Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (3 page)

As though to emphasise the scale of the decay, the singer had meanwhile allowed his record company and his management to pass implicit judgement with 1985’s multi-disc
Biograph
compendium
.
The exercise, involving 53 famous or previously unreleased recordings spanning a 20-year period, was not intended to shame Dylan. It was, among other things, the first move in a long campaign to reclaim his work from the bootleggers. Nevertheless, the contrast between tracks discarded in the ’60s and ’70s and the stuff he was passing as fit for consumption in the 1980s was damning.
Biograph
, an expensive set, sold at least as well as anything purportedly new to which Dylan was then putting his name. In most cases, it did better.

Real Live
, a redundant document from a European tour, had been lucky to reach number 115 in the American chart at the end of 1984.
Empire Burlesque
had reached 33 in the summer of ’85, but the pricey
Biograph
matched that when winter came, and went on to sell vastly more copies than Dylan’s latest product.
Knocked Out Loaded
and
Down in the Groove
would follow: knocked down, then out. Such was the standard verdict. Most talented performers in popular music start out as small fry, as ‘cults’, and proceed with luck, work and judgement to achieve fame. Dylan was heading in the opposite direction. To all appearances, he was a spent force.

Did he care? Did he notice? Stray comments from the period suggest a stoical acceptance that his moment as an unlikely star had come and gone. For all that, whether obliged by contract, financial need or stubborn defiance, he continued to release those derided albums. The 1980s would see seven such artefacts emerge from the recording studios.
Infidels
and
Oh Mercy
might each have redeemed Dylan’s reputation, but each was defaced – another unavoidable word – by its maker and those around him. The rest were very easy to forget.

In one sense, it needn’t have mattered. On any fair reading Dylan’s reputation would have been secure thanks only to the songs composed and sung between 1962 and 1978. In his business, particularly at the artistic end of the trade, a 16-year career is nothing at all to be ashamed of. Plenty of performers have made money for decades from work achieved in less time. The Beatles, those reproving deities, had hung together for barely seven years as recording artists, after all. Elvis had counted out most of his days among the living dead. But the seeming creative extinction of Dylan in the late 1980s was peculiarly poignant because it seemed both complete and inexplicable.

He had been perplexing for long enough. As far as the forgiving fans who stuck around were concerned, that was part of the contract. In 1969, there was the ‘country’ singer of
Nashville Skyline
; in 1970, the baffling anonymous artist of
Self Portrait.
After two of his most successful works,
Blood on the Tracks
and
Desire
, Dylan had ended the 1970s by surrendering his autonomy to God and evangelical Christianity. But at no time had he seemed wholly lost to art, bereft of ideas or a sense of direction. It hardly mattered, when the rot set in, that bootlegs told a more complicated story. As far as most listeners were concerned, Dylan drifted aimlessly through the second half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. His records were poor or worse and few cared. Nothing important of him remained.

This meant, among other things, that it became silly to talk of Dylan the artist, Dylan the poet. Much attention was still being given to what he had done in better days, but by the 1980s many of the books and articles being published were sounding an elegiac note. The first edition of Robert Shelton’s long-delayed
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan
appeared in 1986, when those liable to wonder what all the fuss was about were being offered
Knocked Out Loaded
. In 498 pages of text, the biography contained only 13 pages dealing with Dylan’s activities between 1980 and 1985. It ended by wondering whether the artist would follow ‘Rimbaud’s route’ – and throw in his hand – or whether he would manage the Yeatsian path to ‘even greater creativity toward old age’. Shelton was not prepared to guess.

The music business can offer at least ten comebacks for every penny. Most draw their inspiration from the creative agency of accountants, from managers sniffing a moment ripe for nostalgia or from the chance to exploit another greatest-hits package. Only rarely do performers renew themselves. Writers, equally, are reluctant to be reborn in late middle age. Lazarus never did explain how the trick was done. Nevertheless, Shelton covered his bets well enough. The late poetry of W.B. Yeats might certainly count as one parallel with Dylan in his second coming; all those old or ageing blues players who were ‘rediscovered’ in his youth could stand as another set of precedents. Equally, you could dismiss all such comparisons. When Dylan rose again, he did it on his own terms.

Among his contemporaries there is a short list of those who have simply ploughed on – Neil Young, Paul McCartney, the egregiously avid Stones – and a vastly long list of the faded and fallen. His case was different. Beginning with his initial work on
Time Out of Mind
in 1996, and pressing on to
Tempest
in 2012, he forged another of those 16-year careers, became still another ‘Bob Dylan’, and vindicated himself. Critics fell into the habit of exhuming and adapting a famous line from Minnesota’s F. Scott Fitzgerald and his unfinished
The Love of the Last Tycoon
(1941).
⁴
As it turned out, there was a second act in at least one American life.

In these pages it will be argued, among other things, that in the process Dylan created a body of work – less sumptuous, less startling, less intoxicating – to match any of the products of his 1960s. He did it, moreover, while contending with everything, the whole accreted legend, the multiplicity of identities, that ‘Bob Dylan’ had come to mean. He did it while contending with age, with the fact of time, and with the burden of memory.

So we look again for the answer to the old, plain and perplexing question: how did he do that?

*

The Swedish Academy does not publicise its discussions or chat about the tastes of its 18 members when they are done selecting the Nobel laureate in literature. Dylan has been nominated each year since 1997, and each year the arguments over his place on the bookies’ lists have resumed. How can one whose art depends on pop music be suitable for the highest honour available to a writer? Where Dylan is concerned, the game is now ancient: poet or not? If a poet, of which variety, and by which criteria? Specifically, how can poetry be said to exist if it fails to ‘survive’ on the page?

Some still talk and write as though the very question demeans the august prize. Some of Dylan’s own admirers meanwhile dismiss the entire debate, as though to clear the ground for bigger claims.
Of course
he is not a poet, they will say, but he is the greatest songwriter in a golden age for songwriting and that alone is a big enough thing. Talking to the fan magazine
Isis
in 2005, the author and Dylan scholar Greil Marcus made the familiar point. The prize is for
literature
(it turns out). Our boy sings, performs, and writes
songs
. Besides, said the scholar, Dylan has plenty of awards and no shortage of money. Marcus argued that ‘thousands’ of novelists were more deserving. Elsewhere, he had said confidently that Dylan’s songs are not ‘true literature’.
⁵

Dylan doesn’t need the Nobel and the Nobel doesn’t need Dylan: point taken. But even implicit questions need answers. If you cannot place him among the poets, where would ‘Desolation Row’ figure in the development of post-war popular songwriting? It’s very hard to say. If you cannot set Dylan among writers of verse, what has all the fuss, 50 long years of it, been about? For some critics, that’s even harder to say. And what is this thing, this self-evidently exclusive thing, we call literature (if the Swedish Academy so pleases)? Where American poetry is concerned, a mid-century professorial parlour game, sometimes still misidentified as a ‘New Criticism’, has done its reductive work on art.

Tomas Tranströmer, an octogenarian Swede for whom the honour is long overdue, wins the Nobel in 2011. A year on, the honour and eight million kronor go to Mo Yan, the first Chinese novelist to be recognised, a writer controversial for his failure to be politically controversial in his homeland. In the present context, the fact leaves a trace of irony. On each occasion, nevertheless, there is no sign that Dylan gives a damn. He accepts his honours, when time allows, but shows no inclination to argue over definitions of his work.

Tranströmer, though, is a
real
poet (who once wrote of ‘Jangling tambourines of ice’, and elsewhere of being ‘north of all music’). His status is not in dispute: anything but. The Swedish master, formerly a psychologist, makes sparse, dazzling arrangements of words to be delivered and received, uttered and heard. So what is it that Dylan does, exactly? Mo Yan’s fictions are rooted in folk tales and given what is described routinely as a ‘hallucinatory’ edge. So why does that sound so familiar? The Nobel, it is sometimes forgotten, is
in
literature. Lexicographers, paid to think twice, will not stretch the definition of the thing beyond ‘the art of composition in prose or verse’, or ‘the art of written work’. Academicians are a little harder to describe.

Judging by some of the press discussion over a song and dance man, a lot of people still define literature by a process of elimination. The only agreed truth is that no one else in Dylan’s ‘field’ – which would be? – could even merit consideration as a candidate. In this game he is too big, or just too old, to be contained within mere popular music, yet simultaneously insufficiently literary to stand alongside others who pattern words obsessively. Where the recent history of the Nobel is concerned, Dylan might also be, quite simply, too American.

Gordon Ball, the Professor of English and Fine Arts at the Virginia Military Institute who first proposed Dylan for the 1997 Nobel, had attempted to deal with some of the arguments in his nomination letter for 1999. Backed by an international committee of like-minded academics, the editor and friend of Allen Ginsberg had reminded the Nobel judges that, in honouring the Italian playwright Dario Fo in 1997, they had already recognised an artist whose work ‘depends on performance for full realisation’. Ball had then recalled the prize given to W.B. Yeats in 1923, despite, as was said at the time, ‘a greater element of song than is usual in Modern English poetry’. Thereafter the professor had invoked the praise given by Yeats to Rabindranath Tagore, a previous laureate, who was, said the Irishman, ‘as great in music as he is in poetry’. Ball could no doubt have piled up more evidence for his thesis. The literature award has been given in years past to historians and philosophers. There is no obvious, definable reason why Dylan’s way with words should be accounted the wrong way. But it would be unwise to risk money on the argument.

Remarking on the speculative betting generated by the 2011 Nobel, the permanent secretary to the Swedish Academy, one Peter Englund, compared Dylan to ‘a literary UFO’. It was a neat way to dismiss a phenomenon and an inadvertent confession. Englund, and perhaps the Nobel Committee itself, didn’t know what to make of Dylan. This said nothing about the singer, but it amounted to a slightly depressing comment on the guardians of world literature in the twenty-first century. Dispassionately, their response throughout has been puzzling. Either they want to say – but do not dare – that the Nobel must not be sullied by popular song, or they don’t want to get into arguments liable to raise questions about their criteria, and hence about the nature of literature itself.

In March of 2013, nevertheless, an interesting fragment of news goes around the world. It seems that Dylan has been elected to join the elite group, generally 250 strong, of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. To most observers of such matters in the United States, this is not just another scintillating bauble to add to the pile in the artist’s crowded trophy cabinet. There is more to it than a hearty handshake and a souvenir photograph. For better than a century the academy has had a reputation, never denied, for disdaining popular culture and anyone deemed too modern for their own or society’s good. Once upon a time, those who ran the institution would not have deigned even to notice Dylan’s existence.

In 2013, in contrast, he is offered honorary rather than full membership simply because the academy cannot decide whether he is worthy – though there is apparently no longer any doubt about that – because of his music or because of his words. ‘The board of directors considered the diversity of his work and acknowledged his iconic place in American culture,’ says Virginia Dajani, executive director. ‘Bob Dylan is a multitalented artist whose work so thoroughly crosses several disciplines that it defies categorisation.’

True enough. So again you wonder, whether the artist cares to or not, why the organisers of the Nobel are so fearful of cultural UFOs. He has been central to American culture for half a century. He is as ‘literary’, say millions of listeners and several shelves full of earnest books, as they come. Still the struggle to decide what he is, and what he is worth, and how he is to be placed in anyone’s canon, goes on.

*

In November of 1965, the 24-year-old Dylan had told Joseph Haas of the
Chicago Daily News
that he was spiritually non-aligned, that he reserved the right to make his own choices in life. ‘I just don’t have any religion or philosophy,’ he had said. ‘A lot of people do, and fine if they really do follow a certain code. I’m not about to go around changing anything. I don’t like anybody to tell me what I have to do or believe, how I have to live.’

Oblivious to the contradiction, the young singer then proceeded to extol the ‘amazingly true’ I Ching, the ancient (if stubbornly cryptic) Chinese divination manual he pronounced ‘the biggest thing of all’. By February of 1974, nevertheless, Dylan was explaining himself again to Ben Fong-Torres of
Rolling Stone
: ‘Religion to me is a fleeting thing. Can’t nail it down. It’s in me and out of me.’ In the autumn of the following year, on the opening night of the Rolling Thunder Revue, he was questioned about belief in the deity by Allen Ginsberg. As Barry Miles, later the poet’s biographer, reconstructed the exchange, the answer was as follows: