Bob

Addendum #30

As the author of a novel (Songs from a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyan, Song Writer and Performer) based on Bob Dylan’s early years, I was interested to learn that a movie has been made about Dylan. Understandably, the movie has received a lot of attention. Bob Dylan is a mythic figure in American culture, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and a hell of a songwriter. My novel tackles the nature and growth of an imagination since imagination is what, above all, distinguishes Dylan, the teeming wit of his making it all up. One wants to add something about where he was coming from, the upper Midwest, but as far as imagination is concerned, everywhere is anywhere in the United States. We take it where we find it, though the centralizing, homogenizing, commercial forces are fierce and getting fiercer.

Writers joke that a novel isn’t a novel until it’s been optioned for a movie. Most of those movies never get made, but since the movies represent glamour, publicity, and money, the mirage of cinematic prestige is enough. A mere writer sitting at a keyboard and trying to put together many sentences is far removed from the collaboration, to say nothing of the funding, that a movie requires. And then there’s the thread of inspiration that leads a writer to write a book and how dicey that inspiration can be, as in here one day and gone the next. A day for a writer can be years and they can amount to nothing as far as a finished book is concerned. Then again, movies are routinely shelved, too.

I may see the movie, I may not. The world I created is a wordy world. That fits Bob Dylan but, although I write about various musical sources, my novel lacks a soundtrack. Nor do I have photos that show what, for instance, his childhood home looked like. And since my novel is a fiction, it’s not about biographical nooks and crannies, something many books have done already. What interested me was the legendary quality of Dylan, how much he took in and how much he trusted the poetry that a song could embody, how free he was. No guidelines applied for someone taking miscellaneous American song materials and making original art of them. When Dylan was introduced in a club as a “folk artist,” the specifying adjective somehow excused the dodgy noun.

You can’t show inwardness in a movie. Yes, the face is a portal to the soul and a good actor shows us that, but the accretion of inspiration is invisible and often relies on metaphor to indicate what is happening. A movie also has to jump into the protagonist’s life. How much of the back story is conveyed is equivocal or, often, irrelevant. That’s fair for the purposes of drama. We don’t need to know about Hamlet’s childhood but we do wonder about motives for actions. Movies, because they must be devoted to action, often let action speak for itself but someone sitting and dreaming up a song isn’t exactly a case of action. He may be sitting there seemingly doing nothing, not even strumming a guitar.

My next collection of poems begins with three poems entitled “My Mother at the Movies.” They are a homage to the experience of movie going in the 1940s and 1950s. I try to imagine what looking at Joan Crawford or Katherine Hepburn was like for her, what she was being told, and how it affected her. I don’t know of course but again there is that hidden feeling concerning inspiration. Dylan watched his share of movies while growing up. It’s comforting to feel that the movies will go on forever, but the existential contingency that Dylan has invested in one song after another speaks to something very different from “forever.” The momentum of a movie gives us a small eternity, whereas a Dylan song so often gives us a vision that in a spatial sense goes deep and goes nowhere. It’s impossible to say how those stanzas accrue within us. Poetry is like that, which is why I inserted quatrains between the chapters in my novel to lend poetry’s quicksilver blessing to the endeavor.

A commercial society busies itself with telling people what is happening now. New product seems ever forthcoming. It’s hard to explain that a poem or song is not new product, not “another.” It’s hard to make room for those songs in the sense that they are songs and thus on the side somehow. They are not the real stuff of the society which is encoded in work and money. They are “just” songs. Bob Dylan has known this all the way through and has rarely if ever complained. He heard the examples of rural people and urban people, often Black, who made music and didn’t get a million dollars for it. They often got very little if anything. They sang from the heart and for the heart. They made music and though much music became part of something called the “music industry,” no factory was involved. Dylan has spoken for himself as a radical individual, not in a political sense, but in the human sense of being more than a bunch of societal constraints, in the sense of airing out his imagination and letting it go where it was inclined to go – an act of great confidence, invention, sheer playfulness, and, lest we forget, of deference to other musicians, writers, and poets.

In writing my novel, I felt that the best way into the story of an imagination, of someone who, after all, changed his name and thus made himself up, was not through facts but through fiction, particularly since the story was, as novelists like to put it, “character driven.” What plot could there be given one man’s aspirations? A career, as many of his early colleagues remarked, did not seem in the making. That sort of certainty is the last thing the songs are about. Perhaps the movie shows that, perhaps not. I’m glad, for my part, I took the time to go where the songs led me.