Why Bob Dylan Matters

by Richard F. Thomas

  He ends as Melvile began, with Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, who like Dylan the songwriter, is the one who makes the masks: “Ishmael survives. He’s in the sea floating on a coffin. And that’s about it. That’s the whole story. That theme and all that it implies would work its way into more than a few of my songs.”

  While Moby-Dick for Dylan offers ways of surviving, along with choices to make, Dylan’s response to another book that worked its way into his songs, All Quiet on the Western Front, a “horror story,” is very different. At first the use of the second person “you” seems to refer to the audience, also to Dylan himself, as he begins:

  This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals. You’re stuck in a nightmare. Sucked up into a mysterious whirlpool of death and pain.

  The German novel, written in the aftermath of the first world war, and so effective as an antiwar novel that the Nazis burned it and banned it from a Germany that was moving toward the catastrophe of the next world war, is until its last page narrated entirely in the first person. The narrator and lead character is Paul Baümer, through whose eyes we see the human degradation brought about by life in the mud and rat- and corpse-infested trenches of the “war to end all wars.”

  Dylan’s narration, almost a third of the entire lecture, is astonishing. From the very next sentence, it becomes clear that the identity of the “you” is in fact not Dylan or us, but Paul himself:

  You’re defending yourself from elimination. You’re being wiped off the face of the map. Once upon a time you were an innocent youth with big dreams about being a concert pianist. Once you loved life and the world, and now you’re shooting it to pieces.

  For more than six minutes, piano softly playing in the background, the Nobel lecture becomes a talking blues, a distillation of the entire book, turning Remarque’s first person into a second person, as Dylan addresses the young soldier-narrator. The detail is relentless, as is the book that it distills, with Dylan’s poetic powers in full view:

  More machine guns rattle, more parts of bodies hanging from wires, more pieces of arms and legs and skulls where butterflies perch on teeth, more hideous wounds, pus coming out of every pore, lung wounds, wounds too big for the body, gas-blowing cadavers, and dead bodies making retching noises. Death is everywhere. Nothing else is possible. Someone will kill you and use your dead body for target practice. Boots, too. They’re your prized possession. But soon they’ll be on somebody else’s feet.

  Through the inhumanity depicted by the book in Dylan’s empathetic and brilliant retelling there shines a ray of humanity, especially right before shrapnel hits Paul in the head and kills him. In the book the narration at that moment shifts from first person to third: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front,” then proceeding dispassionately to relate the death of the person whose voice has led us throughout the book: “he had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping . . .”Dylan ends by switching from second to first person, with an epitaph to Paul followed his own reflection:

  You’re so alone. Then a piece of shrapnel hits the side of your head and you’re dead. You’ve been ruled out, crossed out. You’ve been exterminated. I put this book down and closed it up. I never wanted to read another war novel again, and I never did.

  Like the book, Dylan’s lecture is also a searing indictment of the old who make the wars and send the young to their deaths in battle: “You’ve come to despise that older generation that sent you into this madness, into this torture chamber.” For Dylan, as for many of his generation, these thoughts go back to Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 warnings about the proliferation of the “military-industrial complex,” issued the very week the twenty-year-old Dylan arrived in New York City in that frigid January. He may not have read another war novel again, but he didn’t need to. He had all that he needed to write “Masters of War,” the greatest anti-war song ever written. Three or four years after reading All Quiet at Hibbing High, Dylan finally found in Jean Ritchie’s song “Nottamun Town” the melody for his version of the novel:

  You hide in your mansions

  As young people’s blood

  Flows out of their bodies

  And is buried in the mud.

  “SEAL UP THE BOOK”

  It is time to “seal up the book and not write any more,” as Dylan sings in “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” from Time Out of Mind. But this is a hazardous business, since Dylan’s work continues, and words can come back to haunt you. For all I know, just as this book goes to press, Dylan’s camp may announce that a sequel to Tempest is in the works, or is even about to be released, my triad may have disappeared, the songs left in Rome in November 2013 may come crowding back into the setlist.

  Two of the foremost Dylan scholars out there, Michael Gray and Clinton Heylin, were quite aware of the predicament. Gray’s Song and Dance Man III, published in 2000, ended with a lamentation of the state of Dylan’s art at the time, with Gray fervently hoping that he “refuses to settle for this comfortable descent, in an apparently inevitable smooth arc, into being a performer and writer of less and less artistic power.” But Gray also concluded by allowing that there might be an ascent, albeit with faint praise (“faltering step”) for the extended miracle that started happening in 1997:

  Impending old age is itself good raw material. Instead of clinging to his back catalogue, he could voice his real concerns, as once he did, and be glad to have an audience: 1997’s “Time Out of Mind” is a faltering step along this path.

  Only seven of twenty-one songs from the 2017 tour existed in Dylan’s songbook when Gray wrote that. The path from 2000 has been long and wide.

  The approach of Clinton Heylin, to whom scholars and fans of Dylan, myself not least, are most in debt, was to continue supplementing his 1991 Behind the Shades biography, its 498 pages growing to 780 pages in the 2001 “Revisited” volume, and 902 in the 20th Anniversary Edition in 2011, getting us down to 2010, so not covering Tempest. This is not to count his five other books on Dylan, especially the two-part song-by-song histories, Revolution in the Air (2009) and Still on the Road (2010). By the time you are reading this book, a sixth, his treatment of the gospel years, Trouble in Mind, will have been added.

  So I prefer to give Dylan the last word. In his most recent interview to date, with writer and TV executive Bill Flanagan on March 22, 2017, Dylan to my mind confirms many of the aspects of his art that I have engaged in this book. He doesn’t use the word intertextuality—why should he?—but he is talking about the phenomenon when he says, “Try to create something original, you’re in for a surprise.” Instead, like the poets you have met—maybe for the first time—in this book, he has other ways of creating. In the interview, Flanagan asks him a question, which sounds a lot like a plant by Dylan: “People yell about plagiarism . . . but it has always gone on in every form of music, hasn’t it?” Dylan replies:

  I’m sure it has, there’s always some precedent—most everything is a knockoff of something else. You could have some monstrous vision, or a perplexing idea that you can’t quite get down, can’t handle the theme. But then you’ll see a newspaper clipping or a billboard sign, or a paragraph from an old Dickens novel, or you’ll hear some line from another song, or something you might overhear somebody say just might be something in your mind that you didn’t know you remembered. That will give you the point of approach and specific details. It’s like you’re sleepwalking, not searching or seeking; things are transmitted to you. It’s as if you were looking at something far off and now you’re standing in the middle of it. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It’s the art of transforming things. You don’t really serve art, art serves you and it’s only an expression of life anyway; it’s not real life.

  Flanagan also asks Dylan about the world that has been l
ost since the time of the writers of the Great American Songbook. His response refers to those songs but also to his art in general and to the ways that art has worked for him for a long time:

  You can still find what you’re looking for if you follow the trail back. It could be right there where you left it—anything is possible. Trouble is, you can’t bring it back with you. You have to stay right there with it. I think that is what nostalgia is all about.

  I’ve been on that trail for a long time, engaging not just with the world of the songs that Dylan wrote in the mid-twentieth century, but going way back, all the way to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid. And Bob Dylan, the supreme artist of the English language of my time, has been on that same trail, going back to ancient times to mine material for his work, and making it about the here and now. In 1997, the last song of the comeback album Time Out of Mind treats that nostalgia, being “there in my mind” in the Highlands of Robert Burns, yes, but as the next twenty years would show, in even more ancient worlds:

  Well my heart’s in the Highlands at the break of day

  Over the hills and far away

  There’s a way to get there and I’ll figure it out somehow

  But I’m already there in my mind

  And that’s good enough for now.

  —Bob Dylan, “Highlands”

  Good enough for me, too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have many people to thank, beginning with Jeff Rosen and his colleagues in Bob Dylan’s office, who have been so helpful and generous to scholars of Dylan over the years, myself included. Along with Jeff Rosen, I thank David Beal, Larry Jenkins, Debbie Sweeney, Raymond Foye, and Lynne Sheridan, the wonderful people whose judgment helps give access to the art of Bob Dylan even as they serve as judicious gatekeepers to the person of Bob Dylan.

  Jessica Sindler, senior editor at Dey Street Books, first approached me about writing this book in October 2016, and I am grateful she did so, as I am for her expert help, guidance, admonishment, and encouragement.

  Particular thanks are due to Jud Herrman, Tim Joseph, Kevin McGrath, and Mike Sullivan, bobfans, scholars, poets, and friends, who read a draft of the book.

  Special thanks go to family, friends, and many others whose acquaintance I made over the years and who all contributed to this book: Stephen Hazan Arnoff, John “Dan” Bergan, Daniel Blanco, Barbara Boyd, Susannah Braund, Ward Briggs, John Broughton, Sergio Casali, Lydia Cawley, Michael Chaiken, Matthew Clark, James Clauss, Michael Cosmopoulos, Megan Devir, Will Dingee, Terry Gans, Elena Giusti, Joe Harris, John Henderson, Peter Knox, C. P. Lee, Catharine Mason, Tom Palaima, Hayden Pelliccia, Seth Pitman, Robert Polito, Samuel Puopolo, Iain Purdie, Sir Christopher Ricks, Chris Rollason, Ben Roy, Stephen Scobie, Jason Scorich, Lorri Shalley, Linda Stroback, Theoharis Theoharis, Joan Thomas, Julia Thomas, Sarah Thomas, Scott Warmuth, Rose Whitcomb, India Whitmarsh, Tim Whitmarsh, Elizabeth Wilson, Clem Wood, Teresa Wu, Jan Ziolkowski, Ted Ziolkowski—with apologies to those whose names should be here but aren’t.

  These are just some of the many people with whom I have traveled through my life with Dylan. I particularly acknowledge the dedicatees of this book, my freshman seminar students at Harvard from 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016, teenagers who decided that Bob Dylan was worth a quarter of their time for a semester, even to the puzzlement of their peers. The announcement of October 13, 2016, was vindication for them as it was for millions of us who have in their long or less-long lives known that something was happening here.

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