Dylan's Visions of Sin (59 page)

His earlier “No”, positively grateful for her (a much larger thing than being grateful to her), is completed at last by his “yes”, negatively
grating.

This last verse, the ninth, concludes what had begun as alternating exchanges, no longer happily paired off but with an odd number of verses. A way of getting even. A pair of boots, not the odd
boot. She is now (except that she isn’t going to do it) asked to give him the boots, having previously given him the boot: “sudden and callous rejection” (
The Oxford English
Dictionary
).

With the exception of
sorrow / tomorrow
, to which I’ll return, the final rhyme
weather / leather
is the only full rhyme and the only predictable rhyme in the song. But it is predictable
only because of the title
Boots of Spanish Leather
, with the teasing complication that, on the one hand, the title of a song is very seldom uttered by its singer, but, on the other, everybody soon
comes to know the title of the song and moreover it is given on the album . . . Anyway, the conclusive final line is a pointed modulation of the song’s title, which had not spelt out the
double Spanish requisition: “Spanish boots of Spanish leather”. Spanish boots were an instrument of torture for the Inquisition. They caught on. Germany, Russia . . .
⁴²⁵

The Spanish leather was perhaps imported from
Gypsy Davey
, a song that Dylan has since recorded.
⁴²⁶
In conversation with Studs Terkel in 1963,
Dylan sided with this suggestion for a moment but then sidled away. Is there something I can sing you from across the sea?

“You wanna hear a love-song?”

Boy meets girl – Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.

“This is girl leaves boy . . . This is called ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’”

“Boots of Spanish Leather” – like “Gypsy Davey”, a line from it.

“Yeah [plays a few chords and then] – no, not because of that but because I’ve always wanted a pair of boots of Spanish leather.”

A personable personal touch, but not one that we should allow to imperil the impersonality of the song itself. The conjunction of the personal and the impersonal can be heard
in Dylan’s pronunciation of “leather”, itself leathery and subtle and supple.

Clearly, the fact that, upon first hearing, it isn’t clear who speaks first – which means that it will not become clear for quite a while exactly how this gendered song was
engendered – must imply that later hearings will be different in kind. But this is a commonplace about works of art. If you have seen
Hamlet
before, you know what will happen in the story.
(
Dysfunctional family tries to cope with death of father
.) If a story stakes everything on suspense, especially suspense of a tricksy or risky kind, then you may never want to experience it again.
At the video store there are thrillers that still thrill and there are those that don’t or won’t. But it characterizes works of art that to experience them again may be to experience
them anew, gaining at least as much as one loses. Suspense may be not abolished but polished.

If we imagine
Boots of Spanish Leather
sung – as it easily could be – by alternate voices (so that the gendresult would be immediately announced), then we find that we are imagining
something much
less
lastingly worth while than what we hear while the song is in Dylan’s voice throughout. And this, not only because of what Dylan’s voice is. A single voice is called
upon to tell this story of how the dual partnership of love met duplicity.
⁴²⁷

This delayed indubitability – as to who is breaking off with whom – has taken up into itself along the way some intimations about these intimacies.
These
moments are more than tricks; they are to bring out how tricky these things are. Take what happens when two consecutive lines, clearly by alternating speakers, are so phrased as to sound as though
they are addressed in the same direction, from him to her. In the second verse, for instance, “Just to carry yourself back to me unspoiled” sounds like – and here is –
something that a man says to a woman. For “unspoiled” (not quite the same as “unspoilt”) may have a whiff of condescension, and, because of what it is to despoil or violate,
may suggest, too, the dangers that women run.
⁴²⁸
But then the reply that at once follows, “Oh, but I just thought you might want something
fine”, does rather sound as though (again) it is a woman who is being addressed. (Quite wrong of us, of course, to more associate women with wanting something fine, but you know how it is.)
What matters is the way in which the uncertainty as to who / whom, a hesitation as to the sex of the speaker, can become part of why it is not a misogynistic song, this and the fact that it never
generalizes about women and about men.

The seventh verse, the narrative turn, is divided between the man and the woman, but not as an exchange of two passages of direct speech.

His two lines directly narrate, but her two are direct speech of calculated indirection: “I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again”. “It depends on how
I’m a-feelin’” – what an unfeeling way of putting it down, of putting him down.

The alternation of feminine and masculine voices, that way round (we find), is something that Dylan rightly makes no effort to dramatize. He doesn’t act the song, he sings it, refusing to
settle things, unsettlingly. This is in parallel with the alternation of masculine and feminine endings, lines that end with a stressed syllable alternating from the start with lines that end with
an unstressed one:

In each quatrain, it is lines 2 and 4, only, that rhyme or half-rhyme or off-rhyme.
⁴³⁰
So that the
rhymes are all, or all but all, feminine rhymes. For instance:

There Dylan points up the feminine / masculine endings by singing something other than what is printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
: the lyrics have “There’s nothing I
wish to be ownin’”, but he sings “There’s nothing I’m wishing to be ownin’”, with the triple
-ing
sounding in our ears, the feminine ending undulating and
insistent. Much is offered:

Or
? Choose one? Sorry, you’re not going to get something made of silver with a golden inlay . . . That isn’t the tone, which is extravagantly (because guiltily
already?) eager to bestow:

“Made of silver or of golden”:
⁴³¹
this, too, is largesse (
largesse oblige
), luxuriously
redundant, since we expect either “Made of silver or of gold” or “Made of silver or golden”. “Made of silver or
of
golden” overflows to the point
of overdoing it, affluently and fluently: is she making too much of this wish to give him something, and giving herself away? At the same time the cadence fulfils the pattern of alternating a
stressed and an unstressed final syllable (“fine” / “of gólden”) that “of gold” would lack. And rhyming with the line, off-rhyming with it, is the city
with the feminine ending, Barcelóna, following upon the previous line and its city with the masculine ending, Madr´ıd.

It is broadly true, then, that only half of the lines rhyme (the even ones). But only broadly true, for many of the unrhyming words at the ends of the odd lines are gathered up from previous
rhymes or rhyme-placings, rhyme-plaitings: so “love” may not be rhymed but it does end two lines, and the same is true of “again” and of “day” and of
“me”. It is against this interlacing that the rent in the fabric of love is felt.

For the repetitions, which had at first possessed (despite the imminent parting) something light of heart, gain weight:

Take heed
: thrice, like a witch’s spell, more like a conjuration than an adjuration.

Nothing could be simpler, in some ways, than the song’s movements of mind as it contemplates these movements of the heart. But, yet again, the
simplicity is alive
in “that perpetual slight alteration of language” that T. S. Eliot valued.
⁴³⁴

Not “From the place that I’ll be landing at”. It is not that Dylan just had to have “landing” at the end, since he could have done this by singing
“From the place where I’ll be landing”, and it is not that he couldn’t fit “landing at” into the line. He can always fit things into lines if need be or even if
wish be. No, the point is that the speaker (she, as it turns out) is not imagining merely where she is going to land, or that she is going to land at a place; oh no, she is going to land a place.
It makes it sound ominously like some splendid fish or splendid prize, these things that you gleefully land. Too blithe a spirit at parting.

The whole song engages with reciprocity and repetition and these then becoming broken. The first verse, “my own true love”, is matched with the second verse, “my own true
love”, a loving answer it would seem. But by the eighth verse she is not saying any such thing, and he is no longer saying “my own true love” but the milder bleaker “If you,
my love, must think that-a-way”. No longer my own, no longer my own true love. There is an audible finality. This love is over. Differently over, it is true, from that in
One Too Many
Mornings
, with its level dismay (“We’re both just one too many mornings / An’ a thousand miles behind”). And altogether different from those love songs that really put in
one last plea, as does
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
.
Boots of Spanish Leather
asks for nothing. What gives the finality its high shine is the contrast with all those repetitions
along the way, all the hope that used to be invested in “again”, a word that embodies the repetitive asking that is an irritant to the lover. “How can, how can you ask me
again”: deeply felt, the vexation, in that it does itself perpetrate an “again” (“How can, how can . . .”), and then itself has to say “again” again:

“The same thing” plays along with all the repetitions within the song, not just words or phrases but whole questions, whole sentiments. But
then there comes the final “again”, the one that is compounded by an internal rhyme, when word comes from her: “Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back
again”.

It is this moment before the letter arrives that warns us that tomorrow will bring sorrow:

Sorrow / tomorrow
: this is not just a foreseeable rhyme, but – like the other such one, which closes the song and the relationship – a full true
rhyme.
⁴³⁶
All the other rhymes in the song till this point have been imperfect and happy to be so; but the rhyme
sorrow / tomorrow
comes with the
predictability of sunrise while dawning on us as a cold sun.

“Take heed, take heed of the western winds”.
⁴³⁷
We are to take heed of the unforgettably laconic medieval poem that this sends back to
us, sends us back to. Four lines sadly say it all.

The cry in
Boots of Spanish Leather
is differently poignant: Christ that my love were my love. (But in any case no western wind, being a wind from the west, could bring a ship
from Spain to America.) The pressure of “tomorrow” in Dylan’s song might send us to another song of his,
Tomorrow
Is a Long Time
, and its
tribute both to a loved one and to “O western wind”, the refrain,

In the lost faith or lost fidelity of
Boots of Spanish Leather
this has become a different longing: If only she had lived a truth, and lived it by me.

A catechism is a course of instruction that proceeds through a series of questions. The catechism in the Book of Common Prayer ministers to faith, laying out the grounds for the
faith that pre-exists you but that is now to prove the grounds of your existence. Since you will in the end confront the Four Last Things,
⁴³⁸
first
things first: