The song’s pressures put all this to you, aware of the resistance that its severe judgement on conceit is likely to meet, aware that conceit is good at suggesting that its stakes are not high, let alone sharp. Like vanity,237 conceit is shallow and petty, so can it really inflict any deep harm? Yes, for conceit, unlike pride and arrogance, wreaks its destruction by not seeming, on the superficial face of it, to be anything like as heftily dangerous as the other members of the Family.
There’s a whole lot of contrarieties in Disease of Conceit. The jarring weight of the clangorous chords at the very beginning of the song, the sombre pace as though a judge in his grandeur were solemnly donning the black cap before passing the death sentence that is its final words:
Give ya delusions of grandeur
And an evil eye
Give ya the idea that
You’re too good to die
Then they bury you from your head to your feet
From the disease of conceit
– eye into idea into die: these are weighty matters to ponder. Mark 7:22: “deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness: all these evil things come from within, and defile the man”. But at the same time there is this contradictory impulse, something sinisterly weightless. For the word “disease” has a kind of weight that the word “conceit” disarmingly and dangerously lacks, disarmed to the teeth. We know well enough, thank you, that conceit is not a good thing, but is it really such a destructively bad thing? Doesn’t it suggest the hollow, the empty, the puffed up, as against the tonnage that terror carries? Pride, we admit, carries weight, and when Dylan summons the Foot of Pride, he brings it down with the biblical weight of the Psalmist’s cry: “Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let not the hand of the wicked remove me.”238 But conceit?
Yet the swollen distention, with its pressure, can be that of disease. The Bible understands the gravity of conceit, and Disease of Conceit is, among other things, set upon restoring to what might seem to be a petty word a pressing sense of its ancient menace. “Wise in his own conceit”: three times in one chapter of Proverbs alone.239 Romans 12:16: “Be not wise in your own conceits.” Which entails being wise about the word itself and how its modern-day triviality may disguise its deadliness.
Understatement is a way of ensuring that the song, though weighty, never becomes overweight. The unexpected epithets for conceit are those that say the most, to say the least.
Nothing about it that’s sweet
The disease of conceit
Ain’t nothing too discreet
’Bout the disease of conceit
Itself very discreet, the word “discreet” there. Such words, “sweet” and “discreet”, feel at once full and empty: full of an underlying understated threat, empty of any lying or huffing and puffing. And the same effect is created by the process and progress of the refrain. It is in the nature of a refrain that its reiteration makes it both more full and more empty every time it returns. A refrain needs to be both concentrated and concentrated upon. So the deeply imaginative uses of refrain are always ones that don’t just deny or deplore the fact that there is an emptying process that goes on when you say something again and again and again (your own name, for instance, getting more and more evacuated of you yourself as you go on repeating it). No, the intense resourcefulness of a refrain is shown when there is in the song or poem some appropriate engagement with this very condition: when getting at once fuller in some ways and emptier in other ways is the grim point, the poignant plight. Which is where conceit comes in, steps into your room, eats into your soul. The fuller you are of conceit, the emptier you are of everything else, including yourself, your self.
“Disease”, when the word is figurative and not literal, means “a deranged, depraved, or morbid condition (of mind or disposition); an evil affection or tendency”. 1607: “Ambitious pride that been [i.e. that was] my youth’s disease”; or, the disease of pride. Conceit is “an overweening opinion of oneself; over-estimation of one’s own qualities, personal vanity or pride”. Granted, vanity and pride are often in the company of conceit, but they aren’t the same and they don’t have the same heft and weft. It may be worth calling up the old sense of conceit to mean “a (morbid) affection or seizure of the body or mind”, that is, a disease. (To take a conceipt, or conceit, was to sicken.) Worth calling up, perhaps, not because Dylan is a great man for browsing in dictionaries (though he may very well be: A-Bazouki), but because anything that the English language has a way of comprehending (the relation of conceit to disease?) is likely to be something that a very resourceful adept of the English language may well be in touch with, in harmony with.
Two further pressures contribute to the saddened and saddening weight of the song. First, the disease of conceit is one that you can suffer from without really knowing it; you can suffer from it without exactly suffering.
There’s a whole lot of people suffering tonight
From the disease of conceit
For the cunning of conceit (Marlowe’s “cunning of a self conceit”) is that it may find its pleasure in not giving you pain. At least, not yet a while. It is happy to bide its time, like the tumour that prefers to give no warning. “Comes out of nowhere”. Some of the people glimpsed in Dylan’s song clearly know that they are suffering even though they don’t know what from: “There’s a whole lot of hearts breaking tonight”, “Whole lot of people crying tonight”. But some do not. Seeing double, they don’t see the half of it. T. S. Eliot saw this as an understanding bitterly arrived at in Djuna Barnes’s novel Nightwood:
The miseries that people suffer through their particular abnormalities of temperament are visible on the surface: the deeper design is that of the human misery and bondage which is universal. In normal lives this misery is mostly concealed; often, what is most wretched of all, concealed from the sufferer more effectively than from the observer.240
Last, and lacerating, there is the fact that “conceit” is from the Latin for conceiving, conception. So there is something peculiarly horrible about all the death that conceit deals. It ought to be a word that is on the side of life. It isn’t. Not least because it likes to “give ya the idea that / You’re too good to die”. Too bad, this thinking too well of oneself.
The Virtues
Justice
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Many of Dylan’s songs hinge upon the cardinal virtue that is justice (“cardinal” means pertaining to a hinge). The songs turn upon justice, while – in the opposing or oppositional sense of “turn upon” – they turn upon injustice. There can be no grosser injustices than those perpetrated by the law itself, by justices, and the most heartfelt of Dylan’s remonstrations is The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. It is a song that brings home the falsity of the boast – on this occasion at the very least – that “the courts are on the level”. This is why the song has not only to level with us but to be unremittingly level in its tone, verbally and vocally. Well judged in its dismay at what had been so ill judged.
The deadly sin of the aggressor who killed Hattie Carroll was anger, impatience bursting into unwarrantable anger. He is “the person who killed for no reason / Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’”. The truthful surprise is the double sense of “without warning” – without warning to other people but also without warning (since anger suddenly erupts) to Zanzinger himself. Zanzinger’s name just happens to contain, in sequence, a n g e r. But he could not contain his anger. The song (a triumph that must never sound triumphant) movingly resists temptation and is patient, containing its anger. Oh, the anger is there all right, but to be contained, to be held in check in contrast.
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is the coinciding of a newspaper item with a cadence.
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’
William Zanzinge
r, Hattie Carroll. The thing about those names – you might say that this starts as purely technical, but then, as T. S. Eliot said, “we cannot say at what point ‘technique’ begins or where it ends”241 – is their endings. What the killer and the killed have in common is that, in both their first names and their surnames, they’ve got feminine endings. She’s Hatte Cárrll, where in both of her names the first syllable is stressed [Carroll] and the last is unstressed [Carroll], and he’s Wíllam Zanzíngr, where again his first name is stressed on the first syllable and where his surname, though it has the second syllable stressed, again has its last syllable unstressed. Dylan heard this, and the song is founded upon the particular cadence of their real-life names (except only that there should be a t: Zantzinger) and a real death.
It is a cadence that perhaps explains why Dylan wanted the word “lonesome” in the title, where it can evoke a contrast between the loneliness of dying, of her dying, and the crowded hotel (“At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’”). The word “lonesome” is not to be heard in the song itself, wisely, since there it might have invited a lover’s complaint (within this particular song and its responsibilities, unlike in Tomorrow Is a Long Time, “lonesome would mean nothing to you at all”242), but the word does set a scene, or rather set a cadence: Th Lónesme Déath f Hátte Cárrll.
The first line of the first verse begins with his name and brings her name to its end: “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll”. The second verse begins with his name: “William Zanzinger, who had twenty-four years”.243 The third verse begins with hers: “Hattie Carroll was a maid in the kitchen” and it ends (leading into the refrain) with his name: “And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”. The fourth verse, the final verse, closes the case: “William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence”. In this final verse he had been, at first, “the person who killed for no reason”. At this appearance in the dock, he was not named.
The double challenge to the song lay in its duty not to yield to the anger that had seized Zanzinger, and in its duty to resist melodrama and sentimentality. Dylan knows what he does in adopting this cadence. For the feminine ending naturally evokes a dying fall or courage in the face either of death or of loss, something falling poignantly away. This can be heard in Wordsworth:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the mountains.
(The Brothers, 182-3)
The móuntins. And it’s imperative that the thought of death not sit easy on the man who has been born and dies among the hills, rocks, crags, or any of those words. The masculine ending (“the man”, as it happens) is in tension with the feminine ending (“móuntins”). Not this:
The thought of death sits easy on the pérsn
Who has been born and dies among the móuntins.
And not this:
The thought of death sits easy on the man
Who has been born and dies among the hills.
What the voice has to do in apprehending Wordsworth’s very wording, “Who has been born and dies among the mountains”, is breathe life into the final syllable, as though it were a flag that will lapse into limpness unless it can be made to ripple out resiliently. The cadence will fall away unless the voice holds it up, holds it forth. The ending may choose to acquiesce, or it may resist: there is an axis, and the energies may run in either direction. These properties of language are like the paradoxical properties of everyday soap: the very thing that makes it so slippery when wet is what makes it stick so obdurately to the side of the bath as it dries.
In this cadence, Dylan fashioned his song, which is steeled and steely in support of “the gentle”. From the start, he established this movement, inexorable in its sadness and in its curbed indignation. Duly monotonous, provided that we understand here what William Empson understood in the great double sestina of Philip Sidney: “The poem beats, however rich its orchestration, with a wailing and immovable monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain.”244 Always, in the verses of Dylan’s song, there is this last dying fall, a cadence that advances like nemesis. This is what Dylan hears from the beginning, having us not only hear it but listen to it.
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’
And the cops was called in and his weapon took from him
– where the fourth line is notably, differently, vivid, in bringing out that the feminine ending doesn’t depend upon how many syllables there are in the closing word. It’s not “his weapon took from him” (as against from someone else), it’s “his weapon took from him”, so that within “from him” the word “him”, although it’s a monosyllable, is a feminine ending, isn’t where the stress is carried.245 There is only one moment when this cadence of the verses is broken, and it’s when he fells her. “Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane” – not “Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a trúnchon”:
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room
– not “came down through the lóbby” or “came down through the chámbr”. What happens in this terrible quiet moment is that there’s an amputation, which is exactly understated and yet is registered. Something – a life – is cut short, curtailed by curt brutality, at that moment, and this without the song’s having to melodramatize it. A cutting short of what had seemed an unchanging cadence: that will do it.
A cadence runs throughout the song. (Ah, but not quite so, for there is the refrain, for which we wait. And shall wait now for a moment.) There may be the effect of an internal rhyme (for there is no external rhyme, rhyme at the line-endings, in the body of the verses, as against the refrain), as when “Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane” comes back in the self-satisfaction of the judge: “he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished”. That’s the only other moment when you’ve got a line that has this form of internal rhyme, and it’s the moment when the judge had better remember that he is there because a woman “lay slain by a cane” (there’s very strong assonance as well: lay / slain / cane).246
Hattie Carroll has her enslaved rhyming – or rather non-rhyming, since a rhyme would offer some change in wording, some relief from monotony – of “the table . . . the table . . . the table” as the grim ending of three consecutive lines:
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level
She never appears by name in the final verse (but then he is not at first named there, though his turn will come), but she is still there, because when this verse begins –
In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
– gavel / equal / level must call us back not only to the word “level” from before (“And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level”), but to everything that has sounded within “Carroll”, “table”, “table”, “table”, “level”. That’s her sound, that -l. And it goes with the “gentle”: Zanzinger with his cane had been “Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”.
It’s very brave not to mention her, or her name, at the end. It’s not shrugging her off, it’s shouldering what happened to her, and what then. For now it is too late. Now is the time for your tears. Or as he sings, “For now’s the time for your tears”. If I’d had the genius to come up with the song, I fear that – having sung “Now ain’t the time for your tears” all the way through till now – I would have gratified myself emphatically by singing “Now is the time for your tears”. He doesn’t sing “Now is”, he sings “Now’s”. The contraction at the very end quietly takes out anything hotly hortatory.
The body of the song, the verse pro
per, refuses to rhyme (very unusually for Dylan); instead it has the different relentlessness of the gentle, there in the cadence with its feminine ending. But the refrain, the wheel, on the contrary is distinctly, bracingly, different: it is all masculine endings and it rhymes insistently: disgrace / fears / face / tears. There are two syllables to “disgrace”, but it’s not a feminine ending, not dísgrace but disgráce. So whereas the verses all the way through possess unrhymed feminine line-endings, the clinching refrain doubly does the opposite – a refrain that opens with the effect of a tank turret turning in threat, an iron rhyme: “But you who . . .” This you who reminds me – and not as a matter of sources or allusions, but as an analogue, a place of power – of what Shakespeare does in the opening soliloquy of Richard III, when Richard has chafed at the many maddening obstacles to his murderous ambitions and then says, “Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace . . .” Why, I. Again, the menace, the turret turning; Dylan’s you who, this is the levelled gaze.247
There are the effects of rhyme, then, including internal rhyming – and including not rhyming when you might have expected it. (T. S. Eliot once said that punctuation “includes the absence of punctuation marks, when they are omitted where the reader would expect them”.248) But two things unexpectedly change in the final verse of Hattie Carroll. The first is the sudden outbreak of a grim rhyme, an off-rhyme: caught ’em / bottom. You haven’t heard anything like this before in the song, whether in the rhyming refrain or in the unrhyming verses.
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
– this is sardonic, Byronic, and it is en route to the end of this last verse, repentance / sentence. This is the one and only full rhyme at a line-ending in any of the four verses, and moreover it is a disyllabic rhyme (as against, say, pence / hence). The rhyme repentance / sentence is poised to lead into the full, the fulfilling, rhymes of the final refrain after this clinching ruling:
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 23