I don’t know if you’ve heard about this — or, conversely, if you’d heard more about it than you care to — but a couple of weeks back, the Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Bob Dylan.
I’ll have something more to say about that simple fact a few paragraphs hence. But first, as the politicians say, a few words about Bob Dylan and me:
I don’t know exactly what it says about me — I do know of several things that it might say, not all of which can be construed as necessarily complimentary — that in the minutes and hours and days after news of the Nobel committee’s decision came into the public ambit, I received a certifiable rash of messages, via every device and media platform through which I am reachable, in essence congratulating me on Mr. Dylan’s achievement.
Admittedly, the news that I am a worshipful Dylan acolyte will come as about as much a surprise to anyone who knows me, actually or virtually, as my recent, voluntary public admission that my political and social and spiritual views are liberal. Still, it was gratifying, and even uplifting, to have so many folks reach out to acknowledge, and in most cases, share in — “most,” but not “all,” as some several of my congratulators will tell you straightaway that Bob’s music is not their particular cup of tea, which somehow made their kind words all the nicer to hear — what they knew would be my absolute pleasure at the news of the Nobel.
I think I’m safe in saying that what each and every one of them does recognize, along with the Nobel committee, is that you don’t have to be a fan of Dylan’s music to be an admirer of the depth and range and, yes, musicality, of both his poetry and his prose.
And yes, I am aware of the current unearthing of some less than flattering comments about Dylan the poet by another of my favorite writers, the late Kurt Vonnegut. My first reaction to that is, So what? Everyone’s entitled to his or her opinion, and everyone comes to their opinion from a different set of contributing circumstances.
In other words, if Kurt Vonnegut considered Bob Dylan to be a lousy poet, it’s no skin off my nose. I love both men — as writers, as people of vision, as possessors, or at least transmitters, of certain signs and signals and truths to be passed on to anyone who cares to read or listen. Vonnegut’s opinion of Dylan’s poetry has no bearing on my appreciation of either writer (my guess is that Dylan probably admires Vonnegut, but that doesn’t matter either).
Which is all the better for me, because I do think Vonnegut’s wrong on this one. Therefore, if I tell you that I find Kurt’s opinion of Bob as a poet to be cockeyed, I implore you not to take it as a declaration of my intention of never again cracking the spine of Deadeye Dick, or Breakfast of Champions, or A Man Without a Country, or any of a handful of other Vonnegut favorites. My final word on that is, read all the Vonnegut you can.
However: Had I but the opportunity, I would ask Vonnegut — as I am asking you now — to consider the following string of words and images, which are the first to come to my mind as I type this very sentence:
Through the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowing rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked
Tolling for the outcast burning constantly at stake
We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.
Now, I’m just a lowly English major, educated, such as I am, in a small-town school system and at what was at the time a tiny, quasi-parochial liberal arts college. But I know a little something about trying to string words together in compelling ways. And thanks to the good fortune of having wonderful and dedicated teachers at every level of my education, I know good writing when I see it, and generally when it comes from my own pen or fingertips as well. I also know what makes a good poem — when I read it silently from the page, when I speak its rhythms aloud, when I hear it read or spoken or chanted or sung. And friends and neighbors, Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom” is poetry.
So are scores of other Dylan lyrics, along with fragments and phrases by the thousands, a Whitmanesque range and scope combined with a persona that is equal parts restless troubadour, irreverent jokester, and sly prophet of perilous times. As is one mark of great literature, Dylan’s words have a galvanizing effect, drawing the reader/listener into a particular moment and landscape and point of view, and yet leaving us to our own devices in terms of “interpreting” what we find there and processing any and all feelings that we attach to it.
And he’s been doing it for more than half a century. To wit:
Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive
A world war can be won, you want me to believe
But I see through your eyes and I see through your brain
Like I see through the water that runs down my drain…(1963)
Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doing our best to deny it…(1966)
She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet from the 13th century
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burning coals
Pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul
From me to you…(1975)
I hear the ancient footsteps, like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand…(1981)
Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day
It’s too hot to sleep, and time is running away…(1997)
Every step of the way, we walk the line
Your days are numbered
So are mine…(2001)
My enemy crashed into the dust
Stopped dead in his tracks and he lost his lust
He was run down hard and he broke apart
He died in shame; he had an iron heart…(2012)
You get the idea. Or not. Either way, it’s alright, Ma.
Nor are Dylan’s literary gifts limited to the musical and poetic spheres. His voice in prose is equally expressive and evocative, possessed of the same urgent undertones and oracular tincture. Consider a passage from his highly impressionistic 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One (presumably, volumes two and three are forthcoming, though that’s been the case for well over a decade now), in which he recounts the moment when, as a 21-year-old aspiring folk singer living hand-to-mouth in New York’s Greenwich Village, he came to a sudden knowledge of the heights to which he was headed:
Outside of Mills Tavern the thermometer was creeping up to about ten below. My breath froze in the air, but I didn’t feel the cold. I was heading toward the fantastic lights. No doubt about it. Could it be that I was being deceived? Not likely. I don’t think I had enough imagination to be deceived; had no false hope, either…[N]ow, destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else.
Dylan also revisited the late 1980s, a time of great artistic frustration, when he considered quitting the business (The thought of retirement didn’t bother me at all, he wrote. I’d shaken hands with the idea and had gotten comfortable with it). He reflected self-critically on his perceived decline and the “many reasons…for the whiskey to have gone out of the bottle,” providing us with some insight into his creative process:
Always prolific but never exact, too many distractions had turned my musical path into a jungle of vines. I’d been following established customs but they weren’t working. The windows had been boarded up for years and covered with cobwebs, and it’s not like I didn’t know it.
And besides, I can’t think of another person in the history of the universe who has the background and experience to write the following passage, Dylan’s memory of one of those nameless nights in a grungy club, sitting backstage while onetime pop idol Ricky Nelson played out front, visiting with another aspiring singer who’d have his own fleeting date with destiny:
The thing was that Ricky was still making records and that’s what I wanted to do, too…. Ricky’s song ended and I gave the rest of my French fries to Tiny Tim [and] went back into the outer room…
In its own way, that is a beautiful passage. It’s beautiful because of the distinctively matter-of-fact voice in which Dylan evokes the surreal exoticism of that moment. It’s beautiful in the way it renders the strange and beautiful and ultimately tragic confluence of three American “celebrities” on decidedly different paths and trajectories in life. It’s beautiful because, of all of the people living on earth today, only Bob Dylan could write it and have it be true.
Those things, along with the other examples I’ve cited and observations I’ve made, are what makes the work of Bob Dylan worthy of the highest recognition we can give it. Rating one poet or singer or artist above another is an exercise in subjectivity and disciplinary prejudice. But that doesn’t devalue it, or make the recipient of it any less worthy.
So here’s to the Nobel committee. And here’s to Mr. Dylan.