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i
Inner Lives
SERIES EDITOR
William Todd Schultz
Dan P. Mcadams
George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream:
A Psychological Portrait
Tim Kasser
Lucy in the Mind of Lennon
Kyle Arnold
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick
Andrew McCarron
Light Come Shining: The Transformations
of Bob Dylan
iii
Andrew McCarron
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v
CONTENTS
Credits vii
Index 205
v
vi
vii
CREDITS
vii
viii
viii Credits
In The Garden
Copyright © 1980 by Special Rider Music
Lonesome Day Blues
Copyright © 2001 by Special Rider Music
Nettie Moore
Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music
Red River Shore
Copyright © 2008 by Special Rider Music
Where Teardrops Fall
Copyright © 1989 by Special Rider Music
With God On Our Side
Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special
Rider Music
ix
PROLOGUE
A C A S E F O R T H I S P S YC H O B I O G R A P H Y
x Prologue
1. In the late 1990s, Dylan’s former girlfriend, Susan Ross, unsuccessfully attempted to
find a publisher for a tell-a ll unauthorized biography of her ex-boyfriend that revealed
him to be a lousy lover and raging alcoholic who’d been secretly married twice and
fathered a number of children since his 1978 divorce from his first wife Sara Lownds.
xi
Prologue xi
xii Prologue
Henry Murray once wrote that we are all in some respects like
all other people, like some other people, and like no other people
(Murray & Kluckhohn, 1953). Psychobiography tackles this last
piece, the part of a person that’s unique and that may resist easy
intelligibility. It asks why someone is the way he or she is—then
draws on psychological theory and experimental research to ad-
dress the question. Much like the hagiographical tradition of the
Middle Ages, psychobiography is after the essence of lives. The two
genres are similar insofar as they concern themselves with a spe-
cific feature or virtue within the lives of their subjects, whether it’s
Saint Francis’s relationship to the natural world or Jack Kerouac’s
lifelong search for his dead brother, Gerard. This sort of approach
is at odds with the “who knows more” scholasticism of Dylan
studies, where Dylanologists battle over the dating of songs, the
names of girlfriends, and the exact number of children he has
had outside of his two known marriages. The field of Dylanology,
consequently, has reached a point of absurdity. To quote from
Dylan’s 2006 song “Nettie Moore,” on the album Modern Times,
“The world of research has gone berserk /too much paper work.”
Psychobiography tries to cut through the biographical paper work
with one or more claims about a person’s underlying motivations
prompted by a well-crafted psychological question.
Beyond being one of the most lauded and loved songwrit-
ers and performers of all time, there are multiple other reasons
why Dylan’s life is worth thinking about. First of all, there is
much to be learned in the study of cultural icons. Such indi-
viduals come to symbolize many of our shared fantasies and
fears as a society. In 1985, Spin Magazine asked Dylan if there
was anyone that he would enjoy interviewing himself. Dylan’s
xiii
Prologue xiii
xiv Prologue
Prologue xv
unlikely that he’d have a clear picture of his own motives because
people almost never do. Thankfully, the absence of direct access
to a subject doesn’t prevent good psychobiography from being
done. Enough documentary evidence, in addition to a mixture
of critical judgment, historical perspective, and a willingness to
discern order from disorder are the most vital ingredients. And at
the heart of it all must be an ethical commitment not to exploit or
sensationalize the subject. Rembrandt’s portraits and Leonardo da
Vinci’s anatomical drawings are better models for life studies than
the salacious “tell-all’s” that dominate the popular biographical
marketplace.
During the process of drafting this book, I was asked what was
new about my take on Dylan. But the task of a good psychobiogra-
pher or any researcher doing qualitative work on a life isn’t to gen-
erate a new theory. Striving for originality for its own sake runs
the risk of producing a caricature. The goal, rather, is to construct
a representative portrait of a person as he or she experiences and
understands his or her life. The narrative psychologist and artist
Suzanne Ouellette has written on how the psychological study of
a person and portrait painting share similarities. Ouellette writes,
“As I paint, I seek to recognize and look through prior social con-
structions to capture in paint the reality I see in my distinctive
way; a way that represents both the individuality of the person
I am painting, and a few small truths about what it means to be a
person that strike me as transcending the particular individual in
a particular pose.” The same can be said of good psychobiography.
Such portraits aim to capture “not the lifetime of one man only /
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered,” as T. S. Eliot puts it
in Four Quartets.
xvi
xvi Prologue
This work requires the delicate art of bringing a life into form
and faithfully accenting its surfaces with color. Bob Dylan, of
course, is notorious for refusing to sit still for long. He is a prince
of protean self-reinvention and deflection. His wheeling, dealing,
and jiving during interviews have led to a dizzying accumulation
of masks. But I hope to show how a careful look across the sur-
faces of these masks reveals the depths of a life characterized by
more unity than disunity, more coherence than fragmentation.
And at the heart of this coherence is a repetitive story of spiritual
death and rebirth grounded in a sonic mystery religion that Bob
Dylan first heard as kid in the Forties by turning the dial of the
family radio.
It bears mentioning from the outset that I’m not trying to ex-
plain why Dylan composed the songs and lyrics that he did. In
a letter to Carl Jung, Freud wrote, “Before the problem of the
creative artist analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.” Believing
that human beings were “over-determined,” he was doubtful that
psychoanalysis could penetrate the sources of creativity, writing
elsewhere that “all genuinely creative writings are the products of
more than a single motive and more than a single impulse in the
poet’s mind, and are open to more than a single interpretation.”
I agree with this assessment. What this book does do is to search
Dylan’s self-descriptions and some lyrics for recurring themes and
plotlines that help make psychological sense of his many personal
and artistic changes over the decades.
xvii
1
2
m a s k e d a n d a n o n y m o u s 3
1. This introduction was adapted from an article by Jeff Miers that appeared in The
Buffalo News on August 9, 2002.
5
m a s k e d a n d a n o n y m o u s 5
and Lady Gaga, for example, are all marked by change over time.
Yet, for Dylan, unlike for Bowie or the others, the changes suggest
transformations at the level of personality. Alongside his musical
changes, it wasn’t uncommon for Dylan to change his spoken ver-
nacular, his ideas about spirituality, the company he kept, and the
self-defining memories that he shared during interviews. Dylan,
who referred to himself in 2012 as a transfigured person, has fre-
quently made reference to a feeling of personal destiny behind the
constant becoming that has shaped his life.
Why did he leave Minneapolis for New York City with no clear
plan or regular place to stay? Why did he change his name from
Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan? Why did he disappear from
the public eye for several years at the peak of his fame? Why did he
convert to Christianity and attempt to evangelize the audiences
who paid to see him play? Why did he recommit himself to sing-
ing and songwriting after nearly quitting the music business in
the late Eighties? His answer: It was destiny. This powerful force
compelled him to keep moving on, turning corners, disappearing,
reappearing—changing his voice, image, and musical style. It’s
not simply an evasive way of deflecting the inquiries of journal-
ists in search of rational explanations to nonrational experiences.
Nor is it the slippery performance of a trickster or confidence man
worthy of Herman Melville or Mark Twain. It’s a piece of poetry
used by Dylan to explain a defining feature of his inner life.
In this book, I argue that the best place to find Dylan’s unique
psychological fingerprint is within the twists and turns of his
changes. Furthermore, I show how his autobiographical reflec-
tions on the more significant of these changes reveal a recur-
ring narrative (a script) that can be traced back to his childhood
6
m a s k e d a n d a n o n y m o u s 7
2. In The Varieties, James made note of two types of religious conversion: a willful or
volitional type and a more sudden and affective type called the type by self-surrender.
3. Miller, William R., & C’deBaca, Janet. (2001). Quantum Change: When Epiphanies
and Sudden Insights Transform Ordinary Lives. New York: Guilford Press.
8
m a s k e d a n d a n o n y m o u s 9
4. David has refrained from saying much on the record about his older brother ever
since speaking candidly to Newsweek Magazine in 1963 and deeply hurting and
angering Dylan.
10
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