Dylan's Visions of Sin (2 page)

Waltzing with Sin
is not a Dylan song, but it danced along on
The Basement Tapes
. Dylan likes setting to music our besetting sins. He likes company in doing so, and he likes the
comedy that company encourages. Which is one reason why
7 Deadly Sins
was issued by a joint stock company, the Traveling Wilburys.

One of the endearing things about the song, tucked up in all innocence, is that there don’t actually seem to be seven sins on the go at all. Just
one good old one. Touching, really.

The claim in this book isn’t that most of Dylan’s songs, or even most of the best ones, are bent on sin. Simply that (for the present venture in criticism) handling sin may be the
right way to take hold of the bundle. Dylan himself may make a mock of the idea that songs are
about
things, but he did speak of the “things I have to say about such things as ghetto
bosses, salvation and sin”. And even in his travesty of owlishness (the notes accompanying
World Gone Wrong
), he heads these comments of his on other men’s songs with the
words:

Of
Broke Down Engine
, Dylan remarks (in a way that may freewheel, but is not out of control) that “it’s about Ambiguity, the fortunes of the privileged elite,
flood control – watching the red dawn not bothering to dress”. So I shall take Ambiguity as an excuse for returning to the author of
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, William
Empson.
⁸

Empson explained why he came to do the explaining in which he took delight. His method, verbal analysis, started simply from the pleasure of his response to a poem.

I felt sure that the example was beautiful and that I had, broadly speaking, reacted to it correctly. But I did not at all know what had happened in this
“reaction”; I did not know why the example was beautiful. And it seemed to me that I was able in some cases partly to explain my feelings to myself by teasing out the meanings of the
text.
⁹

Empson’s example is crucial to me, not only in its happiness, but in his not being dead set upon convincing anybody else that a particular poem
is
good. The idea was not so much to show someone that a poem is good, as to go some way towards showing how it comes to be good, so very good.

You think that the poem is worth the trouble before you choose to go into it carefully, and you know more about what it is worth when you have done so.
¹⁰

In the same spirit, I think of what I am doing as prizing songs, not as prising-open minds. (Most people who are likely to read this book will already know what they feel about
Dylan, though they may not always know quite why they feel it or what they think.)

I think that nowadays we can explain why Milton was right, but the explanations usually seem long and fanciful; they would only convince men who believed already that the line
was beautiful, and wanted to know why.
¹¹

Literary criticism – unlike, say, music criticism or art criticism – enjoys the advantage of existing in the same medium (language) as the art that it
explores and esteems. This can give to literary criticism a delicacy and an inwardness that are harder to achieve elsewhere. But, at the same time, this may be why literary critics are given to
competitive envy: What I’d like to know, given that he and I are working in the same medium, in the same line of work, really, is why
I
am attending to
Tennyson
, instead of
his
attending to
me
. . .

And then there is the age-old difficulty and problem of
intention
. Briefly: I believe that an artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative unconscious or subconscious,
more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained
and deeply instinctual. So if I am asked whether I believe that Dylan is
conscious
of all the subtle effects of wording and timing that I suggest, I am perfectly happy to say that he
probably isn’t. And if I am right, then in this he is not less the artist but more. There are such things as unconscious intentions (think of the unthinking Freudian slip). What matters is
that Dylan is doing
the imagining, not that he be fully deliberatedly conscious of the countless intimations that are in his art. As he put it:

As you get older, you get smarter and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse. Creativity is not like a freight train going down the
tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to program your brain
not to think too much.
¹²

A shrewd turn, this, the contrariety of “You’ve got to program your brain” and the immediate “not to think too much”.

T. S. Eliot, who knew that it “is not always true that a person who knows a good poem when he sees it can tell us why it is a good poem”, knew as well that “the poet does many
things upon instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody else”.
¹³

Still, there are many admirers of Dylan who instinctively feel that adducing Mr Eliot when talking about Dylan is pretentious and portentous. So let me take an instance of a Dylan / Eliot
intersection that is not of my finding (though I shall do a little developing). The
Telegraph
(Winter 1987) included a note:
¹⁴

On a more literary level, had you noticed that
Maybe Someday
quotes from T. S. Eliot? In
Journey of the Magi
, Eliot has:

Later in the same poem there’s mention too of “pieces of silver”. So in Dylan’s lines:

I remember the excitement I felt when I myself noticed Dylan’s debt (
many
pieces of silver) – and then the unwarrantable disappointment I felt when I later
discovered from the
Telegraph
that I was not the first to discover
it. Mustn’t be hostile or unfriendly about this not-being-the-first business. (The first
shall be last.) But then the song is a tissue of memories of the poem. Here are a few more moments.

Take what you have gathered from coincidence, yes, but these are not coincidences, once you concede that the likeness of Eliot’s “And the cities hostile and the
towns unfriendly” to Dylan’s “Through hostile cities and unfriendly towns” goes beyond happenstance. Such a likeness, then, may give some warrant for taking literarily the
art of the man who imagined Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower.

Note

I wrote about Dylan in the
Listener
in 1972 (1 June); I gave a BBC talk,
Bob Dylan and the Language that He Used
, in 1976 (22 March); over the years there were
talks, some of them again for the BBC, and one that was printed in the
Threepenny Review
in 1990.
¹⁵
Much of this, it’s all been written in
the book, but there are some further thoughts about Dylan not included here, to be found in my essay on
Clichés
and in the one on
American English and the inherently
transitory
, both in
The Force of Poetry
(1984).

The words of the songs are quoted here in the form in which he sings them on the officially released albums on which they initially appeared. The Index of Dylan’s Songs and Writings, at
the back, is supplemented by a General Index and by a list, Which Album a Song is on.

The new edition of the lyrics,
Lyrics 1962–2002
, unlike the original
Writings and Drawings
and the later
Lyrics 1962–1985
, is apparently not going
to include Dylan’s
Some Other Kinds of Songs
. . ., or his other poems and miscellaneous prose, so for these I give references to the earlier collections.

The discrepancies between the printed and the other versions (whether officially released, studio out-takes, or bootlegged from performances) are notable. Sometimes they are noted in the
commentary here. Clearly they are of relevance to Dylan’s intentions or changes of intention, and I have to admit that sometimes one performance decides to do without an effect that another
has, and that I had thought and still think exquisite – for instance, the plaiting of the rhymes at the end of
If Not For You
. Oh well. I think of Shakespearean revision. Sometimes I
read (or rather, listen) and sigh and wish.

Songs, Poems, Rhymes

Songs, Poems

Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she is their servant.
The triangle of Dylan’s music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking.

One day a critic may do justice not just to all three of these independent powers, but to their interdependence in Dylan’s art. The interdependence doesn’t have to be a competition,
it is a culmination – the word chosen by Allen Ginsberg, who could be an awe-inspiring poet and was an endearingly awful music-maker, for whom Dylan’s songs were “the culmination
of Poetry-music as dreamt of in the ’50s & early ’60s”.
¹⁶
Dylan himself has answered when asked:

Why are you doing what you’re doing?

[
Pause
] “Because I don’t know anything else to do. I’m good at it.”

How would you describe “it”?

“I’m an artist. I try to create art.”
¹⁷

What follows this clarity, or follows from it, has been differently put by him over the forty years, finding itself crediting the words and the music variously at various
times. The point of juxtaposing his utterances isn’t to catch him out, it is to see him catching different emphases in all this, undulating and diverse.

WORDS RULE, OKAY
?

“I consider myself a poet first and a musician second.”
¹⁸

“It ain’t the melodies that’re important man, it’s the words.”
¹⁹

MUSIC RULES, OKAY
?

“Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song. I only look at them musically. I only look at them as things to sing. It’s the music
that the words are sung to that’s important. I write the songs because I need something to sing. It’s the difference between the words on paper and the song. The song disappears into
the air, the paper stays.”
²⁰

NEITHER ACOUSTIC NOR ELECTRIC RULES, OKAY
?

Do you prefer playing acoustic over electric?

“They’re pretty much equal to me. I try not to deface the song with electricity or non-electricity. I’d rather get something out of the song verbally and
phonetically than depend on tonality of instruments.”
²¹

JOINT RULE, OKAY
?

Would you say that the words are more important than the music?

“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.”
²²

“It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words, there’s nothing that’s exploited. The words and the music, I can hear the sound of what
I want to say.”
²³

“The lyrics to the songs . . . just so happens that it might be a little stranger than in most songs. I find it easy to write songs. I have been writing songs for a long
time and the words to the songs aren’t written out for just the paper, they’re written as you can read it, you dig? If you take whatever there is to the song away – the
beat, the melody – I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can’t do that with either – songs that, if you took the beat and melody
away, they wouldn’t stand up. Because they’re not supposed to do that you know. Songs are songs.”
²⁴

What’s more important to you: the way that your music and words sound, or the content, the message?

“The whole thing while it’s happening. The whole total sound of the words, what’s really going down is –”
²⁵

– at which point Dylan cuts across himself, at a loss for words with which to speak of words in relation to the whole total: “it either happens or it doesn’t
happen, you know”. At a loss, but finding the relation again and again in the very songs.