Would you say that the words are more important than the music?
“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words.”22
“It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words, there’s nothing that’s exploited. The words and the music, I can hear the sound of what I want to say.”23
“The lyrics to the songs . . . just so happens that it might be a little stranger than in most songs. I find it easy to write songs. I have been writing songs for a long time and the words to the songs aren’t written out for just the paper, they’re written as you can read it, you dig? If you take whatever there is to the song away – the beat, the melody – I could still recite it. I see nothing wrong with songs you can’t do that with either – songs that, if you took the beat and melody away, they wouldn’t stand up. Because they’re not supposed to do that you know. Songs are songs.”24
What’s more important to you: the way that your music and words sound, or the content, the message?
“The whole thing while it’s happening. The whole total sound of the words, what’s really going down is –”25
– at which point Dylan cuts across himself, at a loss for words with which to speak of words in relation to the whole total: “it either happens or it doesn’t happen, you know”. At a loss, but finding the relation again and again in the very songs.
It ought to be possible, then, to attend to Dylan’s words without forgetting that they are one element only, one medium, of his art. Songs are different from poems, and not only in that a song combines three media: words, music, voice. When Dylan offered as the jacket-notes for Another Side of Bob Dylan what mounted to a dozen pages of poems, he headed this Some Other Kinds of Songs . . . His ellipsis was to give you time to think. In our time, a dot dot dot communication.
Philip Larkin was to record his poems, so the publishers sent round an order form inviting you to hear the voice of the Toads bard. The form had a message from the poet, encouraging you – or was it discouraging you? For there on the form was Larkin insisting, with that ripe lugubrious relish of his, that the “proper place for my poems is the printed page”, and warning you how much you would lose if you listened to the poems read aloud: “Think of all the mis-hearings, the their / there confusions, the submergence of rhyme, the disappearance of stanza shape, even the comfort of knowing how far you are from the end.” Again, Larkin in an interview, lengthening the same lines:
I don’t give readings, no, although I have recorded three of my collections, just to show how I should read them. Hearing a poem, as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much – the shape, the punctuation, the italics, even knowing how far you are from the end. Reading it on the page means you can go your own pace, take it in properly; hearing it means you’re dragged along at the speaker’s own rate, missing things, not taking it in, confusing “there” and “their” and things like that. And the speaker may interpose his own personality between you and the poem, for better or worse. For that matter, so may the audience. I don’t like hearing things in public, even music. In fact, I think poetry readings grew up on a false analogy with music: the text is the “score” that doesn’t “come to life” until it’s “performed”. It’s false because people can read words, whereas they can’t read music. When you write a poem, you put everything into it that is needed: the reader should “hear” it just as clearly as if you were in the room saying it to him. And of course this fashion for poetry readings has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go: easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. I don’t think it stands up on the page.26
The human senses have different powers and limits, which is why it is good that we have five (or is it six?) of them. When you read a poem, when you see it on the page, you register – whether consciously or not – that this is a poem in, say, three stanzas: I’ve read one, I’m now reading the second, there’s one to go. This is the feeling as you read a poem, and it’s always a disconcerting collapse when (if your curiosity hasn’t made you flick over the pages before starting the poem) you turn the page and find, “Oh, that was the end. How curious.” Larkin’s own endings are consummate. And what he knows is that your ear cannot hear the end approaching in the way in which your eye – the organ that allows you to read – sees the end of the poem approaching. You may, of course, know the music well, and so be well aware that the end is coming, but such awareness is a matter of familiarity and knowledge, whereas with a poem that you have never seen before, you yet can see perfectly well that this is the final stanza that you are now reading.
Of sonnet-writing, Gerard M. Hopkins wrote of both seeing and hearing “the emphasis which has been gathering through the sonnet and then delivers itself in those two lines seen by the eye to be final or read by the voice with a deepening of note and slowness of delivery”.27
For the eye can always simply see more than it is reading, looking at; the ear cannot, in this sense (given what the sense of hearing is), hear a larger span than it is receiving. This makes the relation of an artist like Dylan to song and ending crucially different from the relation of an artist like Donne or Larkin to ending. The eye sees that it is approaching its ending, as Jane Austen can make jokes about your knowing that you’re hastening towards perfect felicity because there are only a few pages left of the novel. A novel physically tells you that it is about to come to an end. The French Lieutenant’s Woman in one sense didn’t work, couldn’t work, because you knew perfectly well that since it was by John Fowles and not by a post-modernist wag there was bound to be print on those pages still to come, the last hundred pages. So it couldn’t be about to end, isn’t that right?, because this chunk of it was still there, to come. But then John Fowles, like J. H. Froude, whose Victorian novel he was imitating in this matter of alternative endings, knows this and tries to build this, too, into the effect of his book.
Dylan has an ear for a tune, whether it’s his, newly minted, or someone else’s, newly mounted. He has a voice that can’t be ignored and that ignores nothing, although it spurns a lot. Dylan when young did what only great artists do: define anew the art he practised. Marlon Brando made people understand something different by acting. He couldn’t act? Very well, but he did something very well, and what else are you going to call it? Dylan can’t sing?
Every song, by definition, is realized only in performance. True. A more elusive matter is whether every song is suited to re-performance. Could there be such a thing as a performance that you couldn’t imagine being improved upon, even by a genius in performance? I can’t imagine his doing better by The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, for instance, than he does on The Times They Are A-Changin’. Of course I have to concede at once that my imagination is immensely smaller than his, and it would serve me right, as well as being wonderfully right, if he were to prove me wrong. But, as yet, what (for me) is gained in a particular re-performing of this particular song (and yes, there are indeed gains) has always fallen short of what had to be sacrificed. Any performance, like any translation, necessitates sacrifice, and I believe that it would be misguided, and even unwarrantably protective of Dylan, to suppose that his decisions as to what to sacrifice in performance could never be misguided. Does it not make sense, then, to believe, or to argue, that Dylan’s realizing of The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll was perfect, a perfect song perfectly rendered, once and for all?
Clearly Dylan doesn’t believe so, or he wouldn’t re-perform it. He makes judgements as to what to perform again, and he assuredly does not re-perform every great song (you don’t hear Oxford Town or Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands in concert). Admittedly there are a good many good reasons why a song might not be re-performed, matters of quality newly judged, or aptness to an occasion or to a time, or a change of conviction, all of which means that the entire rightness of a previous performance wouldn’t have to be what
