Ten Years in the Tub (34 page)

     
  
Chronicles: Volume One
—Bob Dylan

     
  
Little Children
—Tom Perrotta

     
  
Soldiers of Salamis
—Javier Cercas

     
  
The Book of Shadows
—Don Paterson

T
he story so far: I have been writing a column in this magazine for the last fifteen months. And though I have had frequent battles with the Polysyllabic Spree—the fifty-five disturbingly rapturous and rapturously disturbing young men and women who edit the
Believer
—I honestly thought that things had got better recently. We seemed to have come to some kind of understanding, a truce. True, we still have our differences of opinion: they have never really approved of me reading anything about sport, and nor do they like me referring to books wherein people eat meat or farmed fish. (There are a whole host of other rules too ridiculous to mention—for example, you try finding “novels which express no negative and/or strong emotion, either directly or indirectly”—but I won't go into them here.) Anyway, I was stupid enough to try to accommodate their whims, and you can't negotiate with moral terrorists. In my last column, I wrote a little about cricket, and I made a slightly off-color joke about Chekhov, and that was it: I was banned from the magazine,
sine die, which is why my column was mysteriously absent from the last issue and replaced by a whole load of pictures. Pictures! This is how they announce my death! It's like a kind of happy-clappy North Korea round here.

I have no idea whether you'll ever get to read these words, but my plan is this: not all the fifty-five members of the Spree are equally sharp, frankly speaking, and they've got this pretty dozy woman on sentry duty down at the
Believer
presses. (Sweet girl, loves her books, but you wouldn't want her doing the Harold Bloom interview, if you know what I mean.) Anyway, we went out a couple of times, and I've told her that I've got the original, unedited, 600-page manuscript of
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
, her favorite novel. I've also told her she can have it if she leaves me unsupervised for thirty minutes while I work out a way of getting “Stuff I've Been Reading” into the magazine. If you're reading these words, you'll know it all came off. This is guerrilla column-writing, man. We're in uncharted territory here.

They couldn't have picked a worse time to ban me, because I read my ass off last month.
Gravity's Rainbow, Daniel Deronda
, Barthes's
S/Z
, an enormous biography of some poet or another that was lying around… It was insane, what I got through. And it was all for nothing. This month I read what I wanted to read, rather than what I thought the Spree might want me to read, and there was nothing I wanted to read more than
Chronicles
and
The Plot Against America
.

I'm not a Dylanologist—to me he's your common-or-garden great artist, prone to the same peaks and troughs as anyone else and with nothing of any interest in his trash can. Even so, when I first heard about a forthcoming Dylan autobiography, I still found it hard to imagine what it would look like. Would it have a corny title—
My Back Pages
, say, or
The Times, They Have A-Changed
? Would it have photos with captions written by the author? You know the sort of thing: “The eyeliner years. What was
that
all about?!!?” Or, “Mary Tyler Moore and I, Malibu, 1973. Not many people know that our break-up inspired
Blood On The Tracks
.” Would he come clean about who those Five Believers really were, and what was so obvious about them? Even if you don't have much time for the myth of Dylan, it's still hard to imagine that he'd ever be able to make himself prosaic enough to write autobiographical prose.

Chronicles
ends up managing to inform without damaging the mystique,
which is some feat. In fact, after reading the book, you end up realizing that Dylan isn't willfully obtuse or artful in any way—it's just who he is and how his mind works. And this realization in turn has the effect of contextualizing his genius—maybe even diminishing it, if you had a lot invested in his genius being the product of superhuman effort. He thinks in apocalyptic metaphors and ellipses, and clearly sees jokers and thieves and five (or more) believers everywhere he looks, so writing about them is, as far as he is concerned, no big deal. Here he is describing the difference a change in his technique made to him: “It was like parts of my psyche were being communicated to by angels. There was a big fire in the fireplace and the wind was making it roar. The veil had lifted. A tornado had come into the place at Christmastime, pushed all the fake Santa Clauses aside and swept away the rubble…” The boy can't help it. (My favorite little enigmatic moment comes when Dylan tells us how he arrived at his new surname, an anecdote that includes a reference to “unexpectedly” coming across a book of Dylan Thomas's poems. Where did the element of surprise come in, do you think? Did it land on his head? Did he find it under his pillow one morning?)

What's so impressive about
Chronicles
is the seriousness with which Dylan has approached the task of explaining what it's like to be him and how he got to be that way. He doesn't do that by telling you about his childhood or about the bath he was running when he started humming “Mr. Tambourine Man” to himself for the first time;
Chronicles
is non-linear and concentrates on tiny moments in a momentous life—an afternoon in a friend's apartment in New York in 1961, a couple of days in New Orleans in 1989, recording
Oh Mercy
with Daniel Lanois. But he uses these moments like torches, to throw light backwards and forwards, and by the end of the book he has illuminated great swathes of his interior life—the very part one had no real hope of ever being able to see.

And
Chronicles
is a lot humbler than anyone might have anticipated, because it's about wolfing down other people's stuff as much as it's about spewing out your own. Here is a random selection of names taken from the second chapter: The Kingston Trio, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Greil Marcus, Tacitus, Pericles, Thucydides, Gogol, Dante, Ovid, Dickens, Rousseau, Faulkner, Leopardi,
Freud, Pushkin, Robert Graves, Clausewitz, Balzac, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Leadbelly, Judy Garland, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie… Many of the writers on this list were apparently encountered for the first time on a bookshelf in that NYC apartment. I have no idea whether the shelf, or the apartment, or even the friend actually existed, or whether it's all an extended metaphor; and nor do I care, because this is a beautiful, remarkable book, better than anyone had any right to expect, and one of the best and most scrupulous I can remember reading about the process of creativity. You don't even have to love the guy to get something out of it; you just have to love people who create any art at all.