Dylan's Visions of Sin (34 page)

Would that this were not just a true rhyme but true. Dylan in a recent interview quoted four lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem
Gentlemen-Rankers
, among them
“We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung”. The ladder and lawlessness. The thought that comes in Kipling three lines
later, immediately after the lines
that Dylan quoted, is “Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence”.
²⁵⁰

Words of clean truth, exactingly timed and voiced, are Dylan’s throughout this song. He can crucially pivot a line-ending into an immediate rhyme at the head of the ensuing line:
“That sailed through the air and came down through the room / Doomed . . .” It’s a sickening rotation-repetition. You think at first that it’s Hattie Carroll who was doomed,
but it wasn’t, it was Zanzinger with his cane: “. . . Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”. In some terrible way, Zanzinger, too, is doomed, isn’t in control not
just of himself but of his life. Yet part of the feeling in the word “determined” is that he does will it, too. This is Freud’s antithetical sense of primal words.
“Determined” means either that you didn’t have any choice in the matter (determinism), or, on the contrary, that you’ve chosen (determined) it, chosen in a fury to destroy
all the gentle.

Richard III
, the opening soliloquy again:

The repetition at the line-ending,
these . . . days / these days
, has a grating resentment (Richard the hunchback, a victim of bodily deformity who is on the offensive)
that is the counterpart to the defenceless victim’s grind in
the table . . . the table . . . the table
.

Or take the double negative in the line that immediately follows: “And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”. In its positive power to elicit a simple pathos, this reverts to
a child’s sense of injustice, of injustice perpetrated against the powerless. James Baldwin moved this terrible turn of phrase beyond any possibility of condescension to Black English in his
play
The Amen Corner
:

Such a nice baby, I don’t see why he had to get all twisted and curled up with pain and scream his little head off. And couldn’t nobody help him. He hadn’t
never done nothing to nobody.

“And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”: it takes you right
back to a time when you believed, or hoped against hope, that there
surely must be somebody who would see to it that such things didn’t happen. The sadness and pathos are on her behalf, but they touch us all.

All this, though, without that human illusion of feeling that is sentimentality.
²⁵¹
The song opens with a line that takes a risk: “William
Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll”. But “poor” is saved from any soft pity because it is hard fact. The word is compassionate but it is dispassionate, too, for it does not lose
sight of the plain reality that she is poor. Zanzinger, on the other diamond-ring hand, is not poor. He has “rich wealthy parents”. They’re not just rich, and they’re not
just wealthy; they’re rich wealthy. Superfluous? You bet. Wasteful? But not a word is wasted.

“Rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him”. Parents provide. True. But parents also provide for you. (When you are a child . . .) No, no: his parents didn’t just
provide for him, they provided him. And yet in the eerie way that may be true of these rich families, he both is owned by his parents and owns them in his turn:

This doesn’t say, as it might have said, that he is a man “With rich wealthy parents”, but that he “Owns a tobacco farm . . . With rich wealthy
parents”.

Who provide him, not just provide for him? Some people say, well, that’s just because Dylan couldn’t get the word “for” in. But Dylan can always get into any line as many
words as his art asks. Talk about Hopkins’s sprung rhythm – this is more than sprung, it’s highly sprung. When he sings “who provide and protect him”, he means it. A
poet, as G. K. Chesterton maintained, is someone who means what he says and says what he means.

“Provide” as against “provide for”: a great deal may turn upon the unobtrusive difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb. The judge “Stared at the
person who killed for no reason”. There, one of the horrible things is that Dylan doesn’t, as we might have predicted, call
Zanzinger “the person who
killed Hattie Carroll”. (The cadence would have been fulfilled, after all.) No, it’s just “who killed”. Period. For no reason. Killed as though with no object. The verb
“to kill” doesn’t mind being, as is its right on occasion, an intransitive verb, flat, hideous, indifferent.
²⁵²
The converse is
true of the telling indictment of “you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears”. Whereas “criticize” is its usual transitive self, “philosophize”,
which is usually intransitive, turns transitive. Usually you just philosophize, that is it. You don’t philosophize something. So Dylan’s sense becomes: you who hold forth and who spin
philosophical excuses for what is simply disgrace, you for whom it’s easy to be philosophical about these things since they don’t really impinge on your daily life.
²⁵³

He has a tobacco farm; she empties the ashtrays. He has parents; she gave birth to ten children. “Gave birth to” is piercing (how many lived?). It just reminds you that if
you’re poor, the infant mortality rate does not favour you. Or if you’re black. The song never says she’s black, and it’s his best civil rights song because it never says
she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story.
²⁵⁴
You just know that she must have
been black. But then you know that Zanzinger is white, though it never says this either. It’s a terrible thing that you know this from the story, and from the perfunctory prison sentence,
even while the song never says so. It’s white upon black, it’s man upon woman, it’s rich upon poor, it’s young upon old.

William Zanzinger, who owns things, had “twenty-four years”. Hattie
Carroll “was fifty-one years old”. It is the simple or even casual word
“old” that underscores the difference of age, without underlining anything. We don’t have to be implying that someone is old when we use the phrase “. . . years old”,
but we ought to register what happens when you set “twenty-four years” against “fifty-one years old”.
²⁵⁵
And, given her life
and livelihood, Hattie Carroll is likely to be old at fifty-one. Or there is the way in which nouns are seen as property.

It’s not that he had a finger that had a diamond ring on it; he had a diamond-ring-finger. He may well have had, too, an amethyst-ring-finger, an opal-ring-finger, and a
ruby-ring-finger. His diamond ring finger has this extraordinary feeling of affluent agglomeration. “At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’”. Add up the nouns like that and
you’re really propertied. Nouns are items, and you can possess them, you can own them. It’s partly, yes, the feeling of a newspaper headline,
BALTIMORE HOTEL SOCIETY
GATHERING
,
²⁵⁶
but it’s also the way in which the nouns can be felt to bank up so very very powerfully.

Powerfully, and with rich insolence. For William Zanzinger

Not walked out on bail but strolled out on bail: “In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking”. One fine day. There you have it, leisure and freedom and
amplitude. Meanwhile that “matter of minutes” anticipates another little lapse of time, that “six-month sentence”. Such numbers are felt to figure all the way through, as
with those twenty-four years and those fifty-one years old. Even the scale of the verses plays its scrupulous part. The verses build up. First, six lines plus the refrain. Then seven lines plus the
refrain. Then
ten lines plus the refrain. And then the same again, for there it must stay, on the same scale, no longer lengthening. The final verse, pronouncing the
sentence of (and upon) this court, must not be allowed to trump the life of Hattie Carroll. The scales of justice must hold perfectly level the scale of the two verses, however disgracefully the
court failed to be on the level.

Hattie Carroll
is a supreme understanding of the difference between writing a political song and writing a song politically. T. S. Eliot knew, and practised, the difference between
writing religious poems and writing poems religiously. It is good to be able to write religious poems, but the great thing is being able to write poems religiously, to have religion be not the
subject of a poem but the element.
Hattie Carroll
is one of Dylan’s greatest political songs, not so much because it has a political subject as because everything in it is seen under
the aspect of politics. Truly seen so.

One would need many more words of appreciation than Dylan needed of creation to bring out the living perfection, four square and subtle, of this great song. What Dylan said of the album
Time
Out of Mind
should no less be said of the song
Hattie Carroll
: “There’s no line that has to be there to get to another line.”
²⁵⁷
Yet sometimes he is too modest.

Y’know, every one of my songs could be written better. This used to bother me, but it doesn’t any more. There’s nothing perfect anywhere, so I shouldn’t
expect myself to be perfect.
²⁵⁸

But here is a song that could not be written better. Something perfect everywhere.

Seven Curses

Dylan raised the case of Hattie Carroll to mythic status without ever losing sight of the fact that the judicial hearing was fact: a real particular woman had been killed in
1963, a real particular man had just been brought to trial. So much was history. Dylan’s art ensured that the death of Hattie Carroll was not degraded into either the transcendently mythical
or the slang sense of
history
, something over and done with (forget it, it’s history). But in a different
indictment of the law’s corruptions,
Seven
Curses
, the world is not that of historical fact, let alone recent fact, but that of myth. Truth is to be tested and manifested otherwise than in history. Folklore, ancient and modern, is felt
to populate a worldly story that is at once that of Shakespeare and of Judy Collins.
²⁵⁹

The sin is lust. It might have been covetousness, but the judge did not find himself tempted by the gold and silver. The first verse ends “With an iron chain around his neck”. By the
end of the second verse, the metal has become more precious, and the hope is to save his neck (the chain will otherwise become the rope around his neck) with the help of what is in her hand:
“With gold and silver in her hand”. Appealing to the sin of covetousness. But the judge isn’t excited by money (although he is by her hand, which he wants, though not in
marriage), as he makes clear with his nasty half-punning suggestivenesses with the words “free” and “dear”:

The nauseating thing here is the travesty of the love between father and daughter: “The price, my dear, is you instead”, enjoying its little libidinous suspension,
pausing before and after “my dear” so that it may savour and purr the more. (Not “My dear, the price is you instead” or “The price is you instead, my dear”, but
“The price, my dear, is you instead”.) Old Reilly is the older generation, like the judge: