Yet another lovable side of Bob Dylan is his expansive and invariably colourful praise for fellow artists and influences, from Woody Guthrie to The Kinks (as it says online) and dozens in between.
But he’s also very careful, as we all know, to use obfuscation when it suits him, which is nearly always.
Dylan’s book Chronicles: Volume One is full of approbation that you’d die for behind a title that’s typically vague (Volume Two for Christmas, folks! Yeah, right.), and his long Nobel Prize speech followed suit without mentioning a single Dylan song (how many of us would have done that?).
We also know that if we met Dylan the last thing we’d ask would be questions. My email mate, *Professor Richard Thomas – who had the cheek to teach Dylan at Harvard University before the Nobel gesture – put it well to the New York Times: ‘Whatever I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me. Dylan is very careful at controlling what he gets asked.’
That control, once you’ve got it and need it within your own circumstances, is bound to affect you in numerous ways, especially if you’re a genius. ‘Playfulness’ is my favourite Tarot card and I wouldn’t mind betting it’s in Dylan’s top three, not that I’d ever ask him!
But does that control seep into areas that Dylan would avoid, either because they don’t interest him or because he simply wants to keep it to himself and use later at some point? I think he likes the power and joy of surprise. Alicia Keys is surely wonderful testament to that. But – and there was always going to be a but – what about J.D. Salinger and, to a lesser extent, George Orwell?
Please allow me to give a bit of personal background. My working class Dad and I never talked about it once but, without either of us knowing, he planted something in me that had more effect than anything else – the importance of heroes.
I realised after Ernie died in 1980 that we had three special ones each. His – in no particular order of preference, I think – were singer Al Jolson, writer P.G. Wodehouse and British TV comedian Tony Hancock. He welled up watching Larry Parks play Jolson in The Jolson Story (1946); he read every Wodehouse book (he never knew it was pronounced ‘Woodhouse’); and he said of Hancock: ‘People like him shouldn’t be allowed to die’.
Mine were Dylan first and Salinger/Orwell joint second. All I wonder is why these two icons of literature, Salinger most obviously, of course, don’t seem to figure in the thousands (millions?) of words written around and by Dylan (let me know if I’m wrong!).
I find it strange because there’s no doubt that Salinger and Orwell were just as important as Dylan, and their times – while changin’ just as much – also overlapped with his, Salinger 1919-2010; Orwell 1903-1950.
It’s hard, if not impossible, to imagine Salinger and Orwell having a beer together in New York or London, but there could have been a point, surely, when Dylan and Salinger could have shared an hour playing Cribbage and chatting in the back room at the Café Wha??
Picture Robert Zimmerman in, say, the summer of 1959, just turned 18. There was no way on earth that he hadn’t read The Catcher in the Rye or Nineteen Eighty-Four, come to that.
Voracious was a word invented for Dylan’s appetite for reading and stealing them, and, while he growled no interest in Brendan Behan (and I’m sure in “tankie” songwriter Ewan MacColl) in Don’t Look Back, these two books, especially The Catcher, must have been read and placed in The Sponge…
The proof is usually in the pudding, but this is where I need your help in finding Salinger and maybe a little Orwell in Dylan’s songs. I need your help because, like Orwell, I never went to “uni” and tend to shrink in the face of scholarship. All that fascinating Classics stuff from Professor Thomas was totally new to a Catford lad through and through
All you’ll get from me is a wonky insight or two and the odd guess or gamble, so please don’t take them ultra-seriously and by all means swamp me with your own erudition.
Nervously, I throw To Ramona (1964) into the mix. I do it knowing that one person’s analysis is another person’s absurdity. I looked up a serious scholar’s efforts in the same area, published online not that long ago, and he goes on and on about hippies, socialism and Phil Ochs. Which goes to prove – to me, at least – that swapping thoughts on these things needs to take place in a spirit of mutual respect, whatever you might think
My own line is that Dylan’s narrator counselling Ramona could be straight out of Salinger’s Zooey talking to his depressed younger sister in Franny and Zooey (1961). Where Dylan talks about “a world that just don’t exist” and that Ramona’s sorrow stems from “fixtures and forces and friends”, Zooey agrees that some of Franny’s professors are “lethal as hell” and mostly to blame for the “mob of ignorant oafs with diplomas,” But whereas Dylan’s approach is gentler and concedes that “Someday maybe, who knows, baby, I’ll come and be crying to you”, Zooey attacks Franny for the “snotty crusade” she’s leading against “everybody.”
The salient point, in my opinion, is that both Salinger and Dylan are explaining what young people have to understand, above all else, is the system. Dylan soon weighs in with a song that Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye could have sung at Pencey Prep, Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965). Look out, kid, it’s something you did/God knows when, but you’re doing it again.
Is anyone trying to tell me that someone who was genius enough to write Subterranean was not fully cognisant with the equal genius of The Catcher in the Rye, published just 14 years earlier? – even if Salinger/Caulfield/ “Ackley kid” or even Lane Coutell have never figured in any Dylan publicity? Or has it? Let me know.
Part of my explanation for Dylan’s silence on Salinger is that it’s simply Another Side of the loveable rogue aspect that steals books and records and lines from old songs, telling the court with a grin that he’s “The Expeditionary.” This side also keeps to himself those (obvious?) influences that, if revealed, could automatically render them banal – the same as not answering any questions the admirable Prof Thomas might put to him.
To my mind, getting bolder, the whole of Bringing It All Back Home (1965) has a Brando/Dean/Kerouac/Ginsberg and, yes, Holden feel to it, the magical mid-Sixties when the whole place was turned upside down by the man from Hibbing. No doubt others could point out other cultural mores (Bukowski?) that make the first team.
But did George Orwell ever fit in at all? He could hardly be called cool, more like cold (but still lovable). His drug was tobacco and his drinks were beer and tea – “Indian with the tea poured into the cup BEFORE the milk!” His mantra was writing plain English and when he starts a book “I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
He’s had that all right, these days as much as ever with Trump running the Ministry of Truth and Johnson sacked from the Ministry of Transparency. Sales of Nineteen Eighty-Four have rocketed in the US apparently and in Britain ‘Orwellian’ is used virtually daily in newspapers, on television and social media.
The Orwell link to Dylan? The nearest the latter gets to dystopia is probably Desolation Row (1965), but I don’t think his heart is in it and as a song, albeit a long song, I don’t think it begins to compare with the books Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm (where Trump, of course, is Napoleon).
The start to the magnificent It’s Alright, Ma (I’m only bleeding) – Darkness at the break of noon – is said by some to be a reference to the dystopian novel Darkness at Noon (1940) by Arthur Koestler, an ally of Orwell, and perhaps it’s significant that six words at the beginning of one of Dylan’s greatest songs sums up interest, or lack of it, in that area, preferring to emphasise how the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools.
So…not much there to link two of my heroes to the main one, Bob Dylan, except a deeply-felt feeling that they were soulmates on one level or another. Maybe I’m talking nonsense. I’d certainly like to hear what others think, hopefully respectfully.
*Professor Thomas was at Greenwich Theatre, SE London, a few years ago. talking about Why Dylan Matters.
DoubleSpeak 