Bob Dylan
By MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
In the 1960's, like millions of other white, middle-class teenagers, I
used to jump around in my suburban bedroom, sing-shouting the lyrics to
"Positively Fourth Street" and "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to my
poster-covered walls and narrow bed. Bob Dylan and I were (or so it seemed
at the time) ticked off about the same things -- America's vanity and
hypocrisy -- and in love with the same things -- anarchic freedom, the
strange beauty of the underlife, the whole haunted shimmer of a vast and
dangerous world. I was not a particularly bookish child. I loved Bob Dylan back when
names like Flaubert, Dostoyevsky and Woolf were mere rumors to me. Hearing
Bob Dylan sing "Just Like a Woman" on "Blonde on Blonde," I had my first
real sense of transport at the hands of a writer. I had never before heard
anything so passionate and peculiar, so utterly itself. I was knocked out
not only by the lithe, effortless rhymes, but by his songs' particular
combination of ardor and cruelty; by their implied conviction that the
yearning for happiness is a deadly serious business, and that seeking it
may not leave your life in any shape you recognize as comfortable or
kind. Every adolescent has heroes, and the people we love in our middle age
are rarely the ones we loved during puberty. Bob Dylan, however, has stood
up for me. When I write fiction, I hope not only to honor the depth and
magic of great authors but to approximate, on paper, the jangly exaltation
I felt when the needle touched the grooves of "Blonde on Blonde." Bob Dylan's most durable gift as a writer may be his obdurate,
unapologetic intensity. He has never once been even slightly ironic. He
has never stood to the side of anything and commented wryly. In a world
swamped by irony, he's held fast. Bob Dylan belongs to a line that includes not only Woody Guthrie and
Jack Kerouac, but Flaubert, Woolf, William Gaddis, and even Maria Callas.
Like them, Bob Dylan is one of the slightly preposterous and wholly
necessary figures who've risked public humiliation by making no secret of
their passions; who've courted reputations as fools, romantics and
hysterics; who've rambled the highways so that we in our beds could
imagine them out there roaming a world so immense and mysterious that the
only conceivable thing to do is try to make art of it. They understood that their strangeness was part of their strength, and
that a great artist can seldom expect to come through with his or her
dignity intact. I've tried to learn what I can. Michael Cunningham is the author of "The Hours," which won the
Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999.
ob Dylan turns 60 this
month. It's been almost 40 years since Joan Baez took him on stage with
her at the Newport Folk Festival, where he appalled just about everyone
with his stridently unpretty singing voice and his raucous, edgy lyrics.
He was then, at least in theory, a folk singer. But Bob Dylan wasn't
interested in wistful melancholy or febrile lament. He sang about poverty
and desperation; he sang about love's limitations in a voice hoarse with
feeling.
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