Conclusion: Speechless in Stockholm
On October 1, 2008, the British paper the Guardian ran a headline above a photo of Philip Roth, NO NOBEL PRIZES FOR AMERICAN WRITERS: THEY’RE TOO PAROCHIAL. The source was Horace Engdahl, then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and one of the eighteen members whose job it is to select the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular,” said Engdahl. Himself fluent in six languages, he went on, “They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the great dialogue of literature.” The response from writers in the United States had been as harsh as the statement, perhaps because Engdahl’s words seemed to be an advance notice that there would be no American winner in 2008. David Remnick of the New Yorker told the Associated Press, “You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures.”
Sure enough, that year and for the next seven years, the drought stretching back to 1993, when Toni Morrison won the award, would continue, with a rich variety of non-American winners: French-Breton, Romanian-German, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Canadian, Ukrainian-Belarusian.
But by October 13, 2016, things had changed. Sara Danius, who had taken over as permanent secretary of the Nobel Committee, delivered the news to the applause and acclamation of the scores of journalists present for the occasion, in an elegant building that in an earlier age housed the Stockholm Stock Exchange. The text Danius read in Swedish, English, French, and German was as simple as it was meaningful and momentous: “The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
This moment was actually twenty years in the making. In 1996, two Dylan fans in Norway, journalist Reidar Indrebø and attorney Gunnar Lunde, contacted the office of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, hoping for support for the nomination of Bob Dylan. Nobel nominations are only accepted from members of the Swedish Academy itself or of other similar academies, from professors of literature and language, from past Nobel laureates, or from presidents of literary societies around the world. Ginsberg met none of these criteria, but he had decided to anoint Dylan as his successor, one poet thus recognizing the artistic genius of another who would replace and eclipse him. Ginsberg’s office put the wheels in motion by contacting a professor at the Virginia Military Institute named Gordon Ball, who was the author of three books on Ginsberg, and who had been a fan of Bob Dylan since first seeing him perform at the historic Newport Folk Festival in 1965. As a result of this chain of communication, beginning in 1996, and then again every year afterward, Ball had been nominating Bob Dylan for the Nobel. Two decades later, in 2016, the message had finally gotten through. As one commenter put it, “Looks like the Nobel Committee has gone electric.”
The reaction to the announcement from the literary community was swift and uncompromising, and a mix of celebration and detraction. Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Salman Rushdie immediately hailed the choice. Rushdie, who may well have been a candidate himself, was unstinting, quoted in the New York Times as saying that “from Orpheus to Faiz, song and poetry have been closely linked,” and calling Dylan “the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition,” with a further punctuation, “Great choice.” King declared himself “ecstatic” and called the choice “a great and good thing in a season of sleaze and sadness”—this in the difficult and tawdry weeks leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Andrew Motion, poet laureate of the UK, 1999-2000, considered the award “a wonderful acknowledgement of Dylan’s genius: for 50 and some years he has bent, coaxed, teased and persuaded words into lyric and narrative shapes that are at once extraordinary and inevitable.”
Those who objected were in the minority, their objections often definitional: Dylan might be a good singer-songwriter, but without music his words could not stand on their own, and thus were not poetry or literature. So, for instance, Irish literary critic Edna Longley called the award “a ridiculous decision, and an insult to real poets.” But by the time of the ceremony in Stockholm, naysayers in the media and blogosphere had largely been silenced. In the words that Engdahl read at the ceremony, the awarding of the Nobel Prize “was a decision that seemed daring only beforehand and already seems obvious.”
The Nobel Prize ceremony, also triadic, a play in three parts, took place on December 10, 2016, and the formal address that evening was delivered by the same Horace Engdahl who had called American writers parochial eight years earlier. The speech sounded very much like the work of a committee, with various threads that somehow all came together, in many ways reflecting the complexity of the phenomenon that is Bob Dylan. The address began with the opening question: “What brings about the great shifts in the world of literature?” The answer got to the heart of the matter: “Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple, overlooked form, discounted as art in the higher sense, and makes it mutate.” The committee had also closely engaged with the question of whether song can be literature. Maybe they even debated or disagreed over the issues, which has long seemed irrelevant to many, as the address went on to note:
In itself, it ought not to be a sensation that a singer/ songwriter now stands recipient of the literary Nobel Prize. In a distant past, all poetry was sung or tunefully recited, poets were rhapsodes, bards, troubadours; “lyrics” comes from “lyre.”
Throughout Engdahl’s address, we are inevitably hearing the voices of various members of the academy, as well as of Gordon Ball from his annual nominations, and of Dylanologists whose writings had been brought to the attention of those voting.
Engdahl went on to talk of the many qualities that had persuaded the committee: the creativity that begins with imitation, the dazzling rhymes “scarcely containable by the human brain,” Dylan’s love songs, his eclipse of those in whose tradition he sang—Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Blake, Rimbaud, Whitman, Shakespeare, his bringing back of a poetic language “lost since the Romantics.” For the Nobel Committee, Bob Dylan mattered because of his creation of an art that compelled them to see it as literature of the highest order:
By means of his oeuvre, Bob Dylan has changed our idea of what poetry can be and how it can work. He is a singer worthy of a place beside the Greeks’ aoidoi [“poet-singers”], beside Ovid, beside the Romantic visionaries, beside the kings and queens of the Blues, beside the forgotten masters of brilliant standards.
PATTI SMITH COVERS “A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL”
Next came the second act, starring Patti Smith, a sort of channel to Dylan, who had opted not to attend the award ceremony. Bob Dylan’s absence in Stockholm, and the fact that it took him weeks to respond when the prize was first announced, are matters of speculation. My guess is that he just couldn’t see himself in that august room; it wasn’t his thing. So Patti Smith singing Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” was as close as we were going to get that night. Anyone who saw that performance was a live witness to why Dylan matters. The modern significance of his work was seemingly encapsulated by this one song, written more than half a century earlier in Greenwich Village by a twenty-one-year-old. The song’s line “Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter” may well have come from the reality of Dylan’s life in the Village in those days, as he sang in cafés for hamburgers and spare change and slept on couches. Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain” in the summer of 1962 and first performed it on September 22, in the weeks before the Cuban missile crisis of October 16–28, the closest the world came to all-out nuclear war. When the song was released on May 27, 1963, on Dylan’s first original album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it was naturally assumed that the “hard rain” was the rain of nuclear bombs that had threatened a few months before. Indeed, by then there was no reason not to connect it to such events—though ultimately the language of the song, and the absence of defining and limiting topical, geographical, or chronological elements, make it a song for any time. Dylan has said of this and by extension of all song, “it doesn’t really matter where a song comes from. It just matters where it takes you.”
Each verse of Dylan’s song begins with a variant of a line from a seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish ballad called “Lord Randall.” In the original ballad, the singer addresses a character named Lord Randall: “Oh where ha you been, Lord Randall, my son, / And where ha you been, my handsome young man.” But in Dylan’s song he substitutes “my blued-eyed son” for “Lord Randall,” thus allowing the song to be addressed to the strikingly blue-eyed Bob Dylan himself.
If we interpret the lyrics as a sort of call-and-response between Dylan the singer and Dylan the addressee, the song transforms from a narrative ballad to a cry of warning that Dylan has to offer to a world gone wrong:
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Each of the scenes the blue-eyed boy encounters in the final verse is as vivid now as it was back in the 1960s:
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
In a piece she wrote for the New Yorker in December 2016, Patti Smith recalls how she came to sing “A Hard Rain” at the ceremony. She had first heard it in 1963, the year the album came out, when she was sixteen. According to Smith, her mother, a waitress, had bought the album for her secondhand, using her tip money. Smith described it as “a song I have loved since I was a teenager, and favorite of my late husband”—guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith.
“I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’,” Smith sang, halfway through the second verse. At that moment, the camera focused on presenter of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Thors Hans Hansson, a distinguished gray-haired, bearded gentleman. His formal white tie and tails might have led one to think he would disapprove of a Bob Dylan song being performed at the Nobel ceremony, following the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s rendition of Jean Sibelius’s Serenade, from the King Christian II Suite. But then Hansson’s lips started moving as he sang to himself, “blood that kept drippin’.” Clearly the theoretical physicist was at that moment just another Dylan fan. And if one expected to see doubt or disapproval on the faces of others in attendance, either at the novelty of the award or at the failure of Dylan to come to their ceremony, the truth was far from it, as Dylanologist David Gaines reported:
The Swedish Minister of Culture, a striking woman in a red dress, cried throughout the song. When Smith closed, the royals and the other 1,250 people looked toward her and applauded. My Swedish friends with whom I watched the broadcast (it is the most widely watched program in Sweden every year) told me, “We have never seen such applause before.”
At this point the camera moved back toward the stage as Smith stumbled over the lyrics, halfway through the second verse of a song that she had been singing with such power. She struggled to find her place, eventually giving up and turning to the orchestra: “Sorry. I’m sorry. Could we start that section again?” She looked out at the audience: “I apologize. Sorry. I’m so nervous.” In response, the hall seemed to echo with applause, restoring her confidence. She picked up where she had left off and finished the song beautifully, from the crowd’s perspective. As Smith wrote of the experience in the New Yorker:
From the corner of my eye, I could see the huge boom stand of the television camera, and all the dignitaries upon the stage and the people beyond. Unaccustomed to such an overwhelming case of nerves, I was unable to continue. I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I was simply unable to draw them out.
“Patti Smith botches Nobel tribute to absent Bob Dylan,” proclaimed the New York Post on December 11, a putdown of both artists. The Post missed the point. In that lapse you see the frailty and humanity of the singer, as she goes on to complete the song, but you also see her resilience. Through Smith’s performance, we witnessed the lyrics of “A Hard Rain” come to life, showing us what it means to fall, as we’ve all fallen, and to get up and struggle on. Smith was performing for an audience that included the king of Sweden and other royals, as well as scientists and academics and members of the Swedish Academy and high society. The roomful of men in white tie and tails and women in evening gowns lent a strict formality to the occasion, with differences and individuality concealed behind evening dress. Those six words—“I apologize. Sorry. I’m so nervous”—were so honest and vulnerable that they shifted the tone and canceled out any differences in the room, between physics and folk song, chemistry and rock, medicine and popular culture.
In the early sixties, years that had students hiding under their desks in nuclear war drills, the song’s lyrics had taken listeners to the threat of Cold War missile attacks. On the night of Smith’s performance, fifty-five years after the song was written, its lyrics conjure up new associations: people “whose hands are all empty” remind us of an inequality throughout the world that seems endless; “pellets of poison” might evoke the poison of electoral politics in 2016, or the environmental consequences; “damp dirty prison” might suggest mass incarceration in the United States or Kalief Browder, the black teenager held for three years without trial and in solitary confinement at New York’s Rikers Island, dead by his own hand at twenty-two. As for the “always well-hidden” executioner’s face, it’s not now the hooded executioner, but maybe a uniformed figure in a dimly lit room, deploying a drone far from its target—like playing a video game. What other song from 1962 still works the way “Hard Rain” does?
It is a song of indignation, but also a song of resolve—“I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it.” Patti Smith showed that as she recovered and finished the song, which mattered in that moment, as surely it did back when Dylan wrote it. It is also a song of beauty. The tears that many shed as they watched Smith came from a place of human desire, or need, for what is beautiful.
It had initially taken Dylan more than two weeks to respond to the announcement of the award. Sara Danius had seemed patient four days after the initial announcement, as she told the Telegraph on October 17. “Right now we are doing nothing,” said Danius. “I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now that is certainly enough.” In the two weeks since the October 13 announcement, Dylan performed eleven concerts in eight states, from California to Mississippi. He may just have been focused on what matters most to him: performing his songs. Eventually, on October 28, the Swedish Academy put out a press release under the heading “The Call from Bob Dylan”:
“If I accept the Prize? Of course.” . . . This week Bob Dylan called the Swedish Academy. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless,” he told Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy. “I appreciate the honor so much.”
The next day the journalist Edna Gunderson published an interview with Dylan in the Telegraph, scheduled in connection with an upcoming exhibition of Dylan’s artwork in London. Gunderson, quoting Danius, asked Dylan how he felt about the permanent secretary’s connecting his songs to poetic texts of classical antiquity:
“If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so,” she [Danius] has said, “you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho . . . and we enjoy it, and same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read, and should be read.”
Dylan responds with some hesitation:
“I suppose so, in some way. Some [of my own] songs—‘Blind Willie,’ ‘The Ballad of Hollis Brown,’ ‘Joey,’ ‘A Hard Rain,’ ‘Hurricane,’ and some others—definitely are Homeric in value.” Of this Gunderson says, “He has, of course, never been one to explain his lyrics. ‘I’ll let other people decide what they are,’ he tells me. ‘The academics, they ought to know. I’m not really qualified. I don’t have any opinion.’”
With this answer from Dylan, who is almost invariably silent on the meaning of his songs, the door opened a little, as he acknowledged that some of them might legitimately be considered “Homeric.” The fact that he chose to compare “Blind Willie [McTell],” a song about a blind blues singer, to Homer, another blind poet, was typical of Dylan’s sense of humor. In reality, he had, night after night since news of the award was released, been singing the words of Homer’s Odysseus from “Pay in Blood” and “Early Roman Kings”—truly Homeric songs—but he wasn’t about to let that out. Dylan goes back to Homer, but he also differs gently but surely from Danius in his Nobel lecture, honest to the end: “songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read.” So much for that question.
Eventually, on November 17, the Associated Press reported that Dylan had told the Swedish Academy that “he wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible.” He did, however, send in an acceptance speech, a condition of receiving the Nobel. Read by Azita Raji, the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, it was a tour de force, a demonstration to anyone who needed it that they had the right man, coming across as sincerely grateful, and marked by elegance, wit, and humor. Raji delivered Dylan’s prose to the banqueters:
Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.
The same gracious tone continues:
I’m sorry I can’t be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize.
Then things get interesting as Dylan’s speech begins to reveal its artistic purposes:
From an early age, I’ve been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.
A few weeks earlier, Dylan had said that the award had left him “speechless,” and now the sentiment was “beyond words”—but this at the end of some fairly specific words from the man of whom Joan Baez sang, “you who’re so good with words, and at keeping things vague.” He chooses to cite six specific writers, now fellow laureates, as making an impression on him, George Bernard Shaw but no W. B. Yeats or Seamus Heaney. Hemingway but no William Faulkner or even John Steinbeck.
Nor does Dylan mention T. S. Eliot, who famously appeared along with Ezra Pound in his 1965 song “Desolation Row,” whose words borrowed, or stole, from Eliot’s first poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as noted at the beginning of this book. In his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan makes a distinction: “I never did read him [Pound]. I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading.” It is curious that Dylan failed in his acceptance speech to mention the poet whose work he must have highly regarded, and who transformed poetic tradition in the 1920s in a way that’s comparable to Dylan’s transformation of songwriting traditions forty years later. I suspect that Dylan left Eliot out through real modesty. He knew what Eliot had done for English literature and was not quite ready to put himself on that pedestal. Even if that is where he belongs.
Dylan’s tone is modest, but his typical allusiveness and humor are never far off:
If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I’d have about the same odds as standing on the moon.
Is Dylan here alluding to Seamus Heaney’s 1995 Nobel acceptance speech, which also compared the prize to venturing into space? Or was “standing on the moon” just a nod to Robert Hunter, who wrote the Grateful Dead song of that title with Jerry Garcia, and who also cowrote most of the songs of Together Though Life and the first song on Tempest, “Duquesne Whistle,” with Dylan?
Dylan’s next sentence also shows that humor is in the air:
In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn’t anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.
No one was good enough in the literature category in 1941, the year Dylan was born? Or could it be that Sweden and the Swedish Academy had more pressing things going on in the difficult war years from 1940 to 1942, and that’s why they awarded no prizes in any category during this period? Dylan, a historian at heart, knew this full well. Good one, Bob!
What about Dylan and Shakespeare? People have been connecting the two names for years, and rightly so. With modesty, style, and wit, Dylan gave us an answer in his address:
I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn’t have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: “Who’re the right actors for these roles?” “How should this be staged?” “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. “Is the financing in place?” “Are there enough good seats for my patrons?” “Where am I going to get a human skull?” I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question “Is this literature?”
The point Dylan makes is a serious one, and it’s one that draws an interesting parallel between Shakespeare and himself as both concerned with performance, and not “literature.” But the fact that he makes it with humor, with poor Yorick’s skull carrying the punch line, removes any possibility for self-importance. “Do I really want to set this in Denmark?” . . . “Where am I going to get a human skull?” Dylan loves the three-part parallel question, of which there are two sets here, and he will return to this device later in his speech. It belongs to the world of rhetoric and persuasive speech, going back to the Greeks and Romans, and it is at the core of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the song he positioned in first place on his first original album: “How many roads . . .” But it also belongs to the world of jest, vaudeville, and the punch line, worlds never far from Dylan’s mind. Before coming back to the triple question, Dylan first turns to his own song in performance, to what he has always cared most about:
Well, I’ve been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I’ve made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it’s my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I’m grateful for that.
Dylan’s expression of gratitude for the place he and his songs have found in the hearts of millions gives a rare glimpse, seldom seen in performance, of his appreciation for his fans. As he put it on the 1997 song “Mississippi,” “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me,” or in the words of the cover song with which he has closed many concerts in recent years, “Stay with me.”
Soon his speech elegantly loops back to Shakespeare, and their shared concern with performance over creating high literature. This time, as Dylan returns to the three-part question, there is no joke. These are the questions he has been concerned with for years, the questions that go to the heart of his art:
But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. “Who are the best musicians for these songs?” “Am I recording in the right studio?” “Is this song in the right key?” Some things never change, even in 400 years.
Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, “Are my songs literature?”
In closing, Dylan’s speech comes full circle as he accepts the academy’s judgment and honors their answer, not his, to this question, which the world had been debating for the last two months:
So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.
My best wishes to you all, BOB DYLAN
The verdict is in. Yes, Dylan’s work is literature, in an expansive rather than a limiting sense of the word. He is rightly the holder of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016, and you can add his speech to the rest of his masterpieces. But at the same time, Dylan’s award gives us reason to call into question the way we define “great literature” in modern society. If literature is only something that gets written down, valued by literate societies, preserved in libraries, read in solitude and taught in schools, much of the material that went into Dylan’s songs—at least until his songwriting in the twenty-first century—is not itself great literature. And yet, how do we classify artistic work that springs from the oral tradition of the blues and folk, and that survives and thrives in illiterate and semiliterate cultures because what those traditions preserve is something human communities need? Is this work not literary until a Dylan, or a classical poet like Homer, comes along and the song is written down? It is a mark of Dylan’s art, and of his genius, that the song he has created—and performed—is something that matters as much as the more conventionally literary traditions that, like his song, convey solace, joy, and sadness to humanity.
DYLAN’S NOBEL LECTURE
On June 5, 2017, days before the deadline of June 10, the Swedish Academy announced that Bob Dylan had delivered a video of the 2016 Nobel Lecture in Literature, taped in Los Angeles on June 4. The week before, as reported in the New York Times on June 7, jazz pianist Alan Pasqua, who had briefly played for Dylan in the late seventies, was contacted by Dylan’s business manager:
“Have you ever watched those old clips of Steve Allen interviewing people, when he plays the piano?” And I was like, yeah! And he said, “Well, we need some of that kind of music. You know, not really melodic, not cocktail, not super jazzy, but sort of background-y piano music.”
Pasqua obliged, and the music can be heard gently and unobtrusively in the background. Its presence should be one clue that the lecture would not be conventional. It is however highly informative, with Dylan talking about Buddy Holly at the “dawning of it all,” the singer whose intertwining of country western, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues into one genre showed the seventeen-year-old Bob Zimmerman what was possible, as did the “beautiful melodies and imaginative verses” Holly created. In the drama of Dylan’s lecture—clearly a work of creative imagination as well as actual truth—right around the time Holly died in the plane crash of 1959, someone hands him a Leadbelly record. This transports him “into a world I’d never known,” the world of work songs, prison songs, gospel, the blues. A leaflet that came with the Leadbelly record introduced him to Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Jean Ritchie, all on the same label as Leadbelly, and therefore bound to be worth listening to, he informs us. A neat way of describing or constructing his genesis as folksinger!
Dylan then moves on to a fascinating description of how he gained a mastery over the “vernacular” of the early folk artists by singing the songs: “You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea chanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.” These are important observations for those wishing to understand how Dylan’s songwriting genius came to be, the experience and observation that go along with his imagination. There follows a magnificent paragraph in which the lecture enters into the worlds of these old traditions, and the use of the pronoun “you,” pointing to Bob Dylan the songwriter, anticipates what we already saw with respect to the Odyssey at the end of the lecture, where “you” included Dylan and Odysseus:
You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.
Just as he becomes Odysseus later in the lecture—“You too have had drugs dropped in your wine”—so too here he has entered into the folk songs and ballads which he has hardwired and whose world he inhabits. This is what it means to live inside the world of literature and song. Dylan’s words are crowded with lines of songs: ”Stagger Lee was a bad man” (“Stagger Lee”), “Frankie was a good girl” (“Frankie and Albert”), “the fife that played lowly” (“Streets of Laredo”), and the absurdism of what Dylan’s songwriting can do is on full display: “you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek.” He may even be having a little political fun. In the song “Mattie Groves,” which goes back to the early seventeenth century and is known by various other titles, Mattie, aka “Little Musgrave,” goes to bed with Lady Barnard. Lord Barnard catches the two in flagrante delicto, kills Mattie, and then kills his wife after she expresses a preference for Mattie—sounds like the situation in the 2012 song “Tin Angel.” Mattie would rightly be called the “lusty” one in this ballad. Lord Barnard, who has a number of variant names, including “Lord Donald” is the cuckold. But Dylan’s “lusty Lord Donald” may have appealed to him for contemporary political reasons.
The bulk of the lecture focuses on three books out of many, read back in “grammar school,” from which Dylan had acquired “principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world.” Along with the Odyssey, he names Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). For the former Dylan particularly focuses on character and on the book’s “scenes of high drama and dramatic dialogue,” with a rousing conclusion at the end of the hunt for the great white whale. His thoughts here seem to revolve around faith and creeds, resurrection and survival, and in the most eclectic way: “Everything is mixed in. All the myths: the Judeo-Christian Bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules—they’re all whalers.” He also explores how to respond to the hand fate deals us, how “different men react in different ways to the same experience.” The lesson for Dylan is in the contrast between Ahab, obsessed and driven by Moby, and Captain Boomer, who “lost an arm to Moby. But he tolerates that, and he’s happy to have survived. He can’t accept Ahab’s lust for vengeance.” The narration here is straightforward, without that autobiographical use of “you,” but also deals in masks and personas:
We see only the surface of things. We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit. Crewmen walk around on deck listening for mermaids, and sharks and vultures follow the ship. Reading skulls and faces like you read a book. Here’s a face. I’ll put it in front of you. Read it if you can.
He ends as Melville began, with Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, who like Dylan the songwriter, is the one who makes the masks: “Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.”
While Moby-Dick for Dylan offers ways of surviving, along with choices to make, Dylan’s response to another book that worked its way into his songs, All Quiet on the Western Front, a “horror story,” is very different. At first the use of the second person “you” seems to refer to the audience, also to Dylan himself, as he begins:
This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain.
The German novel, written in the aftermath of the first world war, and so effective as an antiwar novel that the Nazis burned it and banned it from a Germany that was moving toward the catastrophe of the next world war, is until its last page narrated entirely in the first person. The narrator and lead character is Paul Bäumer, through whose eyes we see the human degradation brought about by life in the mud and rat- and corpse-infested trenches of the “war to end all wars.”
Dylan’s narration, almost a third of the entire lecture, is astonishing. From the very next sentence, it becomes clear that the identity of the “you” is in fact not Dylan or us, but Paul himself:
You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.
For more than six minutes, piano softly playing in the background, the Nobel lecture becomes a talking blues, a distillation of the entire book, turning Remarque’s first person into a second person, as Dylan addresses the young soldier-narrator. The detail is relentless, as is the book that it distills, with Dylan’s poetic powers in full view:
More machine guns rattle, more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and legs and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body, gas-blowing cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target practice. Boots, too. They’re your prized possession. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet.
Through the inhumanity depicted by the book in Dylan’s empathetic and brilliant retelling there shines a ray of humanity, especially right before shrapnel hits Paul in the head and kills him. In the book the narration at that moment shifts from first person to third: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front,” then proceeding dispassionately to relate the death of the person whose voice has led us throughout the book: “he had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping . . .” Dylan ends by switching from second to first person, with an epitaph to Paul followed his own reflection:
You’re so alone. Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead. You’ve been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.
Like the book, Dylan’s lecture is also a searing indictment of the old who make the wars and send the young to their deaths in battle: “You’ve come to despise that older generation that sent you into this madness, into this torture chamber.” For Dylan, as for many of his generation, these thoughts go back to Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings about the proliferation of the “military-industrial complex,” issued the very week the twenty-year-old Dylan arrived in New York City in that frigid January. He may not have read another war novel again, but he didn’t need to. He had all that he needed to write “Masters of War,” the greatest anti-war song ever written. Three or four years after reading All Quiet at Hibbing High, Dylan finally found in Jean Ritchie’s song “Nottamun Town” the melody for his version of the novel:
You hide in your mansions
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.
“SEAL UP THE BOOK”
It is time to “seal up the book and not write any more,” as Dylan sings in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” from Time Out of Mind. But this is a hazardous business, since Dylan’s work continues, and words can come back to haunt you. For all I know, just as this book goes to press, Dylan’s camp may announce that a sequel to Tempest is in the works, or is even about to be released, my triad may have disappeared, the songs left in Rome in November 2013 may come crowding back into the setlist.
Two of the foremost Dylan scholars out there, Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin, were quite aware of the predicament. Gray’s Song and Dance Man III, published in 2000, ended with a lamentation of the state of Dylan’s art at the time, with Gray fervently hoping that he “refuses to settle for this comfortable descent, in an apparently inevitable smooth arc, into being a performer and writer of less and less artistic power.” But Gray also concluded by allowing that there might be an ascent, albeit with faint praise (“faltering step”) for the extended miracle that started happening in 1997:
Impending old age is itself good raw material. Instead of clinging to his back catalogue, he could voice his real concerns, as once he did, and be glad to have an audience: 1997’s “Time Out of Mind” is a faltering step along this path.
Only seven of twenty-one songs from the 2017 tour existed in Dylan’s songbook when Gray wrote that. The path from 2000 has been long and wide.
The approach of Clinton Heylin, to whom scholars and fans of Dylan, myself not least, are most in debt, was to continue supplementing his 1991 Behind the Shades biography, its 498 pages growing to 780 pages in the 2001 “Revisited” volume, and 902 in the 20th Anniversary Edition in 2011, getting us down to 2010, so not covering Tempest. This is not to count his five other books on Dylan, especially the two-part song-by-song histories, Revolution in the Air (2009) and Still on the Road (2010). By the time you are reading this book, a sixth, his treatment of the gospel years, Trouble in Mind, will have been added.
So I prefer to give Dylan the last word. In his most recent interview to date, with writer and TV executive Bill Flanagan on March 22, 2017, Dylan to my mind confirms many of the aspects of his art that I have engaged in this book. He doesn’t use the word intertextuality—why should he?—but he is talking about the phenomenon when he says, “Try to create something original, you’re in for a surprise.” Instead, like the poets you have met—maybe for the first time—in this book, he has other ways of creating. In the interview, Flanagan asks him a question, which sounds a lot like a plant by Dylan: “People yell about plagiarism . . . but it has always gone on in every form of music, hasn’t it?” Dylan replies:
I’m sure it has, there’s always some precedent—most everything is a knockoff of something else. You could have some monstrous vision, or a perplexing idea that you can’t quite get down, can’t handle the theme. But then you’ll see a newspaper clipping or a billboard sign, or a paragraph from an old Dickens novel, or you’ll hear some line from another song, or something you might overhear somebody say just might be something in your mind that you didn’t know you remembered. That will give you the point of approach and specific details. It’s like you’re sleepwalking, not searching or seeking; things are transmitted to you. It’s as if you were looking at something far off and now you’re standing in the middle of it. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It’s the art of transforming things. You don’t really serve art, art serves you and it’s only an expression of life anyway; it’s not real life.
Flanagan also asks Dylan about the world that has been lost since the time of the writers of the Great American Songbook. His response refers to those songs but also to his art in general and to the ways that art has worked for him for a long time:
You can still find what you’re looking for if you follow the trail back. It could be right there where you left it—anything is possible. Trouble is, you can’t bring it back with you. You have to stay right there with it. I think that is what nostalgia is all about.
I’ve been on that trail for a long time, engaging not just with the world of the songs that Dylan wrote in the mid-twentieth century, but going way back, all the way to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. And Bob Dylan, the supreme artist of the English language of my time, has been on that same trail, going back to ancient times to mine material for his work, and making it about the here and now. In 1997, the last song of the comeback album Time Out of Mind treats that nostalgia, being “there in my mind” in the Highlands of Robert Burns, yes, but as the next twenty years would show, in even more ancient worlds:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind
And that’s good enough for now.
—Bob Dylan, “Highlands”
Good enough for me, too.