Chronicles - Bob Dylan [42]
3
New
Morning
I HAD JUST returned to Woodstock from the Midwest — from my father’s funeral. There was a letter from Archibald MacLeish waiting for me on the table. MacLeish, Poet Laureate of America — one of them. Carl Sandburg, poet of the prairie and the city, and Robert Frost, the poet of dark meditations were the others. MacLeish was the poet of night stones and the quick earth. These three, the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World, were gigantic figures, had defined the landscape of twentieth-century America. They put everything in perspective. Even if you didn’t know their poems, you knew their names.
The previous week had left me drained. I had gone back to the town of my early years in a way I could never have imagined — to see my father laid to rest. Now there would be no way to say what I was never capable of saying before. Growing up, the cultural and generational differences had been insurmountable — nothing but the sound of voices, colorless unnatural speech. My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, “Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?” when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved — a car, a bird, a blowing leaf — anything that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver. I had not even the vaguest notion of the broken world I was living in, what society could do with you.
When I left home, I was like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. I’d done that and I’d been to the ends of the earth — to the water’s edge — and now I was back in Spain, back where it all started, in the court of the Queen with a half-glazed expression on my face, with even the wisp of a beard. “What’s with the decoration?” one of the neighbors who had come to pay their respects said pointing to my face. In the short time I was there, it all came back to me, all the flimflam, the older order of things, the Simple Simons — but something else did, too — that my father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of me, but he didn’t understand me. The town he lived in and the town I lived in were not the same. All that aside, we had more in common now than ever — I, too, was a father three times over — there was a lot that I wanted to share, to tell him — and also now I was in a position to do a lot of things for him.
Archie’s letter said that he’d like to meet with me to discuss the possibility of me composing some songs for a play that he was writing, called Scratch, based on a Stephen Vincent Benet short story. MacLeish had earlier won a Tony Award on Broadway for one of his plays called JB. My wife and I drove over to Conway, Massachusetts, where he lived, to meet with him about his new play. It seemed like a civilized thing to do. MacLeish wrote deep poems, was the man of godless sand. He could take real people from history, people like Emperor Charles or Montezuma and Cortés the Conquistador, and with the tender touch of a creator, deliver them right to your door. He praised the sun and the great sky. It was fitting that I’d go see him.
The events of the day, all the cultural mumbo jumbo were imprisoning my soul — nauseating me — civil rights and political leaders being gunned down, the mounting of the barricades, the government crackdowns, the student radicals and demonstrators versus the cops and the unions — the streets exploding, fire of anger boiling — the contra communes