ROBERT HANDICOTT

Notes on a Haunting Line

Back in the late 80s, under the enthusiastic new leadership of Bill Roberts, but with the full support of its founders and long-term stalwarts on the staff of the English Department at James Cook University, ELLA, the organisation which produces this magazine, made a brave bid for greater involvement from JCU students. Of several well-attended functions organised at that time, one in particular came to my mind again just recently. It was an evening on which anyone interested was invited to bring and play recordings of recent pop songs the texts of which were deemed to possess literary merit. People spoke freely in defence of their offerings and to comment on works submitted by others; but the emphasis was on enjoyment rather than criticism. It was a mellow experience. The songs came mostly from what one might call the better end of the 60s and 70s' pop music spectrum and were easy on the ears. They revealed us as a sensitive, tasteful and rather conservative lot. Atno point did anybody get up and rage. Of course was one of the composers represented. He could hardly have been omitted from any discussion about the literary merit of pop lyrics. It was while thinking about him again recently that I was reminded of ELLA's successful but unrepeated experiment. There have been reasons lately to think of Bob Dylan again. In 1991 he celebrated both his fiftieth birthday and thirty years as a recording artist for CBS. The double anniversary was marked publicly by a number of significant events. Most important of these was undoubtedly the release by Columbia of a three-CD or-cassette boxed set of rare or previously unreleased recordings spanning the whole period from 1961. But some substantial new books appeared also. The most remarkable is surely Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched and scrupulously fair 500-page biography, Dylan: Behind the Shades, published by Viking. The unique feature of this book is that it pays equal attention and respect to each phase of Dylan's fluctuating career. Also valuable is The Dylan Companion, an anthology of Dylan pieces old and new edited by Elizabeth Thomson and David Gutman and published by Macmillan. The latter contains contributions from most of the writers one expects to find in a book on this specialist subject. Some of the most important are by non-literary people such as Susan Rotolo, Dylan's former girlfriend. The long established advocates with literary credentials include , Christopher Ricks and Wilfrid Mellers. It is a pleasant surprise to find also, among the many

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 83 previously unfamiliar contributors, the names of Christopher Logue, Frank Kermode and Stephen Spender. The Dylan Companion concludes with a solicited piece by Robert Shelton. This is appropriate, since no other writer has engaged himself for so long with the phenomenon of Dylan. It was a review by Shelton published in the New York Times of September 29, 1961, which gave Dylan's career its first major impetus. (Heylin describes how assiduously the ambitious young folk singer courted the critic to obtain the review, which then graced the cover of his first recording.) Shelton, who calls himself Dylan's "intermittent friend, more often observer, chronicler and biographer," refuses to address the issue of literary merit out of sheer frustration over past failed efforts. "Attempting to persuade the prejudiced about the poetry in, and between, his lines is sailing a boat towards oblivion," he claims; and if anyone should know, he should. He recounts a typical experience on BBC Radio 4,

as the host of Bookshelf, who is something of a minor poet himself, told me that it was absurd to regard Dylan as any kind of a poet. "Give me just one line from Dylan we can regard as poetry," he jeered.

Shelton doesn't actually tell us if he took up the challenge. Nor does he indicate whether the "minor poet" concerned is one of those pilloried by Hugh Kenner in A Sinking Island for writing as if nothing had happened since Rupert Brooke. But on a literary scene where there can be an earnest campaign at present (evidently led by Auberon Waugh) for a full return to rhyme and metre, he probably didn't bother. I'd like to bother now. That the host of Bookshelf, whatever his gifts as a poet, is a far more searching critic than were the student members of ELLA some years ago, I have no doubt. Nor do I disagree with the concluding statement in the entry on Dylan in the Longman Dictionary of 20th Century Biography, which, having noted that "his lyrics have been published and studied as though they were literature," adds that "many inflated conclusions have been drawn from these studies." Yet in Dylan's 500 published songs it is really not difficult to find lines "we can regard as poetry": lines which satisfy not only the formal definition of poesis or Dichtung (a making dicht, or dense, with meaning), but which have also the impact of poetry - an experience unknown to those who never felt it, but once delightfully if naively described by the Australian poet, David Campbell: "1 get a cold feeling down my back, and my ears sit back." As an example I submit a line from Visions of Johanna, a song copyrighted in 1966 and first released that year on the double LP:

The ghost of 'lecticity howls in the bones of her face.

For readers whose ears haven't moved, the best I can do is offer an explication of the line, well aware that "poetry" (which is not a matter of explicability or inexplicability) generally evaporates in such a process, as surely as humour in the explanation of a joke. Humility is in order, too; for Bob

84 LiNQ 20/1 (1993) Spitz, another recent Dylan biographer, notes that Blonde on Blonde has proved "a magnet for every pseudo-intellectual and neurotic analyser of lyrics"; while Michael Gray, one of the best Dylan critics, writing of Visions of Johanna, confesses: "It is, for me at least, quite impossible to say what the song is 'about'." On the simplest level, Visions of Johanna is bout the unsatisfactory male experience of being with one woman while pre-occupied with, or haunted by, another. More particularly, it seems to be about the failure of an attempt to seek consolation with an old girlfriend after a lover's death. The "face" of our line (the penultimate line of stanza two) belongs to the willing consoler, Louise. She "holds a handful of rain, temptin" the persona of the song to "defy" his sense of being "stranded". The "rain" has been knowingly interpreted as heroin or cocaine; but there are ample literary precedents for interpreting it as love, as it is for example in Johannes Bobrowski's Russian Songs: "I give you / a drop of rain / from the land / where no one weeps." If Louise thinks of the one with whom she is "entwined" as "her lover", however, to him at this hour she is merely "all right" and "just near." Her presence, in fact, is far less real to him than the absence of Johanna, which she defines. The "ghost of 'lectricity" is literally the faint, filtered light which "flickers from the opposite loft" into the darkened room where the song is set. The initially descriptive image is immediately developed, however, by the powerful auditory active verb, "howls", accentuated on the page by the anapaestic rhythm and on Dylan's recordings of the song by the highest (howled) note in the line. The developed image is by no means opaque. In moments of more-or-less even darkness, the man's eyes, accustomed to the absence of light, make out Louise's "delicate" features, and can find himself, or his own fragile humanness, reflected there as in a "mirror". Every neon flash from across the street, however, illuminates only the prominent "bones" of the sleeping face while softer details disappear into shadow. The effect is electric - literally shocking: like a person's first glimpse of Edvard Munch's The Scream. For the man sees suddenly (as in a tilted hologram) not simply Eliot's "skull beneath the skin" (a memento mori or general premonition of death) but a particular, skull-faced "ghost": a "vision" of Johanna, who presumably often shared the same bed in the same tatty room. This is the cruelest of the "tricks" that the night is playing. On this view, the line considered explains the title of the song and provides the key to the whole. That Johanna has actually died and not merely walked out with death- like finality, is supported both by the "ghost" and "bones" imagery and by the fact that there is not a single hint in the whole lyric text of her continuing existence except in the persona's mind, the state of which the song gives us with remarkable fullness. Dylan has written dozens of songs about former lovers, real and imaginary; and these invariably refer to the ladies' (likely) subsequent careers, or Dylan's wishes for them, often in very bitter terms. One need only think of Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and Like a . The impact and reputation of Visions of Johanna, presumably, owe not a little to the song's genuine originality among Dylan's work: its relative lack of the trademark put-

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 85 downs and wallowings in self-pity. They are still there, but serving a more profound idea. They are not the main point or chief source of power in the song. What Visions of Johanna conveys is something far less conventional and far harder to evoke: a sense of loss so overwhelming and numbing that it is felt as presence. Nothing in the remainder of the song contradicts the interpretation offered above. On the contrary, in the following three stanzas the sense of being "stranded" by loss is elaborated with considerable psychological insight. The cascading imagery, familiarly Dylanesque with its parade of weird, belittled characters ("little boy lost," "the jelly-faced women," "Madonna"), is that of an interior monologue: we see something like a movie of looping memories and moods. Helplessly unable to sleep, the persona thinks now of the uselessness and "gall" of a particular acquaintance's comforting smalitalk, now, more philosophically, of the futility of all efforts to resist time and change ("Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial"). Confusion and guilt compound grief, before the luminous desolation of the conclusion:

The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain.

Some commentators on this song seem to have been excited and misled by the obvious echoes in the first two stanzas of T.S. Eliot's early work and, in particular, of the Preludes. Undoubtedly the song is set in one of the "thousand furnished rooms," above a "blackened street" in the "Unreal City" in winter: for "ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots," for example, we have "the empty lot" where "the all-night girls" "whisper of escapades out on the 'D' train." But to read Visions of Johanna, as Michael Gray does in Song & Dance Man, basically as an updated, 60s version of Eliot's "vision of the street," interpreting the depiction of an extreme state of mind as an image of the mind of an age or generation (in the tradition of J. Alfred Prufrock and Joseph K.), mistakes influence for intention. In Dylan's song personal loss is distinctly in the foreground. In Visions of Johanna the "infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing" remains the singer himself.

Footnote. Bob Dylan's 1992 album - according to Time his 38th and "one of the best things he has ever done" - has an interesting local connection. , an eclectic but unified collection mostly of traditional songs from both sides of the Atlantic, includes also the Australian convict ballad, Jim Jones at Botany Bay. It is a version unlikely to feature on Australia All Over. Dylan, typically, makes no concessions whatever to commercial expectations; and the one-take rawness of his singing and playing requires more getting used to this time than ever. The voice, never to everyone's taste, is so startlingly eroded that he seems to be in pain simply making a noise. Yet, undoubtedly, with repeated hearings less becomes more. For Jim Jones, and for most of the other folk and blues songs on the album, the harrowing delivery is appropriate, the determined perseverance sounds fully in role. The expression Dylan gets into such lines as "For life, Jim Jones, I'm sending you" and "They'll flog the poaching out of you" must be as authentic as can be expected 150 years after transportation. The

86 LiNQ2O/1 (1993) performance affirms both the quality of the particular song, and also - remarkably, in 1992 - the enduring validity of folksong as an expression of universal human experience and emotion. "It's weird, man," Dylan once said of folk music, "full of legend, myth, bible and ghosts."

LiNQ 20/1 (1993) 87