We must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, “OF SOLITUDE”

 

 

2

 

CLASSIC SOLITUDES

 

 

Revealing as Springsteen’s autobiography is about his life, career, and craft, Born to Run is not least a confirmation of his qualities as a writer. Maybe he overuses capitals and occasionally rocks and rolls down anecdotal byways, but from that first description of childhood memories of Randolph Street through the compassionate portrait of his father to his relative honesty about his own failings, it’s shot through with incisive descriptions, character sketches, observations, and judgments. This is no surprise. Robert Coles reports Walker Percy saying that some of his novelist friends told him they wished “they could write a story that had the power and the appeal of Springsteen’s musical storytelling.” Bob Dylan told his son Jacob that Springsteen “can block out a novel in two lines.” Writers and songwriters have long admired Springsteen’s way with words. He doesn’t feature in Percy’s fiction, but the novelist notes T. Coraghessan Boyle’s story, “Greasy Lake,” and the influence on it of “Spirit in the Night.”1 With Richard Ford, the admiration is mutual. Springsteen observes that The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land “nail the Jersey Shore perfectly” while Ford admits that “Springsteen’s New Jersey songbook was instrumental” to his “believing that the Garden State was a fit subject and setting” for his Frank Bascombe novels. He simply avoided direct reference for fear of undermining his own art.2 This didn’t worry Bobbie Ann Mason with In Country, or contributors to the story collections inspired by his songs (Trouble in the Heartland, edited by Joe Clifford), or by a single song (Meeting Across the River, edited by Jessica Kay and Richard J. Brewer), or by an album (Tennessee Jones’s Nebraska-inspired Deliver Me from Nowhere).3 Springsteen is himself indebted to classic and contemporary American writing. He describes “films and writers and novels” as “primary influences” (TAD 198). A musical “traditionalist,” he’s equally part of the writing continuum.

As with many artists, the interaction between solitude and companionship has to do with Springsteen’s experiences and innate disposition. Anthony Storr writes of “the emotional significance” of what goes on in an individual’s mind when alone, and of “the central place occupied by the imagination in those capable of creative achievement.” Not least because Springsteen’s art oscillates between solitude and the communal, he’s become, in Storr’s terms, an “attachment figure” people feel they “can rely on even though the person concerned is not actually present.” In a given situation, individuals ask of such figures what they would do (be they a public figure or a deity, or simply absent). For Storr, this amounts to “relying upon someone who, although not there in reality, has been incorporated into an individual’s imaginative world as someone to turn to in a dilemma.”4 In the case of artists, the work provides sustenance by exuding an apparent sincerity born of the communal impulse within the experience of solitude. For Storr, success can be intimately related to “emotional scars.” Activity designed as “compensation for deprivation” becomes “a rewarding way of life” that proves “as valid as any other, and more interesting than most.” Often the artists themselves have developed “imaginative capacities as a compensation for the absence of, or severance of, intimate relationships with parents.” Creativity takes on a “healing function.” Our drive to understand and connect is also “a hunger for integration and unity within.” (“Everybody,” Storr may as well be saying, “has a hungry heart.”) This is the intersection between lonesomeness and community, and between solitary creation and a paradoxical loss of self that is lessened by sharing that creation with others.5 Connected, no doubt, with his early sense of isolation, Springsteen has referred to relationships as “the bonds that keep you from slipping into the abyss of self-destruction” (TAD 176). But like many artists, he’s turned these feelings into something of social value. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes of how the “mystical states” involved in artistic activity can transport the individual “from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace.”6 A disposition toward solitude, oscillating with a need to connect, explains Springsteen’s intense assertion of his symbiotic relationship with his audience. “I had to infuse the music with my own hopes and fears,” he’s said. “If you don’t do that, your characters ring hollow” (S 69). Introspection leads to connection. For Springsteen, “this conversation,” helped by the E Street Band as “the living manifestation of the community I write about,” has ensured his continued desire to write, record, and perform (TAD 197).

In this, Springsteen is a fellow traveler with a wide range of American literary figures. Various sources, including the 2014 New York Times Review interview, testify to his intellectual interests.7 He’s read plenty of literature, and not just American. But while you don’t read The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and Love in the Time of Cholera without them affecting you, it may be conversely true that, as a product of American culture, he need not have read Emerson, William James, and so forth to absorb their worldview. Through such reading, his main discovery may have been not new ideas so much as a realization that others have asked similar questions. When Emerson advises that we speak our “latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense,” he reminds us that we learn from observation.8 Like many independent thinkers, Springsteen took time to master not only his craft but also some self-understanding. Therapy led him to see more of how he really was. Solitude resulting in self-discovery and contemplation of others has long been an American activity. Frederick Douglass learned to read and write. Nathaniel Hawthorne entered shadowy worlds. Herman Melville set out to sea. Henry David Thoreau sought the woods by Walden Pond to build a cabin. Emily Dickinson escaped patriarchal dictates by descending into her cerebral labyrinth to “hit a World at every turn.” Walt Whitman sang from the rooftops, and Mark Twain wrote of life on the Mississippi, away from the conventions and cruelties of shore. To contribute “productively to a community,” writes Kevin Lewis, individuals have often “taken strength from their obligatory solitariness.”9 Working for hours alone, artists exemplify this. What follows, therefore, may illuminate Springsteen’s relationship with what I’ve termed “classic solitudes” in American writing.

 

Reading Born to Run I found myself thinking of The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). For all their obvious differences in shape, size, and substance, the autobiographies share certain themes. One of these is empowerment through expression. As far as the dominant culture is concerned, and in some ways within African American culture, Douglass is an outsider looking in. He’s born not just into physical slavery but also into the likelihood of growing up ignorant, and therefore mentally enslaved. In seeking a way out he must balance cultural identification with objectivity. He comes to realize, in maturity and freedom, that “to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one,” or, perhaps more accurately, to ensure an uneducated one.10 If individuals acquire an education they acquire broader perspectives. They then empower themselves and are able to empower others. In childhood Douglass has “a want of information” about who he is. He’s lost his mother, knows only that his father is white, and has no knowledge of the historical context of his position. His master, who may be his father, deems even basic enquiries by a slave to be “improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit.”11 Douglass experiences mental and physical trauma from childhood on, not least with the “cursing, raving, cutting and slashing” of the overseer, Mr. Severe. But he also learns from observing and listening. He sees the ambivalence of the slaves’ attitudes toward those with power. “The Great House Farm,” he explains, is “associated in their minds with greatness.”12 He sees how they express themselves and understands that expression shapes reality.

Douglass’s story is also, in particular, associated with artistic expression, including music. Hearing his people’s songs, he acquires, in sentiments later echoed in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk (1903), James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1993), an understanding of its ironic edge: obvious to those who know, unrecognized by those who don’t. African Americans’ “greatest gift” to the nation, writes Du Bois, suggests that a slave’s life was “joyous,” when in fact it’s the music of “an unhappy people.” “White Americans,” writes Baldwin, “seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad,” and don’t “understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes.” “Laughter is serious,” writes Morrison. “More complicated, more serious than tears.”13 “Into all their songs,” writes Douglass, the slaves weave “something of the Great House Farm,” but he appreciates, as the masters may not, “the deep meaning of these rude and apparently incoherent songs.” For all the spirited nature of the sounds, they express “the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish,” testifying against injustice and yearning for deliverance. Where Du Bois will describe himself as “within the veil,” Douglass is “within the circle,” and so able to see and hear differently from “those without.” But he finds an art form—writing—that provides a way out of the circle and, to an extent, into the master’s world.14

This basic pattern is the root of Springsteen’s appeal, too. His version of “the Great House Farm,” is a Mansion on a Hill. At first it’s beyond attainment, but in the end he owns it, even while staying true to the people whose lives he makes use of in his art. Alain Locke, a student of William James’s writing and the most notable African American pragmatist, describes the pattern in terms applicable to individuals regardless of race. In “The Ethics of Culture,” he explains how such individuals educate themselves into becoming people who, having worked matters out internally, are eventually able to pass their self-taught knowledge onto others. “Culture,” he writes—meaning self-cultivation in the deepest sense—“proceeds from personality to personality.” It can’t be taught, only learnt. But its appeal,” he argues, is that it’s the “self-administered part” of a person’s education, representing one’s “personal index of absorption.” “As faulty as is the tendency to externalize culture,” he goes on, “there is still greater error in over-intellectualizing it.” Rather, such individuals cultivate themselves through experience. They start with their own lives and those of people they know. Only then can they look outward and appeal to those beyond this. “True culture,” therefore, “must begin with self-culture.” For this reason initially such individuals start out in solitude, for “in the pursuit of culture one must detach oneself from the crowd.” The “pardonable concentration upon self-cultivation” allows for “spiritual capital” to accumulate. For Locke, this “must have been the essential meaning of Socrates’s favourite dictum—‘know thyself’—that to know, one must be a developed personality. The capacity for deep understanding is proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge, and by finding and expressing one’s true self, one somehow discovers the common denominator of the universe.”15

What Douglass and Springsteen share is the voice of a person who, brought up among entrapped people, finds freedom through knowledge of self, others, and context, combined with a skill that enables transformation. The solitary being, through force of will, must journey alone to a position that allows for a return to the community to teach what they’ve learned. Their writing—as with Du Bois’s, Baldwin’s and Morrison’s—is what Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin would call “double-voiced.” It speaks of the two worlds, of double selves, and addresses different recipients, with a literal meaning and an ironic meaning, a surface exuberance and an inner complexity. Such writers are expert manipulators of tone, leading to wide appeal even if not all recipients quite understand the contents of the artwork. This is precisely why the phrase “Born in the U.S.A.” came to be famously misinterpreted by George F. Will as “a grand, cheerful affirmation.” All this conservative columnist heard was the upbeat sound and surface sentiment, when, as Eric Alterman puts it, the song is characteristic of an album featuring one “thrilling rave-up about a miserable human being” after another. Springsteen puts his debt to the blues succinctly in a 1996 interview. “I heard tremendous depth and sadness in the voice of the singer singing ‘Saturday Night at the Movies,’” he explains, “and a sense of how the world truly was, not how it was being explained
to me.” He knew that rock music “should also be fun,” but often, as noted, that fun would mask desperation.16

Further into Douglass’s autobiography these resemblances strengthen. Douglass acquires the Word. Not unlike Springsteen’s discovery of music and songwriting, Douglass recognizes articulation as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” “With high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble,” he learns to read.17 The more he reads, the more he detests his “enslavers.” Fearful of being used by them, he needs another power, and so finally succeeds “in learning to write.”18 From here, he teaches others, tapping into their own wish to learn. His passion becomes to pass on to them his “life-giving determination.”19 While there are degrees of enslavement and violence, you needn’t be a slave, or descended from slaves, to identify with disempowerment. Few contemporary readers have experienced life in a Siberian gulag, but experience of rigid control, whether in the army, in prison, or at boarding school, enables you to identify on some level with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, whose story of humdrum deprivation ends with the devastating reminder that “there were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his stretch.”20 Few contemporary readers have experienced or witnessed the kind of extreme violence meted out to slaves in the antebellum south, but experience of violence, whether within a family, an institution, or society at large, and not least that perpetrated by an adult to a child, enables you to respond to Douglass’s descriptions. Art, however haphazardly and inconsistently, cultivates the empathic impulse—and music, suggests Kathleen Higgins in The Music of Our Lives, at least as much as any other form.21

Both Douglass and Springsteen set up an opposition between facility and hostility. The combination helps shape their self-acquired vision. The parentless Douglass portrays his master and mistress as parent-figures. Think about Springsteen’s evident relationship with his father and mother in the following passage from Douglass, and the similarities are striking. “What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought.” In sum, writes Douglass, “I owe almost as much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the benefits of both.” Springsteen’s mother may have bought him his first guitar, but without his father to kick against, his subject matter would have been drastically curtailed. Both men’s life trajectories result from positive and negative forces. We are, as Montaigne reminds us, “double in ourselves.”22

 

Red and black make me think of not only Stendhal’s novel and Nebraska but also The Scarlet Letter. All are dark works with a streak of brightness, like a red dawn or dusk through storm clouds or silhouetted trees. Rereading The Scarlet Letter with Springsteen in mind, I noticed that Nathaniel Hawthorne is as conscious of his Puritan ancestry as Springsteen is of his Catholic upbringing. He makes clear in the “Custom-House” preface that to write is to rebel. There were two unpopular things in the Springsteen household in his late teens: Bruce and his “goddam guitar.”23 Had the youth read Hawthorne’s preface, no less than Douglass’s autobiography, he’d have found solace. The relationship of art, not least music, to damnation, has a long history. “No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable,” writes Hawthorne. “No success of mine—if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. ‘What is he?’ murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. ‘A writer of story-books! What kind of business in life,—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation,—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!’”24 This time it’s less Springsteen’s “restless spirit” against economic hardship that comes to mind than Springsteen’s rebelliousness against Catholicism. As Hawthorne implies, writing and musicianship are akin. “‘What is he?’ mutter the nuns, ‘a mumbling strummer!’” Dreams of dark forests permeate Springsteen’s oeuvre, from “My Father’s House” to “Downbound Train,” just as they do Hawthorne’s, not only in The Scarlet Letter but in, say, the allegorical story of “Young Goodman Brown,” whose nightmarish forest excursions represent a permanent psychological scar. In such ways, Hawthorne’s art illuminates Springsteen’s like a lantern on a lonesome trail away from family and social expectations into the perceived wilderness of the “outsider art.”

If the preface of The Scarlet Letter indicates Hawthorne’s ambivalence toward his cultural upbringing, his story is of another near-solitary being, Hester Prynne, ostracized for childbirth outside marriage. Forced to wear a scarlet “A” on her tunic, signaling “Adulteress,” she and her daughter, Pearl, are exiled to the dark woodland on the edge of town. Although Pearl eventually escapes this gloomy community, Hester herself, though for a while suffering the kind of ignominy Springsteen dramatizes in “Streets of Philadelphia”—very much a Scarlet Letter tale—not only outlives the community’s “scorn” and wins its respect and even “reverence,” but also opts to stay there. “Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow, and here was yet to be her penitence.” People visit her with “all their sorrows and perplexities” and beseech “her counsel.”25 If there’s a kind of parallel between Hester’s choice and Springsteen’s recognition that his subject matter and his community are primarily the Jersey Shore, it’s also true that, as Jim Cullen shows in detail, part of him retains something of that Catholic upbringing and those cultural expectations.26 He can’t escape his cultural any more than his genetic make-up. “Let them scorn me as they will,” writes Hawthorne of the Puritans, “strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine.”27 “Brainwashed as a child with Catholicism” (TAD 412), Springsteen admits that, while he doesn’t “buy into all the dogmatic aspects” (TAD 165), “once you’re a Catholic, you’re always a Catholic” (TAD 412). Growing up in the immediate vicinity of the Catholic church, “with the priest’s rectory, the nuns’ convent, the St. Rose of Lima church and grammar school all just a football’s toss away” (BTR 5), and experiencing the violence of a nun getting a “beefy enforcer” to give him a “smack across the face” may have estranged him from his “religion for good,” but even those who remain “physically untouched” evidently find that Catholicism has seeped into their bones. As he grew older, Springsteen admits, he “came to ruefully and bemusedly understand” himself to be “still on the team” (BTR 16–17). As for genetics, despite Springsteen’s fights with his father, he’s always been aware, as he writes in “Independence Day,” that they were “just too much of the same kind,” or, in “Adam Raised a Cain,” that “the same hot blood” ran in their veins.

So, too, might there be a partial explanation for the darker moments of his life in terms of a residual guilt. It’s startling to finish Hawthorne’s novel with Springsteen in mind and contemplate those final lines, depicting Hester’s gravestone. On it is carved an inscription the somber nature of which is “relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow”: “on a field, sable, the letter a, gules.”28 Like this red letter on a black background, the novel is a shadowy tale in lurid red. No doubt it’s coincidental that Springsteen’s darkest, most guilt-ridden, most depressive album, wrought in solitude in his bedroom on “a four-track Japanese Tascam 144 cassette recorder” as he tried to come to terms with the meaning of his life and art after initial success, is his red and black album, Nebraska (BTR 299). With its stories of guilt with or without redemption, its doomed sinners, and Twilight Zone figures, the album is smeared with fear and self-hatred. “State Trooper,” “Open All Night,” and “Atlantic City” are gloomy stories of souls in purgatory. The link between “My Father’s House” and Springsteen’s visits to a psychiatrist to ask why he habitually drove nights by that childhood home on Randolph Street, and so by the church on the corner, is more than a twice-told tale. The Scarlet Letter, then, along with other Hawthorne material, has a family resemblance to Springsteen’s work. He’s a Hester figure himself, an adolescent outcast, a “freak,” “on the outside looking in,” dumped in a garbage can, unable to graduate, an acned youth ousted from college, yet turning his scarlet letter into the substance of his redemption. Like Hester, he outlived being labeled (in his case “Blinky” as well as “Saddie”), and used the very source of the “scorn” to bring upon himself, through his Art and Actions, Adulation and Awe, a truly American tale.29 Maybe red on black is the color combination not just of the gothic romance but of rock and roll, from the cover of Nebraska to the field sable and red Gretsch guitar of the Cochran memorial in my hometown.

 

Melancholy solitude is no less evident in Herman Melville. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael starts out alone and morbidly depressed. Impecunious and beset by “a damp, drizzly November” in his soul that causes him to pause “before coffin warehouses” and follow along behind funerals, he opts to “see the watery part of the world.” His “substitute for pistol and ball” is to “quietly take to the ship.”30 Time for a breakaway: the eternal urge of youth to escape. That town might be Freehold, or Verrières in the Franche-Comté, which Julien Sorel must escape in The Red and the Black, or Joe Gargery’s place in Great Expectations, or Emma Rouault’s father’s farm in Madame Bovary, or the homestead where Yevgeny Bazarov’s parents live in Fathers and Sons, or Hannibal, Missouri, in Huckleberry Finn, or Oak Park, Illinois, for Hemingway, or the English Northeast of the Animals in “It’s My Life” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” or Dartford, Essex, “somewhere to get out of” for Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, or any number of small dots on the map of Europe, America, and wherever else.31 In doing so, along the Nantucket boardwalk, Ishmael finds interracial companionship with Queequeg and then a crew of misfits. The Pequod pulls away from the Eastern Seaboard crewed by hunters of invisible game, born, as it were, to sail.

Springsteen said of Moby-Dick, which he’d recently finished when asked about his reading in 2014, that though it scared him off “for a long time” he in fact “found it to be a beautiful boy’s adventure story.”32 The Pequod contains a band of searchers. Picture Federici, Weinberg, Clemons, and Tallent joining Van Zandt in crewman garb. The elusive quarry, the white whale, is metaphorically a pursuit of meaning. On board, Ishmael, the “cautious man,” as Dave Marsh calls Springsteen, encounters his twin and opposite. Where Ishmael weaves back and forth reflecting and commenting on the chase, another solitary figure, Captain Ahab, single-mindedly pursues his prey.33 Ishmael is no less “a seeker” than Ahab, but of “truth, experience, reflection of the world as it is,” as he sings his “blues away” (TAD 400). The monomaniacal captain, in contrast, is hell bent on pursuit. He’ll stop at nothing in his mad hunt for the “ungraspable phantom of life.”34 Set apart in the studio, month after month, the Boss will stop at nothing in his mad pursuit of unattainable perfection that, in Springsteen’s analogy of his ambition while making Born to Run, was like trying “to shoot for the moon” (TAD 222). Faith in your vision is the only fuel. “Stay true to the dreams of your youth,” runs a sentiment close to Melville’s heart.35 Like Melville, Springsteen knows that “true places” are never “down on any map.”36 Hence the complexity of the search: the next song, story, performance, trip, or book. Of course, Moby-Dick is much more than an “adventure story.” Springsteen issues a warning that “you will learn more about whales than you have ever wished to know.”37 Perhaps he was thinking of the passage where Melville lists creatures ranging from “the Bottle-Nose Whale” through to “the Quog Whale; the Blue Whale &c” before stating that he will now leave his “cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower.” Yet, Springsteen can’t be oblivious to his own Melvillian pursuit. “God keep me from ever completing anything,” proclaims Melville. “This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.”38 The tortuous search for perfection with the Born to Run album testifies to Springsteen’s capacity for obsessiveness. As much to the point is the pragmatist nature of this: fallibility, process, pursuit.

 

A disciple of Emerson, Henry Thoreau absented himself from Concord, Massachusetts, to conduct an experiment in simple living. As he writes in Walden: or, Life in the Woods, he lived “a mile from any neighbor” in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, and earned his living by manual labor. The shore of a Massachusetts pond in the mid-nineteenth century may differ significantly from the Jersey Shore, but his reasons are familiar. Another young man alienated from his hometown, Thoreau asks why his fellow citizens should “begin digging their graves as soon as they are born.” “The mass of men,” he states, “lead lives of quiet desperation.” In contrast, he’s determined to live life on his own terms. “What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can,” he writes. “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.”39 His writing anticipates the young Springsteen’s tensions with his father, the “one-man minefield,” and with the older generation of that blue-collar community (BTR 356). Seeing trapped lives, the young Springsteen would have found his feelings echoed in Thoreau’s opinion that “the old have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons, as they must believe.” Thoreau claims that he’s “yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.”40 He believes that he must become intellectually self-reliant. Springsteen had to do much the same; to make from his solitude a sturdy construct; to find a path out of the trap that those around him fell into; to see that it’s not necessarily an individual’s fault—the result of “private reasons”—but may have a wider context related to social and economic forces. In doing that, he would cast his eyes back to his society and write songs like “Factory” and “Independence Day.”

Why, he asks in such songs, do people become the living dead? How is it that they end up living desperate lives? “If I am the guy in ‘Born to Run,’” out there, away from society, he said to himself, “where is everybody?” He “began to question from that moment on the values and the ideas” set out on Born to Run. Out of this contemplation came Darkness, The River, and Nebraska. “You just get out there and you turn around and you come back because that’s just the beginning.” As he goes on to explain, “It’s like that great scene in The Last Picture Show where the guy hits the brakes and turns around.”41 Both Thoreau and Springsteen escape society, turn back, and assess. “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau titles a chapter. Springsteen, too, shows an acute interest in creating a life purpose. Both strive to fulfill their human potential by confronting issues that those around them have no time for. To ask “what you can do with your life” and to use your observations to enable others to “experience their own inner vitality” is a version of Thoreau’s evangelical zeal to alert his contemporaries to life’s possibilities (TAD 256). Far from proposing “to write an ode to dejection,” Thoreau intends “to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost,” if only to wake his neighbors up. “To be awake is to be alive,” he asserts. “Is there anybody alive out there?” shouts Springsteen into the crowd. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” writes Thoreau. “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.”42

In the end such writers look inward in order, through artistic expression or through action, to find the communal out of the solitary. Thoreau speaks directly to us as “you” just as Springsteen looks “into the faces” of the crowd each night. “I look straight at you,” he’s said, “and I see you looking straight back” (SOS 366). Thoreau’s findings sound like a gloss on the singer’s career. “I learned this, at least, from my experiment,” he writes, “that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” In particular, “solitude will not be solitude.” Like many young people of such dispositions, Springsteen initially created a “fortress of solitude” (BTR 392). Thoreau’s take on it is that, “if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”43 The foundations of castles in the air—in the publications, recordings, performances, images, and memories that artists provide—take the form of art, and art enhances lives. Art in its broadest sense is communion often born of a need to express and therefore share feelings of solitude. It thus relates to human companionship. In youth, Springsteen wanted to know “if love is real.” He found the answer. As any parent knows, and as he eventually articulated, “children are the ‘living proof’ of our belief in one another, that love is real. They are faith and hope transformed into flesh and blood” (S 218).

 

Reportedly identifying during a period of his life with Ethan Edwards, the John Wayne character in John Ford’s The Searchers, Springsteen often refers to his protagonists as “searching” (TAD 143 and 185). The solitary figures in Nebraska search for family, connection, or community. Much discussion of this album centers on Springsteen’s empathy for criminals, but the songs also focus on family and personal memories and, as he put it to Gilmore, with the “tone” of his childhood.44 No Springsteen songs and no Emily Dickinson poems are bleaker, when it comes to the sense of exile we experience from our own childhood, than “My Father’s House” and Poem 609. Indeed, Springsteen might as well have modeled his song on the poem. “I Years had been from Home,” begins Dickinson, “And now before the Door / I dared not enter, lest a Face / I never saw before / Stare stolid into mine / And ask my Business there—.” Envisaging a stranger answering the door, she replies that her “Business” was “a Life I left / Was such remaining there?”

 

I leaned upon the Awe—

I lingered with Before—

The Second like an Ocean rolled

And broke against my ear—

 

The speaker hesitates. Reflecting on how time has passed, she’s terrified of what she might find. She laughs “a crumbling laugh” that she “could fear a door,” and fits her hand to the latch “with trembling care.” But nerves fail her and she flees “gasping from the house.” The strange phrases create an unsettling tone. We at once understand the temptation to return yet are warned that to do so will bring heartache. To borrow the title of a Thomas Wolfe novel, you can’t go home again.

“My Father’s House” has a similar troubling theme. Both poem and song are about a solitary being whose lonesomeness has as much to do with time as with space. Nebraska grew in particular out of Springsteen’s memories of the timeless feel of his grandparents’ house on Randolph Street, with its living room dominated by the photograph of his father’s sister, Virginia, dead aged five, struck by that truck in 1927. Given that several stories “came directly” out of his family experience, he often opts to write “from a child’s viewpoint” (S 138). The quality of fearfulness suggests that Dickinson, too, is writing of a childhood memory. Springsteen was interested in “the thin line between stability and that moment when time stops and everything goes black,” and “wanted the music to feel like a waking dream” (S 138–39). Both depict a common nightmare. Springsteen’s speaker dreams that he (or she) is a child trying to get home through a forest before night. The wind rustles in the trees. “Ghostly voices” rise from the fields. Scratched by “branches and brambles,” clothes torn, the child breaks into a clearing and there shines the father’s house. Falling into the father’s arms, the speaker wakes from the dream and drives to the house. But the occupant is a stranger behind a door chain. Her apologetic response is that “no one by that name lives here anymore.” The song ends with the speaker contemplating the father’s house. “Hard and bright it stands like a beacon” in the night, “calling and calling so cold and alone / Shining ’cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned.”

To become an adult is to understand that if you do try to return home, which means to return to the past, you’ll haunt a location that’s no longer yours. Perhaps not least because of the trauma of migration and distance, it’s a recognizably American theme. In Death of a Salesman, for example, Arthur Miller has Linda Loman tell Biff, away for months between infrequent visits to his parents, that he’s such a child, failing to realize that one day he’ll find strangers there. Dickinson’s speaker desists from turning that latch and daren’t even knock. Springsteen’s finds the door opened by an unknown woman. We carry with us images of places from our past, and to go back is invariably to discover that the life and people we left have vanished. As Springsteen attests in “Independence Day,” “different people” fill the empty spaces. Much of what we’ve known has been “swept away.” Dickinson and Springsteen express the existential lonesomeness of human experience. “I like to get on the bus after the show and ride all night,” Springsteen said in 1980. “I don’t like staying.”45 Born to run as we think we are, only in our dreams can we return to our origins. A flight of fancy might allow us to imagine that the girl in Dickinson’s poem anticipates the ghost of little Virginia Springsteen, forever five years old, and living on as a photograph forming the centerpiece of the room on Randolph Street. “I Years had been from Home,” she tells us, too frightened to enter in case the owners ask her business there. “My Business but a Life I left / Was such remaining there?”

It’s because our self-identity is dependent upon accumulation of memory that the notion of an afterlife has power. Springsteen addresses this in such songs as “Souls of the Departed,” “We Are Alive,” and the intriguing “County Fair,” written, he explains on the lyric page of The Essential Bruce Springsteen, “shortly after the Nebraska album.” Dickinson’s most famous meditation on the theme is Poem 712, “Because I could not stop for Death—” the shock of which rests not merely in the leisurely way that kindly Death drives the speaker by carriage past a school and fields and on, as the sun sets, to her grave, but with the actual time frame the final stanza alerts us to.

 

Since then—’tis Centuries—and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ heads

Were toward Eternity—

What seemed like a life that would last forever is now long gone. Springsteen administers a similar shock in “County Fair.” Described by June Skinner Sawyers as “a wistful piece of nostalgia,” it depicts the anticipation, experience, and memory of such events.46 Unlike in “We Are Alive,” where the speakers are a chorus, those in Dickinson’s poem and in “County Fair” seem utterly alone. At first we think both poem and song are about the present, but it dawns on us, as each unfolds, that they’re about the past. “Summer comes around,” muses Springsteen’s speaker. They “stretch a banner across Main Street,” and “you feel something happen in the air.” We see the lights being set up, viewed from Carol’s house on Telegraph Hill, yet Carol herself is strangely absent from the middle section, and is only named again in the final verse. Whether colloquial metaphor or literal, the middle verses refer to “Daddy” speaking directly to his “little girl.” Two-thirds through, the tone darkens. The band playing are “James Young and the Immortal Ones.” Since no one remains young or is immortal, we realize that this is a memory. It gets late, but before heading back for town they let the “fortune wheel spin.” The speaker cajoles the operator to tell him “what’s waiting out there.” Seeking the car, he kisses his companion, who then morphs back into Carol by the final verse. Back home he and Carol sit outside and listen to the radio. He leans
back, stares “at the stars” and wishes he’d “never have to let this moment go.”

As Sawyers notes, the melody “lingers long after the song stops.” “Rather than repeating the catchy chorus,” Springsteen “defies expectations and pulls back, ending the song on an uncertain note.” Reviewing the details, we find that the song’s “leisurely pace” has misled us.47 Childhood excitement gives way to young romance; anticipation of new beginnings mingles with anticipation of endings. Moments dissolve as we grasp at them. Carousel horses may go round but the horses’ heads pulling the carriage of time are toward eternity. Then again, another possibility occurs. What if we’ve misread the timescale? What if objections to Springsteen’s “infantilization of women” would be entirely misplaced here?48 The disconcerting element of the song is that the listener is never Carol. She is referred to in the third person at the start and end. In between, he’s speaking to someone else. This might be a substitute for Carol, or it might be that the “little girl” is all he has left to remind him of her. Where the girl brags of not being scared at the top of the rollercoaster, and of winning “one of these stuffed bears,” there’s an invitation to see her as an actual child and the man as her actual father. What if the memory of taking his daughter to the county fair triggers another memory of when he and her mother were young and in love? What if Carol has left him or died? Our options are (1) that Springsteen is a clumsy songwriter or (2) that the song toys with our perception of time. Such subtlety has precedent. Dave Marsh notes that in “Reason to Believe” it takes a while “to see that what passes in the instant” is in fact a “lifetime, that the baby dunked in the water and the old man flung back into the earth are the same person.”49 The man in “County Fair” is regretting a lost relationship and the illusion that allows us to squander time. The autobiography confirms that this idea haunts Springsteen. “The price I paid for the time lost was just that,” he writes. “Time lost is gone for good” (BTR 311). “County Fair,” in the manner of “Reason to Believe,” thus provides a narrative jolt similar to “Because I could not stop for Death—.” Both speakers turn out to be looking back, in deepest solitude, on times they took for granted. Carpe diem! Robert Coles cites William Carlos Williams saying that “art gets a second life—the first in the life of the creator, the second in the life of the person who hears or sees what the creator has sent along, with her paintbrush, with her fountain pen or typewriter, with her voice, signing or speaking.” Through its very ambiguities, “County Fair” invites such a “second life.”50

Fellow travelers in “lonesome Glee” (Poem 774), Dickinson and Springsteen recognize, above all, that, for all the joy of creativity, for all the communion it offers, we are in the end solitary beings. They therefore see fame—being “known” by multiple others—as an ephemeral, illusory phenomenon. Dickinson wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that if she sought fame she’d never find it but if it sought her she could not escape it.51 Springsteen’s song about Elvis Presley, “Johnny Bye-Bye,” adapted from Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny,” is his pithiest statement of his wariness of fame. The song starts out with an image of a mother and son. She puts him on a Greyhound with his guitar “on a one-way ticket to the promised land.” News of Elvis’s death comes on the radio. In another example of the fast-forward mode, suddenly it’s his funeral, with his coffin in a white Cadillac and a woman crying by the roadside. In the final verse we learn that they found him drugged up and “slumped against a drain.” The song closes with the title and the refrain, “you didn’t have to die.” Dickinson might have appreciated the song. “Fame is a fickle food / Upon a shifting plate,” she writes in Poem 1659. “Men eat of it and die.”

 

* * *

The summer always makes me want to pick up Leaves of Grass for a while and sit on the front porch,” Springsteen has said. “I come away happier.” As an altogether more expansive writer than Dickinson—a “louder” writer, one might say—Walt Whitman speaks to another side of Springsteen. They both shout their “barbaric yawp” from on high. Yet for all his poetical crowd surfing, Whitman’s persona is still set apart from the audience he claims to belong to. In his insistence that he can speak with us across the decades he resembles a wandering ghost, haunting the places he used to inhabit.52 Springsteen’s most Whitmanesque offering, in this sense, is most obviously “Land of Hope and Dreams,” a song about community even as it champions inner worlds. But no less in tune with Whitman is the melancholy flipside to this, that sad and soaring song, “The Promise.”

As Sawyers explains, “Land of Hope and Dreams” grows out of an “old African-
American spiritual ‘This Train (Is Bound for Glory).’” First recorded in 1925, it’s been performed by numerous artists, including Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, Johnny Cash, Bob Marley, and the Indigo Girls. Guthrie’s memoir, Bound for Glory, makes ironic reference to it. Springsteen places the phrase on Jimmy the Saint’s car in “Lost in the Flood.” In more general terms, his version draws on “gospel songs about the Promised Land” that date back to the nineteenth century. But it also subverts the original religious message. “This Train (Is Bound for Glory)” emphasizes that “if you ride you must be holy.” “Liars,” “gamblers,” “midnight ramblers,” “jokers,” “cigarette smokers” and other such rabble are unwelcome.53 Springsteen, in contrast, wanted his “refrain to be inclusive” (S 296). Theoretically it’s all aboard the rock-and-roll flyer. As Ernie Sandonato showed in his 2012 symposium presentation, the train is Springsteen’s oeuvre and the passengers his characters.54 It thunders through sunlit fields carrying “saints and sinners,” “losers and winners,” “whores and gamblers,” “fools and kings.” Whatever you have faith in, it “will be rewarded.” “No one will be turned away,” Sawyers assumes. “Brother Bruce’s expansive universe is big enough to hold anyone who wants to join him.”55

Whether Springsteen, any more than Whitman, is so all-inclusive, however, seems contestable. “Hope and dreams” is a seductive phrase, but one person or group’s hopes and dreams, whether or not the intentions are malevolent, can have
devastating consequences for other people. “Land of Hope and Dreams” is not the same as Elvis singing “American Trilogy” in Las Vegas, where, as Greil Marcus puts it, his “yes,” his “grandest fantasy of freedom,” is “finally a counterfeit freedom,” because “it takes place in a world that for all its openness (Everybody Welcome!) is aesthetically closed, where nothing is left to be mastered, where there is only more to accept.”56 Springsteen’s song doesn’t at all state that “anyone” can hop aboard, and he’s not himself without judgment. Aside from his assessment of Reagan’s appropriation of “Born in the U.S.A,” and the “public service announcements” that punctuated the Magic tour during the second Bush administration, there’s the story of “Oliver North’s infamous secretary and fellow document shredder, Fawn Hall,” sending word that “she and her date, Rob Lowe, would like to come back stage and introduce themselves.” Springsteen’s curt response would suggest that not everyone is welcome on his railroad. Eric Alterman’s reference to this comes after quoting Springsteen telling an audience, “Pat Robertson can kiss my ass.” He, too, might find it hard to acquire a ticket. Years later Springsteen tells a crowd, “Don’t vote for that fucking Bush, no matter what!” Given that Springsteen has called Donald Trump “a flagrant, toxic narcissist” with “no sense of decency and no sense of responsibility about him,” it seems unlikely that he’d get aboard.57 Aside from the question of whether all Americans are welcome, regardless of religious or political views, or degree of sanctimony, mendacity, or criminality, there should also be some doubt about, for instance, psychopaths, malevolent dictators from Vlad the Impaler through Pol Pot into the present, and the architects of the Final Solution.

In “Paradise,” Springsteen does contemplate the mind of a suicide bomber, but neither his art nor Whitman’s speak of inclusivity. He may write that he wants his refrain “to be inclusive” of “everybody,” but there’s no reference to “everybody” in the lyrics (S 296). “Trust the art and be suspicious of the artist,” we recall him echoing Lawrence (TAD 314). Whitman’s version of the sentiment in “Song of Myself” is to give “the sign of democracy,” accepting “nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” “Through me many long dumb voices,” he writes, from “prisoners and slaves” through the “despised” and “forbidden.”58 But the absences speak for themselves. There’s no mention of governors, rulers, the rich, the powerful. Similarly “Land of Hope and Dreams” emphasizes the downtrodden rather than the successful and, although Springsteen refers to kings, in an American context that might just mean that rogue in Huckleberry Finn, or the fan-anointed Frank or Elvis, since the fiction of hereditary “royalty” has no place in a republic.

In assessing hopes and dreams, Springsteen’s song might still seem overly optimistic, portraying inner worlds as benevolent. This tendency, in Louis Menand’s words, to assume that everyone’s “wants and beliefs” will lead them to act positively toward themselves and others, is one of pragmatism’s “deficiencies as a school of thought.” It’s not enough to say, “faith will be rewarded.” As Joyce Carol Oates puts it, “men and women will die for the sake of beliefs we know to be delusional (i.e., other people’s religions).”59 Then again, despite the vividness of those great wheels rolling through sunlit fields, the train is only a metaphor. As Colin Burrow puts it, “metaphors don’t carry guns” and “people rather than words kill people.” Positively or negatively, they “influence how people think about their relationships” to others; the Nazis exploited this by inter-splicing newsreels about Jews with footage of scurrying rats.60 But this only illustrates Rorty’s point that “any philosophical view is a tool which can be used by many different hands.” The first step toward a better world is to believe that it’s possible. As for what “better” might mean, we live in a world of specifics, not abstractions. Context is all.

Whitman and Springsteen both expound the belief that art can change and even save lives. They’re concerned with how inner worlds shape outer realities. Our metaphors—the art of our language—shape our thoughts. This belief is tied to the conviction that, in James Baldwin’s words, each of us is “responsible to life” as the “small beacon” between “the terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return,” and must “negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.” The trick, he urged, is “to say ‘yes’ to life.”61 We have a choice. “From a pragmatic viewpoint,” writes William James, “the difference between living against a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust.” If we’re materialistic we’ll be suspicious, “cautious, tense, on guard. If spiritualistic, we may give way, embrace, and keep no ultimate fear.”62 Springsteen’s version of this is that “you have to remain interested in life and in the way the world’s moving” (TAD 417).

To cite an updated expression of pragmatism, what Giles Gunn calls “pragmatism with a vengeance,” Richard Rorty’s perspective (as Gunn explains) is that the language we use is contingent. Truth, therefore, is not “a reality beyond language” but exists only “in the relations among our sentences.” Hence, language is less a medium of “representation or expression” than “an instrument of redescription.” To accept this premise is to see the self as “linguistically constructed.” From that, it follows that “cultural change has a lot more to do with alterations in language than with revolutions in belief.” Thus, for the Rortian pragmatist, language “is more like a set of tools for performing a task than a medium for getting something straight.” If we accept this, then “the question is no longer how to secure agreement between one’s language and something that stands beyond it, such as fact, truth or reality—‘the world offers no criteria for comparing alternative metaphors’—but how to get over one way of talking and acquire the habit of another.”63 Change your metaphors, change your vocabulary, and you can change minds. Nothing is guaranteed but if, in Rorty’s words, “discursive practices go all the way down to the bottom of our minds and hearts,” this allows us to think of individual minds being “capable of ever more novel, ever richer, forms of human happiness.”64 Whitman and Springsteen share with Dewey, Rorty, and other pragmatists this emphasis on language as our primary art form. Whitman decides to describe his poetic self not merely as a man but as something far more encompassing. He wills his art to be greater than the individual artist. Springsteen holds up his guitar, without which he would, like the rest of us, be his actual, diminished, fallible, vulnerable, stumbling clown of a self. The language of music,
lyrics included, can make us all something more. “Talk about a dream / Try to make it real.”

Of course, there’s a burden to this, too, and Springsteen articulates it a long-
buried song from the Darkness era, finally resurrected, decades later, as the title track of The Promise. The speaker of “The Promise” is in a band “looking for that million-dollar sound.” He bunks off his nightshift to lose himself in movies, following “that dream just like those guys do way up on the screen.” But when the promises are broken he cashes in some of his dreams, sells the Challenger he’s built, and spills his secrets. By this stage in the song many a listener thinks of the lawsuits of the time between Springsteen and his first manager, Mike Appel. (“I don’t write songs about lawsuits,” Springsteen retorted, and the song stayed unreleased for over thirty years.)65 But more importantly the song is about the dream of being an artist and the struggle to retain the belief that art matters in a world where economics predominates. “This is my life,” Springsteen told a hearing, and as the song goes: “Every day it just gets harder to live this dream I’m believing in.”66 As with Whitman, the speaker’s emotions are directed outward. He feels responsible for “the broken spirits of all the other ones who lost.” In contrast to “Land of Hope and Dreams,” he focuses on how wrong it can go: how against “fortune” always stands “that other thing” that “never feels that far away.” The speaker is losing touch with what has given his life meaning. But part of that loss and pain is about more than himself as an individual. Both songs have a vivid image of wheels moving. In “Land of Hope and Dreams” it’s the big wheels rolling through fields. In “The Promise” it’s “the tires rushing by in the rain.” The first image is of exhilaration. The travelers are bound for the metaphorical sunshine their dark past must accede to. The second image is of a man whose faith is faltering. Since he built it himself, the car he’s sold is really a crafted vision, a body of work. He’s trudging the rain-soaked roadside. On his road to nowhere, the wheels “rushing by” cover him in filthy spray.

The moment in the song that brings Springsteen closest to Whitman focuses not on self-pity but on social responsibility. We make best use of our inner selves by looking outward. The promise within us must become a promise to others, especially “the broken spirits” who gain sustenance from the artist’s conviction. Success, he writes, brought “a sense of accountability to the people I’d grown up alongside of” (S 65). He knew himself to be an anomaly. Others around him had seen hopes and dreams slip away. “The promise” is a promise the speaker has felt within, has made to himself and then makes to those he grew up with, and to his audience. “Your ticket is your handshake,” as he puts it in the Austin address (SOS 394). But it also suggests the promise unfulfilled in many individuals. “The whole thing of the wasted life,” he’s said, “was very powerful to me” (TAD 308). Promise anticipated, promise fulfilled, promise kept, promise betrayed, promise wasted. The theme of the promise binds the nineteenth-century poet and the contemporary songwriter on precisely this point: the promise the writer makes to us has to do with his reminder of the promise within us. The artist is a catalyst.

Springsteen, no less than Whitman, articulates the intimate message of spiritual sustenance through words that speak of shared experience. We return to his songs as we return to Whitman. “If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles,” writes Whitman, for the artist, by way of the art, stops somewhere, waiting for us. The final lines of “Song of Myself” are a vision of how a voice can transcend time and place. The intimacy of a voice from another time or place can change and shape a life here and now. In this mutual belief, Whitman and Springsteen show themselves to be comrades in art, neither one above the other. Bruce Springsteen, Whitman might have proclaimed, a kosmos, of New Jersey the son, “Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. / No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, / No more modest than immodest.”67 At the very least, he would surely have approved of one of his successors as, in the words of Robert Coles, “a poet singing” with “the people listening.”

 

* * *

Ernest Hemingway notes in Green Hills of Africa that “all modern American literature” derives from Huckleberry Finn. F. Scott Fitzgerald in turn writes that Mark Twain was the first American writer to look back across the continent rather than to project westward with European precedent in mind.68 Greil Marcus links Huck with Ahab in that, though Ahab is obsessive while Huck seeks peace of mind, both will choose damnation over compromise. He sees “the obsessiveness and the wish for peace of mind” as “cornerstones” of rock music to be found “together more often than not.” For, he later adds, the link between great rock careers is “volcanic ambition.” “It is that bit of Ahab burning beneath the Huck Finn rags of ‘Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the arrogance of a country boy like Elvis sailing into Hollywood, ready for whatever kind of success America had to offer.”69 All this would seem true enough of Springsteen. His art exhibits “obsessiveness,” but there’s also that milder, ruminative side, a lonesomeness that expresses itself not in stormy rage but a yearning to become emotionally becalmed. To find it, no less than to fulfill obsessive dreams, requires both companionship and solitude.

The word “lonesome” crops up often in Twain’s novel, but Huck, while a good companion, ultimately chooses to be alone. Only when beyond social constrictions can he reflect and grow, in a way that Tom Sawyer never can. “Learning, thinking, innovation, and maintaining contact with one’s own inner world,” Anthony Storr explains, “are all facilitated by solitude.” Moreover, to grow must involve a sense of incompleteness. “The process of remedying incompleteness” is such that many of us experience “adaptation through maladaptation.” For Storr, “the hunger of imagination, the desire and pursuit of the whole, take origin from the realization that something is missing.”70 Springsteen makes a similar point when he speaks of those who “take their own thoughts and formulate them in some fashion” that channels dysfunction into “something positive and creative.” Art derives then from a “need to sort yourself out” (SOS 270). Both echo Alain Locke. It’s not that merely rock and roll is the “outsider art,” but that art—including the art of self-cultivation—is, in many cases, an outsider activity. Yet it’s also true that the Born to Run album cover features Springsteen leaning on Clarence Clemons, a twentieth-century version of Huck and Jim. Huck’s relationship with Jim is essential to his growth, and his moment of revelation is about Jim even while it necessarily occurs in solitude, just as he’ll end the novel alone. Anguishing over whether to betray his friend or to lie to save him from recapture, he writes a note revealing Jim’s whereabouts to his owner, Miss Watson. But something gnaws at him. In Storr’s terms, “something is missing.” He knows the “right” thing to do in this slave society, but his recognition of Jim, not only as a human being but also as an actual and surrogate father, won’t allow such betrayal. “All right then,” he says, “I’ll go to hell” and destroys the note.71 Too young to understand that society is wrong, he must work through these dilemmas alone, without Tom telling him what to think and without Jim’s or anyone else’s presence to distract him. Lighting out for Indian Territory, he’s probably aiming for what is now Oklahoma. Springsteen will resurrect the motherless Huck by way of Rainey Williams, who leaves his presumably dying mother behind in “Black Cowboys,” and travels alone toward that very same state.

Both Huckleberry Finn and “Black Cowboys” are about loyalty and self-reliance. Twain makes no mention of Huck’s mother, Springsteen none of Rainey’s father. Each has to deal with a single self-destructive parent whom they must escape. Rainey’s mother tries to raise him but also provides the tools for his departure, both by stimulating his imagination and by hiding the money that funds his journey. “What does it mean to be a friend to somebody?” asks Springsteen in an interview. What indeed does it mean to be a good parent, or someone’s child? In contrast to the drunkard, Pap, Jim shows what it means to be the former, teaching Huck, too, about the responsibility of child to parent. Huck works out that he must act according to innate feelings of justice regardless of society’s judgment. Stuck with Aunt Polly’s attempts to “sivilize” him he feels, as Lewis writes, “so lonesome” he “could die.”72 Post-Elvis, we hear “Heartbreak Hotel” in this. Maybe we can also imagine Jim’s influence as the equivalent of Clemons’s saxophone in Springsteen’s music—the soft, mellow, gentle, sometimes urgent sound of a voice and presence that shows Huck how to feel, and that it’s okay to do so. Rainey is equally alone and must make his own perilous decisions, but he, in turn, is haunted by the idea of the black cowboys, imaginary companions whom he will never find but for whose spirits he searches. The bones in his mother’s chest become the bone of the desert as he approaches Oklahoma, starting point of The Grapes of Wrath, the state Cochran’s parents were from, and once known as the Territory. Thus a contemplation of classic solitudes in light of Springsteen’s music leads to a contemplation of his work in terms of contemporary solitudes.73