The tambourine men

Disillusioned and disenchanted: Melville and Dylan

Herman Melville:

I recently read (or reread) all of the prose works by Hermann Melville.  After a while, I began to notice some parallels between Melville and Bob Dylan, especially the Dylan music of the 1960s.  Both writers employed a poetic style full of biblical references, and both created works of art that can be viewed as a form of protest.  This is most obvious in Melville’s semi-autobiographical novel “White-Jacket”, and in Dylan’s second and third albums.  But what interests me the most is the way their approach seemed to change in response to career setbacks.

I’m a big fan of the sea stories written by Stevenson and Conrad.  Melville’s prose output also focuses 19th century sailors, but he is a much different writer.  He often tried out new and radical literary experiments, even within a given novel.  At times, he seemed to anticipate mid-20^th century post-modernism.  Partly as a result, he had higher peaks and lower lows than either Stevenson or Conrad.

I haven’t read any Melville biographies, other than the brief summary of his life in the handsome Library of America volumes.  But a biography would seem almost superfluous, as what really matters is an author’s writing, and Melville’s is so open and revealing as to constitute a sort of autobiography.  (If you have read his biography, please use the comment section to correct any errors.)

Melville’s first novel was entitled Typee, and was based on his experience on a whaler in the South Seas.  It was his only major commercial success, and it makes the Marquesas Islands seem like a sort of paradise.  The real mystery is not why Moby Dick didn’t sell (it’s a challenging novel), rather the puzzle is that even Typee’s follow-up Omoo was a flop, even though both books are highly entertaining.

After Omoo, he began a long series of literary experiments.  Mardi starts out in the same style and Typee and Omoo, and then veers off into seemingly endless philosophical musings on all sorts of issues, including a discussion of authors whose works are misunderstood by the public and critics.  Melville seemed to understand that Mardi would be a failure, and was already answering his critics in the novel itself.

In Redburn and White-Jacket, Melville become increasingly disenchanted and disillusioned.  Unless I’m mistaken, these terms have similar but not identical meanings.  Very young people experience an enchanting, almost magical world, which seems to become more dreary as they age.  And young people are often under the illusion that other people see the world in the same way that they do, and become disillusioned when they discover that other people are not what they imagined.

Melville was not just a great writer; he also had a deep understanding of great literature.  (Read his insightful review of Hawthorne.)  He surely understood that in Moby Dick he had written a masterpiece.  I have trouble even imagining how disappointing it would be to see this sort of novel flop with both readers and critics.

Melville’s post-Moby Dick novels and stories utilized a range of different styles.  One  common thread is an extreme cynicism regarding the human race.  After repeated disappointments, Melville seems to have lost his youthful optimism.  The novel Pierre contains a bitter indictment of so-called respectable society.  It portrays a world where anyone who behaves in an idealistic fashion, anyone who takes seriously the teachings of Jesus, will be crushed by society’s hypocrisy.  In Bartleby, Melville creates a character that became completely apathetic after going through an unexplained ordeal.  The Confidence Man is full of cynical sociopaths and trusting victims.  Billy Budd shows how life can be unfair to the young and innocent. 

Bob Dylan:  

Bob Dylan spent a substantial portion of his Nobel Lecture describing how Moby Dick shaped his general worldview.  But Dylan’s interest in early America went well beyond that particular novel.  When he was in his early 20s, he spent long hours in the New York City library, reading microfilm of old newspapers from the Civil War era. Compared to other 60s pop stars, his music is much more grounded in the past.  

I once spent several years reading (on microfilm) all of the New York Times for the decade from 1929 through 1938.  After a while you become so immersed in the period that it starts to feel like the real world.  I suspect that was also true for Dylan.   (I wonder how many people go through life never once thinking about the fact that the distant past actually once was the real world, the “present”.)   

Unlike Melville, Dylan had great commercial success throughout his life.  As a result, some of you will be skeptical of the comparison I am about to make.  But hear me out. 

Dylan achieved early success with protest songs.  Hard Rain, Hattie Carroll and Masters of War were his White-Jacket.  Then in the summer of 1964, he came out with a more personal album that was entirely free of “protest” songs.  (I use scare quotes, as Dylan once quipped that all his songs are protest songs.)  Many of his fans were disappointed. Liner notes from Bootleg #6 suggest:

Dylan has since recalled how much the criticism of Another Side stung. 

Over the course of his career, he would repeatedly disappoint his fans---going electric in 1965, moving back to acoustic in 1967 and to country music in 1969, then to Christian music in 1979.  For me, the most striking change in Dylan’s music occurred even before he went electric, in late 1964.

Today is the 60^th anniversary of a landmark Dylan concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall, captured on the Bootleg #6 release.  The music is still all-acoustic, but it contains three key songs from what would become his first electric album---1965’s Bringing It All Back Home.  Actually only side one is electric; it was three of the acoustic songs from the 1965 album that he played on Halloween 1964 in NYC.  (BTW, the most expensive tickets were $4.50, which is $45 in today’s dollars.)

[As an aside, The Economist recently published an article entitled “Bringing It All Back Home”.  Someone age 21 when that album came out is now 80, and presumably no longer writing articles for that magazine.  How much time must go by before young people abandon the view that interest in Dylan and the Beatles is just boomer nostalgia?]

I’ve always been a bit obsessed with this trio of songs.  Mr Tambourine Man was written in early 1964, and features a sort of enchanted world.  In contrast, Gates of Eden and It’s Alright, Ma were written around July 1964, and reflect the worldview of a disillusioned young man.  These three songs also contain some of his best lyrics (at least to a middlebrow reader like me.)

With Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan had reached the peak of his career.  Critics usually rate his next two albums a bit higher, and they are certainly more sophisticated in a musical sense.  But in some respects, side two of Bringing It All Back Home is the purest expression of what makes Dylan distinctive. 

Unlike Melville, Dylan maintained a pretty high level of success throughout most of his career.  So what would have pushed him in more a cynical direction in late 1964?  Here’s an analogy.  People often tell me that my blogging has been successful, that it’s made a real impact in how people think about monetary policy.  But from my perspective it seems like a complete failure.  Dylan’s several orders of magnitude more successful than me, but also several orders of magnitude more talented.  He may have been frustrated by the reaction of fans and critics.

It’s also a mistake to focus too much on the question of commercial success.  Dylan often left great songs off albums, and replaced them with mediocre ones.  (Imagine Desire with Abandoned Love instead of Joey.)  He often seemed indifferent to commercial success, indeed at times almost averse to it, like Poe’s Imp of the Perverse.  If I’m right about Dylan becoming disillusioned in 1964, it wasn’t about commercial success or the lack thereof.

Imagine a young man who meets the woman of his dreams, and then discovers that she doesn’t share the same taste in music and books.  At that point, the world begins to seem a bit less enchanted.  He begins to feel a bit more isolated from the rest of humanity.  It’s not a good feeling, but it’s often a part of life.  When I read Melville or listen to Dylan, I feel that both went through that sort of disillusionment, and to a much greater extent than the average person.

Both Melville and Dylan produced art that was relatively demanding.  Hardly anyone was able to follow Melville’s art, while Dylan had considerable commercial and critical success.  But even Dylan was probably often disappointed by a lack of connection with his audience and his acquaintances.  That’s alienating.  Both artists occasionally seemed to strike back at their critics in their writing.  (Recall Ballad of a Thin Man.)

Melville’s Billy Budd and Dylan’s Hattie Carroll were both victims of the powerful and corrupt.  Both artists empathized with people at the bottom of society.  Both were interested in confidence artists.  Both disdained bourgeois society.  Bartleby could be the inspiration for a million people who “dropped out” in the 1960s. 

It’s Alright, Ma is full of lines that feel like late Melville:

There is no sense in trying . . .

That he not busy being born, is busy dying . . .

Bent out of shape from society’s pliers . . .

While money doesn’t talk, it swears . . .

In contrast, Mr. Tambourine Man feels like earlier Melville—an enchanted world.

Compared to Melville, Stevenson and Conrad had careers that moved along more of an even keel.  Melville was highly unstable, oscillating between the pretentious and the sublime.  It is interesting to think about how Melville’s career might have played out if he’d had the same level of commercial success as Dylan.

Melville lived another 40 years after writing Moby Dick.  I find his case to be much sadder than someone like Van Gogh, who only reached his peak a couple years before he died.  Dylan has had almost 60 years to wrestle with the problem of how to go on with a career when you can no longer reach the peaks achieved at age 24.  But at least he knows he will never be forgotten.  Melville didn’t even know that.

The final paragraph of Chapter 24 of Moby Dick seems very Dylanesque:

And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.         

In a recent essay on Houellebecq’s Submission, Karl Ove Knausgaard finds a silver lining in disillusionment:

The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and pretenses we concoct to give life meaning, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its own driving force. But what does that matter as long as it creates great literature, quivering with ambivalence, full of longing for meaning, which, if none is found, it creates itself?   

The post title? Well, here’s Melville on the tambourine in time: 

Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!

And Dylan:

And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

Even though I am generally more receptive to the visual arts, Melville and Dylan are my two favorite American artists. The next eight on my top ten list would all be architects or film directors.

PS. Someone with more knowledge of music than I have should do a post on how pop music blew up in 1965. Major albums that came out in 1966 (Revolver, Pet Sounds, Blonde on Blonde, Aftermath, etc.) would have been inconceivable just two years earlier. In 1965, you have musicians starting to adopt the attitude that would eventually lead to punk (in songs like My Generation, Satisfaction, Get Off of My Cloud, Maggie’s Farm, Highway 61). You have the beginnings of the sort of clever wordplay (and intentional misspellings) that would later be associated with rap (Subterranean Homesick Blues), and a lot of other interesting experiments. Has pop ever evolved so much in such a short time, either before or since 1965?

PPS. For some reason (a Richard Hanania link?) there are lots of new subscribers today. Not sure you came here for posts on Melville and Dylan, but welcome anyway and Happy Halloween.