic,” by the Carter Family, from which Dylan took the melody and most of whose words he repurposed as some of the folk song components of his fictional epic. That folk song is visible and audible, and there is no effort or intention to hide the fact. On the contrary, Dylan’s song is the richer for our hearing the old song in his new song. But the new song is something else, something that through Dylan’s genius as a songwriter, singer, verbal painter, has transcended the folk tradition in which it is rooted; it has become both epic and cinematic, a wholly new genre.
BACK TO REALITY
The last chapter of the book takes us back to the first and second. “River of Ice” covers much of the time period of “The Lost Land,” but without the surreal essence of the earlier chapter. In fact, for an understanding of what can be known of Dylan’s life, what it was like growing up in Hibbing, the move to the coffeehouses of Dinkytown, and the eventual move east, you could do worse than start with this last chapter, which ends where the first chapter began, closing the circle, John Hammond signing him to a record deal with Columbia Records in 1961 and Dylan recording the first album in Lou Levy’s studio. “In my beginning is my end,” as T. S. Eliot put it.
So we might expect to run into Ray and Chloe in less surreal guise in this last chapter, which treats 1961 and looks more like truth than untruth. According to Chronicles, Dylan met them through folksinger and folklorist Paul Clayton, whom Dylan describes in Chapter 1 as “good natured, forlorn and melancholic” (26)—with no mention of the fact that he would take his own life in 1967. Clayton himself returns in Chapter 5, and still with no mention of his fate (260–61):
He knew hundreds of songs and must have had a photographic memory. Clayton was unique—elegiac, very princely—part Yankee gentleman and part Southern rakish dandy. He dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare. Clayton traveled regularly from Virginia to New York, and we got to be friends. His companions were out-of-towners and like him, a “caste apart”—had attitudes, but known only to themselves—a non-folky crowd.
That’s all we see of Ray and Chloe. They have disappeared, or rather stepped off the stage, here present only by implication as two of the “out-of-towners” with whom Dylan spent the early weeks of his New York period in early 1961. They and their apartment belonged in the lost land, and that is where Dylan leaves them in the drama of this book. The library of that land, the windowless room “with a painted door—a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library,” has vanished back into the mind of Dylan. Or, as he sang at the end of the melancholic “Forgetful Heart” in 2008, “The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door.”
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF BOB DYLAN
Bob Dylan’s interviews and press conferences are a genre worthy of study in itself, fifty-five years’ worth of creative control and orchestration of the image and information he has permitted the world to possess. He chooses the time, the place, and the interviewers. It is possession of details of his life and lyrics that Dylan’s fans have craved. He almost never discusses or responds to questions about the meaning of lyrics, his politics, relationships, or, since 1980, religious affiliation. Likewise, it is dangerous to trust too much what he does let the world see. My interest in his interviews has to do with the artistic changes through which he went mostly in the twenty-first century, connecting himself across time to other artists, going right back to the ancients. A good part of him is now living in this world.
This process started early, as early as January 31, 1959, when the eighteen-year-old saw Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory, three days before Holly’s death in a plane crash. In his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017, Dylan tells what happened:
He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.
In an interview in 1978, the year before Dylan converted to Christianity for a year or so, Jonathan Cott brings up the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, long associated with Dylan’s music of the mid-sixties, and subject of my next chapter: “I’ve always associated you with Rimbaud . . . do you believe in reincarnation?” Dylan wanders through various possibilities for reincarnation, concluding: “I think one can be conscious of various vibrations in the universe. But reincarnation from the twelfth to the twentieth century—I say it’s impossible.” Cott modifies his question: “when I say Rimbaud and you, you take it as an affinity.” Dylan: “Maybe my spirit passed through the same places as his did. We’re all wind and dust anyway and we could have passed through many barriers at different times.”
More recently, in December 2001, following the release of “Love and Theft,” with those lines of Virgil, Dylan gave another interview, with American writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. As the interview was winding down, Gilmore asked Dylan where the songs on “Love and Theft” came from, noting that the album feels like it’s from “the America we live in now, but also the America we have left behind.” Dylan’s response was complicated:
I mean, you’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s always been that way, for one reason or another. I deal with all the old stereotypes. The language and the identity is the one I know only so well, and I’m not about to go on and keep doing this—comparing my new work to my old work. It creates a kind of Achilles heel for myself. It isn’t going to happen.
Pompeii and Achilles, the world of Rome and of Homer, are mentioned as if Dylan is inhabiting the ancient places. Gilmore doesn’t pick up on Dylan’s references, as regularly happens with his interviews. Instead, he brings things back home to America, asking whether the album emanates from Dylan’s experience of America at that moment. “Every one of the records I’ve made,” Dylan replies, “has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me.” That panorama included the Rome of Dylan’s youth, in Latin classes, the Latin Club, and at the movies, possibly including the director Sergio Leone’s 1959 movie, Last Days of Pompeii, the town destroyed in AD 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which Dylan had just mentioned. In the summer of that year, 2001, Dylan had given the Rome press conference, on July 23. We’ll never know, but I suspect he visited the impressive site of Pompeii, perhaps four days later, July 27, the day after performing a few miles across the Bay of Naples, and before heading off for a concert the following day in Taormina, Sicily.
Dylan’s thirty-second studio album, Modern Times, was released on August 29, 2006, and was soon hailed as a continuation of the comeback that had begun with Time Out of Mind (1997) and continued with “Love and Theft” (2001), the last of the “trilogy,” as it seemed, and was prematurely labeled by some critics. A week after the release of Modern Times, Rolling Stone published “The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan,” written by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who had been interviewing Dylan about the new album. Well before we learned about the classical and other texts in these songs, borrowings from Roman exile Ovid and confederate poet Henry Timrod, Dylan was laying down more clues and hints about the transformations, reincarnations, and transfigurations that his art was undergoing. Here is how Lethem portrayed it, starting with his quote of Dylan from the interview:
“I just let the lyrics go, and when I was singing them, they seemed to have an ancient presence.” Dylan seems to feel he dwells in a body haunted like a house by his bardlike musical precursors. “Those songs are just in my genes, and I couldn’t stop them comin’ out. In a reincarnative kind of way, maybe. The songs have got some kind of a pedigree to them. But that pedigree stuff, that only works so far. You can go back to the ten-hundreds, and people only had one name. Nobody’s gonna tell you they’re going to go back further than when people had one name.”
Who knows when the ten hundreds were? Maybe the Middle Ages, maybe even further back. To those pedigreed people with one name who have been inhabiting Dylan’s song in his renaissance of the last twenty years, and for even longer without his fully realizing it: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Petrarch, Dante, whom Dylan claimed to know by way of Gooch’s library, or more likely through his own serendipitous reading.
Then there is perhaps the liveliest interview he has ever given, in 2012 to Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone following release of the new, and to date last, original album, the masterpiece Tempest. Dylan talks about his own “transfiguration” and produces a book he had brought with him to the interview. He hands it over to Gilmore, who reads some of the book into his tape recorder. It is Ralph “Sonny” Barger’s bestseller Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, cowritten by Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman, or “Zimmermen,” as they call themselves in the preface. The pages Dylan has Gilmore read narrate the motorcycle death in 1961 or 1964 of someone called Bobby Zimmerman. Hell’s Angel is a true story, but for Gilmore things were getting a little strange. None of these three Zimmermans is related, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, to the Bob Zimmerman who became Bob Dylan, who connects the incident in the book to his own motorcycle accident in Woodstock (which happened in 1966, two to five years after that of Bob Z. the Hell’s Angel)—though in a suggestive rather than specific way. He is explaining his own changes in general. To the question, “Are you saying that you really can’t be known?” Dylan replies:
Nobody knows nothing. Who knows who’s been transfigured and who has not? Who knows? Maybe Aristotle? Maybe he was transfigured? I can’t say. Maybe Julius Caesar was transfigured. I have no idea. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe Dante. Maybe Napoleon. Maybe Churchill. You just never know because it doesn’t figure into the history books. That’s all I’m saying.
Julius Caesar, Aristotle, and Dante—again we are back in the world of the Greeks and Romans and their greatest late medieval inheritor, Dante, Italian poet of the thirteenth century. The notion of transfiguration is never quite explained, can’t really be explained. When pushed by Gilmore, Dylan responds as usual: “I only know what I told you. You’ll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it’s about.” And to do that you would have to find “a book about transfiguration.” There is no such book. We are in the world of untruth, as Dylan in this strange and strangely enjoyable interview heads back to—where else?—Rome, the place of his original transfiguration, the city “where I was born” (“Going Back to Rome”). He tells Gilmore:
About a year later I went to a library in Rome and I found a book about transfiguration, because it’s nothing you really hear about every day, and it’s in the mystical realm, and I found out only enough to know that, uh, OK, I’m not an authority on it, but it kind of sets you straight on what sets you apart.
The focus of the interview at one point turns from Tempest to the quality and staying power of his last five albums. Everything since Time Out of Mind, notes Gilmore, “is a body of work that can stand on its own.” Dylan uses this as an opportunity to talk about his music in a way that is at the heart of what this book is about:
The thing about it is that there is the old and the new, and you have to connect with them both. The old goes out and the new comes in, but there is no sharp borderline. The old is still happening while the new enters the scene, sometimes unnoticed. The new is overlapping at the same time the old is weakening its hold. It goes on and on like that. Forever through the centuries.
There are different ways of interpreting this, and Dylan goes on to talk about the shifts in his work from the 1950s to the 1960s, but the words “forever through the centuries” are pretty explicit, and in sync with what is happening with his songs. Later in the interview he will talk in the same way about his performance practices: “[i]t’s always been this way for everybody who’s ever done it, going back to those ancient days.”
In 2017, when Dylan was about to release his thirty-eighth studio album Triplicate, he did another of the carefully scheduled interviews that occur on such occasions, with Bill Flanagan, who at one point says: “No one can hear ‘As Time Goes By’ and not think of Casablanca. What are some movies that have inspired your own songs?” Like the songs he sings on these albums, Dylan’s response takes us back to his teenage years in Hibbing and the world of Roman centurions, gladiators, and biblical epics: “The Robe, King of Kings, Samson and Delilah.” He could have seen The Robe at the State Theater in Hibbing in January 1954. The end of the interview moves from the Roman to the Greek world, as Flanagan asks whether the title Triplicate brings to mind Frank Sinatra’s trilogy of 1980, Past Present Future. “Yeah, in some ways, the idea of it,” Dylan replies, adding, “I was thinking in triads anyway, like Aeschylus, The Oresteia, the three linked Greeks plays. I envisioned something like that.” A follow-up would have been interesting, but the interview instead moved on. We will return to triads.
BOB DYLAN, ROMAN HISTORY TEACHER
Following on from the readings in Ray Gooch’s library, in a 2009 interview with historian Douglas Brinkley, Dylan is asked about the importance of Christian scripture in his life. He redirects the discussion to more works from the Greek and Roman canon:
[T]hose other first books I read were really biblical stuff. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Those were the books that I remembered reading and finding religion in. Later on, I started reading over and over again Plutarch and his Roman Lives. And the writers Cicero, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius . . . I like the morality thing. People talk about it all the time. Some say you can’t legislate morality. Well, maybe not. But morality has gotten kind of a bad rap. In Roman thought, morality is broken down into basically four things. Wisdom, Justice, Moderation and Courage. All of these are the elements that would make up the depth of a person’s morality. And then that would dictate the types of behavior patterns you’d use to respond in any given situation. I don’t look at morality as a religious thing.
I suspect Dylan picked Brinkley as an interviewer—his only interview with a full-time academic—because it was important that his words on this topic, which are fully coherent and have the ring of truth and sincerity, not be garbled or misread.
In 2015, Dylan did a very smart and musically engaged interview with the editor in chief of AARP The Magazine, Robert Love. The interview itself appeared in the March/April issue. To find the theme that has been running through the other recent interviews, to get back to Rome, you have to do some digging and locate the version of the interview on AARP’s website, along with its accompanying photo slide show. In the last of a gallery of twelve slides revealing themes from the interview and its primary subject is a photo with the following caption:
Bob Dylan: His True Calling
“If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”
That sounds about right. As for the slide itself, all it shows is an open book, resting on a stack of four other books. Three of the four dog-eared volumes in the stack look old, going back to the nineteenth or early twentieth century, the sort of books a teacher of Roman history or theology would use, also the sort of books you might have found in the library of Ray Gooch, old editions of Cicero, Tacitus, and Plutarch. The website is that of the AARP, but the hand of Bob Dylan is at work here.