A Review: Reconstruction: Foner, Du Bois, Bowers

April 30, 2008

A Review

Reconstruction:

Foner, Du Bois, Bowers

by

R.E. Prindle

Bowers, Claude:  The Tragic Era, 1929

Du Bois:  Black Reconstruction In America:  1860-1880, 1935

Foner, Eric:  Reconstruction:  America’s Unfinished Revolution 1988

     While race, or species, is the cental problem of Reconstruction none of the above writers bothers to really examine the issue.

     On the one hand the United States was settled by the highest exemplars of human development at that time.  The evolutionary nature of the European settlers was unfolding at a rapid rate that was to blossom in the nineteenth century although still at a relatively low stage of development.

     Added to this species of Homo Sapiens was the infusion of diverse African species fresh from the jungles of Africa.  The African peoples are believed to be the first Homo Sapiens to evolve.  They had been in Africa for 150,000 years or more and had attained no indigenous level of civilization.

     Not all African peoples are the same age.  For instance, the Bantu peoples who came into existence in the Sahel near Ubang-Chari are an obvious Negro-Arab hybrid.  The hybrid developed about 1000AD spreading South and East across the continent.  The Bantus drove the indigenous Bushmen before them eventually forcing the remnant into the Kalihari desert.

     The West Africans may be the stock on which the Arab was grafted.  Now, the anthropologists tell us that at some point the previous hominid strain evolved into Homo Sapiens I, which is to say the Black African.  But, they don’t tell us, nor are they capable of it, exactly what separates the Last Hominid Predecessor from Homo Sapiens.  We don’t know what those indicators are.  Either the Last Hominid Predecessor has disappeared without a trace or the Bushmen may be the LHP or even the West African.  Certainly there are marked differences between the African and the Semite, Caucasian and Mongolid.  The difference is of an intellectual character as well as a number of physical ones, which is to say, genetic.

     No one will deny the physical differences, they are maintained to be merely cosmetic.  It is in the intellectual field we encounter resistance.

     Science has given ample proof that there is a difference in mental capacity between Africans and Caucasians, Mongolids and Semites.  There is an emotional problem with the Biblically oriented because the bible says God created man whole and entire apparently  from nothing and The Declaration Of Independence of the United States says that:  ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…’  The authors provided no evidence of this.

     So we have the statements of men against the scientific evidence of nature.  I opt for science and nature.

     The European discovered America, that they found a continent that they didn’t know was there and invaded it or settled it depending on how you choose to see it.  Following the scientific approach of Darwin I understand that the Europeans invaded the continent driving the earlier settlers before them in the exact same way that one species of bird, for instance, supplants another.

     The Europeans had not yet developed the notion of free labor the way they would in the nineteenth century so they brought indentured White ‘servants’ over who were in fact, slaves.  Shortly thereafter a sea captain unloaded a cargo of Africans as laborers who became chattel slaves.  Over a period of decades the Africans displaced the Europeans as slaves but not before extensive interbreeding as both species were used as field hands.

     In Darwinian terms then, as a competing human species Europeans displaced the Native Americans, or Indians, while at the same time introducing the various African species which by the time of the end of slavery and  Reconstruction would enter into competition with the Caucasians for possession of the  continent.  The difference in species was an irreconcilable difference, an either-or situation.  This is the tragedy of the United States of America and the Western Hemisphere.

     Africans were always a signficant portion of the population of the United States, moreso in the South but they were not inknown in the North where they were treated little differently than in the South.  Edgar Allan Poe records an instance of Negro slavery in Pennsylvania that was not all that unusual.

     Prior to 1793 the ratio of Black to White was much smaller but in that year Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.  This invention opened the black lands across the South from the coast through Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas to Texas to cotton cultivation.  Black lands does not refer to Negroes but to the soil.

     Thus from 1793 to 1860 the importation of Africans increased greatly.  The African population skyrocketed.  At the time of the Civil War Du Bois estimates that 10% were African born.  That is one in ten.  The percentage born to mothers from from Africa and first Generation Africans must therefore represent a full 25% of the African population.  Thus, at the time of Emancipation at least one Negro in four can be said to be African in culture.

     Indeed, Mark Sullivan (1874-1952) in his wonderful multi-volume popular American history, Our Times, recalls the charm of the Africanisms of the Negro that had disappeared by the turn of the century.

      Contrary to common belief the number of slaveholders in the South was relatively small.  Non-slaveholders outnumbered slaveholder by a considerable margin.  Also contrary to common belief Whites, Blacks and Indians all owned slaves.  As one progressed from East to West conditions became more barbarous.  Relatively benign in the East by the time one reached Louisiana where the majority of Black slave owners domiciled, according to Du Bois, slaves were actually worked to death, the owners then buying replacements.  Although it was denied and covered up Kentucky and virginia bred Africans for sale to the Deep South.

     There are those who say that slavery was a dying institution that would have disappeared on its own.  Whether it would have or not I see little to indicate such a development.

     The plantations could be huge affairs of a hundred thousand acres or more; self-contained cotton growing duchies.  Having the economic power the Planters controlled politics.  The much larger non-slave owning White majority was despised by both Planters and Blacks while being bent to the will of the Planters.  It is interesting to watch Du Bois twist and turn trying to explain why it was right for the slaves to despise the ‘po’ white trash.’

     The Planters built up a very pleasant situation for themselves on the backs of both Blacks and Whites.  ‘Oh, Darkies, how my heart grows weary’, Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox and that sort of thing.  Disney’s Song Of The South really cranked out the Blacks.  The Planter-Black alliance against the Southern Whites has evolved today into the Liberal-Black alliance against ‘Whiteness.’

     At the time the Planters had abundant opportunity to study the Blacks.  They came to the conclusion, without using the term, that the Africans were a different species, since corroborated by science.

     Thus, when Reconstruction began we had two species competing for the same territory.  The species were inherently unequal.  Equality of intellect could only be obtained by education, if at all.  In addition, as I noted, fully 25% or, one in four, had but recently been removed from the African jungles.  The remaining three quarters had been in the state of slavery for generations.  They were thoroughly cowed.  Any hope of freedom they had was hundreds of years old.  They were in a body illiterate.  Indeed, it was against the law to school them.

     As Du Bois points out because of its historical relation to the French Caribbean, Haiti, Louisiana had the largest group of educated and cultured Blacks.  Indeed, the early cultural history of New Orleans is worthy of study.  There were things going on there that weren’t going on in other places.

     At one stroke then in 1863 the bonds of the community were broken apart and this Black population nearly equal in size to the Whites, in some places exceeding it, was placed on a political parity by Northern bayonets.  Truly a second Civil War in the South between Blacks and Whites was the only possible result  and that’s what Reconstruction was.  The first result as Eric Foner says was the Unfinished American Revolution.

2.

         The argument of Du Bois depends on the character of the Negro.  That it is both wrong to enslave another and that the introduction of the Negro into the Americas as the greatest error of all goes without saying.  The point is that we have at least two Homo Sapiens species competing for the same land.  The differences are irreconcilable and can only be solved by the elimination of one or the other.  The problem as an evolutionary one is beyond reason.  No amount of good will can resolve it.  Tor those who haven’t thought this situation through that statement may sound strong but the current New Abolitionist movement is dedicated to the genocide of Whites.  That simple fact cannot be denied.

     Du Bois, who writes as a Black apologist and not an historian, has , or ast least displays, absolutely no psychological understanding of the participants.  He believes he is an excellent historian but I’m not prepared to allow him that without a grasp of psychology.

     In his view which he shares the opinion with Liberals that the Negro is by nature an inoffensive, happy-go-lucky fellow who wouldn’t harm a fly.  Why, during the war didn’t he stand by the Missus and the kids while the menfolk were off shooting the Negroes who had joined the Yankee war machine and made it work?  According to Du Bois the war couldn’t have been won if those Negro soldiers hadn’t joined up.

     Supposing that Blacks in the heart of the South did remain quiescent,  Does that mean it was because they were happy and contented or does it mean they were waiting for the results before stirring? Actually the Southern states were the only place Africans in the world were so quiescent so we have to look for other reasons than good natured joviality.

     Earlier in the century nineteenth century when a majority population of Africans revolted against a small minority of Whites in Haiti the Africans slaughtered the White males while retaining the White females as sex slaves.

     In Jamaica where the small minority of Whites couldn’t control the large majority of Africans, Africans escaped to the hinterlands where they formed their own district and carried on guerilla warfare from there.

     Their earlier African heritage had been no different than the Africans of the South.  Tribal wars of extermination were the sole constant of African life.  Tribal centers rose and fell.  Livingstone and others discovered burnt over ruin after burnt over ruin, formerly populous lands entirely deserted.

     In today’s Africa Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has completely demolished the civilization Whites had built up.  One of his first acts upon taking office was to attempt the extermination of the Matabele Zulu over a hundred and fifty year old grievance.

     Now that the Africans in South Africa have been granted power over the Whites they are committing genocide against them while dismantling the civilization the Whites built up.  They simply cannot sustain it.

     In the United States today the Blacks of New Abolitionism are calling for the disappearance of Whiteness now that the United States’ ‘unfinished revolution,’ as Foner expresses it, is rushing to its conclusion.  Unless the Whites of America wake up Whiteness will disappear and the unfinished revolution conclude in their destruction.  In other words, in the Darwinian sense the African species of Homo Sapiens in competition with the White Homo Sapiens species will eliminate them completely.  Human abilities to speak and reason mean nothing compared to the forces of nature, especially when those forces go unrecognized.

     Thus the major weakness of Du Bois’ thesis is that he fails to understand, or at least state, the causes of irreconcilable differences.  African people are not as he describes them.  Nor are Whites.

     Bowers makes it more clear that from the White point of view the battle between Whites was the great tragedy.  From that point of view the whole purpose of Reconstruction was to reconcile the Whites without any reference to Africans.  The Africans were an unpleasant reality that cvould be disposed of in only one way and extermination was too horrible for the Whites to contemplate while, as we have seen, it wasn’t for the Africans of Haiti and isn’t for the Africans of today not only in Zimbabwe and South africa but in the United States of America.  New Abolitionism means the genocide of Whites.

     Bowers wrote in 1929 with popular success so that Du Bois’ volume seems to have been conceived in answer to Bowers.  Bowers takes a pessimistic view of the capabilities of Africans while Du Bois stoutly defends their abilities.  One is led to believe that there was no public edcuation in the South before the war while the bulk of the Whites were as illiterate as the Africans by Du Bois.  The Africans in their desire for learning then organized the entire public school system generously including Whites who promptly segregated the schools.

     A.W. Tourgee in his novel Bricks Without Straw that Du Bois refers to constantly has an interesting passage in which this notion apparently began and persists to this day.  Bricks Without Straw p. 127:

     As they rode away the two representatives of antipodal thought discussed the scenes they had witnessed that day, which were equally new to them both, and naturally enough drew from them entirely different conclusions.  The Northern man enthusiastically prophesied the rapid rise and miraculous development of the colored race under the impetus of free schools and free thought.  The Southern man only saw in it a prospect of more “sassy niggers,” like Nimbus, who was “a good enough nigger, but mighty aggravating to the white folks.”

     With regard to the teachers, he ventured only this comment:  “Captain, it’s a mighty pity them gals are teaching a nigger school.  They’re too likely for such work- too likely by half.”

      The man whom he addressed only gave a low, quiet laugh at this remark, which the other found it difficult to interpret.

Over the succeeding century and a half the Africans seem to have lost their zeal for education while being less cpable of it than the Northern man thought.  No miraculous development of Africans has ocurred.  The facts seem to be that the average intelligence as measured by IQ testing of the African species is fifteen or twenty points below that of the Whites while being even higher in Africa where the Africans have not come into direct contact with Western Civilization.

That this fact is true can be seen by the institution of Affirmative Action.  Blacks have access to equal education but in order to get ‘equalization of results’ the Liberal reactionaries have essentially given Africans a fifteen to twenty point handicap and then declared results equal.

I wonder what Tiger Woods would thinks about Affirmative Action in golf were his opponents  given a ten or fifteen point handicap?

The Liberals tacitly acknowledge the unbridgeable gap in intellectual capabilities between the two species by the institution of Affirmative Action.

Thus, following the defeat of the South, Northern troops were garrisoned in the South to establish equality on the point of a bayonet which was the only way it could be done.

Both Bowers and Du Bois point out the hyprocrisy of the North forcing recial equality on the South when they denied such equality to Africans in the North.  The hypocrisy was stifling.  While the North insisted on the enfranchisement of the Africans in the South there were very, very few places in the North where Africans were allowed to vote.

Du Bois repeatedly refers to Tourgee’s (with a soft G) Bricks Without Straw in corroboration of his view.  I have since read Bricks Without Straw which I found a good novel and historically valuable but my reading of the story doesn’t produce the same results as that of Du Bois.  It seems that there is more than one way to approach the story.

Tourgee was a carpetbagger who went South to make his fortune.  While I have faith that his representation is accurate he still describes two different species, as in the above quote, competing for the same space within the framework of the recent past.  If he is speaking his own thoughts through the mouth of the Captain then if he were alive today he would have to admit his error.

The Africans were still a freed people with a two hundred year history of subjection. There was no way they could function in a free society.  The situation was impossible.   Ante-bellum laws had made it a crime to school slaves so that according to Tourgee not one African in a thousand could read or write.  Du Bois in his depiction of the African’s eagerness for education places the figure much higher.  It is difficult in the circumstances to understand how the millions of Africans in the black belt of the Cotton Kingdom could have gotten even a smidgeon of education.  It was against the law.  Laws are wonderful things, watch out for them.

Even freed it is impossible to believe that many adult Africans could learn to read or write.  Education requires the pliable minds of the young.  It takes real determination to learn to read and write as an adult which very few have.   To be law abiding can be criminal under certain laws.  Witness the lawful Nazi society.

Bowers gives a feel for the conflict between the species with atrocities on either side.  Du Bois takes the position of the poor suffering amiable negro who was harassed and brutalized by the Whites while patiently relying on the courts for justice.  Remember he believes this the Negro nature.

Bowers is closer to the truth but that is irrelevant.  As Foner says this was the beginning of America’s  unfinished revolution.  Reconstruction was the first phase followed by the counter revolution of the Jim Crow period.  That period ended, to use a convenient date in 1954 with the Supreme Court decision in Brown Vs. The Board Of Education.

Thus the African revolt renewed into the present time.  The candidacy of Barry Dunham-Obama signifies the completion of Foner’s unfinished revolution.  If elected the Liberal-African combine will begin in earnest to eliminate Whiteness in America.  The genocide of Whites which has already commenced and is fairly well advanced will be prosecuted in earnest.

Open your eyes and actually see what is happening.

Posted in America, Atlantic Slave Trade, Biology, Civil War, Civilization, Eric Foner, Evolution, Liberalism, Liberals, R.E. Prindle, Reconstruction, Reviews, Science, Slavery, Writing | 2 Comments »

Exhuming Bob IX: Chronicles I Pensees3

April 27, 2008

 

Exhuming Bob IX

Chronicles Vol. I

Pensees 3

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     …I needed to get my own place, one with my own bed, stove and tables.  It was about time.  I guess it could have happened earlier, but I liked staying with others.  It was a less of a hassle, easier, with little responsibility- places where i could freely come and go, sometimes even with a key, rooms with plenty of hardback books on shelves and stacks of phonograph records.  When I wasn’t doing anything else, I’d thumb through the books and listen to records.

     Not having a place of my own was beginning to affect my super-sensitive nature, so after being in town close to a year I rented a third floor walkup apartent…

Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. I

     Yes. Bob’s super-sensitive nature needed his own bed.  He and Suze Rotolo were an item soon after he met her in July of ’61.  He had to give up the the comfort of other people’s books and records in other people’s digs.  He needed his own privacy now.

     Suze would be an important influence in his life.  She came from a long line of Communist agitators.  She was not only Red to the- but was working for- CORE there in New York City.  Bob wasn’t writing much as yet since his major influences hadn’t come together.  While Bob doesn’t mention all those old C&W records as a songwriting influence he nevertheless has always written within a Country and Western context.  Guthrie, his first attested major influence rose from a C&W milieu.

     From being an apparent pauper, one reason Suze’s mother didn’t like him, Bob suddenly had the affluence to rent an apartment while being able to furnish it, even buying a used TV.  He and Suze moved in.  Suze is putting out an autobiography this month (May, 2008) so we’ll see if we can see what Bob saw in the girl.

     As a Communist lass working for CORE Suze must have talked up Civil Rights and other Reconstruction views a bit so we may probably accurately assume that she influenced Bob’s songwriting direction when he gets his songwriting attitude organized here in a paragraph or two.

     Bob came from small town Mid-West Hibbing.  I do know where that’s at.  While he was interested in records there was no indication he was ever interested in any other cultural areas.  He doesn’t seem to have evidenced any interest in the varied cultural life of New York City before he met Suze.  He was no habitue of museums although he does tell us he haunted the library where he read newspapers- those from 1855 to 1865.  No news like old news.

     His mind had been little prepared for what Suze had to show him.  Mid-West small towns can be stifling and that’s no joke.

     As Bob says:  I began to braoden my horizons, see a lot of what the world was like, especially the off-Broadway scene.  Then he mentions Le Roi Jones’ (Amiri Baraka) and the Living Theatre play, The Brig.  Bob may have seeen those plays with Suze but he didn’t see them within the time limits of his story so they could have had no influence on his songwriting development at this time.  Dutchman and The Baptism of Jones that he mentions were first performed in 1964 as was the Living Theatre’s, The Brig.  It is interesting that Jones’ The Bapstism is described as anti-religious when Jones turned Moslem and became Baraka shortly thereafter.  Baptism must have been more anti-White.

     Jack Gelber’s The Connection was made into a movie in  ’62 so he could have seen the play within this time period.  I couldn’t find any time period for the play but it ran for over two years.  I didn’t come up with anything for the Comedia Del Arte.

     The Brecht-Weil show drew a blank but as he seems to have been knocked out by the song Pirate Jenny that may have influenced his song When The Ship Comes In,  while he gives it prime importance as an influence that formed his skills  he must have seen that sometime in the Fall of ”61 or the Spring of ’62.

     He and Suze did visit the artist hangouts she was familiar with while broadening Bob’s horizons by trips to MOMA and the Metropolitan.    Bob probably saw Picasso’s Guernica at MOMA where it was on display at the time.  Bob developed a real interest in painting during this period.

     So, we have the book thumbings from his freeloading days, the records, Suze and her art influences and then when John Hammond signed him he gave Bob an acetate of the first Robert Johnson album, which didn’t sell for beans I might add.  The first Robert Johnson LP was released in 1960 so I don’t understand why Bob was given an acetate unless it was just lying around and Hammond picked it up or else acetates were a sop to new signees who had just been contractually screwed.  You think managers are bad, try record companies.

     Johnson was a revelation for Bob.  He saw something in the LP which only a few people ever have.  I’ve listened to it a couple of times and I’m with Dave Van Ronk.  So What?  There’s nothing to the vocals and he’s obviously a beginner on guitar.  It’s not that he’s inventive he just doesn’t know how to play.

     The story Bob tells is that a teenage Johnson is hanging around some Blues heavies and they shoo him off.  Johnson then meets a supposed guitar wizard nobody’s ever heard of who teaches this very receptive student mega volumes of guitar lore so that Johnson returns to the Blues heavies a year later to knock their socks off with his virtuosity.  As Van Ronk says:  ‘…oh that lick’s from here, this one’s from there; that song is a reworking of another and so on.  Greil Marcus quotes Johnson’s lyrics extensively in his Mystery Train.  Wow!  I guess too much of nothing can be a good thing.

     But anyway Bob learned three or four times as fast from Johnson as Johnson learned from the old coot who taught him.  Bob was up and running within three months.

     However Superbob the Songwriter wasn’t ready to step forth from the phone booth yet, there was something else lacking, what was it, something or other.  That’s it, in French, l’ autre.  Bob had discovered that he was someone else.  I know where that’s at too; I’ve been called somethin’ else a couple times I can remember.  So Bob was somewhere between Bob1 and Bob2.  The transition from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan had to be completed.  Bob picked up a copy of Arthur Rimbaud.  The book fell open in his hands and the words ‘Je suis un autre’ floated up before his eyes and were sucked into his soul.  Bob too realized that he had or was un autre.  Now Bob was ready to rock and roll.

     This is a pretty story and I like it.  I like it a lot.  It might even be true, I’m sure I don’t know and maybe Bob isn’t real positive.  Anyway the songs began to roll out.  John Hammond who had seen only a couple when he suspicioned there might be more in Bob’s head so  he sent the underaged lad to be signed by Lou Levy.  Songs were in the air I guess and Albert Grossman had his radio tuned to Bob’s brain and must have heard them.  Like a vulture spotting a dying man from several thousand feet in the air the eagle eyed Albert, and that is not meant as an insult, descended on Bob and scooped him up.  Wish I’d been there with the gift of gab, a shovelful of chutzpah.   A dream of a life time and Albert split it in two to come up with Bob and Peter, Paul And Mary.  The Fearsome Foursome.

     Although Bob was to have difficulties with Albert in later years when Albert’s cut was growing larger than Bob’s he seemed to have been welcome at this time.  Peter Yarrow says that without Albert Grossman there wouldn’t have been a Bob Dylan and this may be God’s own truth.  So how much did Bob really owe Albert?  But like The Colonel and Elvis a manager seems to inevitably believe the whole belongs to him.  The manager’s cut just seems to get larger and larger while the artist he’s working over gets to lick the plate.  But, those problems were in the future and as Bob’s songwriting skills matured Albert got him much more money than he could have gotten otherwise.

Posted in America, Bob Dylan, Communism, Communists, Elvis Presley, Folk Music, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, R.E. Prindle, Reconstruction, Religion, Rock And Roll, Suze Rotolo, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Exhuming Bob Part IX: Chronicles Vol I: Pensees 2

April 26, 2008

Exhuming Bob

Part IX

Chronicles Vol. I:

Pensees 2

by

R.E. Prindle

 

     I rather admire Bob’s method of integrating his life into history.  He makes himself part of the unfolding plan of historical development.  As some very ancient fellow once said:  The unexamined life is not worth living.  Having posted the rather narrow parameters of his story- that of his signing by Lou Levy and his subsequent redemption of the contract- he fits in most of his intellectual development to the time of the redemption of the contract.

     He does this in an interesting way.  In Chaper 2, The Lost Land, an interesting title in itself, gives the feel of prehistory, he begins by describing how like some insect he burrowed into the nest of Ray Gooch and Chloe Kiel where he lived in parasitic comfort.

     The path to Ray and Chloe’s door is interesting.  First he met Dave Van Ronk, through Van Ronk he met Paul Clayton and through Clayton Gooch and Kiel.  Bob is going to suck off Van Ronk and Clayton to a very large extent also.  Bob describes his hosts as quite eccentric, one might almost say, weird.  As a foreign body in the cocoon he even studies them dispassionately, clinically, one might say.  As one species of another.

     As with the other people he attached himself to they had a terrific record collection and what appears to be a large very eclectic library.  While Bob appreciates the library one feels that he believes the selection of books as odd and weird his hosts.  The library apparently formed the basis of his adult education as he thumbed the books.  This is really the first step in how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan the songwriter.  Remember he has only a year or so before his career is fairly launched and he no longer has any use for people like Ray and Chloe.  Both appear to have been queintessential Bohemians- or Bohos in brief.

     In this environment Bob provides us with this biographical sketch.  P. 28

     I was born in the spring (5/24) of 1941.  The Second World War was alreadey raging in Europe, and America would soon be in it.  The world was being blown apart and chaos was already driving its fist into the face of all new visitors.  If you were born around this time or were living and alive, you could feel the old world go and the new one beginning.  It was like putting the clock back to when B.C. became A.D.  Everybody born around my time was a part of both.  Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Stalin, Roosevelt- towering figures that the world would never see the likes of again, men who relied on their own resolve, for better or worse, every one of them prepared to act alone, indifferent to approval, indifferent to wealth or love, all presiding over the destiny of mankind and reducing the world to rubble.  Coming from a long line of Alexanders and Julius Caesars, Ghengis Khans, Charlemagnes and Naopleons, they carved up the world like a really dainty dinner.  Whether they parted their hair in the middle or wore a Viking helmet, they would not be denied and were impossible to reckon with- rude barbarians stampeding cross the earth and hammering out their own ideas of geography.

     I don’t necessarily agree with the interpretation but one might ask what its intellectual background is.   As bob was writing at the age of 53 of a period he didn’t remember and probably hadn’t formulated his opinions by 1959 he is projecting subsequently obtained knowledge back on his birth as falsified Persistence of Memory.  I admire that.  One has to have order in one’s life.

     Actually if one has read more than somewhat in certain areas the intellectual foundations are more than apparent.  Bob was born Jewish and for four years after his Bar Mitzvah- turning 13- he attended a Zionist summer camp for a month or month and a half in those summers.

     There was a synagogue in Hibbing but it isn’t clear that Bob regularly attended services or was very observant.  As an illustration of what being Jewish means let me cite an ad for the new cable channel called Shalom.  This is the first all Jewish channel.  In the ad or blurb a man is discussing his Jewish education.  He says that they tell you that you will attend a goi school where you will learn to be an educated man.  And then you will also attend this other school where you will learn what it means to be a Jew.  The man says that he already knows what it means to be a Jew-  You suffer.  You suffer.

     Thus at Camp Herzl- the Zionist Camp- Bob spent four summers learning to suffer as a Jew.  Bob didn’t mention Camp Herzl in his book.

     Now, Jewish teaching is that only Jews can rule a just world.  Only Jews are cultured and learned, all others are like ignorant bulls in a china shop- mere barbarians.  The last phrase In the quote from Bob is that the goi leaders were- rude barbarians stampeding across the  earth and hammering out thier own ideas of geography.  This is the exact opposite of how Jews imagine that they would be managing things.

     the notion is that only Jews are capable of creating a just sane society.  This notion hasn’t proven out well in post-WWI Russia, Hungary, and Central Europe or today’s Palestine but facts don’t disturb the notions of ideologues.  We know that Bob is an Israeli citizen and it appears he follows the Party line.  Can’t help himself, really, that was the way he was educated on the Jewish side.

     Then, on pages 27 and 28 bob finds it important to mention Adolf Eichmann.  Now, Bob only has 300 pages to work with here so we may assume he has selected only very key items to discuss.  One could easily write 300 pages without mentioning Eichmann.  I’ve written close to 3000 pages of autobiographical fiction and I don’t believe Eichmann has come up once.  Nevertheless Bob writing of the time at the age of 53 has this to say:

     (Ray worked) also an Omaha slaughterhouse on the kill floor.  Once I asked him what it was like.  “You ever heard of Auschwitz?”  Sure I had, who hadn’t?  It was one of the Nazi death camps in Europe and Adolf Eichmann, the chief Nazi Gestapo organizer who’d managed this, had been put on  trial recently, in Jerusalem….His trial was a big deal.  On the witness stand Eichmann  declared he was merely following orders, but his prosecutors had no problem proving that he had carried out his mission with monstrous zeal and relish.  Eichmann had been convicted and his fate was now being decided on….The State of Israel claimed the right to act as heir and executor of all who perished in the final solution.  the trial reminds the whole world of what led to the formation of the Israeli State.

     Spoken like a true Israeli patriot.  There is no need to defend Eichamnn, the disposal of the conquered belongs to the conqueror without the legal hocus pocus of a trial.  Did anyone believe that the Nuremburg Trial wouldn’t find the defendants guilty?  Why the charade?  There was no exonerting evidence that was going to be considered.  The Israeli State was not even in existence during the Second Wrold War so by what right does the State of Israel act.  None.  Their own will.  Be honest, they wanted to kill this guy, that’s all.  They weren’t even one of the conquerors.  They had nothing to do with the defeat of the Axis.

     So what does the trial of Eichmann mean?  The Israelis violated all international law by abducting an Argentine citizen without authority or extradition.  If Eichmann was a thug the Israelis were no less so.  Did they feel they had an overriding grievance?  Bully for them.  If they’re interested I’ll send a list of mine which I feel no less passionately.

     And then the State of Israel has appointed itself to act as heir and executor of all who perished.  That’s a convenient right to assign oneself.  I, The Jury as Mickey Spillane said.  What a convenient right.  It doesn’t square with justice but then who among them are objecting.  The Jews were self-righteously against capital punishment in all the other barbaric countries of the world.  But…they would make an exception in Eichmann’s case.  As time would show they would make a lot of exceptions.  Assassination became there mode of operations.

     As I say there is no need to defend Eichmann, if you want to kill him, kill him.  No one will object, but to set aside all the rules, all the laws that separate civilization from barbarism seems a bit extreme.  It does make one question one’s sincerity.

     The trial does fit within the time frame of the novel though, so Bravo! Bob.

      After that little moriaistic lesson for us all Bob brings us up to date on some of his musical influences, which were all excellent and then acquaints us with the foundation of his literary and intellectual education as provided by Ray and Chloe.

     He says he did little reading as a kid.  He also says he was not much of a student.  One gathers then that the talk of the biographers about Bob being on the honor roll was a figment of Mother Beatttie’s imagination.  She was apparently telling them of the Bob she wished Bob had been instead of the Bob that was.  Primarily his own reading considted of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Luke Short and H.G. Wells.

     Good influences all.  Luke Short was also my favorite Western writer, him and Ernest Haycox.  Of course I remember not a shred.  The choice of H.G. Wells is probably represented by Seven Science Fiction Novels  of H.G. Wells.  His reading or Wells probably consisted of The War Of The Worlds, The Island Of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man.  The other four didn’t get read very often but I have come to really appreciate The Food Of The Gods and In The Days Of The Comet.  I’m a big Wells fancier myself having read about 90% of a very large corpus, some of it two or three times.  At Bob’s age however I was only familiar with the volume Seven Science Fiction Novels Of H.G. Wells.

     Edgar Rice Burroughs is my forte as my essays on I, Dynamo and ERBzine will attest.  So both Bob’s and my own influences closely mesh.  It is of interest to note that having read Tarzan Bob married a Black woman and installed her in Tarzana.  Burroughs of course founded Tarzana naming it after Tarzan.  Cute.

     Bob goes on to discuss items he read in Ray’s library.  Ray was a pretty interesting reader.  Bob really fell through the rabbit hole when he moved in with Ray and Chloe.

     I don’t feel the need to run through what he read, the reader can check it out himself if he wishes, but Ray provided Bob with a nagnificent foundation in a very short time.  I am impressed that Bob found Honore de Balzac a great writer.  Damn, that Bob does have an unerring nose for the best in both records and literature.  Balzac is one of my favorites too although I’ve only read about twenty volumes of the immense corpus Balzac called the Human Comedy.  If you want to read a really stunning story, a novelette, get The Girl With The Golden Eyes and have your life changed.  Too bad Bob got confused by being forced to try to combine a liberal education with a Jewish one.  I’ve got a Jewish one too, acquired late however, but I scrapped it as useless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Bob Dylan, Civilization, Consciousness, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, FDR, Folk Music, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Greil Marcus, H.G. Wells, Jews, Lipstick Traces, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Religion, Reviews, Rock And Roll, Semites, Tarzan, World War II, Writing | 1 Comment »

Exhuming Bob: IX Chronicles I: Pensees

April 25, 2008

 

Exhuming Bob

Part IX

Chronicles I: Pensees

by

R.E. Prindle

     It has been four years since Chronicles appeared.  Plenty of time to think about it.  I reread it recently and may read it again while I’m writing this.

     If you listen to the bitter denunciatory songs and read the various biographers of Bob’s life as it appeared from the outside one is astonished at the Happy Talk quality of the auto.  We don’t even have an auto-biography here or even a memoir actually: what we have is a series of autobiographical essays that are more or less centered on the theme of how Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.

     Bobby Zimmerman is telling the story but he’s not really mentioned by name.  Bob was impressed by Rimbaud’s ‘Je suis an autre’ which translates I am someone else.  In that sense it seems as if the ‘autre’ is talking about Bob.  So the ‘autre’ is sort of an unnamed narrator.   Bob carefully details the experiences that led to the transition from Bobby to Bob.

     The key points are not those of either the songs or the biography.  For instance no biography has mentioned Bobby Zimmerman’s close encounter with Gorgeous George.  The experience seems to have centered Bobby’s life.  I’m sure most people are too young to have even heard of Gorgeous George.  Gorgeous flamed across the skies during the fifties.

      Bob may have seen him on TV as early as 1951 when his family got their TV.  Only ten at the time it would have been a major experience.  According to Steve Slagle writing at:

http://.wrestlingmuseum.com/pages/bios/halloffame/georgebio.html

     In a very real sense, Gorgeous George single handedly established the unproven new technology of television as a viable entertaining new medium that could reach literally millions (of) homes all across the country.  Pro wrestling was TV;s fisrt real “hit” with the public- the first programs that ever drew any real numbers for the new technology, and Gorgeous George was directly responsible for all the commotion.  It was a turning point for Wagner (Gorgeous George Wagner), wrestling, and the country itself.  Gorgeous George was probably responsible for selling more television sets in the early days of TV than any other factor.

—–

     He influenced…even Muhammed Ali, Little Richard, Liberace, and numerous other figures in both sports and entertainment.

—–

     He grew his hair out so it was long, could be curled and pinned back with gold plated bobby pins, and dyed it platinum blond.  He wore elegant robes, dubbed himself “The Human Orchid” and was always escorted by one of his male ring valets (Geoffrey or Thomas Ross) who would spray his corner of the ring, as well as George’s opponents, with disinfectant and perfume.

      No kidding, George was something else.  That spraying bit brought a vocal response from the couches of America.  He didn’t necessarily make you want to be like him but what he’d done was so phenomenal you wanted to do something to get that effect.  Other phenoms like Mickey Mantle, Liberace and Little Richard captured that supernatural something, that aura, that charisma without being much themselves as was the case with Gorgeous George.

     So you can imagine the effect on Bobby Zimmerman when George entered the arena as Bobby was playing and virtually acknowledged the kid’s existence.  I mean, you could live a lifetime and never have that happen to you.  And out of a lifetime of happenings the event was so fixating Bob chose to give it a central part in his essay.

     The book begins and ends with Lou Levy, a song plugger, appropriately enough.  Bob had been sent to Levy by John Hammond, his record producer, to be signed and sent to Lou Levy again by Albert Grossman, his manager to be unsigned.  So the story Bob tells in his novel  fits into a space between his signing and unsigning.  By novel’s end, did I say novel, Bob Dylan is poised to step onto the world stage, Folk Music’s version of Gorgeous George.

     In between he gives the details of the formation of Bob Dylan the songwriter.  But it’s all Happy Talk; nothing bad happening .  In contrast to Ballad In Plain D lamenting his breakup with Suze Rotolo which is almost too bitter why, all that happened was they came to an intersection, Suze turned left and Bob kept on going.  That’s all there was to it, the inevitable going of different ways.  Well, OK.  Maybe at this stage in his life Bob wants to do the gallant thing.  So, if these are just a series of impressionistic essays no problem.  I thought Barefoot In The Park was good movie too.  Bob’s got an OK story.  Nice novelistic touch, but if this is supposed to be a memoir or autobiography the rendering is fully inadequate.  Given the songs and the versions of the biographers I can’t believe it.  The tale is woefully inadequate.  Bob does call these chronicles although they aren’t that either.  I thought I was buying an auto-biography; I really wanted more.  Where’s the beef? as the saying went.

     However Suze did have an infuence on Our Man.  Bob doesn’t mention the political influence apparent in the songs and dwelt on by the biographers though.  Suze introuduced him to the art world, the avant garde theatre.  One of what he considers his major influences, Brecht-Weil, came through her.  Bob makes it sound like this was an exotic world and one to which he didn’t return when he and Suze, not so much as broke up but, went their separate ways.  He gives the impression that he was an outsider looking in to Suze’s world.  Nice, but not that nice.  Maybe his lack of appreciation had something to do with the drawing apart.

     But, hey, life was blissful.  He moved in on Fred Neil at the Cafe Wha; much as he tells it in Talking New York, who was useful but Bob had eyes on the Gaslight and Dave Van Ronk.  He met Van Ronk, the story is worth dwelling on, moved in on him, gained access to the Gaslight through Van Ronk and never entered the Cafe Wha’ or one assumes spoke to Fred Neil, again.  Bob doesn’t look back.

     Bob also moved in with Van Ronk and his wife Terri.  He moved in with several people but first he made sure they had large record collections and libraries.  Bob made good use of both so that he became conversant with books and authors, recording artists.  Happy talk, life was good.  So, one has to ask, where does Positively Fourth Street and its bitter taunting tone enter in?  Not in this novel.

     His apartment  on Fourth Street where he lived with Suze was blissful too. It was all great, except for maybe Suze’s mother.  Then John Hammond discovered him, signed him to Lou Levy.  That brought the attention of Albert Grossman, exit Lou Levy, end of story.

     But by then Bobby Zimmerman was the eseential Bob Dylan and the great adventure was about to begin.

      I enjoyed the book.  It was a good novel.  I even learned some things about Bob Dylan.  Bob clarified the provenance of his born again last name.  Came from Dylan Thomas just like we knew all along.  There was an awful lot of stuff left out and a lot just skimmed over.  For instance it seems that Bob left high school in early Spring which would mean that he didn’t graduate.  He talks of playing with Bobby Vee in the Summer of ’59 yet he also says that he went down to Minneapolis in early June and hung around Dinkytown and U. Minnesota for the whole Summer.  So, there is some mixed up confusion from, say, April to August that is very vague.

     These were medium good essays but far short of having any real auto-biographical substance.  Didn’t really tell us too much of nothin’.

     I will certainly buy Vol II when it comes out but I suspect it will be about 300 pages of Happy Talk about his most productive period possible edging into his ‘Middle Period’ and the Rolling Thunder Revue.  Or perhaps it will mainly concentrate on his ‘protest’ years with forays elsewhere.  If the volume is as superficial as this one however I’ll not only abandon the happy talk but be a little disgruntled.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Exhuming Bob VIII The Walls Of Red Wing

April 10, 2008

 

Exhuming Bob

VIII

The Walls Of Red Wing

 

1.

Bob And The Radio

 

Haunted By Old Memories

     It seems like most of Bob’s biographers are English.  This poses certain problems as they try to write about things that they are not familiar with.  Radio and music are two of them.

     As regards the two it is very important to fix Bob’s age in the years of the fifties.  He graduated high school in the last year of the fifties- 1959- at the age of eighteen.  That means he began high school in 1957.  That also means he attended Junior High from 1953 to 1956.  Born in 1941 that means he was twelve in 1953.

     There was no Rock and Roll in 1953 especially in Hibbing.  It takes a lot of years for modern times to penetrate such outposts.  I am three years older than Bob.  My birthdate is two days after Bob’s so when he had just urned 12 I had just turned 15.  My brother is the same age as Bob.  The first true Rock and Roll song I remember was Bill Haley And The Comets.  Shake, Rattle And Roll was OK but Rock Around The Clock was thin for me.   Haley was pioneering but unsatisfying.

     Things stayed that way pretty much until 1955 when RnR broke loose.  Now, I was probably as much into records as Bob was.  The town in mid-State Michigan that I grew up in was probably not too different from Hibbing although larger.  Like Bob I went to an all White high school.

     The only records I heard before Rock that were interesting were Hillbilly records after 1954 called Country and Western.  They became ashamed of Hillbilly and wanted to dignify the genre.  Country which is apparently thought to have a great deal more dignity than Hillbilly became the first half and Cowboy songs where dignified by Western becoming the second half.   Wolfman Jack speaking of his station in the area around Shreveport said that they played both kinds of music- Country and Western.  There is a rather sharp division there for those who have the eyes to see it.

     Things stayed that way for me pretty much until 1955 when RnR broke loose.  That was probably Elvis doing Heartbreak Hotel which played John to the Jesus of Be-bop-a-lula by Gene Vincent.  Vincent faded quickly but Be-bop-a-lula strikes me as the actual birth of teenage rock and roll.  It was backed by Woman Love which was even as great as the A side.  Actually I think it was intended as the A side but the B side became the hit.

     I didn’t really get into records until about 1955, mainly because there weren’t any records that merited getting into.  I was then a Junior which put Bob in the eighth grade.  If he says he was listening to all those downstream radio stations in eighth grade maybe he was but I tend to doubt it.  That seems a little early but, may be.

     Now the early to mid-fifties was a time of real diversity in pop music.  Not only diverse but the hostility of not only old people but half of my class toward rock and roll was quite pronounced.  Everything was done so suppress ‘moron’ or ‘pimple’ music.  Ministers proclaimed it the devil’s music and a Communist plot.  Might have been something to both charges but if there was it made no difference to me.  And there really wasn’t much of rock and roll until late ’55 early ’56.

     Big Band was still tailing off.  The Dorseys had a big hit with the swing song So Rare as Rock took off.  The male quartet, Four Lads, Crew Cuts, Hi Los were very popular, lots of big hits.  Mitch Miller produced many excellent folk flavored records- The Bowery Grenadiers, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon.  Hank Williams songs were crossing over into pop performed by guys like Guy Mitchell.  Even Marty Robbins, country itself, scored with A White Sport Coat And A Pink Carnation.  Heylin may make fun of ‘Poor People Of Paris’ and songs of that ilk but they were at least equally as popular as RnR.  Jim Lowe’s Green Door.  Couldn’t be better.  After all Pat Boone ran neck and neck with Elvis for a number of years.  No kid at the time would have turned up his nose at such songs. Napoleon XIV  They’re Taking Me Away, Ha Ha.  Leroy Anderson has always been a favorite of mine- Syncopated Clock and others.

     Of course in late ’55 and into ’56 Black ‘pop’ acts like Bill Doggett, Little Richard and Fats Domino -Chuch Berry- began to score.  I recently bought a book by Cousin Brucie the New York Jock of the era; I never even heard of half his so-called classics.  Where I was and where Bob was we never heard any real Black music nor would I , for instance, have listened to it.  I tuned into Detroit Black stations a couple times and tuned out just as quickly.  To put it politely, it was foreign sounding. Chicago was another country.  So whatever Brucie and Alan Freed thought they were doing they were doing it in a major metropolitan area.  It never reached the hinterlands.  There was stuff that never even reached New York City.  I’ve heard it and know why.

     Bob and his family got a TV in 1951.  That was kind of early but then his dad ran an appliance store.  We only got our TV in 1954 so TV made an impact on me but more negligibly than on Bob.  I was surprised that Bob doesn’t ever mention Dick Clark and his American Bandstand which should have been very influential in the life of Junior high kids in ’55 and ’56.  High schoolers in ’57, ’58.

     It should also be pointed out that there was little programming for TV in those years and fewer channels.  For instance in Oakland, California where I was in 1958 there were only two of the three major networks on TV and there was barely enough advertising to support them.

     If more than two channels could be pulled in in Hibbing I would be surprised.  One of them carried Ed Sullivan because Bob saw Johnnie Ray on the Ed Sullivan show in ’53 or ’54.  Heylin is mistaken in calling Bob on that one thinking Dylan could possibly confuse Johnnie Ray with Johnnie Ace.

      Johnny Ray’s act was as outre as they come.  It was so astonishing one could only gawk.  All the other singers at the time tried to be sophisticated, cool, or whatever you want to call it.  Ray was so emotionally unrestrained that he was psychotic.  His song was ‘Cry.’  ‘When you sweetheart sends you a letter of goodbye, you’ll feel better if you let your hair down and cry-y-y.’  And Ray did just that right there on Ed Sullivan’s stage.  He sobbed and moaned, leant over backwards until he doubled up then fell on the stage floor and sobbed from there.  J. Geils went even crazier but by that time it was old hat.  When Ray did it the first time your eyes just popped, you stopped breathing, looked around the room in wonder and pointed silently at the screen.  That’s what Bob remembers.  It was not Johnny Ace.

     So that’s an approximation of the musical background we grew up with.  Bob was picking this up three years before me at the same time.  As a punk kid I can’t gauge his reactions accurately.  If I’d known him at the time I would have thought he was a little moron.  That was what I thought of my brother, a totally out of it kid, it didn’t matter what he liked or didn’t like.

     We were all, those of us record literate, dissatisfied with our local radio stations.  I don’t know if I was really dissatisfied but I knew or heard that there was more out there.  Duluth was about the same size as my town so there would have been several local stations for Bob including Hibbing’s sole radio station.  But, they would have been nothing compared to the down river mega blasters.

     For the benefit of English readers the area between the Rockies and the Appalachians called the Mississippi Valley is an enormous flat area fifteen hundred miles wide by fifteen hundred miles long, give or take a mile.  That means that a radio signal can travel unimpeded if it is non-direction over the whole expanse.  After six o’ clock in the evening in those days a lot of stations shut down so there was less interference for the 24 hour stations.  There was only one non-directional mega blaster tha I know of and that was XERB in Del Rio, Texas.  The studio was in Del Rio but the transmitter was across the Rio Grande in Mexico.  Mexico didn’t regulate it’s stations so their wattage was unbelievable.  At the time Wolfman Jack began his career they were blasting 250,000 non directional watts from across the river from Del Rio.  Since I presume any readers are interested in this sort of thing Wolfman Jack does a fabulous telling of the history of XERB from ‘Goat Glands’ Brinkley to the present in his no less fabulous autobiography.  The Wolfman’s slipped by unnoticed but it is well worth seeking out.

     Strangely to my ear Bob is never mentioned in the same breath as Del Rio.  XERB must have come in clear as a bell straight up river to Hibbing.

     Bob merely talks about Shreveport, the home of the Louisiana Hayride.  This is also the area that the Wolfman got his start.  I believe he talks about Gatemouth and that he patterned his act on his.  I could get Shreveport but I didn’t like it as well.  Besides I was probably off to the side of the signal and it didn’t  come in as well.  I listened mainly to Del Rio, Wheeling, West Virginia, Waterloo, Iowa and WCKY Cincinatti, Ohio.  C for Cincinatti and KY for Kentucky just across that particular river.  Those were all pure country stations especially Wheeling.  If Bob didn’t get them they may have been directional off his band.

     At any rate for all his talk of listening to Black music when people mention items in his record collection they’re usually country.  Webb Pierce was of course tops.  Bob also listened to a fair amount of Hank Snow.  He owned Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers but he doesn’t seem to have had any of Rodgers records themselves.  He apparently listened to those over at Echo’s.  Rodgers requires a certain taste but if you have it he can’t be beat.

     My impression from listening to Bob is that he had a lot stronger country background than Rhythm and Blues.  I can’t believe there was too much R&B up there on the Iron Range.

     And then he got those Leadbelly records for his graduation.  Heylin may think it was spelled Lead Belly but I never heard that anywhere but in Heylin’s biography of Bob.  Bob and I must have heard Leadbelly together for the first time in different places.  Just for background I was in San Francisco in ’59 in the Navy.  There was a record store down on Market St. specializing in Folk, Blues and Jazz.  Some really obscure stuff.  Don’t know how he sold enough to stay in business.  Didn’t actually, when I went back the store was gone. 

     That was where I was introduced to groups like the New Lost City Ramblers and Bob Gibson and people like that and of course Leadbelly.  Leadbelly was already legendary to me perhaps from Seeger and the Weavers.  Huddie Ledbetter, his real name, was the most godawful stuff I ever heard up until that time.  Since then, of course,…but why go into it.  The songs were transcribed from worn out 78s onto a 10″ LP and not only was there nothing but noise but even with sound quality it would have been just hideous moaning.  Bucklen was right; it wasn’t great, it was only OK.  It always amazed me that people who wouldn’t listen to Hillbilly because it was ignorant would go gaga over stuff like Leadbelly.

      So, anyway, that was pretty much Bob’s musical background until he showed up at U. Minnesota.

2.

Bob’s Social Status

     It is necessary to reconstruct to some extent Bob’s social status and his relationship to Echo Helstrom.  Bob has a very deep seated psychotic reaction to his childhood in Hibbing.  It is something that almost seems to grow with time.  He had a real sense of rejection.  This is not an uncommon situation of course but Bob had the uncommon talent to impose his psychosis on the world, a psychosis he has never been able to resolve.

     This pyschosis is a difficult thing to work out.  I have to combine my thinking here with an email correspondent whose initials are RM.  The complete file of correspondence which is more than two hundred pages long can be found on the Lipstick Traces Part IX post on I, Dynamo if you want to read through it.  RM has a real stream of consciousness writing style but she is extremely well read in the area of Dylan and Presley while having very good ideas.

     The work is a matching of known details as reported by the biographers and an analysis of the lyrics of Dylan’s songs.  The biographers seldom agree on the exact details while Heylin and Sounes seem to borrow extensively from Scaduto and Shelton.  The general outline seems to be clear.

     Bob”s early childhood seems to have been relatively happy but then the turning point in his life seems to have been his Bar Mitzvah.  Rather this is so or not by the age of fifteen his sense of rejection and resentment had been firmly established in his mind.

     Much is made of the so-called ‘anti-Semitism’ in Hibbing and its few Jews.  Actually Hibbing had a fairly large Jewish population for its size and they were very influential.  Nadine Epstein and Rebecca Frankel wrote an article for Moment Magazine, August 2005, titled:  Bob Dylan; The Unauthorized Spiritual Biography.  Moment is a Jewish magazine that doesn’t publish online so you’ll have to go to the library to download a copy of the article if you want it. 

     The two authors describe Hibbing thusly:

     Hibbing’s downtown stands as a monument to its once vibrant Jewish community.  “Every single store except for the J.C. Penney’s was owned by Jews,” recalls Neil Scwartz, 53, who grew up in Hibbing and is now a cantor in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  A glance at the 1942 Hibbing City Directory confirms this observation:  Hyman Bloom owned the Boston Department Store, Jacob Jowolsky operated Hibbing Auto Wrecking, Nathan Nides owned Nides Fashion Shop, sold insurance and lent money.  The first Avenue Market was owned by David M. Shapiro, Jack and Israel Sher ran the Insurance Service Agency and Louis Stein was the proprietor of Stein’s Drug Store.  The Edelstein- Stones owned a string of movie palaces, including the local drive-in and the Lybba Theater on Howard Street, named after Bob Dylan’s maternal great-grandmother Lybba Edelstein, who came to the United States from Lituania in 1902.

———-

     By the 1970s, most of these businesses were gone.  “When the mine closed and the miners lost their jobs, people were forced to move, and so the Jews who owned the stores lost their customers,” says Steve Jowolsky, 45.  One of the handful of Jews remaining in Hibbing.  Jowolsky runs his family’s scrap yard.

     So Bob grew up in a town perhaps divided by a religious and social barrier.  The Jews who owned the businesses and the goys who patronized them may have been resentful.  There must have been inevitable conflicts which is probably why Bob didn’t like to be identified as a Jew.

     The critical point is that after his Bar Mitzvah at thirteen for the next four years he attended a Zionist summer camp- Camp Herzl in Webster, Wisconsin.  The Camp was and is a large 120 acre summer camp.  There  it seems that the Jewish youth of Minnesota and, actually from around the country and world, met and became acquainted so that Bob had extensive Jewish connections in Minneapolis-St. Paul the home of U. Minnesota.

     There is some mystery concerning Bob’s Bar Mitzvah.  For non-Jews, a Bar Mitzvah is a coming of age ceremony for men.  If you’ve read your Golden Bough by J.G. Frazer you’ll know that when a boy was young he passed his time with his mother and the girls but when passing into puberty he was taken from the women by the men and underwent a born again ceremony to become a man going to live with the men.  An example Frazer uses is that of passing through a rolled up cowhide symbolizing rebirth as a man.  The story of Achilles in the women’s quarters is a coming of age of ‘Bar Mitzvah’ story.

     In Bob’s case it is said that as there was no Rabbi on the Iron Range a Rabbi was brought in from Brooklyn specifically to give Bob a crash course in Judaism for his Bar Mitzvah.  The mission having been accomplished the Rabbi was put back on the bus for Brooklyn.

     This is a strange story.  Shelton tells us that there was a synogogue and Rabbi in Hibbing while Duluth with a fairly large Jewish population had four.  Certainly the several dozen Jewish families in Hibbing educated their sons for Bar Mitzvahs without resorting to each individual parent bringing in a Rabbi from Brooklyn, New York.

     If the Rabbi was actually brought in then something else was going on.

     Now, Bob’s Jewish name is Sabtai, that is he was named after Sabatai Zevi the last great Jewish Messiah.  This says something about Abraham Zimmerman’s state of mind.  A sect was founded on Zevi’s death in the seventeenth century that flourished as a signficant portion of Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continues to this day.  Freud was of this particular Jewish persuasion.  So must have been Abe Zimmerman.

     If the story is true then the reason for rejecting the local and Duluth Rabbis must have been the the Sabbatian or Frankist  Rabbi was essential to Abe Zimmerman’s conception of the religious education he wanted his boy Bob to have.  The sect was centered in Brooklyn.  Thus Bob’s adolescent and pubertal mind was clouded at thirteen with a concentrated infusion of Sabbatian-Frankist, possibly Lubavitcher, lore.  Bob was now well on his way to his fabled ‘mixed up confusion.’  He had to reconcile extreme fundamentalist Jewish religion with a Country and Western goi outlook.  This is what makes the guy really interesting.

     Then on top of his Frankist crap he began to spend several weeks at the Zionist Camp Herzl.  I interpret several to mean four to six, so that would be a large chunk of the summer separating him from the social life of Hibbing.  Obviously his father wanted to immerse him in some fairly intense Jewish nationalism and religion.  Theodore Herzl is of course the originator of Zionism which is a nationalist Jewish movement.

     Bob attended four consecutive summers beginning in 1953.  No person is independent of their environment.  The Jews had become very distraught as a people after WWII.  For some reason they projected Nazism on Americans and were very fearful that Americans were going to create an Auschwitz for them here.  When McCarran built camps in 1953 for a possible Communist roundup the Jews felt sure it was for them.  By coincidence Bob began attending Camp Herzl in that year.

     As an example of the Jewish paranoia William Paley who owned CBS was so fearful that an attempt at extermination was near that he devised a plan to ‘save’ as many Jewish performers as he could.  Thus he incorporated a number of Jewish musical and comedy stars as businesses and sold shares in  their careers to prominent gois.   TV emerged shortly after the war thus for ten years or so there was a long parade of Jewish performers down to Red Buttons who were given TV shows to provide a return for their investors thus ‘securing the lives’ of the performers.  Jack Benny was a difficult act for them to program but once they did he amply rewarded his investors who had bought into him.  I believe Benny was the last of the packages.  So for all those years the performers were merely on salary when they could have been raking in the coin less the paranoia.

     So that is the Jewish environment Bob was living in   I am not Jewish but my wife is.  Growing up in the fifties she was indoctrinated in the notion that everyone hated the Jews and were out to kill them.  This affected her psychology profoundly but her reasoning was why woud anyone want to be something everyone hated when you didn’t have to be.  She consequently rejected religion entirely, so there was no religious incompatibility between us as I from my side also rejected religion.

     So Bob began his several week visit to Camp every summer in this environment.  They don’t show extermination camp movies on TV like they used to but you may be sure Bob was given a steady diet of them every summer.  Boy, they used to piss me off.

     Before his Bar Mitzvah it is said that he was a friendly outgoing guy but became withdrawn and solitary in his high school years.  I have little doubt that his religious training was responsible for it.  If his father considered himself somewhat of a Jewish scholar as represented by this Hasidic or whatever Rabbi from Brooklyn then this added to Bob’s feeling of separation from what is described as almost wholly a Catholic environment.  I would have felt stranger than he did.

     Thus, while Red Wing may have precipitated a crisis in his psychology it was merely the icing on the cake, the straw that broke the camel’s back, etc.

3.

Bob And Echo

          Bob entered high school in 1956 at tge age if 15,  At 15 he would have been fully aware.  Little Richard would have burst on him in ’55 when he was either 14 or 15.  Apparently Little Richard’s seeming lack of inhibitions made a tremendous impression on the already inhibited Bob.  Richard hit at about the same time as the movie Rebel Without A Cause.  The movie and its star, James Dean also blew Bob away.  He saw it several times.  He saw it at 14 I saw it at 17.  I loved the movie but I was unimpressed by Dean.  I saw the movie with a bunch of friends and while I was in awe they appeared to be in shock.  This was serious stuff.  Of course I fell in love with Natalie Wood while I was repelled by the bug-eyed Sal Mineo.

      What spoiled the movie for me was Dean himself.  It didn’t take me long to realize that he was an adult playing a ‘juvenile’ role.  In his most famous scene, rolling the milk bottle over his forehead and actually drinking out of the bottle offended my so much I can’t explain it.  He looked old there, at least 28, and he actually looked ancient in the scene in the police station.  I may be the only one that ever thought that though.

     Now, Heylin misunderstands the chicken or emasculation contest at the end of the  movie.  To set the scene properly America was just emerging from the Depression.  Parents were still virtually paralyzed by their memories of the pre-war years.  Teenagers were just beginning to be able to afford cars.  The gut was full on Saturday nights but most were driving the family car.

     For those that had cars the exhilaration was fantastic.  That was the golden age of customization.  Cars were lowered in the back, dual exhausts were put in, cars were souped up so that for a few years kids had cars that could outrun the stock models of the cops.  Wow!  Hey!   John Dillinger never had it so good. Pretty Boy Floyd would have thought he was in heaven.

     So, you’ve got the hot wheels and all that power so what do you do with it?  You invent the game of Chicken.  That Hollywood thing on the Pacific Palisades if it ever happened in real life was only possible because of the location on the Palisades. 

     The idea everywhere else was for two cars, two drivers to face each other from maybe three or four blocks away then floor the beast, accelerating all the way head on at each other.  The first guy to swerve lost and was the chicken.  Thoroughly emasculated.  Some guys chickened out early some didn’t.  I watched a few of these and thought I’d never seen such craziness.  I hadn’t up to that time, but since…

     So the idea in Rebel on the Palisades was not to jump out as close to the edge as possible which was so crazy some movie guy would have had to have invented it but to drive as close to the last stopping point as possible before hitting the brakes.  I mean, this was so stupid.  So the winner went well behond the stopping point and his car went over the cliff with him in it.   Who’s going to get into a chicken contest and try to jump out of a car going sixty or seventy miles an hour?  Kids are crazy but I hope there’s a limit.  Although, I don’t know, I once played Russian Roulette with a loaded gun.  Three rounds.  I don’t like to admit it but you can’t change history.

     So at this point Bob and Abe came into direct conflict.  If Abe couldn’t understand Dean you can imagine Little Richard’s effect on him.  So here his wonderful Hasidic Jewish kid is entering high school and flushing himself down the goi toilet.  The conflict must have been intense.  Apropos of parental conflict that was so intense it led to his disowning him.  I read somewhere that his mother Beattie was the model for Visions Of Johanna.  Bob’s own words but I can’t remember where I read it.

     So Bob began what appears to be the three most action packed years of his life.  Leaving the tenth grade shortly shortly after his sixteenth birthday Bob pestered his dad for a motorcycle now that he could get a license.  Not a scooter either but a big machine. Harley. No Hondas.  So at the incredibly young age of sixteen Bob got himself a big bike.  Bob’s dad must have been a very indulgent father.  You can ride a bike up on the Iron Range for only a few months a year.  Bob went to summer camp between 10th and 11th too so he really didn’t have much time to ride it.  But somewhere in there he met Echo Star Helstrom.

     Echo impresses me as a tough chickie from the other side of the tracks.  she apparently impressed others that way too.

     Scaduto quotes one Linda Fuller:

     Bob was considered one of the tough motorcycle crowd.  Always with the black leather jacket, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, rather hoody.  And Echo with her bleached hair and vacant look; That’s mostly how I first noticed him, running around with this freaky girl hanging on the back of his motorcycle, with her frizzy white hair flying and her false eyelashes.  It was shocking to me.  I tried not to be narrow minded, but I thought that crowd was a bunch of creeps.  We used to laugh at the sight of them on the motorcycles.  They used to zip through town and it was funny to see them.

     The thing is motorcycles were taboo because motorcycle guys were automatically bad.  I had to stay away from them.  They were terrifying, Bob with his big boots and his tight pants.

     Then Echo chips in:

     (Bob) didn’t fit in with the bums.  I knew the real bums.  All my friends were the wrong-side-of-the-tracks people, the dropouts, and Bob didn’t fit in with them.  He didn’t fit in with anyone in town, really.

     So here we have the portrait of a Nowhere Man posing as a Bad Motorcycle, acting a screamer on stage but quiet and withdrawn in the classroom and school.  Almost a manic depressive.

     Without meaning to cast aspersions on Echo she was what we would have called ‘cheap’.  She knew the real bums, they were all her friends.  The Fugs could have written their song ‘Slum Goddess From The Lower East Side’ about her.

     When she first met Bob she said she thought he was a ‘goody goody.’  Must not have been on his bad motorcycle with those boots and tight fitting pants;  one of those directly opposite of ‘cheap’ or hoody, not one of the bums.  Echo would have seen Bob as ‘upper class’.  Echo was probably going to put Bob on.  That he went for her must have seemed too good to be true.

     Probably Bob moved in on her and meant to pick her up for a cheap thrill or whatever then found to his delight that the girl knew every rock, R&B and Country song in the catalog.  Bob wanted to impress her with his own musical chops so on their ‘first date’ they break and enter the Moose Lodge so Bob can cavort on the piano.  Didn’t even have to think about it, he flipped out a knife forced the lock and they were inside.  Easy as pie.  Must have done it a time or two before somewhere, don’t you think?  The story comes out in different variations in the biographers.  Either Bob or Echo sprung the lock with either his knife or her knife or she with her own knife.  In any case they both appear to be experienced housebreakers.  This is important.

     And now we have a minor problem.  Bob told Echo that he didn’t have an allowance so she ponied up for the hotdogs and cokes.  Yet at the same time Abe bought Bob a motorcycle that would have been expensive while requiring gas and lots of maintenance.  Bikes never run right.  Abe seemed to to give Bob enough money for that.  So through October or whenever the snow began flying Bob is driving Echo around with her frizzy bleached blonde hair blowing in the wind.

     None of the biographers handle the details of these years carefully so I am reconstructing and attempting to arrange the chronology to fit with the details in the time frame.

     Now, Abe and Beattie are watching the apple of their eye get wormy right before their eyes.  Neither Beattie nor Abe had any use for Echo.  Being respectable middle class people they were horrified that Bob was running around with such a cheap trick.  Abe was horrified to see his son ‘defiling’ himself.  At some point in Bob’s young life Abe told him that it was possible for a son to become so defiled his parents would reject him but possibly God would lead him back to the path of righteousness.  These are very strong words and Bob must have strayed from the path for Dad to have expressed himself to strongly.  But I don’t think he mentioned this fact to Bob just yet,  although Bob’s behavior would get worse.  So bad that it is not impossible that his dad may have essentially had him committed for psychiatric attention.

     According to Heylin Beattie did let out that Bob was ‘away’ for a couple months in the summer of ’59 that was a cause of intense embarrassment to her.  One report says that he was sent to a reform school or clinic in Philadelphia while another says that he spent the summer in the house of detention of Red Wing Reform school down on Highway ’61.  Highway ’61 revisited, you see.  As there are no references to psychiatric treatment in the songs I am going to pursue the Red Wing side of it of which there are many references and a clear paper trail in the songs. 

     As Bob entered the eleventh grade he and Echo were evidently quite serious or at least Echo thought they were.  At some point they committed themselves to going steady and Bob gave her his ID bracelet to wear.  ID bracelets were popular at this time.  I wore one for several months in my senior year, maybe even to the end, I can’t remember.  They were a little silver plaque with your name on it.  Kind of like a wrist watch without the watch.

     For what it was worth they talked of marriage even choosing babynames.  Given Bob’s later fecundity they should have chosen several.

     In the eleventh grade Bob also launched himself as a band with a somewhat mixed reception.  Well, it wasn’t really mixed, it was more a form of rejection.  He not only got booed for the first time, but laughed at.

     The question here is how did it affect his reputation in Hibbing.  If your fellow students laugh and boo your act that has to result in a certain amount of contempt in the halls.  People have to make snide comments.  So Bob really had to develop a thick skin.  This would have set him in good stead for his world tour a few years later.

     I smiled when in his autobiography he tells of how Ricky Nelson was booed when he tried to change his style.  He wryly commented that he and Ricky had something in common.  Hurt like hell though.

     And then comments must have been made to his parents.  Already sensitive about his relationship with Echo Abe and Beattie must have begun consulting friends for psychiatric recommendations.  People don’t understand; they didn’t understand me either but like Bob I ignored them and kep on bopping along.  Of course Abe and Beattie belonged to the sub-societal Jewish set also.  So they must have taken redoubled abuse from that quarter.  Synagogue must have been unbearable in those trying days.

     Nevertheless Bob was calling unfavorable attention to himself.  Not only was he ‘getting’ it from Echo through the eleventh grade but we are led to believe that he was succeeding quite well with numerous maidens with shelf like breasts.

      Always indiscreet Bob couldn’t conceal his activities from Echo.  Echo claims that she was faithful to Bob over this year long romance.  I can’t quite believe that of a girl who knew all the bad boys in town but she may actually have given Bob her heart.  Faithful or not this is a very serious situation for when you have given your heart to someone they have it with them and it’s not always that easy to get it back.

     That Echo was hurt to the quick is evident by the manner in which she broke off the engagement.  She chose to do it publicly by handing Bob back his bracelet in the halls at school.  Makes a boy shudder just to think of the ignominy.

     May have hurt Bob as much as anything in his life.

     However, and this is serious, Echo felt like a woman scorned.  Scorning  women is serious business which I know from experience.  I wouldn’t recommend it to boy or man, young or old.  They don’t leave the matter where you think they should and Echo was not going to be satisfied with merely humiliating Bob in school.  She didn’t get adequate satisfaction from that.

     Now we’re at the end of the eleventh grade.  According to the biographers Bob had been after Abe to get him a car.  Abe couldn’t resist his son.  Really, now, Bob had an affluent boyhood in addition to getting laid enough to be the envy of the school.  This guy did a lot better than I ever did on both counts.  If Bob expects sympathy from me for having a tough childhood he can forget it.

     Between eleventh and twelfth grades Bob had a car that he used to drive down to Minneapolis several times that summer.  In one account it was a ’50 Ford with the metal showing through the paint and according to Sounes it was a pink convertible.  No ’50 Ford was ever pink while anyone living in the Minnesota winters would have to be crazy to buy a convertible but I merely report what the biogrpahers say. 

     Cars are even more expensive than motorcycles.  Even if mileage was low and gas was cheap dollars were less plentiful back then.  Since Bob hasn’t done a lick of work yet Abe must have had an open handed attitude.  Wait a minute, it is said that Abe sent Bob out to repossess TVs  which must have been about this time.  Tough job.

     In fact Bob was costing Abe a lot of money.  The report is that Bob was riding down the street on his motorcycle and a kid ran into the street and bounced off the bike.  Must have given Bob the idea for his ‘accident’ a few years later.  Did he really have that famous fall from his bike?  I can’t say but I’m waiting for further developements before I make up my mind.

     If Bob was dangerous on a bike that was nothing compared to Bob in an automobile.   There are reports of more than one accident but the worst one cost Abe four thousand dollars to make good.  That one tested Abe’s notions of defilement.

     Four thousand dollars in 1958 was a chunk of money.  You could still buy paper back books for from twenty-five to fifty cents each that now cost 7.95 and 8.95.  Calculate four thousand dollars to that ratio.  In the Navy in the same year I was making two thousand dollars a year.  I was twenty-five years old before I topped four thousand dollars a year.

     So Abe forked over a sum.  Besides which Bob would definitely have been cited perhaps arraigned in court.  He may have been facing a jail sentence if Abe hadn’t bought the plaintiffs off.  Bob was becoming known at least as a wild man in the rather small Hibbing legal environment.

4.

The Chimes Of Freedom

But it’s hard lookin’ in and you can’t see out.

Dylan- Cold Irons Bound

     During the summer of ’58 when Bob was spending so much time down in Minneapolis doing god only knows what Echo was stewing home alone.  That was equivalent to being ignored and when you’re going steady.  Naturally a girl wants vengeance but the question was how to get it.  Echo would have known a lot more about Bob’s reputation in Hibbing than he did.  Bob may have been oblivious to the outside world paying attention only to what was going on inside his head.  The appearances are that he was probably thought of as a troublesome lad.  Proabably a lot of people would have liked to have seen him take a fall, go to jail.  I think it probable that Echo arranged that fall.

     It probably didn’t take much to get Bob to go around with her a bit in the Fall of ’58 so he would have thought that everything was alright and he’d gotten away with things.  The evidence from his songs that we’ll get to here in a bit is that Echo lured him into breaking and entering.  My surmise is that she had arranged for them to be caught and caught they were.

     As we know from the Moose Lodge Bob was an adept at breaking and entering.  One can’t say that he was suspected of other such breakins for sure but his reputation was such that he had to be taught a lesson.

     From appearances I would say that he was caught, tried and sentenced sometime in the late Winter of ’58-’59.  The question is when did he serve his sentence?

     My original thought as expressed here was in the Summer of ’59 but as he would then have been an adult of eighteen he would have been too old for Red Wing where the top age was seventeen.

     In Chronicles I Bob says he left home in early Spring of ’59.  Based on that slender hint I’m going to suggest that he was in Red Wing from Possibly March 25th 1959, released on his birthday of May 24th or the day before.

     Thus he was back in Hibbing in time for graduation.  His reluctance to attend the large party his parents got up may have been from shame just as the party may have been to welcome him back to acceptance.  His reluctance was overcome and he is said to have had a great time at the party.  So, awaiting further information I am inclined toward the last two months of his senior year.

     As we have seen Abram Zimmerman and his fellow Jews were powerful in the city so that it is possible that In order to let Bob  finish school his father may have pleaded with the Judge and he was allowed to serve perhaps a two month sentence in July and August of ’59 just before he began U. Minnesota.  His senior year was when he fell off the honor roll according to his mother.  It was probably at this time that a mortified Abe advised him that he could defile himself to the point that his parents would renounce him.

     After having extricated Bob from all previous difficulties so that Bob may have thought he was Bobby Teflon Bob may have held his father responsible for his having to do time at Red Wing.

     At any rate Bob graduated in June of ’59 collected his Leadbelly records, spent a couple two or three weeks as a busboy in Fargo then returned to do his time out on Highway 61.  This esay will stop at his possible release from Red Wing.  And now for the evidence from Bob’s songs to give credibility to the above scenario.

     The actual breaking and entering for which he was arrested and sentenced is recorded in his song The Chimes Of Freedom.  Bob had a way of clothing things in words that made common place events ethereal.  Chimes of Freedom is one of those.  The song seems to record the breakin in a stream of high flown metaphors.

     The first line:  Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll, means literally well after sundown that in Winter in Hibbing would probably be 3:30 in the afternoon and between midnight something happened late during that interval.  That’s pretty clear just confused by language.

     What happened was:  We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing.  In other words the ‘we’, who I asume to be Bob and Echo slipped the knife into the lock and sprung the door.  The excitement of the moment made each noise sound like thunder crashing.  In other words Bob is describing his psychological state of mind.

     Then he has the nonsense phrase ‘As majestic bells of bolts…’ That is literally meaningless but gives a sense of his heightened sensibilities.  ‘…struck shadows in the sounds seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing.’  more emotional tension and atmosphere.  This was a key moment in Bob’s life and he’s making the most of it.  Bob wrote this in ’63 or ’64 some four or five years after the incident.

     And then he goes into a flight of self-pity comparing himself and Echo to loners against the world.

Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight

Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight

An’ for each and every underdog soldier in the night

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

      There you go.  That sounds heavy and coming from the speakers backed by the emotional wailing voice, howling harmonica and flailing driving guitar rhythm it sounded then and sounds now like there’s meaning there that isn’t transparent but in fact there isn’t any deep meaning.  Bob has just generalized his break in emotions.  One hears the tone of voice and listen to the music and gropes for what isn’t there.

     Bob goes on like this through six long verses as he milks the tale for all it’s worth.  Actually the first four lines of the second verse if you know the story are quite well done:

In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched

With faces hidden while the walls were tightening

As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain

Dissolved into the bells of the lightning

     In so many words he’s saying that the authorities are closing in and that he and Echo are about to be caught as the ‘walls close in.’  If he and she were attempting a reconciliation that ended as the wedding bells dissolved as the authorities arrested them- in other words, the lightning.

     And then four more lines of self-pity:

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake

Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned and forsaked

Tolling for the outcast burnin’ constantly at the stake

     There’s a neat little description of Bob’s situation in Hibbing as he sees it.  Jim Stark the Rebel Without a Cause.  Bob obviously considered himself a rake.  Luckless is obvious and writing four years later he realized that he was abandoned and forsaken by Echo.  He ignores his own actions that led her to forsake him.  And then the eternal outcast burning at the stake.

     Another couple verses follow that go on in the same vein; then Bob comes to the climax of his story.

Starry eyed and laughing as I recall when we were caught

     Here Star reflects the Echo of the first verse and indentifies his companion as Echo Star Helstrom so that she would know he was talking to and about her.  This is for world wide consumption.  This is unimagined success, laying your complaint before the whole world.  But, Bob doesn’t explain that he and Echo were caught in the act of breaking and entering.

     So now he and Echo are apprehended by the authorities; caught in the act:

Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended

     So they became so involved in their crime- starry eyed and laughing- that they lost track of time.  Remember Charlie Starkweather and Carol had just committed their crimes a little to the West so the authorities would have been on edge.

As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look

Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended.

     Yes, now like Jim Stark of Rebel Without A Cause Bob is down at the jailhouse coming down.  He’s been busted and busted good.  His dad can’t get him off and the Judge gives him his time in Red Wing.  I imagine that his father may have negotiated terms that let Bob down as easy as possible such as allowing him to graduate and do his time in the summer or possibly an easier task of negotiating with the school to allow Bob to graduate.

     Echo apparently skated out of there but Bob for the rest of the year was a convicted criminal as the whole school sneered at him.  I don’t think there was any question that Bob was set up.  Echo was the agent but there must have been others involved or else they probably wouldn’t have been caught, unless Bob turned all the lights on.

     The crime created what seems to be an undissolvable bond between Bob and Echo.  R.M. has followed Bob’s career whereas I signed off at John Wesley Harding so she pointed out the 1997 song from Time Out Of Mind called Cold Irons Bound.  This song appears to be an ode to Echo and Hibbing.

     I would guiess that for the remainder of the school year she snubbed Bob refusing to acknowledge his existence.  Bob expreses this snubbing as a metaphor in Cold Irons Bound:

I went to church on Sunday and she passed me by

My love for her is taking such a long time to die

     And then Bob records his feelings fresh as green grass nearly forty years after as the cops drove him down Highway 61 to Red Wing.

In waist deep, waist deep in the mist

It’s almost like, almost like I don’t exist

I’m twenty miles out of town, in cold irons bound.

     Yep.  Echo got him good.  You can be sure she was standing out of sight when they put Bob into the car for the long drive down to Red Wing and relishing every moment of it.  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  She might not be finished yet.  They wait and wait and plot and plot.

     My own corroborating experience that I have recorded in my novelette,  The Angeline Constellation on reprindle.wordpress.com, check it out if you’re interested, it’s a good story, 100 pages, confirms Bob’s.  I got off light at the time although I’m not anxious to give Ange a second chance. 

     Briefly the romance took place when I was in the tenth grade.  Ange other than making my life miserable in the background could find no opportunity, or if she did I’m unaware of it.  There is one incident in my life sort of like Bob’s that I’m not sure of but if she planned it it misfired and didn’t come off satisfactorily.

     But I went into the Navy in ’56 returning on leave in  the summer of ’57.  Ange was, if not waiting for me, quick on her feet.  I ran into a girl I had known right after Ange who Ange turned against me.  I saw her on leave and asked her out being haughtily, coldly and, dare I say, insultingly refused.  Well OK, no problem.  Then she must have mentioned that she saw me to Ange.  Ange came up with a plan immediately.  This girl then asked me to go to a party.  Well, after having been told what I could do with myself one would have thought I would have said:  No thanks.  I’ll never be that dumb again.

     I went to this party.  She insisted I wear my Navy uniform.  I don’t get that.  I was not allowed to escort her to the party but was to meet her there.  Yeah, well, I’m not so easy now.  Of course, I’m not so young either.

     At the party I was plied with booze.  I didn’t drink at the time.  I had never even had a bottle of beer.  So I got schnockered pretty quick.  I mean stumbling drunk.  The hostess kept pouring.  So Ange went to this woman who hosted the party and a number of her girl friends, I don’t remember any guys at this party, to set me up and be done.  Ange stayed out of sight until I was pretty drunk then she came out of the back of the house to gloat at my back.  She doesn’t know to this day that I knew she was there and I saw her.  But I did.

     Now drunk and sick it was time to leave.  I asked for a ride but was refused.  I asked for my hat but was again refused.  So there I was stumbling down the street a sailor without a hat, in undress.  You can be sure Ange was following my progress and laughing bitterly.  Bad enough but the next day it gave my stepfather, a drunk, with who I was on bad terms a chance to scorn me.  So four years later a scorned woman wreaked some revenge.  And that is the way it works.  Watch your step.

     You can bet that Echo stood gloating out of sight as they put Bob in the car and drove down the side of the gaping pit toward Highway 61 and Red Wing.  I believe that’s how Bob’s little drama may have worked out.

5.

He’s In The Jailhouse Now

 

I used to know a guy named Rambiin’ Bob,

Who used to steal, gamble and rob,

He thought he was the smartest guy around.

Well, I found out last Monday,

They arrested Bob last Sunday,

They got him down (on Highway 61) in the can.

He’s in the jailhouse now.

Immie Rodgers

     The question is was Robert A. Zimmerman ever at Red Wing Reformatory for Boys?  On the one hand we have the evidence of his songs and his actual statement to the NYC journalist Al Aronowitz that he did time at the prison.  On the other hand we have the claim of the Minnesota Department of Corrections that Bob Dylan never served time at Red Wing.  Of course Bob Dylan didn’t.  There was no Bob Dylan in existence in the Spring or Summer of ’59.

     The DOC however declines to say whether a Robert Allen Zimmerman did time.  And then there is the competing claim that Bob was under psychiatric care in Phildelphia at the same time.  Still no records.  There seem to be no references to this latter option in the songs so I do not consider it a viable option.

     Certainly the key piece of evidence is the song The Walls Of Redwing.  The song was first copyright in 1963 so it was possibly written in 1962 which would be roughly three years after the event.  Unlike the very heavy metaphors Bob uses elsewhere Walls was written in plain English as though the terror was still on him.

     There are those that say the song didn’t require direct experience to write, that it is just generalized stuff that could be filched from movies or whatever but both R.M. and I agree that the allusions are too personal, reflect actual experiences, than to be just a story.

     I’ll reproduce the lines here.  These are taken from the Bob Dylan website:

The Walls Of Red Wing

 

Oh, the age of the inmates

I remember quite freely,

No younger than twelve,

No older than seventeen.

Thrown in like bandits

And cast off like criminals

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

From the dirty old mess hall

You march to the brick wall,

Too weary to talk

And too tired to sing.

Oh, it’s all afternoon

You remember your hometown

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

Oh, the gates are cast iron

And the walls are barbed wire.

Stay far from the fence

With the ‘lectrified sting.

And It’s keep down your head

And stay in your number,

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red wing.

 

Oh, it’s fare thee well

To deep hollow dungeon,

Farewell to the boardwalk

That takes you to the screen.

And farewell to the minutes

They threaten you with it,

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

It’s many a guard

That stands around smilin’,

Holding his club

Like he was a king.

Hopin’ to get you

Behind a wood pilin’

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

The night aimed shadows

Through the cross bar windows,

And the wind punched hard

To make the wall siding sing.

It’s many a night I pretended to be sleepin’,

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

As the rain rattled heavy

On the bunk house shingles

And the sounds in the night,

They made my ears ring.

‘Til the keys of the guards

Clicked the tune of the morning,

Inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

 

Oh, some of us’ll end up

In St. Cloud Prison

And some of us’ll wind up

To be lawyers and things,

And some of us’ll stand up

To meet you on your crossroads,

From inside the walls,

The walls of Red Wing.

     Bob at eighteen would have been the oldest boy there so he could watch them more or less as an outsider.  Bob is obviously the one who is going to meet us at our crossroads where he intends to take his pound of flesh.  His whole career is one of wreaking vengeance on somebody.

     I’ve never been in prison but I have been in the Orphange and the Navy.  While not jails or prisons they are similar enough so that I have some understanding of the experience.  Altogether I spent five years out of my first twenty behind fences under the control of men and women but little different than prison guards.

     I know many of the things Bob is talking about and my understanding of the lyrics is that Bob was there and knows what he is talking about from first hand experience.

     I would never lie to a journalist about being in prison whose very job is to broadcast tidbits about celebrities.  Or maybe Bob would claim that it was only ‘hophead’ talk and not to be taken seriously.  If it were me I wouldn’t even let it be known I knew what hophead talk was.  Bob told so many tall stories he could compulsively slip in an occasional truth without expecting to be believed.  The difference is that none of the rest of the tall stories found their way into his songs.

     The song was so painful and personal that he never released it at the time.  It was eventually released in the Bootleg Series.  R.M. who has followed the playlists says that Bob only sang it in public one time.  That one time was in New York when had flown his parents out to a Carnegie Hall concert. However Mike Bloomfield who saw Bob in Chicago says he was singing the song that time.

     Remember that, if Abe had disowned him, Bob had disowned his parents.  He claimed in New York to be an orphan maintaining that dodge.  People were very surprised to learn that his parents were still alive.  So, with his parents in the audience, singing, one imagines directly to them, he recited the Walls Of Red Wing.  I don’t understand exactly why he held them responsible.  There are some things even a father in a small town can’t fix.  In looking over his career I don’t think Bob even knew the meaning of restraint.  He seems to have believed that whatever he wanted or wanted to do should never be denied.

     The effect of his being restrained and constrained in Red Wing was devastating to Bob’s mind.  And Red Wing was forever linked in Bob’s mind with Echo.  R.M. points to You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere written at Woodstock, copyrighted in 1967, as an example.  Two verses, the first and the second, are relatively clear:

Clouds so swift

Rain won’t lift

Gate won’t close

Railing’s froze

Get your mind off wintertime

You ain’t going nowhere.

Whooee ride me high

Tomorrow’s the day

My bride’s gonna come

Oh,oh are we gonna fly

Down in the easy chair.

     Incarcerated in July and August Bob’s thoughts turn to wintertime when he will be free, in the meantime R.M. thinks he believes that Echo is going to relieve the tedium of his imprisonment by visiting him- his bride, but she’s punishing Bob like Bob punished her.  He put her in a psychological prison and now as a prelude to a psychological prison she has him in a real prison and she is going to let him rot there.

     The feeling was translated into words in the song Steel Bars copyrighted in 1991:

In the night I hear you speak

Turn around, you’re in my sleep

Feel your hands inside your soul

You’re holding on and won’t let go.

 

I’ve tried running but there’s no escape

Can’t bend them, and (I know) I just can’t

break these…

 

Steel bars wrapped all around me

I’ve been your prisoner since the day you found me

I’m bound forever, till the end of time

Steel bars wrapped around this heart of mine.

     So Bob is learning the hard way inside the walls, the walls of Red Wing.

I don’t care

How many letters they sent

Morning came and morning went

Pick up your money

And pack your tent

You ain’t goin’ nowhere.

     So apparently Mom and Dad sent letters but nobody would pay the visit Bob so desperately needed.

     As R.M. points out visiting hours were in the morning so that the morning came and the morning went and Bob’s hope of a friendly face went on being frustrated.  As for those letters they could have stuffed them.

     And then in 1968 in a show of bravado Bob wrote a demand letter to Echo, possibly, in the song Nothing Was Delivered:

Nothing was delivered

And I tell this truth to you,

Not out of spite or in anger

But simply because it’s true.

Now, I hope you won’t object to this,

Giving back all of what you owe,

The fewer words you have to waste on this,

The sooner you can go.

     Perhaps Bob thought he could bully his way to freedom.  but he couldn’t.  Echo didn’t have to listen.

     And so Bob left Red Wing at the end of his term, the die was cast for the rest of his life.  He ‘tried running but there was no escape.’  ‘He thought he was alone but the past was just behind.’

      Echo had trapped him behind the walls of a psychological Red Wing.

Finis.

 

I Thought I Was Alone But The Past Was Just Behind

I Thought I Was Alone But The Past Was Just Behind

 

Posted in America, Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Greil Marcus, Jews, Lipstick Traces, R.E. Prindle, Sabbatai Zevi, Semites, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 41 Comments »

A Review: Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution

March 29, 2008

A Review

Reconstruction:

America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877

by

Eric Foner

Review by R.E. Prindle

Eric Foner

     Foner’s Reconstruction was originally published in 1988 some twenty years ago.  Some water has passed under the bridge since then.  For instance genetic advances have been startling.  The role of biology in the various species of Homo Sapiens is becoming more apparent and clear.  The question is now not one of prejudice but of science, of knowing.  One imagines that Mr. Foner would have or should have incorporated these discoveries into his study.  One might say that the study of history has been profoundly affected by the new findings.

     Mr. Foner takes the old sentimental view of the race, or species rather, problem in the United States.  While we may all agree that slavery is an evil that should never be tolerated in a society or be begun by one, slavery has nevertheless been ever present , even endemic, in human society for many thousands of years down to the present.  Slavery has been practiced in every society on every continent, there are no innocents.  There were slave cities in China at the beginning of WWII and there are those who say that current labor conditions in China differ not at all from slavery.  Indeed there are tens of thousands of women and children serving as sex slaves on every continent at the present.  Nothing is done about sex slavery, in fact, there is little or no publicity or protest.

      Granting then that slavery is and has been endemic to human society, there is no reason to consider White slave owners in the South of the United States as worse than any other slave owners whether we are revolted at the concept of slavery or not.  And, I might point out, not everyone is.  As slave owners in Africa, for instance, had the right of life, death and mutilation over their slaves and the US slave owners didn’t it is clear that US slave owning was much more humane than the African.  That’s not an awful lot to be proud of but, as I say, the issue of slavery in the world and in the US is not a dead letter yet.  The future looks more bleak than promising.

     While not unique, slavery in the US was characterized by one race or species being paramount and the other subordinate.  A peculuarity of US slavery is that the slaves were classed as a sort of farm animal.  I think it clear that we are dealing with two different Homo Sapiens species one of which is more highly evolved than the other.  As the African was first evolved as all agree it would follow that the first evolved, the African, would be a predecessor to following more highly evolved human species.  Thus the problem shifts from merely freeing equals to what to do with the less highly evolved species.  That has been the central problem of Reconstruction past and present.

     The reading of the human genome has proven the ongoing evolution of the human species to be true.  The scientific fact or reality runs counter to human inner wishful thinking, at least White inner wishful thinking, that desires all Men to be equal.  The majority prefer wishful thinking to reality.  Reality must assert itself over wishful thinking however.

     The myth that powerful White people went to Africa and ripped these poor defenseless Africans forcefully from their soil is also false.  The slaves were legally sold by their chiefs to the Whites.  It is erroneous to think that Whites were ever the uncontested lords of Africa.  Until the introduction of modern firearms human physical realities were paramount and the Africans were physical equals.  Europeans by no means have ever had a physical advantage.  With the development of modern arms, military tactics and discipline Europeans developed a clear advantage over the mentally limited Africans.  Still Europeans never had the will or were able to dictate to Africans in the manner that slave owners could dictate to their slaves.

     The ability to command only came into existence briefly in the last quarter or so of the nineteenth century.  African resistance movements began after this brief window opened and closed.

     Whatever conception the average person has of Euroean-African relationships is certainly erroneous.

     Now, the Africans who came out of the jungles to be taken to the United States were primitive beyond belief while all concepts of civilization as practiced in the United States were foreign to them  The transition was no different than entering a parallel universe.

     Indeed as Foner points out when the former slaves were encouraged to return to Africa, the return to the jungles after having been elevated by White civilization was no longer possible for them.  The nation of Liberia created for them was not more enticing than discrimination against them in the United States.  Those who could quickly returned from Liberia to conditions in the Reconstruction South.

     The Southern planter who bought these slaves may perhaps be forgiven because he believed that he was dealing with a superior form of farm animal but a lower form of humanity- something between a cross of ape and human.  I do not say this is true only that it was believed.  As near as I can tell this was a common belief.  Indeed, I know of no early African explorer who believed differently.

     One has only to compare National Geographic photos of Africans from the twenties with current pictures to see that contact with Western civilization has worked a mremarkable transformation in the appearance of the of the African.

     While African slavery began toward the end of the seventeenth century in the US importation was the heaviest from 1790 to 1860.  A large number of Africans entered the country as slaves, albeit illegally, between 1810 and 1860.  Thus at the beginning of the Civil War a fairly large number of Africans had had little time to become acclimated to civilization at the time of emancipation.  Thus there were a fair number of literal savages that the North attempted to elevate over Southern Whites during Reconstruction.

     Mr. Foner does not seem to take into account the impossibility of near savages and Africans who had been in slavery for actual generations becoming citizens capable of governing a heterogeneous population  in a system that was completely foreign to their experience in Africa overnight if at all.  This is to make no adverse reflections on the Africans as people.  You might just as well take a homeless person from the streets and make him President of the United States.

     The number of Africans in the South were almost equal to the Whites.  In South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi the Africans were actually in the majority.   Thus as Southern society disintegrated and the full weight of Northern bigots was thrown behind the Africans in order to subjugate the Whites there was a real recipe for trouble.

     Nor was White society North or South all that developed in 1860 compared to that of today.  Universal education was far from a fact with compulsary schooling still in the future.  The University system was miniscule compared to the enormous industry of today.  Illiteracy in fact was quite high North or South.  Northern laborers in fact thought of themselves as wage slaves less well off even than the Southern Africans and this is too close to the truth to be lightly dismissed.  Small White children were forced to work in mines, for instance, at wages that would have shamed an ogre let alone should have shamed an ‘enlightened industrialist.’  If that wasn’t child slavery then no African was ever a slave in the US.

     So for the North to be condemnatory of the South was hypocrisy of the highest order.  It is all in how you characterize yourself compared to the other fellow.  Nevertheless there were different intellectual approaches to reality.

     Mr. Foner, who is an Israeli citizen, has little to feel superior about himself.  While Mr. Foner expresses great sympathy for the African while condemning Southern Whites, the Israeli solution to the Arab problem in Palestine makes one’s eyebrows rise, while they wish to expel recent Black African immigrants from the country so as not to pollute White Israelis.  While condemning segregation in the South one can’t help but notice that Mr. Foner’s own Israelis have built a fence between Israelis and Arabs and allow no Arabs on their side.  The Arabs are even Semites of the same human species as the Israelis and yet the Israelis call the Palestinians sub-human worthy of extermination.

     The Israelis just pound their cousins to death too.  I don’t even want to got into the detestable state of Lebanon.  I suppose my question is from whence this moral superiority of Mr. Foner and his Israelis arises.  His fellows even have terrorist camps like the ADL, AJC and SPLC that they run on American soil itself in order to control American opinion.

     US race relations have never been anything like relations between the Israelis and the Palestinians or even between them and us.  Thus while I’m sure that Mr. Foner has done quite a bit of research, at least as indicated by his footnotes, I’m not sure his vision is so unclouded as to make an accurate assessment of the facts.  One feels what’s sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander in Mr. Foner’s book and with his Israelis as well.

     I’m happy that Mr. Foner has made a lucrative home for himself here in the US with a darn good paying prestigious job in the University industry.  I don’t quarrel with his scholarship, such as it is, but I think his interpretation is a trifle suspect.

Posted in America, Eric Foner, Greil Marcus, Jews, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Writing | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments »

Exhuming Bob VII: Blowin’ In The Wind

March 26, 2008

Exhuming Bob VII:  Blowin’ In The Wind

by

R.E. Prindle

     It is commonly believed that Bob’s protest catalogue of the early sixties is related to the Civil Rights Movement.  It is further believed that Bob changed his direction or emphasis beginning with Another Side.  I’m going to suggest that there is only one side of Bob and that that is continous from 1961 through 1966 after which a discontinuity did occur.

     I recently viewed a video of Bob performing with Joan Baez.  The video was undated and did not identify the performance but was of the period when Bob wore the napkin on his head.  The video is a performance of Blowin’ In The Wind at the beginning of which Bob dedicates the song to Hibbing, Minnesota.  He couldn’t or wouldn’t have done that unless the song applied.  It follows then that Blowin’ In The Wind has nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement but to Bob himself.  I never understood at the time how people could relate the song to Negroes but they did.

     The character may have been projected on it by the expectations  of the time perhaps even taking Bob by surprise.  Then perhaps encouraged by Suze Rotolo he was able to convert his resentments against Hibbing and U. Minnesota into Civil Rights ‘anthems.’ 

     Even such songs as Masters Of War and Only A Pawn In The Game can be converted into reflections of Hibbing.  The masters of war would be enemies in Hibbing while his being arrested and sent to Red Wing would make him only a pawn in their game.

     Even James Meredith at U. Mississippi can be converted to the experience of Bobby Zimmerman attempting to morph into Bob Dylan at U. Minnesota.

     In an exchange on Lipstick Traces IX correspondent RM and I have worked out an interlocking set of songs relating to Echo Helstrom’s betrayal of Bob and the subsequent term spent at Red Wing Reformatory.  I will try to write this up soon.

     While Bob first puts his complaints in song from 1961-66 he merely shifted the emphasis from John Wesley Harding on when he added his current complaints to his repertoir.

     In any event it is now possible to interpret his catalogue from 1961-66 as one unit addressing one set of problems.  Of course William Zanzinger does pose a problem but one may be able to find his counterpart in Hibbing if one can find the necessary information.

     If Bob ever gets around to Vols. II and III of his autobiography I rather imagine he isn’t going to go into much detail on this matter.  We would rather find the answer on the pages of his autobiography than blowin’ in the wind.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Folk Music, Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, R.E. Prindle, Uncategorized, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Pt. 2 Greil Marcus In The Threepenny Review

March 16, 2008

Greil Marcus In The Threepenny Review

Part II

Greil Marcus At Sea

 

     When in doubt consult the internet.  It would seem that the USS Hull along with the Monaghan and Spence is a celebrated episode in Naval history.

     A history of the movements of the Hull during the war is to be found on Wikipedia.  There have been several Hulls.  The one is question is DD 350.  Fox News appears to replicate whatever Mr. Marcus saw on TV.  That site may be found at HTTP://www.patriotwatch.com/

     These sites provide us with dates to deal with.  The Hull went down on December 18, 1944.  Therefore Mr. Marcus was born on June 19, 1945 or possibly July 19.

     The Hull was active during the entire war having a very distinguished record.  On August 25, 1944 it entered Puget Sound for repairs.  Although the biography says Seattle, I suppose that means the Bremeton Naval Yards on the West side of the Sound opposite Seattle.

     Depending on whether Greil Gerstley had been with the Hull several years or only recently he obtained a much needed leave heading for the flesh pots of San Francisco.  The leave was probably a thirty day leave so he had to back in Seattle sometime in October.  He probably left the ship at the beginning of September or shortly after so he may have been in San Francisco about September 10th.  If he met and married Mr. Marcus’ mother in September that was indeed a whirlwind romance.  I don’t mean to be snide but after several years at sea Gerstley was ready for anything.  And then he may have thought it’s now or never, unlike MacArthur I may not return.

     The Hull put out to sea again on October 23, 1944 so that the newly weds had probably less than a month together so truly Mr. Marcus’ mother had little to tell him other than that his dad was a nice guy.

     And then on December 18th the Hull caught a wave and wiped out.

     Now, was any one person responsible as Mr. Marcus thinks?  I think not.  Unless Mr. Marcus has a verifiable alternate version the official version is that the whole fleet under the command of Admiral Halsey was taken by surprise by the typhoon.  Halsey didn’t maliciously order the three DDs into the typhoon to see what they were made of.  I feel certain there was no talk of a mutiny involving Gerstley or anyone else.  The storm hit, the ship sank within a day.  No possiblity for mutiny talk.  No reason for it.  Mr. Marcus’ imagination is overheated by the Caine Mutiny nonsense aboard, get this, a Minesweeper.

     In Seattle he (the former Captain) was replaced by a martinet from Annapolis, a man so vain and incompetent, so impatient with advice from experienced sailors and sure of his own right way, that…twenty men went AWOL…  in Seattle.

     The above is from Mr. Marcus’ article.  It appears that he believes that Capt. Marks (for that was his name) came directly from Annapolis to assume command.   If so, that is an impossibility.  DDs (Destroyers) had a Commander as Captain.  I served on a DE (Destroyer Escort) which required only a Lieutenant Commander as Captain.  To become a Commander one must have first passed through the grades of Ensign, Lieutenant JG, Lieutenant and Lieutenant Commander so that apart from possibly over rapid wartime promotion Captain Marks was an experienced sailor.  What his commanding syle was I can’t say but I wouldn’t take Capt. Queeg of the fictional novel The Caine Mutiny as a model for Naval officers.  If anything both of the Captains I had were over lenient.  Twenty men going AWOL, apparently wisely, to avoid entering a war zone doesn’t strike me as unusual.

     Now, when the storm struck it caught Halsey and his fleet unawares.  More damage was caused than most minor naval engagements.  Not only were the three DDs lost but another 26 ships were seriously damaged while the carriers had 145 aircraft destroyed.

     So while it is tragic for Mr. Marcus that his father was lost at sea that was only one very small part of a natural disaster no different than a hurricane leveling a midwest town.  Mr. Marcus should get over this feeling of official dereliction on Halsey’s part.  There was a war going on, the ships were involved in an invasion of Mindanao.  Good god, somebody is going to die.

     As it was the Hull came off better than the other two ships.  Only six survived the Monaghan, twenty-four the Spence, while sixty-two survived the Hull.  Whether Capt. Marks was a martinet or not he managed to save the largest proportion of his crew.  He himself says he stepped into the water from the bridge as the ship rolled over.  Sounds OK to me.

     Now, sailing Tin Cans through typhoons.  DDs and DEs were called Tin Cans hence I or any who served on them are called Tin Can Sailors.  The Hull was relatively small for a DD at 341 feet and a beam of 34 feet.  The DE I served on was only 306 feet with a comparable beam to the Hull.  The DDs I saw were all of the order of 400+ feet.

     Except for the Hull the ships were top heavy having deballasted preparatory to refueling at sea.  Refueling became impossible as the seas rose.  It is quite possible that with a normal center of gravity the ships would not have rolled.  The Hull is stated as having 70% of its fuel so it was riding lower.

     Next, Mr. Marcus blames Capt. Marks for being an inept sailor making a wrong decision in a ‘trough.’

     A this point let me say that myself and my shipmates are of the few sailors to have experienced an actual typhoon.  At the end of 1958 we were ordered to sail thorugh a typhoon two days sail above Mindanao off the coast of Japan.  As the rest of the squadron sailed around the typhoon one may conclude our orders were of the malicious sort.  If you want the whole story see Part V of my novel Our Lady Of The Blues especially Clip       on my R.E. Prindle blog here on WordPress.

     What is a trough?  A trough is the depression between waves.  A ship will have a crest fore and aft and a crest on both the port and starboard.  In our case the trough was actually a good sized valley perhaps a half mile in circumference.  As I describe in Our lady at one time we entered a trough crossing over a crest and descending head first toward the bottom.  This is a heartstopper because when the ship levels at the bottom the whole ship from stem to stern except for the superstructure is under water.  I know that’s an impossibility but it is also a fact.  Good god almighty, one doesn’t say prayers, one says:  Hello Davy Jones, good bye world.  I can get tears in my eyes just thinking about it.  Like now.  The water is always moving under the ship so troughs are not stationary.  They may lift you relative to your stem and stern or they may lift the ship broadside up the whole height of a seventy foot wave then rolling you over the crest and into the next trough.  That one give a whole noter idea on the value you place on your life.  But I and the crew sailed into Tokyo Harbor on the ship.

     The question is then was our Captain a good sailor?  Yes, I believe he was, but no matter how good he was survival was always a matter of luck.  There were times when we had no control of the ship, one factor or another could have been the end.  Perhaps a gust of wind at an inappropriate moment.

     The next question then is was Capt. Marks at least a good sailor.  The large number of survivors of the the Hull relative to the other two ships would indicate to me that he was a conscientious Captain and heads up sailor.

     Anybody who would cut their engines at any point in a typhoon should have his head examined.  You cannot maintain control without power.  Also you cannot ‘break out’ of a trough.  If the commentators suggest the trough was ‘stationary’ I suggest that the commentators have never been to sea let alone been in a typhoon.

     I think I can state that the Hull didn’t go down because of a trough.  It rolled, hence it was ascending or descending a wave.  Case closed.  You can’t ride out a typhoon without ascending or descending waves.

     It is tragic that the Hull rolled over and Gerstley was killed.  Still, the man was simply doing his duty and like a million or so others had his head up at the wrong time.  Mr. Marcus should be proud of his father.  He wasn’t one of the cowards who went AWOL.

     As far as this convention in 2006, sixty years after the event, I wouldn’t take seriously anything these eighty some year old guys said.  I couldn’t even remember my last Captain’s name the day after I left the ship.  I have recently learned from a website that his name was Dodge.  I can’t ever remember my mouth forming the name Dodge and Captain Dodge doesn’t even look like the Captain I remember.

     Crews shift and change so often one can remember only the handful of men you were in constant contact with, if those.  First Division, of which I was part, must have had six First Louies while I was aboard and I can remember the name of only the first one, Mossbarger.  I wouldn’t be able to recognize him today.

     So, I would suggest that these old duffs were just trying to make Mr. Marcus’ cute young daughter feel good.  Telling her what they thought she wanted to hear.  Perhaps what her father told her to ask.

     I’m sure Mr. Marcus’ father was as conscientious and heroic as he could be.  He was a fine man who went down with his ship.  Mr. Marcus should be content with this proud fact.  Indeed, he has no choice.  Make a virtue of necessity.

     Personally, if I knew my ship was going to be involved in a typhoon I would go AWOL too.  Surviving one once is all luck.  I might not be so lucky the second time.

      What the hell.  Greil Gerstley helped us win the war.  It was the peace we lost.

Posted in Bay Area, Greil Marcus, Navy, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, San Francisco, Tyhphoons, US Navy, USS Hull, World War II, Writing | Leave a Comment »

Greil Marcus In The Threepenny Review

March 16, 2008

 Greil Marcus And His Problem Fathers

A Psychological Analysis

by

R.E. Prindle

 Part I

      Greil Marcus has a new article on his old theme in the Spring 2008 Threepenny Review.  The way it is written it appears to have been a talk or lecture at some unidentified place.  His obsession must be intense for while the theme is of an interesting psychological motif I don’t really understand why he thinks the theme  is of such general interest it bears repeating so often.

     If he’s looking for a psychological interpretation I am prepared to offer him one.  It must be understood that I offer an objective analysis of that which M. Marcus has publicly aired.  Whatever I say is based on what he says.  No unkindness is intended.  This version of his obsession is the fullest he has yet offered.  To read the article go to:  http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/marcus_sp08.html

     The main facts are these:  M. Marcus’ father and mother met in 1944 during WWII.  She had just graduated from Stanford in May or June.  He, Greil Gerstley, came from Philadelphia.  He was an officer in the Navy, apparently a full lieutenant so he may have been in uniform since shortly after hostilities began.  They met in San Francisco which was crawling with Navy in 1944.  M. Marcus either doesn’t know or doesn’t tell us but it would appear that as a wartime romance they met and married within a week or two.  M. Marcus doesn’t tell us what Gerstley’s social status in Philadelphia was but it appears as though he came from an affluent background.  We are left uninformed as to the time of year they met.  I’m guessing September or October.  Shortly after marriage the couple left for Seattle where Gerstley shipped out.  He was subsequently lost at sea six months and a day before M. Marcus was born in the summer of ’45.

     Approximately three years later in 1948 his mother married Mr. Marcus whose first name, I believe is or was Gerald.  He apparently married the mother and adopted the son in one swift movement.

     Thus, and this is crucial, for the first three years of his life of which he says he has only haunting memories, M. Marcus was Greil Gerstley.  Even though he has only faint memories of the period this dual identity has left an indelible impression.

     Now we get into what C.G. Jung calls the collective unconscious.  M. Marcus is not responsible for any of his reactions.  They all emerge from the true unconscious.

     Gerald Marcus and his mother gave him siblings.  M. Marcus’ half-brother Bill looks out for him and runs an internet alert.  I have been in communication with brother Bill.  In 1955 the family moved into a fine new home in Menlo Park, California.  Menlo Park is a very affluent suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula so Gerald Marcus was a good provider.  M. Marcus seems to have no complaints about his step-father.  Indeed as Gerald adopted him on marriage it would appear that he was trying to sidestep unconscious psychological animosities by making another man’s child his own, at least in name.

     Shortly after moving into the house in Menlo Park M. Marcus was toying with the radio and heard an announcement about American GIs fathering babies on Korean mothers and then abandoning them.  M. Marcus immediately related that announcement to his biological father’s marriage to his mother and subsequent death that struck a subliminal chord related to the abandonment of the Korean children.  Now the response is not rational but unconscious and fully explicable on that level.

     At some later time M. Marcus saw David Lynch’s movie  Blue Velvet.  Certain homey scenes struck the subliminal chord of his father’s abandonment making him believe that the idyllic scenes were what he had lost with his father’s death or abandonment.  He subconsciously perceived his father’s death or non-return as abandonment.

     These are the facts for Part I.

     In analysis there seems to be a sense of loss between birth and the age of three when his mother remarried.  A blank spot in his life.  When he questioned his mother (now deceased) about his father she had nothing to tell him as she had only known the man for two months or even less.  Thus M. Marcus virtually knew this man he had never met almost as well as his mother.  Whether he has been able to accept her statement or not he doesn’t make clear but there seems to be some doubt.  Some nagging sense of the need for closure which cannot be obtained.

     Now, M. Marcus carries the genes of Greil Gerstley and not those of Gerald Marcus.  Therefore Gerald and his progeny must always have seemed foreign to him.  M. marcus may have resented Gerald’s  co-habitation with his mother.  For instance my mother divorced my father when I was three although I have plenty of memories of my first three years, remarrying seven years later.  I never thought about it then but I always resented my step-father having access to my father’s woman at the same time,  my mother.  The attitude comes from the collective unconscious and is not a conscious reaction.  There is no defense against it.  Therefore from three to ten M. Marcus probably suffered a degree of alienation from his step-father with some lingering resentment of his mother and that resentment was brought into focus in this new house when he heard of the abandoned Korean children.  Even though his step-father was providing well M. Marcus believed, thought or hoped that his real father would have provided even better.  Once again, the reaction was unconscious and could not be helped.  Still this attitude must have distanced him from his step father a little probably causing some resentment on Gerald’s part.

     When M. Marcus saw Blue Velvet with its idyllic opening scenes the subliminal message was that life would have been like that with Gerstley but that had been irrevocably lost when he ‘abandoned’ M. Marcus in the same way the Korean children were abandoned.  I’m almost surprised that he didn’t change his name back to Greil Gerstley.

     A secondary problem is with his mother.  I suspect that he has a haunting feeling that perhaps Greil Gerstley may not be his father and indeed there is a chance that this is so.

     M. Marcus makes a point of saying he was born exactly six months and a day after his father was lost at sea.  but, he refuses to give us his birth date instead saying that he was born between VE and VJ days which leaves some lattitude.  Nor does he give us the date the couple were married or the date Gerstley shipped out.  His mother destroyed any letters received from Gerstley so that resource is missing.

     Certainly apart from the wartime conditions of romance the hasty marriage might have implications.  No one can now know but I suspect the fear haunts M. Marcus.

     I know that children in his situation have real difficulties with their fathers.  I have known adopted children who went to great lengths to locate a biological parent inevitibly being disappointed.  For myself I never saw my father again but neither have I had real curiosity about him.

     Greil Gerstley is gone from M. Marcus’ life and his is stuck with the frustrating situation of being able to do nothing about it  except possibly accepting the fact that that was the hand fate dealt him.  That’s how I’ve always dealt with this early part of my life.  What can you do but play the cards you were dealt.  Wartime conditions produce wartime results.  What can anyone say or do?

     Then one day M. Marcus almost miraculously learned the details of the day his father’s ship went down.

     That in Part 2.

Posted in Biology, C. G. Jung, Consciousness, Freud, Greil Marcus, Psychology, R.E. Prindle, Sigmund Freud, Structural Psychology, Subconscious, Writing | Leave a Comment »

A Review Of The Traitor By Thomas Dixon Jr.

March 15, 2008

A Contribution To The ERB Library Project

A Review of

THE TRAITOR

by

Thomas F. Dixon Jr.

Thomas F. Dixon, Jr.

Review by R.E. Prindle

Of Thomas Dixon’s Reconstruction Trilogy- The Leopard’s Spots, The Clansman and The Traitor- only the last is found in ERB’s library. It would seem reasonably sure that he read the other two also. As The Traitor was published in 1907 it seems certain that the trilogy was read before ERB put pen to paper so that Dixon was influential on the whole of ERB’s career.

This is no small influence as the Civil War and Reconstruction are central to ERB’s works. Once again, one is amazed at how ERB could absorb so many influences and keep each nearly discrete. Further on I will postulate the possible influence of Alexandre Dumas’ French Revolution series.

Of interest to ERB’s reading habits Bill Hillman recently posted a list of books in ERBzine of ERB’s post WWII reading list that Burroughs described as a few of the books he’d read. As the list was substantial the complete list must have been enormous. The list mainly consisted of books in the areas of crime and other topics which certain minds share. As I happen to be one of those minds based on the internal evidence of the novels and shared intellectual direction I feel a fair amount of confidence in my speculations concerning his reading although I leave room for error.

I am also of the opinion now that he could have read from 500 to 750 books from, say, fifteen to thirty-five when he began writing. His consumption from 1911 to 1940 must have been enormous. Fortunately we can get a pretty good fix on the type of books he preferred from his library.

Thomas Dixon Jr. lived from 1864 to 1946. Reconstruction was in effect from 1865 to 1877 when the last occupation troops were withdrawn. Dixon grew up in Shelby, North Carolina where his father was an important figure in the first Ku Klux Klan. The Traitor is apparently based on his father’s career. It is said that because of corruption in the Klan his father was instrumental in disbanding it.

Dixon although young would then have had first hand experience with both Reconstruction and the Clan.

Dixon believed, and I second him, that Reconstruction was one of the most brutal crimes in history. It certainly ranks in the same category as the French Revolution’s criminal acts in The Vendee and Hitler and Stalin’s actions from 1925 to 1945. One should not underestimate the horrors of Reconstruction. Liberals, for their own reasons, have attempted to excise the period from US history while sanitizing what little is taught. One is certain than an inquiring mind like Burroughs sought out the true and whole story.

Liberals have blackened Dixon’s name as they have that of Dixon’s fellow Southerner, D.W. Griffith, who produced the Dixon trilogy as the most amazing movie of its time- The Birth Of A Nation. In 1915.

While both Griffith and Dixon have been defamed as racists in today’s multi-cultural society they must no longer be seen as racists merely as representatives of an anti-Liberal segment of White culture.

Dixon was one of the most popular American writers of the period to at least until the aftermath of the Russian Revolution when he and writers like him, including Burroughs, came under attack from the Communists. With the exception of Burroughs all have been defamed into oblivion today.

As we know Burroughs’ father, George T., served in the Union Army during the Civil War. His father’s more admirable attributes seem to have gone into the character of John Carter, the hero of the first three Martian stories. He seems to have been combined with a Confederate Officer of Virginia stock as well as a character of the nature of Count Caliogstro of the pre-French Revolution period.

Here the problem of Alexandre Dumas and his Revolutionary romances enters. John Carter’s tomb in Connecticut is probably based on Graham’s tomb in The Traitor. The similarity is striking. Carter’s longevity may be based in part on Dumas’ description of the charlatanry of Cagliostro who claimed to be as old as the Great Historical Bum while rationalizing his ability to survive much as the thousand year old Martians did.

The Great Alexandre Dumas

The Martians were in fact deathless as was Cagliostro’s claim unless they were killed by some sort of physical accident. Dumas’ Caliogstro describes his situation in these exact terms. The novels in Dumas’ roman a fleuve are the Memoirs Of A Physician, Joseph Balsamo, The Queen’s Necklace, Ange Pitou, The Countess Of Charny, The Chevalier Of The Maison Rouge and The Blue And The White. I can recommend them highly. We know that Burroughs read The Three Musketeers and probably The Count Of Monte Cristo. He may have read one, two or more of the Revolution series also.

There is an interesting passage in the Physician in which an ignorant country boy teaches himself to write both printed and cursive letters after a very rudimentary instruction in reading. The passage bears comparison to Tarzan’s teaching himself to read and write. The point being that Burrough’s imagination was probably fired by this series.

Now, we know that Burroughs was always opposed to the Revolution. Dumas would have introduced him to conspiracy theory. I would guess that ERB read Dumas before 1900 but that is just a guess. Also bear in mind what we consider ‘classical’ literature was current in Burroughs’ youth. All these books would have been new and therefore doubly exiting. As David Adams noted to me concerning Baum’s Oz series the books would have been equivalent to a new Beatles record in the sixties when people rushed to stores at the earliest possible moment to get their copy. Knowing this stuff would have made one a very hep cat.

We also know that prior to 1911 Burroughs associated with several knowing people among which were Sweetser and Dr. Stace. These buys are always into conspiracy theory as, indeed, am I . As I have said as Burroughs and I share the same reading tastes I think it less than pure speculation that Burroughs also knew something about the Revolutionary conspiracy. Difficult to tell what.

It doesn’t appear that ERB was ever a Freemason. The Revolution was attributed to the Masons. The lodges then would have been thought Communist then by their opponents. Communist and Illuminated. The Illuminati are, of course, central to any conspiracy theory.

In theory and certainly in fact the lodges were instrumental in the overthrow of the French monarchy. I have even read that Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans were involved with the Rosicrucians, hence the Freemasons and hence the Masonic revolution against thrones. While I don’t find the idea improbable I haven’t got enough evidence to speculate one way or the other. I find it interesting though to see that John Adams was thought to be Illuminated. It is certain that Revolutionary cadres in the form of Libertines were active in England during the seventeenth century and were certainly instrumental in the destruction of London’s Newgate Prison some few years before the destruction of the Bastille.

It is also certain that Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati infiltrated the French Freemasons some few years before 1789 and that the Jacobins arose from them. It is also clear that the Illuminatti infiltrated American Freemasons at least by 1799. There are those who believe with good evidence that Thomas Jefferson was Illuminated. Indeed, the Communists of the twenties called Jefferson one of their own. It seemed ridiculous until one looks a little further. Whether Lincoln was one of the Communists’ own along with Jefferson as they claim seems preposterous on the surface of it.

However an illuminated Mason by the name of Morgan was about to publish a book exposing the Masonic plot in 1843 when he was abducted and murdered. A symbol of the Illuminatti was the Phrygian Cap. The Union enlisted cap is nothing less than the Phrygian Cap with the front knob truncated and replaced by a flat board. So, shall we say that the Illuminatti took a prominent but disguised role in the Civil War.

If this Jacobin-Illuminatti attitude was in the Northern attitude then it must have been represented in the Abolitionist attitude. Their hatred always directed against authority was the directed against the Southern Whites and in favor of the Negroes. And in fact it was attempted to make Whites slaves to the Negroes. Just as in France the hatred was directed against not only Aristocracy but against peasants or anyone who resisted the Jacobin or Liberal will. In the Vendee of France which remained loyalist genocide was carried out on the Vendeans. I have no doubt out and out genocide would have been committed against Southerners if it had been possible. In that respect perhaps Sherman’s antecedents should be examined to determine unrecognized motives for the march from Atlanta to the sea.

There is no question that a great many of the post-Civil War immigrants were Communists or socialists and that they refused to accept a non-socialist America. Many if not most of the 48ers who fled Europe after the failure of the Revolution of 1848 were socialist while there is no reason to suppose that a large number of those were Jacobins or Illuminated.

Burroughs first contact with these people was as a child or teenager when he saw them parading through Chicago under the Red banner. It seems very unlikely that he wouldn’t have picked up a lot of anti-Socialist information. At any rate his hatred of German and things German began at that time developing into a near mania during the Great War and a firmest attitude by WWII.

I can’t guarantee that he read Dumas’ Revolutionary novels but there are enough seeming contact points in the novels to indicate that he may have. Thus John Carter’s longevity may be based on Dumas’ portrayal of Cagliostro. This input Burroughs combined then combined with his readings of The Virginian and the positive aspects of his father to create John Carter. It is probably significant that Carter was the main character in only the first three Martian novels before ERB’s father died. When George T. died John Carter ceased being the dominant character being replaced by his son Carthoris in the next novel, Thuvia, Maid Of Mars. Burroughs may not have been able to divide his own alter-ego between Carthoris and Tarzan as the former disappears being replaced by a number of different personae.

However ERB understood the Civil War and Reconstruction the two events were a significant part of his mental makeup.

Pioneering Filmmaker, D.W. Griffith

The three Dixon novels were formative before he began to wirte while the Dixon scripted The Birth Of A Nation filmed by D.W. Griffith and released in 1915 had a terrific impact on Burroughs as well as the Nation.

The movie would have revived all his emotions on the two topics. I have read the novels of the subsequent years with this thought in mind but echoes may be there.

Over the following decades Liberals have succeeded in characterizing Birth Of A Nation as ‘racist’ which it is not. The story may be culturally centered on the White side of the story rather than the Black but this fact doesn’t make the movie any more racist than if it had been culturally centered on the Black aspect. The issue of race simply cannot be avoided.

The movie misunderstands the breach between the two White viewpoints of the North and the South. While the movie is plea for Whites to never do this again and to reunite as one people, the bigots of the North wished only for the destruction of Southern Whites. As the Jewish historian Eric Foner writes, Reconstruction is the unfinished Revolution that is still going on today and will culminate in the election of Barry Dunham-Obama and its sequel.

Eric Foner

Eric Foner is part of the Foner dynasty of Communist historians. His uncle Phil Foner wrote distorted labor chronicles while his Pappy Jack was dismissed from his academic position in the ‘50s as a Communist.

The movie was the most successful of its time providing the funds for the MGM empire. Louis B. Mayer who was a theatre operator at the time made enough from the movie to go to Hollywood and establish the Mayer studios which Loews later combined into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when they crushed William Fox of Fox Studios which then was combined with Twentieth Century to become Twentieth-Century Fox.

The movie certainly was not considered racist at the time except by the Jacobin faction who were not as influential then as they have become today. The Democratic president of the time, Woodrow Wilson, thought it a superb movie.

Interestingly both Wilson (1856-1924) and Dixon were together at Johns Hopkins University with Dixon being a champion of Wilson. D.W. Griffith, from the South as was Wilson, was Burroughs nearly exact contemporary. Griffith was born in Louisville, Kentucky also in 1875 dying in 1948 two years before Burroughs. Griffith was another who was marginalized by the Communists.

Thus the essential Edgar Rice Burroughs was taking its final form in the years from 1900-1911. I would like to organize those years as part of his early married years. This is not easy. As we are aware when he and Emma returned to Chicago from Idaho and Salt Lake City in 1904 ERB was suffering from the excruciating headaches that lasted half a day incurred from his beating in Toronto.

His sojourn in Salt Lake must also be included as part of his education as with his innate anthropological curiosity he would have investigated the absurdities of that religion. Once again he was much closer to the origins of the religion as it had only about sixty years of history to deal with rather than one hundred and sixty.

Even on the train trip back to Chicago ERB would have traveled through an entirely different landscape along approximately the Mormon Trail than today. The geographic changes have been enormous. The earlier geography would have influenced Mormon memories and stories that he would have heard. As an example of a feature that has been completely destroyed is a description from a book titled: The Mormon Trail: Voyage Of Discovery, The Story Behind The Scenery by Stanley B. and Violet Kimball. Page 35:

Weary teamsters and tired oxen struggled onward despite the difficult, rocky terrain. Many journals commented on the hordes of grasshoppers that had helped deplete the area of grass. Still, the optimism remained high in camp for they knew the Sweetwater River was just around the bend. The ground here proved to be miry, “smelled bad”, was swampy and many oxen got “buried in the mud.” Mosquitoes and “Gad flies” were numerous, and both oxen and humans were plagued for miles. The water along this route was so bad that even the cattle refused to drink. Most of the time they had to use sage for firewood here because buffalo chips were scarce and so was wood.Among the several landmarks along this part of the Trail were the Avenue Of Rocks and The Devil’s Backbone. Today the quarter-mile-long Avenue Of Rocks is gone, a victim of road widening.

That’s how little Americans care for their environment. Possibly the Avenue of Rocks was used by Fennimore Cooper as a locale in his novel The Prairie that Burroughs was certain to have read.

The Mormons would have made the trip a scant thirty or so years before so Burroughs would have been regaled with stories by those who had made the trip, probably before Buffalo Bill cleared the prairie of buffalo. Certainly before the tremendous network of reservoirs that now cover the area.

Having returned to Chicago Burroughs had to get down to some serious living; something he wasn’t good at. One would imagine that his father with a long history in business in Chicago could have gotten him a decent job to start but for some reason of which we are not informed he seemed to be in disrepute. ERB literally started at the bottom taking jobs for which there were few applicants.

Burroughs ran through an odd assortment of jobs over the next seven or nine years. After all it was only seven years from 1904 to 1911. Short enough in the telling but the equivalent of several lifetimes in the living. I won’t do a recital of the jobs as I’ve done it before while everyone is familiar with the story.

Intellectually these were stimulating times for Burroughs. L. Frank Baum’s Oz books began at the turn of the century, Baum trying to end the series in 1910. The Oz stories had a great influence on ERB. Jack London began publishing whose hobo experiences probably rekindled Burroughs interest in that life find expression in the trilogy of novel involving Billy Byrne that began in 1913 shortly after ERB began writing.

Owen Wister published The Virginian that would be so influential on Burroughs’ writing going into the character of John Carter. The Graustark novels of George Barr McCutcheon also began appearing the memory of which ERB would cherish to his dying day.

And of course ERB had his relationship with Dr. Stace. Now, Porges gives us very little information on this period in ERB’s life. However John Dos Passos in his USA trilogy includes a character who closely resembles Burroughs. This is in the third volume, The Big Money. Dos Passos was a vicious little man. At the time he was an open Red. Somewhat later in life he supposedly became a ‘conservative.’ As Reds go becoming ‘conservative’ in my opinion merely means getting old. I don’t see how anyone who has based their life on Communist principles can ever embrace opposite principles but many people can, or at least, they allow themselves to think they can.

It would be absurd to think that there would be no stories circulating about one of the most successful writers in the world. Dos Passos was actually from Chicago although absent most of his life, still he undoubtedly picked up some stories on Burroughs who would have been thought of, at the very least, as a colorful character. Thus writing in the thirties Dos Passos may very well have picked up stories from people like Frank Martin himself. Can’t be sure at this time of course…but if you look…

John Dos Passos

Dos Passos carefully describes the type of businessman ERB was. There apparently was a type of scrabbler who while not being able to afford an office of their own would rent space for a desk in someone else’s office so they could have an address. Sort of like the mail box addresses existing today. As an independent businessman Burroughs was of this type. In this capacity Dos Passos has his character turn up with a patent medicine type who go through Michigan trying to sell their wares. Dos Passos details of the foray are unimportant and probably highly imaginative but definitely derogatory. But then his whole corpus is of a mocking nature.

The point is Porges describes about this time, 1907 or so, that Burroughs sent Emma a note from South Bend, Indiana lauding the town saying that he would be back home soon. Porges doesn’t say what he was doing in South Bend. We are left to guess.

I would imagine it was something along the lines that Dos Passos describes. Or perhaps this was about the time the Feds cracked down on the Patent Medicine business and Burroughs and Stace may have found it convenient to absent themselves from the Windy City. I haven’t been able to find a reference to such a trip in the corpus as yet.

More to follow.

Posted in Civil War, Edgar Rice Burroughs, ERBzine, Eric Foner, R.E. Prindle, Reviews, Slavery, Uncategorized, War Between The States, Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »
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