When I was in graduate school studying British and American literature, I accumulated books–lots of books, mainly consisting of literature, literary criticism, and history, and including a small collection of books by Midwestern writers. I remember in particular having a lot of Booth Tarkington and Sinclair Lewis novels in hardcover. They were not hard to come by at book sales and used bookstores.

As time went on and I moved nearly every year, and as a career in academia failed to materialize, I gradually unburdened myself of many books. I sold off lots of literary theory books without remorse. I got rid of many of my Midwestern books with not much more regret, because I hadn’t read the vast majority of them. I did, however, keep two of Lewis’s novels, Main Street and Babbitt, feeling that they were important. I had read Babbitt when in high school and was not extremely taken with it. Of Minnesota authors, I preferred Scott Fitzgerald.

Over the years I continued to come across references to Main Street as an important American novel, and I was nagged by the sense that I needed to read it. Finally, I picked it up off a bookshelf at home and started reading.

I don’t remember where I got my copy of the book, but it was probably in Minnesota. Just inside the cover it’s stamped “Joseph K. Kidder, Lacrosse, Wis.”; the typography of the stamp is in the Art Deco style of the 1920’s. The copyright page indicates the novel was first published in 1920 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company, but my copy of the book was published by Grosset and Dunlap of New York in 1922–the thirty-first printing, not too bad for two years, and just one indication of the book’s success. The book nearly won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921; a jury voted to give the award to Main Street, but the Columbia University trustees overruled it to grant the prize to Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence. Angered, Lewis would later refuse the Pulitzer in 1926 for his novel Arrowsmith. By 1922 the book had also been made into a silent film. My edition comes complete with illustrations from “the photoplay,” “a Warner Brothers screen classic.” (The novel was made into a movie again in 1936, titled I Married a Doctor.)

I finished the book not long ago, and I found it to be an eloquent novel of sharp social observation that is still relevant today. It doesn’t surprise me that it was so successful in its day, nor that Sinclair Lewis–a native of Sauk Centre, Minnesota–would receive the Nobel Prize for literature only ten years later, after publishing four more novels in the 1920’s that, with Main Street, are generally considered to be among his best work: Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929).

In the next week or more I’ll look in detail at Lewis’s novel about life in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and its relevance for us today.

This week I continue my review of Bob Dylan’s autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I. Last week’s review (see below) considered Dylan’s account of growing up in the northern Minnesota town of Hibbing.
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After arriving in Minneapolis on a Greyhound bus from Hibbing in the summer of 1959, Bob Dylan immediately traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic one and began to hang out in the Beatnik coffeehouses of Dinkytown, the area around the University of Minnesota. He had left “very narrow, provincial” Hibbing and never intended to go back.

Staying that summer in a fraternity house (he does not tell us that it is Sigma Alpha Mu, a Jewish fraternity at the university), he soon met kindred spirits in the big city and with their help began to soak up new influences. Folk records were not easy to come by at that time, so he learned of old and new folk singers–the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Blind Lemon Jefferson, John Jacob Niles, Woody Guthrie, and many others–by listening to records in libraries, at other people’s homes, or in record stores. He heard other performers who came through town as well. It was an informal education in folk music, from traditional English and American ballads to songs by newer folk artists.

Dylan calls this world of folk music his “parallel universe”:

“Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it…Folk music was all I needed to exist. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes… I had no other cares or interests besides folk music.”

During that first summer in the Twin Cities, he was playing his guitar “morning, noon, and night.” When he wasn’t practicing, he was performing in coffeehouses, pizza places, on the street, and at house parties, supporting himself with the little money he made. He often played with another young singer, John Koerner. It was the start of a performing career that would hardly pause until years later.

By the fall of 1959 he was living above Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown. At this point he learned about Woody Guthrie’s music for the first time. “Stunned” by its power, determined to be “Guthrie’s greatest disciple,” Dylan sang nothing but Guthrie songs until local folk music maven Jon Pankake–a “classic traditional folk snob,” according to Dylan–confronted him and shook him up by comparing him to Jack Elliott, another folksinger influenced by Guthrie. Dylan had to finally admit Pankake was right. He still had a ways to go as an artist.

Although Minneapolis-St. Paul was much bigger than Hibbing, Dylan knew he was “still stuck in the boondocks” compared to another folksinger his age that he admired, Joan Baez. Baez had already been on television and had made a record in New York. Eventually, he knew it was time to go to the American cultural capital: “Just like Hibbing, the Twin Cities had gotten a little too cramped, and there was only so much you could do. The world of folk music was too closed off and the town was beginning to feel like a mud puddle. New York City was the place I wanted to be.”

Dylan left town one morning in the winter of 1961 with a suitcase, a guitar, and a harmonica rack and hitchhiked his way east to find Woody Guthrie. He was heading to a place “where life promised something more.”
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These are some of Dylan’s musings and memories on his life in the Upper Midwest. As with any autobiography, the reader must take the narrative with a grain of salt. Any writer has an agenda, and that agenda may not include complete truth and accuracy. Is Dylan attempting to create a youth worthy of his legend, falsely presenting himself as an earnest student at the foot of the folk music tradition? Tom Carson, reviewing Chronicles in the New York Times, is a harsh critic of Dylan’s book in this regard. For him, “calculated image-tending dominates the agenda” in the book as Dylan attempts to present himself as “a 20th-century incarnation of primeval Americana.” Carson writes:

“The voice is transparently fraudulent, eliding one side of the young Bob Dylan (his callowness) and playing fancy chess games with another (his ambition). Yet simply as writing, it’s some of the best fake ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I’ve ever read.”

Carson also comments on a strange omission in the book that I noticed as well: Dylan makes no mention of being Jewish. One must wonder why. Did his family not see themselves as Jewish? What was it like to be Jewish in Hibbing? Did it play any role in forming his identity? Not if this book is any indication.

Carson’s criticism seems too heavy, to my mind. Dylan might have grown up as a middle-class kid in Hibbing, relatively privileged compared to Twain’s Huck Finn, but why is his story not as authentic a piece of Americana as any other? If his autobiography bears any resemblance to what really happened, Dylan’s story is a remarkable one. To start in an obscure corner of America and end up in the limelight is no small feat. And going out of your way to master the old power of poetry and music–in effect creating your own apprenticeship independent of any formal school–is even more admirable.

For me, Dylan’s thoughts on the songs that influenced him and their considerable effect on him ring true. Such experiences are necessary for a person to choose the impractical, even scorned road of being an artist. These descriptions of his musical education are also what make him believable when he says later, about his days of fame in the 1960s, that he did not want to be the political spokesperson for a generation. He loved the art and craft of music–not just folk music in the end–and was not seeking anything more. He had mastered the power of the song and the lyre, and young people looked to him as a kind of prophet. His misfortune (as well as his good fortune) was doing so during a time of social upheaval.

The comparison to Huck Finn does not seem outrageous. Taking chances, lighting out on his own like Huck–these are elements of Dylan’s story. He left the familiar surroundings of home and took up a guitar on the street and in the humble coffeehouses of the Twin Cities, then left again to try to make it in the nation’s cultural capital, where failure was much more likely. In doing all this, in taking risks to pursue his dreams, he showed more courage than most of us.

Like people in other places, Minnesotans–Bob Dylan among them–usually know something about their native sons and daughters who become famous. In the closing pages of his new autobiography, Chronicles: Volume I, Dylan mentions other famous Minnesotans that he felt “akin to”: Roger Maris, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Eddie Cochran, an early rock-and-roller. “They were all from the North Country,” Dylan writes as he remembers his youthful self on the brink of musical stardom in New York City. “Each one followed their own vision, didn’t care what the pictures showed. Each one of them would have understood what my inarticulate dreams were about. I felt like I was one or all of them put together.”

With a single-minded purpose, enraptured by the folk music that he would later master and transform, Dylan pursued those dreams from Hibbing to the Twin Cities to eventual success in New York and beyond. His songs have always had a passionate following and inspired extravagant praise, even among the intelligentsia. One leading literary critic, Christopher Ricks, recently published a book on his songs, Dylan’s Visions of Sin.

As for this first volume of Dylan’s Chronicles, it is powerful but also curious–powerful because it conveys the passion he has for music, curious because it employs a confusing, nearly stream-of-consciousness style of narrative that jumps around in time. The rewards of the book outweigh these weaknesses, however, as Dylan proves himself to be an unsurprisingly poetic prose writer, if often an idiosyncratic one.

Other reviewers can do more justice to Dylan’s commentary on his career and on music history; as for my views on those issues, suffice it to say that the book is strongest when Dylan is describing his musical influences and the apprenticeship that brought him to his first professional recording session in New York. Dylan wonderfully describes his experience of hearing the music and words of such disparate artists as Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Woody Guthrie, and many others. That said, I will focus on Dylan’s views on the Upper Midwest.

Out of Hibbing

Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the northern Minnesota city of Duluth in 1941. The family later moved farther north to Hibbing, a small town in the mining region called the Iron Range. Dylan recalls his early years in northern Minnesota with general fondness, and one wonders if he has made the focus of his picture too soft:

“The world I grew up in was…still mostly gravel roads, marshlands, hills of ice, steep skylines of trees on the outskirts of town, thick forests, pristine lakes large and small, iron mine pits, trains and one-lane highways. Winters, ten below with a twenty below wind-chill factor were common, thawing spring and hot, steamy summers–penetrating sun and balmy weather where temperatures rose over one hundred degrees. Summers were filled with mosquitoes that could bite through your boots–winters with blizzards that could freeze a man dead. There were glorious autumns as well.

“Mostly what I did growing up was bide my time. I always knew there was a bigger world out there but the one I was in at the time was all right, too.”

Though he professes acceptance of his life in Hibbing, there is a hint of dissatisfaction in his comment that he was simply “biding his time.” In another passage he recalls a visit to his hometown for his father’s funeral, when he sees again “the flimflam, …the Simple Simons” of small-town life. And he remembers the cultural divide that separated him, a lover of art and music, from his much more practical family. When a teacher tells his father that young Robert has the temperament of an artist, his father asks, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” The opportunities in Hibbing for an artistic youth would certainly have been limited.

Limited and remote as it was, the life of northern Minnesota, especially its radio, exposed Dylan to a wide variety of music ranging from polka to country to popular ballads. He loved rock and roll from the start and formed his own short-lived bands. He sought out and briefly played piano for Bobby Vee, a regional rockabilly singer from Fargo, North Dakota, who would later gain national success. Eventually blues and folk music would claim his soul, however.

Though northern Minnesota is on the American periphery in geographic terms, culturally it did no feel that way for the young Dylan. He claims to have felt connected to the musical currents of the entire country, including the South, from the very beginning:

“Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from…Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts up from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it. It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”

With visions of Jack Kerouac’s road in his mind, Robert Zimmerman left Hibbing in the spring of 1959 on a Greyhound bus bound for Minneapolis, “looking for the great city, looking for the speed, the sound of it…” He had already experimented with new names when performing in northern Minnesota. Now he picked one that would stick. When he arrived in Minneapolis, he introduced himself as Bob Dylan.

Next week: Dylan arrives in the Twin Cities.

Weather Note

In our topsy-turvy climate, we are now enjoying record-high temperatures, with Minneapolis-St. Paul setting a record of 50 degrees today. We have beautiful sun in this midwinter thaw.