University of Virginia Library

IV

Richard Goldstein says Thompson
puts you in U.S. Keds, that
"this is a real story about a real
writer searching out the underpinnings
of a personal myth, and
finding nothing but real country
with real people living in it...

"...there is more about young
Bobby Zimmerman here than any
pseudo-exclusive interview or documentary
hand job could suggest."
Which is true, but along comes the
risk that if you don't "like" the
writer, you won't like his writing,
which is the risk of getting overly
involved with one's subject in a
matter of biographical record.

The journals are really quite
amazing, and you find yourself
more and more appreciating
Thompson's basic honesty. If it's an
act, then it goes even further as
pure art. The picaresque, patchwork
form has some contradictory
holes in it, but for exactly this
juxtapositionary method, the message
begins to appear.

Vonnegut's Bokonon has a concept
of Dynamic Tension, which
applies beautifully in this book. In
two journeys, and from two
accounts, we see a cyclic restless-restful
symmetry. Dylan departed
Hibbing. He had returned
only a few times, once for his
father's funeral.

The last time was for his high
school class's tenth reunion. He
stayed long enough to sign a few
autographs — saw Echo, briefly —
and left as suddenly as he had
arrived. The inevitable drunk, some
monkey, picked the inevitable
fight. Bob split.

But in a way, going home is
what New Morning is about. We
read Thompson's boyhood-to-fame
epic, and yet we see it in such a
way that the road back home stays
at once both open and closed. It is
the realization that Dylan's Highway
61 is a two-way affair, and
the writer, we say, has felt some of
the things his hero has. (Or has
he..?)

Thompson never even met
Dylan. But Dylan knows his biographer,
ever since those Voice
pieces. Rolling Stone (Nov. 29,
1969) quotes Dylan: "That
boy...this fellow, Toby...has got
some lessons to learn." Something
in the series had gone too far. Nor
was shoddy publicity anything new
to Dylan. By the time of Thompson's
articles, the bad vibes were
reaching life size proportions with
the rumor that Bob doubtless was
heading for suicide (on Easter, to
boot). Or so they said. That was
just before Nashville Skyline, and
not long after John Wesley Harding.

And, of course, such speculation
as that was wildly tentative
compared with what they had been
saying a few years earlier — the
culture vultures — who intoned
solemnly about a vegetable —
invalid Dylan, ruined in his bike
mishap, which hadn't been so bad
after all. The talk had been bullshit.

Zimmerman's high school
English teacher compared his
poetry to that of Vachel Lindsay,
more than any other. Dylan, in "his
tight jeans and that kooky little
grin," a veritable lightning rod and
transmitter built into one, he never
wanted to stand still long enough to
humor the pot shooters and
rag pickers of Celebrity Land. They
didn't build Highway 61 for
standing still.

Finally, the story is exhumed,
touched up with a loving hand, and
delivered into writing from the
scrapheap of modern mythology.