A Classicist's Dylan

JOHN HARVARD'S JOURNAL after that, dean Douglas W. Elmendorf with- hancements in College social programs and Conant University Professor Danielle Allen drew Manning’s fellowship, saying HKS had spaces and education about inclusive com- introduced a fresh motion, seeking to balance been mistaken to extend the honorific in munity values. The regulatory approaches the right of association with the right to be this instance, when an invitation to speak are meant to be an incentive to the clubs to free from discrimination. Invoking Massachu- would have sufficed. That response created a modify their policies, and a lever to affect setts law, it would effectively extend recogni- further uproar, as critics charged the school student choices; the third option relies on tion to final clubs and similar organizations; if with caving in to the intelligence commu- persuasion and cultural change. they failed to comply with College policies on nity or discriminating against convicts (see Gordon McKay professor of computer nondiscrimination and governance, students harvardmag.com/jonesmanning-17). The science Harry Lewis, who introduced a mo- who chose to join them would then face re- incident thus overshadowed the traditional tion last year opposing the sanctions, in the moval from the College community—a differ- role the HKS’s forums have played in hosting name of protecting students’ right of free as- ent mix of incentives and leverage. wide-ranging, civil presentations extending sociation in legal organizations, produced a Further discussion and voting may take across the spectrum of political, policy, and revised motion with the same aims. It is in- place on November 7. A complete report on international discourse, and thus became tended to assert faculty primacy in making the October meeting, motions, and speakers more partisan ammunition amid many other policy governing student life, rather than appears at harvardmag.com/usgsos-oct-17. heated debates about speech on campuses ceding that role to administrators. vjohn s. rosenberg nationwide. The dean later announced that he was consulting widely to develop new standards and procedures for appointing fu- Thomas’s two lifelong obsessions—Bob ture fellows; an “improved approach” should A Classicist’s Dylan Dylan and the classics—were intertwined. be in place later this year. It took six months for Richard Thomas Academics have been poking around to draft the manuscript for his newest book, Dylan’s oeuvre since at least the 1970s, sift- Final Clubs, Continued Why Bob Dylan Matters, a study, among other ing for clues to his enigmatic meanings and The first Faculty of Arts and Sciences things, of the songwriter’s deep and abid- origins and influences. But in the past 10 (FAS) meeting of the year, on October 3, ing connection to the poets heard a news-filled annual report from dean of ancient Greece and Rome. Michael D. Smith detailing an initiative on Thomas sat down at his key- inequality in America; growth and diversifi- board a couple of weeks after cation of the professorial ranks; and improve- the announcement last fall ments in FAS’s finances—at least temporarily, of Dylan’s Nobel Prize in lit- thanks largely to a substantial restructuring erature, and by the following of the debt it has incurred to pursue House spring, the pages were in his renewal. (These topics are covered in depth editor’s hands. “I’m not sure at harvardmag.com/fas-octmtg-17.) how I did it,” he says. But most attendees’ attention focused on In truth, though, the Lane the continuation of contentious business professor of the classics— from last year: whether the College should whose freshman seminar “Bob take action against unrecognized single- Dylan” always fills up fall-se- gender social organizations (USGSOs: fi- mester classrooms—has been nal clubs, fraternities, and sororities), whose working on this book for a very membership policies discriminate on the ba- long time. In 2001, he listened sis of gender. Anticipating wide interest, the to Love and Theft a few days af- meeting was moved from the Faculty Room ter the album was released and at University Hall to a large Science Center heard Virgil’s words singing auditorium, and it was nearly filled. back to him in Dylan’s voice. Professor of music Suzannah Clark, co- “I’m gonna spare the defeat- chair of the USGSO committee appointed ed—I’m gonna speak to the by Smith, presented its final report—which, crowd,” Dylan rasps in “Lone- surprisingly, conveyed three possible cours- some Day Blues,” the fifth es of action, not one: prohibiting student track. “I’m gonna teach peace membership in such organizations, effec- to the conquered, I’m gonna GRANGER tive for undergraduates enrolling next fall; tame the proud.” This was the Aeneid. The Bob Dylan in 1965. Already, the classical retaining the May 2016 policy, in effect now, language was unmistakable. Virgil’s lines, world was starting to influence his writing. sanctioning students who join such organi- translated from book six of his epic, read years or so, scholarly “Dylanologists” have zations (denying them leadership positions like this: “Remember Roman, these will be begun truly plumbing the depths, dredging on athletic teams or other campus groups, your arts: / to teach the ways of peace to up connections to—and often almost verba- and withholding required recommendations those you conquer, / to spare the defeated tim quotations from—Milton, Keats, Ten- for fellowships); or some mixture of en- peoples, tame the proud.” It turned out that nyson, Pound, Eliot, Shakespeare. In Why Bob 32 November - December 2017 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 Dylan Matters, Thomas—who reckons he has seen Dylan in concert perhaps 80 times over the years—adds Rimbaud, Twain, Burns, and the Civil War poet Henry Timrod to the list. And of course, the ancients. His book is the first, Thomas believes, to approach Dylan from a classics perspective. It is also the first to offer a long look at one of the artifacts in the newly opened Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa: a small spiral-bound notebook containing drafts of what would become “Tangled Up in Blue.” (In March 2016, the George Kaiser Family Foundation purchased from Dylan his career-spanning collection of 6,000-plus artifacts. The archive opened to scholars earlier this year; a Bob Dylan Center with public exhib- its is planned for 2019.) The song drafts of “Tangled up in Blue,” crammed with addi- tions and cross-outs and a list of rhyming words, reveal, Thomas says, a writing pro- cess not unlike what records show of Vir- gil’s: a morning spent composing or reciting lines, “then going back, deleting, changing, 32 Quincy Street licking into shape.” Cambridge, MA harvardartmuseums.org Open daily, 10am–5pm After Love and Theft, Thomas began listening for other echoes of antiquity in Get Cash Back on Home Dylan’s songwriting. Purchases and Sales! A native New Zealander, Thomas began learning Latin at nine. He began learning Harvard students, faculty, Dylan four years later, when “Blowin’ in the Wind” arrived on the local airwaves. His staff and alums are eligible church choir performed the song in 1964, for this program - including while watching the U.S. civil-rights move- ment from afar. A decade later, Thomas those working at Harvard- was packing Blonde on Blonde into the trunk affiliated hospitals. he shipped from Auckland to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he would soon start grad- uate school in the department of classical studies. That album was one of only two he brought with him to the States (the other was Songs of Leonard Cohen), along with his well-thumbed undergraduate copies of Virgil and Homer, Horace, Ovid, Sappho, Catullus. After Love and Theft, Thomas began listening for other echoes of antiquity in Dylan’s songwriting (and in his interviews Visit huhousing.harvard.edu/homebuying to learn more. and press conferences and memoirs) and discovered a whole universe of them, go- The only Harvard-sponsored home buying service Harvard Magazine 35 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 JOHN HARVARD'S JOURNAL ing back almost to the beginning. In songs Dylan performing in England in 2012. like “If You See Her, Say Hello,” from Blood Age has added “compelling” edges and layers of meaning to the singer’s on the Tracks, an album recorded in 1975 as voice, Thomas says. Dylan’s marriage was beginning to break up, Thomas hears the lyric poet Catullus, Jupiter’s Darling, Helen of Troy, Alexander the whose pungent verses on the pain of lost Great, Spartacus. “Whatever we think we love and the tumult of modernity are some are doing on such journeys,” Thomas of the best, he says, in literature—sharp and writes, “what moves us is the sense of electrifying and revolutionary. Shimmering being at the wellspring of artistic cre- behind 1978’s “Changing of the Guards,” a ation, where creative genius began to song whose overt imagery is Christian, lies form the art that would become cen- a deeper resonance—traceable in an earlier tral to our own lives and imaginations.” draft—that points Thomas to Virgil again, Listening to Thomas talk about this time the poet’s messianic Eclogue 4, Dylan and his place in the firmament of STANSALL/AFP/GETTYIMAGES BEN which describes a boy who will become a classical literature, it becomes clear that this ets is because he considers Dylan to be one god and rule the world. scholarship is not a sidelight to his work on of them, an artist writing classic texts that Dylan’s more audacious borrowing— Virgil and Horace and Homer but an inte- outlast his own time.

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