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Letter to the Editors, New York Review of Books John Leonard's "Liaisons Dangereuses"
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 It's not possible to
respond to John Leonard's Liaisons Dangereuses, a review of David
Hadju's and Howard Sounes' books on the life of Bob Dylan [NYR, July
19] by refuting specific points in intellectual
fashion. That's because his review is utterly
anti-intellectual, a mere diatribe cloaked as erudition, a childish
tantrum covered with a patina of cultural literacy. Leonard
is at odds with a large portion of his generation. He
fancies that Dylan sold out in 1965 and that his switch to electric
guitar led directly to the Reagan era. He flatters himself
that his own partiality for Toni Morrison and James Baldwin
automatically qualifies him as an engagé. For Leonard,
Dylan's finding God was simply "a very Seventies thing to
do." We get the message. All people with
religious feeling are reactionaries.
Genius invites as much abuse as hagiography. The greatest
geniuses are often those that have been the most thoroughly
debunked. That Dylan reportedly wrote "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna
Fall" in twenty minutes is passed off by Leonard as some kind of
joke. But is literary or musical inspiration a
joke? "Hard Rain" is one of the great ballads of our, or
any, age, and the fact that Dylan was the conduit for its inspired
lyrics bestows on him far more than is in Mr. Leonard's power to
depreciate.
The last refuge of the critic
desperate to make some kind of mark for himself is character
assassination. Leonard claims that "caring about the music
makes our interest in (Dylan's) behavior more than
prurient." But he clearly doesn't care about the music, the
lyrics, the message, or anything about the Dylan 'package' that he
claims has been so cleverly marketed. So his interest in
Dylan's behavior is just what he tries to deny it is-purely prurient.
For someone who connects with Dylan's lyrics, vocal style, or attitude,
it doesn't matter if he had an alcohol problem, if "I Want You" is
about heroin instead of a woman, or any of the other personal horrors
with which Mr. Leonard regales us. Dylan has gone to more
pains than any other comparable artist has to distance his life from
his work. That this has only fueled the Dylan research and
biography industry can be viewed cynically, as a well-thought out
marketing strategy. But what would Mr. Leonard have liked
Dylan to do-mug for the camera? This is the common problem
with debunkers-nothing their subjects might do could possibly please
them or atone for their cardinal sin, which is their
genius.
Dylanology can certainly be seen as a comic phenomenon, but there it
is-a voluminous area of investigation spawning an ever-increasing
amount of written material, which practically qualifies it as an
academic field in and of itself. We can ridicule the Dylan
cult, and Dylanology in particular, but the cult and the pseudo science
reflect something real-that Dylan moved people through his lyrics, his
vocal style, his musical innovation, and his personality.
To pick out a single sentence recorded by Joan Baez in conversation
with Dylan in 1965, to judge it "a puerile thing to say," is really the
lowest form of criticism. Dylan was only being accurate when
he said that the difference between him and Baez was that she thought
she could change things and he thought no one could. Let me
ask Mr. Leonard-what did Joan Baez change? She stuck
faithfully to folk music and no one can fault her for
it. But compare Dylan's influence on our music, our culture,
even our thinking, with hers. The rock poet who either
self-deprecatingly or self-indulgently refused to believe in his power
to change anything changed more than most people would have thought
possible.
And from a wider philosophical or historical viewpoint, how can we even
fault Dylan for his cynicism? Let's look back on history
since ancient times and ask what really has changed. Have we
eliminated war, poverty, disease, racial bigotry, or
inequality? What exactly is Mr. Leonard's quarrel with
Dylan's remark that "if somebody really had something to say to help
somebody out, just bluntly say the truth, well obviously they're gonna
be done away with"? Is he saying there's something
inaccurate in that statement? What other conclusion could
one come to in the summer of 1962, or even today, for that
matter?
Mr. Leonard's animus toward Dylan springs from the shallowest notion of
political engagement. He has no conception of artistic
engagement that might transcend politics, yet still be capable of
moving, energizing, or inspiring people. This is a whole
side of life to which Mr. Leonard is simply blind, and it is therefore
not surprising that Dylan can mean nothing to him. Dylan may
not have been an activist in Mr. Leonard's sense of the term, but his
whole message has been to preach activism to his listeners-if not
political activism, then activism of thought, of critical faculties, of
sensitivity to life, of rebellion against all forms of tacit
acceptance.
The guilty undertaker sighs
The lonesome organ grinder cries
The silver saxophones say I
Should refuse you
The cracked bells and washed-out horns
Blow into my face with scorn
But it's not that way-I wasn't born
To lose you
The beauty of lyrics such as
these is that they can be about a woman, about a drug, about an ideal,
about anything to which we might be attached. Regardless of
what they meant to Dylan, or might mean to us, the imagery of the
lyrics is poignant. Our imagination conjures up the visions
of the undertaker, the organ grinder, the brass instruments, and even
the urban environment unmentioned in the lyrics
themselves. That Dylan infused this type of poetic ambition
into popular music elevated our culture beyond the capability of folk
music, no matter how pure the intentions of the prior genre.
It's true that most of us
have listened to Dylan for years without getting the message, without
getting off our asses, without becoming poets ourselves, expressing our
feelings, or practicing what we preach. We have substituted
Dylan's imagination for our own, deluded ourselves into thinking that
just listening to his music gave us the same attitude, convinced
ourselves that we were rebels when in fact we were living a cozy
middle-class life. But you can't blame the messenger if his
words aren't heeded. Dylan's perpetual touring in his old
age may seem sad, even ludicrous, but this is the one thing he knows,
and the one way he has of being true to himself. How many of
us have that clear a notion of our purpose here on this earth that we
would stick to it so doggedly, when we could have just retired to drink
margaritas and sunbathe by the pool decades ago?
What I would like to see in
the pages of The New York Review of Books at some time in the future is
an article that really treats Dylan's work seriously, that really looks
at the lyrics, the stylistic innovation, and the attitude, instead of
the personality. My guess is that the reason this has yet to
be done is that it is such a massive undertaking, and that we do not
yet have the historical distance to furnish us with the unbiased
perspective necessary for the task. |
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Date Submitted:
2001-07-17 00:00:00
Review by The Spiritual Traveler |
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