Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (73 page)

Perhaps Polito had a point. Perhaps Dylan expects his borrowings to be ‘noticed’. Perhaps, too, he expects the people who buy his albums either to understand the folk process and the tactics of Modernism, or – and why not? – to fail to give a damn about a song’s origins if it’s a song worth hearing. Dylan is right about one thing. If simple plagiarism was the only issue, anyone could pull a book from the shelf and manufacture a Bob Dylan song. Whether
Chronicles
can be justified in the same manner is another question.

*

In the summer 2010 issue of the
New Haven Review
there appeared an essay by Scott Warmuth. You must presume the title was his. It amounted to the boldest headline yet where Dylan and his multiplicity of sources were concerned. ‘Bob Charlatan,’ it read, ‘Deconstructing Dylan’s
Chronicles: Volume One
.’ Clearly, Warmuth had moved on from defending the artist as an exemplar of ‘folk process’. The notion that a bunch of people armed with
The Poems of Henry Timrod
couldn’t come up with Bob Dylan songs no matter how hard they tried was no longer a relevant detail, it seemed, where the artist’s book was concerned. Charlatan is a word with no positive connotations.

On his blog, Goon Talk, much as in the September 2006
New York Times
piece, Warmuth describes himself as a writer, musician and disc jockey.
¹⁹
He scarcely does himself justice. Along with another blogger, Edward Cook, Warmuth has subjected a major artist to the kind of extensive crowd-sourced textual analysis that attracts attention. The attention, in turn, raises some serious questions where Bob Dylan’s art is concerned. After all, another word for charlatan is fraud.

Warmuth had made an appearance on the Dylan fan website Expecting Rain at the end of July 2009 with a series of observations on
Chronicles: Volume One
. It is fair to say they caused a good deal of interest among the faithful and a good deal of consternation. Warmuth observed, first, that a March 1961 issue of
Time
magazine had obviously been used to plug a great many gaps in Dylan’s memory while providing the basis for certain
Chronicles
anecdotes and the phrases employed in the telling. The blogger went on to explain that Ed Cook had been hard at work unearthing the debts owed by Dylan to a well-known book called
Really the Blues
, an autobiography written by the horn player Mezz Mezzrow with the help of the novelist Bernard Wolfe and published in 1946. Warmuth had added to the list of borrowings. Then the two men had uncovered more than a few traces of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu stories, and of a book called
Raised on Radio
, and of a volume entitled
Daily Life in Civil War America
, and of numerous lines from Jack London. Walt Whitman, Herman Melville and Timrod would be added to the list. Links with Marcel Proust and several Robert Louis Stevenson stories would be made. Most of the examples were better than plausible. As a certain kind of detective used to say, the game was afoot.

In his
New Haven Review
article, Warmuth came to the point quickly. Between them, he and Cook – entirely appropriately, a co-author of
The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation
– had discovered in
Chronicles
²⁰

an author, Bob Dylan, who has embraced camouflage to an astounding degree, in a book that is meticulously fabricated, with one surface concealing another, from cover to cover.

Dozens upon dozens of quotations and anecdotes have been incorporated from other sources. Dylan has hidden many puzzles, jokes, secret messages, secondary meanings, and bizarre subtexts in his book.

Warmuth called it ‘autobiographical alchemy’. To penetrate the mystery, he had ‘studied cryptography and puzzle-solving’, he had ‘explored techniques used by crossword-puzzle solving champions’ and then ‘keyed in on how code-breakers look for patterns and anomalies, try to find a way in, and then build on their successes’. Warmuth had studied ‘sideshow talkers and pitchmen’, books on poker strategy and cheating at cards. He had looked at the interlinked worlds of magic, carnivals, medicine shows, minstrel troupes and con men. Whether he had enjoyed listening to Bob Dylan albums while all this was going on was not mentioned. To begin with, as Warmuth admits in the essay, he did not know how any of his researches could be applied to the study of the artist’s work.
Chronicles
was, it appears, a gift.

Warmuth and Cook would come up with a dozen pages covering the Jack London connection alone. In his essay, the disc jockey would attempt to deal with the issue of whether plagiarism matters by conceding that London’s own wholesale thefts had done his reputation no lasting harm. Once the idea of codes and hidden meanings was established, at least to the writer’s satisfaction, the next question had become obvious: what was being concealed? Warmuth would end his article by concluding that an ‘initially invisible second book’ existed within the covers of
Chronicles
amid the ‘amalgam’ of voices that constituted Dylan’s singular American voice. On the way to reaching that judgement, the essay observes:

In reading
Chronicles: Volume One
, it may be worth ignoring the perception of motion and looking instead at individual frames as puzzles in their own right. While creating what is read as a narrative, Dylan, with all his samplings and borrowings, may have been seeking to freeze-frame his image and suggest shadows of his possible self.

Warmuth’s work continues. On the Goon Talk blog and elsewhere he continues to add to the stock of alleged Dylan borrowings. Others have joined him in the hunt. The search engine hits just keep on coming and the research effort is impressive, the results undeniably intriguing. Warmuth believes they add up to a kind of ‘treasure map’. You could as easily call them a schematic diagram of the inner Dylan. Sometimes the books cited are obvious enough, sometimes oddly discrepant. So here stand the shades of Juvenal, Hemingway, Ovid, Conrad, Baudelaire, Orwell, H.G. Wells, Homer, Carl Sandburg, Henry Miller, Willa Cather, Strindberg, Pynchon, Tennessee Williams and others besides. Here are Civil War histories, here an encyclopedia of desks. Here, as though to show that Dylan knows his pre-Beat stuff, is Kenneth Patchen’s
The Journal of Albion Moonlight
(1941).
²¹
One incidental service performed by Warmuth and Cook might be to have brought to a halt finally the game of speculative allusion hunting where Dylan is concerned. What point remains when a bibliography has been supplied? At the time of writing, Warmuth and like-minded souls are already hard at work unpicking
Tempest
, the artist’s 2012 album. On 12 August of that year, the blogger wrote:

Dylan’s
Chronicles: Volume One
is a vast palimpsest, with the words of many other writers coming through the text, hundreds and hundreds of times. When you are aware of what the original source material is you find that the subtext often subverts the surface text or adds another meaning to it that you could not be aware of initially.

If that is what the artist is doing, another small question remains to be answered: why he is doing it? Not, surely, for all the grief he has received. In April 2010, Joni Mitchell, veteran of the Rolling Thunder Revue, set Dylan watchers abuzz across the internet by telling an interviewer, ‘Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.’
²²
For the record, Mitchell’s given name was not Mitchell, nor did her parents know her as Joni, but she doesn’t answer to Roberta Joan Anderson. Still: ‘a deception’.

So again you wonder: to what purpose? Just to keep the money coming in? Or because the deceit, if that’s what it is, has gone on for so long Dylan has passed the point of no return? So where stand the songs against which no allegations have been laid? Plagiarism and deception, funnily enough, are not always as they seem. If Warmuth is right about
Chronicles
functioning as a palimpsest, you can as well argue that in all of his twenty-first-century creations the artist is simply doing what he has always done. He is turning the invented figure of Bob Dylan into an artwork. If that’s the case, and if borrowing is part of the method, why on earth would he list his sources?

In his own blog, Ralph the Sacred River, Edward Cook has tried to deal with the entire issue of plagiarism, sorting through definitions of allusion, ‘uncredited use’, the borrower’s intention or consciousness of the borrowing, passing off – presenting the work as the borrower’s own – and the ‘presumption of originality’. Cook accepts that the last of these is ‘weak’ within a folk process that depends, or once depended, on continual reuse and adaptation. He believes, however, that originality is presumed and expected in written work. Dylan is therefore ‘arguably guilty of plagiarism’ in
Chronicles
. Cook, a fan, believes furthermore that in ‘the last ten years or so [Dylan] has compensated for the waning of his creative powers by over-indulging in this borrowing habit, which reaches a high point in his own autobiography’.
²³
The conclusion is that he should therefore own up to the habit. You can only wonder what would then remain of the work created, shorn of the illusions that are supposed to be at the heart of the great conjuring trick.

As previously observed, neither Dylan nor his publishers calls
Chronicles
an autobiography. It ‘explores critical junctures in his life and career’, it is described as ‘an intimate and personal recollection of extraordinary times’, but it is nowhere identified as autobiographical. An interested reader might be entitled to ask what on earth the book is, in that case, but it remains safe to call it a work of literary art. Dylan tells a good story. He incorporates essential elements of the American experience. He functions as an artist. The point made by Warmuth and Dylan himself about the Timrod borrowings is another statement worth adapting. You could hand the keys to the artist’s apparently extensive library to thousands of people and each of them would fail to produce
Chronicles
. That might be the most important fact of all.

*

Chronicles: Volume One
will tell you a lot about Dylan. It won’t tell you what it appears to tell you. Even the deceits are not what they seem. You don’t need to go to the extravagant lengths of Warmuth and Cook – the former would call it ‘thoroughness’ – to grasp the degree of artifice in the book. Then again, anyone who finds Dylan a slippery memoirist should cast an eye over
Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes
(1975). This so-called postmodern autobiography mocks the idea of the story of a life truly told and offers up instead a seeming jumble of (possibly) connected fragments. French literature has been awash since the 1970s, in any case, with
autofiction
, the fictionalised autobiography, the autobiographical fiction. America has had its parallel ‘faction’ genre since Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
(1966) with Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and others following along behind. Some people glory in the ensuing complications. They better represent reality, it is argued, than anyone’s ‘true story’. In that context, Dylan’s book is a wholly modern exercise. And surely he knows it.

There is nothing new about seemingly autobiographical writing founded on the belief that all autobiography is a kind of fiction. The joke has been around at least since Laurence Sterne’s
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
(1759–67) (a book also misunderstood because of plagiarism charges). There is nothing new, either, about the conviction that all modern celebrity memoirs are hogwash, self-serving, mere inventions of the public-relations industry. Dylan has taken that dismal truth and turned it into something valuable. His peculiar dilemma, after all, is that he has spent half a century confronting people who demand ‘the truth’ about him when no such truth is available and when, as often as not, they begin from the conviction that he is forever playing games. Warmuth and Cook maintain that
Chronicles: Volume One
is the most elaborate game of all. They fancy that it can be played and won.

It is, of course, a hell of a way just to read and enjoy a book. Some of the arguments over Dylan’s borrowings and thefts could leave the impression that there is nothing more to
Chronicles: Volume One
than the writer’s unacknowledged debts. But the con artist, if that’s what he is, remains an artist. Among others things, the book contains a real sense of America’s past – the past from which we learn and borrow – and of the people who lived there, from Walt Whitman to Robert Johnson. It reminds you, if you needed reminding, that the writer is very well read, that books, borrowed or not, inform his art in unusual ways. Above all,
Chronicles
shows you what it is like to see the world through Bob Dylan’s eyes.

If a book that turns on the private world of memory means anything, this one gives you the author’s sense of himself, or at least his sense of the character whose name is on the cover of the book, the one identified as the real author. Expecting Bob Dylan to write the last word on Bob Dylan is like expecting a child to catch his own shadow.

*

Despite all controversies,
Chronicles
remained a bestseller in the years after its publication. One way or another, that should have been the end of Dylan’s difficulties with vigilant fans and the press. In September 2011, however, there came a postscript to all the arguments over use and misuse when an exhibition of 18 of his acrylic paintings opened at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. The affair would give even the staunchest defender of Dylan and postmodernist stratagems pause.

In 1994, he had published a book entitled
Drawn Blank
. It involved a collection of drawings he had made while on tour between 1989 and 1992. Several of the images – portraits, interiors, landscapes, still lifes, nudes, street scenes – were not at all bad. Dylan, it transpired, had developed his art to considerable effect since his lessons with Norman Raeben all those years before. He had an eye for composition, a seeming gift for rapid transcription. He could catch a moment.