Dylan's Visions of Sin (10 page)

It’s all over, then. Envy has shown itself to be one of the corrosive agents (but only one, for this is a song that compacts a good many bad impulses).

Your envy (of what you seem to imagine my position and my place to be) is your problem. Sorry about your dissatisfaction with your position and your place (your standing), but
it’s not my problem, “Don’t you understand”. You don’t understand (and that’s your problem).

The song is sharply shaped when it comes to questions. The first two quatrains don’t have any questions in them and the last two don’t have any either. But the middle of the song is
a quartet of questions, most of them such as are not really questions at all, any more than is “Who do you think you are” or “Can I help you”. Dylan doesn’t print them
with question-marks or sing them very interrogatively:

The only question in the song that is manifestly sung (and printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
) with a question-mark is the one that is treacherously considerate, the
inquiry in the street from the friend: “How are you?” Not “You ask, ‘How are you?’”, but “You say, ‘How are you?’”

It may seem a bit late for this commentary to raise the question of whether the friend is a man or a woman. Not to be raised as a biographical or historical matter – it’s clear that
the friend could be a compound ghost, and many candidates have been proposed over the years, with Joan Baez appearing in the company of half a dozen men in David Hajdu’s annals
Positively
4th Street
(2001). Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares? But much of the song’s power may lurk in its decision not to decide this for us. In a Dylan song it is usually clear whether
a man or a woman is being addressed. This time, not so. “Just talking to somebody that ain’t there.” What matters is that a friend has let you down. Badly. Because of envy and
rivalry and . . . And is still capable of unctuating (“Good luck”) unconvincingly.

A question at a press conference in 1965:

In a lot of your songs you are hard on people – in
Like a Rolling Stone
you’re hard on the girls and in
Positively 4th Street
you’re hard on a
friend. Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?

Answer: “I want to needle them.”
⁸⁸

It was a needle that injected the songs back then; now it is more likely to be a laser beam.

For my part, I have always taken the no-friend-of-his to be a man. Friends of mine, it seems, have taken a woman. At one point, the force of the lines would have to be taken differently if the
irritant were not a he but a she.

I envisage the friend himself as despised here, to his face, as “the one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with”. And I take this to be the
formally aggressive mock-incredulity or distancing (“one who . . .”) that says “he” even while speaking to “you”: “Now he tells me!” This, with
“know” as yet another of the occurrences of a word angrily bandied between the two of them throughout the song. I get more from this than from the other interpretation, the one that
travels out, via the third-person pronoun, to a third party who forms part of an obscure narrative that ripples into further rivalries. For I have always thrilled to the immitigably binary set-up
for the song. You and I, not You and I and He.

Oh, there is a crowd you’re in with, but for the duration of the song the crowd is outside the ring, and inside the ring there are just the two of us, with no referee to boot. So I’d
like to continue to hear “one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with” as contemptuously third person – especially if “third” be pronounced in the
Irish fashion. But I can understand the feeling (and I value the reminder) that a woman could well have proved to be just such a friend.
⁸⁹
And
I’d grant that the word “heartbreaks” (“the heartbreaks you embrace”) might consort better, albeit prejudicially, with a woman. Not that heartbreak need be sexual or
amatory – there is no end to the things that break hearts. (
In Among School Children
, Yeats saw how
different are the images that nuns, as against mothers,
worship: “And yet they too break hearts”.) Heartbreak, like so much else in the song, could have a root in envy. Bursting with envy. Jealousy is not the same, but bear in mind the words
set down in 1586: “Shun jealousy, that heartbreak love”. It may be a valuably unsettling thing about the song that the sex or gender of the friend is not settled. In an interview in
Spin
, Dylan said:

Outside of a song like
Positively 4th Street
, which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of
quote, so-called, relationships. I don’t have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven’t.
⁹⁰

Two-dimensional, not one-dimensional, this 4th Street, and although one-sided, it is two-edged, a two-handed engine that stands ready to smite more than once and smite some
more. As to sex or gender: the canting word “relationships” (“quote, so-called”), though these days it does suggest lovees and lovers more than friends, can’t be
denied its applicability to friendship, or to ex-friendship. Catharsis, the ancient critical metaphor in Dylan’s phrase “purge myself”, would be one way of getting rid of the
catharsole and of the waste matter that is pretence.
⁹¹
The metaphor in “purge myself ” is critical, but Dylan’s target isn’t
formally a critic. “Some would later think the vitriolic lyrics were addressed to the critics of his new style. Dylan denies it. ‘I couldn’t write a song about something like
that,’ he said, ‘I don’t write songs to critics.’”
⁹²

I don’t envy the imagined or imaginary “friend” in this song. One other candidate as the sin of the song would be anger. But the power and the threat are felt in the very
restraint: there is no yielding of any kind in the song, and that includes yielding to anger (as against understanding what anger might yield). Anger is a sin resisted or at least curbed by the
song. But if I ask what sin might have tempted the artist himself here, the answer isn’t going to be envy. When it comes to sin, the song is all the more ample in that its position and its
place are not circumscribed by envy. The song looks searchingly into those who, having opted for emptinesses, now want to co-opt someone back into their misvalued ethos and pathos. Pity for the
infected, as Pound said, but preserve antisepsis.

What sin, come to think of it, might envy incite? Why, pride.
My
position and
my
place. Pride in being envied, even sometimes (and this is the very bad bit) if it is being envied
by creeps. And then pride’s further pleasure: contempt for the envious flatterers. But Dylan does not flatter himself – again, not a biographical point but an artistic accomplishment.
He can be proud of the song, not least because he is not proud in it.

Blind Willie McTell

Gratitude to a fellow-singer, no less than in
Song to Woody
(1962), is the life of
Blind Willie McTell
(1983), of which the burden is both a happy refrain and the
possibility of an unhappy weight, the burden that would be envy, were it not that the song goes free from it.

Song to Woody
had acknowledged something without sounding as though this were only conceding or admitting, let alone grudgingly admitting:

That I’m saying and that I’m singing. It may cost a singer a good deal to say this unenviously about another singer, but the cost is gladly paid by a solvent artist,
for it is not so much paid as repaid, and is a debt of honour. And gratitude doesn’t run to ingratiation. The refrain of
Blind Willie McTell
is likewise happy to do some acknowledging.
The earlier “I know that you know” becomes this:

This might sound negative,
know no
(no, no), but then that is how to convey that nothing could be more positive. Or more compacted (I know that no one can, and I know no
one who can). Gratitude is called upon and called for, as it is in the warning voice (O . . . no . . . know . . . know . . . no) above Adam and Eve in
Paradise Lost
:

After Guthrie in Dylan’s creative life, though before Guthrie historically, there comes – welcomed – a new arrival who is a newer rival. The rivalry has its
chivalry.

There is a road that runs for twenty years from the one travelling song,
Song to Woody
, to the other,
Blind Willie McTell
. Take, for instance, Dylan’s sequence “This
land is”, moving on to “from New Orleans / To Jerusalem”. Guthrie didn’t own the franchise on this sequence of words, but it has a way of summoning him.
This Land is Your
Land
was his.
⁹³

Dylan puts his own grim spin on this by having the phrase “This land is” be consummated not by “your land” but by “condemned”. It is a
withering word, once you think of how much it might compact: “condemned” as blamed, censured, judicially sentenced, doomed by fate to some condition, pronounced officially to be unfit
for use (we often hear of a house as being condemned, but a
land
?), or – and this is an odd twist – just the opposite, not unfit for use but so fit for use that the government
claims the right to take it over: to pronounce judicially (land etc.) as converted or convertible to public use. (“The condemnation of private lands for a highway, a railroad, a public park,
etc.”) All these might be seething in the word “condemned”, and so perhaps – since the train of thought is “Seen the arrow on the
doorpost /
Saying, this land is condemned” – might be the application to “a door or window: to close or block up”. Henry James,
Portrait of a Lady
: “the door that had been
condemned, and that was fastened by bolts”.

“This land” was all the more Woody Guthrie’s because not his alone. Behind it there is an inheritance that is respected in
Blind Willie McTell
, too. The phrase
“this land” has its own substantial entry in
Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible
, and the phrase’s being more than a casual pointer in Dylan’s song will be clear
if we recall the word in whose company “this land” repeatedly appears in the Bible: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7, repeated in 24:7); “Unto thy
seed have I given this land” (Genesis 15:18); “I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of I will give unto your seed” (Exodus
32:13). “The stars” rise in Dylan’s second verse, but the song then bides its time, and it is not until the final verse that “this land” meets the word that is sown so
often in its vicinity: “seed”.