The flat weight of this is the old torture visited upon you if you refused to plead guilty or not guilty, the flatly increasing weights that will make you speak or make you no longer alive to speak: peine forte et dure.
“And that seven deaths shall never kill him”: this is the final curse, the ultimate and eternal one. The Book of Job saw “the bitter in soul; which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures” (3:23). The Book of Revelation foresaw that “in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them” (9:6). Exposed and humiliated, Angelo in Measure for Measure had begged His Grace the Duke for grace:
But let my trial be my own confession:
Immediate sentence then, and sequent death,
Is all the grace I beg.
The Duke did not reply, or rather, replied with the words “Come hither Mariana”. Again Angelo begs for mercy, but again the mercy of death:
I am sorry that such sorrow I procure,
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart,
That I crave death more willingly than mercy,
’Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.
Again, no reply. Dylan:
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won’t be able to die?
(Precious Angel)
Seven Curses, because it is myth, not history,is amenable to re-performance as Hattie Carroll perhaps is not. This is a question not of which version to prefer (Dylan preferred to release the Columbia studio recording), but of different facets catching different lights. The Witmark demo tape rendering is faster, with a brisker rhythm, with a dextrously plaited accompaniment, and with a voice that is less saddened or chastened. This Witmark rendering is closer to a traditional ballad, with something of the ballad’s odd insouciance or impersonality, its risking the charge of heartlessness. “Get on your horse and ride away” – as though we, too, may need to do some such leaving. the bootleg series version is superb, and is (as it were) my choice, but something differently true is audible in the contrast with, and in the contrasts within, the Witmark one, something along the lines of William Empson’s comments on the contrariety of the refrain in a traditional ballad (of illicit sexuality and betrayal) that is both discomfiting and comforting:
She leaned her back against a thorn
(Fine flowers in the valley)
And there she has her young child born
(And the green leaves they grow rarely)
Empson: “The effect of the contrast is not simple; perhaps it says ‘Life went on, and in a way this seems a cruel indifference to her suffering, but it lets us put the tragedy in its place, as we do when we sing about it for pleasure.’”272 The ballad bears the title The Cruel Mother, for it tells of her killing her illegitimate baby – a story, somewhere in the vicinity of Seven Curses, of tragic parental plight and of child sacrifice.
“It lets us put the tragedy in its place, as we do when we sing about it for pleasure.” Dylan, too, undertakes the responsibility of putting tragedy in its place, Reilly’s and his daughter’s, so that he may sing about tragedy, strangely, for pleasure – and may bring us responsible pleasure.
Oxford Town
All because . . .: one frequent function of those two words is to introduce – courteously but firmly – a remonstration against injustice. It might be a political remonstration. A black man, down in Mississippi, has been not just mistreated or badly treated but badly mistreated, “All because his face was brown”, or – soon pressing the same point slightly differently, as though wishing not to nag you but to urge you please to think again – “All because of the color of his skin”.
Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
Sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town
He went down to Oxford Town
Guns and clubs followed him down
All because his face was brown
Better get away from Oxford Town
Oxford Town around the bend
He come to the door, he couldn’t get in
All because of the color of his skin
What do you think about that, my frien’?
The scene is set. The fate and the face of James Meredith were set. He was the first black to enrol – over what some whites said would be their dead bodies, although their hope was really that the dead body would be his – at the University of Mississippi. Oxford Town.
The haunted song is played by Dylan obliquely and yet unequivocally. But what was he playing at (equivocation?) when he said, on the Studs Terkel Show,273 “Well, yeah, it deals with the Meredith case but then again it doesn’t”? The right question to ask about this soft-shoe-shuffle of his is not “Is it true?” but “What truth is there in it?” And the answer radiates. Yes, Oxford Town deals with the Meredith case in the sense that as a matter of historical fact this was the place and this was the person there: the confrontation was altogether real, as the photos and footage of the siege in 1962 bear witness, and the challenge by Meredith – that the law be upheld, that his right to admission be admitted – was burlily and brutally met by a challenge to the law from the very officials whose duty it was to enforce the law. In Mississippi, “The leading institution of higher learning”, recorded The Oxford Companion to American History,274
is the University of Mississippi (Oxford, est. 1848). Its campus was the scene (1962) of the most violent opposition to Federal court rulings since the Civil War, after the governor of the state in person sought to block the registration of a Negro student.
So the song deals with the Meredith case. But then again it doesn’t. Not naming Meredith, it isn’t handcuffed to a political particularity. It may be asked whether The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, then, is limited to its occasion, but the cases are very different, not only as history but in the type of artistic realization that Dylan gives to them. The story of Hattie Carroll and of William Zanzinger is told in full and in detail; moreover, though it is dramatic, it is not told by a voice that is itself dramatized in the song. Nobody has been imagined by Dylan, the imaginer, as having this to say. He speaks, and sings, in his own voice, for all of us, and not as any dramatized imaginary one-of-us. But Oxford Town is not on the scale of such a tragic novel (an American tragedy, Hattie Carroll’s life and death, and, yes, William Zanzinger’s life, too); it is a sketch. Not sketchy at all, but offering in twenty short lines a picture of a different kind from that which is painted in the nearly fifty long lines of Hattie Carroll. Added to which, the swift wretched tale of Oxford Town is told to us by someone who (it is imagined) was there. Oxford Town is sung with Dylan’s voice but not sung in Dylan’s voice exactly. For whereas the voice in Hattie Carroll is crucially not that of someone who had been present at the Baltimore hotel society gathering, down there in Oxford Town there we were,
Me and my gal, my gal’s son
We got met with a tear gas bomb
I don’t even know why we come
Goin’ back where we come from
This is the only verse that doesn’t include “Oxford Town”, a name placed and pressed home three times in the first verse, twice in the second, once in the third and in the last, as if the song, like “Me and my gal, my gal’s son”, can’t wait to get out of Oxford Town. “Goin’ back where we come from”. Where was that, exactly?
“I don’t even know why we come”. This is not the stuff of which heroes are made.275 Oh, it took courage to be down there, in the midst of protest, the three of us. But there are limits. In the unmousy words of Tarantula: “it’s every man for himself – are you a man or a self?”276
In Some Other Kinds of Songs . . .277 Dylan imagines a scene:
a loose-tempered fat
man in borrowed stomach slams wife
in the face an’ rushes off t’ civil
rights
meeting.
It would be nice to be sure that a man of this stripe was rushing off to the civil rights meeting in order illiberally to disrupt it, but we had better admit that he just might be going to it to support it. For many a good cause politically is supported by people who don’t begin to practise at home what they preach abroad. “What do you think about that, my frien’?”
Oxford Town does not avert its eyes or ears from the fact that you can’t count on liberals to be heroes. So? Why should you expect it of them? The song is not in the business of urging its listeners to feel superior to the voice they overhear, the voice of someone decent, who was up to going down there but who is not up to dealing with tear-gas bombs. Now is the time for your tears? – but it is not pleasant to think that now is the time and place for tear-gas tears. The idealism, though it is not ridiculed, is felt to falter, all too naturally:
I don’t even know why we come
Goin’ back where we come from
People do well not to go in for protestations about their protest-marches. Robert Lowell cast into verse a letter from Elizabeth Hardwick:278
“I guess we’ll make Washington this weekend;
it’s a demonstration, like all demonstrations,
repetitious, gratuitous, unfresh . . . just needed.”
Bigoted bullies like Bull Connor who wield cattle-prods against protesters, these Oxford Town has no time for, but this does not prevent it from setting reasonable limits to the amount of time that it has for liberal fellows or liberal fellow-travellers, the limits then being the amount of time that the liberals themselves will courageously commit themselves to. “Goin’ back where we come from”. I don’t blame you. But I can’t idolize you or idealize you either. And the song is saved from being in any danger of self-righteousness because it is mediated to us through the voice of someone who has no wish to be a martyr, makes no priggish claim to be a hero, and is not despised for not being a martyr or a hero. “I don’t even know why we come”.
Oxford Town in the afternoon
Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune
Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
“Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”. Singing it insincerely? Hypocritically? Playing along with it? This line is parallel to the earlier one with which it is paired: “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”. In genuine sorrow? In pretended sorrow? Or prudentially, heads ducking below the parapet? The word “down” is bent on dragging the song down, four times in the first six lines, from “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”, through “Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town” and “He went down to Oxford Town”, to “Guns and clubs followed him down”.279
“Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”. But as Robert Shelton wrote of this song, “Melody and tempo are jaunty, the lyrics are not.”280 The brisk buoyant strumming that opens the song does not ever let up or let you down in Oxford Town. It gives you something sorrowful, “but then again it doesn’t”, for the unsorrowful tune does not play along with what the words lay bare. Such counteraction is characteristic of a song that does so much interweaving. The “Ev’rybody” of “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down” and “Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune” becomes, two lines later, the wistful wishful “Somebody” of
Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
Somebody else, as always. Not whatever, but whoever. The patterned song is about patterns of behaviour. And “Sun don’t shine above the ground”, of the first verse, becomes in this last verse “Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon”. And just as “sorrowful tune” might have a romantic colouring, ugly in the circumstances, so another of the quiet horrors in the song is the contrast within the phrase “’neath the Mississippi moon”, for it, too, might have a disconcertingly romantic colouring:
Where I can watch her waltz for free
’Neath her Panamanian moon
That is Stuck Inside of Mobile. Fortunately you don’t have to be stuck inside of Oxford Town. “Better get away from Oxford Town”. The minimal hopeless “Better” of “Better get away” is not at all a good thing, and it returns in “Somebody better investigate soon”, where nothing is any longer being shouldered and somebody is relapsing into shrugging the whole thing off. Verse 1, “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”. Verse 2, “Better get away from Oxford Town”. Verse 3, “He come to the door, he couldn’t get in”. Verse 4, “We got met with a tear gas bomb”. “Got” and “get”, get it? At which point there is verse 5, which has got rid of “got” and “get”. Nobody is going to get caught or punished.
Oxford Town in the afternoon
Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune
Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
A silkily sinister ending. Even tinged, perhaps, with hope they don’t find out anything, a dark thought that is in touch with the bright thought that ends a very different early song about politics, Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues:
So now I’m sitting home investigatin’ myself !
Hope I don’t find out anything . . . hmm, great God!
“Somebody better investigate soon”. As printed in Lyrics 1962–1985, though (and as can be heard on a bootleg tape), Oxford Town ended not with this “soon” that will never be realized, but by circling back to repeat the first verse of the song:
Oxford Town, Oxford Town
Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down
Sun don’t shine above the ground
Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town
Circling is good, both as being wary and as going nowhere, but there is a more effective circling back without the repetition of the opening verse (a touch easy, that), in the coming back round to the “Ev’rybody” lines. “Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down”: “Ev’rybody singin’ a sorrowful tune”.
The sorrowful tune is embodied in the sound that ends the word “tune” or the closely related sound that ends the word “from”. This sound has its unremitting and encircling drone or hum. For all the lines of this song rhyme, and every line can be heard to sound (like “line” and “rhyme”) n or (in the fourth verse) m. Not so, you might say, for what about “ground” in the very first verse? But “ground” there is denied its d by rhyming with “Town”, even as “bend” in the third verse is denied its d by rhyming with “frien’”, and even as “bomb” – with its silent b – is rhymed with “from”. And what might this steady drone or hum do within the song? Create a tone of semi-military menace without remission, not letting up, a background (or a backgroun’) that bows heads down and brings everything down to Oxford Town. Think of the sounds of the bagpipe and of how the chanter’s penetration is set against the drone, the brown air that the drone suffuses through it all.281
The short words go about their work. Meanwhile, “Mississippi” and “investigate” are the long words in the song, and there they are in two successive lines, the two closing lines.
Two men died ’neath the Mississippi moon
Somebody better investigate soon
Two men stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Somebody better see that justice is done to all this. As somebody truly did.
Prudence
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou charácter. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act . . .
Et cetera. Polonius, to his son, Laertes, in Hamlet. “These few precepts”? With a further twenty-two maxim-packed lines awaiting delivery? He must be kidding. You can feel the young man’s relief when at last his father arrives at “This above all”, with the end in sight or in hearing. Look out kid, one wants to say to Laertes, except that this is what his father (allowing for a change of idiom) is repeatedly saying to him. Polonius maximizes precepts. Some centuries later, such prudential considerations came to
be the ammunition of the Maxim gun that is Subterranean Homesick Blues.
Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit282
Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but, being in,
Bear’t that th’opposèd may beware of thee.
Prudence says Beware, and Be aware, and Be wary. Whether or not the times are a-changin’, time is of the quintessence. No Time to Think: such is the title and the refrain of a timely song. American English, with its pleasure in and profit from built-in obsolescence, has its distinctive relation to time, to time’s passing.283 In terms of the transitory language, it is not that there is no time to think, but rather that one of the things that must be promptly thought about is that there’s no time. The refrain that marks the particular whirligig of time that is No Time to Think makes a punctuation point of adding, every time, “And there’s no time to think” – until the last time, the last verse. Then the refrain-line both expands and contracts. It expands, in that it takes over the whole of the last verse. It contracts, in that in the final end when the time comes for the last refrain, time so presses (“No time to lose”) that, instead of “And there’s no time to think”, the refrain is curtailed to “And no time to think”:
No time to choose when the truth must die
No time to lose or say goodbye
No time to prepare for the victim that’s there
No time to suffer or blink
And no time to think
“No time to lose or say goodbye”: yet the song is about to effect its own way of saying goodbye (farewell is too good a word, so I’ll just say goodbye), at once loyal to its refrain and departing not only with it but from it. Minutely. A prudent move, with perfect timing.
Prudence can sound something less than a virtue. Virtuous, merely? A soft touch, a touch too timid or tepid? Too puny to stand up there with Justice and Fortitude? Perhaps this virtue should be placed on a humbler plinth, alongside Temperance, the other less muscular one. But be careful (Prudence warns), for Prudence does have its glint, its steely sense of what a warning is and of how this differs from a threat – it then being understood that the difference may not be all that great. The pliability is wirier and wilier than you might think, and for Dylan it can grab best as “you better”:
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 26