Bob Dylan in America

by Sean Wilentz

  Dylan had hardly come to the Beats in search of a new political cause; rather, he was taken (as he had been before he left Minnesota) with their play of language as well as their spiritual estrangement that transcended conventional politics of any kind. In this sense, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the others served Dylan a bit as rock and roll did—as something he had picked up in Minnesota, returned to, and absorbed anew after he had passed through the confining left-wing earnestness and orthodoxy of the folk revival. Ginsberg sensed Dylan’s disquiet about politics when the two men first met, and it was one reason why he found Dylan so compelling.* “He had declared his independence of politics,” Ginsberg later recalled, “because he didn’t want to be a political puppet or feel obligated to take a stand all the time.7 He was above and beyond politics in an interesting way.” Although he could not help himself, at first, from regarding Dylan, as he later put it, as “just a folksinger,” Ginsberg had heard some of Dylan’s songs and understood them as something much grander than imitative folk art or political storytelling, “an answering call or response to the kind of American prophecy that Kerouac had continued from Walt Whitman.”

  Dylan, for his part, could not yet have known—few if any of the Beats’ young admirers did—how the original core members of the Beat generation had been hard at work for years before they established their reputations in the late 1950s. The Beat generation and its aesthetic had their own long foreground; the major Beat writers began to forge their friendships and find their literary voices in the same 1940s America that produced the Almanac Singers and Appalachian Spring. And the conflicts of the 1950s and early 1960s between the Beats and the liberal intellectuals—the most poignant, ambivalent, fateful, and intellectually interesting of the conflicts—began in the spring of 1944, nearly a decade before anyone had even heard the phrase “Beat generation,” when the Columbia College freshman Allen Ginsberg signed up to take a Great Books course with the eminent literary critic and Partisan Review intellectual Lionel Trilling.

  Ginsberg arrived at Columbia in 1943, having taken a solemn vow that he would dedicate his life to serving the working class, but he would soon change course. He fell in with another student, Lucien Carr, who introduced him to his older friend (and fellow St. Louis native) William S. Burroughs and to a Columbia dropout, Jack Kerouac, who was living on Morningside Heights with his girlfriend, having been honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy on psychological grounds. In conversation with Ginsberg, Carr formulated the aesthetics of what he called, borrowing from William Butler Yeats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, above all, Arthur Rimbaud, the “New Vision”—a Left Bank bohemian transcendentalism, at once Edenic and decadent, based on shameless self-expression, an unhinging of the senses, and renunciation of conventional morality.

  Carr would, before long, become caught up in a bizarre honor murder that landed him in prison for two years, and he would never become a full-fledged author. But out of the New Vision, his friends built ideas about spontaneous renderings of direct experience that became the foundations of Beat writing. And through Ginsberg (whose run-ins with Columbia authorities over relatively minor incidents would lead to a year’s suspension and delay his graduation until 1948), those ideas came into direct contact and conflict with Trilling’s more measured conceptions of literature.

  “In the early years, I tried to be open with him,” Ginsberg later told his friend the journalist Al Aronowitz about Trilling, “and laid on him my understanding of Burroughs and Jack—stories about them, hoping he would be interested or see some freshness or light, but all he or the others at Columbia could see was me searching for a father or pushing myself or bucking for an instructorship, or whatever they had been conditioned to think in terms of.”8 In fact, Ginsberg and Trilling actually shared some important ground, over and against important currents in American culture, which had the effect of making their disagreements all the more rancorous. Both were estranged from the cult of scientific reason and the consumerist materialism that seemed to be swamping the country during the years just after World War II. Both had rejected the submission of art to any strict ideology or party line; despite Ginsberg’s sentimental gestures (and an abiding sense of himself as a radical, no longer Marxist, but Blakean) neither teacher nor student had any use for Communist/Popular Front left doctrine.* Both recoiled from the regnant academicism of the so-called New Critics, including John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, who called for the formalist “close reading” of literature, to the exclusion of history, morality, biography, or any other contextual considerations—thereby turning literary analysis, according to Trilling, into “a kind of intellectual calisthenic ritual.”9

  Allen Ginsberg, 1945. This picture was taken in a photo booth in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay, in August 1945, while Ginsberg was in training for the merchant marine, which he joined during what proved to be a temporary expulsion from Columbia. (photo credit 2.3)

  Yet if Ginsberg and Trilling both saw in literature an escape route from tyranny and torpor, they differed sharply over literature’s spiritual dimensions and possibilities. In his repudiation of literary as well as political fellow traveling, the anti-Stalinist Trilling looked to poetry and fiction to affirm a skeptical liberalism, founded on what he called “the value of individual existence in all its variousness, complexity and difficulty.”10 He was especially drawn to probing the ironies and ambiguities in the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Henry James, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other practitioners of what he called “moral realism”—defined not as merely “the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life.”11 Trilling’s work took readers outside the traditional insight of literary criticism into essentially philosophical considerations of good and evil, nature and civilization, commitment and evasion.

  Lionel Trilling, in an undated photograph. (photo credit 2.4)

  These difficult proving grounds of the liberal imagination afforded little room for the kind of transcendent “freshness” and “light” that the young Ginsberg and his bohemian friends were proclaiming. In 1945, Ginsberg touted Rimbaud to Trilling as a prophet, “unaffected by moral compunction, by allegiance to the confused standards of a declining age.”12 Trilling duly read up on Rimbaud and reported that he found in the poet’s rejection of conventional social values “an absolutism which is foreign to my nature, and which I combat.”13 The idea that artistic genius arose out of derangement of the senses was, to Trilling, a dismal legacy of what he called the Romantic movement’s solipsistic, hedonist conceit that mental disturbance and aberration were sources of spiritual health and illumination “if only because they controvert the ways of respectable society.”

  Trilling’s idea of transcending mundane reality through what he called great literature’s sense of “largeness and cogency” and of the “infinite complication” of modern life struck Ginsberg as, finally, a dodge, a retreat into conformism masked by intellectual ambiguity—a “cheap trick,” he told a friend years later, that Trilling performed to hide his own “inside irrational Life & Poetry & reduce everything to the intellectual standard of a Time magazine report on the present happiness and proper role of the American Egghead who’s getting paid now & has a nice job & fits in with the whole silly system.”14 In direct contrast, Ginsberg and the Beats developed an aesthetic that renounced intellectual abstractions and poeticized individual lived experience—what Ginsberg described in 1948, in a letter to Trilling, as “the shadowy and heterogeneous experience of life through the conscious mind.”15

  By the time the teenage Bob Dylan first encountered Beat writing a decade later, these literary skirmishes on Morningside Heights had turned into battles between archetypes that helped lead, in turn, to the culture wars of the 1960s and after. Beat and liberal intellectual became locked in an antagonism that established each as the opposite of the other in their own minds. Dylan, in Dinkytown, had no trouble deciding which side he was on, and in Din
kytown, far from the political trench wars of Manhattan, there was an easy overlapping between Beat bohemianism and the scruffy authenticity of the folk clubs. But when he arrived in New York, his head full of Woody Guthrie, he would discover that although the two worlds intersected, Manhattan’s cultural alignments were more convoluted.

  In 1958, a resourceful entrepreneur, master carpenter, bohemian, and lover of poetry, John Mitchell, opened a coffee shop at 116 MacDougal Street, near Bleecker, in what was once a coal cellar and which more recently had sheltered a subterranean gay hangout, the MacDougal Street Bar. According to Al Aronowitz, Mitchell, a native of Brooklyn, had settled in Greenwich Village in the early 1950s, where he befriended and, for a time, roomed with the celebrated crumbling old Village bohemian poète maudit Maxwell Bodenheim, shortly before Bodenheim’s shocking murder in 1954. Emerging as something of a neighborhood celebrity himself, Mitchell opened a Parisian-style coffeehouse, Le Figaro, on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker, saw it become an instant hit with the locals as well as curious tourists, then sold it at a handsome profit.

  Mitchell soon had his eye on the space at 116 MacDougal, which was dank and cramped but perfectly located for another coffee shop. Unable to raise the ceiling, he lowered the floor and opened for business, featuring sweet drinks and dessert items as well as coffee. (Having a boozeless menu reduced costs and avoided the hassles with the police and the Mob that went with securing a liquor license—and it catered well to those bohemians whose drug of choice was marijuana, not alcohol. In any case, drinking customers could sneak in bottles stuffed in brown paper bags, or repair to the Kettle of Fish.) Mitchell invited the growing legion of Village poets who broadly identified with the Beat movement to recite their material and entertain his customers, in exchange for the proceeds collected in a basket handed around the audience. He called his new coffee shop the Village Gaslight, and among the poets who would read there was Allen Ginsberg.

  Beat poets standing on MacDougal Street near the Gaslight Cafe, with the Kettle of Fish bar in the background. Left to right: Peter Orlovsky, Alan Ansen, Allen Ginsberg, unidentified man behind Orlovsky, 1959. (photo credit 2.5)

  Ginsberg’s breakthrough had come in San Francisco in October 1955, when a poetry reading in a converted old auto repair shop on Fillmore Street featured his first stunning recital of “Howl.” The poem’s publication, in Howl and Other Poems, by the local bookseller and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1956, followed by Ferlinghetti’s failed prosecution on obscenity charges, brought Ginsberg wide public attention and acclaim. The Beats and their West Coast friends and kindred spirits—who included the young poets Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Philip Lamantia, as well as the older, surrealist-influenced Kenneth Patchen—launched an enthusiasm for Beat and Beat-style poetry that sympathetic critics labeled the San Francisco Renaissance.

  Ginsberg, who had spent 1957 in Morocco and, later, Paris, returned in June 1958 to the United States, where Manhattan would remain his main base of operations for most of the rest of his life. The New York Beat scene of bars and coffeehouses flourished in the 1950s along the main thoroughfares of Greenwich Village west of University Place. (Neighborhood rents climbed so high as a result that artists and poets, Ginsberg included, took up residence across town, east of Cooper Square.) A New York circle was closed, uptown, in February 1959, when Ginsberg returned to Columbia for a highly publicized public reading with Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky and recited “The Lion for Real,” in honor, he said ironically, of Lionel Trilling.* “It’s my old school I was kicked out of,” Ginsberg wrote to Ferlinghetti a week later, “so I suppose I’m hung up on making it there and breaking its reactionary back.”16

  All the while, a few blocks up MacDougal Street from where John Mitchell opened his Village Gaslight, the folksingers had been gathering in Washington Square. At some point either just before or just after the end of World War II, the story goes, a man named George Margolin began turning up on Sunday afternoons with his guitar in the square, to play union ballads and familiar folk songs (including “Old Paint,” one of the songs Aaron Copland had borrowed). By the early 1950s, Sundays in Washington Square had become the focus for folk-music enthusiasts from around the city. Pete Seeger and his wife, Toshi, obtained the necessary police permit for playing music in public, and in time flocks of folk instrumentalists and singers of every variety crowded the dry fountain at the center of the square. Alongside Woody Guthrie’s first great acolyte, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, there jostled the young Dave Van Ronk, and alongside him, the even younger Mary Travers, alongside whom were numerous others who, in the early 1960s, would lead the folk revival. Despite the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers, a New York folk scene had persisted with roots in the Popular Front cultural radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s—although it was also to prove more eclectic than its forerunner.

  Ramblin’ Jack Elliott playing in Washington Square Park, 1953. (photo credit 2.6)

  The continuing presence of Earl Robinson, Alan Lomax, and Seeger, among others, guaranteed folk music’s enduring connection to the 1940s Popular Front Communist worldview. (The Weavers proved resilient enough to enjoy a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall, under the professional hand of their former manager, Harold Leventhal, late in 1955.) A few key institutions—above all Sing Out! magazine, cofounded in 1950 and edited by the politically orthodox Irwin Silber—carried on the Popular Front outlook. And the New York folk-song scene would always have a strong leftist bent, which deepened when the southern civil-rights movement began making headway in the late 1950s. But at almost every level, a growing portion of the folk-song community had no strict or formal political connections and demanded none of its artists and performers.

  Moe Asch, the founder of Folkways Records, was the son of the important Yiddish writer Sholem Asch and came to the United States when he was still a boy. A leftist radical who was involved with the People’s Songs folk revivalists, Asch also kept his distance from Communist ideology—he once called himself a “goddamn anarchist”—and was happy to record strong music regardless of the performers’ politics or the contents of the songs.17 (It was Asch who, in 1952, released the influential six-LP collection Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by the eccentric filmmaker and occultist Harry Smith from previously recorded material.) Although best known for his folk recordings, Asch also worked closely with jazz musicians, including the pioneer of the stride-piano style James P. Johnson.

  Then there was Israel “Izzy” Young. An aspiring bookseller and square-dance enthusiast from the Bronx, born in 1928, Young had developed a passion for folk music and had struck up friendships with some of the more talented and creative Washington Square regulars. (Among them were John Cohen and Tom Paley, who, with Pete Seeger’s half brother, Mike, became the New Lost City Ramblers, and who recorded four albums of old-timey folk music, songs from the Great Depression, and children’s songs by the end of the 1950s.) In time, Young decided to rent a storefront on MacDougal Street for selling folk-music records and books. (In order to cover the lease, he cashed in a thousand-dollar insurance policy.) He called the place the Folklore Center and opened for business in March 1957.

  Fiercely independent in his leftish politics, Young prized music over ideology. His store—located a few doors down from the cellar where John Mitchell would soon be showcasing the Beat poets—became a clearinghouse for musicians, record company men, scholars, and enthusiasts. Young was also something of a concert promoter. One of the founders of the Friends of Old Time Music, he helped arrange, in 1959, a regular concert series at Gerde’s bar on Fourth Street west of Broadway, which he called “The Fifth Peg at Gerde’s.” The bar’s owner, Mike Porco, undertook the venture as a lark, but when the music began attracting steady crowds, Young got squeezed out of the operation. Gerde’s Folk City was born.

  Izzy Young and Albert Grossman at the Folklore Center, circa 1964. (photo credit 2.7)

  Soon after, John Mitchell, having also noticed the trend, swit
ched from using folksingers for turning the house between recitations by Beat poets to hiring folksingers regularly. By the time Bob Dylan arrived in January 1961, the Gaslight was the premier showcase for folksingers on MacDougal Street, and Dylan considered himself fortunate to break into the Gaslight lineup. In April, he secured his first important extended New York engagement, as an opening act for the blues great John Lee Hooker, at Gerde’s. But it was still a long way from the Village clubs to musical stardom. A little more than six months after Dylan premiered at Gerde’s, Young would lose money when he sponsored Dylan’s first theatrical concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall, and only fifty-three ticket buyers showed up. Dylan’s big break only came months later, in September, when the New York Times critic Robert Shelton reviewed a show at Gerde’s, dealt quickly with the headline act, the Greenbriar Boys, and devoted his own headline and the bulk of his story to celebrating Dylan as the prodigious new talent on the folk scene. After playing backup harmonica on a recording session for the folksinger Carolyn Hester the day after Shelton’s article appeared, Dylan signed a five-year recording contract with Columbia Records, where the legendary John Hammond, who had worked with Benny Goodman, Billie Holiday, and Big Joe Turner, would be his producer.

  Bob Dylan performing at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, September 26, 1961. Based on this performance, Robert Shelton wrote the New York Times review that first gave Dylan wide exposure. (photo credit 2.8)

  Relations between the folkies and the Beats in New York were not necessarily close or even harmonious. The Beats’ preferred music was, and always had been, jazz, from bebop to the free jazz experiments being undertaken by Ornette Coleman and others at the Five Spot on Cooper Square. On the West Coast, Kenneth Patchen had pioneered in reading what he called his “picture poems” to the accompaniment of the Charles Mingus combo. Kerouac appeared with a jazz group at the Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue in 1958 and recorded readings of his prose and poetry with the saxophonists Al Cohn and Zoot Sims; he also collaborated with David Amram on the jazzy soundtrack, part spoken, part musical, for Robert Frank’s Beat movie Pull My Daisy. The folksingers shared the Beats’ disdain for consumerist materialism and conventional 1950s dress and mores, as symbolized by clean-cut, collegiate folk groups like the Kingston Trio, who had built on the earlier success of the Weavers. But the Beats had their own hip style that clashed with what the Afro-surrealist Beat Ted Joans (who for a time had shared a cold-water West Village flat with Charlie Parker) called, in 1959, the “silly milly” folksingers, “the squarest of squares,” with “their boney banjo-shaped asses.”18