Chronicles - Bob Dylan [44]
MacLeish tells me that he considers me a serious poet and that my work would be a touchstone for generations after me, that I was a postwar Iron Age poet but that I had seemingly inherited something metaphysical from a bygone era. He appreciated my songs because they involved themselves with society, that we had many traits and associations in common and that I didn’t care for things the way he didn’t care for them. At one point he had to excuse himself momentarily, left the room. I glanced out the window. The afternoon sun was breaking, throwing a vague radiance to the earth. A jackrabbit scampered past the scattered chips by the woodpile. When he returned things fell back into place. MacLeish picked up where he left off. MacLeish tells me that Homer, who wrote the Iliad, was a blind balladeer and that his name means “hostage.” He also told me that there’s a difference between art and propaganda and he told me the difference between the effects. He asked me if I’d ever read the French poet François Villon, and I told him that I did read him and then he said he saw some slight influence in my work. Archie spoke about blank verse, rhyme verse, elegiacs, ballads, limericks and sonnets. He asked me what I had sacrificed to pursue my dreams. He said the worth of things can’t be measured by what they cost but by what they cost you to get it, that if anything costs you your faith or your family, then the price is too high and that there are some things that will never wear out. MacLeish had been a classmate of Douglas MacArthur at West Point and he talked about him, too. He also talked about Michelangelo, said that Michelangelo had no friends of any kind and didn’t want any, spoke to no one. Archie told me that a lot of things that were happening when he was young had blown over. He tells me about J. P. Morgan, the financier, that he was one of the six or eight persons at the beginning of the century who owned all of America. Morgan had said, “America is good enough for me,” and some senator commented that if he ever changes his mind, he should give it back. There was no way to measure the soul of a man like that.
MacLeish asked me who my boyhood heroes were and I told him, “Robin Hood and St. George the Dragon Slayer.” “You wouldn’t want to get on their bad side,” he chuckled. He said that he’d forgotten the meaning of a lot of his earlier poems and that an authentic poet makes a style of his own, a few masterpieces last across the years. The play for which he wanted me to write songs was laying on his reading desk. He wanted songs in it that made some comment to go along with the scenes, and he began reading out loud some of the speeches and suggested some song titles — “Father of Night,” “Red Hands,” “Lower World” were a few of them.
After listening intently, I intuitively realized that I didn’t think this was for me. After hearing a few lines from the script, I didn’t see how our destinies could be intermixed. This play was dark, painted a world of paranoia, guilt and fear — it was all blacked out and met the atomic age head on, reeked of foul play. There really wasn’t much to say or add to it. The play spelled death for society with humanity lying facedown in its own blood. MacLeish’s play was delivering something beyond an apocalyptic message. Something like, man’s mission is to destroy the earth. MacLeish was signaling something through the flames. The play was up to something and I didn’t think I wanted to know. That being said, I told MacLeish I would think about it.
In 1968 The Beatles were in India. America was wrapped up in a blanket of rage. Students at universities were wrecking parked cars, smashing windows. The war in Vietnam was sending the country into a deep depression. The cities were in flames, the bludgeons were coming down. Hard-hat union guys were beating kids with baseball bats. The fictitious Don Juan, a mysterious medicine man