AT NO POINT IN ITS 293 PAGES IS THE BOOK PUBLISHED BY DYLAN IN October 2004 described as a memoir. Even the dust cover’s encomium does not risk the word ‘autobiography’. Instead, the buyer is offered explorations and elegies, intimacy, insight and the briefest stab of punctuating memory. On second sight, the advertisement seems to have been constructed with some care. What is claimed is tantalising; what is left unsaid more tantalising still. The publisher’s commendation for Chronicles: Volume One promises only glimpses, as through a dusty window, of an author’s thoughts and the influences exerted on those thoughts. This is not chapter and verse, then.
A chronicle, says the dictionary, is ‘a continuous record of events in order of time; a history’. Dylan’s Chronicles propose no such thing. The significant word in the blurb, the reader will soon enough learn, is ‘storytelling’. The book is not corroborative evidence for anyone’s case. Yet when the first printing hit the New York Times bestseller lists – and remained there for 19 weeks – it was classified as non-fiction. It is part of Dylan’s method, in prose or verse, to question whether such a claim can be made of anyone’s life.
The critical reception, as he would tell the novelist Jonathan Lethem in the late summer of 2006, moved him almost to tears.1 This author, so long in the making, had the fond belief that literary critics must know what they are talking about, unlike their colleagues on the music (rock and pop) beat. Dylan seemed to believe – each to his own – that book hacks can’t be fooled. If they said Chronicles was vital and valuable, the writer was hugely gratified. It was as though the youth who struggled so hard and long with his Tarantula experiment 40 years before had been vindicated at last.
The confession to Lethem was a reminder that, after everything, Dylan still cared about the reception his work received. It suggested he must have been nervous indeed about appearing in this manner in the court of critical opinion. It told his audience – as though they needed telling – that he understood exactly what to expect with his name above the title. By publishing Chronicles he had once again placed himself under investigation. That fact, in turn, said something about the careful, artful way the seemingly nonchalant book was constructed. You could even call it cunning. Not for the first time, Dylan took preconceptions and juggled with them in a piece of writing that no one had ever expected to see.
Chronicles is not a memoir, not in the usual sense. It is certainly not a cradle-to-the-present autobiography, not a Rousseauian Confessions, an apologia, or the definitive explanation for a life. In 2012, Dylan would remind readers, via his usual Rolling Stone conduit, that the book does not, in fact, contain the very meaning of existence, his ‘or anyone else’s’. The text, he would say, ‘doesn’t attempt to be any more than what it is’.2 The modest disclaimer could leave the reader to wonder what, in that case, Chronicles does attempt. A lot is explained, but most of that happens allusively, between the lines. The choices made in the narrative, or rather narratives, were meanwhile surprising to many fans in 2004 and downright baffling to those looking eagerly for Dylan’s frank remembrances of famous times past. The omissions seemed wilful. For all that, the blurb did not lie: what you got for your bestseller was as fine a piece of pure American storytelling as most readers had recently seen.
*
There are no direct quotations from Chronicles: Volume One in this book, just as there were no direct quotations from the singer’s prose in its predecessor. For once, the overworked word ironic can stand in plain sight. As my Once Upon a Time was nearing completion, someone in Dylan’s office – and who knows? – declined to grant permission for the use of selected passages. Such is the artist’s right and copyright.
The simple idea had been to allow the subject to speak for himself, now and then, while warning the reader, here and there, that alternative accounts were available. Judging by the message relayed from New York through Simon & Schuster, Dylan’s publisher, umbrage was taken by someone at a few illustrative samples from my text. Scepticism towards the idea that Chronicles provided any kind of full documentary record of events and conversations from four decades back and more, human memory being what it is, was taken as an assault on Mr Dylan’s ‘veracity’. (I place the word in quotation marks to signify quotation: it’s a habit worth acquiring.) Close readers of his book might therefore begin to see where irony comes in. I was being forbidden to quote from a volume richly and demonstrably stuffed with quotations, very few of them acknowledged. The subject, it turns out, is a sensitive one. It is also fascinating.
Perhaps, first time around, I should have mentioned the reviews of Chronicles instead. One, written by the film critic and novelist Tom Carson and published in the Sunday books section of the New York Times on 24 October 2004, had plenty to say about veracity. There was ‘the voice Dylan has devised for his youthful self, which is spellbinding in its hokum’. That voice was ‘transparently fraudulent’. The writing offered ‘some of the best fake Huckleberry Finn’ Carson had ever read. The reviewer further observed, correctly, that ‘the book’s larger purpose is mythographic’, but he went on to note its ‘reality-distorting priorities and revealing omissions’, not least in Dylan’s failure to address his ‘square peg’ Jewishness in 1950s middle America. To point out, said Carson, ‘that Chronicles is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it’s genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one . . .’ The memoir was deemed ‘self-serving’, but also – I had laboured the same point – a marvel. ‘This is a veteran carny’s magic show,’ observed the man in the New York Times, ‘not a confessional.’ Precisely.
Other reviewers who knew their Dylan had reached very similar conclusions. A few had been needlessly stern on the subject of veracity. My account argued, somewhere along the line, that the kind of truth being offered did not depend much, if at all, on specific facts. To me, those didn’t matter alongside Dylan’s version of the truth. You could call that truth deeper or higher; I would have said ‘artistic’. And that was while setting aside until this volume most of the arguments over precise words, precise phrases and their precise origins.
Chronicles is a marvel. It counts as a significant piece of American literary art, one all the better for its solid craft in the age of celebrity tell-all-tell-nothing confessions. Pulling it apart like a questionable witness statement is about as useful as denying the power of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ just because Dylan was shaky – as he was – on the facts of that celebrated tragedy. But where Chronicles was concerned the issue of honesty cut a little deeper, it transpired, than any argument over whether the writer had got his stories straight. Suddenly the topic for discussion became the nature of his art in the twenty-first century.
By 2004, it wasn’t exactly a whole new symposium. Noises had been made before about Dylan’s methods, his influences, inspirations, sources, borrowings and the uses to which sometimes he put them. Back in the 1960s he had dismissed all such questions with a famous crack to the effect that influence was impossible to avoid. You open your eyes and ears, he had said, and you’re influenced. That had not been the sole basis for an avid student’s speed-learning in the art of songwriting. It didn’t make him guilty of the glib charge that he was ‘a master thief’. It didn’t establish his unsullied innocence, either. It did help to explain him, however.
Dylan had come to fame by way of a Greenwich Village scene and a folk tradition that saw nothing wrong with ‘borrowing’, adaptation, imitation and the subtle (or not so subtle) shaping of ‘influences’ into a style the artist could call his own. In an important sense, that process was the folk tradition. It amounted to the casual, communal effort continually to remake songs that had been handed down from generation to generation. For some, folk was inspirational on that account alone. Its problems arose only when the old egalitarian hootenanny habits began to run up against a capitalist entertainment industry with a vested interest in copyright and ownership.
Dylan, always remembered as a ‘sponge’, even by those who had done plenty of sponging themselves, had his share of trouble on that score in the first half of the ’60s. His management were obliged to pay off Jean Ritchie, the Appalachian ‘Mother of Folk’, when her arrangement of the ancient ‘Nottamun Town’ turned up as the basis for Dylan’s 1962-3 ‘Masters of War’. His ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right’ was born, indisputably, from a version of the traditional ‘Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)’ developed and placed under copyright by his friend Paul Clayton. For what it’s worth, the publishing companies settled that argument out of court. As Dylan had admitted in a 1962 radio interview and would cheerfully admit again in Chronicles, he had also lifted the tune for ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till’ from Len Chandler, another Village colleague. Amidst all this it hardly required perfect pitch to hear that ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’ was built around the Child ballad ‘Lord Randall’, or that ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ owed its existence to an early-twentieth-century recasting by John Jacob Niles of the old work song ‘Go ’Way From My Window’. The scruffy prodigy’s borrowings from ‘obscure’ black blues players were meanwhile extensive and wholly unselfconscious. It was what everyone did, after all. Copyright arguments aside, the folk scene amounted to a nightly test case for the proposition that originality of authorship, pure, protean and sufficient unto itself, was a myth.
The musicologist Charles Seeger, father to Pete, had devised the phrase ‘folk process’, though the idea was far from original, aptly enough.3 The International Folk Music Council had already attempted to codify the whole business in 1954 with a few lofty-sounding rules involving ‘oral transmission’, reinterpretation and ‘transformation’. It didn’t solve every problem. Interviewed in 2001, Pete Seeger would remember his father describing the folk process as akin to cooks adapting recipes, or to legal systems devising new laws for each new generation.4 The analogies were neat, but they failed to explain, for one conspicuous example, how Pete Seeger himself could wind up as one of the copyright holders to the civil-rights anthem ‘We Shall Overcome’.
The refrain originated in an early gospel song, ‘I’ll Overcome Someday’, written by the Rev. Dr Charles Tindley and published in 1901. By 1947, that piece formed the basis for a song published in its turn as ‘We Will Overcome’. Taken up by the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, it was heard by Pete Seeger and others who then joined in the process of (slight) adaptation. Four individuals or their heirs today hold the copyright, along with various publishers, for this product of the ‘folk process’.
In a 1993 book, Seeger explained that he had taken out the copyright as a purely defensive measure to protect the song from music-business predators.5 It is worth noting, too, that all royalties from ‘We Shall Overcome’ have gone to a fund that bestows grants to aid the cultural efforts of African Americans in the Southern states. The simple fact remains, nevertheless, that only the rectitude of Seeger and his friends prevented the most famous of all folk songs from ending up as a spectacular example of how ridiculously easy it was in the 1950s and 1960s to abuse the fabled ‘process’. Dylan’s Greenwich Village knew all the arguments. Everyone was a staunch believer in folk’s ancient uncorrupted practices until they had a song, or even an arrangement, they could call their own. Claiming to have ‘arranged’ some old, familiar piece in fact became a favourite device in the copyright game.
In his youth, Dylan was also inhabiting another ’60s entirely. In this universe adolescents and students across the western world were reading T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and discovering that it was perfectly OK – fascinating and revolutionary, in fact – to bulk up one’s text with big chunks of imported writing by other hands. The New Criticism, of which Eliot was a household god, was then infesting the English departments of American colleges with the delightful (to critics) notion that an author’s intentions, therefore his ‘authorship’, didn’t really count for much. In France, the critic Roland Barthes was working towards an essay, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), in which readers and the ‘liberated’ text would be judged to matter more than any writer with a byline. Dylan didn’t know much about all of this, if he knew anything at all, but it was part of the era’s background noise.
If creativity could not happen in isolation, if authorship was therefore a disputable idea, how could a line be drawn? For some, easily enough. Copyright protection was sought for the many songs of Bob Dylan, as standard practice, almost as soon as they were written. On a few occasions even songs to which other writers had prior claims were filed under his name. Since the early ’60s all of Dylan’s many works – albums, art, films, even acclaimed books – have been protected as a matter of course. Like any artist, he has his rights.
In pop art in the ’50s and early ’60s collage and photomontage, adapting and juxtaposing ‘found’ or borrowed images, were fashionable techniques. By 1962, Andy Warhol’s Factory was up and running on New York’s East 47th Street, mass-producing copies of mass-produced imagery and offering the results, at excellent prices, as artworks. Pop music, the other art with the name, had long been excusing plagiarism and theft as the name of the creative game. While Warhol was challenging international art buyers to question their preconceptions towards authenticity and the role of the artist, fans of the Billboard Hot 100 were taking precious little interest in the names of the Tin Pan Alley hacks who wrote or rewrote the hit songs.
Dylan, like his generation, had come to adulthood amidst all of this. In an affluent age the cultural chatter said that anything found, borrowed, remade or copied was justifiable as art simply because of the choices made in the act of appropriation. Authorship was an arguable matter. But for one writer who would later assert his right ‘to be identified as author’, the issue was a little more complicated. From the start, Dylan had been uncertain, deeply so, about his identity. He couldn’t get a fix on himself. As he mentioned in a 1991 interview: ‘Yes, well, what can you know about anybody?’6 In Chronicles he would write of a missing person, a person missing ‘inside’, who had to be found. Pronouns confuse the matter, but he needed to find ‘him’. So who really did the making and who did the taking? When the time came to unmask the author, he told some Bob Dylan stories instead.
*
In a book of five long chapters, Dylan composed three concerning the near-year straddling his blizzard-blown arrival in New York in January of 1961 and the making of his first album in late November. He conjured up a long-gone city, its streets, rooms, speech, textures and preoccupations, with a rare sensitivity to the peculiarities of memory, how it looms unexpectedly and fades unpredictably across the span of the decades. Patently, Dylan mythologised his younger self, just as the critics alleged, but that seemed apt. Who looks back with perfectly clear eyes? For his part, the artist was attempting to look backwards through the deep murk of fame and myth at a long-lost youth with a fragile sense of himself who had laboured under the self-imposed burden of an invented name and a heap of juvenile fabrications. Was clarity even possible?
Dylan’s storytelling, the faux reminiscences, wry asides and sly humour that provoked all the flattering comparisons with Twain, made an insistent point. In a proper celebrity memoir he would, for starters, have got his chronology straight and paid due attention to the usual arc of fame. Then he would have hosed his pages with superstar secrets and notable names. His publishers must have prayed nightly for such a manuscript. Instead, the author ignored all the stuff of legend, all the controversies and all the moments, famous and infamous, that had been written about so often by others. He gave his readers tales of old New York – almost a distinct American genre, as it happens – and episodes involving two of his less-celebrated later albums. This, Dylan seemed to be saying, is what I remember when I choose to remember. This is how I remember. For encounters with God or ‘going electric’ (and all that) readers would have to look elsewhere. Or wait.
Late in the autumn of 2012, he would admit that volumes two and three of Chronicles were gestating. If nothing else, there was a contract to be honoured. His readers might yet be allowed to share his thoughts on his moments of high fame, or they might receive nothing much from the horse’s mouth. His original scheme, it appears, had been to anchor his memories to particular albums, but that had already gone awry. The matching idea had been somehow to inhabit the past and the future simultaneously. But with Volume One Dylan had lost one thread and found another, surprising himself in the process. His own youth and his early days in New York had become ‘extremely interesting. When you start doing that, it amazes you what you uncover without even trying.’7
It was not a promise to dish the dirt. Chronicles, properly understood, was of a piece with the music Dylan had been making since Time Out of Mind. The past was in the present; all time was present. Plainly, he found it impossible to say what those future non-memoirs might contain. In any case, as he informed his Rolling Stone interviewer in September 2012, his memory wasn’t great. He remembered what he wanted to remember. ‘And what I want to forget, I forget.’8 His book writing, Dylan said, followed links in a chain. Allen Ginsberg, dying in the year Time Out of Mind was released, had once invoked chains of flashing images to describe the singer’s art. In his songs, as in his book, Dylan followed an associative logic that was not always readily apparent to the listener or the reader. Imagery provided the syntax of the songs. In prose, or so it seemed, he allowed wandering memory to make the connections. A standard autobiography would have followed a linear chronological path. Chronicles was informed by the knowledge that memory simply doesn’t work that way, that to pretend otherwise is a kind of fraud. Then again, a writer who remembers only what he wants to remember, who throws aside the restraint of a chronological structure, can write whatever he likes and call it the truth.
The pair of least-expected chapters devoted to two of Dylan’s less-famous albums, New Morning and Oh Mercy, were disconcerting when set amidst all the engaging reminiscences of Greenwich Village in the early days. Why Dylan would be hung up 30-odd years after the fact on what had passed between him and the aged patrician poet Archibald MacLeish as they attempted to add songs to a play was mystifying. It had been, by any measure, one of the least significant episodes in the singer’s career. His account of his dealings with the producer Daniel Lanois during the making of the Oh Mercy album, aside from raising certain questions of ‘veracity’, also seemed near-redundant. For the reader, the chapters became a puzzle in their own right. Perhaps that was the idea. But why were these events on Dylan’s mind, of all the events in his life, early in the twenty-first century?
If you needed to know, the New Morning section would tell you that he had never cared to be regarded as any generation’s spokesman, that demented fans had ruined his Woodstock idyll, that the conferring of an honorary doctorate by Princeton in 1970 had left him angry enough to want to rend flesh. Set beside riveting accounts of his creative origins, the story of his first encounter with the music of Robert Johnson above all, tales of hard labour in a New Orleans studio, or of strange days under siege in his own home, were almost pointedly beside the point. The episodic anecdotes were beautifully told, but why tell these of all stories?
It was impossible to say how or if the episodes connected with one another, far less with Dylan’s memories of his Greenwich Village youth. In his New York Times Sunday review Tom Carson wrote that ‘the major surprise of Chronicles is its literary cunning, which is partly structural’. The reviewer argued that vignettes of Dylan ‘beleaguered’ in 1970 and as the ‘weary lion’ of 1987 were deliberate counterpoints to the tales, placed before and after, of New York and the Village in 1961. This was a generous interpretation. What the reviewer called this ‘narrative ploy, this convolution’ might have echoed movie flashbacks – Carson nominated a famous sequence in The Godfather Part II – but in film that technique is intended to make plain the connections between past and present. If that was what Dylan was doing, he didn’t bother to make any of his aims clear.
Most reviewers didn’t mind in the slightest. Given only Tarantula to go on, they were taken aback by the fact that the singer had turned out to be such an accomplished prose stylist. Fake or not, the authorial voice was a real achievement, a convincing blend of cunning, wit and conversational tone. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin welcomed a book of ‘amazing urgency’.9 Nevertheless, a journalist who had been observing Dylan for as long as most people in her trade was not deceived by the author’s guile.
Deliberately, no doubt, Chronicles: Volume One beggars the efforts of biographers to reconstruct Mr Dylan’s inner workings. With no great interest in the supposed landmark events of his life or even in the specific chronology or geography of his movements, he prefers to mine a different kind of memory. And he once again makes his homage to Woody Guthrie – another figure not known for autobiographical exactitude – with a writing style both straight-shooting and deeply fanciful.
The tale told by the ‘Holden Caulfield of Hibbing, Minn’, as Maslin styled the author, was ‘lucid without being linear, swirling through time without losing its strong storytelling thread. And it begins and ends at more or less the same place: the calm before the storm . . .’ Approbation for the book was all but universal. In The Guardian, Mike Marqusee, having written extensively on the subject’s 1960s career, said that ‘with this rich, intermittently preposterous, often tender work, Bob Dylan has delivered more than many of us dared hope for’. In the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard said, straightforwardly, that Chronicles: Volume One was ‘an extremely good book indeed, actually a great one’. In the Boston Globe, Carlo Wolff argued that the work ‘affirms Dylan’s idiosyncrasies and his mastery of the vernacular. As his best songs also show, he’s a great reporter with a talent for vivid detail.’ Chronicles, Wolff added, is ‘packed with ruminations on musical theory, sharp and humorous commentary, flashes of poetry – and facts filtered and colored to flummox, entertain, and illuminate’.10 It was enough to make any author weep tears of gratitude.
*
Almost two years after the release of ‘Love and Theft’ in September 2001, a curious tale had appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.11 It involved a 62-year-old Japanese writer and doctor and the then 62-year-old Dylan. Junichi Saga had only a slight knowledge of the American singer – ‘I’m not familiar with these things,’ he told the paper – but the American, it was suggested, had clearly come to know something about Saga’s oral history of a Japanese mobster and former patient, a book translated into English in 1991 as Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld. In fact, as the article proceeded to explain, there were some striking similarities between passages in certain songs on Dylan’s ‘Love and Theft’ album and the dying gangster’s story of the loves and life of a thief. The resemblances did not seem accidental.
It had been noticed back in 2001 that the artist had set the title of his album in quotation marks. The gesture had been treated as an acknowledgement, playful or rueful, that Dylan had borrowed a phrase from Eric Lott’s 1993 book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. That study had attempted to untangle the complicated, century-long story of white responses to black culture, as represented by the white ‘minstrels’ who had once performed in preposterous ‘negro’ costumes with banjos on their knees and burnt cork on their faces. It was incidental to Lott’s main point, but the salience to Dylan and all the other young white men who took up – or stole away – the blues in the 1950s and 1960s was obvious. As the author had mentioned in passing, ‘Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.’12
If it did not amount to an acceptance of the charge, Dylan’s use of Lott’s title – itself a theft, obviously enough – had been a tacit admission that the accusation had force. He didn’t feel guilty about it, necessarily – he venerated the blues and blues musicians – but Dylan had raided black culture at every step of his career. Who had not? Like a lot of his contemporaries, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, oblivious to every contradiction, he had seen no problem with that. In 2003, however, the Wall Street Journal seemed to be saying that contemporary issues of love and theft might be at once more straightforward and more troubling than the artist’s fans realised.
The Journal’s headline had gone to the point: ‘Did Bob Dylan lift lines from Dr Saga?’ If he had not, similarities between ‘Love and Theft’ songs and odd passages in the Japanese book (as translated) were near-impossible to explain. ‘My old man would sit there like a feudal lord . . .’ ran the book. ‘My old man, he’s like some feudal lord / Got more lives than a cat,’ went the song entitled ‘Floater (Too Much to Ask)’. ‘Actually, though, I’m not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded,’ a sentence in Confessions of a Yakuza began. ‘I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound / I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife,’ Dylan sang in ‘Floater’.
There were other examples in the Journal story, some rather less convincing as examples of alleged plagiarism. The book: ‘If it bothers you so much,’ she’d say, ‘why don’t you just shove off?’ ‘Floater’: ‘Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off / If it bothers you so much?”’ Confessions: ‘“Break the roof in!” he yelled. [He] splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside.’ Dylan’s ‘Summer Days’: ‘Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift / Gonna break the roof in – set fire to the place as a parting gift.’
In those cases, the worst that might have been said of the singer was that, consciously or unconsciously, he had adapted a few images and common phrases. One or two of the examples marshalled against him could even have been dismissed entirely as inevitable coincidences in the wide, busy world of literature. What’s a writer to do if he wants to describe trees without echoing someone else’s description of trees? Saga: ‘They were big, those trees – a good four feet across the trunk . . .’ Dylan’s ‘Floater’: ‘There’s a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town / The old one is long gone / Timber two-foot-six across / Burns with the bark still on.’
The affair had come to light when Chris Johnson, a young American teaching English in Japan – but originally from Dylan’s home state of Minnesota – had chanced upon a copy of Confessions of a Yakuza in a bookshop in the city of Fukuoka. The Japanese edition of Saga’s work was by then out of print; the English version had sold a reported 25,000 copies. It was the ‘feudal lord’ line on the first page of the gangster’s narrative that had caught Johnson’s eye. A Dylan fan, he had begun to search, so the Journal reported, for further examples of imitation, adaptation or theft. What struck him was that Dylan had not taken ‘the most poetic or most powerful lines from the book’. In fact, the borrowings appeared to the young teacher to have been almost random. Interviewed by the newspaper, Johnson had nevertheless offered up what must have sounded to the newsroom like the perfect disingenuous quote. ‘I kind of wondered if he had done a lot of that before on other albums,’ he had said. ‘But if he’d been doing this all along, somebody would have caught him a long time ago.’
What had Dylan been doing exactly? ‘Floater’ is 16 verses and 64 lines long. It is set in the rural American South. It has nothing whatever to do, in tone or theme, with Japan or Japanese gangsters. A quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had already been spotted lurking within ‘Love and Theft’. Was that also an act of plagiarism, or precisely the sort of homage you would expect from one American writer to another, an invocation of shared experience, a deepening of the national literature? A piece of verse by the little-read Civil War poet Henry Timrod, the catchily titled ‘Vision of Poesy’, would also be linked with Dylan’s ‘Love and Theft’ track ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. In the ’60s, the singer would have been lauded to the skies for the breadth of his literary knowledge. Journalists and academics would never have tired of quizzing the cultured pop poet about his book habits. By the twenty-first century, thanks to plagiarism scandals of its own involving thefts more flagrant than anything of which Dylan stood accused, thanks to the internet’s corrosive effects on copyright, thanks to corporate media’s increasingly hysterical efforts to defend intellectual property against any unlicensed use, fair or otherwise, all unacknowledged quotation was being treated by the press as theft. It became, as it remains, an obsession for America’s cultural arbiters. Yet this was in the era, ironically enough, of sampling, of the mash-up, the era born of the pop-art collage and Warhol’s Factory. Eliot’s The Waste Land would have been put to the sword – ‘Did Nobel Prize winner lift lines from St Augustine?’ – in such a fervid climate of opinion. Dylan stood no chance. He had not heard the last of it, either.
In the writing of ‘Floater’ stray pieces of Saga’s text had helped him to achieve rhymes. That detail had been overlooked: the good doctor had not attempted poetry. There is not much doubt, equally, that Dylan helped himself to a few words, but their true worth and weight, their real significance, is arguable, at best. One verse of his song, nothing special by his standards, goes:
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes
You could call it American pastoral, an invocation of rural poverty in former times, a scene from a folk tale. You would have to call it culturally specific: tattooed Japanese gangsters are nowhere heard or seen. The Wall Street Journal made no mention in its front-page story of what ‘Floater’ might be about, or of Dylan’s possible artistic purpose in the song. An admirer might regret that he was careless enough to throw in a few images and phrases he had picked up, but the charge of plagiarism only sticks if it involves intentionally passing off substantial parts of another’s work as your own. Dylan seems to have come close – his Lyrics 1962–2001 (2004) makes no mention of sources – but not close enough for conclusions to be drawn. You have to ignore the songs entirely to call the offence heinous.
Consider this comparative exercise. Confessions: ‘My mother . . . was the daughter of a wealthy farmer . . . [She] died when I was 11 . . . I heard that my father was a travelling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him. [My uncle] was a nice man, I won’t forget him . . . After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.’ The frequent ellipses are interesting, let’s say. Now here’s Dylan’s ‘Po’ Boy’:
My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer
My father was a travelling salesman, I never met him
When my mother died, my uncle took me in – he ran a funeral parlor
He did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him.
Mother dies, travelling salesman, nice man, ‘did a lot of nice things’: that’s the sum total of the evidence. Dylan had taken cues from stray passages in a book he had picked up and used them to make a distinct piece of art, yet he stood accused not of creativity but of plagiarism. Another very funny passage in ‘Po’ Boy’, especially when delivered in Dylan’s deadpan voice, goes as follows:
Othello told Desdemona, ‘I’m cold, cover me with a blanket
By the way, what happened to that poison wine?’
She says, ‘I gave it to you, you drank it’
Poor boy, layin’ ’em straight –
Pickin’ up the cherries fallin’ off the plate
Plagiarism from Shakespeare, then? That bard knew the game of beg, borrow or steal better than anyone. Given that Dylan’s po’ boy has a shaky knowledge of the Moor’s tragedy, or a sly appreciation of the comic potential of acting dumb, it would be silly to say that something underhand is going on in this part of the song. It would be no sillier, however, than a suggestion of theft that paid not the slightest attention to what the artist had done with the allegedly stolen goods. There are several clear examples of Dylan appropriating Saga’s translated words. Amid this small fuss, however, there were very few instances of the artist’s accusers mentioning what Dylan was attempting in the finished songs of ‘Love and Theft’. The bigger game, evident since Newsweek had printed the wholly false ‘rumor’ that he was not the author of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, was to prove that Dylan was, in some way, a fraud.13 Saga’s ‘feudal lord’ line, the one that would be quoted repeatedly as some sort of clincher, will serve as a final example. In isolation, the use of the phrase seems lethal to any defence of Dylan. But what happens to it in the context of the song?
My old man, he’s like some feudal lord
Got more lives than a cat
Never seen him quarrel with my mother even once
Things come alive or they fall flat
An old-fashioned husband behaving like a feudal lord: there’s a novel idea. If this was the best that could be managed to catch out Dylan, it was trivial stuff. Interestingly, those who seized on a handful of words also failed to mention their original use in Saga’s text. The words appear on the first page of a chapter entitled ‘Oyoshi’ and have nothing important to do with the verse in Dylan’s song.
My old man would sit there like a feudal lord, with his back to some fancy flower arrangement. The staff would be sitting in front of him, red-faced from bowing down till their foreheads touched the floor.14
In his September 2012 interview with Rolling Stone, Dylan would explain and complain. ‘In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition,’ he would say (while failing to deny the accusation of borrowing). ‘It’s true for everybody but me. There are different rules for me.’ The Confessions of a Yakuza controversy would blow over soon enough – Dr Saga enjoyed ‘Love and Theft’ and had no intention of suing – but Dylan was not yet off the hook.
*
When the Modern Times album appeared at the end of August 2006, any lingering doubts that he had restored his reputation and his career would be eradicated. Album number 32 would become his first since Desire 30 years before to top the charts and his first in any era to go directly to the summit of Billboard’s rankings. A fortnight later, a story would appear in the New York Times.15
‘Perhaps you’ve never heard of Henry Timrod, sometimes known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy,’ the article began. ‘But maybe you’ve heard his words, if you’re one of the 320,000 people so far who have bought Bob Dylan’s latest album, Modern Times.’ Under the headline ‘Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?’, the reporter, Motoko Rich, would then describe what seemed to be copious borrowing by Dylan from the works of a poet of whom, it was possible to guarantee, very few Americans had heard.
Walter Brian Cisco, a biographer of Timrod, would be brought in to pronounce that beyond doubt ‘there has been some borrowing going on’. Verses would be contrasted and compared; a brief account of Timrod’s life would be given. Born in 1828; private tutor on plantations before the Civil War; medically discharged by the Confederate Army because of tuberculosis; too frail to last as a war correspondent; editor of a South Carolina newspaper; occasional poet who took as his themes the war between the states and its effect on the South; dead at 39. Timrod managed only a single volume of posthumously published verse. The New York Times article would mention his ‘Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina 1866’ on the apparent grounds that it was one of only a couple of anthologised Timrod poems liable to be even half-familiar to a non-scholarly American reader. No cribbing by Dylan from those couple of works would be detected, however. Nevertheless, the contrast-and-compare exercise between his Modern Times songs and the versifier’s works would leave little doubt: Dylan had built parts of some songs with recycled masonry. For the benefit of those who knew no better, meanwhile, the Times would further explain that because Timrod was long dead and his works out of copyright, there was ‘no legal claim that could be made against Mr Dylan’.
In an undistinguished poem entitled ‘A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night’, Timrod had written:
These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
In his ‘Vision of Poesy’, meanwhile, the luckless Confederate bard had offered this:
. . . and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
Among other examples of borrowings from Timrod, part of Dylan’s Modern Times song ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ runs as follows:
The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
The matter had come to the attention of the Times thanks to Scott Warmuth, described as ‘a disc jockey in Albuquerque and a former music director for WUSB, a public radio station in Stony Brook, on Long Island’. In the months and years to come, this keen student of the artist and his methods was to cause no small commotion among Dylan’s most dedicated fans and critics. In September 2006, after what the Times called his ‘judicious Google searches’, Warmuth agreed he had not been surprised by the fact that the singer had ‘leaned on a strong influence’. Quoted directly, Warmuth said: ‘I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs. It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.’ He had found ten echoes of Timrod in Modern Times, but did not question Dylan’s originality. In fact, Warmuth made an excellent point: ‘You could give the collected works of Henry Timrod to a bunch of people, but none of them are going to come up with Bob Dylan songs.’
Three days later, the Times invited the singer Suzanne Vega to cast an eye over the case. She argued, first, that it is ‘modern to use history as a kind of closet in which we can rummage around, pull influences from different eras, and make them into collages or pastiches. People are doing this with music all the time.’ Vega wondered, however, whether it was truly part of the ‘folk process’ to lift ‘a few specific metaphors or phrases whole from someone else’s work’. That was a proposition she couldn’t accept. Graciously, she doubted that Dylan had raided Timrod on purpose, speculating that the artist might be in possession of an eidetic memory - he doesn’t think so – or that he had immersed himself so completely in Civil War literature – a better bet – as to render the absorption of Timrod’s work unconscious. In any event, by one definition of the offence, Dylan seemed to be guilty as charged. One essential question remained to be answered. What of it?
In an article for the Poetry Foundation’s website published on 6 October, the poet Robert Polito, director of creative writing at the New School in New York, would respond almost despairingly to the ‘controversy’.16 In his view, to reduce the connection between Dylan and Timrod to a ‘story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper’. After mentioning the advent of sampling in pop music, Polito pointed out that Modern Times also ‘taps into the Bible’ while revisiting the music and words of ‘Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularised by Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra . . .’ Polito also noted, as dedicated fans had noted, the shadows laid across the album by old folk songs such as ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, ‘Frankie and Albert’ and ‘Gentle Nettie Moore’.
The writer intended to vindicate Dylan as an artist who was ‘rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years’ with Time Out of Mind, ‘Love and Theft’ and Modern Times. Reading Polito’s lists of the great and gone, however, a reader was liable to wonder if the case for the defence might not hang the accused in the end. The abundance of ‘sources’ was daunting. Here they were, like a celestial greatest-hits package or the perfected version of what Dylan had attempted back in 1970 with his Self Portrait: ‘Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.’
Polito wasn’t done. He had noticed a range of reference in the so-called Dylan trilogy that had already been spotted, as a collective effort, by other avid fans, but the writer called Dylan’s use of ‘fragments’ a revelation, not plagiarism. So here were more famous names and famous titles: ‘W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, Ovid, T.D. Rice’s blackface Otello, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, the Japanese true crime paperback Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and [Flannery O’Connor’s novel] Wise Blood.’
Polito also talked about ‘folk process’, but accepted that the term was inadequate as a description of Dylan’s methods. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were therefore recruited once again to the artist’s cause. The three albums were thereby defined as ‘Modernist collages’, as ‘verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations’. Within this elaborate verbal machinery, in Polito’s account, Timrod’s presence ‘works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice’. For Polito, none of this ‘conjuring’ counted as plagiarism.
Nevertheless, one remark made by the writer almost as a joke would intrigue Scott Warmuth. Of ‘Love and Theft’, Polito wrote that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album – no matter how intimate or Dylanesque – can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel’. Warmuth returned to his listening, his reading and his Google searches.
For his part, Dylan would in due course tell Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore that when it came to the appropriation of nineteenth-century texts, only ‘wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. The artist would challenge the journalist, asking, ‘as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him?’
Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get . . . It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition.
After conflating those who laid plagiarism charges with those who had called him Judas for taking up the electric guitar in the mid-’60s – ‘All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell’ – Dylan stuck to a bold and simple claim. The most interesting thing about his defence, the most important thing, was the simple fact that in making use of Timrod or of anyone else he had known exactly what he was doing. Dylan was not taking refuge in the excuse that the habit was remotely ‘unconscious’.
I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.17
*
Cast your mind back to the young man who set out late in the 1950s to turn himself into Bob Dylan, folk singer. The word sponge, so often used, is probably inadequate, as is the word dedication. His intensity in the pursuit of musical knowledge more closely resembled an obsession. One of his college contemporaries would tell Robert Shelton in 1966, for example, that Dylan was ‘the purest of the pure’ where folk was concerned, that while living a version of the bohemian life in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis he ‘had to get the oldest record and, if possible, the Library of Congress record, or go find the original people who knew the original song’.18 It sounds less like fascination than a kind of need, less like a desire for knowledge a young singer could use than a desire to know everything there was to know. Dylan was greedy: he wanted it all.
He was in love with folk and blues music, of that there is no doubt. It has remained the one enduring, unquestioned affection in his existence for better than half a century. It is hard, nevertheless, to escape the feeling that Dylan’s desperate thirst for knowledge arose from an equally desperate need to complete himself, to give substance to the identity he was attempting to inhabit. Either there was more to it than just an instinct for art, or the instinct was central to the evolution of the figure called Bob Dylan. Even the fantastical tales the kid would tell about himself in his earliest days in Greenwich Village required documentation, background knowledge, as complete as he could make it or fake it. The stories of the musicians he would claim to have met and played with out on the road – to complicate matters, a few of the stories were true – needed a deep understanding of what they played and how they played. Above all, for Robert Zimmerman himself to believe in Bob Dylan called for the kind of knowledge only that unlikely character could possibly possess. Study, obsessive study, was a way of giving authority to the identity the young Dylan was trying to mould around himself.
But why would the ageing man wall himself behind quotations, allusions, borrowed texts and lifted phrases? It might be, for he has said so often enough, that he finds writing harder now than he found it when he was creating automatically and unselfconsciously in the ’60s. But as we have seen with a song like ‘Floater’, a big pile of verses only depends to a very limited degree – as best we know – on what has been borrowed. You can understand why he might want to add texture for poetic effect by drawing on a variety of sources. As Polito argued, it is a legitimate stratagem. As Vega described matters, it is also commonplace and acceptable within limits. It troubles a lot of Dylan’s fans, however. They wonder if he lards his song with the work of others as an artistic choice or because, these days, he lacks the resources to manage a Bob Dylan song unaided. His defence of the habit when talking to Mikal Gilmore – ‘You make everything yours’ – has an echo throughout literature. There remains the distinct possibility, nevertheless, that Dylan is still completing himself with the gleanings of his relentless studies, that it is a way of maintaining the edifice of his identity and the bigger, ever-present cultural edifice that bears his name.
Perhaps Polito had a point. Perhaps Dylan expects his borrowings to be ‘noticed’. Perhaps, too, he expects the people who buy his albums either to understand the folk process and the tactics of Modernism, or – and why not? – to fail to give a damn about a song’s origins if it’s a song worth hearing. Dylan is right about one thing. If simple plagiarism was the only issue, anyone could pull a book from the shelf and manufacture a Bob Dylan song. Whether Chronicles can be justified in the same manner is another question.
*
In the summer 2010 issue of the New Haven Review there appeared an essay by Scott Warmuth. You must presume the title was his. It amounted to the boldest headline yet where Dylan and his multiplicity of sources were concerned. ‘Bob Charlatan,’ it read, ‘Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One.’ Clearly, Warmuth had moved on from defending the artist as an exemplar of ‘folk process’. The notion that a bunch of people armed with The Poems of Henry Timrod couldn’t come up with Bob Dylan songs no matter how hard they tried was no longer a relevant detail, it seemed, where the artist’s book was concerned. Charlatan is a word with no positive connotations.
On his blog, Goon Talk, much as in the September 2006 New York Times piece, Warmuth describes himself as a writer, musician and disc jockey.19 He scarcely does himself justice. Along with another blogger, Edward Cook, Warmuth has subjected a major artist to the kind of extensive crowd-sourced textual analysis that attracts attention. The attention, in turn, raises some serious questions where Bob Dylan’s art is concerned. After all, another word for charlatan is fraud.
Warmuth had made an appearance on the Dylan fan website Expecting Rain at the end of July 2009 with a series of observations on Chronicles: Volume One. It is fair to say they caused a good deal of interest among the faithful and a good deal of consternation. Warmuth observed, first, that a March 1961 issue of Time magazine had obviously been used to plug a great many gaps in Dylan’s memory while providing the basis for certain Chronicles anecdotes and the phrases employed in the telling. The blogger went on to explain that Ed Cook had been hard at work unearthing the debts owed by Dylan to a well-known book called Really the Blues, an autobiography written by the horn player Mezz Mezzrow with the help of the novelist Bernard Wolfe and published in 1946. Warmuth had added to the list of borrowings. Then the two men had uncovered more than a few traces of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories, and of a book called Raised on Radio, and of a volume entitled Daily Life in Civil War America, and of numerous lines from Jack London. Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Timrod would be added to the list. Links with Marcel Proust and several Robert Louis Stevenson stories would be made. Most of the examples were better than plausible. As a certain kind of detective used to say, the game was afoot.
In his New Haven Review article, Warmuth came to the point quickly. Between them, he and Cook – entirely appropriately, a co-author of The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation – had discovered in Chronicles20
an author, Bob Dylan, who has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover.
Dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources. Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book.
Warmuth called it ‘autobiographical alchemy’. To penetrate the mystery, he had ‘studied cryptography and puzzle-solving’, he had ‘explored techniques used by crossword-puzzle solving champions’ and then ‘keyed in on how code-breakers look for patterns and anomalies, try to find a way in, and then build on their successes’. Warmuth had studied ‘sideshow talkers and pitchmen’, books on poker strategy and cheating at cards. He had looked at the interlinked worlds of magic, carnivals, medicine shows, minstrel troupes and con men. Whether he had enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan albums while all this was going on was not mentioned. To begin with, as Warmuth admits in the essay, he did not know how any of his researches could be applied to the study of the artist’s work. Chronicles was, it appears, a gift.
Warmuth and Cook would come up with a dozen pages covering the Jack London connection alone. In his essay, the disc jockey would attempt to deal with the issue of whether plagiarism matters by conceding that London’s own wholesale thefts had done his reputation no lasting harm. Once the idea of codes and hidden meanings was established, at least to the writer’s satisfaction, the next question had become obvious: what was being concealed? Warmuth would end his article by concluding that an ‘initially invisible second book’ existed within the covers of Chronicles amid the ‘amalgam’ of voices that constituted Dylan’s singular American voice. On the way to reaching that judgement, the essay observes:
In reading Chronicles: Volume One, it may be worth ignoring the perception of motion and looking instead at individual frames as puzzles in their own right. While creating what is read as a narrative, Dylan, with all his samplings and borrowings, may have been seeking to freeze-frame his image and suggest shadows of his possible self.
Warmuth’s work continues. On the Goon Talk blog and elsewhere he continues to add to the stock of alleged Dylan borrowings. Others have joined him in the hunt. The search engine hits just keep on coming and the research effort is impressive, the results undeniably intriguing. Warmuth believes they add up to a kind of ‘treasure map’. You could as easily call them a schematic diagram of the inner Dylan. Sometimes the books cited are obvious enough, sometimes oddly discrepant. So here stand the shades of Juvenal, Hemingway, Ovid, Conrad, Baudelaire, Orwell, H.G. Wells, Homer, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller, Willa Cather, Strindberg, Pynchon, Tennessee Williams and others besides. Here are Civil War histories, here an encyclopedia of desks. Here, as though to show that Dylan knows his pre-Beat stuff, is Kenneth Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941).21 One incidental service performed by Warmuth and Cook might be to have brought to a halt finally the game of speculative allusion hunting where Dylan is concerned. What point remains when a bibliography has been supplied? At the time of writing, Warmuth and like-minded souls are already hard at work unpicking Tempest, the artist’s 2012 album. On 12 August of that year, the blogger wrote:
Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One is a vast palimpsest, with the words of many other writers coming through the text, hundreds and hundreds of times. When you are aware of what the original source material is you find that the subtext often subverts the surface text or adds another meaning to it that you could not be aware of initially.
If that is what the artist is doing, another small question remains to be answered: why he is doing it? Not, surely, for all the grief he has received. In April 2010, Joni Mitchell, veteran of the Rolling Thunder Revue, set Dylan watchers abuzz across the internet by telling an interviewer, ‘Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.’22 For the record, Mitchell’s given name was not Mitchell, nor did her parents know her as Joni, but she doesn’t answer to Roberta Joan Anderson. Still: ‘a deception’.
So again you wonder: to what purpose? Just to keep the money coming in? Or because the deceit, if that’s what it is, has gone on for so long Dylan has passed the point of no return? So where stand the songs against which no allegations have been laid? Plagiarism and deception, funnily enough, are not always as they seem. If Warmuth is right about Chronicles functioning as a palimpsest, you can as well argue that in all of his twenty-first-century creations the artist is simply doing what he has always done. He is turning the invented figure of Bob Dylan into an artwork. If that’s the case, and if borrowing is part of the method, why on earth would he list his sources?
In his own blog, Ralph the Sacred River, Edward Cook has tried to deal with the entire issue of plagiarism, sorting through definitions of allusion, ‘uncredited use’, the borrower’s intention or consciousness of the borrowing, passing off – presenting the work as the borrower’s own – and the ‘presumption of originality’. Cook accepts that the last of these is ‘weak’ within a folk process that depends, or once depended, on continual reuse and adaptation. He believes, however, that originality is presumed and expected in written work. Dylan is therefore ‘arguably guilty of plagiarism’ in Chronicles. Cook, a fan, believes furthermore that in ‘the last ten years or so [Dylan] has compensated for the waning of his creative powers by over-indulging in this borrowing habit, which reaches a high point in his own autobiography’.23 The conclusion is that he should therefore own up to the habit. You can only wonder what would then remain of the work created, shorn of the illusions that are supposed to be at the heart of the great conjuring trick.
As previously observed, neither Dylan nor his publishers calls Chronicles an autobiography. It ‘explores critical junctures in his life and career’, it is described as ‘an intimate and personal recollection of extraordinary times’, but it is nowhere identified as autobiographical. An interested reader might be entitled to ask what on earth the book is, in that case, but it remains safe to call it a work of literary art. Dylan tells a good story. He incorporates essential elements of the American experience. He functions as an artist. The point made by Warmuth and Dylan himself about the Timrod borrowings is another statement worth adapting. You could hand the keys to the artist’s apparently extensive library to thousands of people and each of them would fail to produce Chronicles. That might be the most important fact of all.
*
Chronicles: Volume One will tell you a lot about Dylan. It won’t tell you what it appears to tell you. Even the deceits are not what they seem. You don’t need to go to the extravagant lengths of Warmuth and Cook – the former would call it ‘thoroughness’ – to grasp the degree of artifice in the book. Then again, anyone who finds Dylan a slippery memoirist should cast an eye over Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975). This so-called postmodern autobiography mocks the idea of the story of a life truly told and offers up instead a seeming jumble of (possibly) connected fragments. French literature has been awash since the 1970s, in any case, with autofiction, the fictionalised autobiography, the autobiographical fiction. America has had its parallel ‘faction’ genre since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and others following along behind. Some people glory in the ensuing complications. They better represent reality, it is argued, than anyone’s ‘true story’. In that context, Dylan’s book is a wholly modern exercise. And surely he knows it.
There is nothing new about seemingly autobiographical writing founded on the belief that all autobiography is a kind of fiction. The joke has been around at least since Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759 – 67) (a book also misunderstood because of plagiarism charges). There is nothing new, either, about the conviction that all modern celebrity memoirs are hogwash, self-serving, mere inventions of the public-relations industry. Dylan has taken that dismal truth and turned it into something valuable. His peculiar dilemma, after all, is that he has spent half a century confronting people who demand ‘the truth’ about him when no such truth is available and when, as often as not, they begin from the conviction that he is forever playing games. Warmuth and Cook maintain that Chronicles: Volume One is the most elaborate game of all. They fancy that it can be played and won.
It is, of course, a hell of a way just to read and enjoy a book. Some of the arguments over Dylan’s borrowings and thefts could leave the impression that there is nothing more to Chronicles: Volume One than the writer’s unacknowledged debts. But the con artist, if that’s what he is, remains an artist. Among others things, the book contains a real sense of America’s past – the past from which we learn and borrow – and of the people who lived there, from Walt Whitman to Robert Johnson. It reminds you, if you needed reminding, that the writer is very well read, that books, borrowed or not, inform his art in unusual ways. Above all, Chronicles shows you what it is like to see the world through Bob Dylan’s eyes.
If a book that turns on the private world of memory means anything, this one gives you the author’s sense of himself, or at least his sense of the character whose name is on the cover of the book, the one identified as the real author. Expecting Bob Dylan to write the last word on Bob Dylan is like expecting a child to catch his own shadow.
*
Despite all controversies, Chronicles remained a bestseller in the years after its publication. One way or another, that should have been the end of Dylan’s difficulties with vigilant fans and the press. In September 2011, however, there came a postscript to all the arguments over use and misuse when an exhibition of 18 of his acrylic paintings opened at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. The affair would give even the staunchest defender of Dylan and postmodernist stratagems pause.
In 1994, he had published a book entitled Drawn Blank. It involved a collection of drawings he had made while on tour between 1989 and 1992. Several of the images – portraits, interiors, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, street scenes – were not at all bad. Dylan, it transpired, had developed his art to considerable effect since his lessons with Norman Raeben all those years before. He had an eye for composition, a seeming gift for rapid transcription. He could catch a moment.
In 2006, a woman by the name of Ingrid Mössinger, curator of the Kunstsammlungen Museum in Chemnitz in Germany, had come across the book during a visit to New York. Subsequently she had secured Dylan’s agreement for an exhibition and also inspired him to turn the drawings into paintings. So our artist had become an artist. Not only that, he had become, perhaps predictably, a bestselling artist, with his own www.bobdylanart.com at the forefront of the marketing effort. More prestigious exhibitions had followed in galleries around the world. Collections of prints and books had begun to appear annually. They had sold very well indeed. In fact, given a rough calculation of the limited-edition runs and the ‘sold out’ notices on his art website, Dylan the artist has to date sold perhaps 20,000 prints at £1,500 a time. Everyone should have such a hobby.
The artist’s Asia Series was described initially by its promoters as a ‘visual journal of his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea’. It was composed, supposedly, of ‘first-hand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape’. Within days some of those viewing the works in the Madison Avenue gallery were pointing out that such claims did not so much stretch the truth as twist it into elaborate knots. Yet in this case, just for a change, things were exactly as they seemed.
Briefly, as many as ten of Dylan’s ‘first-hand’ works had been copied, and copied slavishly, from photographs. There was no possible way to deny the fact. There was no good way to explain it, either, when some of the images had been looted from Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dmitri Kessel and Léon Busy, an intrepid camera opérateur who had captured colour (‘autochrome’) images in South East Asia on behalf of Albert Kahn’s early-twentieth-century ‘Archives of the Planet’ project. These victims of Dylan’s acquisitiveness were not mere Sunday snappers. Their photographs were not overlooked works or internet detritus, though Dylan was also accused of ‘borrowing’ six images from the Flickr stream and private collection of a fan named Okinawa Soba. Within days, the Gagosian had ceased to call the show a ‘journal’, preferring instead ‘a visual reflection’. What could not be undone was an interview with the artist staged for the exhibition’s catalogue. Dylan had said:
I paint mostly from real life. It has to start with that. Real people, real street scenes, behind the curtain scenes, live models, paintings, photographs, staged setups, architecture, grids, graphic design. Whatever it takes to make it work. What I’m trying to bring out in complex scenes, landscapes, or personality clashes, I do it in a lot of different ways. I have the cause and effect in mind from the beginning to the end. But it has to start with something tangible.
So had he somehow been in the room in Vietnam in 1915 when Leon Busy was conducting an exercise in photographic colonialism entitled Indochine/Woman Smoking Opium, a picture whose composition and details exactly – as in, ‘in every respect’ – anticipated Dylan’s Opium? Was there any important difference between Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1948 photograph of a Chinese eunuch once of the court of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and the painting bearing Bob Dylan’s signature? How about the artwork of a pair of Yakuza gangsters lighting a cigarette and the monochrome Bruce Gilden photograph from 1998? What of the Kessel? It had once existed as a 1950 Life magazine cover shot bearing the caption ‘Boys playing Siamese chess in front of the Trocadero Hotel’. Was Dylan’s painted facsimile truly just an example, then, of ‘Whatever it takes to make it work’?
A few members of the New York art crowd capable of mistaking theory for artistry attempted to defend Dylan by talking about ‘reference photographs’. The excuses had a hollow sound. Given everything that had gone before, the humour of the situation lay in the fact that each of those photographs were (and are) protected by the iron laws of copyright. Whether Dylan paid to use the images is not yet clear. That he simply copied or traced them, for whatever ‘artistic purpose’, is beyond argument. The last line of defence, it seems, was that they became art, if they became art, simply because Dylan decided to make paintings of them. For those accustomed to treating him as a singular talent, it was a poor return on a long-standing investment.
Looking at the evidence in 2011, it was hard not to be reminded of every previous debate over plagiarism. Then, yet again, you were left to ponder motives. Perhaps Dylan had been too arrogant to realise or care that the Asia Series invited exposure and humiliation. Perhaps, hiding in plain sight, he had fully expected to be caught out. That possibility counted as bizarre but not, on balance, impossible, given the debate over Chronicles. Cartier-Bresson is one of the most important names in the history of photography. His images are near-impossible to disguise. Surely Dylan knew as much?
If the paintings were examples of love and theft why, yet again, had Dylan made no attributions, given no credit, and invited the unwary to believe that each and every image was his own, unaided and original work? The rhetorical question was fast becoming his most important contribution to every argument about the nature of his creativity. If the Asia Series was intended as a complicated statement about art and originality – the last possible plea in mitigation – it didn’t work. This time the charge of plagiarism was impossible to refute.
Then she says, ‘I know you’re an artist, draw a picture of me.’
I said, ‘I would if I could but I don’t do sketches from memory.’24