Robert Polito. After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024. 336 pp.
Review by Anne Margaret Daniel, The New School
After the Flood is meant to cover Bob Dylan’s career from 1991 to 2024, but you can’t write about The Later Dylan standing alone—because he stands neither alone nor still. It’s not The Early Dylan or The Middle Dylan, either, it’s just Dylan. Today, tomorrow, and yesterday too—today and yesterday are the bookends holding tomorrow in place, and they’re all together. Dylan is Faulknerian—the past is never dead to him, and it’s not even past. Ancient footprints of Rome are also those steps he’s just taken; when he stands in the Baths of Caracalla or Shakespeare’s birthplace, I would wager that it seems to be both then and now to him.
Dylan’s last thirty years are no “sketchy coda” (xv), as Robert Polito rightly knows. From his fifties to his eighties, Dylan, Polito writes, is a man who revitalized himself and his art with a fresh, brilliant, intensified collage style of crafting songs; vast, staggering concert tours—over three thousand shows from 1991 through 2024; writing books—Chronicles, Volume One (2004) and The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022); creating a movie, Masked and Anonymous (2003) and inspiring other movies, I’m Not There (2007), No Direction Home (2005), and A Complete Unknown; hosting a weekly radio program, Theme Time Radio Hour (2006-2009); and exhibiting his paintings and welded sculptures in galleries and museums across America, Europe and Asia. (xv-xvi)
Past director of the Poetry Foundation, Polito is a renowned poet as well as a prizewinning biographer (for Savage Art, about the crime/noir novelist Jim Thompson). He’s also a colleague of mine at The New School University, where he was the founding director of our Graduate Writing Program and of the Riggio Writing and Democracy Honors Program for undergraduates. He’s been writing about Dylan for years, and was one of the first writers and critics permitted to use Dylan’s archives after they arrived in Tulsa. In the Helmerich Center for American Research there in 2018, while I was reading the Blood on the Tracks notebooks, he was deep in song drafts from Dylan’s 2012 album, Tempest.
The first chapter of After the Flood, “A: Stay Safe, Stay Observant” begins with the covid pandemic and the release of “Murder Most Foul” at midnight on March 27, 2020. Polito’s close reading of the near-seventeen-minute epic resonates with what Greil Marcus rightly notes as Dylan’s empathy. Polito is right that Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s real Nobel lecture, to him: I love this idea.
Then Polito moves back to Al Santos’s immortal intro of 2002, and deals with Dylan’s own self-dealing of the leadup to the time period capaciously covered in After the Flood. He’s right that Dylan himself in Chronicles dismisses the 1980s out of hand—and Polito says of the decade, “the whole shebang a lullaby of awfulness” (15)—but beware when Dylan’s categorical: he’s often trying to distract us from something. The 1980s also marked the beginning of his decades of thousands of nights of public performance around the world—every night on stage a revision, a confessional, a Nobel lecture, and an entertainment. He toured with dear friends—Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers; the Grateful Dead—who renewed his music and his confidence. Polito calls Biograph (1985) and its liner notes “at the time suggestive of a lavish funeral program” (17), but I must disagree: Biograph gave us, thanks to Jeff Rosen, the first ever box set, and also “Abandoned Love,” “Up To Me,” and “Caribbean Wind.”
After the Flood is at its best when unpacking, through what Dylan has written, made, and performed, the “memory palace” of its subtitle. Memory palace is a classical and poetic term, making it perfect for Polito; and it is also a grim one. There is a legend of the Greek poet Simonides who, after the sudden collapse of a full banqueting hall, recalled who was sitting where to help identify the badly disfigured victims. Cicero later told the story, and then it spread into Renaissance philosophy as a way to use both memory and imagination to recall or reconstruct information. To me, Dylan’s memory palace is more Platonic: the shadows on the wall of the cave. What’s real and what’s imagined? Someone else be the judge. All memory and fate are driven deep beneath the waves, and I can’t tell their order, if there is one. However, I like it that way.
The closest we can get to Dylan’s memory palace is in the archives in Tulsa, in which Polito has spent perhaps more time than anyone other than the Bob Dylan Center’s librarians and archivists. When Dylan sings “I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane,” you know what he’s talking about after just a day working there: the absolute nonstop oceans of drafts, revisions, fragments, splinters, phrases, words—written on notebook pages, hotel and doctor’s office pads, menus, even pieces of paper bags. Polito quotes Dylan’s conclusion from Chronicles after discussing his constant reading about the Civil War in the New York Public Library in 1961: “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind, out of sight, left it alone. Figured I could send a truck back for it later” (Chronicles 86). After the Flood works through what that truck has brought us over the past thirty years.
Polito intersperses personal reflections and autobiography with keen analyses of Dylan’s lyrics and influences, particularly in the songs of Rough and Rowdy Ways. Dylan brings that sense of reflection out in us all, whenever we reflect on what he means to us, and on his own influence over others. Polito’s writing style is both that of a poet and a critic, and suits a study of Dylan, since Dylan himself refuses chronological examination (indeed, examination of any kind has always made him unhappy).
The intense chapters on Dylan’s other albums of the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s are lyric and sharp, the way they make Polito feel often nailed in a clever line: “Time Out of Mind is the country blues record Beckett might have made had he made country blues records: those magnificent sentences telling you all those dire things” (53; though with Beckett, it would have been three words instead of any magnificent sentence, unless you’re Lucky). The magpie snippings and distillations of 2001’s “Love And Theft” “might be approached as the call-to-order of a fierce trilogy of associated releases that spanning Modern Times (2006) and Tempest (2012) would refocus and deepen the career rebirth he confirmed with Time Out of Mind” (78). Polito, unsurprisingly, is particularly good on Dylan’s poetical borrowings in the songs of Modern Times. He’s written before on Dylan’s use of poems by the “Poet of the Confederacy,” Henry Timrod of South Carolina, on “When the Deal Goes Down,” “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” and, for the 2003 film Gods and Generals, “‘Cross the Green Mountain”; but Polito goes deeper now into Dylan and Walt Whitman (“Come Up From the Fields, Father”), Julia Ward Howe (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), and Nathaniel Shepherd (“The Roll-Call”). I particularly enjoyed the discussion of abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier and “Scarlet Town.”
“‘Cross the Green Mountain” has the distinction of a video to go along with it, in which scenes from the movie “Gods and Generals” are intercut with Dylan and his band as a family deputation come to witness the death of, and perform the interment of, a young soldier. The video was filmed in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, in Hollywood Cemetery. Apart from the many marked graves of men who died in battle from 1861-1865, and of George Pickett, who survived the ill-fated charge at Gettysburg that bears his name, Hollywood Cemetery contains the remains of 11,000 unidentified Confederate soldiers, commemorated by an immense granite pyramid. It’s as bleak and chilling a music video as has been made, with the feel of an ancient documentary from a time well before moving pictures; Larry Campbell once told me that filming in Richmond that day was the coldest he’d ever been.
Dylan is more than a Civil War buff or historian—I’d call him a Civil War descendant, myself—as he has told us himself many times, and in many ways, throughout his career. In Chronicles, Dylan writes of his early days learning Civil War songs in the Folklore Center, listening to Paul Clayton and “Ray Gooch” and Dave Van Ronk expound on the war, reading biographies of Robert E. Lee, Thaddeus Stevens, and other wartime figures, and above all poring over newspapers from 1855-1865 on microfilm in the palatial reading room of the New York Public Library. “In the South, people lived their lives with sun-up, high noon, sunset, spring summer. In the North, people lived by the clock. In some ways the Civil War would be a battle between two kinds of time” (Chronicles 85). As he reads, Dylan recalls how past and present melded: “The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age, but yet it did in some mysterious and traditional way” (Chronicles 85). My father, a Civil War historian, would have agreed with Dylan that “Back there, America was put on the cross, died and was resurrected” (Chronicles 86). Resurrected, but America was not Reconstructed, and is still roiled by eternal reach of a frightful aftermath. There are traces of the “war between the states” and the endless evil legacy of slavery on every one of Dylan’s original albums; Polito is right when he says, in a discussion of “Narrow Way,” that “Dylan’s ‘bleeding wound’ at the heart of everything American once again, then, is race”—the phrase stemming from a speech Henry Clay gave in 1850 about the bleeding wounds “related to slavery that needed healing if the United States was to survive” (211). The Compromise of 1850 did not stanch the wounds. Nor, as we now know all too well, did the Civil War itself.
The word Polito favors for Dylan’s late song style is collage, which is good and painterly—I’ve always thought of Dylan’s style during these days as mosaic, because I like the intimation of Moses in the word as well as its Greek root meaning belonging to the Muses. However, Dylan himself has devoted much time to painting recently, and with increasing acclaim. Collage has the feeling of creative development done with paper and brushes and pens. It’s also a movie term, and Polito chronicles in detail Dylan’s use of film scenes, particularly in his Deep Focus paintings.
Dylan on the road is the continually moving Dylan—for Polito, moving in every sense of the word. Polito interlaces his own concert experiences over the years with Dylan’s performances, and his own experiences listening to as advance copy of “Love and Theft” just blocks away as the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City happened—as well as his later determination that “the raw, cheerless tone of Masked and Anonymous . . . carries the distinctive whiff of a toxic post-9/11 fume” (96).
The alphabetical chapters start to move more slowly by Q, a happy grab-bag of quotations, and S, for Sinatra and Shadows in the Night (and its two related covers albums). I giggled at V for Venice and the Victoria’s Secret / Adriana Lima in angel wings / “Love Sick”—and also enjoyed Polito’s discussion in this chapter of Dylan’s looks and changing sense of fashion. W is for weird, and the speculation about Dylan’s health and frailty, his apparent “performing in pain” and “sore hands” (286) seemed weird in this chapter to me: he’s in his middle eighties now, and whatever health issues he has experienced or is experiencing, he’s clearly capable of spending his time on stage, and enjoying it, too. X has the potential to be the most Dylanesque of chapters, in that X is the universal variable, and indeed it covers some of the most bizarre Dylan moments of the last thirty years (except for Soy Bomb, a notable omission).
After the Flood ends with Z. Bob Dylan keeps on keeping on. When asked in May 1966 for the day he’d be arriving in Ireland, Dylan replied “I don’t know. I’m just told to be at a certain place and I go there. I’m just an entertainer. I don’t ask questions.” Still on the road, still throwing change-ups every evening, still seeing friends once more along the way—recently hanging backstage in Santa Barbara with bluesman par excellence Eric Burdon, who is almost exactly the same age (born May 11, 1941) and whose rise to fame with The Animals and “House of the Rising Sun” (in an arrangement borrowed from Dylan’s 1961 recording borrowed from Dave Van Ronk’s) was coincident with Dylan’s own. Dylan lives his many lives, laying down no weary tunes but freshening what’s old and still writing what’s new—and he seems happy to be doing it. The gentleness and lyricism of his latest shows are happily apparent, particularly to young people and new fans who haven’t heard him live—listening to the words, talking about them after the gigs. That’s the way. Dylan follows no alphabet from A to Z. He loops from letter to letter, tosses all 26 in the air and has Dadaist fun with where they come down. The chapters of After the Flood could run this way, too: it’s a fine book for dipping into time and again.
