Dylan's Visions of Sin (25 page)

“But”, not “So” it sure feels right? Anyway, we are yielding to our passions all right, but that feels right. Just this once? “I think we did this
once before”: a jovial insult (can you really not remember
that
, reminisce
that
?) that reminds me of how Shakespeare’s lovers ribbed one another. Lorenzo and Jessica not
only have much to talk about, they talk to one another. The song, though, is the sound of one man clapping (“So glad you came around”, in both senses of
came around
), and it
needed to do what it very well does: that is, build in a good many recognitions of the person spoken to, the person he’s grateful to, the person who will not take amiss the jaunty joshing.
The warmth within the room is thanks to all the logs but also thanks to our heat in love – yet nothing steamy or misty. (There is pure heat playing against the crisp clarity of the frost on
the panes.) And why is there no “It sure feels right” in the third verse? Because what takes its place is such a solid core of heat, such delight as stands in need of no validation or
certification:

“I can’t get any sleep”: we quite understand, and yet the claim is up to
the same tricks as the one in
If You Gotta Go, Go
Now
, opposite direction though it might seem to suggest:

But then one of the qualities that may distinguish desire from lust is that lust has no time for humour, whereas
On a Night Like This
likes fooling around, whether it be
“heat up some coffee
grounds
”, or

“Don’t crowd me, lady” (
Please, Mrs. Henry
), but don’t misunderstand me, pretty miss:

Good company, he is, well worth keeping. And the humour is the vivacious evidence that there is someone else in the room, someone who is complimented by the spirited jokes and
complemented by the trustworthy body.

Anger

Only a Pawn in Their Game

It need not take much courage to take a life. “A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”. That the killer was a skulker is enough to make
your blood boil.

Medgar Evers (1925–63) was Mississippi’s first African-American field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was an
active organizer of voter-registration drives until he was murdered by a sniper.
¹⁸¹

But the word “sniper”, with its possibility of solitary courage in military combat,
¹⁸²
is in danger of flattering
the lurker. Evers’ killer was no soldier. A pawn is a foot-soldier (this is what the word means), but a foot-soldier might find himself called upon to show courage in open warfare.

It took courage in Dylan, back in the summer of 1963 only a month after the murder of Medgar Evers, to say of the white killer – to sing of the white killer, there in front of a
Mississippi audience that was mostly black – “But he can’t be blamed”. Dylan understood the anger that he might invite by not sounding angry enough. He was aware of how he
might himself be blamed for not blaming. A society is indicted, and with an anger that is all the more forcefully contained, because the killer, “he can’t be blamed”. And then
this is averred again, in the second, third, and fourth verses; in these, the wording changes to something that is in its way uneducated and so might be heard as sympathizing with the poor white
(not condescending, because elsewhere in quite different Dylan songs there are similar moments when the demotic meets the democratic): “But it ain’t him to blame”. It is
not until the final verse that there is no longer any talk of blaming or of not blaming. But then at this conclusive stage the scene is set in the imagined future, with
the killer himself duly in his grave, and with the words that have constituted the climax of every verse becoming – in the final end – not only his epitome but his epitaph:

A pawn is pressed to believe that the game is his, too, not just their game, and in a way he is right since it isn’t for him to pretend that a pawn is no piece of the
action. But it may be for someone else – in the spirit of Robert Lowell’s cry “Pity the monsters!”
¹⁸³
– to grant him
the chilling charity “But it ain’t him to blame”. He being a dupe an’ all.

“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”. The act is furtive but the line’s arc is direct. Yet the force is forked, two turns of
phrase at once doubly dealing death.

–
A bullet took Medgar Evers’ life

–
A bullet shed Medgar Evers’ blood

“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”: this compounds the guilt. And the sequence looks to the tracks that are traces of blood:
bullet
. . .
back
. . .
bush
. . .
blood
. Of these four words that alliterate, it is the first that fells: “bullet”, with its two syllables (as though
double-barrelled) as against the others’ one.

Anonymity is furtive, and the killer is reduced to body-parts as indifferently as a bullet reduces a body: a finger, a handle, a hand, two eyes, a man’s brain.
Dashed out, these.

From the back of a bush. From behind his back. The words “back” and “behind” can be heard to pound in the song, compounding the disease that rages in the killer –
and that the song itself will need vigilant prophylaxis to escape infection from.
¹⁸⁴
This first verse, a moment later, eyes the murderous moment:

– the back of his head, behind a man’s back. The more forceful, these lines, because they are unobtrusively paradoxical: the brain is behind the eyes, not the other
way round – except that the eyes are behind the brain in the grim sense that they carry out the brain’s decision, they back the brain:
behind
, “supporting, backing
up”, “at the back of (any one) as a support; backing (one up)”, with the earliest
Oxford English Dictionary
citation being honourably military, “The remainder of the
regiment . . . being behind Captain Lucy”.

This seethes. A bloodshot gaze can be felt to tack from “shacks” (“the poverty shacks”, a stricken phrase) to “cracks” to
“tracks”, joining the “pack” en route to the word that comes back from the back of a bush: “back”.

Poverty . . . pound . . . pack / beats . . . brain . . . back
: the persistent insistence might remind us what kind of consonant a
p
or a
b
is. A plosive.
Plosion and explosion. His head was exploding.

Dylan’s head knows how to contain such explosions. His exposure of them makes us hear what it is for something to pound in a brain. The throbbing pounding rhythms of the song are in time
with its alliterations, rhymes, and assonances, so as to make audible the insanity of a raging obsession, an insanity that is cause and consequence of killing. A hundred and fifty years ago,
Tennyson took the sick pulsations of a man who had killed and who was now in the living death that is madness:

“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood”: this opening shot is taken up, caught up, in the opening line of the final verse: “Today,
Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught”. Here is the return not only to the name that is to be honoured but to the dishonour of the bullet (which now alliterates anew). The first
line of the song had the death-scene in its sights. The second line sounded the unrelenting note that commands the song, there in “name” as it will be in “game”.

His name: Medgar Evers. A bullet had his name on it – but not because of divine destiny, only because of human hatred. As to the killer’s name: it means nothing, it
means nothingness.
¹⁸⁶
“There be of them that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have
no memorial” (Ecclesiasticus 44: 8–9). Medgar Evers left a name behind him. His praises are reported. He has a memorial. His name is there in the first line of the first verse (as it
will be in the first line of the last verse), and it remains the only name in the fifty-two lines of the song, a song in which the word “name” is sounded four times. In another Dylan
song about the brutal killing of someone black by someone white (
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
), the killer enjoys a certain infamy: William Zanzinger, immortalized for that mortal
blow of his. But
Only a Pawn in Their Game
accords its killer no name. “He ain’t got no name”. The last words of the song, the killer’s laconic epitaph, get their
dour force from the vacuity of “Carved next to his name”:

Medgar Evers is named. Twice. As for the rest of those who are set upon by – and are set against – the poor whites, back in the sixties there was the word that had not yet become
opprobrious to those who have since chosen to be known as African-Americans: the word “negro”, or rather (in this song) “Negro”. The n-word that is not Negro is never heard
in this song, but you are incited to imagine it, to acknowledge that it, not “Negro”, is the word that “the South politician” (not quite the same, darkly, as a Southern
politician or even a politician from the South), the marshals, the cops, and the poor whites will all be most pleased to use most unpleasantly. Dylan doesn’t flinch from using the word,
dramatized, in
Hurricane
:

Those two lines (a dozen years later, admittedly, and in collaboration with Jacques Levy) make me wonder whether I am imagining things – as against Dylan’s imagining
how to get us to do so – when I sense that the word “nigger” lurks or skulks in the vicinity. Juxtapose with that couplet from
Hurricane
these two evocations in
Only a
Pawn in Their Game
:

The word “name” links these two moments in the song, and the alliteration in “finger fired” plays along with the off-rhyme of
finger / trigger
, an
off-rhyme (
Medgar . . . finger . . . trigger
) that was to become the true rhyme – truly dramatized and dismaying (“the black folks” use the word themselves) – in
Hurricane: nigger / trigger
. For there should be no ducking the fact that, whereas
Only a Pawn in Their Game
rightly observes the decencies, it manages to intimate to us that the
racists in the South didn’t observe them. It is not “the Negro’s name” that “Is used it is plain / For the politician’s gain”, but the slur-name,
contemptuous and contemptible. The song doesn’t utter the word, doesn’t even mutter the word, but does not let us forget it.