October 24, 2004

'Chronicles': Zimmerman Unbound

OB DYLAN'S ''Chronicles: Volume One'' covers a lot of shrewdly selected ground, but never addresses one burning question: So what was up with the mustache, dude? When I first saw that clipped, preposterously dapper adornment on his famously unkempt face, as he was accepting -- well, not rejecting, that much was clear; the rest was anybody's guess -- the best song Oscar in 2001 for ''Things Have Changed,'' I wondered what could possibly have spurred him to try to get himself taken for Vincent Price popping up on the set of ''Beach Party.'' But 10 seconds later, I was laughing.

The thing was, I hadn't given a flying Wallenda about Dylan in years. Yet the man only had to grow an emaciated ant colony under his nose to get me regressing into speculation about his motives -- or, at any rate, thinking How strange instead of Wow, we're both geezers. That's why they call it mystique, and mystique -- or ''how to suggest only shadows of my possible self,'' as he puts it in ''Chronicles'' -- is the quality that Dylan, decades before his ultimate (so far) epigone Madonna, redefined from gift of the gods to conscious tool of the trade.

For him to turn memoirist is a mustache of another sort, since calculated image-tending dominates the agenda here even more than it did in this year's only other comparably bruited autobiography, Bill Clinton's ''My Life.'' It may be no surprise to some that Bob is better at it than Bill, having practiced since the Kennedy administration. Yet curiosity aside, there was no reason whatsoever to look forward to ''Chronicles.'' Dylan may be unparalleled as a quasi-literary phenomenon, but ''quasi-'' is no idle qualifier.

Up to now, his forays into the written word, as opposed to the sung one, have been painful. Back when assiduous fans were memorizing the liner notes to his 60's albums, searching for the good bits resembled looking for the one genuine straw in a haystack of needles. Even more gnomic and less rewarding was those liner notes' unreadable amplification in his ''novel'' -- ah, remember when the term ''novel'' conferred cachet? -- ''Tarantula,'' published in 1971 but written much earlier. In print, shorn of his vocal authority and the accompaniment's rhythmic kind, the lyrics to even his greatest songs look inane. Picture ''Blowing in the Wind'' penned in somebody's school notebook, and you can practically see the felt-tipped hearts dotting the i's.

That's why the major surprise of ''Chronicles'' is its literary cunning, which is partly structural. After two irresistible chapters that fascinatingly -- I didn't say reliably -- chart his memories of being a resourceful yet earnest tyro folk singer in New York in 1961, on the verge of a big time that didn't exist before his own success defined and, to his folkie peers' chagrin, monopolized it, the book vaults ahead to vignettes from 1970 (beleaguered super-star) and 1987 (weary lion) before returning to bright-eyed young Bob in Camelot for the lengthy coda. As a narrative ploy, this convolution is oddly and maybe even deliberately reminiscent of the haunting flashback to the young Michael Corleone -- Wave bye-bye, Michael -- in ''The Godfather, Part II.'' But the real literary achievement of ''Chronicles'' is the voice Dylan has devised for his youthful self, which is spellbinding in its hokum.

The voice is transparently fraudulent, eliding one side of the young Bob Dylan (his callowness) and playing fancy chess games with another (his ambition). Yet simply as writing, it's some of the best fake ''Huckleberry Finn'' I've ever read. At once naive and wily, the diction summons up the hobbledehoy eagerness, skeptical wit and odd hardscrabble decorum of a half-remembered, half-concocted native idiom with such verve that you can scarcely tell the genuine colloquialisms from the ones he's just made up. Semiliteracy this effective requires a fabulous ear, as you notice when Dylan, describing early-60's folk clubs, recalls ''the confection of tourists'' mobbing the street; the substitution of ''confection'' for the more obvious ''convention'' turns those tourists, memorably, into confetti. But any impression that the twang of Twain in his back pages isn't strategic vanishes when our author -- letting his cards show for once -- calls his high-school girlfriend ''my Becky Thatcher.''

The point of all his Huckstering isn't only to make his younger self winning, though it certainly does that -- reminding us that, in Dylan's folkie incarnation, he was a first-rate comic. By way of respite from his urgent, cannily hectic musings about his budding artistic motives -- according to ''Chronicles,'' he had no personal ones -- he conjures up one crackerjack bit of quick-witted portraiture and bustling description after another. In characteristically jumpy syntax, here he is recalling a cook named Norbert at the Cafe Wha? who used to let Bob and his fellow unknown, Tiny Tim, eat for free in the kitchen: ''He wore a tomato-stained apron, had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of claws -- thought of himself as a lady's man -- saving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy and visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. The kitchen was like a cave bored into the side of a cliff.'' That deadpan ''in Italy,'' and the joke about Romeo and Juliet's tomb, really are Twain-worthy; the unexpectedness of the final sentence is flawless.

Even so, constructing a notional, elusive but compelling identity to suit the project at hand has always been so crucial to Dylan's work that it has often been the project at hand, and his look back is no exception. From its opening scene of homespun Bob in a music publisher's office to the ''few tattered rags'' he packs in a suitcase -- if his mother is alive, she should sue -- before leaving the Midwest, bound for glory, near the fade-out, the book's larger purpose is mythographic, presenting ''Bob Dylan'' as a 20th-century incarnation of primeval Americana in a way to make the critic Greil Marcus -- cited once, in a passage that modestly omits to mention that the book being alluded to was about Dylan himself -- giddy. (Marcus is perfectly capable of seeing through it and still being giddy.)

THIS is less a matter of fibs than of reality-distorting priorities and revealing omissions. For instance, in a provincial Middle American town like Eisenhower-era Hibbing, Minn., where Robert Zimmerman grew up, it's conceivable that the anomaly of his Jewishness might have induced him to feel like someone other than the generic 1950's lad, in a world bounded by duck-and-cover school drills on one side and the old swimming hole on the other, that he aw-shucks -- and aw-ducks -- himself into impersonating here. Yet aside from one strikingly dismissive mention of his 1971 visit to the Wailing Wall, his square-peg religion never comes up. Quite simply, it doesn't fit the image: Huck's bar mitzvah might confuse people, and someone -- though clearly it won't be Bob -- ought to write a book about Dylan and Norman Mailer, his only equal at suspecting that a specifically Jewish identity just got in the way of electing himself Dumbo in the great American carnival.

Funnier still, the Greenwich Village to which Dylan repaired in 1961 was a proudly exotic milieu -- the place to go ''if you want to get out of America,'' as the folklorist Alan Lomax said -- and the folk scene was a highly specialized coterie within it. But that doesn't fit the image either: all those beatniks and bespectacled kooks? What would Tom Joad say? Instead, ''Chronicles'' slyly converts the avant-garde's launching pad into Manhattan's all-star version of Colonial Williamsburg. From his account, the occasional Fellini film or glimpse of -- in a pricelessly laconic description -- ''eclectic girls, non-homemaker types'' aside, he found the Village a fine place to steep himself in America, not get out of it.

It's true that Dylan is a serious amateur of the American past. What's unlikely is that, at 20, he was this conscious of his new stomping ground's links to it. The Cafe Bizarre, we learn, ''used to be Aaron Burr's livery stable.'' Recalling a visit to a tavern named the Bull's Head, Dylan matter-of-factly reports that he never returned after seeing the ghost of one of its former regulars -- John Wilkes Booth -- and the real miracle here may be his luck in being one of the few Americans who, fresh from Hibbing's superb public schools, could pick John Wilkes Booth out of a lineup. (Is he sure it wasn't Stephen Crane?) A paragraph before temporarily bringing down the curtain on his New York apprenticeship, he significantly walks past the building on Seventh Avenue ''where Walt Whitman had lived and worked,'' and this reminds him of standing outside Poe's old house on Third Street. You aren't sure whether to sigh at his vanity -- while Whitman's example isn't out of place in considerations of Dylan as a media-age bard, it's fatuous for the man himself to make the lineage so explicit -- or to admire how craftily he's embedded the constellation of allusions in the text that leads up to this payoff.

Nonetheless, to point out that ''Chronicles'' is designed to manipulate our perceptions is simply to affirm that it's genuine Dylan. The book is an act, but a splendid one -- his sense of strategy vis-a-vis his audience hasn't been this keen in 30 years -- and it's a zesty, nugget-filled read. His assessments of other musicians are as acute as they are idiosyncratic, partly because (no great surprise here) he instinctively zeroes in on their personae in the guise of talking about their music, as in this jambalaya of observations about Roy Orbison: ''He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. . . He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal.'' Better still is a terse explanation of what separated Hank Williams from most 50's country-and-western singers: ''There was nothing clownish about him.''

After following along -- or not -- with Dylan's often stupefying vagaries over the past four decades, it's revelatory to see that his cast of mind is basically analytical. This trait is especially evident when, in the process that provides the book's main suspense, he's letting us in on the cogitations (never basely career-minded; perish the thought) that went into inventing ''Bob Dylan,'' a creature ''at once author, actor, prompter, stage manager, audience and critic combined.'' What he leaves out is his originality in perceiving self-invention as a) an intellectual option and b) his homemade, brilliantly contemporary solution to the Gordian knot of folkiedom's fetish of authenticity.

One reason Dylan's early ragamuffin routine registered as a blatant if seductive ploy even then is that his stint as an unrecognized genius lasted, so far as I can tell, about as long as one of Van Gogh's epileptic fits. His talent and sheer novelty got him spotted as the coming thing with uncommon speed, and we're left to deduce how petted and prized he was from the procession of kind souls -- not poor ones, either, judging from their libraries -- who happily put him up in their apartments. Instead of mulling fate's caprices, though, our hero eyes those fancy bookshelves, and presto -- it's bildungsroman time, as Huck devours Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz (say what?), ''The White Goddess'' by Robert Graves (meeting Graves years later, Dylan ''wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn't remember much about it'') and, appropriately, Balzac: ''You can learn a lot from Mr. B.'' If you say so, Mr. D.

While Hemingway isn't on the list, Dylan clearly made up for that omission later on. Feeling confused by things ''too big to see all at once,'' he reflects, ''You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.'' In his battered-veteran phase -- the hell with it, I'm more famous than Papa now -- he borrows a Hemingway mantra outright: ''Long time ago, good; now, no good.''

THAT doesn't make his own ''now, no good'' less worth pondering. What Dylan might have made of himself in any other era is something even he probably can't imagine. It took fame and his collision with the 60's, a chicken-and-egg problem if ever I heard one, to fuse all that bravura talent, originality and careerism into temporary genius, a formula that may not fit the Beatles or (an even tougher call) Godard but is equally applicable to not only Mick Jagger but Abbie Hoffman and, perhaps, Mailer himself. Yet my contention is that the genius was no less real for being conditional. Conditional genius is how pop culture works, and in a sense, that seismic decade's superstars were the pop equivalent of the Civil War generals, like Grant and Jubal Early, who, after peacetime careers ranging from marginal to disastrous, grew briefly indispensable -- only to go back to being peculiar, bungling misfits five minutes after Appomattox.

If the comparison strikes you as far-fetched, don't tell Dylan, since one of the book's subtlest introductions of the big picture is his description of how he became obsessed -- before the sun was dry on Kennedy's inaugural speech, you might say -- with the 19th century's ultimate Good/Bad War, poring over microfilmed newspapers from 1855-65 in the New York Public Library. It's John Ford's ''Young Mr. Lincoln'' all over again; by implication, we're meant to recall not only his own time's coming storms, but his lightning-rod role in them.

And then -- the pure effrontery of this is hilarious, although maybe not to Simon & Schuster -- he goes and leaves the 60's out. When we next meet Dylan, it's 1970: after the hurricane, after his metamorphosis into a rock musician and the four classic albums that followed, after the motorcycle accident that turned him into a recluse of an order to make the Beatles seem available. (He doesn't mention, but says very little to undermine, the long-standing rumor that his ''accident'' was actually a crackup of another sort.) Fans keep importuning him in his Woodstock retreat, but their idol isn't having any: ''I wanted to set fire to these people.'' He's a family man now, and someone else can have the job of generational spokesman/martyr: ''I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes'' -- oh, come on, Bob; you were wearing sunglasses -- ''and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me.''

Yet here as elsewhere, our memoirist is no slouch at contriving nesting-doll agendas. Tucked quite artfully inside this besieged husband and father's pursuit of peace and quiet is a sublimely funny Tom Stoppard play: ''St. Bob Meets the Academy,'' perhaps. Already memorialized in Dylan's song ''Day of the Locusts,'' his 1970 acceptance of an honorary degree from Princeton gets more grumpily retold here; praised as ''the authentic expression of the disturbed and concerned conscience of Young America,'' the honoree groans -- to us, not to Princeton -- ''Tricked once more.''

His main foil, though, is the poet Archibald MacLeish, who with his usual eagle eye for freight trains has asked the Conscience to contribute some songs to MacLeish's play ''Scratch.'' Dylan is impressed; in his eyes, or so he solemnly swears, MacLeish is a ''gigantic'' figure, right up there with Robert Frost and (this is deadly) Carl Sandburg. They meet, and Dylan is deferential; they part, and Dylan decides he's somewhat reluctant. By sheer coincidence -- it's funny how memory works -- he interrupts his encounters with ''Archie'' to tell us about the time he had dinner with Frank Sinatra Jr. In case we've been slow to catch on who the real giant is, a devastating final comment leaves MacLeish staggering around the hereafter with a huge pen buried in his back.

The retrospective proof that Dylan's youthful Huck voice has been a literary device is the skill with which he glides into a more settled style to mirror his changed status. Yet in ways he didn't recognize, couldn't fix or doesn't care about, his mature tone is less attractive, chiefly due to its boastfulness and self-pity. Not that a hurricane-toughened oak like grizzled old Bob Dylan ever feels sorry for himself, naturally, but he won't discourage us if we do. By the time he's flashed forward to 1987 -- in New Orleans, he and the producer Daniel Lanois are recording his forgettable ''Oh Mercy'' album -- his ruminations on his own greatness, disguised as recognition that ''It wasn't my moment of history anymore,'' have grown embarrassing: ''I had done it once, and once was enough. Someone would come along eventually who would have it again -- someone who could see into things, the truth of things -- not metaphorically, either -- but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.'' Get cracking, Britney.

The awkwardness is that he isn't even wrong about his impact, and yet you wish for more of the sanguineness that led Nabokov, asked to rank himself in modern literature, to snort, ''Jolly good view from up here,'' and leave it at that.

The ''Oh Mercy'' chapter is a fairly fishy self-justification, but a good short story, whether Dylan is milking the wraith-filled New Orleans atmosphere as if he's just read Anne Rice or introducing a suspiciously handy, but vividly described, crazed junk-store owner whose rants, for obscure reasons, cured a bad case of studio block. The blow-by-blow account of the album's making is a fascinating picture of the relations between an artist at low ebb and a headstrong producer, but it's also as guileful as Nixon's ''Checkers'' speech; basically, Dylan is guilt-tripping his indifferent public by describing all the hard work and creative agony that went into an album nobody gave two hoots about. As before, he's tiptoeing around a toad in the garden, too: his ''born again'' phase of 1979-81, more fertile as both music and strategy than people credit but cryptic just the same. (In hindsight, I ascribe it to his omnivorousness for Americana; how could he skip Christianity?) He's also taunting us, since he knows perfectly well that we'd rather be reading about the creation of ''Blonde on Blonde'' or some other LP from his 60's peak. And I've been resisting the stupid joke that maybe Dylan just doesn't remember much about those years, but you know something? Maybe he just doesn't remember much about those years.

Far more likely, of course, is that he's whetting our appetite for the sequel, and I'll grant him this: He does. As self-serving as ''Volume One'' is, not to mention coy -- unless I seriously misremember his marital history, the nameless ''my wife'' of 1971 and her 1987 counterpart are two different people -- the sprays of language, cockeyed aphorisms and good anecdotes win out, with highlights ranging from Dylan's spilling the beans that his boyhood dream was to attend West Point to a charming description of the day he met -- and serenaded -- John Wayne in Hawaii, where the Duke was filming ''In Harm's Way.'' You might want to recommend him to rethink his view of women, though: when future inamorata Joan Baez appears on his horizon, she's ''far off and unattainable -- Cleopatra living in an Italian palace.'' Two lines later, he's fretting that she ''might bury her fangs in the back of my neck'' -- and that's before they've met.

Then again, as so often in ''Chronicles,'' whether these were his perceptions at the time is both doubtful and irrelevant. This is a veteran carny's magic show, not a confessional. Its credo appears when Dylan shares this piece of advice: ''If you have to lie, you should do it quickly and as well as you can.'' In other words, folks, here's your rabbit. What's your hurry?