Bob D. on Thucydides

A Section of Bob Dylan’s Literary Autobiography, and a Too-Brief Glance at the Greatness of Mary Nichols

Bob Dylan has published his second late-career book of prose, The Philosophy of Modern Song.  It’s $45 and looks a like a coffee-table book, just in time for Christmas shopping.  To get an idea of its deliberate oddness, especially in its overall concept and writing, here’s a NYT review. 

Meanwhile, the Provo Great Book Club which I lead chugs on, and this fall we’ve been studying a book I’ve long been recommending to the group, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.  I’ve never had the pleasure of moving through the book at such a leisurely pace, and I’m reminded why it is a favorite of many a discerning thinker. 

It’s also become newly apparent how helpful the extensive maps provided in the Landmark edition of the text are.  And I’ve been reading chapters or articles by a number secondary authors, the classicists/historians Donald Kagan, Michael Grant, A.H.M. Jones, Kurt Raaflaub, the Straussians Timothy Burns, Robert Faulkner, Steven Forde, and Leo Strauss himself; but head and shoulders above all of these, I’ve found, is Mary Nichols’ small-but-packed commentary, Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom.  Here is an excellent lecture which should give you an idea, assuming you’ve read some literature on the work, of the uniqueness of her approach; it should also show you, if, you’re new to the study of Thucydides, why she’s your best guide. 

Nichols gives us a Thucydides who is not as hard-cynical realist, nor as deterministically undermining of free deliberation, nor as unfriendly to Athenian democracy, as the one often given us by other scholars.  And she convinces us with textual evidence and inescapable logic that this take on the man and his book is the best one.

Assuming you care about Thucydides, and understand why you should, that’ll do it for you.  You know you’ll be better off spending time with Nichols on this Great Book than with what follows, because this post is about an aspect Bob Dylan’s weird prose, and not about reading Thucydides, even though we do want to notice how such reading impacted Bob.

Prior to The Philosophy of Modern Song, which I have only glanced through at the book shop, there were two landmark helpings of the mature Dylan’s prose, the Nobel lecture in 2017, and the quasi-autobiography Chronicles, Vol. One, in 2004.¹  There is a lot to say about Chronicles, which overall is a series of autobiographical sketches which jump around in time, at times telling his story pretty straight, but at many more times, riffing on various subjects by means of digression, and, as it turned out once folks dug into it, deploying methods of creative plagiarism. 

It also featured a few sections of literary autobiography, as did the central sections of his Nobel Lecture.  This is a genre where a writer will tell us how certain books influenced him.   The section I want to share and comment upon is around pages 30-45 of Chronicles, where Dylan seems to be sketching his state of mind when in the early NYC folk-scene, and in part, by commenting on the books he encountered then.  He’d just been talking about the fear taught 1950s schoolchildren through the A-bomb duck ‘n’ cover drills, and that led to this transition, an opening bit of literary autobiography:

All that was over now.  I was in New York City, communists or no communists.  There were probably plenty around.  Plenty of fascists, too.  …Radicals of all stripes.  It was said that World War II spelled the end of the Enlightenment, but I wouldn’t have known it.  I was still in it.  Somehow I could still remember and feel the light of something about it.  I’d read that stuff.  Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin Luther—visionaries, revolutionaries…it was like I knew those guys, like they’d been living in my backyard. 

Notice the way he is conveying a picture of the school-boy-like naivete of his mindset at the time, and having fun while doing so.  He thus deprecates his own circa-1961 awareness, and gives us some of his own naïve boasting at the time—“I’d read that stuff.” Here, he couples that brag with a vague but clichéd association of the Enlightenment with “the light of something about it,” and he errantly (or insightfully?) drops Martin Luther into the list of writers.  Poking fun at his and others’ superficial learning and pride, playing retrospectively with aspects of this revealed ignorance as a way of telegraphing serious insights, adopting a kind of down-home yet-middle-brow voice--“like they’d been living in my backyard”--all of these strategies are typical of Dylan’s literary autobiography moments.

Anyhow, he then starts talking about being in this apartment:

I walked across the floor over to the cream-colored drapes, pulled-up the venetian blinds, seeing into the snowy streets.  The furniture in the place was nice, some of it even hand built.

The fictional folk-singer of the same time and place, Llewyn Davis, nosing around in the record section of an apparently similar apartment. From the Coen brothers’ film, Inside Llewyn Davis

He goes on to further describe the bohemian-sophistication of the flat, getting interrupted by a long digression on train-sounds after he recalls hearing one there, which then leads to another about NYC street scenes, another about the character of his own songs at the time, and then this:

…it wasn’t that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up.  I just thought mainstream culture was as lame as hell and a big trick.  It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside your window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk on it.  I didn’t know what age of history we were in nor what the truth of it was.  Nobody bothered with that.  If you told the truth, that was all well and good, and if you told the un-truth, well, that’s still well and good.  Folk songs had taught me that.  As for what time it was, it was always just beginning to be daylight and I knew a little bit about history, too—the history of a few nations and states—and it was always the same pattern.  Some early archaic period where society grows and develops and thrives, then some classical period where the society reaches its maturation point and then a slacking off period where decadence makes things fall apart.  I had no idea which one of these stages America was in.  There was nobody to check with.  A certain rude rhythm was making it all sway, though.  It was pointless to think about it.  Whatever you were thinking could be dead wrong.

A wonderful passage.  Some of it feels like Elder Bob portraying more of the internal confusion about the times than his young self really experienced, and in any case, more than what Young Bob ‘fessed up to at the time, but it feels sincere enough about his overall mindset then.  Here at PostModernConservative, we’re all about trying to figure out what time it is in relation to intellectual history, the story of our civilization, etc., and we draw on our graduate educations in serious political philosophy and Great Books study to do so, a kind of education Dylan never had, and I so accept his judgment that at the time, any attempt he could have made to arrive at a comprehensive conclusion about the times was to a significant extent, doomed to failure.²  That’s a telling confession by the man who once pushed against the assumed intellectual authority of his elders—you might say that I’m young, you might say I’m unlearned—and who was quickly made by the media into the most symbolic instance of his own generation’s intellectual attempts to get a handle on their situation, i.e., to become a generation of Seekers. 

But it’s not a belated confession.  It’s more of a repetition, a spelling out of his earlier attempts on albums like Another Side of.  People forget that one aspect of his ’64/’65 turning away from the political verities of lefty folkie-dom, initially into his iconic phase of surrealistic songwriting, was an insistence on his own confusion and limitations, a rejection of the “Voice of His Generation” hype thrust upon him. 

Anyhow, immediately following this, he takes us into the “library” of the flat, which interestingly, is both a cave and a place of real enlightenment; this is where he encounters Thucydides.

I cut the radio off, crisscrossed the room, pausing for a moment to turn on the black-and-white TV.  Wagon Train was on.  It seemed to be beaming in from some foreign country.  I shut that off, too, and went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door—a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library.  I switched on the lamps.  The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn’t help but lose your passion for dumbness.  Up until this time I’d been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot.  Brando. James Dean. Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy.  Earl Warren and Krushchev, Castro.  Little Rock and Peyton Place.  Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio.  J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse.  The Nelsons.  Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys.  Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy.  Levittown.

Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke.  There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies.  The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed.  Books like Fox’s Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus.  Pericles’ The Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides’ The Athenian General—a narrative which would give you the chills.  It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior.  Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye.  It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.

I’ll say more further down about the textual references to and substantive ideas about Thucydides in this, but here I want to again point to the pose of sub-middlebrow naivete.  First, there are some “misremembered” classical titles:  there are no “lectures” by Tacitus, and the famous letters to Brutus are by Cicero.  Second, we have made-up or real titles of books that would seem to have been cheap abridgements:  though Thucydides’ history, his only writing we know of, was not given a title in the Greek manuscripts, it has long been called The History of the Peloponnesian War, not “The Athenian General.”  It contains his rendering of Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” speech, which does lay out an ideal conception of Athenian greatness and democracy,³ but that wasn’t a separate work, and it wasn’t “by” Pericles anyhow unless we regard it as a word-for-word transcription of what he said—a procedure Thucydides specifically said he did not employ when reporting on the speeches in his history. 

Let’s let his library tour continue:

There were novels by Gogol and Balzac, Maupassant, Hugo and Dickens.  I usually opened up some book to the middle, read a few pages and if I liked it went back to the beginning. Materia Medica (the causes and cures for diseases)—that was a good one.   I was looking for the part of my education that I never got.  Sometimes I’d open up a book and see a handwritten note scribbled in the front, like in Machiavelli’s The Prince, there was written, “The spirit of the hustler.”  “The cosmopolitan man” was written on the title page of Dante’s Inferno.  The books weren’t arranged in any particular order or subject matter.  Rousseau’s Social Contract was next to Temptation of St. Anthony, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the scary horror tale, was next to the autobiography of Davy Crockett. 

In an alternate reality, I’m pretty sure I wrote a dissertation, not one on the Inconstant Democratic Character in Plato and Tocqueville, but one titled On the Juxtaposition of Ovid and Crockett in Dylan’s Chronicles, and subsequently became an academic star. 

Endless rows of books—Sophocles’ book on the nature and function of the gods—why there are only two sexes. [Ed.--no such book exists, but the coupling of these topics might point to Plato’s presentation of a speech by Aristophanes in the Symposium—consider also the similar sound of the names.] Alexander the Great’s march into Persia.  When he conquered Persia, in order to keep it conquered, he had all his men marry local women.  After that, he never had any trouble with the population, no uprisings or anything.  Alexander knew how to get absolute control.  There was Simón Bolívar’s biography, too.  I wanted to read all these books, but I would have had to have been in a rest home or something in order to do that.  I read some of The Sound and the Fury, didn’t get it, but Faulkner was powerful.  I read some of the Albertus Magnus book…the guy who mixed up scientific theories with theology.  It was lightweight compared to Thucydides.  Magnus seemed like a guy who couldn’t sleep, writing this stuff late at night, clothes stuck to his clammy body.  A lot of these books were too big to read, like giant shoes fitted for large-footed people.  I read the poetry books, mostly.  Byron and Shelley and Longfellow and Poe.  I memorized Poe’s poem “The Bells” and strummed it to a melody on my guitar.  There was a book on Joseph Smith, the authentic American prophet who identifies himself with Enoch in the Bible and says that Adam was the first man-god.  This stuff pales in comparison to Thucydides, too.  The books make the room vibrate in a nauseating and forceful way.  The words of “La Vita Solitaria” by Leopardi seemed to come out of the trunk of a tree, hopeless, uncrushable sentiments.

He goes on in this vein for several more pages, never mentioning Thucydides again, but slipping here and there into riffs on how folksingers could “sing songs like an entire book,” on Al Capone, on Pretty Boy Floyd, on the wrestler Gorgeous George, on how relatives of his advised against his pursuing a military career—this comes up from his mentioning his taste for Clausewitz and military books.  He highlights his liking the biographies of Robert E. Lee, Frederick the Great, and especially, Thaddeus Stevens.  The more literary/philosophic authors who get mentioned are Milton, Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Robert Graves, Balzac, and Freud.  Of these, he makes a dismissive remark about Freud,⁴ and seems more interested in Balzac and Dostoevsky than the others; but of all the authors mentioned in this literary autobiography, next to Thucydides the one he seems to praise the most is Clausewitz: 

When he claims that politics has taken the place of morality and politics is brute force, he’s not playing.  You have to believe it.  …Don’t give me that dance that God is with us, or that God supports us.  Let’s get down to brass tacks.  There isn’t any moral order.  You can forget that. …It’s either high ground or low ground.  This is the way the world is and you have to look it right in the eye.  Clausewitz in some ways is a prophet.  Without realizing it, some of the stuff in his book can shape your ideas.  If you think you’re a dreamer, you can read this stuff and realize you’re not even capable of dreaming.  Dreaming is dangerous.  Reading Clausewitz makes you take your own thoughts a little less seriously.

So, that’s the whole “cave of books” (my term) section of Chronicles, Vol. 1.  The last author mentioned is Balzac, who is said to be “hilarious” given his superstitious focus on the meaning of small details.

What should we make of it overall, and in particular, can we make anything out of his several mentions of Thucydides?  Do they merely constitute a random ornamental moment, or a clichéd one, in a work of prose artistry more concerned with effects than with meanings?  Since “Dylanologists” like Scott Warmuth have shown that the book is shot-trough with creative appropriations, i.e., thefts, might some of what I’ve quoted have been snipped from some other source, such that Dylan himself would all the more laugh to witness our attempts to look closely, like Balzac, at the details therein? 

A great little book on the study of, and obsessions with, Dylan

Well, I’m not going to worry about that.  The collage artist still cuts and pastes with an artistic purpose.  And the nice thing about our focusing on the mentions of Thucydides is that it limits our task. 

Before looking at those, however, we should draw some general conclusions about this section.  First, while there are a few indications that the world of such books is problematic, with it first of all it being a “cave” which evokes the myth- and conventional-wisdom- dominated ignorance of Plato’s cave, and then being said to be potentially “nauseating,” these negative warnings are outweighed by positive qualities:  the “vibration” the books give is not simply “nauseating” but also “forceful,” and this is the place where the shallowness of 50s and early-60s popular culture is exposed as a “joke,” where you might be cured of your “passion for dumbness.”  Dylan undergoes multiple rethinkings of things due to this library.  This cave is one of liberation, or at least, one of a relative liberation that takes him up to a higher cave.  

Second, coming just before his descriptions of his participation in the NYC folk-scene and his first song-writing efforts, this section suggests that his exposure to various bohemian book collections in the flats he stayed in at the time, which perhaps here have been composited into one, were essential to his making the artistic breakthroughs he did.  He learned so much he needed a dump truck to unload [his] head! (“From a Buick 6”) One should compare this account of literary-exposure-as-liberation with the perhaps less-sincere one in his Nobel Lecture, which praised the way American high-school classes in literature could bring the young mind up to the likes of Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the Odyssey.  (Or at least, to Cliff Notes versions of them!)  His high-school literary explorations, whatever their content, did not, it seems, have as deep an impact on his soul as the one unleashed by his encountering book collections in NYC apartments.   

Third, while Dylan scholars have focused on his debts to various poets (one of the authoritative accounts is the second chapter of Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man III, which presents Donne, Bunyan, Blake, Longfellow, Poe, Browning, Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Pound, Eliot, Williams and a couple of the Beats as major influences), Dylan seems to want to downplay all that here, and stress his also being influenced by more “brass tacks” authors like Thucydides and Clausewitz.  We might add as a fourth point, that he seems to want to suggest that the young songwriter famous for “Masters of War” had a taste for reading about war situations and military men—Alexander, Bolívar, Frederick, Lee--which connects to his reporting that when he was a little younger he had wanted to try to get into West Point. 

So, in the context of this, what does he say about Thucydides?

First of all, there is the rather typical judgment, that there are a number of moments in the history which strike one as remarkably “chilly.” Well, yes.  The quick recounting of the Athenian slaughter of the men of Scione, tucked away as an innoucuous detail, the morality-free argumentation given by the Athenians at Melos before a similar massacre, the refusal of all argumentation by the Spartans at Plataea before yet another, the behavior of most Athenians during the plague, the civil war at Corcyra, the death-march of the defeated Athenians in Sicily, etc. 

The portrayal of human nature is particularly dark in the descriptions of what happens during the Corcyran civil war, and the Athenian plague, and those are precisely the two places where Thucydides speaks (III 82.4, and implicitly at II 53.3) of the phenomenon of “how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning.”  The civil war at Corcyra is also where Thucydides seems to speak of “human nature [being] always the enemy of anything superior.” (III 84.2)⁵ 

So at the very least, Dylan did read the Corcyra passages, but certainly the whole book shows us instances of chilliness and of “how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye.”  He does seem to have zeroed in on themes and characteristics of the book that are core ones.  Some might say that the theme of “envious hatred of superiority” doesn’t exactly leap out, but it does play an important role in the disastrous mistreatment of Alcibiades, in the rise of leaders like Cleon after Pericles’ passing, and perhaps in Thucydides’ account of the real causes of the war itself. 

I think Dylan is truthful in implying he read at least a good deal of the book at the time.  It’s not a decisive detail, but there is an out-of-place lyric in his important “My Back Pages” from 1964, where he’s mainly singing about his turning away from standard leftist pieties, but where he tells us that Girls’ faces formed the forward path, from phony jealousy, to memorizing politics, of ancient history.  I do not grasp what he’s saying there, nor feel I can judge the degree to which he’s assigning a merely ironic/self-deceptive weight to the study of ancient history; I just want to highlight the fact that the idea of such study possibly being a significant activity was in his head at the time.  (As for the latter-day Dylan who wrote Chronicles, in songs such as “Crossing the Rubicon,” “Early Roman Kings,” and “Lonesome Day Blues,” he does regularly play with ancient political subject-matter.) 

The only other mentions of the book by Dylan we get is being told that Albert Magnus’ speculations are “lightweight” compared to Thucydides, and so are the writings of a group of poets and writers that includes two which scholars have long assumed were important to Dylan, Poe and Longfellow—more weirdly, that grouping of writings said to “pale to Thucydides” also includes those by the prophet/founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith.  To Dylan, Thucydides’ thought is quite a bit more weighty than, and superior to, that of many famous poets and of heterodox religious thinkers also.

I would agree, but would note this:  regardless of whether Clausewitz is correctly characterized as thinking there is “no moral order,” Mary Nichols shows us again and again that such a characterization would be an error if applied to Thucydides.  He makes moral judgments.  Yes, he knows better than anyone what morals-dismissing arguments focused solely on self-interest would say, as he demonstrates in portraying the Melian dialogue, and even in the efforts of Diodotus to appear less-concerned with justice before his tough-minded sophisticated Athenian-audience than he really is, but such moments do not represent Thucydides’ own judgements.  If Dylan treasured him because he thought he was as amorally realist as he took Clausewitz to be, he made a mistake.

Granted, it is a mistake made by many leading scholars of Thucydides over the ages. 

I would point those who feel otherwise to particularly note Nichols’ footnote on the scholars Orwin, Pangle, and Ahrensdorf on page 118, and her closing statements about Thucydides’ relation to Athens in her conclusion. 

Here is one her opening statements:

Throughout his history of the Pelopnnesian War, I will show, Thucydides portrays speeches and deeds that do make a difference, for better or worse.  He thereby affirms that freedom is a cause of human action, without denying limits to freedom. 

And a couple of her closing ones: 

Thucydides apparently found that his own city of Athens came closer at times to the judicious balancing or mixing that renders democracy defensible than any other city that appears in his work.

…Thucydides achieves his homecoming by his act of writing his history of the war as “possession for all time,” for he thereby repossess his city through the active acquisition that Alcibiades craves for all his possessions, while attaining the perfect sense of possession that Nicias never risks enough to achieve.  Moreover, whether or not Thucydides can find a home in Athens after his exile, he finds homecoming time and again in the future, wherever his written memory of Athens survives, generates wonder, and can be brought to bear on human and political life.

Hearers have often detected, and well prior to his Slow Train Coming period, a Biblical tint to Dylan’s tough judgments on human failings, failings so contrary to their ideals and dreams.  Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the title, after all, of one of the more thoughtful works on his songs.  And in a time where so much of our society of the last twenty years is being revealed to have been a massive scam, this sober and Old Testament aspect of his artistry will likely become all the more appreciated.  But perhaps, if the witness of the odd—and I think quite delightfuly odd—literary-biography section of Chronicles, Vol 1. can be trusted-enough, this tough-minded yet still morally judging aspect of Dylan’s art was also cultivated, at least in part, by one of those later homecomings of Thucydides’ Athenian wisdom into a receptive human soul.

1. Dylan-heads will know that in his earlier days, he also published the beatnik-y Tarantula—officially a prose novel, although I recently saw it placed in a bookshop’s poetry section.  By my admittedly superficial sampling of its pages, I would say that whatever else it does, it underlines how tedious Dylan’s surrealistic side is when detached from song—it seems an extension of the “notes” on the back of Highway 61 Revisited.

2. I also accept his warnings against intellectual pride dispersed throughout his songbook, e.g. lines likes you’re very well read, it’s well known, but I’m not going to belittle the value of the education I received, and when a good ten or so years older than Young Bob, from the St. John’s College Graduate Institute, and then from the thinkers at Fordham University’s political philosophy section and from thinkers, friendly to them but teaching elsewhere, such as Michael Davis, David Nichols, Paul Seaton, Peter Augustine Lawler, Dan Mahoney, James Ceaser, and Mary Nichols herself.   

3. If you’d like a fine translation of this famous speech, but don’t intend to read Thucydides as a whole, I recommend this slender little work, which pairs it with Plato’s attempt to portray Socrates imitating and outdoing it, the Menexenus, a more overtly comic, and a more-democracy-friendly-than-usual, slice of Plato. 

4. In his 2020 song “My Own Version of You,” Freud is quickly characterized, alongside Marx, as one of the great intellectual villains of our times, and is seen being punished in hell.

5. A close look at the passage admittedly qualifies Dylan’s summary statement, in that Thucydides says human nature always wants to rebel against law, but that it was only when the civil wars broke out in so many Greek cities between the democrats and oligarchs, that one actually saw it doing so, and then also against the very idea of justice and against “anything superior.”