Dylan's Visions of Sin (32 page)

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
is the coinciding of a newspaper item with a cadence.

William Zanzinger, Hattie Carroll. The thing about those names – you might say that this starts as purely technical, but then, as T. S. Eliot said, “we cannot say at
what point ‘technique’ begins or where it ends”
²⁴¹
– is their
endings. What the killer and the
killed have in common is that, in both their first names and their surnames, they’ve got feminine endings. She’s Hatt
e
Cárr
ll, where in both of her names the first syllable is stressed [Carroll] and the last is unstressed [Carroll], and he’s
Wíll
am Zanzíng
r, where again his first name is stressed on the first syllable and where
his surname, though it has the second syllable stressed, again has its last syllable unstressed. Dylan heard this, and the song is founded upon the particular cadence of their real-life names
(except only that there should be a
t
: Zantzinger) and a real death.

It is a cadence that perhaps explains why Dylan wanted the word “lonesome” in the title, where it can evoke a contrast between the loneliness of dying, of her dying, and the crowded
hotel (“At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’”). The word “lonesome” is not to be heard in the song itself, wisely, since there it might have invited a
lover’s complaint (within this particular song and its responsibilities, unlike in
Tomorrow Is a Long Time
, “lonesome would mean nothing to you at all”
²⁴²
), but the word does set a scene, or rather set a cadence:
Th
Lónes
me Déath
f Hátt
e Cárr
ll.

The first line of the first verse begins with his name and brings her name to its end: “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll”. The second verse begins with his name:
“William Zanzinger, who had twenty-four years”.
²⁴³
The third verse begins with hers: “Hattie Carroll was a maid in the
kitchen” and it ends (leading into the refrain) with his name: “And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”. The fourth verse, the final verse, closes the case:
“William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence”. In this final verse he had been, at first, “the person who killed for no reason”. At this appearance in the dock, he was not
named.

The double challenge to the song lay in its duty not to yield to the anger that had seized Zanzinger, and in its duty to resist melodrama and sentimentality. Dylan knows what he does in adopting
this cadence. For the feminine ending naturally evokes a dying fall or courage in the face either of death or of loss, something falling poignantly away. This can be heard in Wordsworth:

The móunt
ins. And it’s imperative that the thought of death not sit easy on the man who
has been born and dies among the
hills
, rocks, crags, or any of those words. The masculine ending (“the man”, as it happens) is in tension with the feminine ending
(“móunt
ins”). Not this: