Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (71 page)

It was impossible to say how or if the episodes connected with one another, far less with Dylan’s memories of his Greenwich Village youth. In his
New York Times
Sunday review Tom Carson wrote that ‘the major surprise of
Chronicles
is its literary cunning, which is partly structural’. The reviewer argued that vignettes of Dylan ‘beleaguered’ in 1970 and as the ‘weary lion’ of 1987 were deliberate counterpoints to the tales, placed before and after, of New York and the Village in 1961. This was a generous interpretation. What the reviewer called this ‘narrative ploy, this convolution’ might have echoed movie flashbacks – Carson nominated a famous sequence in
The Godfather Part II
– but in film that technique is intended to make plain the connections between past and present. If that was what Dylan was doing, he didn’t bother to make any of his aims clear.

Most reviewers didn’t mind in the slightest. Given only
Tarantula
to go on, they were taken aback by the fact that the singer had turned out to be such an accomplished prose stylist. Fake or not, the authorial voice was a real achievement, a convincing blend of cunning, wit and conversational tone. In the
New York Times
, Janet Maslin welcomed a book of ‘amazing urgency’.
⁹
Nevertheless, a journalist who had been observing Dylan for as long as most people in her trade was not deceived by the author’s guile.

Deliberately, no doubt,
Chronicles: Volume One
beggars the efforts of biographers to reconstruct Mr Dylan’s inner workings. With no great interest in the supposed landmark events of his life or even in the specific chronology or geography of his movements, he prefers to mine a different kind of memory. And he once again makes his homage to Woody Guthrie – another figure not known for autobiographical exactitude – with a writing style both straight-shooting and deeply fanciful.

The tale told by the ‘Holden Caulfield of Hibbing, Minn’, as Maslin styled the author, was ‘lucid without being linear, swirling through time without losing its strong storytelling thread. And it begins and ends at more or less the same place: the calm before the storm …’ Approbation for the book was all but universal. In
The
Guardian
, Mike Marqusee, having written extensively on the subject’s 1960s career, said that ‘with this rich, intermittently preposterous, often tender work, Bob Dylan has delivered more than many of us dared hope for’. In the
Sunday Times
, Bryan Appleyard said, straightforwardly, that
Chronicles: Volume One
was ‘an extremely good book indeed, actually a great one’. In the
Boston Globe
, Carlo Wolff argued that the work ‘affirms Dylan’s idiosyncrasies and his mastery of the vernacular. As his best songs also show, he’s a great reporter with a talent for vivid detail.’
Chronicles
, Wolff added, is ‘packed with ruminations on musical theory, sharp and humorous commentary, flashes of poetry – and facts filtered and colored to flummox, entertain, and illuminate’.
¹⁰
It was enough to make any author weep tears of gratitude.

*

Almost two years after the release of
‘Love and Theft’
in September 2001, a curious tale had appeared on the front page of the
Wall Street Journal
.
¹¹
It involved a 62-year-old Japanese writer and doctor and the then 62-year-old Dylan. Junichi Saga had only a slight knowledge of the American singer – ‘I’m not familiar with these things,’ he told the paper – but the American, it was suggested, had clearly come to know something about Saga’s oral history of a Japanese mobster and former patient, a book translated into English in 1991 as
Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld
. In fact, as the article proceeded to explain, there were some striking similarities between passages in certain songs on Dylan’s
‘Love and Theft’
album and the dying gangster’s story of the loves and life of a thief. The resemblances did not seem accidental.

It had been noticed back in 2001 that the artist had set the title of his album in quotation marks. The gesture had been treated as an acknowledgement, playful or rueful, that Dylan had borrowed a phrase from Eric Lott’s 1993 book
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
. That study had attempted to untangle the complicated, century-long story of white responses to black culture, as represented by the white ‘minstrels’ who had once performed in preposterous ‘negro’ costumes with banjos on their knees and burnt cork on their faces. It was incidental to Lott’s main point, but the salience to Dylan and all the other young white men who took up – or stole away – the blues in the 1950s and 1960s was obvious. As the author had mentioned in passing, ‘Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.’
¹²

If it did not amount to an acceptance of the charge, Dylan’s use of Lott’s title – itself a theft, obviously enough – had been a tacit admission that the accusation had force. He didn’t feel guilty about it, necessarily – he venerated the blues and blues musicians – but Dylan had raided black culture at every step of his career. Who had not? Like a lot of his contemporaries, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, oblivious to every contradiction, he had seen no problem with that. In 2003, however, the
Wall Street Journal
seemed to be saying that contemporary issues of love and theft might be at once more straightforward and more troubling than the artist’s fans realised.

The
Journal
’s headline had gone to the point: ‘Did Bob Dylan lift lines from Dr Saga?’ If he had not, similarities between
‘Love and Theft’
songs and odd passages in the Japanese book (as translated) were near-impossible to explain. ‘My old man would sit there like a feudal lord …’ ran the book. ‘My old man, he’s like some feudal lord / Got more lives than a cat,’ went the song entitled ‘Floater (Too Much to Ask)’. ‘Actually, though, I’m not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded,’ a sentence in
Confessions of a Yakuza
began. ‘I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound / I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife,’ Dylan sang in ‘Floater’.

There were other examples in the
Journal
story, some rather less convincing as examples of alleged plagiarism. The book: ‘If it bothers you so much,’ she’d say, ‘why don’t you just shove off?’ ‘Floater’: ‘Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off / If it bothers you so much?”’
Confessions
: ‘“Break the roof in!” he yelled. [He] splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside.’ Dylan’s ‘Summer Days’: ‘Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift / Gonna break the roof in – set fire to the place as a parting gift.’

In those cases, the worst that might have been said of the singer was that, consciously or unconsciously, he had adapted a few images and common phrases. One or two of the examples marshalled against him could even have been dismissed entirely as inevitable coincidences in the wide, busy world of literature. What’s a writer to do if he wants to describe trees without echoing someone else’s description of trees? Saga: ‘They were big, those trees – a good four feet across the trunk …’ Dylan’s ‘Floater’: ‘There’s a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town / The old one is long gone / Timber two-foot-six across / Burns with the bark still on.’

The affair had come to light when Chris Johnson, a young American teaching English in Japan – but originally from Dylan’s home state of Minnesota – had chanced upon a copy of
Confessions of a Yakuza
in a bookshop in the city of Fukuoka. The Japanese edition of Saga’s work was by then out of print; the English version had sold a reported 25,000 copies. It was the ‘feudal lord’ line on the first page of the gangster’s narrative that had caught Johnson’s eye. A Dylan fan, he had begun to search, so the
Journal
reported, for further examples of imitation, adaptation or theft. What struck him was that Dylan had not taken ‘the most poetic or most powerful lines from the book’. In fact, the borrowings appeared to the young teacher to have been almost random. Interviewed by the newspaper, Johnson had nevertheless offered up what must have sounded to the newsroom like the perfect disingenuous quote. ‘I kind of wondered if he had done a lot of that before on other albums,’ he had said. ‘But if he’d been doing this all along, somebody would have caught him a long time ago.’

What had Dylan been doing exactly? ‘Floater’ is 16 verses and 64 lines long. It is set in the rural American South. It has nothing whatever to do, in tone or theme, with Japan or Japanese gangsters. A quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
had already been spotted lurking within
‘Love and Theft’
. Was that also an act of plagiarism, or precisely the sort of homage you would expect from one American writer to another, an invocation of shared experience, a deepening of the national literature? A piece of verse by the little-read Civil War poet Henry Timrod, the catchily titled ‘Vision of Poesy’, would also be linked with Dylan’s
‘Love and Theft’
track ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. In the ’60s, the singer would have been lauded to the skies for the breadth of his literary knowledge. Journalists and academics would never have tired of quizzing the cultured pop poet about his book habits. By the twenty-first century, thanks to plagiarism scandals of its own involving thefts more flagrant than anything of which Dylan stood accused, thanks to the internet’s corrosive effects on copyright, thanks to corporate media’s increasingly hysterical efforts to defend intellectual property against any unlicensed use, fair or otherwise, all unacknowledged quotation was being treated by the press as theft. It became, as it remains, an obsession for America’s cultural arbiters. Yet this was in the era, ironically enough, of sampling, of the mash-up, the era born of the pop-art collage and Warhol’s Factory. Eliot’s
The Waste Land
would have been put to the sword – ‘Did Nobel Prize winner lift lines from St Augustine?’ – in such a fervid climate of opinion. Dylan stood no chance. He had not heard the last of it, either.

In the writing of ‘Floater’ stray pieces of Saga’s text had helped him to achieve rhymes. That detail had been overlooked: the good doctor had not attempted poetry. There is not much doubt, equally, that Dylan helped himself to a few words, but their true worth and weight, their real significance, is arguable, at best. One verse of his song, nothing special by his standards, goes:

You could call it American pastoral, an invocation of rural poverty in former times, a scene from a folk tale. You would have to call it culturally specific: tattooed Japanese gangsters are nowhere heard or seen. The
Wall Street Journal
made no mention in its front-page story of what ‘Floater’ might be about, or of Dylan’s possible artistic purpose in the song. An admirer might regret that he was careless enough to throw in a few images and phrases he had picked up, but the charge of plagiarism only sticks if it involves intentionally passing off substantial parts of another’s work as your own. Dylan seems to have come close – his
Lyrics 1962–2001
(2004) makes no mention of sources – but not close enough for conclusions to be drawn. You have to ignore the songs entirely to call the offence heinous.

Consider this comparative exercise.
Confessions
: ‘My mother … was the daughter of a wealthy farmer … [She] died when I was 11 … I heard that my father was a travelling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him. [My uncle] was a nice man, I won’t forget him … After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.’ The frequent ellipses are interesting, let’s say. Now here’s Dylan’s ‘Po’ Boy’:

Mother dies, travelling salesman, nice man, ‘did a lot of nice things’: that’s the sum total of the evidence. Dylan had taken cues from stray passages in a book he had picked up and used them to make a distinct piece of art, yet he stood accused not of creativity but of plagiarism. Another very funny passage in ‘Po’ Boy’, especially when delivered in Dylan’s deadpan voice, goes as follows:

Plagiarism from Shakespeare, then? That bard knew the game of beg, borrow or steal better than anyone. Given that Dylan’s po’ boy has a shaky knowledge of the Moor’s tragedy, or a sly appreciation of the comic potential of acting dumb, it would be silly to say that something underhand is going on in this part of the song. It would be no sillier, however, than a suggestion of theft that paid not the slightest attention to what the artist had done with the allegedly stolen goods. There are several clear examples of Dylan appropriating Saga’s translated words. Amid this small fuss, however, there were very few instances of the artist’s accusers mentioning what Dylan was attempting in the finished songs of
‘Love and Theft’
. The bigger game, evident since
Newsweek
had printed the wholly false ‘rumor’ that he was not the author of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, was to prove that Dylan was, in some way, a fraud.
¹³
Saga’s ‘feudal lord’ line, the one that would be quoted repeatedly as some sort of clincher, will serve as a final example. In isolation, the use of the phrase seems lethal to any defence of Dylan. But what happens to it in the context of the song?