CHRONICLES: Volume One
by Bob DylanSimon & Schuster £16.99 pp293
Fans of Bob Dylan — I have been more or less craven for 40 years now — have come to expect many startling things of their hero. There was the icy refusal to be claimed by folkies, protesters, rockers, popsters or, indeed, anybody. There was the vicious, brittle, hipster wit, alternating with exquisite, lovelorn tenderness. There were the sudden spiritual conversions — to orthodox Judaism, to born-again Christianity — combined with improbable, unthinkable aesthetic U-turns. And, most heartbeaking of all, there were the sudden, drab intrusions of mediocrity and sloppiness into the glittering flow of his genius.
Anything could happen with Bobby and it usually did at least twice. But the one thing none of us expected was that he would ever write a good book. His novel, Tarantula, had its moments but it didn't work, and his written as opposed to sung poems lay flat on the page. But now here comes Chronicles, an extremely good book indeed, actually a great one. If you are not weeping with gratitude by the end, then, frankly, the age has passed you by.
Dylan may well be, as his most lucid critic Christopher Ricks has suggested, the greatest living user of the English language. Many find this hard to understand. How can writing so apparently cliché-laden and awkward be considered great? This is to miss the point. No cliché in Dylan stays quite where it belongs, and each awkwardness, like those in Thomas Hardy's poems, conceals a verbal revelation. Dylan, undereducated but always supremely intelligent, encounters language the way Buster Keaton encounters the world, with an innocent and alarmed but penetrative gaze.
But this is only half of the story, and a misleading half at that. Dylan writes songs, not poems. The distinction is fundamental yet seldom fully appreciated, perhaps because so many of his apologists have come from literary backgrounds and have failed to grasp the depth and breadth of his assimilation of sung forms. The first thing to say about Chronicles is that it hugely and triumphantly corrects that imbalance.
"I practised in public," he says of his apprentice years on the New York folk scene. But, in private, he listened with stricken intensity. We all know about Woody Guthrie, of course. Dylan was partly in New York in 1961 to visit him as he lay dying of Huntington's Disease. But here we also learn about him listening to Dave Van Ronk, Roy Orbison, Cisco Houston, Hank Williams, Jack Elliott and even Joan Baez. He takes apart, analyses, imitates and reworks every song he really admires. When he encounters the best, he is speechless and humble. Without the great bluesman Robert Johnson and Kurt Weill's bleak Pirate Jenny, he admits he would have achieved little. His own chilling masterpiece Blind Willie McTell — not mentioned here — is a modest confession that his world may not be made for the absolute authenticity of the old blues masters.
The book begins with those early New York years and returns to them at the end. In between, he bounces poignantly and pointedly around his life, devoting a fifth of the book to the recording of Oh Mercy!, the album that began his resurrection from the bad days of the 1980s and slow progress to the magnificent near-death experiences of Time out of Mind and Love and Theft. Myths are wryly corrected along the way. He did not jump a freight train to get to the city, but hitchiked from Minnesota, arriving rather comfortably "in a four-door sedan, '57 Impala". The freight-train lie was idly made up for a record company PR man while Dylan eyed up "a blazing secretary" in a neighbouring building. "If you have to lie," he comments later, "you should do it quickly and as well as you can."
In fact, he elevated lying to high art. In the late 1960s, his fame had become an intolerable burden — "like having some weird diploma that won't get you into any college". Alarmed by the threats and demands of his increasingly crazed fans around the time of his magnificent but politically quietist album John Wesley Harding, he deliberately released two albums (Nashville Skyline and Self-Portrait) to convince them that he was no longer a rock, pop or protest star. "Art is unimportant next to life," he writes, "and you have no choice."
But, typically, the albums were art. Both were flamboyantly complacent, yet, even as red herrings, they were strangely brilliant musically. Equally brilliant was his appearance in a yarmulke at the Wailing Wall. It was another diversion, intended to bore his fans to death by a return to his faith. Probably his later conversion to fundamentalist Christianity was another diversion, but he does not admit this here. To be honest, I'm not convinced that any of these gyrations were really for the benefit of his family. He just loves shattering any self-image before it can become fully formed. Rimbaud's "Je est un autre" had become his motto while in New York.
This all becomes high comedy when he describes receiving an honorary degree at Princeton University, a story later to be told in the song Day of the Locusts. Dylan turns up with the magnificently stoned Dave Crosby. He listens patiently to the citation. The one thing he doesn't want to hear is that he was "the conscience of Young America". But, sure enough, that's what the guy says. Cosmically paranoid, Dylan flees while Crosby summarises the scene — "Bunch of dickheads on auto-stroke."
Crosby is just one of the dozens of characters that leap, fully formed, from these pages. There's Albert Grossman, later to be Dylan's manager and the subject of Dear Landlord, packing a .45 and looking like Sydney Greenstreet. There's the poet Archibald MacLeish, "the aura of a governor, a ruler — every bit of him an officer". And, fleetingly, there is his own family, clearly beloved but somehow blurred and distant. All of them, that is, except for the grandmother, who tells him with a prescience that is shattering but possibly too good to be true that happiness isn't on the road to anything. Happiness is the road. These days, Dylan is happy, perpetually touring on the happy road to nowhere.
His evocation of places, meanwhile, should just go straight on to every school syllabus. "Everything in New Orleans," he writes, "is a good idea." And, in that city, he sees "chronic melancholia hanging from the trees". New York was never colder or more crowded than in these pages, and America never more limitless. Also the South was never more different from the far north from which he sprang, possessed, he says, like all northerners, with a gift for abstraction. Significantly, in the New York public library, he buries himself in the history of the civil war between North and South. "Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything that I would write."
I cannot remember a book that has made me happier than this one.
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