E-Mail This Article to a Friend Bob Dylan’s movable feast (continued)

The compositional technique is at once slapdash and exacting, like his songwriting, or his guitar playing. Details accrete, expand, then refine themselves down to a single point like a lead sinker. Episodes click along discursively, then double back and return to the narrative thread. Van Ronk looms like a giant: "In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was the king of the street, he reigned supreme." He passes by the awestruck Dylan "on a cold winter day near Thompson and 3rd, in a flurry of light snow when the feeble sun was filtering through the haze," then disappears amid random memories of Greenwich Village clubs and coffeehouses, the Gaslight and Café Bizarre, Richie Havens, Café Wha?, the Folklore Center and its eccentric (what else?) proprietor, Izzy Young, until — boom — who should show up at the Folklore Center but Van Ronk, and this time the young Dylan is able to approach him and even play a song for him.

It’s like this in one encounter, one vividly sketched character and scene, after another: Archibald MacLeish at his bucolic home in Conway, Massachusetts (he had invited Dylan to write songs for his play Scratch); the record producer Bob Johnston ("His idea for producing a record was to keep the machines oiled, turn ’em on and let ’er rip . . . ); David Crosby, who provides comic counterpoint in a scene where Dylan receives an honorary degree from Princeton ("He was teetering on the brink of death even then and could freak out a whole city block all by himself, but I liked him a lot. . . . He could be an obstreperous companion").

A flubbed note or dropped beat here and there doesn’t matter, and that’s one of the many points Dylan makes in this book, implicitly or explicitly. He achieves that perfect balance of the memoirist’s art — the meeting of the present narrator with the young self he’s re-creating on the page. One encounters the people, places, and events in Chronicles as Dylan encountered them, with a wide-eyed sense of discovery. He and Lou Levy hammer out a publishing deal — "not that there was any great deal to hammer out. I hadn’t written much yet." Meanwhile, the snow blows outside the window.

The book’s most conventional chapter recalls the making of Oh Mercy with producer Daniel Lanois — conventional in that it sticks with one episode from Dylan’s life and re-creates it in familiar terms: the artist at work, writing songs, recording them, the frustrations and the breakthroughs. But it’s the depiction of the physical world that sustains the chapter and gives it context. Dylan puts us in New Orleans with him, with its heavy tropical air, its cemeteries and its ghosts. Important as anything that happens in the studio is a trip he and his wife take up to the town of Napoleonville on a vintage Harley — it’s all of a piece with the songs and the sessions.

The "sensational" aspects of the book — the section published in Newsweek regarding his hiatus from touring following his motorcycle accident, his attempts to escape fame — are part of the story too, but in some ways the least of it. Chronicles answers the question what does he think he’s doing with vivid candor.

In the final chapter, Dylan returns to his signing with Leeds and with Columbia Records and the visionary producer John Hammond. Hammond gives him an advance copy of the Robert Johnson recordings, which, virtually unheard since their original release, were being prepared for their first, earth-shattering reissue. Dylan rushes back to the apartment of Dave and Terri Van Ronk to give it a listen. Dylan is stunned, Van Ronk indifferent. For Van Ronk, Johnson is derivative. For Dylan, Johnson seemed "like a guy who could have sprung from the head of Zeus in full armor. . . . The compositions seemed to come right out of his mouth and not his memory." They argue on. Van Ronk plays sides by Leroy Carr and Skip James and Henry Thomas and says, "See what I mean?" Dylan says, "I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite."

As he always has, Dylan is continually responding to that particular something beyond rational argument, beyond naming. His ear is to the ground, listening for the sound of that "invisible republic" that Dylanologist Greil Marcus wrote about and that Dylan tips his hat to here. He can hear and understand your argument just fine and agree with it in all of its parts and yet think just the opposite. "My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn’t any way to explain that to anybody."

Dylan’s hagiographers, whom he’s always trying to throw off his trail, will probably find a million discrepancies and contradictions in Chronicles, maybe even some outright lies. But they’d be missing the point. The point isn’t literal truth or names and dates but that "eternal ‘now’ " of music and theatrical performance that he refers to in his memories of Archibald MacLeish’s play, conjured here by the evocation of real things, objects, places, the sound of a voice in a room or on a record. As for the facts, as Dylan himself advised confused fans in the liner notes to one album, "Consult the playlists." And as for that secret wife, I’m sure she’d show up somewhere on Google.