Читать книгу Why Dylan Matters - Richard Thomas F. - Страница 11
ОглавлениеDYLAN AND ANCIENT ROME: “THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN”
GOIN’ BACK TO ROME / THAT’S WHERE I WAS BORN.
—BOB DYLAN, “GOING BACK TO ROME,” 1963
IF YOU WERE BORN AROUND THIS TIME OR WERE LIVING AND ALIVE, YOU COULD FEEL THE OLD WORLD GO AND THE NEW ONE BEGINNING. IT WAS LIKE PUTTING THE CLOCK BACK TO WHEN BC BECAME AD.
—BOB DYLAN, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, P. 28
In March 2007, I traveled to the University of Minnesota for a symposium in Bob Dylan’s home state titled Highway 61 Revisited: Dylan’s Road from Minnesota to the World. The conference was designed to coincide with the exhibition Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956–66, concurrently taking place at the university’s Weisman Art Museum. Many of the best-known Dylan scholars were in attendance: Michael Gray, C. P. Lee, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Stephen Scobie. The symposium was evidence that Dylan had become part of the academic mainstream. But that fact alone was not what drew me to the north woods along with the other Dylanologists. It was something more: the opportunity to come together to discuss Dylan in this place where his genius had first come into being, at the university where Bob Zimmerman was technically enrolled in 1959–60, just a few blocks from Dinkytown and the coffeehouses where he began in earnest to practice and perfect the art he would take out into the world.
The day before the conference, like many of the others attending, I signed up for a guided bus tour of Hibbing, Minnesota, the town where Dylan grew up. Hibbing is situated about seventy miles northwest of the city of Duluth, built on the rich iron ore of the Mesabi Iron Range, and at the edge of the town lies the world’s largest open-pit iron mine. Dylan was born in Duluth on May 24, 1941, and grew up in Hibbing after his family moved there when he was six years old. The bus ride itself was memorable and scenic, as we headed north from Minneapolis on Highway 61, the road that follows the Mississippi all the way down to New Orleans, and rode through pine stands, past the Frank Lloyd Wright gas station in Cloquet, then on into Hibbing. We were a busload of about forty-five Dylanologists and assorted Dylan fans, including a young guy whose name tag read Jack Fate—the character played by Dylan in the underappreciated 2003 film Masked and Anonymous, as he was eager to explain to the few who needed explaining. Jack was handing out Highway 61 bumper stickers.
We eventually found ourselves standing in the library of Hibbing High—the magnificent “Castle in the Wilderness,” as it’s known—from which Robert Zimmerman graduated in 1959. Our tour guide, John “Dan” Bergan, a now-retired English teacher at Hibbing High, had been a classmate of Dylan’s younger brother, David Zimmerman. David graduated five years after Bob and was “a terrifically talented musician in his own right,” according to Bergan. Our busload of pilgrims was also treated to a talk by eighty-three-year-old B. J. Rolfzen, who had once been Dylan’s English teacher. You could tell he must have been a dynamic teacher fifty years earlier, engaged by poetry and with a fire for conveying the magic of literature to his students. Music journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus has described this moment from Rolfzen’s talk:
Presumably we were there to hear his reminiscences about the former Bob Zimmerman—or, as Rolfzen called him, and never anything else, Robert. Rolfzen held up a slate where he’d chalked lines from “Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher / If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen pointed to the tour member who was sitting in the seat directly in front of the desk. “I always stood in front of the desk, never behind it,” he said. “And that’s where Robert always sat.” He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “I was born here and I’ll die here / Against my will.” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right here. I don’t care what’s on the other side,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to be learning from a student. With that out of the way, he proceeded to teach a class in poetry.
The Hibbing experience was all part of what later came to seem to me a carefully staged tour. It reminded me of a visit I’d taken a few years earlier to Max Gate, the house that novelist and poet Thomas Hardy designed and lived in on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset, England, from 1885 till his death in 1928. Or else it was a bit like visiting the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. As a 2016 headline in the CTPost put it, “Mark Twain fan visits his Hartford mansion, finds it’s like communing with a long-lost friend.” Whatever we think we are doing on such journeys, what moves us is the sense of being at the wellspring of artistic creation, where creative genius began to form the art that would become central to our own lives and imaginations. In Hartford, we’re looking for Huck or Tom. In Dorsetshire, we’re hoping to run into some sign of Tess or the mayor of Casterbridge. Likewise, in Hibbing, we were all there looking for something to connect us to the Dylan we had known back in our youth and been with ever since. We were hoping to find it in the magnificent Hibbing High auditorium, where the fifteen-year-old Bob Zimmermann had played with his band, singing and pounding out a Little Richard tune on the piano, as recalled by his then friend John Bucklen:
He got up there … in this talent program at school, came out on stage with some bass player and drummer, I can’t remember who they were, and he started singing in his Little Richard style, screaming, pounding the piano, and my first impression was that of embarrassment, because the little community of Hibbing, Minnesota, way up there, was unaccustomed to such a performance.
I think we could all imagine that event, but in 2007, fifty years after the show, it was hard to get close. Bob wasn’t there, but it was also easy to imagine him up on the stage looking out at the audience in the elegantly upholstered seats of the 1,805-capacity auditorium of which Dan Bergan, who wrote a booklet on the school, rightly noted, in language that, like the auditorium, seemed remote from the hard realities of the Iron Range:
Nowhere in the United States can one find a high school auditorium—perhaps any auditorium—of such incomparable beauty, of such ornate and elaborate decoration … the auditorium features a 40- by 60-foot stage, framed by its 20- by 40-foot proscenium arch whose borders are marked by massive pillars with composite capitals in gold rising on each side of the stage.
Dylan would soon enough be performing at Carnegie Hall in New York and at the London Palladium, but that stage in Hibbing was not a bad place to start. This auditorium must be emblazoned in his mind. The nostalgia involved in the activation and exploration of memory is something that is essential to Dylan—as he said in 1967, “You can change your name / but you can’t run away from yourself.”
After visiting Hibbing High, our group, a little ragged from the warmth of the early spring day, made the short three-block walk from the school down Seventh Avenue, now “Bob Dylan Drive,” to the corner of Twenty-Fifth Street, and the house Bob Dylan grew up in. According to the Iron Range Tourism Bureau, it is no longer open to the public—“drive-by visits only”—but on that day the owner had actually opened its doors and allowed us to go into the front living room, where he had set up a display of Dylan memorabilia on a coffee table. There was a Dylan song playing, I can’t quite remember which one, and I think all of us felt a combination of pleasure at having arrived at such a place, along with slight embarrassment to be intruding in the inner sanctum. I was relieved that a request to visit the bedroom was declined, though some went around the side of the house to look up at its window. The owner of the house told us about Dylan’s own occasional visits over the years. He would spend time up in the bedroom of his old house, presumably making contact with memories of listening on the radio to the music that would form him, first gospel blues and country, later rock and roll. He surely found his teenage self on these occasions.
Lunch was at Zimmy’s, which has since closed as the town continues its economic decline. Some of us bought very unauthorized-looking Zimmy’s T-shirts, along with copies of B. J. Rolfzen’s memoir, The Spring of My Life, a self-published book in ninety-five pages of Courier font—and an interesting account in its own right of growing up poor in post-Depression America. The bus also took us a few miles out of town for a visit to the famous iron ore pit that you can see from the moon. The best ore was long gone, even when Dylan was growing up, and it was easy to connect to the song “North Country Blues” from The Times They Are A-Changin’—a mining blues folk song Dylan would sing at the Newport Folk Festival on July 26, 1963, then once again, for the last time at a concert, at Carnegie Hall, on October 26 of the same year. “This is a song about iron ore mines, and—a, iron ore town,” he said at Newport. The song is in the voice of a woman, as we discover only in the fourth verse, brought up by her brother, who falls victim to the mines, following the same end as her father. In a final blow her husband deserts her and her three children. Dylan had written the song following a trip back to Hibbing, before the public discovered that he had grown up in the town. Andrea Svedberg broke the news of that reality in a Newsweek article published the Monday after the Carnegie Hall concert.
Once the Hibbing connection was made, “North Country Blues” was too easily situated in Hibbing and to the background of Bob Zimmerman, despite its narrator’s female voice and the far different details of its story. Maybe that was why Dylan sang it only once more, in 1974 at a benefit concert for the Friends of Chile. By 2001, when “Floater (Too Much to Ask)” came out, Dylan cared less about people knowing where he came from, and B. J. Rolfzen in his talk is not the only one to have detected autobiographical undertones to the song, both in the lines he quoted and in the ending of the same verse, on the young people of the town:
They all got out of here any way they could
The cold rain can give you the shivers
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee
All the rest of them rebel rivers
By the time of that song, 2001, Dylan’s real identity and background was even more beside the point. While “North Country Blues” is a song that can be tied to the hard lives of those who worked and died in the mines of Hibbing, Minnesota, it is even more a song that came more from the folk tradition of mining songs, and especially from the fertile mind of Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, our group soon enough boarded the bus and headed south, following his fifty-year-old trail, to the University of Minnesota, and the next day for coffee in Dinkytown, where he went in the fall of 1959 to take up the art of folksinger performance on his way to Greenwich Village and destiny. The conference itself was memorable enough, but what has stuck in my mind most is that day, spent in the little Minnesota town of Hibbing.
LATIN AND THE LATIN CLUB, HIBBING, 1956–57
As the only classicist in the group, I was also in Hibbing looking for something else, for traces of a bond I shared with Bob Dylan that for me dated back to 1959, when I began studying Latin at the age of nine. Following lunch at Zimmy’s, I slipped out and walked the two blocks to the Hibbing Public Library. One of the waitresses had told me there was a Dylan exhibit there, featuring a copy of the Hematite, Dylan’s high school yearbook from 1959, the year he graduated. The Hematite was named for the mineral form of iron oxide that brought wealth to the town, and had in the days before the main lode dried up paid for the building of its magnificent school. I had already seen page 76 of the yearbook, at a Dylan exhibit in Seattle in 2005, and in the Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, so I knew what to expect. On that yearbook page the life and career of the future Nobel laureate was summed up in just three details:
Robert Zimmerman: to join “Little Richard”—
Latin Club 2; Social Studies Club 4.
Plenty has been written about Bob’s early interest in Little Richard, one of the foundational singers of rock and roll, whose hit “Tutti Frutti” shot up in the charts at the end of 1955, when Bob was a freshman at Hibbing High. By the following fall, backed by the Shadow Blasters, his name for the first band he had put together, Bob Zimmerman was himself now imitating the songs and stage antics of Little Richard. Indeed, the head shot of Bob Zimmerman at the top of that same yearbook page even alluded to the identity his notice craved, in the form of his trademark Little Richard pompadour hair style. This was well before he started taking on the persona, and the look, of Woody Guthrie as he headed for the folksinging scenes of Greenwich Village.
But few have paid much attention to his membership in the Latin Club. With his newfound performing interests, and from the evidence of his dropping off the honor roll from 1956 to 1958—he made it back on for his last year—his later claim to be interested in nothing beyond his music (liner notes, Biograph, 1985) might seem credible enough, though mostly on piano, not yet guitar. But right around this time he was also turning up to Latin class and to Latin Club meetings, and he certainly posed for the group photo of the club that came out in the 1957 Hematite. Bob Zimmerman’s enrollment file “disappeared” years ago from the meticulously kept records of the school, but we know that he was taking Latin and learning about Rome that same year he put his first band together. In addition to the yearbook, the school paper, the Hibbing Hi Times, for November 30, 1956, in the regular “Club Notes” column also gives us a unique rarity, a record, unimpaired by the potentially creative memory of those friends who later recalled this or that detail—part of a day in the life of the fifteen-year-old:
SOCIETAS LATINA HOLDS INITIATION
Societas Latina [Latin Club] held its annual initiation party and ceremony for new members recently in the high school cafeteria. Several associated members of the club were present also.
Second-year students vied on a mock TV program, answering questions on Roman gods and goddesses and identifying words dealing with various phases of Roman life. Winners were awarded prizes. After the formal pledge of allegiance by new members, initiates received badges and were raised from the status of slave to that of plebeians. Members then adjourned to the punch bowl where Consul Mary Ann Peterson and Anna Marie Forsmann, in Roman dress, presided.
Consul Joe Perpich, assisted by Dennis Wickman, Bob Zimmerman, and John Milinovich, was in charge of the formal induction and radio program.
For whatever reason, interest in the Roman gods and goddesses, helping with the radio, or the favorable gender imbalance (fifty girls to fourteen boys)—or all three—Bob Zimmerman was a member of the Hibbing High Latin Club. The only other information about the Latin Club comes with the paper’s issue for March 15, 1957, in the spring of Bob’s membership year, under the headline LATIN CLUB EDITS IDES OF MARCH NEWS:
Societas Latina members today published a paper to celebrate the death of Caesar on the Ides of March (March 15). The paper included Roman history, an original poem, cartoons, and many other items with a Roman background.
Any trace of that paper is long gone, but it is safe to assume Bob Zimmerman played some role in the celebration. Almost sixty years later, as we’ll see, Dylan was quoted as saying, “If I had to do it all over again, I’d be a schoolteacher—probably teach Roman history or theology.”
We can’t be sure what got Bob Zimmerman interested in Latin and the Romans, but it looks as if those interests started in the years before he walked into Miss Irene Walker’s Latin class in the fall of 1956. Bob’s uncle owned the Lybba, named after Dylan’s great-grandmother, one of the town’s four movie theaters, along with the State, and the Gopher, like the Lybba both just a few blocks from his home, the fourth a drive-in. The early to mid-1950s saw an intensification of movies about Greece and Rome, the latter in particular, along with biblical movies, with or without Romans. This was part of a post–World War II, Cold War–generated escape into the relative security of antiquity: swords and sandals, rather than the atom bomb. At the same time, these years saw the height of McCarthyism and the blacklisting of Hollywood actors, producers, and directors. The ancient world could be used as a medium for camouflaging contemporary red-baiting while depicting persecutions emanating not from Washington, D.C., and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but rather from the city of Rome: between 1950 and 1956, when Bob decided to take up Latin, any number of such movies were available for him to have seen, including Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1953 hit version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, starring Marlon Brando, one of Dylan’s favorites, who got the best actor nomination for his role as Mark Antony.
In these years the following movies about the ancient world were available for Bob Zimmerman to see, free at the Lybba, or at either of the other two theaters, opening on the following dates:
Serpent of the Nile: Gopher, July 26, 1953
The Robe: State, January 1, 1954 (and its sequel):
Demetrius and the Gladiators: Lybba, June 24, 1954
Julius Caesar: State, February 9, 1955
The Silver Chalice: State, February 11, 1955
Jupiter’s Darling: Lybba, March 11, 1955
Helen of Troy: State, March 4, 1956
Alexander the Great: Lybba, June 16, 1956
In 1951 he may have been too young for Quo Vadis, with Peter Ustinov as the lyre-playing emperor Nero, but it probably made a return visit in the years that followed. By the time Ben-Hur came out in 1959, Bob Zimmerman was moving on, though he claimed in an interview that the book on which the movie was based was part of the scriptural reading he did in his youth, just as he mentions The Robe and the 1961 King of Kings as early influences. There is not much else to do in Hibbing, particularly in the cold of the northern Minnesota winter, whether or not the theater is owned by your uncle.
I know I’m not the only classicist who was attracted to the world of Rome by Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 movie, Spartacus, starring Kirk Douglas, which I first saw as an eleven-year-old. That movie opened at the Lybba on December 29, 1961, when Bob Dylan was back in Hibbing from his first year in Greenwich Village, for the end-of-year holidays—a year later he chose to visit Rome, and on his return to Greenwich Village sang a song he had just written, “Goin’ Back to Rome.” These movies were beginning to peter out when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton gave us Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Mankiewicz’s lavish 1963 epic, Cleopatra. Such things happen. Bob Zimmerman moved on, dropped Latin and stuck with his music, and became Bob Dylan. But my contention is that the memory of his contact with classical antiquity, like the memory of everything else, stayed with him, and had a similar early influence on the evolution of his music, as did the poetry he read in B. J. Rolfzen’s English class and his own extensive and varied reading.
According to Dylan’s own account in Chronicles: Volume One, published in 2004, the Rome of Hibbing makes one more appearance in his high school days, by way of the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a touring group that came to town to act out the suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus. It seems they also needed locals to play the part of extras, as Dylan fondly recalls:
One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet—breastplate, the works—a non-speaking role, but it didn’t matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic … as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible. That seemed a million years ago now, a million private struggles and difficulties ago.
Who knows what year this was, perhaps Dylan’s sophomore year of high school, when members of the Hibbing High Latin Club got to take on such roles. If he was a Roman soldier, he presumably participated in the scene depicted in the gospels where Roman soldiers cast lots to see who will get the tunic of the crucified Jesus—both scenes familiar to him from The Robe and King of Kings. Bob Dylan revisited that scene in the 1975 song “Shelter from the Storm,” where the singer’s role is different, but reminiscent of the play he refers to in Chronicles. First “she walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns,” suggesting an identification with Jesus Christ, and four verses later “In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes / I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose.” It doesn’t matter whether his role as a Roman soldier was a reality or one of the many inventions and embellishments in his memoir, though the former seems more likely in this case. In his mind, back in 1957 and an epoch later in 2004, the road from Hibbing, like all roads, led to Rome. Dylan went back to Rome again, and to his role as a Roman soldier, in his Nobel lecture, delivered on June 5, 2017. In the lecture, he discusses three books that influenced him since grammar school, All Quiet on the Western Front, Moby-Dick, and the Odyssey, and describes the experience of Paul Bäumer, the soldier-narrator of All Quiet as being like “You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”
In Dylan’s 2006 song “Ain’t Talkin’,” the narrator says, “I’ll avenge my father’s death, then I’ll step back.” While the avenging of a father’s death may initially suggest Hamlet, one of Dylan’s favorite plays, I believe the echoes of the line may also lead to Rome, and to the aftermath of the killing of Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44 BC, the event celebrated by the Latin Club in 1957. As is now well known, “Ain’t Talkin’ ” steals a number of verses from the exile poems of the Roman poet Ovid, banished in AD 8 by the emperor Augustus to the desolate shores of the Black Sea. When Augustus took control through civil war and came to rule over the Roman Empire, he presented himself as restoring the state from the slavery imposed by Brutus and the other assassins of Julius Caesar:
Those who killed my father I drove into exile, by way of the courts, exacting vengeance for their crime. … I did not accept absolute power that was offered to me.
The reality was otherwise, of course. Augustus maintained the trappings of republic, but in effect his power was absolute; he avenged his father’s death, but he did not step back.
Whatever the impulse, for Bob Dylan the city of Rome, and along with it the culture of the ancient Romans, came to hold a special place over the years. We’ll never know for sure what all those movies and his membership in the Latin Club have to do with this productive association, but the fact is that Rome and the Romans turned up in his songs from early on, and they continue to play a role in his creative imagination.
DYLAN AND CATULLUS
Folk music and the blues may be seen as the primary reservoir of Dylan’s words and melodies for pretty much all of his music that followed. Rock and roll was the musical staple of his high school years, and it remained a part of him as he soaked up the various folk traditions, in Dinkytown in Minneapolis, and later in Greenwich Village. But folk was the old from which the new would emerge. For the youth of America, rock and roll was generational; it belonged to them. It cleared out the music of their parents, the era before immediately after World War II, the Great American Songbook, given voice by Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Tony Bennett—the mine to which Dylan would return, starting with the 2015 album Shadows in the Night. With what was happening, musically and culturally in the mid-1960s, Bob Dylan’s genius was in the right time and the right place.
Something similar was happening in the middle part of the first century BC in Rome. Traditional forms of literature, drama, and early epic poetry were coming to be perceived as old-fashioned, precisely as society was opening up in other ways. A clash of cultures was taking place in Rome during this period, similar to the clash that would begin to take place in post-sixties America. Among other now-lost poets of antiquity, flourishing in the two decades before Julius Caesar was killed, was a rare survivor, an ancient Roman poet who can usefully be compared to Dylan, the avant-garde lyric poet Catullus. He died young (c. 54 BC) after creating a body of work that electrified Roman readers, reflected the turmoil and the modernity of Roman times, and changed the course of literary history.
Catullus has long been one of my favorite poets. For me, no other poet, except maybe Dylan, has been able to convey a sense of the pain caused by the loss of love as intensely as Catullus. Dylan wouldn’t begin to make creative use of the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome until the albums he released in the twenty-first century, even though he had long been living in the Rome of his memory and imagination.
In his 2007 movie, I’m Not There, director Todd Haynes used Dylan’s 1966 song “I Want You” for a scene in which Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing the roles of Robbie and Claire, immediately recognizable versions of Bob and Sara Lownds, first fall in love. The song encapsulates first love, joyous, and just right for that moment, with its highly poetic verses and its simple, direct refrain: “I want you, I want you / I want you so bad / Honey, I want you.” Catullus too captured in his poetry the first flush of love, for instance in one of his “kiss” poems: “Suns can set and then come back again, / When our short day sets once and for all, / our night must be forever to be slept. / Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred, / then another thousand and second hundred, / then still another thousand, then a hundred.”
But the lyrics of Catullus and of Dylan mostly share a focus on love that is lost, that doesn’t work out—that’s where the poetry is. So, for instance, Catullus Poem 11, one of his last poems to Lesbia, the name he gave to the Muse (recalling Sappho, who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos), who inspired his love song. He begins with an address to two acquaintances, whose task it will be to take a message to Lesbia: “You who are ready to try out / whatever the will of the gods will bring / Take a brief message to my old girlfriend / words that she won’t like. / Let her live and be well with her three hundred lovers, / Not really truly loving them / but screwing them all again and again.” The poem ends by shifting the brutal tone and bringing out the hurt and the love that is still there: “Let her not look back for my love as before / which through her fault has fallen like a flower on the edge of a meadow / nicked by the blade of a passing plough.”
By 1975, whatever the realities of his relationship with his wife, Sara, Dylan was, like Catullus as time went by, approaching the end of a relationship in trouble, and he constructed a lyric voice that made art from that situation. The song we already saw, “If You See Her, Say Hello,” is similarly about a relationship that is over:
If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so
The song, separated from the autobiographical, is like Catullus’s poem, and is there for anyone who has shared that loss and hurt. Like Catullus, Dylan too imagines the rival who has supplanted him: “If you’re making love to her …” Back in Ann Arbor, I was reading the Latin poetry of one, and listening to the songs of the other. And that is how Catullus and Dylan, both lyric poets, sharing common human situations across twenty centuries, have become inextricably linked in my mind, and why they belong together.
Catullus would have been much more familiar in America in the early 1960s, as is clear from an early scene from Cleopatra. It was the highest-grossing film of 1963, won four Academy Awards, and still lost money, so costly was its production. It is highly likely that Dylan, like millions in America and around the world, saw it that year, as I did back in New Zealand. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, kittenish and scantily clad on her couch in Alexandria, receives a visit from Rex Harrison’s Julius Caesar. Richard Burton’s Mark Antony is waiting in the wings, and will take over after the assassination of Caesar on those Ides of March. Her spies have reported on Caesar’s movements:
CLEOPATRA: This morning early, you paid a formal visit to the tomb of Alexander. You remained alone beside his sarcophagus for some time. … And then you cried. Why did you cry, Caesar?
CAESAR, CHANGING THE SUBJECT: That man recites beautifully. Is he blind?
AN ATTENDANT: Don’t you hurt him.
CAESAR: I won’t. Not anyone who speaks Catullus so well.
CLEOPATRA: Catullus doesn’t approve of you. Why haven’t you had him killed?
CAESAR: Because I approve of him.
CAESAR, TO THE YOUNG SINGER, HIS WORDS MEANT FOR CLEOPATRA:
Young man, do you know this of Catullus?
Give me a thousand and a thousand kisses
When we have many thousands more,
we will scramble them to get the score,
So envy will not know how high the count
And cast its evil eye.
Several scenes later, once Cupid’s work is done and Caesar and Cleopatra are lovers, she lies back on her bed and volunteers, “I’ve been reading your commentaries, about your campaigns in Gaul.” He, skeptical: “And does my writing compare with Catullus?” She, suggestively: “Well, it’s [slight pause] different?” “Duller?” he asks. “Well, perhaps a little too much description.”
Unlike today’s audiences, those watching the film in 1963, including Dylan, would have gotten these references. Ancient Rome and its spoken language, Latin, the biggest language club at Hibbing High and elsewhere, used to be much more relevant. As late as January 28, 1974, the cover of Newsweek could show Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, and Rosemary Woods encoiled by the Watergate tapes in an image that was a clear allusion to the twin snakes in Virgil’s Aeneid that devour the Trojan priest Laocoön, who is trying to urge his people not to bring the Greeks’ fateful horse into the city. Readers of Newsweek, Dylan included, would have gotten it, either from their knowledge of Virgil or of the ancient statue of the scene, now in the Vatican. Until 1928, enrollments in Latin language courses in the United States outstripped all other languages combined. Spanish took over as the years went by, but in 1962 there were still 702,000 students studying the ancient language. Sputnik, the Cold War, and the perceived need for more science and practicality in U.S. school curricula put an end to all that. The decline began when the National Defense Education Act of 1958 omitted Latin from the curriculum—a year after Bob Zimmerman had been in Latin class at Hibbing High. It took some time to see the full effects of that measure, but by 1976 the number of Latin students had dropped sharply to 150,000, helped by the difficult nature of the language, along with its association with the church, discipline, and authority. Latin hardly fit the ethos of the counterculture.
The paradox here is that Catullus’s poetry is in fact completely modern in the themes and sentiments it expresses. Those who understand his work read it for the beauty and the music of his verse, for the intensity of the personal voice, and for solace when they have loved and lost. Catullus was among the most-read poets of a number of the Beat poets. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, laureate poet of Victorian England, visiting the ruins of Catullus’s house on Lake Garda in northern Italy, thought of Catullus’s poem to his dead brother: “Came that ‘Ave atque vale’ [hail and farewell] of the poet’s hopeless woe / Tenderest of Roman poets nineteen hundred years ago.” The historian and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) could not read Catullus’s Poem 8 without weeping. It has been a favorite since Thomas Campion, the poet, musician, and doctor, translated it and put it to music in the early seventeenth century. Unlike many in our age, Campion obviously saw no distinction between poem and song. The poem is a self-address, urging strength and resolve, after the loss of Lesbia’s love:
Poor Catullus, you should stop being a fool!
Should realize what you see is lost is gone for good.
Bright were the suns that once shone once for you
When you would go wherever she would lead you.
That girl loved as no other will ever be.
Many playful things happened then,
Things you wished and she then wanted too.
Bright indeed the suns that once shone for you.
Now she doesn’t want you. You should be the same.
The poem continues, with the poet unable to get beyond the love that is lost, as he imagines her with another: “Whom will you kiss, whose lips will you nibble.” Or, as Dylan put it in refrain of the 1997 song “ ’Til I Fell in Love with You”: “I just don’t know what I’m going to do / I was all right ’til I fell in love with you.” Or at the end of “Love Sick,” from the same album:
I’m sick of love; I wish I’d never met you
I’m sick of love; I’m trying to forget you
Just don’t know what to do
I’d give anything to be with you
This is the art of Catullus and the art of Bob Dylan, then a fifty-six-year-old songwriter, the essence of which he sums up in Chronicles: Volume One: “experience, observation, and imagination”—qualities he shares with the Roman poet.
Another poem of Catullus, his shortest, was translated by Abraham Cowley, English Civil War poet, in the seventeenth century:
I hate and yet I love thee too;
How can that be? I know not how;
Only that so it is I know,
And feel with torment that ’tis so.
In spirit these poems share much with the songs Dylan was writing in the second half of 1962, when he was wasting away in the Village, pining for the absent Suze Rotolo, and producing some of his best work because of that absence. Perhaps he even knew the Catullus poem above—Miss Walker may have shown it to the Latin class, given its simplicity and brevity—as we seem to hear its echoes in a letter he wrote to Suze in 1962:
It’s just that I’m hating time—I’m trying to … bend it and twist it with gritting teeth and burning eyes—I hate I love you.
The songs of this period come across as heartfelt, and reflect a reality, but like the poems of Catullus, they come into being and endure through the artistry with which they capture the human condition. The connection between the lyric genius of these two poets may be coincidental, but Dylan’s interest in the city in which Catullus lived, loved, lost, and died young is a very real thing.
DYLAN VISITS ROME
Bob Dylan would pay the first of many visits to Rome, also his first time in Europe, in January 1963, a side trip after performing in a BBC film in London the month before, during what was also his first trip to England. The summer before these trips, in June 1962, Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s girlfriend and Muse of those years, had been taken off to Italy by her mother. Mary Rotolo disapproved of her young daughter’s relationship with Dylan, and Suze herself was troubled by the stress that Dylan’s exploding fame was beginning to cause. Originally scheduled to return by Labor Day, she stayed on past the summer, studying art for the rest of the year in the Umbrian city of Perugia. But Dylan’s trip to Rome had nothing to do with retrieving Suze, who by then had returned to New York. So why did he first visit Rome, and not Paris, Berlin, or Madrid? The liner notes to his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, mention that he actually performed on this first trip to Rome, at the Folkstudio in the bohemian region of Trastevere (“across the Tiber”), “in its heyday a Greenwich Village–style club with three or four performers every night and a generous open-stage policy.” It seems likely that Rome and its fascination had existed in Dylan’s imagination, dating back just a few years before the trip to his study of Latin and the Latin Club, all those movies, and his stage debut as a Roman soldier, with the highlights of the eternal city, not least of all its Colosseum (or “Coliseum”) and gladiators, appealing to his young mind.
Dylan’s separation from Suze Rotolo gave us some of his greatest songs, written while they were apart: “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “One Too Many Mornings,” “Girl of the North Country,” and of course, “Boots of Spanish Leather,” its first six verses a dialogue between the singer and his lover. Dylan and Rotolo had corresponded during her absence, and the seventh verse of the song captures the pain of the man who has been left behind:
I got a letter on a lonesome day
It was from her ship a-sailin’
Saying I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again,
It depends on how I’m a-feelin’
Dylan and Suze would later get back together, but written during those first days that Dylan spent in Rome, it preserves the evidence of a painful memory of separation, “across that lonesome ocean.” Dylan would sing the song on Studs Terkel’s show in May 1963. Terkel asks for a love song. Dylan: “You wanna hear a love song?” Terkel: “Boy meets girl. Here’s Bob Dylan, boy meets girl.” Dylan strums a chord or two—and corrects Terkel, “Girl leaves boy.”
Dylan’s trip to Rome also gave us a song called “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which he would perform on February 8, 1963, at Gerde’s Folk City, once he returned from his trip. “Goin’ Back to Rome” is not copyrighted, or included among the songs on Dylan’s official website, but it is preserved on the bootleg recording “The Banjo Tape,” transcribed here correctly for the first time:
Hey, well, you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
Well you know I’m lying
But don’t look at me with scorn.
I’m going back to Rome
That’s where I was born.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry,
Keep it for my friend.
Buy me an Italian cot and carry
Keep it for my friend.
Go talk to Italy
All around its bend.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
You can keep Madison Square Garden
Give me the Coliseum.
So I don’t wanna see the gladiators
Man I can always see ’em.
While the lyrics here are obscure, they may not be pure nonsense. We can connect “going back to Rome” with the fact that the twenty-one-year-old had actually been in Rome the month before. And when he sings, “Buy me an Italian cot and carry, / Keep it for my friend,” we wonder about the identity of the friend for whom he would buy the portable baby cot. Could it have been for Suze Rotolo herself, whose pregnancy later that year was terminated by an abortion? Suze was presumably in the audience at Gerde’s that night, having just been reunited with a Dylan much happier than the one who had been moping around the Village in the second half of 1962 while she was off in Italy.
The song’s claim of a birthplace in Rome is an early instance of Dylan’s tendency to create environments for his various identities and characters. Another example is in the traditional “Man of Constant Sorrow” (1962), where the narrator is “going back to Colorado,” where he was “born and partly raised.” Other versions of this song have the singer “born and raised” in old Kentucky, others in San Francisco, and so on. As long as the meter of the place is the same (Cólorádo, Sán Francísco, etc.), anything works, variety and change of place and time being a natural feature of folk songs. But for Dylan, Rome is different. It is hard not to connect his staking a claim for his birthplace in Rome with other utterances that try to create a new point of origin for himself, one that makes more sense in the creative mind of this genius, like this moment in his 2004 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley. Questioned about changing his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan, he replied: “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, the wrong parents.”
Even before the trip to Rome and the penning of the song “Goin’ Back to Rome,” which followed the visit, was an even earlier song, “Long Ago, Far Away,” sung before he would have known of the Folkstudio in Rome, in Minneapolis friend Tony Glover’s apartment on August 11, 1962. Recorded in November 1962, the song shows he was thinking of ancient Roman times. It shows a debt to gospel, as it considers human cruelty throughout history, from the point of view of those who suffer, not least the crucified Jesus, with whom the song begins and ends:
To preach of peace and brotherhood
Oh, what might be the cost?
A man he did it long ago
And they hung him on a cross.
Then the ironic, even sarcastic, refrain, implying that nothing has changed:
Long ago, far away,
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
The thrust of the song is along the lines of Woody Guthrie’s song “Jesus Christ”:
This song was made in New York City
Of rich man and preachers and slaves
If Jesus was to preach like He preached in Galilee
They would put Jesus Christ in His grave.
Of the examples in the five verses in the body of Dylan’s song, only two specify historical moments, the chains of slaves “during Lincoln’s time,” and in the striking image of the second to last verse, absent from the official Dylan website:
Gladiators killed themselves
It was during the Roman times
People cheered with bloodshot grins
As eyes and minds went blind
Long ago, far away
Things like that don’t happen
No more, nowadays
“Goin’ Back to Rome” has “always see ’em” rhyming with “Coliseum,” and we will see this rhyme used again, a few years later, in a famous and much better song from 1971, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” The first two verses of that song are all about Rome. It is thought to preserve the memory of another trip Dylan took to Rome, following the 1965 tour of England that was the subject of D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back. According to this plausible theory, Dylan went back in the company of his new Muse, Sara Lownds, whom he would marry by the end of the year. Sara left her husband, Hans Lownds, to take up with Dylan, and it is hard not to connect this reality with one of Dylan’s most iconic lines, from “Idiot Wind,” written in 1974: “They say I shot a man named Gray and took his wife to Italy.”
Sara is absent in name from “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” thus allowing the singer in the scene Dylan paints to have an assignation with “a pretty little girl from Greece,” or in the official lyrics, “Botticelli’s niece,” who will be able to help out with painting the masterpiece in the title and in the last line of each verse:
Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece
It is worth noting that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was the regular opener for the first of the two Rolling Thunder Revue tours in the fall of 1975, which also featured the new song “Sara.” “Sara” is pretty much the opposite of “Idiot Wind” in its lyrical and sweet memories of their decade-long relationship, children and all. The only song with a title and lyrics that are unambiguous on the identity of the lover, its last two choruses end with a hint of the breakup toward which the two were headed: “You must forgive me my unworthiness. … Don’t ever leave me, don’t ever go.” By this time, Dylan was involved with other women, and when the 1976 part of the Rolling Thunder Revue resumed in Lakeland, Florida, on April 18, 1976, “Sara” was gone from the setlist, its position taken over by “Idiot Wind”—the first public performance of the song that had come out fifteen months earlier. In a televised performance on May 23, 1976, the eve of Dylan’s thirty-fifth birthday, he delivers a glorious, impassioned version of it with his wife, children, and mother in the audience. It was likely not much appreciated by Sara, sitting there, the object of much of the song’s anger and venom. Their divorce was finalized on June 29, 1977.
Clearly Dylan feels a connection to the antiquity of Rome, as he does with no other place. When he first traveled there in 1963, he was immediately inspired. That’s why in January 1963 he would write and sing the words “Goin’ back to Rome, / That’s where I was born.” That trip to Rome, subsequent trips, and the adoption of the city as the place where he was born seemed years later to incite a kind of artistic rebirth for Dylan, or at least it coincided with that rebirth.
PRESS CONFERENCE IN ROME, 2001
Bob Dylan would be back in Rome on July 23, 2001, for an interview with a group of European journalists who had been listening that morning to an advance copy of his new album, “Love and Theft,” due out the following September. This was in between concerts in Pescara, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and Anzio, on the coast south of Rome. On this tour he performed in Scandinavia, Germany, England, Ireland, but it was Rome that he chose for the press conference that would plant a few clues about the new directions in his songwriting. One of the reporters asked an early question:
Are you enjoying to be in Rome?
Oh yeah.
You’re often here in Rome.
Pretty regular huh?
You write songs about [Rome].
Quite a few.
It is interesting that Dylan doesn’t limit himself to just the obvious song or to any one song, but “quite a few.” The journalist misses his observation, and is just thinking of the song in question:
“Paint My Masterpiece.”
Exactly.
You speak exactly of this here. …
Exactly. This is it … Spanish Steps.
The Hotel de la Ville, where the interview took place, was a little way along the Via Sistina from the top of the Spanish Steps—another prop for the interview. As the press conference continued, Dylan proceeded to lay down a trail for journalists to follow:
My songs are all singable. They’re current. Something doesn’t have to just drop out of the air yesterday to be current. You know, this is the Iron Age, we’re living in the Iron Age. But, what was the last age, the Age of Bronze or something? We can still feel that age. I mean if you walk around in this city, you know, people today can’t build what you see out there. Well at least, you know when you walk around a town like this, you know that people were here before you and they were probably on a much higher, grander level than any of us are. I mean it would just have to be. We couldn’t conceive of building these kind of things. America doesn’t really have stuff like this.
This looks close to being scripted, preplanned, and he gets back to it later in the interview after the journalists fail to pick up on where he was going:
We’ve talked about these ages before. You’ve got the Golden Age, which I guess would be the age of Homer, then we’ve got the Silver Age, then you’ve got the Bronze Age. I think you have the Heroic Age someplace in there. Then we’re living in what some people call the Iron Age, but it could really be the Stone Age. We could really be living in the Stone Ages.
Dylan’s language was tantalizing and now caught the attention of those present. After the first of these comments, where he said that something can be “current,” but also as old as the Age of Bronze, and “we can still feel that age,” one of the journalists sensed an opening:
Do you read history books?
Huh?
Do you read books about history? Are you interested about that?
[pause] Not any more than just would be natural to do.
Earlier in the interview, he had been asked about “new” poets on “Love and Theft.” His response deflected the truth, typical of Dylan, for whom there were lots of new poets beginning to enter his arsenal:
Are you still eagerly looking for poets that you may not have heard of or read yet? Or do you go back to the ones that have interested you like maybe Rimbaud? [pause, followed by a sigh of sorts]
You know I don’t really study poetry.
He may not study poetry, but the ancient footsteps that are everywhere on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” are also on “Lonesome Day Blues,” one of the songs from the new album that the reporters had just been listening to, and the one that echoes the lines he had adapted from the Roman poet Virgil:
I’m gonna spare the defeated—I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m gonna spare the defeated, boys, I’m gonna speak to the crowd
I’m goin’ to teach peace to the conquered
I’m gonna tame the proud.
Dylan, however, was not going to spell things out more than he had already done. That’s not his style. The journalists would have to make that connection for themselves. The interview ended with applause from the twelve satisfied and grateful reporters. “Now I’m gonna go see the Colosseum,” he told them. In reality, this was a highly unlikely proposition, though a drive-by could have happened. In 1965 he and Sara could just have pulled off a visit, but in 2001 Dylan would have been mobbed in such a public and open space. As is often the case with Dylan, he was visiting the song in that moment and in his mind’s eye.
The second verse of “When I Paint My Masterpiece” has the singer in the Colosseum, reusing the rhyme he had come up with for “Goin’ Back to Rome”:
Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb
Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece
With the fourth line—“It sure has been a long, hard climb”—he looks across the ten short years in which so much had happened since he had set out from his native Minnesota and arrived in Greenwich Village. But what about the next lines? The train wheels running through the back of his memory might seem to take us into another Dylan song, “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from 1963, when he falls asleep while “riding on a train goin’ west” and is taken back to the days of his youth, and to the first few friends he had back then—by way of a nineteenth-century folk song.
But why does his memory train have him “running on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese”? Clinton Heylin tried to make sense of it: “he has returned in his time machine to Hibbing, remembering a time when he ‘ran on a hilltop following a pack of wild geese.’ ” But it is hard to find space for Hibbing in this song, whose next verse, “I left Rome and landed in Brussels,” would sandwich his hometown on a short plane ride between the capitals of Italy and Belgium. And following geese in Hibbing doesn’t make too much sense, unless the geese were in some classroom at Hibbing High, either during a Latin class or in discussion at the Latin Club. The wild-goose chase to which his memory goes back from the streets of Rome is more likely to refer to one of the favorite stories about ancient Rome, bound to have been on the quiz shows of the Latin Club, in which the sacred geese of the goddess Juno on the Capitoline Hill warned the Romans that invading tribesmen from Gaul were attacking the religious center of Rome. Virgil has the scene, along with other high points of Roman history, Romulus and Remus, the Sabine women, and Tarquin the Proud, on the shield that the hero Aeneas, Rome’s founder, carries into battle in the Aeneid:
And here the silver goose was fluttering
Through gilded porticos cackling that the Gauls were at the gate
“CHANGING OF THE GUARDS” AND THE SOULS OF THE PAST
It would be some years before the streets of Rome, or at least some things Roman, came back into his lyrics, but in one song from the immediate pre-Christian—in some ways not even pre-Christian—phase he can be seen reaching back through the years and the centuries, giving us fragments of worlds, hard to unravel or pin down, but highly evocative. “Changing of the Guards” was put out as the first track of the 1978 album Street Legal. The opening words of the song, and the album, have generally been seen as taking stock, looking back across the years to the beginning of his career in 1962: “Sixteen years / Sixteen banners united over the field.” Asked about these numbers in an interview with Jonathan Cott in November 1978, Dylan—of course—denied the relevance of the math, as he denies any single meaning for his songs. The images, situations, and characters that this song rolls out put it almost beyond overall interpretive reach—“It means something different every time I sing it.” The song proceeds through an array of figures, across fields with the good shepherd grieving, desperate men and desperate women, perhaps the music industry with which he had been dealing in those years: “Merchants and thieves, hungry for power, my last deal gone down,” and later, “Gentlemen he said / I don’t need your organization, I’ve shined your shoes / I’ve moved your mountains and marked your cards.” Just as it can mean something different every time he sings it, so it can mean something different every time I hear him sing it, depending on what images, all generally mysterious, are flashing by.
