Dylan's Visions of Sin (36 page)

This became, in the performance that Dylan chose to release in his
bootleg series
, “And they laid him down in the jailhouse ground”. As good as dead,
“in the jailhouse ground”. It will not be long before the diggers make actual what had been proleptic, and bury him.

The chilling effect when the name Reilly disappears is like that in T. S. Eliot’s
Sweeney Among the Nightingales
, another poem about death expected and unexpected, where the first
verse opens, “Apeneck Sweeney”; the second ends, “And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate”; and the third ends, “Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees” –
whereupon Sweeney goes, as good as dead, unnamed in the succeeding verses, all seven of them. Yet it remains Sweeney’s poem (he is in its title, as Reilly is not), since the poem consists of
three sentences, and his name is in each of the three. For the first sentence is the first verse, and the second is the second verse, but the third is all the other verses, three to
ten.
²⁶⁹

We never learn the name of his daughter (the more strikingly in that Dylan has always loved what you can do with names), but then this is horribly true to her existing in this song, as far as
this grim story goes, solely as old Reilly’s daughter. The relation in
Measure for Measure
had been brother and sister, not father and daughter. But here: “And my skin will
surely crawl if he touches you at all”. Her skin is from his. In the play, Isabella had excoriated her brother when he weakened and wanted her to give herself up to Angelo:

It would have been no less a kind of incest, in
Seven Curses
, had Reilly chosen to profit from his own daughter’s shame. Reilly urged her
to ride away. She saw that she must defy him. And then, next day, “She saw her father’s body broken” – as hers had, differently, been. The song never says that she is a
virgin, but this is how it feels. The song had vaulted into the saddle.

“Catch” and “bring” do not rhyme, but “caught him” and “brought him” assuredly do, and rhyme is a means by which things are
caught and brought. From the beginning, the song seizes and is seized by the life that is in rhyme. It might be a sudden leap of apprehension, as when the last line of the third verse, the
judge’s smirk, “The price, my dear, is you
instead
”, prompts a sickening rhyme within the first line of the next verse: “‘Oh I’m as good as
dead
’, cried Reilly”. I don’t think that I’m imagining such effects but that Dylan imagined them, whether consciously or not –
caught him / brought him
,
or
dead / instead
– and to put this weight on the word “instead” may be the more plausible in that this is the first full rhyme in the song. (The first verse,
back /
neck
; the second,
hang / hand
; but the third,
dead / instead
.) In the spirit of ballads, there are alliteration and assonance to take and make their chances throughout, hauntingly
at such moments as “stole a stallion” and “The gallows shadows shook the evening”. But three verses place their strong internal sounding in the third line, in the ballad
manner, and these lines constitute the plot. Verse 1, “And they laid him down in the jailhouse ground”. Verse 4, “And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all”.
Verse 5, “And pay the price and not take your advice”.

There are two verses that rhyme their first, second, and fourth lines: verse 5, which incarnates hope that tries to stay,
die / try / stay
(on edge as a rhyme), and verse 7, which is hope
broken:
awoken / spoken / broken
.

There is a surprise to “she had awoken”: could she have slept, you ask yourself, on such a night, a night of rape, her father’s last night on earth? Yet it is
not difficult to imagine her exhaustion, and it is proper to hope
that she found mercy in oblivious sleep. When she wakes, though, it is to the terrible reality that she
had known she would have to suffer. “Oh why did I awake? When shall I sleep again?”
²⁷⁰

As in the very different feat that is
Hattie Carroll
, there is the sense of what it is to count. The phrase “the price” comes three times. First, the judge: “The price,
my dear, is you instead”. Second, the daughter: “And pay the price and not take your advice”. Third, the narrator, in a stanza that then three times tolls the words “In the
night”:

Seven verses precede the seven deadly curses. The final two verses, eight and nine, in their relentless telling and tolling of the curses, one by one, constitute the
song’s first – and therefore its one and only – momentum not within a verse but from one verse to the next. No longer is there a rhyme-scheme, which might offer something of a
relief or release. Instead, an eternity of curses upon him:

cannot save him / cannot heal him / cannot see him

cannot hear him / cannot hide him / cannot bury him / shall never kill him
²⁷¹

The flat weight of this is the old torture visited upon you if you refused to plead guilty or not guilty, the flatly increasing weights that will make you speak or make you no
longer alive to speak:
peine forte et dure
.

“And that seven deaths shall never kill him”: this is the final curse, the ultimate and eternal one. The Book of Job saw “the bitter in soul; which long for death, but it
cometh not; and dig for it more than for hid treasures” (3:23). The Book of Revelation foresaw that “in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die,
and death shall flee from them” (9:6). Exposed and humiliated, Angelo in
Measure for Measure
had begged His Grace the Duke for grace:

The Duke did not reply, or rather, replied with the words “Come hither Mariana”. Again Angelo begs for mercy, but again the mercy of death:

Again, no reply. Dylan:

Seven Curses
, because it is myth, not history,is amenable to re-performance as
Hattie Carroll
perhaps is not. This is a question not of which version to prefer (Dylan preferred to
release the Columbia studio recording), but of different facets catching different lights. The Witmark demo tape rendering is faster, with a brisker rhythm, with a dextrously plaited accompaniment,
and with a voice that is less saddened or chastened. This Witmark rendering is closer to a traditional ballad, with something of the ballad’s odd insouciance or impersonality, its risking the
charge of heartlessness. “Get on your horse and ride away” – as though we, too, may need to do some such leaving.
the bootleg series
version is superb, and is (as it were)
my choice, but something differently true is audible in the contrast with, and in the contrasts within, the Witmark one, something along the lines of William Empson’s comments on the
contrariety of the refrain in a traditional ballad (of illicit sexuality and betrayal) that is both discomfiting and comforting:

Empson: “The effect of the contrast is not simple; perhaps it says ‘Life
went on, and in a way this seems a cruel indifference to her
suffering, but it lets us put the tragedy in its place, as we do when we sing about it for pleasure.’”
²⁷²
The ballad bears the title
The Cruel Mother
, for it tells of her killing her illegitimate baby – a story, somewhere in the vicinity of
Seven Curses
, of tragic parental plight and of child sacrifice.

“It lets us put the tragedy in its place, as we do when we sing about it for pleasure.” Dylan, too, undertakes the responsibility of putting tragedy in its place, Reilly’s and
his daughter’s, so that he may sing about tragedy, strangely, for pleasure – and may bring us responsible pleasure.

Oxford Town

All because
. . .: one frequent function of those two words is to introduce – courteously but firmly – a remonstration against injustice. It might be a
political remonstration. A black man, down in Mississippi, has been not just mistreated or badly treated but badly mistreated, “All because his face was brown”, or – soon pressing
the same point slightly differently, as though wishing not to nag you but to urge you please to think again – “All because of the color of his skin”.

The scene is set. The fate and the face of James Meredith were set. He was the first black to enrol – over what some whites said would be their
dead bodies, although their hope was really that the dead body would be his – at the University of Mississippi. Oxford Town.

The haunted song is played by Dylan obliquely and yet unequivocally. But what was he playing at (equivocation?) when he said, on the
Studs Terkel Show
,
²⁷³
“Well, yeah, it deals with the Meredith case but then again it doesn’t”? The right question to ask about this soft-shoe-shuffle of his is not “Is it
true?” but “What truth is there in it?” And the answer radiates. Yes,
Oxford Town
deals with the Meredith case in the sense that as a matter of historical fact this was the
place and this was the person there: the confrontation was altogether real, as the photos and footage of the siege in 1962 bear witness, and the challenge by Meredith – that the law be
upheld, that his right to admission be admitted – was burlily and brutally met by a challenge to the law from the very officials whose duty it was to enforce the law. In Mississippi,
“The leading institution of higher learning”, recorded
The Oxford Companion to American History
,
²⁷⁴

is the University of Mississippi (Oxford, est. 1848). Its campus was the scene (1962) of the most violent opposition to Federal court rulings since the Civil War, after the
governor of the state in person sought to block the registration of a Negro student.

So the song deals with the Meredith case. But then again it doesn’t. Not naming Meredith, it isn’t handcuffed to a political particularity. It may be asked whether
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
, then, is limited to its occasion, but the cases are very different, not only as history but in the type of artistic realization that Dylan gives to
them. The story of Hattie Carroll and of William Zanzinger is told in full and in detail; moreover, though it is dramatic, it is not told by a voice that is itself dramatized in the song. Nobody
has been imagined by Dylan, the imaginer, as having this to say. He speaks, and sings, in his own voice, for all of us, and not as any dramatized imaginary one-of-us. But
Oxford Town
is not
on the scale of such a tragic novel (an American tragedy, Hattie Carroll’s life and death, and, yes, William Zanzinger’s life, too); it is a sketch. Not sketchy at all, but offering in
twenty short lines a picture of a different kind from that which is painted in the nearly fifty long lines of
Hattie Carroll
. Added to
which, the swift wretched tale of
Oxford Town
is told to us by someone who (it is imagined) was there.
Oxford Town
is sung with Dylan’s voice but not sung in Dylan’s voice exactly. For whereas the voice in
Hattie Carroll
is crucially not that of someone who had been present at the Baltimore hotel society gathering, down there in Oxford Town there we were,

This is the only verse that doesn’t include “Oxford Town”, a name placed and pressed home three times in the first verse, twice in the second, once in the
third and in the last, as if the song, like “Me and my gal, my gal’s son”, can’t wait to get out of Oxford Town. “Goin’ back where we come from”. Where was
that, exactly?