Dylan's Visions of Sin (33 page)

And not this:

What the voice has to do in apprehending Wordsworth’s very wording, “Who has been born and dies among the mountains”, is breathe life into the final syllable,
as though it were a flag that will lapse into limpness unless it can be made to ripple out resiliently. The cadence will fall away unless the voice holds it up, holds it forth. The ending may
choose to acquiesce, or it may resist: there is an axis, and the energies may run in either direction. These properties of language are like the paradoxical properties of everyday soap: the very
thing that makes it so slippery when wet is what makes it stick so obdurately to the side of the bath as it dries.

In this cadence, Dylan fashioned his song, which is steeled and steely in support of “the gentle”. From the start, he established this movement, inexorable in its sadness and in its
curbed indignation. Duly monotonous, provided that we understand here what William Empson understood in the great double sestina of Philip Sidney: “The poem beats, however rich its
orchestration, with a wailing and immovable monotony, for ever upon the same doors in vain.”
²⁴⁴
Always, in the verses of Dylan’s song,
there is this last dying fall, a cadence that advances like nemesis. This is what Dylan hears from the beginning, having us not only hear it but listen to it.

– where the fourth line is notably, differently, vivid, in bringing out that the feminine ending doesn’t depend upon how many syllables there are in the closing
word. It’s not “his weapon took from
him
” (as against from someone else), it’s “his weapon took
from
him”, so that within “from him”
the word “him”, although it’s a monosyllable, is a feminine ending, isn’t where the stress is carried.
²⁴⁵
There is only one
moment when this cadence of the verses is broken, and it’s when he fells her. “Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane” – not “Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a
trúnch
on”:

– not “came down through the lóbby” or “came down through the chámb
r”. What happens in
this terrible quiet moment is that there’s an amputation, which is exactly understated and yet is registered. Something – a life – is cut short, curtailed by curt brutality, at
that moment, and this without the song’s having to melodramatize it. A cutting short of what had seemed an unchanging cadence: that will do it.

A cadence runs throughout the song. (Ah, but not quite so, for there is the refrain, for which we wait. And shall wait now for a moment.) There may be the effect of an internal rhyme (for there
is no external rhyme, rhyme at the line-endings, in the body of the verses, as against the refrain), as when “Got killed by a blow, lay
slain
by a
cane
” comes back in the
self-satisfaction of the judge: “he
spoke
through his
cloak
, most deep
and distinguished”. That’s the only other moment when you’ve
got a line that has this form of internal rhyme, and it’s the moment when the judge had better remember that he is there because a woman “lay slain by a cane” (there’s very
strong assonance as well:
lay / slain / cane
).
²⁴⁶

Hattie Carroll has her enslaved rhyming – or rather non-rhyming, since a rhyme would offer
some
change in wording, some relief from monotony – of “the table . . . the
table . . . the table” as the grim ending of three consecutive lines:

She never appears by name in the final verse (but then he is not at first named there, though his turn will come), but she is still there, because when this verse begins
–

–
gavel / equal / level
must call us back not only to the word “level” from before (“And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level”), but
to everything that has sounded within “Carroll”, “table”, “table”, “table”, “level”. That’s her sound, that
-l
. And it goes
with the “gentle”: Zanzinger with his cane had been “Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”.

It’s very brave not to mention her, or her name, at the end. It’s not shrugging her off, it’s shouldering what happened to her, and what then. For now it is too late. Now
is
the time for your tears. Or as he sings, “For now’s the time for your tears”. If I’d had the genius to come up with the song, I fear that – having sung
“Now ain’t the time for your tears” all
the way through till now – I would have gratified myself emphatically by singing “Now is the time for
your tears”. He doesn’t sing “Now is”, he sings “Now’s”. The contraction at the very end quietly takes out anything hotly hortatory.

The body of the song, the verse proper, refuses to rhyme (very unusually for Dylan); instead it has the different relentlessness of the gentle, there in the cadence with its feminine ending. But
the refrain, the wheel, on the contrary is distinctly, bracingly, different: it is all masculine endings and it rhymes insistently:
disgrace / fears / face / tears
. There are two syllables
to “disgrace”, but it’s not a feminine ending, not dísgrace but disgráce. So whereas the verses all the way through possess unrhymed feminine line-endings, the
clinching refrain doubly does the opposite – a refrain that opens with the effect of a tank turret turning in threat, an iron rhyme: “But you who . . .” This
you who
reminds me – and not as a matter of sources or allusions, but as an analogue, a place of power – of what Shakespeare does in the opening soliloquy of
Richard III
, when Richard
has chafed at the many maddening obstacles to his murderous ambitions and then says, “Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace . . .”
Why, I
. Again, the menace, the turret
turning; Dylan’s
you who
, this is the levelled gaze.
²⁴⁷

There are the effects of rhyme, then, including internal rhyming – and including
not
rhyming when you might have expected it. (T. S. Eliot once said that punctuation “includes
the absence of punctuation marks, when they are omitted where the reader would expect them”.
²⁴⁸
) But two things unexpectedly change in the
final verse of
Hattie Carroll
. The first is the sudden outbreak of a grim rhyme, an off-rhyme:
caught ’em / bottom
. You haven’t heard anything like this before in the
song, whether in the rhyming refrain or in the unrhyming verses.

– this is sardonic, Byronic, and it is en route to the end of this last verse,
repentance / sentence
. This is the one and only full rhyme at a line-ending in any of
the four verses, and moreover it is a disyllabic rhyme (as against,
say,
pence / hence
). The rhyme
repentance / sentence
is poised to lead into the full, the
fulfilling, rhymes of the final refrain after this clinching ruling:

Unforgettably clear sense, this, while at the same time being tricky, hard to parse or to disentangle. “False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin”
(
Jokerman
).

But he
handed out strongly
(
for penalty and repentance
)
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
? Any disingenuousness in this way of putting it is not
to be laid at Dylan’s door. “The courtroom of honor”? Not so, Your Honor.

Dylan’s refusal to commit the sin that is Zanzinger’s anger – however much such righteous anger might have claimed to be all in the good cause of giving a bad man some of his
own medicine – is audible in the exquisite self-control of the pause in the singing (the least of pauses and therefore the most telling) after the word “a”, in “with a [. .
.] six-month sentence”. The temptation at such a moment must always be to luxuriate in indignation: “With a [
pause
: For Christ’s sake! Can you believe it?] SIX MONTH
sentence!” All he does is just lengthen the toneless
a
[ə] to
a
[ei, as in
pain
], and then bide this micro-second of cold incredulity. Indignation may sometimes be a
good servant but is always a bad master. Zanzinger should have curbed his temper; Dylan’s is the timing that can temper steel.

Tempered, and temperate (temperance being another of the cardinal virtues). For it is a mark of Dylan’s cooled control of this incendiary case that he watches his language. Aidan Day has
said of Dylan’s “vehement moral sense” that it “cauterised white judges who handed out six-month sentences to white murderers of black kitchen maids”.
²⁴⁹
You can sympathize with
Day’s indignation (while glad that Dylan didn’t yield to vehemence), but this is overheated, not
only in its putting the case into the plural (judges? murderers? maids?) but in its unmisgiving use of a word that Dylan does not use: “murderer”. Back at the time,
Sing Out!
used such terms (“She was murdered on February 8, 1963, by William Devereux Zantzinger”), though it did then acknowledge, even if reluctantly, that the court found him “guilty of
manslaughter, dismissing charges of first and second degree homicide”. The song rightly doesn’t issue a ruling on this point. The police “booked William Zanzinger for first-degree
murder”, but the song, though it contests the sentence, does not contest the verdict. Far from weakening its cold contempt for the mildness of the sentence, this determination not to enjoy
vehemence strengthens the contempt. It was a brutal indefensible killing, but you distort the horror of it all if you insist – without ever going into the evidence – that Zanzinger, in
his drunken impatience, will have intended to kill her, that (and this is what we need to mean by murder) he murdered her. Dylan doesn’t respect any such easy appeals to self-gratifying
indignation. Think of what is going on in
Who Killed Davey Moore?
Of all the scoundrels with their excuses, the ugliest may be the gambler who bleats: “I didn’t commit no ugly
sin / Anyway, I put money on him to win”. The boxer who killed Davey Moore is, horribly, both right and wrong in his defensive words: “Don’t say ‘murder’”
– true, it wasn’t murder in the ring – but “don’t say ‘kill’”? Don’t say murder,
do
say kill. And don’t, for Heaven’s sake,
go on, confident that this is the last word: “It was destiny, it was God’s will”.

The judge “handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance / William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence”. Sentence and repentance were supposed to be how this case would close. The
two words constitute an ancient rhyme, and they consummate Dylan’s sentence. As with a prison sentence, there’s a point of timing, of punctuation, here at the very end (which is then no
end at all, given the perfunctory legal sentence). The Victorian book
Punctuation Personified
had characterized the full stop,