Read
the full lyrics of Bob Dylan's Desolation Row
Just like the singer himself, the debate about whether Bob Dylan is as good as
John Keats never goes away for long. It's back again now, as he is. And
while he tours the arenas of Britain and releases yet another album of his
songs, Dylan-versus-Keats offers the strange diversion of literary critics
bringing their classical intellects and professional vocabulary to bear on
rock'n'roll. Because Dylan can be called, among many other things, a pop
star, it has been easy for such scrutiny to be ridiculed as a case of
sledgehammers and walnuts. But the years have proved the truth of one of his
most banal observations; the times have indeed a-changed, and if you can
bring yourself to accept that he is a poet, then he is now as highly
regarded as any at work today in the English language. No one in the
supposedly low arts has ever drawn more high-minded attention than Bob
Dylan.
There is almost too much of it. More than a thousand books about the
67-year-old father of lit.rock have been published in English. About twice
that number if you add the works in 27 other languages. There are many
reasons: first, and most obviously, he has been turning out the songs for
nearly half a century. These too probably number about a thousand. By any
standards it is a mighty and varied body of work. His longevity means that
people who spent - indeed whose parents spent - their teenage years
listening to him are now established writers and critics themselves, and so
setting the tone of the debate.
Even the critiquing of Bob Dylan has a tradition. For the British, there are
several crucial players. They include Professor Christopher Ricks, now 75,
whose long-
contemplated book, Dylan's Visions of Sin, finally came out in 2003; and the
late
Wilfred Mellers, who was the University of York's first Professor of Music in
the 1960s. Their colleagues may have been bemused at their interest in this
cowboy-sounding waif. There was no getting round that voice, hence no
possibility of engagement with what it was saying. But to the young audience
who were enjoying the cleverness of his rebellion, here were credible
allies. After all, Ricks was an Oxford professor. He was an authority on
Milton, Tennyson, Keats and Eliot. When he expressed his approval for songs
with such lines as “In the museum infinity goes up on trial”, or “Though I
know that evening's empire has returned into sand”, he did so from a vantage
point with a long perspective.
This did not mean that all the writing was good, or even readily
comprehensible - as Mellers said of the singer's ballad origins: “In the
world of the ‘poor white', the grand modal themes survive, but the line
becomes harder, tighter, the rhythm more cabined and confined in the metres
of
hymnody ... The happiness is eupeptic, even if also a bit euphoric; for the
shutting out of pain involves a wilful hardening of sensibility.”
Then there is Michael Gray, a former
student of the renowned critic F.R.Leavis, and author of the compendious new
Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and Clinton Heylin, whose analytical history of
Dylan's songs, Revolution in the Air, is published next week. Gray is widely
credited with a new kind of critical writing that takes account
of the fact that while the lyrics of the
songs may be poetic, and therefore
inspected as poetry, they remain just one part of the genre.
The point is echoed by Ricks, who now teaches at Boston University and gives
talks on Dylan. He says you have to bear in mind that there are three
strands - the words, the music and, like it or not, the voice. “For that
reason the business about whether Dylan is better than Keats seems perhaps
idle ... what seems certain to me is that he does stand comparison with the
very greatest poets.”
Even Ricks has no idea of the number of US universities running courses that
offer Dylan studies. What is certain is that he is now officially recognised
in academe as a great of American letters. Last year brought the publication
of The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, with a collection of scholarly
essays by contributors from Yale and other distinguished institutes. The
Oxford Book of American Poetry carries the lyrics of Desolation Row, the
long bleak song that Ricks once called Dylan's Waste Land. A high school
textbook, The Norton Introduction to Literature, prints the lyrics of Mr
Tambourine Man. Our own Poet Laureate Andrew Motion says Dylan is the most
important artist working today, anywhere and in any field.
When it comes to what is being said and written about him, Dylan himself has
always seemed to be somewhere between uninterested and disdainful. In an
ongoing conversation with Bill Flanagan, currently being published on his
website, Dylan recently said he finally felt ‘freed up', “I see that my
audience now ... feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it
go at that. Images don't hang anybody up. Like if there's an astrologer with
a criminal record in one of my songs it's not going to make anybody wonder
if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value.” In his
Chronicles, however, he despairs at the Dylan freaks clambering over his
roof while he and his first wife Sara are trying to raise their young family
in upstate New York. One of the reasons he is reckoned fair game by his
analysts is that he himself seems to be littering his own trails with
cultural clues, whether he is noting that “No one ever sang the blues like
Blind Willie McTell”, or invoking Verlaine and Rimbaud, or spotting “Ezra
Pound and T.S.Eliot/Fighting in the captain's tower”.
At the University of Illinois at Springfield, Professor of English Dr Bill
Carpenter has started a summer course called “Bob Dylan's America”, which
studies the relationship between the songs, their author, and “the different
communities with which he has interacted”. Themes include civil rights
activism, evangelical Christianity and the millennial generation. “There was
such a huge shift in everything when he appeared,” Dr Carpenter says, “and
you can still see its effects everywhere.”
He also says the young of today have discovered Dylan's work, whether through
their own networks or their parents'/grandparents' shelves. This point is
made by enthusiasts of all sorts. Reasons include the success of Chronicles;
the 2005 Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home, in which he spoke
eloquently about his life and influences; his emergence as a thoughtful and
witty presenter on the Theme Time Radio Hour music shows; the sheer quality
of his most recent records, one of which, Modern Times in 2006, made him the
oldest artist to top the US album chart; the anticipation of the new album.
“Raw-country love songs, sly wordplay ... seductive border-café feel,” says
Rolling Stone. You don't need a PhD to join in. That's the fun thing about
having a Pulitzer prize-winning world poet who is also enough of a good
old-fashioned rock star to command a “Dress Like Bob Dylan” spread in The
Sun. A degree of nerdishness helps. A Brooklyn fan called A.J. Weberman
founded the critical approach known as garbology, which entailed going
through the singer's rubbish bin for signs and clues.
Today the sifting can be conducted by search engine. New Dylan albums are
routinely Googled to within an inch of their life. Some dogged Dylanologists
detected similarities between the lyrics of Modern Times and the work of a
little-known poet of the American Civil War, Henry Timrod. “More frailer
than the flowers, these precious hours,” sings Dylan on When the Deal Goes
Down. “A round of precious hours,” wrote Timrod, “Oh! Here, where in that
summer noon I basked/ And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers.”
He has always borrowed. The more purist of his detractors say that word should
be put in quotation marks because he doesn't credit his lenders. According
to old friends of the teenage Robert Zimmerman in his home town of Hibbing,
Minnesota - where there is now a Bob Dylan museum - he also failed to return
their LPs. But then it was his deep, early knowledge of the oral music
tradition that made his own material so substantial. So what you had, and
have, is a musician steeped in the folk song of Britain and Ireland, the
blues and gospel of his own country, the rock that evolved from them, the
narrative ballads
of his hero Woody Guthrie, and much besides.
Beyond this there was, crucially, the non-musical influence of the Beat Poets
of the 1960s, particularly the late Allen Ginsberg, whom he befriended, and
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, still writing at 90. There are dozens of Dylan's
songs in which you hear the same verbal energy as in Ginsberg's 1956 poem
Howl, or, for that matter, the imagery of Poe or the long, winding lines of
Walt Whitman. There had been plenty of great songwriters before Dylan, none
more so than Cole Porter. From him and his peers came sublime marriages of
wit and passion - “the Tinpantithesis of Melody” - but there had never been
popular music with stanzas of such literate complexity or wild flights of
expressionism. That is where the great change came; that is what set the
critics going and keeps them at it.
Just as there are good and bad singers, there are good and bad critics.
Elizabeth Thompson, a former editor of Publishing News and the compiler of
several books on Dylan, has her doubts about the value of the pursuit. “Some
of the dissertations I've read are just badly written, and with poor
scholarship,” she says. “The same rigour should be applied to this kind of
research as any other.”
“All musicians need listeners more than they need critics,” Ricks says, “just
as all playwrights need audiences more than they need theatre critics. Yet
it's true that they [critics] can mediate usefully. For example, I'm
grateful to Harold Hobson for writing about Samuel Beckett as he did.”
As many are to F.R.Leavis for writing about T.S. Eliot as he did. What would
he (Leavis) have made of Bob Dylan and all his works? “Oh, I don't think he
would have comprehended it,” says Michael Gray,” although, if he had been
young when Dylan came through, then I think he would have recognised Dylan's
strength, just as he had with Eliot.”
Anyone who values Leavis's critical principles must return to the text. The
trouble is that with Dylan there isn't really a text, and what there is
keeps altering. Round and round he goes on his never-ending tour, 100 gigs a
year, each time tearing down the familiar shapes of the songs and throwing
up strange new ones, deliberately missing the old notes by a mile. As has
been said of him so often, the only constant thing about him is his
shape-shifting. Protean is the expensive word. It makes the spectacle of
Dylan-hunting faintly hilarious. It always has. The title of Todd Haynes
2007 film about him, I'm Not There, was right on the money. As one critic
said with a laugh: “The trouble is, he isn't dead.”
So here's one critical certainty. If you think there will be a last word -
epilogue, coda, postscript - on this professionally elusive subject, you're
plain wrong.
Bob Dylan is at the O2 Arena on April 25(www.theo2.co.uk) and tours the UK
until May 3. His new album, Together Through Life, is out on April 27.
Clinton Heylin's Revolution in the Air is published by Constable on Thursday
