Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante

Author:Luc Sante
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
Published: 2011-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Dylan is a complex, mercurial human being of astounding gifts, whose purposes are usually ambiguous, frequently elusive, and sometimes downright unguessable. At the same time he is a sort of communicating vessel, open to currents that run up and down the ages quite outside the confines of the popular culture of any given period. That he is able to tune his radio to those long waves in a time of increasingly short memories and ever more rapid fashion cycles is not the least of his achievements.

Chronicles, which would appear to have been printed without editorial intervention,12 is so fluid in its prose and alive in its observations that Dylan looks like a natural at the book game, although his previous experience was not so happy. Tarantula was the result of a much-trumpeted contract for a novel that Dylan signed with Macmillan in 1966. The book was not published until 1970, having in the meantime been bootlegged in several different versions. Nearly everyone was disappointed in the final product, which arrived behind the prow of a carefully hedged and rather condescending preface by its editor, Bob Markel. Ever since, the phrase “famously unreadable” has been attached to it, and persons who have wished to demonstrate that Dylan’s vaunted verbal mastery was just so much hype have used it as a handy chair-leg with which to beat its author. It is, in fact, a mess, but it’s a fascinating mess—it’s what Dylan’s automatic writing looks like when it doesn’t have formal containers to shape it. The population of Dylan’s world (Homer the Slut, Popeye Squirm, “Phil, who has now turned into an inexpensive Protestant ambassador from Nebraska & who speaks with a marvelous accent,” etc.) hurtles hectically through a landscape of tanktowns and drunk tanks, all of the action telegraphically alluded to, at best, as if the book were a compilation of gossip columns from whatever newspaper Smokey Stover subscribed to. Although it is easily more entertaining than any of the automatic productions of the Parisian Surrealist crowd, it only clicks at odd intervals, when Dylan briefly finds a model for parody, such as the interspersed letters, which have something of Ring Lardner about them:cant you figure out all this commie business for yourself? you know, like how long can car thieves terrify the nation? gotta go. there’s a fire engine chasing me. see you when i get my degree. i’m going crazy without you. cant see enough movies your crippled lover, benjamin turtle

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