Dylan's Visions of Sin (80 page)

198
“The finest song on the album, and Dylan’s greatest so far, I think, is
Like a Rolling Stone
, the definitive
statement that both personal and artistic fulfilment must come, in the main, by being truly on one’s own. Dylan’s social adversaries have twisted this to mean something very devious and
selfish, but that is not the case at all. Dylan is simply kicking away the props to get to the real core of the matter: Know yourself. It may hurt at first, but you’ll never get anywhere if
you don’t. The final ‘You’re invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal / How does it feel? / How does it feel? / To be on your own’ is clearly optimistic and triumphant,
a soaring of the spirit into a new and more productive present.”

(
Sing Out!
, February / March 1966)

199
“
Like a Rolling Stone
is of course a put-down – most likely the best Dylan ever wrote. What is annoying about
it to me is its self-righteousness, its willingness to judge others without judging oneself, the proselytizing in disguise for Dylan’s own way of life” (Jon Landau,
Crawdaddy!
,
1968).

200
Bob Dylan
by Miles (1978),
see this page
(not to be confused with the compilation by Miles,
Bob
Dylan in His Own Words
, also 1978). Apparently from an interview with Jules Siegel (March 1966).

201
Playboy
(March 1966).

202
Rolling Stone
(26 January 1978).

203
Now you see this one-eyed midget

Shouting the word “NOW”

And you say, “For what reason?”

And he says, “How?”

And you say “What does this mean?”

And he screams back, “You’re a cow

Give me some milk

Or else go home”

(
Ballad of a Thin Man
)

How now no brown cow.

204
“Napoleon in rags” is, among other things, the great man who has fallen. People’d call, say, “Beware,
Boney, you’re bound to fall”; he thought they were all kidding him. On Napoleon and his fall in relation to how language can be used, consider Byron on “the ‘greatest living
poet’”: “Even I . . . / Was reckoned, a considerable time, / The grand Napoleon of the realms of rhyme. / / . . . But I will fall at least as fell my hero” (
Don Juan
,
XI, 55–6). My hero: compare Dylan’s
Hero Blues
, “You need a different kind of man, babe / You need Napoleon Boneeparte”.

205
The “you” in “you’re” is a different sound, and it does different work in the song (three
times).

206
There are two excruciating crescendos that writhe with “him” and “he”:

207
Stephen Leacock,
Studies in the Newer Culture
;
Winnowed Wisdom
(1926),
see this page
.

208
Interview, London (4 October 1997);
Isis
(October 1997).

209
When Tennyson was about to be given his honorary degree at Oxford in June 1855, an undergraduate (recalling the first line of
The May Queen
: “You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear”) called out as the long-haired honorand entered, “Did your mother call you early,
dear?”

210
Philip Larkin has a soundly patterned evocation of the bestselling novelist in lavish exile among glittering prizes: “the
shit in the shuttered chaˆteau / Who does his five hundred words / Then parts out the rest of the day / Between bathing and booze and birds” (
The Life with a Hole in it
). To
bathe, not to bath, I take it.

211
Matthew Arnold, on some verses by Wordsworth about education and its benches, verses grim in the extreme:

One can hear them being quoted at a Social Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon
daylight; benches full of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without to declaim these lines of Wordsworth; and in the
soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, and mourning, and woe!

(
Wordsworth
, 1879)

There was no conversation. “Benches full of men with bald heads”: to baldism, I shall return.

212
A twist might then be given to “There was little to say”, given that a
parliament
is a place to say
things.

213
Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: “Bare ruined quires, where late the sweet birds sang”. The leafless branches as pews or
benches.

214
Tennyson,
Mariana
: “All day within the dreamy house, / The doors upon their hinges creaked; / The blue fly sung in
the pane”. A board of examiners would lower the mark (for sung read sang), but T. S. Eliot raised the mark: “
The blue fly sung in the pane
(the line would be ruined if you
substituted
sang
for
sung
)” (
Selected Essays
, 1951 edition,
see this page
). The words sing differently.

215
Dylan’s title has “day” in the singular, “locusts” in the plural. Nathanael West’s had them
both in the singular:
The Day of the Locust
(1939). He might have come to Dylan’s mind, not only because he died the year before Dylan was born but because of the name-changing: Nathan
Wallenstein Weinstein (1903–40) into Nathanael West; Robert Allen Zimmerman into Bob Dylan. West hadn’t had Allen as his middle name, but he did have Allen within his middle name:
Wallenstein.

216
Gotta Serve Somebody
. As to the stage, compare
11 Outlined Epitaphs
: “who have no way of knowin’ /
that I ‘expose’ myself / every time I step out / on the stage” (
Lyrics 1962–1985
, 1985,
see this page
).
See this page
,
on
Eternal Circle
.

217
Exodus 10 has the word swarming through its verses:

tomorrow will I bring the locusts into thy coast . . . And the Lord said unto Moses, Stretch out thine hand over the land of Egypt for the locusts, that they may come upon the
land of Egypt, and eat every herb of the land, even all that the hail hath left . . . and when it was morning, the east wind brought the locusts. And the locusts went up over all the land of Egypt,
and rested in all the coasts of Egypt: very grievous were they; before them, there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such. For they covered the face of the whole earth, so
that the land was darkened.

Revelation 9:2–3: “and the sun and air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was
given power.”
Day of the Locusts
: “Darkness was everywhere, it smelled like a tomb”.

218
See footnote,
see this page
.

219
The painter Walter Sickert wrote about the patron Sir Hugh Lane: “Now that Sir Hugh Lane has been knighted for admiring
Manet – (I wonder if Manet would ever have been knighted for
being
Manet?), it might perhaps be permissible without blasphemy to speak the sober, unhysterical truth about him”
(
A Free House: Being the Writings of Walter Richard Sickert
, ed. Osbert Sitwell, 1947,
see this page
).

220
Letters
, ed. Valerie Eliot, vol. I (1988),
see this page
.

221
To Eleanor Hinkley, 14 October 1914;
Letters
, vol. I, p. 61.

222
Lyrics 1962–1985
(1985),
see this page
.

223
On Doris Day and the song, see Michael Gray,
Song and Dance Man III
(2000),
see this page
.

224
“May I help you” to stay out of trouble and the courts . . .

225
Seven Types of Ambiguity
(1930, second edition 1947),
see this page
.

226
See this page
.

227
In Our Exagmination
. . . (1929),
see this page
. I discuss this in
Beckett’s Dying
Words
(1993),
see this page
.

228
“Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, / But bid for, Patience is!”

229
Sung so; as printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, “do for You”.

230
For Dylan on questions that truthfully answer themselves in some way,
see this page
.

231
Saved
was recorded in February 1980.

232
Dylan One Year Later
(1980),
see this page
.

233
Dylan,
Biograph
: “The Bible says ‘Even a fool when he keeps his mouth shut is counted wise,’ but it
comes from the Bible, so it can be cast off as being too quote religious. Make something religious and people don’t have to deal with it, they can say it’s irrelevant.”

234
Melody Maker
(21 June 1980).

235
Off-rhyming here, just this once. The ensuing opening rhymes come straight down the line:
breaking tonight / shaking
tonight
,
dying tonight / crying tonight
, and
in trouble tonight / seeing double tonight
.

236
Marlowe,
Doctor Faustus
, prologue.

237
“God got the power, man has got his vanity” (
Ain’t No Man Righteous
). Think how different “man
has got his pride” would be, bringing home that pride, unlike vanity and unlike conceit, can be a good thing, self-respect for instance.

238
Psalms 36:11.

239
Proverbs 26:5: “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.” 26:12: “Seest thou
a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.” 26:16: “The sluggard is wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason.”

240
Introduction to Djuna Barnes,
Nightwood
(New York, 1937).

241
The Sacred Wood
(1920), preface to the 1928 edition, p. ix.

242
In the love songs
Tomorrow Is a Long Time
and
Boots of Spanish Leather
, the word means much.

243
Dylan sings “had”; as printed in
Lyrics 1962—1985
(1985), “at”.

244
Seven Types of Ambiguity
(1930, second edition 1947),
see this page
.

245
T. S. Eliot, in
Little Gidding
, II, has an alternation of feminine and masculine endings, arriving at the end of the
seventh line at just such a monosyllable that is unstressed, a feminine ending (“sóund w
s”):

In the uncertain hour before the morning

Near the ending of interminable night

At the recurrent end of the unending

After the dark dove with the flickering tongue

Had passed below the horizon of his homing

While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin

Over the asphalt where no other sound was

246
Often noted in
Hattie Carroll
has been the spectral presence of Cain (identical with
cane
to the ear that hears,
though not to the eye that reads): “slain by a cane”. “To lay cane [
Cain
] upon Abel; to beat any one with a cane or stick” (Francis Grose,
Vulgar Tongue
). A
rhyme is wielded in
Every Grain of Sand
: “Like Cain I now behold this chain of events that I must break”, and Cain and Abel put in their appearance in
Desolation Row
. As
for
Hattie Carroll
: “The table . . . the table . . . the table”: does this
-able
prepare for the word that soon follows, “cane”? Cain and Abel, masculine and
feminine endings.

247
Like the sharp identification in
The Waste Land
: “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!”

248
A statement with Eliot’s recorded reading (1947) of
Four Quartets
.

249
“
Do You Mr. Jones?
”
Bob Dylan with the Poets and the Professors
, ed. Neil Corcoran (2002),
see this page
.

250
Rolling Stone
(22 November 2001).

251
T. S. Eliot: “Stendhal’s scenes, some of them, and some of his phrases, read like cutting one’s own throat;
they are a terrible humiliation to read, in the understanding of human feelings and human illusions of feeling that they force upon the reader” (
Athenaeum
, 30 May 1919).

252
Pope opens his
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
with a chafed impatience that immediately repeats an imperative through clenched
teeth: “Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d I said, / Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead, / The Dog-star rages!” The Dog-star isn’t the only thing
that rages. Pope seizes the difference between repeating, say, an intransitive verb such as “Go” (where you could just say “Go, go” without necessarily being impatiently
maddened), and repeating a transitive verb, “Shut, shut” as though unable to wait even a second for the object: “the door”.