Why Bob Dylan Matters
Page 17
The girl is also at an aquarium, and on a lake in which she catches a fish. The town in the background could be Duluth. Three props make their cameo appearances, all sending us back in time to the three men he admired most: Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory appears in the woman’s lap as she swings in a porch hammock, a cassette of Hank Williams’s Wanderin’ Around is juxtaposed with an acoustic guitar propped up on the porch, and the video closes with what looks like a scene from Mardi Gras with masked figures, and the sleeve of the 1958 album Buddy Holly. The seventeen-year-old Dylan famously saw Buddy Holly at the Duluth National Guard Armory on January 31, 1959, two days before he died in the plane crash. Dylan has pretty much moved back there anyway, as in the new lyrics in performance of “Simple Twist of Fate”: “She should have known me in ’58 / She would have stayed with me.”
Some songs on Modern Times were demonstrably old. Even before we heard the words, once the title list was known, Dylan aficionados easily tracked down the eighth cut, “Nettie Moore,” connecting it to an 1859 song, “Gentle Nettie Moore.” There the singer is a slave whose woman has been bought by a trader from “Louisiana Bay” and taken off in shackles, leaving him alone in the little white cottage they had shared on the Santee River in South Carolina. All that is left is to wait for the day when he meets her in heaven, “up above the skies.” Dylan takes over the opening of the chorus, “Oh I miss you, Nettie Moore, and my happiness is o’er,” and the final line of his chorus gets the spirit of the song written two years before the outbreak of the Civil War: “The world has gone black before my eyes.”
The rest of the song is pure Dylan invention, on the face of it an absurdist assortment of images that take the listener in all sorts of directions, incorporating fragments of other songs and texts, for instance quoting from Delta bluesman Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail”: “Blues this morning falling down like hail.” Dylan can juxtapose a reference to his own band (“I’m in a cowboy band”), to the excesses of Dylanology (“The world of research has gone berserk / Too much paperwork”)—and then throw in a reference to the traditional folk song “Frankie and Albert,” which he had covered on the 1992 anthology Good As I Been To You: “Albert’s in the graveyard, Frankie’s raising hell.” And yet it works as a song whose sorrow reflects that of the 1859 slave song whose title it takes, but is intensified by the melody, the images, and above all by Dylan’s voice in all its aged richness. American historian and Dylan critic Sean Wilentz, who collects many of the components of the song, puts it well:
The song wafts through time and space, past and present, old songs and new, as Dylan’s recent songs do. It presents itself in the fragmented, ambiguous way that has marked Dylan’s music, through many phases, for decades.
It is a world that can be comprehended only from inside the song, on its own terms. However, as always, recognition of the specifics of past and present, old and new are what can help inform and enrich the songs as they conjure up the way Dylan’s thought shifted as he transforms his musical and literary traditions.
The sense of the old is conveyed not just by way of the intertexts of this album that inject their original contexts into the new setting, as with “Nettie Moore,” but also by the very language that Dylan employs and by the settings he chooses: “I was passing by yon cruel and crystal fountain,” “the whole world which people say is round” (“Ain’t Talkin’ ”), “I’m staring out the window of an ancient town” (“Beyond the Horizon”). The week before Modern Times came out, Jon Pareles, journalist and music critic for the New York Times, well captured the essentials of the album:
His lyrics, and sometimes his music, are studded with quotations and allusions spanning more than a century of Americana. . . . For Mr. Dylan there’s no difference between an itinerant bluesman and a haggard pilgrim. “I practice a faith that’s been long abandoned,” he sings. “Ain’t no altars on this long and lonesome road” . . . “The suffering is unending,” he sings. “Every nook and cranny has its tears.” He’s a weary traveler, a bluesman and a pilgrim, on a dark and unforgiving road.
CONFEDERATE POET AND ROMAN EXILE
A few weeks after Pareles’s review, on September 14, 2006, Motoko Rich reported in the New York Times that Albuquerque disc jockey Scott Warmuth had, through “judicious googling,” revealed that a number of songs from Modern Times borrowed closely from Henry Timrod, a Confederate poet, born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828. Timrod wrote with a lyric voice that clearly appealed to Dylan, and the “old” feel of some of Dylan’s lyrics seemed to have come straight from Timrod, as in the third verse of “When the Deal Goes Down”:
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
These lines, like a number of others on the album, draw heavily from two of Timrod’s poems:
“A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night”
These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! Here, where in the summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered, I was blest.
and “A Vision of Poesy”:
A strange far look would come into his eyes
As if he saw a vision in the skies
We are again reminded of the T. S. Eliot line: “Immature poets borrow, mature poets steal.” The Bob Dylan of Modern Times is at the height of his maturity, and has here successfully stolen. The rhyming phrases “precious hours” and “logic frailer than the flowers” are unconnected except by rhyme in Timrod; Dylan brings them tightly together, transforming his source by having the hours, the shared time of the singer and the addressee, Dylan and us, be that which is frail or fragile, the internal rhyme “flowers . . . hours” matching that in his reuse of the other Timrod intertext, in a different poem, “eyes . . . skies,” which is similarly transformed and bettered. Here Dylan has put himself back into his favorite century, and the song is all the more powerful once we see where this part of it came from and can appreciate how it was transformed. Again, look at Timrod, consider the two poets side by side, then ask yourself if you could do this:
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down.
And that’s quite apart from coming up with the melody and singing it with the cadence and voice of Bob Dylan. But Modern Times conjures up souls much longer dead than Timrod.
It turned out that Bob Dylan had again gone back to Rome in his songwriting. Soon after Modern Times came out in the fall of 2006, I was on sabbatical at Oxford University, hardwiring the new album, and getting lost in its beauty by listening to it every day on my walk back and forth to the library. I was working on a commentary on the last book of the Odes of the Roman lyric poet Horace (65–8 BC). As on Dylan’s new album, some of Horace’s poems connect song, love, and the passing of time, all filtered through the lyric genius of the Roman poet, for whom time is slipping away, with music and song a compensation, as at the close of the Odes 4.11, “To Phyllis”:
Love only as it is fitting; do not desire
That which you ought not to have. Phyllis, listen to me:
You are the last of my loves; there will be no others.
Come, learn a new song and sing it to me, for song,
Is the means, in your beautiful voice, to alleviate sorrow.
—Horace, tr. David Ferry
With Horace’s Phyllis as “the last of my loves,” that particular poem had long since found a resonance in my mind with Dylan’s 200
1 song “Bye and Bye,” where he had already sounded to me like Horace: “Well the future for me is already a thing of the past / You were my first love and you will be my last.” This was a coincidence, but a meaningful one: the tradition Dylan is in goes back to the lyric poets of Greece and Rome.
So, there I was, in Oxford Town, working on the lyric poems of Horace and listening to the lyrics of Dylan, having taught courses on both of them a couple of years before, as I would keep on teaching them in the years that followed. When the album came out, I was also curious, given Dylan’s quoting Virgil five years before on “Lonesome Day Blues,” about what might be hiding out on the new album. What looked like one allusion was there in plain sight, on the first song, the driving “Thunder on the Mountain,” in the sixth verse: “I’ve been sitting down studying the art of love / I think it will fit me like a glove.” The only Art of Love I knew was the three-book poem of Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–c. AD 17), a playful early work, a “how-to” for those looking to get and to keep a romantic partner. But Modern Times didn’t seem to have much to do with that poem, but rather, if anything, with the last poems Ovid wrote.
In AD 8, Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus—we really don’t know why, possibly for writing the Art of Love—to a frontier Black Sea town, modern Constanta in Romania, about as bleak a spot as could be found for punishing the urbane, witty Roman poet. He spent the rest of his days there. He explored this exile in two collections of poetry, produced in the last years of his life: Tristia (Poems of Sadness) and Letters from the Black Sea. “Thunder on the Mountain” closed with the singer getting away from the world, heading north, another version of “Highlands” from Time Out of Mind: “I’m gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north / I’ll plant and I’ll harvest what the earth brings forth.” This ending to the first song seemed, along with the final verse of the last song, to frame the whole album:
Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’
Up the road around bend
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
In the last outback, at the world’s end
That ending was also stolen, from Ovid. On October 10, 2006, Cliff Fell, a New Zealand poet and teacher of creative writing, wrote in his local paper, the Nelson Mail, of a striking discovery. He happened to be reading Peter Green’s Penguin translation of Ovid’s exile poetry. Green is one of the finest translators of Greek and Latin poetry, always coming up with the right idiom for his authors, and so bringing them to life in contemporary English. This is an important detail. Like me in Oxford and like millions throughout the world, Fell was also listening to Modern Times. As he describes it:
and then this uncanny thing happened—it was like I was suddenly reading with my ears. I heard this line from the song “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “No-one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you.” But there it was singing on the page, from Book 2.52 of Tristia: “My cause is better: no-one can claim that I ever took up arms against you.”
As Fell read on in Ovid, he came across further lines that were entering his consciousness from listening to Modern Times:
Bob Dylan, “Ain’t Talkin’ ”
Ovid, Black Sea Letters, 2.7.66
Heart burnin’, still yearnin’
In the last outback at the world’s end.
I’m in the last outback, at the world’s end.
Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2”
Ovid, Tristia, 5.12.8
To lead me off in a cheerful dance.
or Niobe, bereaved, lead off some cheerful dance.
Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2
Ovid, Tristia, 5.13.8
Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking
That you have forgotten me?
May the gods grant . . . / that I’m wrong
in thinking you’ve forgotten me!
Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2”
Ovid, Tristia, 2.179
My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf / Come sit down on my knee /
Show mercy, I beg you, shelve your
cruel weapons.
Bob Dylan, “Workingman’s Blues #2”
Ovid, Tristia, 5.14.2
You are dearer to me than myself /
As you yourself can see.
wife, dearer to me than myself, you yourself can see.
The recognition that comes from reading or hearing one text through the medium of a later text is part of the aesthetic pleasure that is the product of the intertextual process, and the excitement of Fell’s discovery was apparent.
It eventually emerged that more than thirty lines of Ovid’s exile poems had been reappropriated and become an essential part of the fabric of the songs of Modern Times. Dylan even reused Ovid in the title of the first song of the next album, Together Through Life, from 2009. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” a song firmly in the setlist of concerts, is lifted from Ovid, Tristia 2.195–96: “beyond here lies nothing but chilliness, hostility, frozen / waves of an ice-hard sea.” The refrain of the third verse seems to look back to the source: “Beyond here lies nothin’ / But the mountains of the past.”
Ovid was one of those “mountains of the past.” Scaling the “mountains of the past” was something Dylan continued to do in his covers of the Great American Songbook in 2015–17, with Frank Sinatra now replacing Ovid. So, from an interview coinciding with release of Shadows in the Night:
You know, when you start doing these songs, Frank’s got to be on your mind. Because he is the mountain. That’s the mountain you have to climb even if you only get part of the way there.
Scaling the mountains of the past is expressed in a different metaphor in the lively blues song “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”: “I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs.” That line too is borrowed from Ovid, not his exile poetry, but rather the love poems of his youth—where a witch “conjures up long-dead souls from their crumbling sepulchers.” Timrod and Ovid are the long-dead souls, joining those of Homer, Virgil, Burns, and any number of others whose poetry and song Dylan has been putting to such good use in these years. Bob Dylan has been conjuring them up, as he brings them back to life in the songs of Modern Times, in effect bringing them into the modern times, where they fit so well, both in translation and in their transformations into Dylan’s songs.
This connects to other conjuring Dylan has been doing of late. Toward the end of the interview Dylan did with Mikal Gilmore for the September 27, 2012, issue of Rolling Stone, Dylan was asked about his “quotes” of Timrod:
And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you ever heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him?
The answer to these slightly elusive questions is “Bob Dylan.” It is Dylan who has brought the obscure Timrod and the less obscure Ovid out from their tombs into the full light of day. Dylan has done this because he cares about the traditions in which he belongs, about poetry and music, and about taking us back into those lost worlds that are so vital a part of him. Incidentally, in his very response to Gilmore, we hear a line “Soon After Midnight,” a song on Tempest, released two weeks before the interview: “Two Timing Slim, who’s ever heard of him.”
WHY THE EXILE POEMS?
In the inner exile he created for his own protection, and from which he sends us his songs, Bob Dylan discovered and invoked Ovidian exile poetry, the poetry coming at the end of the career of Ovid. Indeed, the last words of the last song, “Ain’t Talkin’,” and therefore the last words of the third album of what looked like the trilogy, suggest a finality, a closing of the book, and they are straight from Ovid as Dylan puts himself “in the last outback, at the world’s end.” At the same time, it needs to be noted that Dylan’s borrowings—or thefts—are all transposed into new situations that have little to do with, but that once noticed and activated evoke comparison with, those of the Ovidian models—the essence of creative intertextuality. It is worth noting again the p
erception of T. S. Eliot, who himself practiced precisely the art that Dylan had become part of:
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it is torn. . . . A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.
That is part of the art of Bob Dylan. On songs like “Ain’t Talkin’ ” and “Workingman’s Blues #2” he is not citing or quoting; rather he is renewing and re-creating, as he has been doing for years, with material from folk and other traditions, but also the Bible, Rimbaud, and more.
The Ovidian lines reused by Dylan are largely acknowledged now. But why Ovid? What is it about the Roman poet that made his voice, traveling across two thousand years into Green’s translation, so appealing to Dylan? Ovid is very different from Cicero, who was also exiled and also wrote real letters back to friends, his wife, his brother, and various other figures. What Ovid wrote was exile poetry, many of the poems posing as letters, but they are not actual letters. The poems lament his condition, but they still show the wit, irony, and character of the poet familiar to readers of Ovid’s earlier and happier times, for instance the reader of the Metamorphoses, one of the texts encountered by Dylan in Ray Gooch’s library in Chronicles: Volume One. Ovid’s exiled voice is not just that of a sufferer; he is also in control of things, doing with his lyrics just what he wants, creating the persona, or exile mask, he wants for any given poem. All we have of Ovid is his poetry, what he wanted the world to see of him, and in this respect he and Dylan belong together.