Not long ago, in my capacity as a literary editor, I was exchanging emails with the eminent Dylanologist Clinton Heylin. Heylin wanted to review a new biography of Bob Dylan and I was sceptical. Could there be anything more to say about Dylan? Haven’t those ashes, by now, been thoroughly raked? “There have been so many,” I complained.
“You obviously know something I don’t,” Heylin replied with a steely good grace – because, needless to say, I knew, and he knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew, the chances of me knowing something he didn’t on the subject were as slim as the chances of His Bobness covering the Spice Girls as the closing number for one of his shows.
According to Heylin, the last new Dylan biography came out 19 years ago – and there are now a grand total of five, fewer than of Janis Joplin. I suspect Heylin might have a high standard for what counts as a biography worth counting, but let’s not split hairs. In any case, if he was right then he’s going to be a bit less right by the end of this year. This spring, in time for the great man’s 80th birthday, brings Paul Morley’s You Lose Yourself, You Reappear: The Many Voices Of Bob Dylan, Sean Latham’s The World Of Bob Dylan, a new edition of Howard Sounes’ seminal Down The Highway: The Life Of Bob Dylan... and, of course, leading the pack, a 700-page breeze-block called A Restless, Hungry Feeling: The Double Life Of Bob Dylan, Volume One 1941-1966 by, er, Clinton Heylin.
Anyway, I stand – a bit – by my position, which is that even if there aren’t quite as many books about Dylan as I assumed, most of us will still have the impression that there are dozens. Dylan impinges on the literary world more than any other rock or pop act. One of the most eminent critics in the language, Christopher Ricks, in Dylan’s Visions Of Sin, produced a series of close readings so ingenious I suspect him of lighting on allusions in the songs that Dylan will have had no idea existed. And why not? Dylan didn’t, after all, get the Nobel Prize in rock and pop.
And Dylan is literary. He is widely read, apt to drop a reference to Dante (“Tangled Up In Blue”) or Ezra Pound (“Desolation Row”) without it seeming showy (compare, unfavourably, Sting mispronouncing Nabokov’s name in “Don’t Stand So Close To Me” or The Cranberries singing about Yeat’s [sic] Grave). More than that, he flirts with the sort of meaninglessness poets flirt with, rather than the sort pop singers flirt with.
“I saw a white ladder all covered with water” has the same symbolist vibe as the rainwater on William Carlos Williams’ red wheelbarrow. Dylan’s lyrics are poetic in the way that they often follow the punning logic of language – “The sun’s not yellow: it’s chicken” – rather than the movement of thought. Most pop lyrics will settle on some clunking metaphor and hammer it to death; Dylan’s imagery is more fugitive, his points of view more plural.
But why Dylan in particular? Sure, he’s the best, but is he really in a lyrics-as-literature class of one? Kurt Cobain never gets the credit as a lyricist he deserves (I’d like to see Ricks go to town on “A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido”) and though hats are tipped to Leonard Cohen, Neil Young or Nicks Cave and Drake, they still aren’t usually featured in the same category.
My hunch is that it’s in part a matter of sociology: a generation of bookish young men doing English degrees in the heyday of “new critical” close reading were just the right age to grow up with Dylan. He allowed a lot of Eng-lit nerds to wear leather jackets and they returned the favour in the way they had the chops for.
But there’s a point that bears making – against our eagerness to make him a poet. Dylan, like any rock lyricist, draws on the resources of poetry, but he’s doing something different. A song lyric is designed to work with – and sometimes against – the music. Poetry works against silence. That makes a difference. You might not know from the lyrics alone, for instance, that “Idiot Wind” is a love song.
A good poem needs good words. A good song can be none the worse for having absolute drivel as a lyric. (On a good day I can even forgive Led Zeppelin for “’Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor, I met a girl so fair”.) So Dylan’s work can be called literature, if you like, but let’s not call him a poet. Something is happening here, to quote the man himself, but you don’t know what it is.
