Chronicles - Bob Dylan [14]
The Russian stuff on the shelves had an especially dark presence. There were the political poems of Pushkin, who was considered revolutionary. Pushkin was killed in a duel in 1837. There was a book by Count Leo Tolstoy, whose estate I’d visit more than twenty years later — his family estate, which he used to educate peasants. It was located outside of Moscow, and this was where he went later in life to reject all his writings and renounce all forms of war. One day when he was eighty-two years old he left a note for his family to leave him alone. He walked off into the snowy woods and a few days later they found him dead of pneumonia. A tour guide let me ride his bicycle. Dostoyevsky, too, had lived a dismal and hard life. The czar sent him to a prison camp in Siberia in 1849. Dostoyevsky was accused of writing socialist propaganda. He was eventually pardoned and wrote stories to ward off his creditors. Just like in the early ’70s I wrote albums to ward off mine.
In the past, I’d never been that keen on books and writers but I liked stories. Stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote about the mythical Africa — Luke Short, the mythical Western tales — Jules Verne — H. G. Wells. Those were my favorites but that was before I discovered the folksingers. The folksingers could sing songs like an entire book, but only in a few verses. It’s hard to describe what makes a character or an event folk song worthy. It probably has something to do with a character being fair and honest and open. Bravery in an abstract way. Al Capone had been a successful gangster and was allowed to rule the underworld in Chicago, but nobody wrote any songs about him. He’s not interesting or heroic in any kind of way. He’s frigid. A sucker fish, seems like a man who never got out alone in nature for a minute in his life. He comes across as a thug or a bully, like in the song…“looking for that bully of the town.” He’s not even worthy enough to have a name — comes across as a heartless vamp. Pretty Boy Floyd, on the other hand, stirs up an adventurous spirit. Even his name has something to say. There’s something unbound and not frozen in the muck about him. He’ll never rule over any city, can’t manipulate the machine or bend people to his will, yet he’s the stuff of real flesh and blood, represents humanity in general and gives you an impression of power. At least before they trapped him in the boonies.
There was no noise in Ray’s place, just if I’d turn the radio on or listen to records. If not, there was only a graveyard silence and I’d always return to the books…dig through them like an archeologist. I read the biography of Thaddeus Stevens, the radical Republican. He lived in the early part of the 1800s and was quite a character. He’s from Gettysburg and he’s got a clubfoot like Byron. He grew up poor, made a fortune and from then on championed the weak and any other group who wasn’t able to fight equally. Stevens had a grim sense of humor, a sharp tongue and a white-hot hatred for the bloated aristocrats of his day. He wanted to confiscate the land of the slaveholding elite, once referred to a colleague on the floor of the chamber as “slinking in his own slime.” Stevens was an anti-Mason and he denounced his foes as those whose mouths reeked from human blood. He got right in there, called his enemies a “feeble band of lowly reptiles who shun the light and who lurk in their own dens.” Stevens was hard to forget. He made a big impression on me, was inspiring. Him and Teddy Roosevelt, maybe the strongest U.S. president ever. I read about Teddy, too. He was a cattle rancher and a crime buster, had to be restrained from declaring war on California — had a big run in with J. P. Morgan, a deity figure who owned most of the United States at the time. Roosevelt backed him down and threatened to throw him in jail.
Either one of those guys, Stevens or Roosevelt or even Morgan could have stepped out of a folk ballad. Songs like “Walkin’ Boss,” “The Prisoner’s Song” or even one like “Ballad of Charles Guiteau.