Part II A Review: Trilby by George Du Maurier

A Review

Trilby

by

George Du Maurier

George Du Maurier

Review by R.E. Prindle

      Du Maurier is interesting as a possible influence on Burroughs.  Du Maurier not only borrows from authors he admires but tells the reader he’s borrowing.  Burroughs borrows without creditation.  The great literature of the nineteenth century was written during Du Maurier’s lifetime.  Thus Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers of 1845 was a new book.  It was also a book that overwhelmed Du Maurier’s imagination while having a later profound effect on Burroughs.  Thus Du Maurier tells the reader his plot is based on The Three Musketeers.  Like Burroughs Du Maurier incorporates several sources in an obvious manner.  He was apparently fascinated by Henry Murger’s Scenes De La Vie Boheme of 1851.  I haven’t read the book as yet but other reviewers say the influence is there.  I pick up an influence from La Dame Aux Camellias by Dumas fils also.  Du Maurier refers to many poets and writers whose writing left him helpless but as I am not that well grounded in many aspects of early nineteenth century literature I can’t identify the influences myself but they are as plentiful and obvious as with Burroughs himself.

     In his own life Du Maurier had aspirations to be an opera singer but lacked the powerful voice.  He then aspired to be an artist but lacked that talent becoming one of the premier illustrators of the century instead.  And then as he felt death approaching he turned to writing.  Thus a failure as a singer, a failure as an artist but success as an illustrator he became a huge success as a novelist.  The careers of his protagonists generally follow the same course.

     He is also a nostalgic writer as he lovingly recreates the scenes of his youth and life.  He always retained the impress of La Boheme living his life in a genteel bohemian style.  I suppose today he would be like an old hippy walking around in a gray pony tail, sandals and the garb of the sixties while making a fortune as a stock broker.

     Thus Trilby opens in an artist’s atelier on the Left Bank of Paris in the Latin Quarter.  The Latin Quarter of his time may be compared to New York’s Greenwich Village or San Francisco’s North Beach of the fifties and sixties.  Du Maurier himself lived such an existence for a couple years at the end of the eighteen fifties.

     We are thus introduced to his three musketeers- Taffy, the Laird and Little Billee.  They are fine comrades living the Bohemian life style much as some upper middle class hippies took to a bohemian life style with torn jeans and the pose of the impoverished in the nineteen-sixties.

     The whole ensemble  is gathered thogether in the atelier for the opening section.  Taffy, The Laird and Billy are letting the studio.  As Du Maurier says on the title page this is a love story.  Trilby O’ Farrell the love interest turns up immediately.  She and Billy love each other but Trilby is classed as a grisette which was apparently the equivalent of a hippy chick who was somewhat free living.  Trilby declassed herself completely by posing as an artist’s model in the altogether or, in another word, nude.  This was no small thing to all concerned although the bohos tended to be a little tolerant.

     After Trilby arrives come Svengali and his sidekick Gecko.  They are musicians.  Svengali is billed as an incomparable musician which is to say performer.  He was a great pianist.  He taught Gecko his violinist everything he knew.

     We are discussing the nineteenth century and nineteenth century views in context.  The story can’t be told any other way.  If the attitudes and opinions of other times and other people offend y0u be forewarned and proceed at  you own risk.  I will bowlderize history to suit no one’s whims.  As Walter Duranty facetiously said:  I write as I please.  Du Maurier, the gentlest of men, nevertheless had well formed opinions.  Svengali is a Jew and pretty much a stereotype of the Jew at the time.  He appears to be a beteljew from the Pale actually although he is said to be German but the accent Du Maurier gives him could just as well be Yiddish as German.  It is important to bear all this in mind because in the contest for the possession of Trilby between Billy and Svengali the latter is going to  obtain her.

     There’s an interesting contrast here the meaning of which isn’t exactly clear to me.  Trilby has a beautiful foot, the kind that drives fetichists wild.  After this first encounter Billy, the consummate artist, sketches the foot on the wall to perfection.  All the others are amazed at the likeness.   This sketch occupies as central place in the story as does Svengali’s hypnotism of Trilby.  Svengali on the other hand demands that Trilby open her mouth wide so he can look in.  Raises your eyebrows when you read this.  Not only does Trilby have a beautiful foot but she has a cavernous mouth that made for an amazing sound chamber, the kind that comes along apparently once in ever.

     The problem is that Trilby can’t put two notes together nor can she even find the note while finding the key is bothersome.  Much is made of her inability to sing as she screeches ludicrously through Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt.  (Ben Bolt was one of the most popular songs of the century on both sides of the Atlantic.  Due to the wonders of the internet if you’ve never heard Ben Bolt you can get a good performance on the net.  I’d heard of the song but never heard it until I checked it out on the net.  Just amazing.)

     Her rendition was a cause of great merriment.  So you have the European sketching the foundation of the girl while the Jew is inspecting the intellectual possibilities.  The Jew will win because he’s at the right end.  As I say the mystery of these images float over my head.  I’m merely making a stab at the meaning.  I know there’s a contest and what it’s about but the symbolism is shaky to me.

     And so the introduction ends with everyone agreeing that Svengali is a cad after he left and all three musketeers falling in love with Trilby.

Svengali Type

   There is much description of the fine times the musketeers have.  One gets the impression that Du Maurier was living the life in the sixties in Paris but such was not the case.  He signed on at Punch in 1860 and thus was working as an illustrtor for them from that date until his death.  He seems to have been familiar with the Pre-Raphaelite painters of London of whom he speaks highly most especially of Millais.  He seems to have been friends with a Fred Walker who he thought was a great artist but who seems to have been lost in the mists of time.  I’d never heard of him anyway but one can find his pictures on the internet.  Du Maurier loved the artist’s life.

     Much of this book as well as the other is a loving recreation of the times and his memory of the times is one of wonderful things.  Very refreshing against the unremitting negativity of modern literature.  The book is set mainly in the sixties but the ‘horrible’ year of 1871 and the French Commune obtrudes.  Du Maurier while recognizing its ugliness nevertheless passes over it quickly with a shrug and back to the good times.  He introduces some additional charming characters but then come the crisis.

     Billy had asked the declassed Trilby to marry him nineteen times and she had always refused because she knew she wasn’t in his class.  After an amazingly wonderful Christmas feast in the atelier Billy asks again.  Trilby, as she says, in a moment of weakness accepts.  When the news reaches Billy’s mother, Mrs. Bagot, she scurries over to Paris from London to check Trilby out.  When she learns that Trilby had posed in the altogether she persuades Trilby to give up her son.

     Trilby leaves town without a goodbye.  When Billy finds out he has his brain fever or a nervous breakdown that prostrates him for weeks.  There was a chance he wouldn’t make it.  He does but with psychological consequences.  He can no longer love while he lives in a deep melancholia.  There are some who know where that’s at.  After he recovers he returns to England.  the wonderful Bohemian rhapsody is over.

     Trilby had left Paris to go to the provinces.  She had a little brother who she was supporting and bringing up who she took with her and who then dies of a fever.  This devastates Trilby who cuts her hair, dresses as a man and walks back to Paris.  Her old haunts have disappeared in the interim so she shows up on the doorstep of Svengali who is but too happy to take her in.  The hypnotized Trilby is a small part of the book.  The next hundred pages or so describe Billy’s wonderful success as a painter and the loss of camaraderie as the young idealists of the Latin Quarter age and lose their affinity for each other.  Charmingly told with just the right touch of heartache.

     In the meantime and off stage, as it were, Svengali accompanied by Gecko keeps Trilby in a hypnotic trance as he

Henri Murger

teaches her to use her tremendous oral cavity to sing.  While she has the exact equipment to be a great singer she lacks the musical sense and can’t learn it sober.  Svengali instills the musical sense through hypnosis but as Gecko later explains Trilby is merely providing the instrument while Svengali is actually singing through her.  For three years they labor in the salt mines, as they say, performing on street corners or wherever.  Then Trilby is properly trained becoming the rage of Europe as La Svengali becoming bigger and better than such stars as Adelina Patti or Jenny Lind, two real life divas.

     Thus while Billy has lost Trilby’s foot or body, Svengali has captured her soul or oral cavity.  That’s about the only way I can make sense of foot and cavity.

     Now, in real terms the Jews had been emancipated beginning in 1789 by the French Revolution although occuring at different localities in Europe at different times.  With the emanicipation a contest began for the soil and soul of Europe.  Europeans owned the soil but the Jews while originating nothing became the cultural virtuosi of Europe.  Not only in the performing arts but in finance, science and as entrepreneurs.  The soil temporarily remained European but the culture was becoming Judaized.  It was then that Freud made his assault on European concepts of morality.  So Du Maurier has portrayed the situation poetically in a magnificent manner.

     Thus the Jews while offering no Beethovens, Bachs or Mozarts became virtuoso interpreters of the music as performers.  As Svengali says:  Piff, what is the composition compared to my ability to render it.  There you have the exploiter’s motto.  The Allen Kleins and Albert Grossmans of the world suck the talent, as it were, out of their performers or, boys, as they call them, as agents taking nearly everything leaving the actual talent a pittance.

      Nothing changes, this is what Svengali was doing with Trilby or, in another word, Europe.  He was making a fortune while Trilby in her hypnotized state was wasting away.  Oh, Svengali dressed her well but for the sake of his appearance not hers.  When she died, of the fortune  that she had made for Svengali none was left to her.  Except for presents she had received in appreaciation of her singing she had nothing.  They were supposed to be man and wife but, in fact, Svengali never married her.  Here I think we have the real import of the story; the competition for Europe between the Jew and the European.  Having given up the soul of Europe Europeans were losing their very substanc, the soil, or Trilby’s foot.

     Du Maurier is also describing the rise of the artist from a despised menial to the central position in society that they have attained today, especially movie, TV and musical stars.  One only has to look at the position Bob Dylan has attained to see the result today.  Here is a man with no qualities revered as if he was the savior while poised to begin a tour of stadiums at 67.50 a head that will sell out earning him a fortune within a couple months.  Thus as with Svengali he has conquered the soul and wealth of virtually the world.  This is truly astonishing.

     So Svengali is on top of the world.  Despised as a beteljew in the atelier a short five years ago he now has Trilby/Europe and the fortune that goes with her.  Alas, he is sucking the life’s blood from her to do this and she is within weeks of death when the Three Musketeers hearing of La Svengali’s fame travel back to Paris to see her perform.

     Of course they are so astonished at seeing someone who looks like Trilby singing that they can’t believe it is indeed her.  Svengali harbors ill will toward Billy because Billy is always in her heart while her relationship with Svengali is strictly professional.

     The Musketeers and the Svengalis are staying at the same hotel where Svengali meeting Billy can’t resist spitting in his face.  Billy, who is actually known in the story as Little Billee is much smaller than the six foot Svengali but he nevertheless goes after him getting the worst of the fight until Taffy, a giant body builder type, shows up grabbing Svengali’s ‘huge Hebrew nose’  between his first two fingers leading him around by the nose.  Oh, those unintended consequences.  The humiliation is too much for Svengali, he becomes vicious toward Trilby in revenge.  Readying for their London debut he bullies Trilby in front of Gecko, now his first violinist, who stabs Svengali in the neck with a small knife.

     Svengali while wounded is not hurt that bad but his physicians advise him not to conduct the opening performance.  This creates a problem because Svengali must make eye contact to sing through Trilby.

     He takes a box directly in front of Trilby.  But he spots Billy and the other two musketeers in the pit in front of him.  The malice and venom he has toward Billy makes his heart fail.  His face freezes into a risus sardonicus as he sits lifelessly leering at the Three Musketeers, triumphant in death.  Of course Trilby can’t sing a note on her own so that ends a fine career.  Now begins the denouement.  While seemingly superfluous this is a very important part of the story giving it its secondary meaning.

     The Musketeers take Trilby in charge.  No one is aware she had been hypnotized while she has no memory of performing and little of the lost five years.  The situation between she and Mrs. Bagot, Billy’s mother, are now reversed.  Trilby is the great lady while Mrs. Bagot is merely a middle class hausfrau.  One might say Svengali has created the real Trilby.  Mrs. Bagot still hadn’t posed in the altogether however.  Where was Hugh Heffner when you needed him.

     On the surface it looks as though Mrs. Bagot has gotten her comeuppance but as Trilby is the creation of Svengali she would have remained the simple little grisette that Billy loved without him.  She would have remained the foot without realizing the potential of her oral cavity.  Nevertheless this Trilby was Trilby as she should have been.

     The woman was fading fast.  Svengali had drawn the vital energy from her in his exploitation of her.  Mysteriously, just before she dies, a life sized portrait of Svengali is delivered.  The contest between he and Billy is still in effect.  Gazing in the painted eyes of the hypnotist Trilby breaks into song as a final effort in her best manner.

     Billy is grasping desperately for Trilby’s love.  On her death bed he leans close to hear her breath out- Svengali, Svengali, Svengali.  Thus he believes she loved Svengali more than he.  His brain fever is reactivated, he dies.  In grand operatic style the love story ends.  All because Mrs. Bagot was a snob.  But, I think a correct one.  Although, what the heck, Billy was just a boho painter.

     As an anti-climax in a final chapter titled Twenty Year After as tribute to Dumas whose sequel to The Three Musketeers was title Twenty Years After, Taffy takes a trip to Paris where he finds Gecko playing fiddle in a music hall.  He sends a note that Gecko accepts requesting a meeting at his hotel.  There Gecko resolves the mystery filling Taffy in on Trilby’s missing five years.  He reveals that Trilby had always loved Little Billee and never Svengali.

     The reading public then and now has concentrated on the Svengali-Trilby hypnotism aspect of the novel ignoring the rest.  That aspect is actually a very small part of the novel but without it I suppose the story woud have fallen flat.  Even today a manager like Colonel Tom Parker is thought of as a Svengali to Elvis Presley, so the name has come into common usage for someone’s inexplicable control of someone else.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs who had a fascination with hypnotism was probably charmed by that aspect of the story.  In his most detailed reference to hypnotism in Thuvia, Maid Of Mars he seems most influenced by stage hypnotism in which the audience is induced to see what is not there rather than the Svengali type.  Still, Thuvia-Trilby and the relationship between Jav and Thuvia and Thuvia and Tario has some resonances.  I dout that ERB would have been conscious of his borrowing  imagining rather that he was creating the story from whole cloth.

End of Part Two, Go to Part Three the Review of The Martian.

A Review: Pamela Des Barres, Let’s Spend The Night Together

 

A Review

Let’s Spend The Night Together

by

Pamela Des Barres

Review by R.E. Prindle

Des Barres, Pamela, Let’s Spend The Night Together, 2008 Chicago Review Press

Wild thing,

You make my heart sing.

Wild Thing,

You make everything,

groov-eh.

Chip Taylor

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

For tomorrow brings but sorrow,

The girls that are so sweet today

Will be mothers-in-law tomorrow.

College Humor

Pamela

 

     Pamela Des Barres having apparently exhausted what appeared to be an inexhaustible fund of rock n’ roll memories returns to the publishing fold with a whole book full of other groupies’ memories.  She introduces some twenty-four supergroupies to tell their back stage secrets of rock gods.

     If you’re into titillating sexual stuff you’ve just found the Dutchman’s lost gold mne.  For those into this stuff Cynthia Plaster Caster is pictured fondling the immortalized member of Jimi Hendrix.  At least we know that one’s true.  However some of the memories recorded seem to be sort of stretchers to me.  Making a good story better is OK but pure invention is something else.

     I did catch one of the girls, women, mothers-in-law, almost all grandmothers, in a fabrication or, shall I say, a delusion.  I don’t want to be unkind because the lady in question, Catherine James, did time in the orphanage while having one of those mothers from hell.  I can sympathize, a double whammy like that can do things to you.  I had a number of issues with my mother, who has now gone to her greater reward wherever that may be, while she too put me in the orphanage. So, as I say, I can sympathize.

Catherine

     Well, Miss James says she quit the groupie game in 1971 at the age of nineteen while she began at age thirteen.  That would have made her beginning in 1965.  As she tells it those six years were eventful enough for any busload of wayward girls.

     As I read my eyebrows kept going up.  This was too amazing, it seemed, to be true.  After reading her chapter I put the book down while my eyes were spinning around in my head.  Then I began going over the details looking for that fatal flaw.  As there was no way I could contradict her stories based on her revelatory details, I would have to examine dates and when I did I found that flaw. Not gentlemanly, but I do have that inquisitive mind that just won’t be satisfied.  As it happened the flaw involved the ‘spokesman of his generation’ Bob Dylan.

     Miss James says that she met Bob, as I gather he was the first, at thirteen.  As she tells it Bob gave her some good soul saving advice about her mother; otherwise she might have been driven mad.  I can dig that, too.

     But there was a problem with that.  Miss James lived in the LA area.  She says she met Bob in California between the recording of Bob Dylan and The Free Wheelin’.  That would probably have been about the time Bob was heavy with Suze Rotolo in NYC.  At any rate in ’62 Miss James would have been about ten years old not thirteen.

     Miss James who has extraordinary faith in the art of cosmetology believes that at thirteen she could make herself up successfully enough to fool a guy into thinking she was minimally legal.  That alone seems like a mega stretcher to me.  But what are cosmetics going to do for a ten year old?

     Quite clearly Miss James could not have met Bob when she was thirteen in LA.  She would like to have met Bob and gotten that good advice but she couldn’t have.

     Making a good story better she compounds the delusion by saying that still at thirteen she made the pilgrimage to Greenwich Village to be with Bob.  In an interesting dream sequence she describes arriving in NYC broke, not unlike Bob, with no place to stay.  Talking to some young people in the Village she told them she was there to visit Bob.  Naturally this admission was greeted with snickers.  But, lo and behold, who should drive up to the street corner at that instant but Bob himself.  She ran over to greet him.  He rolled down the window to say he was off to a concert and drove away.

     As I say I don’t wish to cause Miss James distress and I’m sure she ins’t any less truthful than any of these girls, women, mothers-in-law, but much of this stuff requires that extra grain of salt.

     The opening chapter concerning the adventures of someone called Tura Satana and Elvis requires some documentation.  But, why go into it.  As Samuel Johnson said who but a blockhead wouldn’t write for money.  I presume that Miss Pamela would like to see a nice fat royalty check.  Lord knows Frank Zappa left Miss Pamela short when she was a member of the GTOs, so buy a copy if you like this stort of thing and make that ageing Wild Thing’s heart sing.  She’s got it coming, believe me.

Exhuming Bob IX: Pensees 6 Bob And Dave A Review

Exhuming Bob IX

Pensees 6:  Bob And Dave

A Review

Dave Van Ronk: The Mayor Of MacDougal Street

by

R.E. Prindle

 

Texts:

Dylan, Bob  Chronicles Volume One  Simon And Schuster 2004

Thompson, Toby  Positively Main Street  U. Minnesota 2008, reprint of 1971 text.

Van Ronk, Dave  The Mayor Of MacDougal Street: A Memoir  Da Capo Press 2006

 

     Van Ronk’s memoir published in 2006 becomes part of the ongoing Bob Dylan debate.  A part of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties Van Ronk little knew how his life would be affected, destroyed, by the arrival of Bob Dylan from out of the West in 1961.

     At the time of Dylan’s arrival Van Ronk was one of the most important, if not the most important, folk singer in the Village.  Thus Bob set his sights to suck out Dave’s substance and cast the empty husk aside.

     On page 211 of the paperback Dylan is quoted at the beginning of Chaper 15:

I once thought the biggest I could ever hope to get was like Van Ronk.  And it’s bigger than that now, ain’t it?  Yeah, man, it’s bigger than that.

-Bob Dylan c. 1964

     Once Dylan learned of Van Ronk on his arrival, it is doubtful that he had heard of him in Minneapolis, he made it his goal to insinuate himself into Van Ronk’s life.  Dylan tells how he began his assault on page 21 of his Chronicles.  The scene takes place in the Folklore Center:

     One winter day a big burly guy stepped in off the street.  He looked like he’d come from the Russian Embassy, shook the snow off his sleeves, took off his gloves and put them on the counter, asked to see a Gibson guitar that was hanging up on the brick wall.  It was Dave Van Ronk.  He was gruff, a mass of bristling hair, don’t give a damn attitude, a confident hunter.  My mind went into a rush.  (My italics.)  There was nothing between him and me.  Izzy took the guitar down and gave it to him.   Dave fingered the strings and played some kind of jazzy waltz, put the guitar back on the counter.  As he put the guitar down, I stepped over and put my hands on it and asked him at the same time how does someone get to work down at the gaslight, who do you have to know?  It’s not like I was trying to get buddy-buddy with him,  I just wanted to know.

     Van Ronk looked at me curiously, was snippy and surly, asked if I did janitor work.

     I told him, no, I didn’t and he could perish the thought, but could I play something for him?  He said, “Sure.”

     I played him “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.”  Dave then said I could come down about eight or nine in the evening and play a couple songs in his set.  That was how I met Dave Van Ronk.

     Possibly.  But one learns to take Dylan’s stories with a shaker full of salt.  Bob has a difficult time separating fact from fancy.  The way Van Ronk tells it he was hanging around with a bunch of the boys when someone burst in and said ‘New guy, come on, you got to hear this.’ and it was Bob.  So Van Ronk would have had an idea who Bob was not that he necessarily would have acknowledged him.  There are some interesting points in Dylan’s narrative which I believe is Bob at his most fanciful.  That he marked Van Ronk for destruction is apparent when he says he looked like he came from the Russian Embassy.  Maybe.  But Bob was a Jew and the Russians were the enemies of the Jews throughout the last two hundred years so Bob was casting him in the role of the enemy.  Then he identifies Van Ronk as a ‘confident hunter.’  Jews usually associate hunting with goys while traditionally despising the practice so Bob is saying that the hunter didn’t know he was being hunted.  And then Bob placed his hands on the guitar as he spoke to Van Ronk indicating that he was appropriating the man’s tool or emasculating him.   Very significant action.

      Bob says Van Ronk was snippy and surly.  Well, maybe but since I think he’s making this up he is casting a character on Van Ronk to make you dislike him.  Besides who wouldn’t appear surly if you placed your hands on the musician’s guitar.  The exchange after that when Dave asked if Bob did janitor’s work was a particular Jewish insult that gave Bob his excuse for hurting Van Ronk.

     Then like a parasite or lamphrey eel Bob latches onto Van Ronk slowly ‘stealing everything that he could steal.’

     When the process was complete and Bob was way bigger than Dave could hope to be Bob then disses Van Ronk off.  As Van Ronk tells it p. 217: Van Ronk:

For myself I consider it fortunate that Bobby and I reached our parting of the ways fairly early.  Shortly after his third or fourth record had come out had gone diamond or whatever, he was holding court in the Kettle of Fish and he got on my case and started giving me all of this advice about how to manage my career, how to go about becoming a star.  It was complete garbage, but by that point he had gotten used to everybody hanging on his every word and applauding any idea that came into his head.  So I sat and listened for a while, and while I was polite and even asked him a couple of questions, but it became obvious that he was simply prodding and testing me.  He was saying things like “Why don’t you give up the blues?  You do  that, and I”ll produce an album on you, you can make a fortune.”  He wasn’t making a lick of sense, and I finally pushed back my chair and said, “Dylan, if you’re so rich, how come you ain’t smart?’  And I walked out.

     So within three years Bob met and surpassed his mentor then trashed him like he trashed everyone and everything else in his life.  Beware of Bob.  To a very large extent MacDougal Street is the story of Bob Dylan within the folk scene of Greenwich Village although within that context Van Ronk tells a rich and rewarding story of the emergence of Folk from 1940 to c. 1970.  A fabulous book with a generous dollop of belly laughs.  I loved the book.

2/

     Van Ronk himself never made it.  I first heard of him in 1967 and listened to the Prestige Folksinger album.  There was nothing there.  Van Ronk rasped out all his vocals in a monotonous fashion in that same gargling hoarse voice with nary a variation from song to song.  At that age and time I found the songs uninteresting.  The arrangments didn’t grab me.  The music was about as exciting as the New Lost City Ramblers which is to say a stone bore.

     Van Ronk may have prided himself on his musicianship and it may have been pretty good, I couldn’t care less.  I know few people who listen to records for musicianship and I don’t care to listen to records with those who do.  So Dave was concentrating on all the wrong things.

     There were people running around saying how great he was but I was in the record business and nobody bought his records.  you can foget the Hudson Dusters.  Over the years his legend grew with that of the vanished Folk Scene and I guess twenty-five years or so after the fact he was able to cash in on that basis.

     There is one really great song Van Ronk did though called Don’t Leave Me Here.  I have it on The Folk Box, Elektra EKL 9001.  That’s a really fine four record collection compiled and annotated by the Robert Shelton.  It has selections from nearly all the folkies of the Greenwich Village scene excluding Dylan.  A terrific collection and a perfect representation of the scene.  Hard to find though; I couldn’t find any copies on a quick search of the internet.

     However the story of Dave’s learning process is vastly interesting.  His history of the folk era, especially the late fifties and the people and personalities make the book a best buy.  But then we get back to Dylan.

     Bob not only wheedled his way onto Van Ronk’s stage but he wheedled his way into his very household appropriating Dave’s couch for his living quarters.  Now comes an interesting conjecture.  In Chronicles Bob says that he met a Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel with whom he stayed for some time.  Now, Bob arrived in New York in January of ’61 and he rented his apartment with Suze Rotolo in the Fall of that year becoming financially independent thereafter never going back to anyone’s couch.

     So that gives him a maximum of nine months to sleep on all those peoples’s couches.  He says in Chronicles that he first met Van Ronk and through Van Ronk Paul Clayton.  These are two colorful characters.  He then says that through Clayton he met Ray Gooch.  So far, so good.  But then he gives a fairly minute description of the street the Gooches lived on, the building, the apartment and significantly the church across the street.

     Before w go on let us consider an incident from Van Ronk on page 4:

…Bob Dylan heard me fooling around with one of my grandmother’s favorites, “The Chimes Of Trinity,” a sentimental ballad about Trinity Church that went something like:

Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay,

Tolling for the (something, something), long passed away,

As we whiled away the hours, down on old Broadway,

And we listened to the chimes of Trinity.

     He made me sing it for him a few times until he had the gist of it, then reworked it into the “Chimes Of Freedom.”  Her version was better.

     Now let’s check into a passage from Toby Thompson’s ‘Positively Main Street’ pp. 210-211:

     But the larger portraits of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel are complex and layered with mystery.  Why haven’t we seen them before?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but their names appear in no biography of Bob.  Could they be projectionsof his own divided psyche.  Ray, the competent man of the world, the toolsmith, the gun collector, the would be warrior, and Chloe, the dreamy, slightly stoned performance oriented homebody?  Bob’s not certain whether they are siblings or lovers.  I’m not certain they are real.  Chloe was the heroine of Longus’s second century novel Daphnis and Chloe.   She was an orphan, nurtured by sheep, and is described as ‘a naive lily-white girl” who falls for the youth, Daphnis.  Echo is mentioned in the story.  In my case the apartment Ray and Chloe inhabit on Vestry is a boho Eden, Every hipster’s wettest dream of Manhattan digs.

     The Sunday after reading Chronicles,  a blustery afternoon in New York I took a subway to Franklin Street and walked north then west along Vestry, looking for the building that might have housed it.  Bob describes it precisely, Federal style, facing a Roman Catholic church with a bell tower, on the same block as the Bull’s Head Tavern, below Canal Street, not far from the Hudson River.  The neighborhood hasn’t changed much since the early sixties, but I could find no building that resembled it.  Not the church, not the Bull’s Head Tavern.  Houses disappear, but churches aren’t often torn down.  I wanted to locate that apartment, only because he described it so beautifully.

     So I think it safe to say the whole dozen pages or so in Chronicles is a fabrication.  Bob dreamed it a few times and wrote it down as fact.  A clue lies in the progression  Van Ronk>Clayton>Gooch.  Gooch has a made up quality to it so Gooch is probably a conflation of the personalities of Van Ronk and Clayton.  And possibly the pair are also a sentimental portrait of Abe and Beattie, the mother and father.  Not as they were but wouldn’t it have been loverly if they had been.  Ray’s background also coincides with Bob’s studies of the pre-Civil War era in the South in the New York Library.

     The church across the street reflects Trinity Cathedral in Dublin as in Dave’s song the Bells Of Trinity so that places the story after his stay with Van Ronk.  Note the specified bell tower on the church.  Bob’s not there and neither is most of his early reported life.  I’ll say again anything he says is untrustworthy.  As they say in Hollywood:  Based on a true story.

     The last couple chapters of MacDougal tell of the changes in the Village and performance after 1960 to 1967 when drugs took the scene down.  These are relevant and important chapters as he describes how Dylan’s success caused the failure of the scene.  ‘There’s no success like failure and failure is no success at all.’

     Altogether I give Van Ronk’s Mayor Of MacDougal Street exceptionally high marks, worth a second reading and retention as a reference work.  Positively Fourth Street by Toby Thompson has a place on your shelf also.  I’ll review that after a second reading.  It is well worthy of study, picking up the stray hint and fact here and there.

     Chronicles of course is important to understand what Dave called the convoluted workings of Bob’s mind.  Bob’s an interesting study because he has managed to fool a lot of people all the time and another pack of us for a time.  I tell ya folks if I could live my life over I’d do some serious homework before I began but then even that probably wouldn’t help.

 

 

Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob

 

Exhuming Bob X:

Lubavitcher Bob

by

R.E. Prindle

There’s something happening here

But you don’t know what it is,

Do you, Mr. Jones?

-Bob Dylan

Bob En Regalia

 

     In 1979 Bob publicly embraced Jesus as his personal savior.  This was widely seen as a conversion to Christianity because Bob went to the Vineyard Fellowship of Tarzana for indoctrination into the Christian mysteries.  He could hardly have learned Christianity from Jewish circles although the Jewish group of Jews For Jesus was already active.  Pharasaic Jews have always despised Jews For Jesus so that may not have been a viable option for Bob.

     While non-Jews may be scandalized by the concept of Jews embracing Jesus there is no reason for them to be astounded.  After all Jesus was a Jew, preaching to Jews in the Jewish tradition.  The early Christian movement was entirely Jewish.  They were Jews of the Jews who had accepted Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.  Christianity became a universal religion only after Paul reconstructed it shedding the practices most repellent to gentiles while the Hellennic  or Greek religion and philosophy was grafted onto the religion which gave it substance and intellectual vigor displacing Semitic stultification.

     There should be little wonder then that Jewish Christianity should resurface  two thousand years later with Bob as its Messiah.

     Bob was uniquely trained for the role.  He grew up in a Christian community dominated by the Hillbilly music on the radio with a large and active Jewish congregation.  His father thought of himself as a Jewish scholar while heading the local chapter of B’nai B’rith and ADL.  His father was covertly ultra-orthodox.

     In 1990 Bob wrote a letter to the editor of a publication called Sister2Sister. (Bob’s Unshakeable Monotheism, Part IV, Scott Marshall http://www.jewsweek.com/ ) in which he said:

…until the entire world believes and obeys the same God, there can be no truth or justice or peace for anyone.

     What that means in the age old Jewish notion that as God’s chosen people they are destined to bring their vision of God to all the peoples of the Earth at which time they will become a nation of priests, the rulers and overseers of all others.  The Supreme People placed between God and humanity as demi-gods.

     The notion did not necessarily occur to Bob in 1990 but was placed in his mind at a much earlier date.  It would always have been present in the synagogue.  Anyone who has ever attended Jewish services will be be struck by the insistence that Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples.  It is the duty of every Jew to further that work.

     Whether Bob had the Messianic impulse before his Bar Mitzvah is the question.  It may have been there in embryo.  In 1954 as Bob was about to turn thirteen his father, Abraham, who obviously believed the proper religious education was lacking in Hibbing sent for a Lubavitcher Rebbe from Brooklyn to come to Hibbing specifically to indoctrinate Bob in the more recondite lore of the ultra-orthodox.  The intensity of the instruction would be virtual hypnosis.  It was at this point, I believe, that the Messianic impulse was fixed in Bob’s mind.

     The indoctrination had devastating results for the young boy’s character and personality.  He went off the rails becoming wild and dissolute.  In searching for a means to spread the message he had received he hit on music and from there it led into folk music.  Folk music had a special appeal because it was a pure expression of the dominant culture.  If one subverted folk music one subverted the culture.

     Thus after being  initiated into folk at Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota Bob left for the Big Apple, New York City.  The Folk scene of Greenwhich Village in New York was a virtual Jewish enclave or colony.  A great many Jews were already doing what Bob set out to do.  Disoriented by his conflicts between his Jewish and Christian education Bob nevertheless set about changing Folk music, discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms.  The Jewish world organization realizing they had something in Bob gave him maximum publicity actually turning him into a messianic figure through television and magazines.

     The stresses of intense fame to his personality and character were terrific almost destroying him.  Bob retreated at the height of his fame in 1966 after having established himself with three terrifically influential record albums.  His mind was now focused and somewhat cleared.  Placing a large Bible in the middle of his living room for easy reference Bob and his band worked and experimented with the Folk and old timey oeuvre of the White Christian hill people.  Once again retaining the forms while stripping the material of the content, he infused Jewish Biblical content which was familiar to the Christian culture into the material.  The immediate result was John Wesley Harding which is a Jewish religious album in tradtional White Christian dress. 

     The result is quite remarkable and on that basis is an astounding work of Jewish genius.  Unaware of what was being done to them White Americans could offer no defense except rejection.  There were quite a few of us who walked away from Bob at that point.  I can’t say that I understood what Bob had done but I felt the insult to my sensibilities.

     Thus, in retrospect, Bob’s so-called Christian period became inevitable as his strategy slowly unfolded in his mind.  There is no conflict with Bob’s intense Jewishness in his combined religious entities, or reclaiming the Jewish Jesus for Judaism.  Nothing could be more natural.

     The preemption of the goi culture for Judaism is the astonishing achievement of little Bobby Zimmerman.  Long after the fact there are still few who get it.

 

Note: The old Jewsweek format has been discontinuted.  The text is no longer available on that site.

Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side: A Review

 

A Review

Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side

Some Thoughts On The Autobiography Of Suze Rotolo:

A Freewheelin’ Time

by

R.E. Prindle

 

1.

Sandoz The Great

Hofman Holding LSD Model

     In 1938 Albert Hofman, a Swiss chemist working for Sandoz isolated LSD-25.  In 1938 young Tim Leary was 18 years old.  It was in 1943 that Albert Hofman discovered the effects of LSD.  Seventeen years after that LSD burt onto the world through the agency of the now, Dr., Timothy Leary, a psychologist with Harvard University.

     LSD was adopted by the Bohemian society and all its offshoots as the appearance of the new chemical Messiah:  Better living through chemistry as the slogan was.  Its use quickly spread through the folk music community of Greenwich Village in New York City.

Timothy Leary Is Dead

Goodbye Tuli. Died 7/12/10

     In 1923 a fellow by the name of Tuli Kupferberg was born and his partner Ed Sanders came along in 1939 a year after I did.  Kupferberg and Sanders were poets who became influenced by the folk scene forming a band sometime in 1964 originally called the Village Fugs, later the Village was dropped and they became simply the Fugs.  In 1965 they released their first LP on Folkways.  Now, cut one, side one was little number entitled Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Sort of OK as a song, funny, as were a lot of Fugs songs.  Like Dylan they searched for social significance rather than write trite love songs.  Unlike Dylan you could easily understand the meaning of the lyrics.  Slum Goddess was one and then there was a song that many of us thought significant in the social sense back in those days entitled:  Boobs A Lot.  ‘Do you like boobs a lot?  Gotta like boobs a lot.’  As I said deep and intense meaning.  This was followed by a song eulogizing jock straps.  ‘Do you wear your jock strap?  Gotta wear your jock strap.’  So the Fugs were with it.

     At some point after 1965 the Village Voice decided to run a feature depicting some East Village lovely as the Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side.  Suze Rotolo had the dubious honor of being selected as the very first Slum Goddess.

     To what did she owe this honor?  Well, she was famous on the Lower East Side for being featured on the album cover of Bob Dylan’s second LP, The Free Wheelin’ Bob Dylan.  She was at that time, 1962, I believe, Bob’s girl friend or, at least, one of them, perhaps the principle one but one can’t be sure as Bob had others as ‘part time’ girl friends.

     Thus one has to go back to the summer of 1961 to discover how Suze Rotolo began her odyssey to become the very first Slum Goddess.  Suze tells her story in her autobiography issued in May of 2008 called A Freewheelin’ Time.  It is a bitter sweet story not lacking in charm.  Bob was born in 1941 while Suze was born three years later.  All the disparate elements in our story born at separate times were slowly moving to a central focal point in New York City from 1961 to 1965 or so.

     Suze and Bob were of that age when freewheelin’ seemed possible while the psychological social moment was about to congeal and then vanish before it could be realized as psychological moments do.  Some catch the golden ring as it come around, some don’t.  Bob did, Suze didn’t.

     Suze was born in Queens, over there on Long Island, as a red diaper baby.  In other words in the romanticized Communist parlance her parents were Communists when she was born.  She was brought up in the faith.

     Bob described her as a libertine dream or some such epithet.  I’m not sure Suze saw herself in the same way.  I think she expected a little more of Bob than to be his sex toy.  As a Communist she should have had a more freewheelin’ attitude.

     Suze seems to have been brought up completely within the Red religion much as a Christian might be a Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran or as Jew in whatever stripe of Judaism it might be.

     She edged into race agitation at a young age.  She met Bob when she was seventeen while she had been working for CORE  (Congress Of Racial Equality) for  a couple years before that.  She would have been fifteen or sixteen.  Whether she had sexual experiences with the Africans she doesn’t tell us.  In her search for a raison d’ etre for her life she found herself in Greenwich Village in the Summer of ’61 where she met the twenty year old Bob Dylan just in from the Iron Range of Minnesota.  They were mutually attracted, quickly forming a sexual relationship.

     Bob as everyone knows was and is Jewish.  He came not only from a Jewish background but from an orthodox background.  Hibbing, Minnesota, his hometown, had a Jewish population of about three hundred families with their own Jewish establishment and synagogue.

     According to Beattie Zimmerman, Bob’s mother, Bob was a good boy who attended services regularly while investigating the nature of the various Christian churches.  As a mother Beattie’s version of things must be interpreted through the eyes of mother love.

     Father Abe was not only a practising Jew but the President of the Hibbing chapter of B’nai B’rith and its terrorist arm the Anti-Defamation League.  In addition Beattie, Bob’s mother, was the President of the Women’s auxiliary, Hadassah.  So Bob isn’t just Jewish but comes from a very committed Jewish background.

     As the President of the Hibbing chapter, Father Abe would have attended statewide gatherings in Minneapolis, regional meetings wherever they were held and possibly if not probably national meetings in NYC and elsewhere.  Now, within the international Jewish organizations heavy hitters attend various levels of meetings where they meet and learn something of the various local and regional people.  Thus, it may be assumed that Abe Zimmerman as a name at least was known on the national Jewish level.  Kind of the Jewish Who’s Who, you know.  Bob says that he had contacts to help him when he got to New York.  Those contacts would have come through Father Abe while being part of B’nai B’rith and ADL.  Bob wasn’t entirely alone out there.

     Bob’s Jewish name is Sabtai after the last acknowledged Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.  There have been many that filled a Messianic role since Zevi not least of which was Sigmund Freud and possibly Albert Einstein.  Bob may have been encouraged to take the role for himself.

     At any rate when Bob approached thirteen and Bar Mitzvah time Abe brought in a special Rabbi from Brooklyn to instruct Bob.  Now this is really signficant.  He was probably a Lubavitcher or ultra-orthodox Jew.  When Bob publicly expressed his Judaism after his Christian stint he chose to do so as a Lubavitcher.  Very likely that was no coincidence.  Having received his crash course in orthodoz Judaism Father Abe next sent his son to a Zionist summer camp for ‘several ‘ weeks for each of four successive summers ending at the age of seventeen.  This would have the effect of introducing him to young Jews not only of the region but from around the world while at the same time estranging him from his fellow Hibbingites giving him his strange cast of character.

     Camp Herzl was named after the originator of Zionism, Theodore Herzl.  the camp with a spacious hundred and twenty acres is located on a lake near Webster, Wisconsin.  Herzl is not your basic summer church camp but a national and international gathering place where young Jews from around the US and the world can meet and get known to each other somewhat.

     The camp is conducted exclusively for Jews along Jewish lines eliminating as many goyish influences as is possible.  At least when he was seventeen Bob was playing the Wild One showing up in a mini biker cavalcade.  One may assume that many national and international Jewish figures made appearances over the four years to both instruct, encourage and look over the upcoming generation.

     The post-war years were very traumatic for the Jewish people.  The death camps of the Nazis dominated their minds.  They were psychologically devastated and unbalanced looking for Nazis under their beds before they went to sleep at night.  One may safely assume that Bob and his fellow campers had to watch extermination movies over and over lest they forget.

     The State of Israel was founded in 1948 while the first of Israel’s successful wars occurred in 1956.  The ’56 war was a seminal event bolstering the spirits of the Jews turning them aggressive as they now believed they could fight.  After ’56 they began to come out of themselves.

     For whatever reasons as Bob entered high school his personality began to disintegrate.  Perhaps he had to cease being Bobby Zimmerman to become what his people expected of him which was a probable religious leader who then became Bob Dylan.  As always Bob would combine two cultures, Jewish and Goyish.

     After an extremely rocky year in Minneapolis where Bob shed the remnants of his goody goody image of Hibbing he became the dirty unkempt Bob Dylan of his rush to fame of the Folk years.

     Thus as Bob and Suze met in the Summer of ’61 they were both searching for something to be.

Part 2.

Why Do Fools Fall In Love?

Just We Two

     The question now that Suze and Bob have gotten together is to sort out the various accounts of what happened.  Bob says everyone has gotten it wrong.  However his own account in Chronicles I is no more factual than the accounts of his biographers and commentators.  Suze doesn’t provide us with much more clarity.  While Bob tells it like he wanted it to have been Suze on the the one hand protects her memory of what she wants to keep as a beautiful memory while glossing over her own actions at the time to keep it so.

     Bob goes through the romantic notion of constructing their bed with saw, hammer and nails.  This is a charming story and I’m embarrassed to say I took him at his word.  You simply can’t.  Chronicles came out four years ago so Suze has had plenty of time to read it and mull over Bob’s ruminations.  Thus she must be aware of Bob’s story of the bed.  She says it was an old bed the landlord left from another tenant.  Another beautiful tale of Bob’s down the tubes.

     Suze rather unflatteringly depicts Bob as a rouster and fairly heavy drinker.  She was offended that Bob, who was posing as Bob Dylan, not yet having officially changed his name, didn’t level with her and confide that Dylan was a pseudonym that looked better on a marquee while his real name was Zimmerman and that he came from Minnesota rather than being an orphan from New Mexico.  Coming home one night, as Suze tells it, Bob, stumblingly drunk, dropped his ID and she discovered the truth as she picked it up.  Even then she had to drag the truth out of Bob.

     These problems mounted up.  There was immediate hostility between Bob, Suze’s mother and her sister Carla.  The mother seems to have instinctively seen through Bob, while I’m sure Carla soon learned that Bob was doing her sister wrong.

      As we know from Chronicles Bob had other ‘part-time’ girl friends, pick ups and whatever.  As the folk crowd was a fairly tight knit group even if Suze didn’t want to hear the obvious Carla who was employed by the Folklorist, Alan Lomax, could hardly have been unaware that Bob had a laissez faire attitude toward romancing the girls.

     Indeed, Bob’s understanding of Suze was that she was his Libertine belle.  As a libertine therefore he could hardly have believed fidelity was a necessary condition.  I don’t know if Suze considered herself a Libertine but as a Communist both fidelity and jealousy were forbidden by the dogma so speaking consistently with the belief system neither mother, Suze nor Carla had grounds for complaint.   Nevertheless both mother and Carla wished to separate Bob and Suze.

     Bob records his side of the conflict in his song Ballad in Plain D.  In his usual high flown language Bob says in his song:

“The tragic figure!” her sister did shout,

“Leave her alone, goddamn you, get out.”

All is gone, all is gone, admit it, take flight.

I gagged twice, doubled, tears blinding my sight.

My mind it was mangled, I ran into the night

Leaving all of love’s ashes behind me.

     Within a few months he was married to Sara who he kept waiting in the wings.  Subsequently he tried to keep Sara and his growing family in Woodstock and the Slum Goddess Of The Lower East Side out on the side.  Suze, apparently not quite as Libertine as Bob supposed, declined the honor.

     Just as Bob blithely romanticizes his early NY years in some sappy Happy Talk that belies his songs and what nearly everyone has written about him so Suze adopts a near virginal girlish pose.  Her story of how she left for Italy and her true blue yearning for the perfect love of Bob who sent those charming letters purloined from old country songs is also belied by the various biographers.  To hear Suze talk she never looked at a boy in Italy and certainly never dated one let alone kissed or petted.  Yet by her religious Communist ideology that would have been no sin, even would have been a virtue.  In fact she did have an Italian boyfriend who was apparently dropped down the memory hole at autobiography time.

     When she did return the road of romance was much more rocky than she lets on.  Carla who stayed home where she could watch Bob was privy to his doings which were much more libertine than anything he accused Suze of.  He had to have slept with Liam Clancy’s live in somewhere in there.  He’s accused of being a womanizer and you can’t be a womanizer without a lot of women.  So whatever Carla knew it was somewhat more than an earful and I’m sure that between Carla and her mother Suze heard it all.

     Suze out of respect for this young love which, after all, must still occupy a sacred spot in her life never expresses but the mildest resentment of Bob but letting her sister speak for her she says that ‘she (Carla) felt I was better off without the lyin’ cheatin’ manipulative bastard.’  Right on all counts I’m sure except for the last although as Bob claimed to have no parents Carla could justly so surmise.

     At any rate if Suze couldn’t make up her mind her mother and Carla could.

     Ballad In Plain D again:

Beneath a bare light bulb the plaster did pound

Her sister and I in a screaming battleground,

And she in between, the victim of sound,

Soon shattered the child ‘neath her shadows.

—–

The wind knocks my window, the room it is is wet.

The words to say I’m sorry, I haven’t found yet.

I think of her often and hope whoever she’s met

Will be fully aware of how precious she is.

     And then Bob married Sara and ruined her life.

     While Suze and Bob talked marriage there is no reason to take that seriously; he talked marriage with Echo too.  I don’t think Bob had any notion of marrying aouside his faith.  The mother is the culture carrier; Bob is firmly within the Jewish culture so there could have been no chance that he would have taken other than a Jewish wife.  Even then he may have married only to fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.  Once he had fulfilled that duty he broke the marriage apart.

3.

The Slum Goddess

I'm Leaving Town Tommorow

     Suze was now a young woman of twenty or twenty-one alone adrift in New York City.  While she and Bob were having their tempestuous romance the times they were a changin’.

     Tim Leary, up in harvard, had embraced psychedelics.  Once in love with LSD he wanted to share his love with everyone.  He became the High Priest of his psychedelic religion.  I can recommend both his autobiography and his volume of reminiscences: High Priest.  The latter is a spectacularly well written book if tending toward tediousness.

     Leary’s experiments attracted the dark angel of the Hippie years, Allen Ginsberg.  Ginsberg also attached himself to Dylan tying the Beat and Hippie decades together.  Vile man.

     Bob had introduced Suze to Marijuana and what else I don’t know, perhaps LSD.  He himself was into the pharmacopeia also undoubtedly dabbling in heroin although if he did he is still an addict or was successful in kicking the habit after his retreat from fame in ’66.  That whole thing about the motorcycle accident may have been just rehab.  He sure needed it.

     As Bob notes the effect of LSD on the Greenwich Village folk scene was to turn people inward destroying any sense of community.  Suze then was attempting to navigate this terra nova.  Along with turning people inward, LSD, the drug scene, turned the scene sexually rasty in ways even the Communists couldn’t have imagined.  The Pill coming along at this time certainly was as influential as LSD in changing sexual mores.

     Suze, if aware of this, makes no mention of it in her auto.  The Fugs released Slum Goddess in 1965 although they may possibly have been playing it around the Village for a year or two earlier.  The Slum Goddess is not a savory woman.

     That Suze was selected as the first Slum Goddess strikes my sensibilities as a negative compliment.  Her presentation of it implies a souring experience.  Shortly after her selection she chose to withdraw from Village life.  She gives as the reason that her earlier relations with Bob caused upleasant curiosity and that was certainly true.

     The scene turned absolutely rotten after 1968 when between drugs, profound negativity and the progressing degradation of the Hippie movement anyone with any sense of dignity was driven out.

     Suze must have been one of us for she left the scene behind.  There are few today who choose to remember it.  As for me, life is life, there it was and there was I.  I was who I was; je ne regret rien.  I hope Suze doesn’t either.  Bob?  He just stays on the bus and doesn’t get off.  Reality can be such a drag.

Forget About Yesterday