Dylan's Visions of Sin
Page 2
Later in the same poem there’s mention too of “pieces of silver”. So in Dylan’s lines:
Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns
Thirty pieces of silver, no money down
I remember the excitement I felt when I myself noticed Dylan’s debt (many pieces of silver) – and then the unwarrantable disappointment I felt when I later discovered from the Telegraph that I was not the first to discover it. Mustn’t be hostile or unfriendly about this not-being-the-first business. (The first shall be last.) But then the song is a tissue of memories of the poem. Here are a few more moments.
Eliot
Dylan
an open door
breakin’ down no bedroom door
the voices singing in our ears
a voice from on high
it was (you may say) satisfactory
when I say / you’ll be satisfied
I remember
you’ll remember
all that way
every kind of way
Take what you have gathered from coincidence, yes, but these are not coincidences, once you concede that the likeness of Eliot’s “And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly” to Dylan’s “Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns” goes beyond happenstance. Such a likeness, then, may give some warrant for taking literarily the art of the man who imagined Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower.
Note
I wrote about Dylan in the Listener in 1972 (1 June); I gave a BBC talk, Bob Dylan and the Language that He Used, in 1976 (22 March); over the years there were talks, some of them again for the BBC, and one that was printed in the Threepenny Review in 1990.15 Much of this, it’s all been written in the book, but there are some further thoughts about Dylan not included here, to be found in my essay on Clichés and in the one on American English and the inherently transitory, both in The Force of Poetry (1984).
The words of the songs are quoted here in the form in which he sings them on the officially released albums on which they initially appeared. The Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings, at the back, is supplemented by a General Index and by a list, Which Album a Song is on.
The new edition of the lyrics, Lyrics 1962–2002, unlike the original Writings and Drawings and the later Lyrics 1962–1985, is apparently not going to include Dylan’s Some Other Kinds of Songs . . ., or his other poems and miscellaneous prose, so for these I give references to the earlier collections.
The discrepancies between the printed and the other versions (whether officially released, studio out-takes, or bootlegged from performances) are notable. Sometimes they are noted in the commentary here. Clearly they are of relevance to Dylan’s intentions or changes of intention, and I have to admit that sometimes one performance decides to do without an effect that another has, and that I had thought and still think exquisite – for instance, the plaiting of the rhymes at the end of If Not For You. Oh well. I think of Shakespearean revision. Sometimes I read (or rather, listen) and sigh and wish.
Songs, Poems, Rhymes
Songs, Poems
Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she is their servant. The triangle of Dylan’s music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking.
One day a critic may do justice not just to all three of these independent powers, but to their interdependence in Dylan’s art. The interdependence doesn’t have to be a competition, it is a culmination – the word chosen by Allen Ginsberg, who could be an awe-inspiring poet and was an endearingly awful music-maker, for whom Dylan’s songs were “the culmination of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ’50s & early ’60s”.16 Dylan himself has answered when asked:
Why are you doing what you’re doing?
[Pause] “Because I don’t know anything else to do. I’m good at it.”
How would you describe “it”?
“I’m an artist. I try to create art.”17
What follows this clarity, or follows from it, has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various times. The point of juxtaposing his utterances isn’t to catch him out, it is to see him catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse.
WORDS RULE, OKAY?
“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.”18
“It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words.”19
MUSIC RULES, OKAY?
“Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song. I only look at them musically. I only look at them as things to sing. It’s the music that the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into the air, the paper stays.”20
NEITHER ACOUSTIC NOR ELECTRIC RULES, OKAY?
Do you prefer playing acoustic over electric?
“They’re pretty much equal to me. I try not to deface the song with electricity or non-electricity. I’d rather get something out of the song verbally and phonetically than depend on tonality of instruments.”21
JOINT RULE, OKAY?
Would you say that the words are more important than the music?
“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.”22
“It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words, there’s nothing that’s exploited. The words and the music, I can hear the sound of what I want to say.”23
“The lyrics to the songs . . . just so happens that it might be a little stranger than in most songs. I find it easy to write songs. I have been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren’t written out for just the paper, they’re written as you can read it, you dig? If you take whatever there is to the song away – the beat, the melody – I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can’t do that with either – songs that, if you took the beat and melody away, they wouldn’t stand up. Because they’re not supposed to do that you know. Songs are songs.”24
What’s more important to you: the way that your music and words sound, or the content, the message?
“The whole thing while it’s happening. The whole total sound of the words, what’s really going down is –”25
– at which point Dylan cuts across himself, at a loss for words with which to speak of words in relation to the whole total: “it either happens or it doesn’t happen, you know”. At a loss, but finding the relation again and again in the very songs.
It ought to be possible, then, to attend to Dylan’s words without forgetting that they are one element only, one medium, of his art. Songs are different from poems, and not only in that a song combines three media: words, music, voice. When Dylan offered as the jacket-notes for Another Side of Bob Dylan what mounted to a dozen pages of poems, he headed this Some Other Kinds of Songs . . . His ellipsis was to give you time to think. In our time, a dot dot dot communication.
Philip Larkin was to record his poems, so the publishers sent round an order form inviting you to hear the voice of the Toads bard. The form had a message from the poet, encouraging you – or was it discouraging you? For there on the form was Larkin insisting, with that ripe lugubrious relish of his, that the “proper place for my poems is the printed page”, and warning you how much you would lose if you listened to the poems read aloud: “Think of all the mis-hearings, the their / there confusions, the submergence of rhyme, the disappearance of stanza shape, even the comfort of knowing how far you are from the end.” Again, Larkin in an interview, lengthening the same lines:
I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the
end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, take it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until it’s “performed”. It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that is needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page.26
The human senses have different powers and limits, which is why it is good that we have five (or is it six?) of them. When you read a poem, when you see it on the page, you register – whether consciously or not – that this is a poem in, say, three stanzas: I’ve read one, I’m now reading the second, there’s one to go. This is the feeling as you read a poem, and it’s always a disconcerting collapse when (if your curiosity hasn’t made you flick over the pages before starting the poem) you turn the page and find, “Oh, that was the end. How curious.” Larkin’s own endings are consummate. And what he knows is that your ear cannot hear the end approaching in the way in which your eye – the organ that allows you to read – sees the end of the poem approaching. You may, of course, know the music well, and so be well aware that the end is coming, but such awareness is a matter of familiarity and knowledge, whereas with a poem that you have never seen before, you yet can see perfectly well that this is the final stanza that you are now reading.
Of sonnet-writing, Gerard M. Hopkins wrote of both seeing and hearing “the emphasis which has been gathering through the sonnet and then delivers itself in those two lines seen by the eye to be final or read by the voice with a deepening of note and slowness of delivery”.27
For the eye can always simply see more than it is reading, looking at; the ear cannot, in this sense (given what the sense of hearing is), hear a larger span than it is receiving. This makes the relation of an artist like Dylan to song and ending crucially different from the relation of an artist like Donne or Larkin to ending. The eye sees that it is approaching its ending, as Jane Austen can make jokes about your knowing that you’re hastening towards perfect felicity because there are only a few pages left of the novel. A novel physically tells you that it is about to come to an end. The French Lieutenant’s Woman in one sense didn’t work, couldn’t work, because you knew perfectly well that since it was by John Fowles and not by a post-modernist wag there was bound to be print on those pages still to come, the last hundred pages. So it couldn’t be about to end, isn’t that right?, because this chunk of it was still there, to come. But then John Fowles, like J. H. Froude, whose Victorian novel he was imitating in this matter of alternative endings, knows this and tries to build this, too, into the effect of his book.
Dylan has an ear for a tune, whether it’s his, newly minted, or someone else’s, newly mounted. He has a voice that can’t be ignored and that ignores nothing, although it spurns a lot. Dylan when young did what only great artists do: define anew the art he practised. Marlon Brando made people understand something different by acting. He couldn’t act? Very well, but he did something very well, and what else are you going to call it? Dylan can’t sing?
Every song, by definition, is realized only in performance. True. A more elusive matter is whether every song is suited to re-performance. Could there be such a thing as a performance that you couldn’t imagine being improved upon, even by a genius in performance? I can’t imagine his doing better by The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, for instance, than he does on The Times They Are A-Changin’. Of course I have to concede at once that my imagination is immensely smaller than his, and it would serve me right, as well as being wonderfully right, if he were to prove me wrong. But, as yet, what (for me) is gained in a particular re-performing of this particular song (and yes, there are indeed gains) has always fallen short of what had to be sacrificed. Any performance, like any translation, necessitates sacrifice, and I believe that it would be misguided, and even unwarrantably protective of Dylan, to suppose that his decisions as to what to sacrifice in performance could never be misguided. Does it not make sense, then, to believe, or to argue, that Dylan’s realizing of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll was perfect, a perfect song perfectly rendered, once and for all?
Clearly Dylan doesn’t believe so, or he wouldn’t re-perform it. He makes judgements as to what to perform again, and he assuredly does not re-perform every great song (you don’t hear Oxford Town or Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in concert). Admittedly there are a good many good reasons why a song might not be re-performed, matters of quality newly judged, or aptness to an occasion or to a time, or a change of conviction, all of which means that the entire rightness of a previous performance wouldn’t have to be what was at issue. Still, Dylan takes bold imaginative decisions as to what songs to re-perform, so can we really not ask whether there are occasions on which a particular decision, though entirely within his rights and doing credit to his renovations and aspirations and audacities, is one for which the song has been asked to pay too high a price? “Those songs have a life of their own.”28
I waver about this when it comes to this song, one of Dylan’s greatest, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, even while I maintain that the historical songs, the songs of conscience, can’t be re-created in the same way as the more personal (not more personally felt) songs of consciousness, with the same kind of freedom. “The chimes of freedom” sometimes have to be in tune with different responsibilities. Dylan can’t, I believe, command a new vantage-point (as he might in looking back upon a failed love or a successful one) from which to see the senseless killing of Hattie Carroll. Or, at least, the question can legitimately come up as to whether he can command a new vantage-point without commanding her and even perhaps wronging her.
He makes the song new, yes, but in the mid 1970s, for example, he sometimes did so by sounding too close for comfort to the tone of William Zanzinger’s tongue (“and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling”). “Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”: the song is rightly siding with the gentle, and it asks (asks this of its creator, too) that it be sounded gently. But then the song can be sung too gently, with not enough sharp-edged dismay.
I used to put this too categorically, and therefore wrongly:
He cannot re-perform the song. He unfortunately still does. There is no other way of singing this song than the way in which he realizes it on The Times They Are A-Changin’. If he sings it any more gently, he sentimentalizes it. If he sings it any more ungently, he allies himself with Zanzinger.29
Alex Ross, of the New Yorker, who is generous towards my appreciation of Dylan, thinks any such reservation narrow-minded of me:
Ricks went on to criticize some of Dylan’s more recent performances of Hattie Carroll, in which he pushes the last line a little: “He doesn’t let it speak for itself. He sentimentalizes it, I’m afraid.” Here I began to wonder whether the close reader had zoomed in too close. Ricks seemed to be fetishizing the details of a recording, and denying the musician license to expand his songs in performance.30
I bridle slightly at that fetishizing-a-recording bit. (What, me? All the world knows that it is women’s shoes that I am into.) Nor do I think of myself as at all denying Dylan licence to expand his songs. (Who’s going to take away his licence to expand?) I’m only proposing that, although he has entire licence in any such matter, freedom is different from (in one sense) licence, and it must be that on occasion an artist who is on a scale to take immense risks will fall short of his newest highest hopes. Samuel Bec
kett has the courage to fail, and he urges fail better. He knows there’s no success like failure. And that it is not clear what success would mean if failure were not exactly rare but simply unknown. Dylan in 1965:
I know some of the things I do wrong. I do a couple of things wrong. Once in a while I do something really wrong, y’ know, which I really can’t see when I’m involved in it; and after a while I look at it later, I know it’s wrong. I don’t say nothin’ about it.31
It is the greatest artists who have taken the greatest risks, and it is impossible to see what it would mean to respect the artists for this if on every single occasion you were to find that the risks that were run simply ran away. Doesn’t it then start to look as though the risks were only “risks”? If you were, for instance, to think of revision as a form that re-performing may take when it comes to the written word, it is William Wordsworth and Henry James, the most imaginative and unremitting of revisers, who on occasion get it wrong and who lose more than they gain when it comes to some of their audacious post-publication revisions.
Hattie Carroll is a special, though not a unique, case. “License to expand his songs”? But strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. It must at least be possible that the gains of re-performing this particular song could fall short of the losses.
Alex Ross went on at once to evoke beautifully the beauty of a particular re-performing:
I had just seen Dylan sing Hattie Carroll, in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give. He turned the accompaniment into a steady, sad acoustic waltz, and he played a lullabylike solo at the center. You were reminded that the “hotel society gathering” was a Spinsters’ Ball, whose dance went on before, during, and after the fatal attack on Hattie Carroll. This was an eerie twist on the meaning of the song, and not a sentimental one.