How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke He refused to be a Leftist prophet

The American birthright entails both the freedom and often times the necessity of making yourself up from scratch. Many of America’s most famous heroes were self-made men, from Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. The same is true for the protagonists of America’s best-loved tales, from Huckleberry Finn to Jay Gatsby. Where Europeans defined themselves, both individually and collectively, through bloodlines and attachment to the soil, Americans defined themselves through a shared freedom from the past and an accompanying licence to roam.

Where Americans were born and who their parents are has always been much less important than how they greeted the present moment, with one eye fixed on the road ahead and the other on the stars. Walt Whitman’s great “Song of Myself”, written in 1855 and unfolding over 52 stanzas, including accounts of sea battles and slavery, mentions not a single word about the speaker’s parents, or even what their names were.

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, in which “Song of Myself” is contained, is the fountainhead of American poetics, particularly in the 20th century. Its distinctive echo can be heard everywhere after the Second World War, from the Beats to the novels of Saul Bellow, to the highbrow confessional poems of John Berryman and Frank O’Hara. In Rock and Roll music, Whitman’s greatest late 20th-century heir was undoubtedly Bob Dylan, who eerily reproduced both Whitman’s continent-spanning metre and his love of playful self-contradiction. Try reading nearly anything Whitman wrote in Dylan’s distinctive nasal tone, and the kinship will be plain.

James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown is merely the latest of a series of films that have attempted to grapple with the sometimes gratifying, often alienating mixture of freedom and vertigo inherent in the American birthright through the character of the man from nowhere. If the bright side of this character can be glimpsed in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, arguably the founding work of American literature, in Whitman’s all-embracing cosmic self, and in the rags-to-riches tales of Horatio Alger, the darkness that can accompany freedom from the past isn’t hard to find either. Natty Bumppo, the frontiersman-killer of James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, is the precursor to the ambivalent killer-hero of nearly every Western. Jay Gatsby’s invented self is ultimately more loyal and virtuous than the Long Island snobs who attend his glittering parties; it is also lie that ends in death.

The character of Bob Dylan, the boy who ostensibly learned to play music from circus performers passing through Hibbing, Minnesota and then re-named himself after the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (a fact that Dylan strenuously denied for years before admitting to in his charming autobiography Chronicles) was more or less fully-fashioned even before the young performer set off to New York City to find Woody Guthrie and set the often drearily earnest world of American folk music on its ear. America has never really known Robert Zimmerman, the man who invented Bob Dylan. It has only known Bob Dylan.

So why did the 19-year-old Zimmerman choose to become Dylan? The answer, as he told 60 Minutes interviewer Ed Bradley 20 years ago, was because those are the rules of American selfhood. “You call yourself what you want to call yourself,” Dylan responded. “This is the land of the free.”

Dylan’s self-invented character of a punk Woody Guthrie, or as a rock and roll Walt Whitman, was wildly influential in his moment, for reasons that take a moment to recover. Meanwhile, his best songs have lost none of their immediacy. Working in the genre of “original folk music” that he more or less invented, he set the rules for rock songwriting for the next half century while writing two or three dozen major and minor classics that uniquely merited the awarding of a Nobel Prize for Literature, despite the formal and functional gulf that separates song lyrics from novels and poetry.

The rules of a “Dylan song” have remained remarkably consistent over time, bringing together the worlds of Woody Guthrie, hipster downtown New York, American roots music, the blues, country and western, into a kind of primordial soup that Dylan could dip his brush into at will; he created deceptively off-hand-seeming compositions governed by a rueful romanticism and a bullet-proof intelligence that twists and turns like a fish in order to avoid being caught.

It is also true that the alchemy by which singer-songwriters (itself an invention of the Sixties) do their thing tends to produce a period of startling peak creativity that lasts perhaps five years, often precluding the possibility of a second act. The Beatles produced all their great records within five years, as did the Rolling Stones. Jimi Hendrix’s entire career lasted four years, as did Kurt Cobain’s.

For artists who survive their creative peak, the reward is often an afterlife with lesser access to the divine. Part of Dylan’s spectacular self-awareness, which has only rarely faltered, is that he recognised the departure of the spirit much sooner than most; he never insisted that his newer songs were actually his best work. “I don’t know how I got to write those songs,” he admitted to Ed Bradley, of the classics he penned at his peak. “It’s a penetrating type of a magic, and I did it at one time.”

What’s left now, apart from the songs, is the distinctive voice, along with a repertoire of feints and dodges mixed with the occasional lip-curling hipster put-down. Onstage these days, the songwriter is often a gnomic shell, appearing to follow an internal logic by which he makes sense of himself to himself. Whatever those dialogues may be about, one suspects that the “real Bob Dylan” — whatever that means — of the singer’s youth was more sharper-edged and predatory than Timothée Chalamet’s cuddly, doe-eyed portrayal.

Still, Chalamet gets the look and the gestures right. He also nicely conveys the capacity for menace that the self-made man inherently contains. After all, if a person invents themselves from scratch, discarding their flesh-and-blood parents and origins in favour of their own self-invented mythos, then how much is that person likely to care about you? Not much. In his portrayal, Chalamet is notably faithful to the first and greatest portrayal of the character of Bob Dylan on film, which was by Bob Dylan himself, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back — which smartly allowed Dylan to do the work of explaining himself. By contrast, I’m Not There, an annoying film by the supremely surface-orientated director Todd Haynes, a master of a colder type of irony, swallows the Dylan mythology whole, as some kind of sacrament of modern American selfhood — without understanding or explaining why that should be true, apart from the multiplicity and seeming discontinuities in the pop star’s character, which Haynes implies should each be respected individually, like a family of distinguished drag queens.

What Haynes misses, and Pennebaker viscerally understood — and Mangold clearly intimates, without wanting to emphasise it too strongly — is that Dylan, in both his music and his persona, found himself at the centre of the great intergenerational battle of the Sixties over the American gospel of individualism. For Dylan, the young man from Hibbing, the self that he invented out of his own materials was at once an entirely personal creation and at the same time represented his connection to a shared vision of America. He was a distinctly American individualist, just as Whitman was, and most great American-born artists are.

The materials he chose to work from were coded in ways that the young Dylan didn’t entirely recognise, though. Woody Guthrie wasn’t just a great American songwriter who spoke and sang in his own half-invented popular. The way that the young Robert Zimmerman might have imagined him. He was also a member of the Communist Party, which had its own uses for Guthrie’s persona and his art. The same was true of the parents of Dylan’s Greenwich Village girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who Dylan credited with educating him about racial discrimination and labour politics and other subjects that the young singer-songwriter professed to “not know much about”. While the great folk archivist Alan Lomax, whose materials became Dylan’s, was not a Communist, he was undoubtedly a preservationist who saw folk music not as raw material to be mined and re-mixed by a future rock and roll Whitman, but the rightful property of the oppressed.

In other words, as Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.

In doing so, Dylan turned his back on the certainties of Leftist politics in order to more fully become what he wanted to be in the first place, which was himself. Aside from being a singer-songwriter, who that person was was entirely his own business. “I’m a song-and-dance man,” he once told a press conference at the height of the mania surrounding his decision to become a rock and roll artist and release “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna”, instead of additional helpings of Leadbelly covers. Neither Dylan nor the gathered reporters seemed able to disguise their glee at the proposition that he could simply make music, free of politics or the demands of being a prophet. “Elvis, I could easily see myself as him,” Dylan mused more than once. “But a prophet? Nah.”

It is only fair to Bob Dylan, the man, however self-made, to acknowledge how much the decision to break free from the heavily politicised aesthetics of the American Left, and the expectations and demands that came with it, must have cost him, both as a human being and as an artist. The assertion of the greater truth of his own art over the demands of the collective must have been, in many dimensions, a never-ending nightmare. Such was the price of the creative freedom that he sought and gained.

Was it worth it? For Dylan and for America, the answer is yes. Dylan’s legendary Basement Tapes with the Band, which surfaced as a lost corpus of songs from somewhere deep in the American imagination, continue to speak to us now, as much as his albums from his creative peak do. The fact that he maintained his place in the national imagination up through his 80s, speaks to a personal strength that is uniquely visible now, and makes it possible for his music to be heard by a new generation. In an era in which cookie-cutter Leftist politics similarly declares its pre-eminence over the aesthetic whims of mere artists, whose job is to bend the knee and crank out Shepherd Fairey-like propaganda in the interests of the Party, Dylan’s struggle again resonates.

Dylan himself would most likely have as little interest in being portrayed as a refusenik against the demands of proto-wokism as he would in continuing to sing worker’s protest songs. He was more interested in being Elvis. Yet, his example feels especially potent now for the obvious reason that we are once again living in an age when the threats to the integrity of the self, and to artistic expression, from both the Left and Right are very obviously real, and it takes real courage to say no.

Dylan’s triumph in that fight was total. No one has ever been cooler than Bob Dylan, and no one since Walt Whitman wrote better lyrics that encompassed more of the American spirit. The folkies who wanted Dylan to continue to play acoustic folk and demonstrate for CORE, and who saw albums like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks as betrayals of the party line, are plainly ridiculous figures, even as their present-day kin are easy to spot.

For those who knew Dylan, and who in one way or another had reason to see themselves as his peers, Dylan continues to represent the highest mountain in their American songwriting. Jimmy Webb, the great American songwriter, told me once of meeting Dylan at a party, whereupon Dylan pulled out a guitar and played Jimmy his version of “Wichita Lineman”, a Jimmy Webb song that could have also perhaps have been written by Dylan. When he was done, he looked at Webb expectantly. “What, now I’m supposed to play you one of your songs?” Webb shot back.

It’s weird to think that at 83, Bob Dylan is as relevant as ever to the country that gave him the freedom to invent himself. But it’s plainly true. That’s because America remained his greatest inspiration, and the place in the mind where he was always most at home. As he explained it, obliquely, in a long poem he wrote upon the death of his hero:

“You can touch and twist
And turn two kinds of doorknobs
You can either go to the church of your choice
Or you can go to Brooklyn State Hospital
You’ll find God in the church of your choice
You’ll find Woody Guthrie in Brooklyn State Hospital

And though it’s only my opinion
I may be right or wrong
You’ll find them both
In the Grand Canyon
At sundown”