Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  Who knows what year this was, perhaps Dylan’s sophomore year of high school, when members of the Hibbing High Latin Club got to take on such roles. If he was a Roman soldier, he presumably participated in the scene depicted in the gospels where Roman soldiers cast lots to see who will get the tunic of the crucified Jesus—both scenes familiar to him from The Robe and King of Kings. Bob Dylan revisited that scene in the 1975 song “Shelter from the Storm,” where the singer’s role is different, but reminiscent of the play he refers to in Chronicles. First “she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns,” suggesting an identification with Jesus Christ, and four verses later “In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes / I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose.” It doesn’t matter whether his role as a Roman soldier was a reality or one of the many inventions and embellishments in his memoir, though the former seems more likely in this case. In his mind, back in 1957 and an epoch later in 2004, the road from Hibbing, like all roads, led to Rome. Dylan went back to Rome again, and to his role as a Roman soldier, in his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017. In the lecture, he discusses three books that influenced him since grammar school, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby-Dick, and the Odyssey, and describes the experience of Paul Baümer, the soldier-narrator of All Quiet as being like “You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”

  In Dylan’s 2006 song “Ain’t Talkin’,” the narrator says, “I’ll avenge my father’s death, then I’ll step back.” While the avenging of a father’s death may initially suggest Hamlet, one of Dylan’s favorite plays, I believe the echoes of the line may also lead to Rome, and to the aftermath of the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, the event celebrated by the Latin Club in 1957. As is now well known, “Ain’t Talkin’ ” steals a number of verses from the exile poems of the Roman poet Ovid, banished in AD 8 by the emperor Augustus to the desolate shores of the Black Sea. When Augustus took control through civil war and came to rule over the Roman Empire, he presented himself as restoring the state from the slavery imposed by Brutus and the other assassins of Julius Caesar:

  Those who killed my father I drove into exile, by way of the courts, exacting vengeance for their crime. . . . I did not accept absolute power that was offered to me.

  The reality was otherwise, of course. Augustus maintained the trappings of republic, but in effect his power was absolute; he avenged his father’s death, but he did not step back.

  Whatever the impulse, for Bob Dylan the city of Rome, and along with it the culture of the ancient Romans, came to hold a special place over the years. We’ll never know for sure what all those movies and his membership in the Latin Club have to do with this productive association, but the fact is that Rome and the Romans turned up in his songs from early on, and they continue to play a role in his creative imagination.

  DYLAN AND CATULLUS

  Folk music and the blues may be seen as the primary reservoir of Dylan’s words and melodies for pretty much all of his music that followed. Rock and roll was the musical staple of his high school years, and it remained a part of him as he soaked up the various folk traditions, in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and later in Greenwich Village. But folk was the old from which the new would emerge. For the youth of America, rock and roll was generational; it belonged to them. It cleared out the music of their parents, the era before immediately after World War II, the Great American Songbook, given voice by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett—the mine to which Dylan would return, starting with the 2015 album Shadows in the Night. With what was happening, musically and culturally in the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan’s genius was in the right time and the right place.

  Something similar was happening in the middle part of the first century BC in Rome. Traditional forms of literature, drama, and early epic poetry were coming to be perceived as old-fashioned, precisely as society was opening up in other ways. A clash of cultures was taking place in Rome during this period, similar to the clash that would begin to take place in post-sixties America. Among other now-lost poets of antiquity, flourishing in the two decades before Julius Caesar was killed, was a rare survivor, an ancient Roman poet who can usefully be compared to Dylan, the avant-garde lyric poet Catullus. He died young (c. 54 BC) after creating a body of work that electrified Roman readers, reflected the turmoil and the modernity of Roman times, and changed the course of literary history.

  Catullus has long been one of my favorite poets. For me, no other poet, except maybe Dylan, has been able to convey a sense of the pain caused by the loss of love as intensely as Catullus. Dylan wouldn’t begin to make creative use of the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome until the albums he released in the twenty-first century, even though he had long been living in the Rome of his memory and imagination.

  In his 2007 movie, I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes used Dylan’s 1966 song “I Want You” for a scene in which Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing the roles of Robbie and Claire, immediately recognizable versions of Bob and Sara Lownds, first fall in love. The song encapsulates first love, joyous, and just right for that moment, with its highly poetic verses and its simple, direct refrain: “I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.” Catullus too captured in his poetry the first flush of love, for instance in one of his “kiss” poems: “Suns can set and then come back again, / When our short day sets once and for all, / our night must be forever to be slept. / Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, / then another thousand and second hundred, / then still another thousand, then a hundred.”

  But the lyrics of Catullus and of Dylan mostly share a focus on love that is lost, that doesn’t work out—that’s where the poetry is. So, for instance, Catullus Poem 11, one of his last poems to Lesbia, the name he gave to the Muse (recalling Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos), who inspired his love song. He begins with an address to two acquaintances, whose task it will be to take a message to Lesbia: “You who are ready to try out / whatever the will of the gods will bring / Take a brief message to my old girlfriend / words that she won’t like. / Let her live and be well with her three hundred lovers, / Not really truly loving them / but screwing them all again and again.” The poem ends by shifting the brutal tone and bringing out the hurt and the love that is still there: “Let her not look back for my love as before / which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of a meadow / nicked by the blade of a passing plough.”

  By 1975, whatever the realities of his relationship with his wife, Sara, Dylan was, like Catullus as time went by, approaching the end of a relationship in trouble, and he constructed a lyric voice that made art from that situation. The song we already saw, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” is similarly about a relationship that is over:

  If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier

  She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear

  Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow

  She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so

  The song, separated from the autobiographical, is like Catullus’s poem, and is there for anyone who has shared that loss and hurt. Like Catullus, Dylan too imagines the rival who has supplanted him: “If you’re making love to her . . .” Back in Ann Arbor, I was reading the Latin poetry of one, and listening to the songs of the other. And that is how Catullus and Dylan, both lyric poets, sharing common human situations across twenty centuries, have become inextricably linked in my mind, and why they belong together.

  Catullus would have been much more familiar in America in the early 1960s, as is clear from an early scene from Cleopatra. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, won four Academy Awards, and still lost money, so costly was its production. It is highly likely that Dylan, like millions in America and around the world, saw it that year, as I did back in New Zealand. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, kittenish and scantily cl
ad on her couch in Alexandria, receives a visit from Rex Harrison’s Julius Caesar. Richard Burton’s Mark Antony is waiting in the wings, and will take over after the assassination of Caesar on those Ides of March. Her spies have reported on Caesar’s movements:

  CLEOPATRA: This morning early, you paid a formal visit to the tomb of Alexander. You remained alone beside his sarcophagus for some time. . . . And then you cried. Why did you cry, Caesar?

  CAESAR, CHANGING THE SUBJECT: That man recites beautifully. Is he blind?

  AN ATTENDANT: Don’t you hurt him.

  CAESAR: I won’t. Not anyone who speaks Catullus so well.

  CLEOPATRA: Catullus doesn’t approve of you. Why haven’t you had him killed?

  CAESAR: Because I approve of him.

  CAESAR, TO THE YOUNG SINGER, HIS WORDS MEANT FOR CLEOPATRA:

  Young man, do you know this of Catullus?

  Give me a thousand and a thousand kisses

  When we have many thousands more,

  we will scramble them to get the score,

  So envy will not know how high the count

  And cast its evil eye.

  Several scenes later, once Cupid’s work is done and Caesar and Cleopatra are lovers, she lies back on her bed and volunteers, “I’ve been reading your commentaries, about your campaigns in Gaul.” He, skeptical: “And does my writing compare with Catullus?” She, suggestively: “Well, it’s [slight pause] different?” “Duller?” he asks. “Well, perhaps a little too much description.”

  Unlike today’s audiences, those watching the film in 1963, including Dylan, would have gotten these references. Ancient Rome and its spoken language, Latin, the biggest language club at Hibbing High and elsewhere, used to be much more relevant. As late as January 28, 1974, the cover of Newsweek could show Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Rosemary Woods encoiled by the Watergate tapes in an image that was a clear allusion to the twin snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid that devour the Trojan priest Laocoön, who is trying to urge his people not to bring the Greeks’ fateful horse into the city. Readers of Newsweek, Dylan included, would have gotten it, either from their knowledge of Virgil or of the ancient statue of the scene, now in the Vatican. Until 1928, enrollments in Latin language courses in the United States outstripped all other languages combined. Spanish took over as the years went by, but in 1962 there were still 702,000 students studying the ancient language. Sputnik, the Cold War, and the perceived need for more science and practicality in U.S. school curricula put an end to all that. The decline began when the National Defense Education Act of 1958 omitted Latin from the curriculum—a year after Bob Zimmerman had been in Latin class at Hibbing High. It took some time to see the full effects of that measure, but by 1976 the number of Latin students had dropped sharply to 150,000, helped by the difficult nature of the language, along with its association with the church, discipline, and authority. Latin hardly fit the ethos of the counterculture.

  The paradox here is that Catullus’s poetry is in fact completely modern in the themes and sentiments it expresses. Those who understand his work read it for the beauty and the music of his verse, for the intensity of the personal voice, and for solace when they have loved and lost. Catullus was among the most-read poets of a number of the Beat poets. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, laureate poet of Victorian England, visiting the ruins of Catullus’s house on Lake Garda in northern Italy, thought of Catullus’s poem to his dead brother: “Came that ‘Ave atque vale’ [hail and farewell] of the poet’s hopeless woe / Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.” The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) could not read Catullus’s Poem 8 without weeping. It has been a favorite since Thomas Campion, the poet, musician, and doctor, translated it and put it to music in the early seventeenth century. Unlike many in our age, Campion obviously saw no distinction between poem and song. The poem is a self-address, urging strength and resolve, after the loss of Lesbia’s love:

  Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool!

  Should realize what you see is lost is gone for good.

  Bright were the suns that once shone once for you

  When you would go wherever she would lead you.

  That girl loved as no other will ever be.

  Many playful things happened then,

  Things you wished and she then wanted too.

  Bright indeed the suns that once shone for you.

  Now she doesn’t want you. You should be the same.

  The poem continues, with the poet unable to get beyond the love that is lost, as he imagines her with another: “Whom will you kiss, whose lips will you nibble.” Or, as Dylan put it in refrain of the 1997 song “ ’Til I Fell in Love with You”: “I just don’t know what I’m going to do / I was all right ’til I fell in love with you.” Or at the end of “Love Sick,” from the same album:

  I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you

  I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you

  Just don’t know what to do

  I’d give anything to be with you

  This is the art of Catullus and the art of Bob Dylan, then a fifty-six-year-old songwriter, the essence of which he sums up in Chronicles: Volume One: “experience, observation, and imagination”—qualities he shares with the Roman poet.

  Another poem of Catullus, his shortest, was translated by Abraham Cowley, English Civil War poet, in the seventeenth century:

  I hate and yet I love thee too;

  How can that be? I know not how;

  Only that so it is I know,

  And feel with torment that ’tis so.

  In spirit these poems share much with the songs Dylan was writing in the second half of 1962, when he was wasting away in the Village, pining for the absent Suze Rotolo, and producing some of his best work because of that absence. Perhaps he even knew the Catullus poem above—Miss Walker may have shown it to the Latin class, given its simplicity and brevity—as we seem to hear its echoes in a letter he wrote to Suze in 1962:

  It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to . . . bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes—I hate I love you.

  The songs of this period come across as heartfelt, and reflect a reality, but like the poems of Catullus, they come into being and endure through the artistry with which they capture the human condition. The connection between the lyric genius of these two poets may be coincidental, but Dylan’s interest in the city in which Catullus lived, loved, lost, and died young is a very real thing.

  DYLAN VISITS ROME

  Bob Dylan would pay the first of many visits to Rome, also his first time in Europe, in January 1963, a side trip after performing in a BBC film in London the month before, during what was also his first trip to England. The summer before these trips, in June 1962, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend and Muse of those years, had been taken off to Italy by her mother. Mary Rotolo disapproved of her young daughter’s relationship with Dylan, and Suze herself was troubled by the stress that Dylan’s exploding fame was beginning to cause. Originally scheduled to return by Labor Day, she stayed on past the summer, studying art for the rest of the year in the Etruscan city of Perugia. But Dylan’s trip to Rome had nothing to do with retrieving Suze, who by then had returned to New York. So why did he first visit Rome, and not Paris, Berlin, or Madrid? The liner notes to his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, mention that he actually performed on this first trip to Rome, at the Folkstudio in the bohemian region of Trastevere (“across the Tiber”), “in its heyday a Greenwich Village–style club with three or four performers every night and a generous open-stage policy.” It seems likely that Rome and its fascination had existed in Dylan’s imagination, dating back just a few years before the trip to his study of Latin and the Latin Club, all those movies, and his stage debut as a Roman soldier, with the highlights of the eternal city, not least of all its Colosseum (or “Coliseum”) and gladiators, appealing to his young mind.

  Dylan’s separation from Suze Rotolo gave us som
e of his greatest songs, written while they were apart: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Girl of the North Country,” and of course, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” its first six verses a dialogue between the singer and his lover. Dylan and Rotolo had corresponded during her absence, and the seventh verse of the song captures the pain of the man who has been left behind:

  I got a letter on a lonesome day

  It was from her ship a-sailin’

  Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again,

  It depends on how I’m a-feelin’

  Dylan and Suze would later get back together, but written during those first days that Dylan spent in Rome, it preserves the evidence of a painful memory of separation, “across that lonesome ocean.” Dylan would sing the song on Studs Terkel’s show in May 1963. Terkel asks for a love song. Dylan: “You wanna hear a love song?” Terkel: “Boy meets girl. Here’s Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.” Dylan strums a chord or two—and corrects Terkel, “Girl leaves boy.”

  Dylan’s trip to Rome also gave us a song called “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which he would perform on February 8, 1963, at Gerde’s Folk City, once he returned from his trip. “Goin’ Back to Rome” is not copyrighted, or included among the songs on Dylan’s official website, but it is preserved on the bootleg recording “The Banjo Tape,” transcribed here correctly for the first time:

  Hey, well, you know I’m lying

  But don’t look at me with scorn.

  Well you know I’m lying

  But don’t look at me with scorn.

  I’m going back to Rome

  That’s where I was born.

  Buy me an Italian cot and carry,

  Keep it for my friend.

  Buy me an Italian cot and carry

  Keep it for my friend.

  Go talk to Italy