Bob Dylan (49 page)

There were huge chandeliers, imported from Czechoslovakia, four thousand dollars each when they were shipped across the Atlantic in the 1920s, irreplaceable today. We weren’t in Hibbing, a redundant mining town in northern Minnesota; we were in the opera house in Buenos Aires. Yet we were in Hibbing; there were high-school Bob Dylan artifacts in a case just down the hall. There were more in the public library some blocks away, in a small exhibit in the basement. Scattered among commonplace talismans and oddities were the lyrics to the Golden Chords’ “Big Black Train,” from 1958, a rewrite of Elvis’s 1954 “Mystery Train,” credited to Monte Edwardson, LeRoy Hoikkala, and Bob Zimmerman:

The next day, walking up and down Howard Street, the main street of Hibbing, we looked for the poetry on the walls. “A NEW LIFE,” read an ad for an insurance company—was that it? Was there anything in that beer sign that could be twisted into a metaphor? What was the woman in Berkeley talking about? Later we found out that the walls with the poetry were in the high school itself.

In the school library there were busts and chiseled words of wisdom and murals. Murals told the story of the mining industry, all in the style of what Daniel Pinkwater, in his young-adult novel
Young Adults,
called “heroic realism.” There were sixteen life-size workers, representing the nationalities that formed Hibbing: native-born Americans, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Norwegians, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians, Austrians, Germans, Jews, French, Poles, Russians, Armenians, Bulgarians, and more. There was a huge mine on the left, a misty steelworks on the right, and, in the middle, to take the fruit of Hibbing to the corners of the earth, Lake Superior. With art-nouveau dots between each word, the inscription over the mine quoted Tennyson’s “Oenone”:

—while over the factory one could read

That was the poetry on the walls—but not even this was the real poetry in Hibbing. The real poetry was in the classroom.

 

 

After stopping by the auditorium and the library, the tour made its way upstairs to Room 204, where for five years in the 1950s, B. J. Rolfzen taught English at Hibbing High—after that, he taught for twenty-five years at Hibbing Community College. Eighty-three in May of 2006, and slowed down by a stroke, getting around in a motorized wheelchair, Rolfzen sat on the desk in the small, suddenly steamy room, as forty or more people crowded in. There was a small podium in front of him. 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.

He handed out a photocopied booklet of poems by Wordsworth, Frost, Carver, the Minneapolis poet Colleen Sheehy, and himself; moving back and forth for more than half an hour, he returned again and again to the eight lines of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

He kept reading it, changing inflections, until the words seemed to dance out of order, shifting their meanings. Each time, a different word seemed to take over the poem. “Rain,” he would say, opening up the poem one way; “beside,” he’d say, and an entirely different drama seemed under way. Finally he came full circle. “‘so much depends / upon a red wheel barrow,’” he said. “
So much depends.
This isn’t about
rain.
It’s not about
chickens.
So much depends on the decisions we make. My decision to enlist in the Navy in 1941, when I was seventeen. My decision to teach.
So much depends
on the decisions you’ve made, and will make.”

The poem stayed in the air: the loudness of the first line faded into “beside the white chickens,” not because they were unimportant, but because from “so much depends,” from the decision with which the poem began, the poem, like a life, could have gone anywhere; it was simply that in this case the poem happened to go toward chickens, before it went off the page, to wherever it went next. Rolfzen made the eight lines particular and universal, unlikely and fated; he made them apply to everyone in the room, or rather led each person to apply them to him or herself. This was not the sort of teacher you encounter every day—or even in a lifetime.

 

 

“Bits and pieces of the Great Depression still lie about,” Rolfzen wrote in
The Spring of My Life,
a memoir of the 1930s he published himself in 2005—but, he said, “The experiences and frightful hopelessness of one day of the Great Depression can never be understood or appreciated except by those who have lived it.” Nevertheless,
he tried to make whoever might read his book understand. He went back to the village of Melrose, Minnesota, where he was born and grew up. He spoke quietly, flatly, sardonically of a family that was poor beyond poverty: “Life during the Great Depression was not a complex life. It was a simple one. No health insurance needed to be paid, no life insurance, no car insurance, no savings for a college education or any education beyond high school, no savings account, no automobile needed to be purchased, no gas was necessary to buy, no utilities beyond the $3.00 a month my dad paid for six 25 watt bulbs.” There were eleven children; B. J.—then Boniface—slept in a bed with three brothers.

His father was an electrical worker and a drunk: the “most frightening day,” Rolfzen writes, was payday, when his father would stagger home, then and every day until the money ran out. One day he tried to kill himself by grabbing high-voltage lines; instead he lost both arms just below the elbow, and sent the family onto relief. “I never saw my mother with a coin in her hand,” Rolfzen writes; everything they bought they bought on credit against fifty dollars a month. There was a family of four that boarded up the windows of their house to keep out the cold, but the Rolfzens would not advertise their misery, even if the windows sometimes broke and, before they could be replaced, maybe not until winter passed, maybe not for months after that, snow piled up in the room where Rolfzen slept.

All through the book, through its continual memories of privation and idyll—of catching bullheads, playing marbles, picking berries, working on a farm for three months at the age of sixteen for four cents a day, or the toe of a young Boniface’s shoe falling off as he walked to school—one can feel Rolfzen holding his rage in check. His rage against his father, against the cold, against the plague that was on the land, against the alcoholism that followed from his father to his brothers, against the Catholic elementary school he was named for, St. Boniface, run by nuns who “enjoyed causing pain,” a place where students were threatened with hell for every errant act—where religion “was a senseless, heartless and unforgiving practice. I still bear its scars.”

“In times behind, I too / wished I’d lived / in the hungry Thirties,” Bob Dylan wrote in 1964 in “Eleven Outlined Epitaphs,” his notes to
The Times They Are A-Changin’.
“Rode freight trains for kicks / Got beat up for laughs / I was making my own depression,” he wrote the year before in “My Life in a Stolen Moment”—speaking of leaving Hibbing, leaving the University of Minnesota, traveling west, trying to learn how to live on his own. “I cannot remember ever having a conversation with my dad about anything,” Rolfzen writes—but you can imagine him having conversations about the thirties with Robert. Maybe especially about the tramp armies that passed through Melrose, starting every day at ten when the train pulled in, twenty men or more riding on top of the box cars, jumping from the doors, men who had abandoned their families, who broke into abandoned buildings and knocked on the Rolfzens’ back door begging for food—“My mother never refused them,” Rolfzen writes. With whatever they could scavenge, they headed to a hollow near the tracks, the place called the Bums’ Nest or the Jungle. As a boy, Rolfzen was there, watching and listening, but he will not allow a moment of romance, freedom, or escape: “Theirs was a controlled camaraderie with limited laughter. Each man was alone on these tracks that led to nowhere . . . And so they left. More would arrive the next day. One gentleman in particular I remember. An old bent man dressed in a long shabby coat, a tattered hat on his head and a cane in his hand. The last time I saw him, he was headed west along the railroad tracks, headed for an empty world.”

This is not how the song of the open road goes—and while Bob Dylan has sung that song as much as anyone, as the road opened it also forked, even from the start. “At the end of the great English epic
Paradise Lost,
” Rolfzen writes, “Milton observes the departure of Adam and Eve from the Garden, and as he observes their leaving by the Eastern Gate, he utters these beautiful words: ‘The world was all before them.’”
So much depends
—think of “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,
in 1963. There he is, twenty-two, “riding on a train going west,” dreaming of his
true friends, his soulmates—and then suddenly he is an old man. He and his friends have long since vanished to each other. Their roads haven’t split so much as crumbled, disappeared—“shattered,” he sings. How was it that, in 1963, his voice and guitar calling up a smoky, out-of-focus portrait, Bob Dylan was already looking back, from forty, fifty, sixty years later?

 

 

“As I walked out . . .” With those first words for “Ain’t Talkin’”—not only the longest song on
Modern Times,
and the strongest, but the only performance on the album where you don’t hear calculation—Bob Dylan disappears. Someone other than the singer you think you know seems to be singing the song. He doesn’t seem to know what effects to use, what they might even be for. It’s the only song on the album, really, without an ending—and with those first four words, a cloud is cast. The singer doesn’t know what’s going to happen—and it’s the way he expects that nothing will happen, the way he communicates an innocence you instantly don’t trust, that steels you for the story that he’s about to tell, or that’s about to sweep him up. He walks out into “the mystic garden.” He stares at the flowers on the vines. He passes a fountain. Someone hits him from behind.

This is when he finds the world all before him—because he can’t go back. There is only one reason to travel this road: revenge.

For the only time on
Modern Times,
the music doesn’t orchestrate, doesn’t pump, doesn’t give itself away with its first note. Led by Tony Garnier’s cello and Donnie Herron’s viola, the band curls around the singer’s voice even as he curls around the band’s quiet, retreating, resolute sound, as if the whole song is the opening and closing of a fist, over and over again, the slow rhythm turning lyrics that are pretentious, even precious on the page into a kind of oracular bar talk, the old drunk who’s there every night and never speaks finally telling his story. “I practice a faith that’s long abandoned,” he says, and that might be the most frightening line Bob Dylan has written in years.

The singer moves down his road of patience and blood. You can sense his head turning from side to side as he tells you why his head is bursting: “If I catch my opponents ever sleeping,” he says, “I’ll just slaughter ’em where they lie.” He snaps off the line casually, as if it’s hardly worth the time it takes to say, as if he’s done it before, like William Munny in
Unforgiven
killing children on his way to wherever he went, but that will be nothing to what the singer does to get wherever it is he’s going. God doesn’t care: “the gardener,” the singer says to a woman he finds in the mystic garden, “is gone.”

 

 

Now, Bob Dylan didn’t need B. J. Rolfzen’s tales of the tramp armies that passed through Melrose during the Great Depression to catch a feel for “tracks that led to nowhere.” Empathy has always been the genie of his work, of the tones of his voice, his sense of rhythm, his feel for how to fill up a line or leave it half empty, his sense of when to ride a melody and when to bury it, so that it might dissolve all of a listener’s defenses—and this is what allowed Dylan, in 1962 at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, at home in that secret community of tradition and mystery, to become not only the pining lover in the old ballad “Handsome Molly,” but also Handsome Molly herself.

There’s no tracing that quality of empathy to anything—
so much depends
—but if effects like these had causes, then there would be people doing the same on every corner, in any time. On the way to Hibbing, we stopped at an antique store; shoved in among a shelf of children’s books was a small, cracked book called
From Lincoln to Coolidge,
published in 1924, a collection of news dispatches, excerpts from congressional hearings, and speeches, among them the speech Woodrow Wilson gave to dedicate Abraham Lincoln’s official birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, on 4 September 1916—according to the story a young Bob Dylan was told, just weeks before his one-year-old mother was taken by her parents to see the president campaign in Hibbing from the back of
a train. “This is the sacred mystery of democracy,” Wilson said that day in Hodgenville, “that its richest fruits spring up out of soils that no man has prepared and in circumstances amidst which they are least expected.”