Dylan's Visions of Sin
Page 7
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it
You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it80
The accuser is the one who had faith to lose. The music and the voice combine to create a chilling thrilling pause after that word “lose”, so that “And you know it”, pouncing, brooks no resistance.
Such an evocation of faith negated is a positive achievement, because it makes sense only as founded upon faith in the possibility of something better. For every Positively 4th Street about faith misplaced in friendship, there is a Bob Dylan’s Dream about friendship’s solid solidarity for all its pains and losses. And in any case the vibrant anger in Positively 4th Street does itself directly convey what friendship ought to be and can be. For how could there be a true indictment of false friends that didn’t call upon and call up true friends?
But now it settles into third, fourth, and fifth sets of verses, all in the sedate template. First, my back / contact, and in with / begin with:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
Then, embrace / place, and rob them / problem:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
“Understand” is irresistible (“Don’t you understand”), an unobtrusive triumph, mindful both of “You just stood there” at the beginning and of the undeviating repetition of “You could stand inside my shoes” at the end.
But the problem / rob them rhyme is something of a problem. The rhyme is a touch far-fetched, and is it worth the carriage? Perhaps, but that would have to be the point, for the other rhymes are living near at hand, and are simply telling: friend / lend, grinning / winning . . . The rhyme problem / rob them precipitates a different world or mood, suggesting the uneasy bravura of half sick / traffic in Absolutely Sweet Marie (absolutely sweet there). Nothing wrong with one pair of rhymes asking a different kind of attention (not more attention, really) than do the other rhyme-pairs in a song, and this would be congruent with the perplexity of the syntax in this verse. For whereas elsewhere in Positively 4th Street the syntax is positively forthright, advancing straight forward, here it is circuitous, and it pauses for a moment upon “Perhaps”:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
What is it (the phrase is cryptic) to embrace heartbreaks? To enjoy one’s own sufferings? To be sicklily solicitous of other people’s suffering, creepily commiserating away? And do these tangents amount to one of those mysterious triumphs of phrasing that exquisitely elude paraphrase (like “One too many mornings / And a thousand miles behind”), or is this one of those occasions when something eludes not us but the artist? Dylan is a master of living derangements of syntax81 but even he must sometimes let things slip. Dr Johnson ventured to characterize as an imperfectionist that Dylanesque writer William Shakespeare:82
It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.83
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying “No, I do not feel that good”. So an unsettling rhyme such as problem / rob them might rightly be hard to stomach, especially given the tilting “Perhaps”. And given what a problem is: not just “adifficult or puzzling question proposed for solution; a riddle; an enigmatic statement” (the song takes care to couch these “problem”-lines enigmatically, riddlingly), but a forcible projectile, “lit. a thing thrown or put forward”. The song throws out and puts forward its weaponry.
But again, “Perhaps I’d rob them”: what does this enigmatic phrase mean? “I’d steal them” (these heartbreaks)? Then what would you do with them? And wouldn’t that have to be “I’d rob you of them”? Rid you of them? Not rob them, the heartbreaks, presumably – except that rob is sometimes used to mean “to carry off as plunder; to steal” (The Oxford English Dictionary, 5, “Now rare”), as in “rob his treasure from him”, or “Passion robs my peace no more”,84 so Dylan wouldn’t have to be taking or stealing much of a liberty. Especially as there may be a suggestion of heart-breaking and heart-entering (or exiting). And yet the lines, like nothing else in the song, continue to rob my peace. Not that the song offers itself as a peace-maker. A truce at most.
On and on and on and on the song weaves, and yet with a left and a right or a shifting of weight all the time pugnaciously, combatively. But we can sense that the round must be drawing to an end, or may be nearing a knock-out, when the pattern of the opening re-emerges. There, the line “You got a lotta nerve” had opened two successive quatrains, and now the reminder that even this vituperation must come to an end is brought home to us when we hear, as we have not heard along the way, such a repetition again at the head of two successive quatrains: “I wish that for just one time” / “Yes, I wish that for just one time”. (Relentless, this pressing home twice the words “just one time”.) But then there is a further compounding of the shape in which the tireless tirade had been launched, for back then it had been only a matter of repeating the first line, whereas now that there is to be a complete dismissal of the ex-friend, it is not one but two lines that will be repeated to begin the excommunication:
I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
Usually the idiom about wishing that someone could stand inside your shoes is a movement inviting sympathy (see it my way, please); here it swings round into antipathy. And Dylan gives voices to these feelings so that at the end of each verse – and consummately at this very end – the few syllables are held, stretched on a rack all the more frighteningly for there being nothing of a scream at this end.
Until this unpalliated ending you feel that Dylan could have gone on pounding for ever (Eternal Circle of hell), so that the challenge was to arrive at a conclusion that could bring proof and reproof to an end. And then, for the only time in the song (truly “for just one time”), there is a shrewd little tilting of the stress within the disyllabic rhyme, with “be you” not having exactly the same measured pressure as “see you”, the first asking slightly more emphasis upon “you” than does the second:
And just for that one moment
I could be yóu
You’d know what a drag it is
To sée you
There is a famous poignancy in Hardy’s poem The Voice:
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me; yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
F. R. Leavis brought out how H
ardy’s rhythms escape the “crude popular lilt” that might endanger the poem: “you that I hear” is set in contrast with the hope “Let me view you then”, asking that there be some emphasis on “view”, whereas in the line that rhymes with this, the antithesis is of “now” as against “then”, so that there has to be a touch tilting it away from a lilt. As Leavis saw and heard, “The shift of stress (‘víew you then’, ‘knew you thén’) has banished the jingle from it.”85
Positively 4th Street was never going to succumb to a jingle, or even to a jingle jangle, but it is the deadly precision of the emphasis that consummates the act of banishment, giving the unanswerable last word to this song that is not I and I but You and I.
It has the hammering away at words, and with words, that characterizes a quarrel, and one word above all others: know. About this friend or “friend” we know nothing except what the song declares through and through. If I now quote something that Dylan himself said, it is not in order to invoke whatever biographical facts might exist outside the song, or to adduce Dylan’s own character – it is the character of his songs that matters to me. But Positively 4th Street is an act of retaliation, and it gives some warrant for stressing know in the song that Dylan makes much of the word in this context. “I’m known to retaliate you know; you should know I’m known to retaliate.”86 You know; you should know I’m known . . .
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
You had no faith to lose
And you know it
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you87
It’s all over, then. Envy has shown itself to be one of the corrosive agents (but only one, for this is a song that compacts a good many bad impulses).
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
Your envy (of what you seem to imagine my position and my place to be) is your problem. Sorry about your dissatisfaction with your position and your place (your standing), but it’s not my problem, “Don’t you understand”. You don’t understand (and that’s your problem).
The song is sharply shaped when it comes to questions. The first two quatrains don’t have any questions in them and the last two don’t have any either. But the middle of the song is a quartet of questions, most of them such as are not really questions at all, any more than is “Who do you think you are” or “Can I help you”. Dylan doesn’t print them with question-marks or sing them very interrogatively:
Why then don’t you show it
Do you take me for such a fool
Why don’t you just come out once And scream it
Don’t you understand
The only question in the song that is manifestly sung (and printed in Lyrics 1962–1985) with a question-mark is the one that is treacherously considerate, the inquiry in the street from the friend: “How are you?” Not “You ask, ‘How are you?’”, but “You say, ‘How are you?’”
It may seem a bit late for this commentary to raise the question of whether the friend is a man or a woman. Not to be raised as a biographical or historical matter – it’s clear that the friend could be a compound ghost, and many candidates have been proposed over the years, with Joan Baez appearing in the company of half a dozen men in David Hajdu’s annals Positively 4th Street (2001). Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares? But much of the song’s power may lurk in its decision not to decide this for us. In a Dylan song it is usually clear whether a man or a woman is being addressed. This time, not so. “Just talking to somebody that ain’t there.” What matters is that a friend has let you down. Badly. Because of envy and rivalry and . . . And is still capable of unctuating (“Good luck”) unconvincingly.
A question at a press conference in 1965:
In a lot of your songs you are hard on people – in Like a Rolling Stone you’re hard on the girls and in Positively 4th Street you’re hard on a friend. Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?
Answer: “I want to needle them.”88
It was a needle that injected the songs back then; now it is more likely to be a laser beam.
For my part, I have always taken the no-friend-of-his to be a man. Friends of mine, it seems, have taken a woman. At one point, the force of the lines would have to be taken differently if the irritant were not a he but a she.
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
I envisage the friend himself as despised here, to his face, as “the one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with”. And I take this to be the formally aggressive mock-incredulity or distancing (“one who . . .”) that says “he” even while speaking to “you”: “Now he tells me!” This, with “know” as yet another of the occurrences of a word angrily bandied between the two of them throughout the song. I get more from this than from the other interpretation, the one that travels out, via the third-person pronoun, to a third party who forms part of an obscure narrative that ripples into further rivalries. For I have always thrilled to the immitigably binary set-up for the song. You and I, not You and I and He.
Oh, there is a crowd you’re in with, but for the duration of the song the crowd is outside the ring, and inside the ring there are just the two of us, with no referee to boot. So I’d like to continue to hear “one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with” as contemptuously third person – especially if “third” be pronounced in the Irish fashion. But I can understand the feeling (and I value the reminder) that a woman could well have proved to be just such a friend.89 And I’d grant that the word “heartbreaks” (“the heartbreaks you embrace”) might consort better, albeit prejudicially, with a woman. Not that heartbreak need be sexual or amatory – there is no end to the things that break hearts. (In Among School Children, Yeats saw how different are the images that nuns, as against mothers, worship: “And yet they too break hearts”.) Heartbreak, like so much else in the song, could have a root in envy. Bursting with envy. Jealousy is not the same, but bear in mind the words set down in 1586: “Shun jealousy, that heartbreak love”. It may be a valuably unsettling thing about the song that the sex or gender of the friend is not settled. In an interview in Spin, Dylan said:
Outside of a song like Positively 4th Street, which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships. I don’t have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven’t.90
Two-dimensional, not one-dimensional, this 4th Street, and although one-sided, it is two-edged, a two-handed engine that stands ready to smite more than once and smite some more. As to sex or gender: the canting word “relationships” (“quote, so-called”), though these days it does suggest lovees and lovers more than friends, can’t be denied its applicability to friendship, or to ex-friendship. Catharsis, the ancient critical metaphor in Dylan’s phrase “purge myself”, would be one way of getting rid of the catharsole and of the waste matter that is pretence.91 The metaphor in “purge myself ” is critical, but Dylan’s target isn’t formally a critic. “Some would later think the vitriolic lyrics were addressed to the critics of his new style. Dylan denies it. ‘I couldn’t write a song
about something like that,’ he said, ‘I don’t write songs to critics.’”92
I don’t envy the imagined or imaginary “friend” in this song. One other candidate as the sin of the song would be anger. But the power and the threat are felt in the very restraint: there is no yielding of any kind in the song, and that includes yielding to anger (as against understanding what anger might yield). Anger is a sin resisted or at least curbed by the song. But if I ask what sin might have tempted the artist himself here, the answer isn’t going to be envy. When it comes to sin, the song is all the more ample in that its position and its place are not circumscribed by envy. The song looks searchingly into those who, having opted for emptinesses, now want to co-opt someone back into their misvalued ethos and pathos. Pity for the infected, as Pound said, but preserve antisepsis.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is
(Dark Eyes)
What sin, come to think of it, might envy incite? Why, pride. My position and my place. Pride in being envied, even sometimes (and this is the very bad bit) if it is being envied by creeps. And then pride’s further pleasure: contempt for the envious flatterers. But Dylan does not flatter himself – again, not a biographical point but an artistic accomplishment. He can be proud of the song, not least because he is not proud in it.
Blind Willie McTell
Gratitude to a fellow-singer, no less than in Song to Woody (1962), is the life of Blind Willie McTell (1983), of which the burden is both a happy refrain and the possibility of an unhappy weight, the burden that would be envy, were it not that the song goes free from it.
Song to Woody had acknowledged something without sounding as though this were only conceding or admitting, let alone grudgingly admitting:
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That I’m saying and that I’m singing. It may cost a singer a good deal to say this unenviously about another singer, but the cost is gladly paid by a solvent artist, for it is not so much paid as repaid, and is a debt of honour. And gratitude doesn’t run to ingratiation. The refrain of Blind Willie McTell is likewise happy to do some acknowledging. The earlier “I know that you know” becomes this: