Poetry makes nothing happen.

—W. H. AUDEN, “IN MEMORY OF W. B. YEATS”

 

On the contrary, poetry, or the poetic imagination, has made everything happen.

—JOYCE CAROL OATES, New Heaven, New Earth

 

 

5

 

PRAGMATIC ROMANTICISM

 

 

Some appraisals of Springsteen describe him as an American romantic. This is invariably meant pejoratively. Geoffrey Himes refers to the early work as “romanticism” that by 1978 Springsteen had “learned too much to ever go back to,” and writes that one of his “weaknesses” is “a tendency toward romanticized earnestness.” Simon Frith, in 1988, refers to Springsteen’s career in terms of the “commercialization of romanticism.” Robert Sandall, a rock critic for the Sunday Times in Britain, said in the early 1990s, “there’s a sense in which we probably always exaggerated Springsteen as a realist” and that “he’s much more of a romantic in his approach to America.” For Sandall, Springsteen’s version of small-town America “is the kind of folksy America that was being dealt with realistically back in the thirties. These small town couples running away with each other into the sunset” don’t belong to “real life as we know it” but rather locate him in the “dream world mythology of rock and roll.” More recently Ian Collinson refers to Darkness on the Edge of Town moving “away from the romantic individualism of his first three albums and towards something approaching realism.” Select specific songs, and these comments contain truth. Alex Pitofsky is right about the “vague, abstract references to death” in early work, such as the “melodramatic journey to ‘hubcap heaven’ in ‘The Angel.’”1 Even Springsteen refers to “Incident on 57th Street” and “New York Serenade” as “romantic stories of New York City,” his “getaway from small-town New Jersey” since he turned sixteen
(S 26). He thus apparently accepts Lester Bangs’s 1975 concurrence with a friend’s comment that “when I listen to Bruce Springsteen, I hear a romanticized version of New York. When I listen to Lou Reed, I hear New York.”2 But Springsteen’s fluid pragmatism renders restrictive descriptions of his work outmoded as soon as made. With his vision developing, even as his songs came into being he was always a step ahead of his characters. Just because Wendy is promised a future where she’ll “walk in the sun” doesn’t mean the writer shares such naivety.

Nevertheless, discussion of Springsteen and romanticism ultimately depends upon what we mean by the term. From a pragmatist viewpoint, such judgments downgrade his writing by way of false oppositions of the kind that, in John Stuhr’s words, are merely “distinctions made in thought.” To elevate realism over romanticism is a distinction that Dewey, Menand implies, would “find inherently invidious and wish to break down,” “a tacit hierarchy” implying that reason is superior to emotion.3 Sandall’s comments relate Springsteen’s vision to escapist nostalgia. He designates it a sentimental fantasy about an illusory past.4 But there are other ways to define romanticism.5 Even if Springsteen writes of a “land of hope and dreams,” and of “the dream world of popular music,” such places needn’t preclude practical planning and realistic expectations. Tours, for instance, involve huge logistics. Behind the AccorHotels Arena in Paris I found rows of vehicles for Trucking Service, and purple EST trucks with yellow lettering (www.yourock-weroll
.com). But these are the foundations for the dream castles built in the night air. Springsteen errs toward idealism, but that isn’t necessarily the opposite of realism. True to his pragmatist instinct, as early as 1980 he redefined romanticism as something less about escapism than about the practical effects of how we think. “‘Romantic’ is when you see the realities, and when you understand the realities,” he said, “but you also see the possibilities” (SOS 115). It’s intriguing, indeed, to read of him saying, in 1986, that he “looked at Born to Run and the things people were saying about it, that it was just a romantic fantasy and all that,” and thought, “No, this is me. This is my story.” Only then did he realize that the lives of his friends and acquaintances “weren’t that way at all” and “look around and see what other stories there were to tell.”6 This dissolves another supposed opposition: that of reality and imagination. Springsteen’s life differed because he acted on the possibilities. As Stevens puts it, just as “there is always a romantic that is impotent,” so “there is always a romantic that is potent.” Springsteen’s romanticism transformed his possibilities, lifting him, in Mikal Gilmore’s words, “from a life of mundane reality” into “a life of bracing purpose.”7

One might think that the opposite of realities would be fantasies. It’s true that Springsteen’s characters often resort to fantasies as a means of escape. But there’s a world of difference between a writer portraying people in that situation and believing that fantasy is a long-term solution. What Mikhail Bakhtin notes of the polyphonic novelist applies to Springsteen’s narratives. Such an author “ventriloquates” voices, an “oscillation” sometimes near to the author’s vision and sometimes far from it. Sceptical of oppositions that may only be mental distinctions, the author champions nuance over category, complexity over simplicity, and interpretation over dogma. Where W. H. Auden states that “poetry makes nothing happen,” the pragmatist Oates states that, “on the contrary, poetry, or the poetic imagination, has made everything happen.”8 To see this as a contrast between Old and New World thinking would be to erect another simplistic opposition, but America was imagined into being, and that’s had a continued effect on the way American artists think. As Springsteen discovered when he read Allan Nevins and (former Dewey student) Henry Steele Commager’s Pocket History of the United States, first there was the statement of ideals, and then the attempt to implement those ideals.9 Of course, it works better in some ways than others, but this is the tradition that leads Oates to uphold the poetic imagination as shaping our worldview and that leads Springsteen to associate realities and possibilities. Such pragmatic realism is melioristic: to imagine and articulate new realities creates the conditions for them to materialize. The key, to quote from his Live in New York City “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” mock-preacher routine, is that “you’ve got to work at it.” “You” means both the individual and the collective.

Far from being something he’d “learned too much to ever go back to,” therefore, Springsteen’s romanticism never really went away. It either always contained or else morphed into a pragmatic romanticism, rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of realities and possibilities. If the early E Street Band, in Carlin’s words, represented “the American ideals of strength, equality, and community,” and if “the sound of such belief” in the post-1960s era “was stunning,” the feeling returned in the years of the band’s reunion.10 This took a subtle form on the Magic tour. The shows started with mechanical, fairground-style music. Was it an invitation to experience the thrills and spills of fantasy? Not entirely. The seeds of this sound are evident even in Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., which introduced us to the semi-fantasy world of the boardwalk, out of which he would create a parallel world that would in turn bring that real place to life in the recipient. This, as Christa Wolf writes, is one reason why writers are important. Out of ordinary places they create possibilities that enrich our mental landscapes. If Asbury Park was built and has always operated with fantasy in mind, it’s now forever associated with and thus shaped by Springsteen’s songs.11

The boardwalk, as a venue for escapism, is in a way already “a place that never existed,” as Daniel Wolff puts it, “and has proved almost impossible to leave.”12 In “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” “tired of hangin’ in them dusty arcades,” the speaker urges Sandy to move on with him. “This pier lights our carnival life on the water” is Springsteen’s concise description of the dynamic interaction between the imagined and the actual in a seaside town. The reflected lights in the lapping water remind us of the ephemerality of their boardwalk lives. In Magic Springsteen again reminds us that reality and fantasy are symbiotic. He posits the artist as a magician. “Go back through any creative expression and you’re trying to pull something out of thin air and make it tangible and visible,” he said in the year before Magic. “That’s why you’re the magician” (TAD 304). Since we’re all artists, all using language to define our lives, magic is not something apart from life but at its heart.13 Not least among magicians are politicians—whether inspiring or deceiving, or both. Fantasy is a fact of life—all lives, not just those of the boardwalk or Springsteen, involve a degree of “fraud,” as he calls it at the start of Born to Run—so we’d better harness it appropriately rather than have others control our lives through magic shows of their own.

The title song of Magic refers indirectly to the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 as being based on a “romantic” vision of America. This vision was that America and her allies (in then British prime minister Tony Blair’s words) stood “shoulder to shoulder” in what the administration called a “war on terror” against an “axis of evil.” Such misleading rhetoric has always existed, and not least during the Vietnam era that saw Springsteen come of age. To acknowledge that the notion of a fight between good and evil is a fantasy with real consequences for ordinary people is not to ignore the phenomenon of terrorism. It’s merely to illustrate that romanticism is enmeshed within reality. The “war on terror,” Richard Gray notes in After the Fall, “reinforced this slippage between fact and fantasy” by way of a rhetoric that elided “the real and the artificial.” To illustrate this, he quotes New York Times journalist Ron Suskind’s account of what a senior government aide told him early in the Iraq war: “The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’” “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide continued. Since America was now “an empire,” “when we act, we create our own reality.” Moreover, “while you’re studying that reality,” the government would “act again, creating other new realities.” Only members of the administration were “history’s actors.” The role of everyone else, journalists included, was to “be left to just study what we do.”14

“Magic” makes the same point. “I got a coin in my palm / I can make it disappear.” Whatever the magic trick, “this is what will be.” The linguistic sleight of hand creates the reality, dictating perception and shaping facts, from the invasion of Iraq through the war in Afghanistan to the toppling of Gaddafi. In our post-truth era of populist movements, from Brexit to the election of a reality television host as president, it resides in the very core of the English-speaking Western world. This works both ways. Through language, the song’s implicit subject, we can discover freedom as surely as Houdini escaped his shackles. “Chain me in a box in your river / And I’ll rise singin’ this song.” Therefore, advises the magician, “Trust none of what you hear / And less of what you see.” If you trust others’ rhetoric, without thought of their agenda, you may become the next victim, falling mentally and perhaps physically for the fraudulent. Propaganda’s “shiny saw blade” simply requires “a volunteer,” whom they’ll cut in half while their victim smiles “ear to ear.” Thus the distortions come to seem the reality. What is true in “TV Movie” is true in the “artistic” rhetoric of politicians. “This is what will be.” The final verse is uncompromising in its assertion that the magic show on offer during the times of which Springsteen is writing has unleashed horror on innocent and guilty alike, and, as in all wars, most of the victims are innocent. “There’s a fire down below,” writes Springsteen. “But it’s comin’ up here.” Hell has surfaced. People are displaced, their lives destroyed, forced to leave everything they know and to carry only what they fear, and there are “bodies hangin’ in the trees.”

“Magic” thus uses implication as a counter to the politicians’ tautologies and binary oppositions. Metaphor can deceive or enlighten, but for Stevens the poet’s “motive for metaphor” is to shrink from “the A B C of being, / The ruddy temper, the hammer / Of red and blue,” and use “intimation” rather than “steel.” Through indirection, the writer avoids “the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X” of moral certainty. A “war on terror” against an “axis of evil,” like the quasi-Orwellian tautology “Brexit means Brexit,” is a dogmatic position as fixed and fake as “The A B C of being.” “Magic,” in contrast, offers a nuanced response, countering the unsubtle romanticism of Us against Other or good against evil characteristic of primitive tribalism and contemporary populism.15 “All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,” wrote Melville. The old have always persuaded the young to fight their wars through simplistic appeals. Sometimes you have to counter such simplification directly. “Blind faith in your leaders or in anything,” Springsteen said in 1985 before a rendition of “War” (on Live/1975–85), “will get you killed.”16 But undermining false oppositions is another ploy.

Springsteen’s pragmatic romanticism, therefore, is demonstrably complex. Indirection can mask direct critique while, as with “Born in the U.S.A.,” declarative statements can contain subtler levels of meaning. A useful contrast to Springsteen’s approach with “Magic” is Toby Keith’s song on the same subject, “Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” A rousing, uncomplicatedly romantic tune beloved by Texan Republicans, if not by the Dixie Chicks, its gung-ho lyrics directly address America’s enemies about the country’s intention to avenge 9/11. In contrast, Springsteen’s reference to bodies hanging in trees alerts us to the bigger picture of romanticism in American history. The romanticism of the South led to a belief in the myths of a hierarchical society “gone with the wind” as a result of Yankee invasion. That this southern romanticism was inextricable from the brutalities of racism is starkly documented in the visual evidence of lynching. In turn, this testifies to the intertwining of romanticism and reality, whereby human beings designated as outside the dominant group are destroyed with alacrity. On the album as a whole, a benevolent form of romanticism does exist in the idealistic belief that the country must realign with its founding statements. But through “Magic” and other songs, including “Livin’ in the Future,” “Last to Die” and “Long Walk Home,” Springsteen not only shows the label of romanticism to be misleading, if meant to designate him a pied piper for escapists, but also that his mature idealism links to political realism even while alert to the nuances of all such “-isms.”17

 

The extent to which Springsteen’s romanticism is escapist or pragmatic depends upon its consequences. The argument here is a one-time transatlantic disagreement about the relationship of thought to action, pitting William James’s pragmatism against Bertrand Russell’s logical positivism. While much less the case among neo-pragmatists, who like Dewey view it as “the philosophy of democracy,” pragmatism was once seen, in Rorty’s words, as “distinctly American.” Russell describes it as such but “in tones of contempt,” regarding it as “a shallow philosophy, suitable for an immature country.” Against Russell’s determination to find truth beyond language, scientifically and logically so he thought, pragmatists reject any attempt to be told how things are, beyond language and human agency. For logicians like Russell, “redemption by philosophy is through the acquisition of a set of beliefs that represent the ways things are.” The idea that “the only source of redemption is through the human imagination” was for Russell anathema.18

Springsteen might be aware of this clash of ideas. In the New York Times Review interview, he cites Russell’s History of Western Philosophy as having turned him on to philosophy.19 In it, Russell takes issue with James’s argument about belief, and shows himself, as a twentieth-century patrician Englishman, to be fundamentally at odds with the American pragmatist impulse. For Russell, James’s argument that how we think shapes our lives is mere guesswork. We can’t, he counters, simply will the future into being without knowing the consequences. As the inventor of radical empiricism, writes Russell, James became “the recognized leader of American philosophy.”20 But he sees James as thinking in two incompatible ways, “one scientific, the other religious,” and takes issue with the latter. “An idea is ‘true,’” writes James in Pragmatism, “so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives.” Therefore, “our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays.” In terms of religion, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true.”21 If the outcome of a belief is good then something is true about it. Russell objects that, firstly, we must know what is good and that, secondly, we must know what the outcome is before we can decide if the belief is true. If we choose to believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, rather than in 1491 or 1493, we have to ascertain what the effect is of believing one date over another, and must in turn argue that the effect is good and therefore true. As far as Russell is concerned, James would have us believe that Santa Claus exists because the hypothesis is useful. For Russell, James “wants people to be happy” (a trait he shares with Springsteen) and has decided that “if belief in God makes them happy let them believe in Him,” but he calls this “benevolence, not philosophy.” “James’s doctrine is an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of scepticism,” he writes, “and like all such attempts it is dependent on fallacies,” in James’s case the fallacy that you can “substitute belief in God for God” and “pretend that this will do just as well.” This, for Russell, is “subjectivist madness.”22

Yet my sympathies, surely Rorty’s—and I suspect Springsteen’s if he’s read Russell or James—remain with James. This is not merely because it’s a more comforting option. Russell’s argument is flawed. The will to believe is not guesswork but a pragmatic approach based on past evidence of practical consequences. Moreover, his mockery of James’s reasoning is the result of a word-based philosophy that takes no account of emotion. He can’t understand that words are as ephemeral as feelings while feelings, even if ephemeral, are facts. The emotions experienced during a concert “are real and they happen,” protested Springsteen in 1980 (TAD 104). Not only does a song, created like magic out of nothing, become physically real, but a concert experience, for all the fantasy, is also “real and its results are physical and tangible” (TAD 231). Emotions are real, and the effects are real. Art can change your perspective, and therefore your actions, and therefore your life. Proof of this can be found by viewing this in reverse. Paranoia or anger can lead to intimidation, violence, murder, and death camps. By Russell’s logic, to believe that another group of people is evil or threatening or to blame for your circumstances is unconnected with truth. But beliefs demonstrably create truth; such attitudes lead to racism, random violence, and genocide. Truth can therefore be (in James’s words) what “happens to an idea.”23 Whether in positive, negative, benevolent, or pernicious ways, to recognize the relationship between language and truth enables you to use it.

Oddly, neither Russell nor James shows much interest in music. Russell mentions music on only six of the eight hundred pages of History of Western Philosophy. Each reference is fleeting, and none relate to emotional effect. James, as Oliver Sacks notes, devotes one sentence to music in the fourteen hundred pages of Principles of Psychology.24 This is an extraordinary gap in the thinking of both men yet equally characteristic, according to Kathleen Higgins, of contemporary American philosophy. Whether attention to music is likely to produce a positive outlook and to enhance your usefulness depends, of course, on the music. Patsy Cline’s “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray” is likely to leave you feeling grimmer than Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”25 “Waiting on a Sunny Day”; “Blue Bayou,” cowritten with Joe Melson by “that great tragedian” Roy Orbison; or the dark lyrics offset by a swaggering rhythm on the Rolling Stones’ “Ventilator Blues” might lift or drop you depending upon your state of mind (BTR 45).26 But you choose your medicine and poison. Take one labeled “Rosalita” and the effect may depend upon whether you’re a would-be rock star or the parent of a daughter. (If you’re both, you might offer a mixed response.) Either way, by James’s logic but not Russell’s, there’s something true about music, if like James we take truth to mean useful and life enhancing: “not duplication but addition.”27 Russell becomes ensnared in words rather as a worker might get entangled in his tools. “Words,” as the clown reminds us in Twelfth Night, “are very rascals since bonds disgrac’d them,” and words, as Russell’s erstwhile disciple, and ultimately James admirer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, puts it, are the limits of our world. James’s use of the word “true” discombobulates Russell because he’s tied to the notion that truth is inflexible. But truth is not the same thing as fact, and within the word “true” there are other meanings. The effect of music on people proves James to be describing a truth that the formidably logical Russell is unaware of.28 Had he owned an iPod or smartphone, chosen judiciously from the menu, and trusted its effects, his History of Western Philosophy might have read a little differently. James at least worked out through other means what Russell was deaf to.

 

This foray into a philosophical dispute perhaps familiar to Springsteen facilitates a brief survey of songs that show what we might mean by romanticism across the earlier part of Springsteen’s career up to and including the Born in the U.S.A. era. The reason for focusing on this first section of his career is that, however you define the interlude of Tunnel of Love, after this album pragmatic romanticism becomes Springsteen’s professional raison d’être. The pertinent question with regard to romanticism in these earlier albums, therefore, is whether the lyrics express escapist or pragmatic romanticism. Does his romanticism evolve over this time? If the E Street Band has become “purpose-based,” what’s the nature and purpose of romanticism in the earlier albums? A handful of individual songs from the period may provide a sufficient answer.

The Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., song “Lost in the Flood,” for instance, has nothing to do with pragmatic romanticism; it’s pure escapism. It involves at least one death, and two shootings, possible fatalities, one by the police, but the violence is caricatured and without consequence: “vague, abstract references to death,” to recall Pitofsky’s verdict. The narrator is as excited by the action as those he talks to. What happens is unclear but involves “Ragamuffin Gunner” who is admired by girls and warned by Sticker about quicksand. The bald, pregnant nuns running through the Vatican “pleading immaculate conception” make up one of several memorable images but, unless they represent Catholic girls impregnated by the likes of Gunner and Sticker, they seem unrelated to the rest of the song. The next verse switches to Jimmy the Saint, a Sunday street racer who suffers a James Dean fate: “just junk across the horizon, a real highwayman’s farewell.” The narrator advises a bystander that he’s looking not at oil but blood, and wonders what Jimmy thought as “he hit that storm.” Next, there’s a hold-up and shoot-out. The cops arrive. “The whiz-bang gang from uptown” get involved, as does “that cat from the Bronx,” promptly “blown right off his feet.” A Hispanic kid comes “blastin’ round the corner, but a cop puts him right away.” As he lies there screaming, another bystander exclaims that the Hispanic boy’s “body hit the street with such a beautiful thud.” We’re left with the narrator musing on all this violence and mayhem, and wondering if these “poor cats” were “just lost in the flood.”

Such lyrics aren’t meant for scrutiny. But it’s notable that the images belong to popular culture. The scenario bears little relation to actual lives. Just to mention “41 Shots (American Skin)” in relation to “Lost in the Flood” reveals the distance between this early portrayal of violence and Springsteen in artistic maturity. The primary impulse here is making street life into something fantastical, just as the little boy in “Bishop Danced” would seem to have retreated from a hostile world into his imagination. In “Lost in the Flood,” the most vivid character is the fantasist Jimmy the Saint. The young Springsteen might have had Dean’s death in mind. Certainly Dean’s life, films, and death would have influenced individuals Springsteen knew in Jersey. The description of this “pure American brother, dull-eyed and empty-faced,” “telling racing stories” on the hood of a Chevy emblazoned with “Bound for Glory in blue, red and white flash paint” anticipates the economy of his later writing. The realism in the song is the recognition that fantasy is an escape from the mundane. Jimmy’s expression suggests that the narrator sees beyond those he observes. In “Growin’ Up,” as the title implies, that gap exists between the narrator and his younger self. The song is about the journey toward maturity. The voice is ironic about the “cosmic kid,” but we see that he had the promise that his older self now feels is being fulfilled. The gap between escapist and pragmatic romanticism, suggested by “Lost in the Flood” versus “Growin’ Up,” is also evident in The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle. The song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” is about moving on from that fantasy world deftly signaled by the image of pier lights reflected in water. Reality and romanticism interlink. If for this narrator the “boardwalk life is through,” “Rosalita”
shows the way out. Typical of early Springsteen songs in focusing on the writer’s life—“emotionally autobiographical” without disguise (BTR 267)—it’s about creating something from very little: the magic of art made manifest.

The album that critics usually mean when they refer to Springsteen’s romanticism is Born to Run. But in fact this album shows further signs of an evolving sense of what the term might signal. “Backstreets” may offer nothing more than escapist romanticism, but “Thunder Road” does. The narrator tells Mary not to waste her “summers praying in vain / for a savior to rise from these streets.” Had he read Madame Bovary, and had she, too, read Flaubert’s novel (and so known what he was talking about), he might have said, Don’t be an Emma Bovary; don’t dream your life away waiting for a romantic hero. Choose me, instead. “Well now I’m no hero / That’s understood,” he says. All he has is a car and a guitar, and no doubt callused hands, but he appeals to reality over fantasy. What he actually offers is a vision that might make a difference, whereas having no vision, or wallowing in pure fantasy, will get them nowhere. They have the possibility “to make it real.” We forgive the hyperbole because without urgency nothing will happen. He wants Mary to feel that she must go with him now or never. Then the realism appears. “I got this guitar / And learned how to make it talk.” His romanticism has a practical basis. He’s learned his craft. Nor are the song’s two best-known lines as straightforward as they might seem. “It’s a town full of losers / and I’m pulling out of here to win” might seem to be the all-or-nothing sentiments of youth. As Julian Barnes writes, it always looks simple. “There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the life of ambition served, or the life of porcine failure.” But this character might, like Springsteen, be a little older. Carlin notes that acoustic versions of “Thunder Road” can sound as if the lines are “exhaled like a sigh of defeat.”29 The acoustic conclusion to the second Paris show made the song sound wistful; the older man sang it knowing that in a way he had won, but that time devours us in the name of wisdom.30 Whether one interprets the lines as working for this particular character or not, whether one sees this as a musician who succeeds or fails, these lines speak to the reality but also the possibilities. If you have the vision, you can hone skills and, refusing the living death of a wasted life, achieve something. Springsteen clearly understood that possibilities didn’t mean certainties, and that success always has a flip side. The likes of Whitman, Dewey, and Rorty, in Rorty’s words, are never “committed to the view” that things will “inevitably go well,” only that “self-creation” is a viable option. “You keep trying, but you don’t count on things,” Springsteen has said. “It can be a strength. Because I know some people who sweat on winning so much it kills them.” To pursue your goal while aware of the odds is pragmatic romanticism (TAD 20).31

As for “Born to Run,” its theme of romantic escapism would seem obvious, but the meaning of the song depends not just, as in “Thunder Road,” on the tone with which it’s sung but also upon what you mean by “run.” In “What Pragmatism Means,” James tells an anecdote of returning from a walk during a camping expedition to find the others engaged in a dispute about a squirrel. Imagine that a live squirrel is “supposed to be clinging to one side of a tree-trunk” while you stand on the other side. You try to catch sight of the squirrel by moving round the tree, but no matter how fast you go, “the squirrel moves as fast in the opposite direction,” always keeping the tree between you and therefore never being seen. “The resultant metaphysical problem,” writes James, is whether or not you go round the squirrel. His solution is that it “depends on what you practically mean by ‘going round.’” If you think in broader terms of north, east, south, and west then, yes, you’ve gone around the squirrel. If you mean begin in front of the squirrel, then try to move to the side, then behind and so on, then, no, you’ve not been around the squirrel since it’s always facing you. Straightforward language can turn out on inspection to be complex. So it is with “Born to Run.” We’re all born, and in being born may be destined. The implication is of a positive destiny. John Fogerty notes in “Fortunate Son” that “Some folks are born silver spoon in hand.” But, just as “Born in the U.S.A.” has an obviously ironic element, “to run” complicates matters. Does it mean to run as in escaping, or is it run as in perpetual motion? Cars run (as in Arcade Fire’s “Keep the Car Running”) but they don’t themselves escape. Does it mean to run for office? No, but you can see how the phrase would look on the badge of a presidential candidate. Donald Trump: Born to Run. Perhaps it means that poor folk have to keep one step ahead, out of the firing line, away from the abyss; that “shuffle” being “the dance you do every day just to stay alive.”32 But the fact is that, in another sense, we’re all born to run. We run, as cars run, until our bodies give out. “Born to Run,” taken this way, is not mere romanticism but realism. We can’t know whether or not the young Springsteen saw this. As John Rockwell notes, “Born to Run” may only be “four-and-a-half minutes long” but took “three-and-a-half-months to finish.”33 That left Springsteen a lot of time to dwell on the meaning. The obvious meaning is in terms of escape. If they run long and far enough, they’ll be able to slow down and “walk in the sun,” and it’s certainly true that, if the song is strummed slowly with close attention to the words, there’s scope to exhale these lines, too, as a “sigh of defeat.” But the lyrics as a whole, in urging action to implement dreams, can still be understood as a romantic pragmatist’s call to arms.

By the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the preoccupation is no longer to expend energy but to focus it. When Springsteen wrote “Racing in the Street” he may not have read Arthur Schopenhauer, but their preoccupations are similar. Schopenhauer’s term for this energy, “wille,” is translated as “will” but has wider connotations, including force, urge, and drive. For Schopenhauer, we are simply will. “The striving of matter can always only be checked, but never fulfilled or satisfied,” he writes in The World as Will and Idea.34 Throughout nature “the will to live invariably preys on itself,” he argues, “and in different forms is its own nourishment.”35 What’s true in nature is true in human behavior. “Every person has constant aims and motives,” and he or she can always explain “individual actions,” but if you were to ask the person why they will at all, or even will “to exist,” the person “would have no answer.” For Schopenhauer, their likely sense that the question is absurd would reflect their awareness that they themselves are “nothing but will.” “Every goal attained is the starting-point of a new lap in the race, and so on ad infinitum,” he argues. “Aspirations and desires” are our nature; we then find things to aspire to or desire. (As Nietzsche will later echo, “ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired.”) “The fulfilment of these masquerades,” states Schopenhauer, is “the ultimate objective of our willing,” but once attained we invariably discard them “as vanished illusions.” Thus, for all our yearning to fulfill an aim, “we consider ourselves fairly fortunate” to have something “to strive after.” This allows us “to keep up the game whereby desire constantly passes into satisfaction, and satisfaction into new desire—if the pace of this is swift, it is called happiness, and if it is slow, sorrow—and does not falter and come to the standstill that shows in dreadful, stultifying boredom, in lifeless yearning without a definite object, a deadening languor.”36 Put simply: this is why on the road Springsteen felt at home while off it he felt lost.

What does it mean to race in the street? Springsteen believes, along with Emerson, James, and Rorty, that we work from the inside out. We look at our own and others’ lives and find that connection. He may not have been literally a racer on the circuit, but he knew such individuals. On one hand, street racing as a metaphor allows for identification. Springsteen’s view is the same as Schopenhauer’s: “each of us can only be one, while on the other hand he can know all.”37 We can intuit other lives by observing our own. All life is energy, but whether your romanticism goes beyond escapism depends upon what you do with your energy. You can spend it on cars souped up for the drag. Maybe you’ll win a race. You can agree to meet criminals across the river. Maybe you’ll become a noteworthy gangster. You can learn guitar. Maybe you’ll find success. But it’s still energy expended for the sake of it. While he may not have been a street racer, Springsteen did put energy into getting (physically) nowhere: just back and forth across the stage and from venue to venue. To use energy in a doomed way, unless it’s to roam “empty rooms looking for something to blame” (or, worse, to channel your anger into plans for a murderous suicide attack or mass shooting) may be better than dying “piece by piece.” On the other hand, while actual street racers achieve little—except, evidently, causing Asbury Park traffic light patterns to be changed—music, craft, and not a little talent, produce tangible, longer-term benefits.38 Springsteen’s ebullient optimism bubbles between the cracks. It proves infectious. It makes his life. It may only amount to repetitive and reciprocated feel-good activity, but feelings change worlds. As a metaphor for that phenomenon, as good as any is “Racing in the Street.”

Other pertinent songs from the era include “Badlands,” “The Promised Land,” and songs from The Promise, including “Gotta Get That Feeling,” “Breakaway,” and “The Promise” itself. The first two are about taking a stand against injustice and asserting change through force of will. To believe that you can achieve your goal is the first step toward doing so. Both songs exude meliorism, that pragmatist belief that you can improve your world and that of those around you. To believe in a “promised land” needn’t be naive. It can mean that you know that belief in the future risks disappointment but believe because there are practical reasons for doing so. As for The Promise, the romanticism of the cover epitomizes that sense of the American lonesome but with a difference. The cover of Darkness shows Springsteen tousle-haired and trapped—before a shabby wall, blinds down against the night (or day), jacket on, jacket off—what does it matter about his clothes or hair? Who’s he going to meet? He has the same pose and expression in three photographs, back and front and inside sleeve: alone, indoors, behind blinds, without a guitar, unsmiling. On The Promise, with photographs chosen decades later, he’s still alone, still guitar-less, but the paint-peeled rooms give way to photographs on a porch, at a gas station, in a car, on the road. It’s still the American lonesome but with romanticism restored. In one, Springsteen strikes a pose worthy of Jack Kerouac, the solitary figure literally On the Road, beside his car on the dirt track, with the dark skies behind. There are realities but also possibilities.

The Promise occasionally depicts the world of escapist romanticism that Spring­steen tried to excise from Darkness. “Breakaway” is a melancholy song about the urge to escape, with three examples of willed disappearance. “Gotta Get That Feeling” depicts romantic, impecunious coupledom, and the desire to find release by indulging the emotions. But “The Promise” itself shows that Springsteen is no Beat. Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise evades responsibility. He presents himself as shambling after the madly energetic, amoral “con-man,” Dean Moriarty, a fictionalized Neal Cassady. But he’s a con-man himself, making promises in California to a Mexican girl (interestingly named “Terry”—though some way from the backstreets of the Jersey Shore) and then, feeling the pull of his “own life,” just ditching her with the words, “well, lackadaddy, I was on the road again.”39 In contrast to such solipsism, “The Promise” is ultimately about helping others. The lines about “carryin’ / the broken spirits / Of all the other ones who lost,” and of living on “when the promise is broken,” echo with desolation. The breaking of promises, something Springsteen often returns to, must have come close to causing permanent disillusionment. It must have seemed at times that romanticism had no place in reality and that his own promise, to himself and to others, could never be fulfilled. “Thunder Road,” the phrase that encapsulates his early romanticism and that finds its way into the song, as Samuel Bagenstos notes, to powerful effect, must always remain a mythic place rather than a real option.40 The step forward in maturity, as one might expect given Springsteen’s comments that with success he felt responsibility for the people he knew, is the song’s focus on others—from promise-as-potential to promise-as-vow.

The River offers more of the downbeat, despite or even because of Springsteen’s attempts to inject levity. But, as with some of the songs that came to light on The Promise, it also provides a fitful sense that the will to believe is merely in recess. In truth it will take until the 1990s for that faith to rally and until 2001 for Springsteen to refocus his vision. But the spirit is willing. The River swells with solitude and a yearning for companionship. “Two Hearts” posits the idea that “childish dreams must end,” but that “to become a man” means to “grow up to dream again.” As with Darkness, the direct addresses to his father brim with compassion. “They ain’t gonna do to me what I watched them do to you,” writes Springsteen in “Independence Day,” a pithy line no less effective than Wordsworth’s statement in the Intimations Ode: “the things which I have seen I now can see no more.” An engaging quality of Springsteen’s world is his supremely articulate awareness that he and his father, in being “too much of the same kind,” have lived out two possible versions of a life and either, in different circumstances, might have lived the alternative. Had he not discovered the guitar and been able to face these facts directly in time, Springsteen’s moodiness could as easily have turned to failure.41 Hence he can understand the mind-set, as he puts it in “Hungry Heart,” that causes you to take “a wrong turn” and just keep going. It’s because of this that he knows, in words from “I Wanna Marry You,” that “an unfulfilled life, girl, makes a man hard.” He can’t offer optimism, but he can offer meliorism: “To say I’ll make your dreams come true would be wrong,” he admits. “But maybe, darlin’, I could help them along.” To do so, he creates story after story about the kinds of people he knows, from his sister and brother-in-law, whose situation gave rise to “The River,” to the girl in “Point Blank,” to the man in “Stolen Car” who waits to get caught but never does, and who fears above all, that he “will disappear,” just as another fears he’ll “fade away.”

The closely connected albums, in terms of time and composition, Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., continue in this vein; neither offers much by way of romanticism as escape. The solitary figures in Nebraska are lost souls doomed to drive forever (“Open All Night”), or to dream of visiting a father’s house only to find strangers there (“My Father’s House”), or pleading not to be stopped (“State Trooper”).42 They’re not about to “walk in the sun.” The muted romanticism we do see is the belief in possibility against the evidence (“Reason to Believe”). Born in the U.S.A. is, strangely, one of Springsteen’s bleakest albums. He gives us the dead-end life of a Vietnam veteran; a song about a man pleading to be protected from the world; two songs about felons (“Darlington County” and “Working on the Highway”); two about descent into an emotional and economic quagmire (“Downbound Train” and “I’m Goin’ Down”); two about desire (“I’m on Fire” and “Dancing in the Dark”); two about how things were better in the past (“Glory Days” and “My Hometown”), and two more that offer a heavily ironic take on escapist romanticism.

“No Surrender” and “Bobby Jean” are elegies for the appealing but unsustainable escapism of youth. As with “Backstreets,” their romanticism has no pragmatic element. This may explain Springsteen’s ambivalence about “No Surrender,” which he “didn’t intend to include on the album” until Van Zandt persuaded him to. He was “uncomfortable” with it, he writes in Songs. “You don’t hold out and triumph all the time in life. You compromise; you suffer defeat; you slip into life’s gray areas.” For Van Zandt, “the portrait of friendship and the song’s expression of the inspirational power of rock music was an important part of the picture” (S 166). But if “No Surrender” refuses compromise, and therefore reality, its partner, “Bobby Jean,” pointedly has the singer stranded and alone with his escapist vision, heard only on the radio in some motel room. That the friend might be listening exacerbates the sense of that fragile communication that, decades later, the singer will seek on “Radio Nowhere,” where the solitude is existential, the sound “bouncing off a satellite.” Were “Bobby Jean” a movie, the final scene would show the friend in that nondescript room, with the singer’s voice suddenly not up close but issuing from a cheap radio. The camera would pull back, out the window and up and away. You’d see the motel as a pinprick of light amid other lights, and then not at all, just an outline of the continent, with the big cities glowing but, where the motel must be, just an overwhelming darkness and finally, out in space with planet earth a ball in blackness, no sound at all. “These romantic dreams” in his head are a farewell to that youthful romanticism that imagines escaping beyond the horizon. Springsteen had come to acknowledge that, “seductive” though it may be, the rock-and-roll dream, if it’s to mean anything in maturity, needs situating within the context of “finding your place in the world.”43 But without that romanticism in the first place, he’d have achieved little. Overall, therefore, his career vindicates romanticism, defined as the will to believe: a vindication not of escapism but of meliorism, of “seeing the realities but also the possibilities,” and therefore a romanticism couched in pragmatic terms.