by Bell, Ian
Gordon Ball, the Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military Institute who first proposed Dylan for the 1997 Nobel, had attempted to deal with some of the arguments in his nomination letter for 1999. Backed by an international committee of like-minded academics, the editor and friend of Allen Ginsberg had reminded the Nobel judges that, in honouring the Italian playwright Dario Fo in 1997, they had already recognised an artist whose work ‘depends on performance for full realisation’. Ball had then recalled the prize given to W.B. Yeats in 1923, despite, as was said at the time, ‘a greater element of song than is usual in Modern English poetry’. Thereafter the professor had invoked the praise given by Yeats to Rabindranath Tagore, a previous laureate, who was, said the Irishman, ‘as great in music as he is in poetry’. Ball could no doubt have piled up more evidence for his thesis. The literature award has been given in years past to historians and philosophers. There is no obvious, definable reason why Dylan’s way with words should be accounted the wrong way. But it would be unwise to risk money on the argument.
Remarking on the speculative betting generated by the 2011 Nobel, the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, one Peter Englund, compared Dylan to ‘a literary UFO’. It was a neat way to dismiss a phenomenon and an inadvertent confession. Englund, and perhaps the Nobel Committee itself, didn’t know what to make of Dylan. This said nothing about the singer, but it amounted to a slightly depressing comment on the guardians of world literature in the twenty-first century. Dispassionately, their response throughout has been puzzling. Either they want to say – but do not dare – that the Nobel must not be sullied by popular song, or they don’t want to get into arguments liable to raise questions about their criteria, and hence about the nature of literature itself.
In March of 2013, nevertheless, an interesting fragment of news goes around the world. It seems that Dylan has been elected to join the elite group, generally 250 strong, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. To most observers of such matters in the United States, this is not just another scintillating bauble to add to the pile in the artist’s crowded trophy cabinet. There is more to it than a hearty handshake and a souvenir photograph. For better than a century the academy has had a reputation, never denied, for disdaining popular culture and anyone deemed too modern for their own or society’s good. Once upon a time, those who ran the institution would not have deigned even to notice Dylan’s existence.
In 2013, in contrast, he is offered honorary rather than full membership simply because the academy cannot decide whether he is worthy – though there is apparently no longer any doubt about that – because of his music or because of his words. ‘The board of directors considered the diversity of his work and acknowledged his iconic place in American culture,’ says Virginia Dajani, executive director. ‘Bob Dylan is a multitalented artist whose work so thoroughly crosses several disciplines that it defies categorisation.’
True enough. So again you wonder, whether the artist cares to or not, why the organisers of the Nobel are so fearful of cultural UFOs. He has been central to American culture for half a century. He is as ‘literary’, say millions of listeners and several shelves full of earnest books, as they come. Still the struggle to decide what he is, and what he is worth, and how he is to be placed in anyone’s canon, goes on.
*
In November of 1965, the 24-year-old Dylan had told Joseph Haas of the Chicago Daily News that he was spiritually non-aligned, that he reserved the right to make his own choices in life. ‘I just don’t have any religion or philosophy,’ he had said. ‘A lot of people do, and fine if they really do follow a certain code. I’m not about to go around changing anything. I don’t like anybody to tell me what I have to do or believe, how I have to live.’
Oblivious to the contradiction, the young singer then proceeded to extol the ‘amazingly true’ I Ching, the ancient (if stubbornly cryptic) Chinese divination manual he pronounced ‘the biggest thing of all’. By February of 1974, nevertheless, Dylan was explaining himself again to Ben Fong-Torres of Rolling Stone: ‘Religion to me is a fleeting thing. Can’t nail it down. It’s in me and out of me.’ In the autumn of the following year, on the opening night of the Rolling Thunder Revue, he was questioned about belief in the deity by Allen Ginsberg. As Barry Miles, later the poet’s biographer, reconstructed the exchange, the answer was as follows:
God? You mean God? Yes, I do. I mean I know because where I am I get the contact with – it’s a certain vibration – in the midst of – you know, I’ve been up the mountain, and – yes, I’ve been up the mountain and I had a choice. Should I come down? So I came down. God said, ‘Okay, you’ve been up on the mountain, now you go down. You’re on your own, free. Check in later, but now you’re on your own. Other business to do, so check back in sometime. Later.’6
‘Later’ turned out to involve the passage of just a few short years. By then it would cease to be a question, as it happens a wholly redundant question, of whether Dylan entertained a belief in God. Instead, he would ‘accept Christ’ sincerely and embrace the belief that Jesus is the Messiah. It’s fair to say that the artist would surprise and dismay a few people with his decision. Early in 1979, nevertheless, he would be baptised by full immersion in a California swimming pool and begin to tell his audiences what it meant to be born again. Most would not thank him for it.
Oddly, perversely, his fans and critics would in later years treat Dylan’s involvement with evangelical Christianity as a kind of phase, as though the artist had taken a holiday from himself. Somehow ignoring a host of songs over better than three decades, they would study the small print and ignore the contract, concluding – the relief was palpable – that he had got the thing out of his system with three quick albums, 1979 to 1981, before returning to ‘secular music’, his true calling. Of all the nonsense ever talked about Dylan, this error counts as monumental. Given the artist’s habit of delivering statements of faith, albeit reluctantly, whenever he is pressed on the matter, given the apocalyptic imagery that runs through song after song, given that many of those songs are impossible to understand if you discount religious belief, calling Dylan ‘secular’ is like calling the Dalai Lama a careers adviser. This artist cannot be understood without his God. Church membership is neither here nor there.
He was a religious writer for much of the 1960s, though it took a while for most people to notice. By the beginning of the 1980s, he had come to occupy a precise area in the unending realm of faith. Most followers of the major religions would consider Dylan’s beliefs to be paradoxical. Some would call them nonsensical, others blasphemous. His statements and his songs nevertheless support a simple description. He remains a Jew, but a Jew who accepts Jesus and believes, furthermore, that Christ will return any time now. Fireworks and more will follow. Dylan is, as these things are described, a messianic Jew.
It renders him part of a small minority, but it also makes him typically American, one of those millions who have assembled creeds of all sorts from whatever was to hand and persuasive since before the republic was founded. After all, Dylan’s acceptance of Christ at the end of the ’70s happened at precisely the moment when evangelical Christianity was sweeping America. The history of his entire career says that he changes as the nation changes (and vice versa). In 2012, his latest album, Tempest, would again be coloured by the language of belief. For example, almost at random:7
I love women and she loves men
We’ve been to the west and we going back again
I heard a voice at the dusk of day
Saying, ‘Be gentle, brother, be gentle and pray.’
Or:
Low cards are what I’ve got
But I’ll play this hand whether I like it or not
I’m sworn to uphold the laws of God
You could put me out in front of a firing squad
Or:
They waited at the landing
And they tried to understand
But there is no understanding
By the time Rolling Stone was being allowed its traditional audience in honour of the new album in September 2012, the artist had all his lines, of defence and attack, by heart. Faith as a general notion was not denied; the specifics, some of them liable to test the patience even of believers, were kept vague. For Dylan, the ambiguities and self-contradictions, weighed to the ounce, had become part and parcel of what it means to believe. A touch of the Sermon on the Mount wouldn’t go amiss, however. Asked if his ‘sense’ of faith had changed, Dylan replied:
Certainly it has, O ye of little faith. Who’s to say that I even have any faith, or what kind? I see God’s hand in everything. Every person, place and thing, every situation. I mean, we can have faith in just about anything. Can’t we?8
This from one who had just laid claim, in the same interview, to transfiguration. Who could say if he had any kind of faith, but who could gainsay him if he claimed to detect the hand of God in everything? Eschatology is one of the big words used to mark last things: it has been Dylan’s specialist subject for decades. It counts as the most important fact of the last 30-some years for the man and his writing. But here he was deploying it, just as in the good old days, to twist the skull of a hapless journalist. For all that, when he faced a question about whether he found the experience of touring ‘fulfilling’, Dylan gave what sounded like an entirely straight answer. ‘Well, what kind of way of life is fulfilling?’ he asked in return. ‘No kind of life is fulfilling if your soul hasn’t been redeemed.’
*
His career has passed the half-century mark with no sign that he means to desist or surrender to age. After so many nights and years on the road his voice is a magnificent ruin, a thing of wonder and dismay to which notes and words must these days be moulded with care. The words keep on coming for all that. Whether he has appropriated certain of those words has become, in a strange way, almost irrelevant. As with his prose, as with his paintings, the word plagiarism is heard, but the uses to which Dylan puts borrowed lines and images in songs interest more people than they trouble. His motivations are more fascinating than his pillaged sources, though there is a whole cottage industry devoted to spotting those sources. None of that explains why a writer who was the most fecund of them all has need of such stratagems.
He writes a book that is miscalled a memoir and seems to sit back and wait until every allusion, hidden quotation and filched gem of prose or poetry is discovered. He calls the book Chronicles, accepts praise for a style that would not have shamed Mark Twain, and hears himself being corrected for mistaking – some people are less kind – the facts of his own life. Then the lists of debts owed begin to arrive: Twain, Jack London, Proust and many more besides. He begins to show his paintings and begins to receive a little grudging praise. Then he produces a series, ‘The Asia Series’, that the gallery describes as ‘a visual journal of his travels’ when he knows, as everyone with any interest in Dylan or art soon knows, that in several cases he has done no more than copy famous photographs that he could have copied anywhere, at any time. It is as though he is determined to confuse every issue.
That might even be the case. Back in those headlong 1960s days he was praised on all sides for his originality. The entire point, so it seemed, was that there was no one like him. Now, time and again, intermingling his work with the work of others, he risks exposure by a simple question: who was Bob Dylan anyway? Often enough he seems to be hoping that someone, some accusing voice, will tell him.
*
Only rarely do biographical studies of Dylan resist the temptation to judgement. Even the most reverent works are provoked into petulance, bitterness or disappointment here and there. A contrary individual has done plenty of things, personally and artistically, to upset someone, somewhere, at some time. Sooner or later, he pisses everyone off. Dylan’s unstable identity, the sense he gives that what passes for a personality is never better than a veneer, has guaranteed a rough ride down the years for devotees and sceptics alike. Add the fact that he is as driven as any authentic artist, obedient first and foremost to creative instinct, and you have a recipe for perplexity, then dismay, sometimes for a kind of anger.
Who has Dylan not betrayed? They form a queue, decade upon decade: the folk crowd, the radicals, the literary cliques, the godly, the secular, the politicians and priests, the journalists, the myth-makers, the prisoners of nostalgia and those who believe, desperately insistent, that with genius comes a sacred responsibility. Almost every word written about Dylan has been written by someone who knows exactly what he should be doing, or should have done. This alone makes him interesting.
None of it truly matters, of course. The making of a bad record is not a moral issue. If art is the topic, personal behaviour is irrelevant. Artistic choices are matters of fundamental opinion. You don’t like that song? Listen to something else. His latest opinions distress you? Find another hero. What Dylan is, and why he is what he is, and why that should matter at all, comprise the only worthwhile puzzle. To this day, several pieces are missing.
CHAPTER TWO
Written in My Soul
ON THE THIRD FRIDAY IN JANUARY 1975, BOB DYLAN RELEASED HIS 15th studio-made album in a dozen or so years. Blood on the Tracks was neither expected nor suspected. Its author had been back in business as a public performer, by his lights, for just over a year, but nothing had prepared his audience for this new work. Of all the things of which he was thought capable – as always, an improbably long list – unburdening himself, purging himself publicly, was not his style. Dylan didn’t do that.
Planet Waves, issued in the previous January, had been his first attempt in 40 long months at a fully rounded set of self-composed songs. The effects of a willed absence had been evident: rust had penetrated the artistic mechanism. Critical hyperbole, the special blend reserved for Dylan, had helped to give him his first number-one album in America, but sales had waned quickly. The set had soon enough felt thin, underweight, oddly mannered and hesitant. For no immediately explicable reason, it failed to repay much attention. Public demand for the latest Bob Dylan was limited.
Somehow there was a stiffness in the musical joints, an unpersuasive, metronomic rigour to The Band’s best efforts, and a vagueness to Dylan’s memory where an ineffable vocal line was concerned. If ‘Tough Mama’ or ‘On a Night Like This’ were what remained of ’66, and of the Woodstock basement, the performers who reassembled in the early 1970s had forgotten the meaning, verb and adjective, of ‘rock’. Two acute and forbidding pieces, ‘Going, Going, Gone’ and ‘Dirge’, were lost in the shuffle on Planet Waves. Those who had grown up with Dylan, desperate to hear again the old, unalloyed genius after some testing times, had tried and failed to kid themselves. The album’s ecstatic and ribald handwritten sleeve notes, later removed, had been more fascinating than most of the songs. ‘Back to the Starting Point!’ Dylan had scrawled. ‘Yeah the ole days are gone forever and the new ones aint [sic] far behind …’ But the promise of the ‘cast-iron songs & torch ballads’ of Planet Waves soon faded into another of those fascinating false dawns.
Reviewers had taken a keen interest in the writer’s apparent willingness to appease the confessional urge, but with a couple of exceptions – the transparently autobiographical ‘Wedding Song’, the ‘anthemic’ (in pop’s crude coinage) ‘Forever Young’ – the tracks could not bear the weight. Unlike the singer-songwriters he had licensed, Dylan allowed only hints of intimacy. He mentioned places familiar from the standard bio and set scenes, glittering like little recovered jewels, that might have sprung from memory. But such songs – ‘Something There Is About You’ and ‘Never Say Goodbye’ – had merely invited Dylan’s audience to treat allusion as fact. Had Planet Waves been produced by any other artist, reviews would have ranged from ‘not bad’ to ‘pretty fair’. The competition Dylan had provided for himself, the unrelenting competition with which he would have to contend for decades to come, rendered the album a middling affai
r. Irrespective of anything supportive critics wanted to believe, he was still falling a long way short of his best. Whatever the problem, Planet Waves was not the answer.
The 1974 ‘comeback’ tour, launched in Chicago in that same January amid an all-outlets media pandemonium, had meanwhile amounted to misdirection, to a sleight of hand. The tour had embraced 21 cities in Canada and the United States, but musically it had gone nowhere at all. Audiences had been delighted, predictably, and critics had swooned to see the artist back on tour – ‘live’, as they say – for the first time since 1966. For most, striking matches or waving their twinkling cigarette lighters in comical obeisance, it had been enough just to celebrate and bear witness. But as the accompanying album, Before the Flood, had made plain, there was nothing subtle about this returning hero.
He and The Band, performing together and apart – in theory, billing was shared – had gone at the rearranged Dylan songs with a metaphorical wrecking ball. There had been plenty of sound and fury, but the significance of the performances had been slight. On the recordings approved for release – certain bootlegs, to be fair, are more intriguing – Dylan sounds as if he wants to get through the ordeal with all possible speed. With the exception of the double-edged ‘Forever Young’ and intermittent performances of ‘Wedding Song’, the Planet Waves compositions disappeared from the set as the tour progressed. They were not granted space amid the famous hits on Before the Flood. Such choices told their own story.
Dylan, though on guard against an epidemic of nostalgia, instead gave lucky customers the old stuff in new guises. He took their money, a lot of money, but soon enough disdained the praise. Talking to Cameron Crowe for the 1985 Biograph box set, he spotted his own mistake. On the tour he had played ‘Bob Dylan’ to his utmost, nothing more, and gained plaudits for mere ‘energy’. Looking back, he called that absurd and ‘sort of mindless’.