Chronicles - Bob Dylan [43]
I was determined to put myself beyond the reach of it all. I was a family man now, didn’t want to be in that group portrait.
MacLeish’s place was up past a quaint village on a quiet mountain laurel road — bright maple leaves piled high around the walkway. It was easy walking across the small footbridge leading to a wood-shaded alcove and a reconstructed stone cottage with modern kitchen facilities, MacLeish’s studio. A caretaker had led us in, and his wife placed a tray of tea on the table, said something cordial and then left. My wife went with her. I glanced around the room. There were gardening boots in the corner, photos on the desk and framed on the walls. Lace-cap flowers with dark stems — baskets of flowers, geraniums, dusty leaf flowers — white cloth, silver plates, bright fireplace — circular shadows…a gallery forest out the window in full bloom.
I discovered what MacLeish looked like through the photos. There was a snapshot of him as a young boy on a saddled pony, a woman in a bonnet holding the reins. Other photos — Archie at the head of his class at Harvard — photos of him at Yale and as a World War I captain in the artillery — in another photo he’s with a small company of people in front of the Eiffel Tower — photos taken of him at the Library of Congress — in another photo he’s at the table with a board of editors from Fortune magazine. In another, he’s being given the Pulitzer Prize…there’s a picture of him and some Boston lawyers. I heard his steps coming up the stone pathway, and he entered the room, came forward and extended his hand.
He had the aura of a governor, a ruler — every bit of him an officer — a gentleman of adventure who carried himself with the peculiar confidence of power bred of blood. He got right straight to it, starts right up the track. He reiterates a few things he said in his letter. (In his letter, he made mention of some lines in a song of mine that places T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound symbolically fighting in a captain’s tower.) “Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren’t they?” he says. What I know about Pound is that he was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II and did anti-American broadcasts from Italy. I never did read him. I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading. Archie says, “I knew them both. Hard men. We have to go through them. But I know what you mean when you say they are fighting in a captain’s tower.” MacLeish would do most of the talking, told me some remarkable stuff about the novelist Stephen Crane, who wrote The Red Badge of Courage. He said he was a sickly reporter always on the side of the underdog — wrote Bowery stories for magazines, and that he once wrote a piece defending a prostitute being shaken down by the vice squad only to have the vice squad come against him and haul him into court. He didn’t go to cocktail parties or theater openings — went to Cuba to cover the Cuban War, drank a lot and died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight. MacLeish had more than a passing knowledge of Crane, said that he was a man who did things for himself and that I should check out Red Badge of Courage. It sounded like Crane was the Robert Johnson of literature. Jimmie Rodgers died of TB, too. I wondered if they ever crossed paths.
Archie said he liked a song of mine called “John Brown,” a song about a boy that goes off to war. “I don’t find the song to be about this boy at all. It’s really more of a Greek drama, isn’t it? It’s about mothers,” he tells me. “The different kinds of mothers — biological, honorary…all the mothers wrapped into one.” I’d never thought of that, but it sounded right. He mentioned a line in one of my songs, that says that “goodness hides behind its gates,” and asked if I really saw it that way and I said that sometimes it appears that way. At some point, I was going to ask him what he thought about the hip, cool Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac, but it seemed like it would have been an empty question. He asked me if I had read Sappho or Socrates. I said, nope, that