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 was at issue. Still, Dylan takes bold imaginative decisions as to what songs to re-perform, so can we really not ask whether there are occasions on which a particular decision, though entirely within his rights and doing credit to his renovations and aspirations and audacities, is one for which the song has been asked to pay too high a price? “Those songs have a life of their own.”28
I waver about this when it comes to this song, one of Dylan’s greatest, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, even while I maintain that the historical songs, the songs of conscience, can’t be re-created in the same way as the more personal (not more personally felt) songs of consciousness, with the same kind of freedom. “The chimes of freedom” sometimes have to be in tune with different responsibilities. Dylan can’t, I believe, command a new vantage-point (as he might in looking back upon a failed love or a successful one) from which to see the senseless killing of Hattie Carroll. Or, at least, the question can legitimately come up as to whether he can command a new vantage-point without commanding her and even perhaps wronging her.
He makes the song new, yes, but in the mid 1970s, for example, he sometimes did so by sounding too close for comfort to the tone of William Zanzinger’s tongue (“and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling”). “Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”: the song is rightly siding with the gentle, and it asks (asks this of its creator, too) that it be sounded gently. But then the song can be sung too gently, with not enough sharp-edged dismay.
I used to put this too categorically, and therefore wrongly:
He cannot re-perform the song. He unfortunately still does. There is no other way of singing this song than the way in which he realizes it on The Times They Are A-Changin’. If he sings it any more gently, he sentimentalizes it. If he sings it any more ungently, he allies himself with Zanzinger.29
Alex Ross, of the New Yorker, who is generous towards my appreciation of Dylan, thinks any such reservation narrow-minded of me:
Ricks went on to criticize some of Dylan’s more recent performances of Hattie Carroll, in which he pushes the last line a little: “He doesn’t let it speak for itself. He sentimentalizes it, I’m afraid.” Here I began to wonder whether the close reader had zoomed in too close. Ricks seemed to be fetishizing the details of a recording, and denying the musician license to expand his songs in performance.30
I bridle slightly at that fetishizing-a-recording bit. (What, me? All the world knows that it is women’s shoes that I am into.) Nor do I think of myself as at all denying Dylan licence to expand his songs. (Who’s going to take away his licence to expand?) I’m only proposing that, although he has entire licence in any such matter, freedom is different from (in one sense) licence, and it must be that on occasion an artist who is on a scale to take immense risks will fall short of his newest highest hopes. Samuel Beckett has the courage to fail, and he urges fail better. He knows there’s no success like failure. And that it is not clear what success would mean if failure were not exactly rare but simply unknown. Dylan in 1965:
I know some of the things I do wrong. I do a couple of things wrong. Once in a while I do something really wrong, y’ know, which I really can’t see when I’m involved in it; and after a while I look at it later, I know it’s wrong. I don’t say nothin’ about it.31
It is the greatest artists who have taken the greatest risks, and it is impossible to see what it would mean to respect the artists for this if on every single occasion you were to find that the risks that were run simply ran away. Doesn’t it then start to look as though the risks were only “risks”? If you were, for instance, to think of revision as a form that re-performing may take when it comes to the written word, it is William Wordsworth and Henry James, the most imaginative and unremitting of revisers, who on occasion get it wrong and who lose more than they gain when it comes to some of their audacious post-publication revisions.
Hattie Carroll is a special, though not a unique, case. “License to expand his songs”? But strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. It must at least be possible that the gains of re-performing this particular song could fall short of the losses.