Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  What were the actual titles in that library, whether real or imagined? At the top of Dylan’s list, receiving three mentions in two pages, is the ancient Greek writer Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which Dylan refers to as The Athenian General. He gets the title wrong, but no matter, for he captures the relevance of the Greek historian (36):

  It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides talks about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be changed in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.

  Clearly Dylan has dipped into Thucydides, as we can see from similarities between his description above and Rex Warner’s Penguin translation of one of the most famous passages of History of the Peloponnesian War (1.22):

  It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

  Thucydides was very much in the air in 2003 and 2004, when Dylan was writing Chronicles and the United States was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Reading Thucydides then would indeed “give you the chills,” as it did for Dylan. The Greek historian had said of the unwise decision of the Athenians to invade Sicily in 415 BC: “The result of this excessive enthusiasm of the majority was that the few who were opposed to the expedition were afraid of being thought unpatriotic if they voted against it, and therefore kept quiet.” Dylan, writing at the time of our own wars, seems to have been thinking precisely of passages such as this, and about the relevance of the history of ancient Greece to modern America, for more than a decade, as in a 1991 interview, the second year of the First Gulf War:

  A college professor told me that if you read about Greece in the history books, you’ll know all about America. Nothing that happens will puzzle you ever again. You read the history of Ancient Greece and when the Romans came in, and nothing will ever bother you about America again. You’ll see what America is.

  History is always about the place of the past in the present time, and in 1991 and 2004, the time of Gulf Wars I and II, Dylan was connecting America and the ancient Greeks and Romans. He does so in these pages of Chronicles that do not name any book but give an example of how the Greeks dealt with occupation in the same area where the United States currently found itself:

  Alexander the Great’s march into Persia. When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all of his men marry local women. After that he never had any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything.

  It is hard not to take this as surreal advice emerging from the surreal world that is “The Lost Land.”

  Thucydides’s contemporary Sophocles, the writer of tragedies, is also there in the library, again with a wrong title, as is Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman historians, though he wrote histories, not “lectures and letters to Brutus.” “The Twelve Caesars” of Suetonius, the other Roman historian on whom Robert Graves based his novel I, Claudius, is also there. Ray’s library also contained the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, “the scary horror tale”—not a bad description of a work that depicts how human bodies are transformed into trees, birds, flowers, and various kinds of beasts.

  Beyond the Greeks and Romans, Dylan expands his range of literary references. From the thirteenth century he mentions Dante’s Inferno, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Machiavelli’s The Prince, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, and Milton’s poem “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.” He moves on to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with “Gogol and Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo and Dickens,” books on Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, on Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and on Sigmund Freud, “the king of the subconscious.” But nothing he mentions is in chronological order. Everything is jumbled up, Ovid next to the “autobiography of Davy Crockett,” Rousseau’s Social Contract next to Temptation of St. Anthony. This mixing up helps lend the whole catalog an air of pure stream of consciousness, with a delectable juxtaposing of these daunting and frequently off-putting titles in the lively, contemporary voice of Bob Dylan, resulting in an incongruity essential to his humor. Thucydides “could give you the chills,” “Materia medica (the causes and cures for diseases)—that was a good one,” “The words of ‘La Vita Solitaria’ by Leopardi [nineteenth-century Italian poet] seemed to come out of the trunk of a tree, hopeless, uncrushable sentiments.” Joseph Smith “pales in comparison to Thucydides.” “Albertus Magnus was lightweight next to Thucydides,” with a play or joke on the meaning of Latin magnus (“big”): “a lot of these books were too big to read, like giant shoes for large-footed people.” “In the end,” Dylan writes, “the books make the room vibrate in a nauseating and forceful way.” Ray Gooch’s library reflects the creative essence of Dylan’s mind, unfettered by catalogs or by order, and getting to the heart of who he is artistically.

  Still in the library, on page 45 of Chronicles Dylan writes, “Invoking the poetic muses was something I didn’t know about yet.” He may not have known about that in 1961, but by 2004 things had changed, as he had been reading and drawing from the classical texts. The most famous encounter between a poet and the Muses is in the Greek poet Hesiod, from the eighth century BC, whom Dylan was quoting in the Rome press conference in 2001 when he discussed the Iron Age and the Golden Age of Homer. There he also mentioned the memoir he was working on. The Muses tell Hesiod what he should learn from them: “We know how to speak many false things that seem like the truth, but we also know, when we choose, how to sing the truth.” Like Dylan, they knew the truth and untruth, and both are fine.

  That is what was going on in the description of Ray Gooch’s library, and it is also what is going on in Dylan’s songwriting, right up to the epic 14-minute, 45-verse song “Tempest,” from the 2012 album of the same name. This song is really the culmination of his songwriting. There is truth in it, indeed in its opening words of the second verse, “ ’Twas the fourteenth day of April,” the day in 1912, one hundred years before the album came out, that the Titanic hit the iceberg that sank it early the next morning. That’s a truth, as is the fact that John Jacob Astor IV, wealthiest of the passengers, went down with the ship. “The rich man, Mr. Astor, kissed his darling wife,” goes the verse. Everyone else in the song is made up. Wellington, who “strapped on both his pistols”; Calvin, Blake, and Wilson, who are “gambling in the dark”; Jim Dandy, who gave up his seat to the “little crippled child”—on the album it was Jim Backus, the actor who played Thurston Howell III on the 1960s TV series of a different shipwreck story, Gilligan’s Island, another lost land—“Davey the brothel keeper,” all of these are untruths. And that too is all well and good, all part of the song that becomes in our memory this newly empowered version of the sinking of the Titanic. Go back to the folk song “The Titanic,” by the Carter Family, from which Dylan took the melody and most of whose words he repurposed as some of the folk song components of his fictional epic. That folk song is visible and audible, and there is no effort or intention to hide the fact. On the contrary, Dylan’s song is the richer for our hearing the old song in his new song. But the new song is something else, something that through Dylan’s genius as a songwriter, singer, verbal painter, has transcended the folk tradition in which it is rooted; it has become both epic and cinematic, a wholly new genre.

  BACK TO REALITY

  The last chapter of the book takes us back to the first and second. “River of Ice” covers much of the time period of “The Lost Land,” but without the surreal essence of the earlier chapter. In fact, for an understanding of what can be known of Dylan’s life, what it was like growing up in Hibbing, the move to the coffeehouses of Dinkytown, and the eventual move east, you could do w
orse than start with this last chapter, which ends where the first chapter began, closing the circle, John Hammond signing him to a record deal with Columbia Records in 1961 and Dylan recording the first album in Lou Levy’s studio. “In my beginning is my end,” as T. S. Eliot put it.

  So we might expect to run into Ray and Chloe in less surreal guise in this last chapter, which treats 1961 and looks more like truth than untruth. According to Chronicles, Dylan met them through folksinger and folklorist Paul Clayton, whom Dylan describes in Chapter 1 as “good natured, forlorn and melancholic” (26)—with no mention of the fact that he would take his own life in 1967. Clayton himself returns in Chapter 5, and still with no mention of his fate (260–61):

  He knew hundreds of songs and must have had a photographic memory. Clayton was unique—elegiac, very princely—part Yankee gentleman and part Southern rakish dandy. He dressed in black from head to foot and would quote Shakespeare. Clayton traveled regularly from Virginia to New York, and we got to be friends. His companions were out-of-towners and like him, a “caste apart”—had attitudes, but known only to themselves—a non-folky crowd.

  That’s all we see of Ray and Chloe. They have disappeared, or rather stepped off the stage, here present only by implication as two of the “out-of-towners” with whom Dylan spent the early weeks of his New York period in early 1961. They and their apartment belonged in the lost land, and that is where Dylan leaves them in the drama of this book. The library of that land, the windowless room “with a painted door—a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library,” has vanished back into the mind of Dylan. Or, as he sang at the end of the melancholic “Forgetful Heart” in 2008, “The door has closed forevermore / If indeed there ever was a door.”

  THE TRANSFIGURATION OF BOB DYLAN

  Bob Dylan’s interviews and press conferences are a genre worthy of study in itself, fifty-five years’ worth of creative control and orchestration of the image and information he has permitted the world to possess. He chooses the time, the place, and the interviewers. It is possession of details of his life and lyrics that Dylan’s fans have craved. He almost never discusses or responds to questions about the meaning of lyrics, his politics, relationships, or, since 1980, religious affiliation. Likewise, it is dangerous to trust too much what he does let the world see. My interest in his interviews has to do with the artistic changes through which he went mostly in the twenty-first century, connecting himself across time to other artists, going right back to the ancients. A good part of him is now living in this world.

  This process started early, as early as January 31, 1959, when the eighteen-year-old saw Buddy Holly play at the Duluth National Guard Armory, three days before Holly’s death in a plane crash. In his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017, Dylan tells what happened:

  He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

  In an interview in 1978, the year before Dylan converted to Christianity for a year or so, Jonathan Cott brings up the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, long associated with Dylan’s music of the mid-sixties, and subject of my next chapter: “I’ve always associated you with Rimbaud . . . do you believe in reincarnation?” Dylan wanders through various possibilities for reincarnation, concluding: “I think one can be conscious of various vibrations in the universe. But reincarnation from the twelfth to the twentieth century—I say it’s impossible.” Cott modifies his question: “when I say Rimbaud and you, you take it as an affinity.” Dylan: “Maybe my spirit passed through the same places as his did. We’re all wind and dust anyway and we could have passed through many barriers at different times.”

  More recent, in December 2001, following the release of “Love and Theft,” with those lines of Virgil, Dylan gave another interview, with American writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. As the interview was winding down, Gilmore asked Dylan where the songs on “Love and Theft” came from, noting that the album feels like it’s from “the America we live in now, but also the America we have left behind.” Dylan’s response was complicated:

  I mean, you’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s always been that way, for one reason or another. I deal with all the old stereotypes. The language and the identity is the one I know only so well, and I’m not about to go on and keep doing this—comparing my new work to my old work. It creates a kind of Achilles heel for myself. It isn’t going to happen.

  Pompeii and Achilles, the world of Rome and of Homer, are mentioned as if Dylan is inhabiting the ancient places. Gilmore doesn’t pick up on Dylan’s references, as regularly happens with his interviews. Instead, he brings things back home to America, asking whether the album emanates from Dylan’s experience of America at that moment. “Every one of the records I’ve made,” Dylan replies, “has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me.” That panorama included the Rome of Dylan’s youth, in Latin classes, the Latin Club, and at the movies, possibly including the director Sergio Leone’s 1959 movie, Last Days of Pompeii, the town destroyed in AD 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, which Dylan had just mentioned. In the summer of that year, 2001, Dylan had given the Rome press conference, on July 23. We’ll never know, but I suspect he visited the impressive site of Pompeii, perhaps four days later, July 27, the day after performing a few miles across the Bay of Naples, and before heading off for a concert the following day in Taormina, Sicily.

  Dylan’s thirty-second studio album, Modern Times, was released on August 29, 2006, and was soon hailed as a continuation of the comeback that had begun with Time Out of Mind (1997) and continued with “Love and Theft” (2001), the last of the “trilogy,” as it seemed, and was prematurely labeled by some critics. A week after the release of Modern Times, Rolling Stone published “The Genius and Modern Times of Bob Dylan,” written by novelist Jonathan Lethem, who had been interviewing Dylan about the new album. Well before we learned about the classical and other texts in these songs, borrowings from Roman exile Ovid and confederate poet Henry Timrod, Dylan was laying down more clues and hints about the transformations, reincarnations, and transfigurations that his art was undergoing. Here is how Lethem portrayed it, starting with his quote of Dylan from the interview:

  “I just let the lyrics go, and when I was singing them, they seemed to have an ancient presence.” Dylan seems to feel he dwells in a body haunted like a house by his bardlike musical precursors. “Those songs are just in my genes, and I couldn’t stop them comin’ out. In a reincarnative kind of way, maybe. The songs have got some kind of a pedigree to them. But that pedigree stuff, that only works so far. You can go back to the ten-hundreds, and people only had one name. Nobody’s gonna tell you they’re going to go back further than when people had one name.”

  Who knows when the ten hundreds were? Maybe the Middle Ages, maybe even further back. To those pedigreed people with one name who have been inhabiting Dylan’s song in his renaissance of the last twenty years, and for even longer without his fully realizing it: Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch, Petrarch, Dante, whom Dylan claimed to know by way of Gooch’s library, or more likely through his own serendipitous reading.

  Then there is perhaps the liveliest interview he has ever given, in 2012 to Mikal Gilmore in Rolling Stone following release of the new, and to date last, original album, the masterpiece Tempest. Dylan talks about his own “transfiguration” and produces a book he had brought with him to the interview. He hands it over to Gilmore, who reads some of the book into his tape recorder. It i
s Ralph “Sonny” Barger’s bestseller Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, cowritten by Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman, or “Zimmermen,” as they call themselves in the preface. The pages Dylan has Gilmore read narrate the motorcycle death in 1961 or 1964 of someone called Bobby Zimmerman. Hell’s Angel is a true story, but for Gilmore things were getting a little strange. None of these three Zimmermans is related, at least not in the conventional sense of the word, to the Bob Zimmerman who became Bob Dylan, who connects the incident in the book to his own motorcycle accident in Woodstock (which happened in 1966, two to five years after that of Bob Z. the Hell’s Angel)—though in a suggestive rather than specific way. He is explaining his own changes in general. To the question, “Are you saying that you really can’t be known?” Dylan replies:

  Nobody knows nothing. Who knows who’s been transfigured and who has not? Who knows? Maybe Aristotle? Maybe he was transfigured? I can’t say. Maybe Julius Caesar was transfigured. I have no idea. Maybe Shakespeare. Maybe Dante. Maybe Napoleon. Maybe Churchill. You just never know because it doesn’t figure into the history books. That’s all I’m saying.

  Julius Caesar, Aristotle, and Dante—again we are back in the world of the Greeks and Romans and their greatest late medieval inheritor, Dante, Italian poet of the thirteenth century. The notion of transfiguration is never quite explained, can’t really be explained. When pushed by Gilmore, Dylan responds as usual: “I only know what I told you. You’ll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it’s about.” And to do that you would have to find “a book about transfiguration.” There is no such book. We are in the world of untruth, as Dylan in this strange and strangely enjoyable interview heads back to—where else?—Rome, the place of his original transfiguration, the city “where I was born” (“Going Back to Rome”). He tells Gilmore: