Dylan's Visions of Sin (3 page)

It ought to be possible, then, to attend to Dylan’s words without forgetting that they are one element only, one medium, of his art. Songs are different from poems, and not only in that a
song combines three media: words, music, voice. When Dylan offered as the jacket-notes for
Another Side of Bob Dylan
what mounted to a dozen pages of poems, he headed this
Some Other
Kinds of Songs
. . . His ellipsis was to give you time to think. In our time, a dot dot dot communication.

Philip Larkin was to record his poems, so the publishers sent round an order form inviting you to hear the voice of the Toads bard. The form had a message from the poet, encouraging you –
or was it discouraging you? For there on the form was Larkin insisting, with that ripe lugubrious relish of his, that the “proper place for my poems is the printed page”, and warning
you how much you would lose if you listened to the poems read aloud: “Think of all the mis-hearings, the
their / there
confusions, the submergence of rhyme, the disappearance of stanza
shape, even the comfort of knowing how far you are from the end.” Again, Larkin in an interview, lengthening the same lines:

I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page,
means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even
knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace,
take it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things
like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even
music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until it’s
“performed”. It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that is needed: the reader should
“hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy
rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page.
²⁶

The human senses have different powers and limits, which is why it is good that we have five (or is it six?) of them. When you read a poem, when you see it on the page,
you register – whether consciously or not – that this is a poem in, say, three stanzas: I’ve read one, I’m now reading the second, there’s one to go. This is the
feeling as you read a poem, and it’s always a disconcerting collapse when (if your curiosity hasn’t made you flick over the pages before starting the poem) you turn the page and find,
“Oh, that was the end. How curious.” Larkin’s own endings are consummate. And what he knows is that your ear cannot hear the end approaching in the way in which your eye –
the organ that allows you to read – sees the end of the poem approaching. You may, of course, know the music well, and so be well aware that the end is coming, but such awareness is a matter
of familiarity and knowledge, whereas with a poem that you have never seen before, you yet can see perfectly well that this is the final stanza that you are now reading.

Of sonnet-writing, Gerard M. Hopkins wrote of both seeing and hearing “the emphasis which has been gathering through the sonnet and then delivers itself in those two lines seen by the eye
to be final or read by the voice with a deepening of note and slowness of delivery”.
²⁷

For the eye can always simply see more than it is reading, looking at; the ear cannot, in this sense (given what the sense of hearing is), hear a
larger span than it is
receiving. This makes the relation of an artist like Dylan to song and ending crucially different from the relation of an artist like Donne or Larkin to ending. The eye sees that it is approaching
its ending, as Jane Austen can make jokes about your knowing that you’re hastening towards perfect felicity because there are only a few pages left of the novel. A novel physically tells you
that it is about to come to an end.
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
in one sense didn’t work, couldn’t work, because you knew perfectly well that since it was by John Fowles
and not by a post-modernist wag there was bound to be print on those pages still to come, the last hundred pages. So it couldn’t be about to end, isn’t that right?, because this chunk
of it was still there, to come. But then John Fowles, like J. H. Froude, whose Victorian novel he was imitating in this matter of alternative endings, knows this and tries to build this, too, into
the effect of his book.

Dylan has an ear for a tune, whether it’s his, newly minted, or someone else’s, newly mounted. He has a voice that can’t be ignored and that ignores nothing, although it spurns
a lot. Dylan when young did what only great artists do: define anew the art he practised. Marlon Brando made people understand something different by
acting
. He couldn’t act? Very
well, but he did something very well, and what else are you going to call it? Dylan can’t sing?

Every song, by definition, is realized only in performance. True. A more elusive matter is whether every song is suited to re-performance. Could there be such a thing as a performance that you
couldn’t imagine being improved upon, even by a genius in performance? I can’t imagine his doing better by
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
, for instance, than he does on
The Times They Are A-Changin’
. Of course I have to concede at once that my imagination is immensely smaller than his, and it would serve me right, as well as being wonderfully right,
if he were to prove me wrong. But, as yet, what (for me) is gained in a particular re-performing of this particular song (and yes, there are indeed gains) has always fallen short of what had to be
sacrificed. Any performance, like any translation, necessitates sacrifice, and I believe that it would be misguided, and even unwarrantably protective of Dylan, to suppose that his decisions as to
what to sacrifice in performance could never be misguided. Does it not make sense, then, to believe, or to argue, that Dylan’s realizing of
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
was
perfect, a perfect song perfectly rendered, once and for all?

Clearly Dylan doesn’t believe so, or he wouldn’t re-perform it. He
makes judgements as to what to perform again, and he assuredly does not re-perform every
great song (you don’t hear
Oxford Town
or
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
in concert). Admittedly there are a good many good reasons why a song might not be re-performed, matters
of quality newly judged, or aptness to an occasion or to a time, or a change of conviction, all of which means that the entire rightness of a previous performance wouldn’t have to be what was
at issue. Still, Dylan takes bold imaginative decisions as to what songs to re-perform, so can we really not ask whether there are occasions on which a particular decision, though entirely within
his rights and doing credit to his renovations and aspirations and audacities, is one for which the song has been asked to pay too high a price? “Those songs have a life of their
own.”
²⁸

I waver about this when it comes to this song, one of Dylan’s greatest,
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
, even while I maintain that the historical songs, the songs of
conscience, can’t be re-created in the same way as the more personal (not more personally felt) songs of consciousness, with the same
kind
of freedom. “The chimes of
freedom” sometimes have to be in tune with different responsibilities. Dylan can’t, I believe, command a new vantage-point (as he might in looking back upon a failed love or a
successful one) from which to see the senseless killing of Hattie Carroll. Or, at least, the question can legitimately come up as to whether he can command a new vantage-point without commanding
her and even perhaps wronging her.

He makes the song new, yes, but in the mid 1970s, for example, he sometimes did so by sounding too close for comfort to the tone of William Zanzinger’s tongue (“and sneering, and his
tongue it was snarling”). “Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”: the song is rightly siding with the gentle, and it asks (asks this of its creator, too) that it be
sounded gently. But then the song can be sung too gently, with not enough sharp-edged dismay.

I used to put this too categorically, and therefore wrongly:

He cannot re-perform the song. He unfortunately still does. There is no other way of singing this song than the way in which he realizes it on
The Times They Are
A-Changin’
. If he sings it any more gently, he sentimentalizes it. If he sings it any more ungently, he allies himself with Zanzinger.
²⁹

Alex Ross, of the
New Yorker
, who is generous towards my appreciation of Dylan, thinks any such reservation narrow-minded of me:

Ricks went on to criticize some of Dylan’s more recent performances of
Hattie Carroll
, in which he pushes the last line a little: “He doesn’t let it
speak for itself. He sentimentalizes it, I’m afraid.” Here I began to wonder whether the close reader had zoomed in too close. Ricks seemed to be fetishizing the details of a recording,
and denying the musician license to expand his songs in performance.
³⁰

I bridle slightly at that
fetishizing-a-recording
bit. (What, me? All the world knows that it is women’s shoes that I am into.) Nor do I think of myself as at all
denying Dylan licence to expand his songs. (Who’s going to take away his licence to expand?) I’m only proposing that, although he has entire licence in any such matter, freedom is
different from (in one sense) licence, and it must be that on occasion an artist who is on a scale to take immense risks will fall short of his newest highest hopes. Samuel Beckett has the courage
to fail, and he urges
fail better
. He knows there’s no success like failure. And that it is not clear what success would mean if failure were not exactly rare but simply unknown. Dylan
in 1965:

I know some of the things I do wrong. I do a couple of things wrong. Once in a while I do something really wrong, y’ know, which I really can’t see when I’m
involved in it; and after a while I look at it later, I know it’s wrong. I don’t say nothin’ about it.
³¹

It is the greatest artists who have taken the greatest risks, and it is impossible to see what it would mean to respect the artists for this if on every single occasion you
were to find that the risks that were run simply ran away. Doesn’t it then start to look as though the risks were only “risks”? If you were, for instance, to think of revision as
a form that re-performing may take when it comes to the written word, it is William Wordsworth and Henry James, the most imaginative and unremitting of revisers, who on occasion get it wrong and
who lose more than they gain when it comes to some of their audacious post-publication revisions.

Hattie Carroll
is a special, though not a unique, case. “License to expand
his songs”? But strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth
unto life, and few there be that find it. It must at least be possible that the gains of re-performing this particular song could fall short of the losses.

Alex Ross went on at once to evoke beautifully the beauty of a particular re-performing:

I had just seen Dylan sing
Hattie Carroll
, in Portland, and it was the best performance that I heard him give. He turned the accompaniment into a steady, sad acoustic
waltz, and he played a lullabylike solo at the center. You were reminded that the “hotel society gathering” was a Spinsters’ Ball, whose dance went on before, during, and after
the fatal attack on Hattie Carroll. This was an eerie twist on the meaning of the song, and not a sentimental one.

Why am I, though touched by this, not persuaded by it? Because when Ross says “You were reminded that the ‘hotel society gathering’ was a Spinsters’
Ball”, his word “reminded” is specious. At no point in
Hattie Carroll
is there any allusion to this. You can have heard the song a thousand times and not call this to mind,
since Dylan does not call it into play. Is Ross really maintaining that the performance alluded to a detail of the newspaper story that never made it into the song, which doesn’t say anything
about a Ball, Spinsters’ or Bachelors’? And that such an allusion would then simply validate a thoroughgoing waltz?

Dylan must be honoured for honouring his responsibilities towards Hattie Carroll, and this partly because of what it may entail in the way of sacrifice by him. His art, in such a dedication to
historical facts that are not of his making, needs to set limits (not
too
expanded) to its own rights in honouring hers. This, too, is a matter of justice.

Wordsworth famously recorded that “every author, as far as he is great and at the same time
original
, has had the task of
creating
the taste by which he is
to be enjoyed: so it has been, so will it continue to be”.
³²
T. S. Eliot, sceptical of romanticism, offered a reminder, that “to be
original with the
minimum
of alteration, is sometimes more distinguished than to be original with the
maximum
of alteration”.
³³

But is Dylan a poet? For him, no problem.

Is he a poet? And is this a question about his achievement, and how highly to value it, or about his choice of medium or rather media, and what to value this as?

The poetry magazine
Agenda
had a questionnaire bent upon rhyme. Since Dylan is one of the great rhymesters of all time, I hoped that there might be something about him. There was: a
grudge against “the accepted badness of rhyme in popular verse, popular music, etc. A climate in which, say, Bob Dylan is given a moment’s respect as a poet is a climate in which
anything goes.” (To give him but a moment’s respect would indeed be ill judged.) This is snobbery – I know, I know, there is such a thing as inverted snobbery – and
it’s ill written.
³⁴
(“A climate in which anything goes”? Climate? Goes?)