Note: I originally wrote this piece, on the links between a Bob Dylan song and a Herman Melville novel, a dozen years ago, before his Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was still a ‘song and dance man’. It was written in a compressed form for a specialist Bob Dylan magazine. Here I’ll open it out into a more general look at both writers.

1) Herman Melville was born in 1819 into a patrician Yankee family, left school at eleven, in his early twenties worked on ships (whalers, cargo, warships), and from age 26 to 30 published five seafaring novels, their popularity in inverse ratio to how much of what he really wanted to write was in them.
He spent his early thirties adding to his family and pondering how to survive financially, while writing the books he wanted to write, and failing.
He published Moby-Dick (1851), which sold poorly, and Pierre (1852), “the ravings of  mad man” wrote one reviewer. After a period writing, anonymously, stories for magazines, the stories for which he is known (Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, The Piazza) in 1857 he published The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade. It was badly received by critics and public, and at 38 his literary career was over. He was a customs inspector for eighteen years, while writing poetry. Nathanial Hawthorne quotes him as saying in 1856, ‘he had pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’.  Little remembered at his death in 1891, the revival of his reputation began at his centenary, and he was soon acknowledged as one of America’s greatest writers.

The Confidence-Man is a novel in which, on board a steamboat, The Fidèle, heading down the Mississippi to New Orleans on April Fool’s Day, a succession of tricksters, confidence men (or possibly one man adopting various guises? As seems from the title) attempt to gull a series of American ‘types’, by inviting them to put their confidence in him: to buy patent medicines, invest in fraudulent businesses, donate to non-existent charities. ‘Confidence’ is used variously to mean faith, trust, gullibility, and hope. It derives from contemporary news reports of a William Thompson, who swindled victims by asking them to express ‘confidence’ in him by giving him money. It satirises the ‘wild west’, life at the fringes of American civilisation, where identities can be adopted, can’t be disproved, trust rather than connection is the necessary currency, while scepticism is equally necessary. There are several hints that the confidence man is the devil, drawing his ‘marks’ to damnation. It was much influenced by Hawthorne’s Celestial Railroad (itself a satire on Bunyan’s A Pilgrim’s Progress), at the end of which the pilgrims transfer from the railroad onto a ferry-boat to cross the river to the Celestial City – when the narrator reveals it is crossing to Hell. The Fidèle can be seen as that boat. Although some of the figures are Christ-like enough to suggest that Melville is sceptical of all ‘confidence’ figures.

2) Bob Dylan was born in 1941. In three years, from 1963, he released six albums that changed popular music. After a motor cycle accident in 1966 he withdrew from touring, and spent his late twenties and early thirties adding to his family and pondering how to negotiate his family-, creative- and love-lives, and his own ambitiousness. As evidenced in his released records, and the recordings he made with the Hawks (who became The Band) in the Big Pink basement in Woodstock. Some examples, all ambiguous – and Dylan’s ambiguity is complicated by the ‘you’ he addresses in his songs being variously a woman, the listener, God, and even fame itself – but, the way I see them.

Doubts about marriage and family life:
Whoo-ee, ride me high
Tomorrow’s the day my bride’s gonna come
Oh, oh, we’re gonna fly
Down in the easy chair.
(Dylan, in an easy chair …?)

Strap yourself to a tree with roots
You aint goin nowhere.

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife and catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids call me pa
That must be what it’s all about.

Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream
Time passes slowly and then fades away.

Doubts about who or what is his ‘true love’:
Grandma says, ‘boy, go follow your heart
You’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine
Don’t you and your true love ever part.’
I been walking the road, I been living on the edge
I just have to cut lose before I reach the ledge
I’m going, I’m going, I’m gone.

Doubts about love itself as the highest priority:
I met somebody face to face and I had to remove my hat
She’s everything I need in love, but I can’t be swayed by that.
It frightens me the awful truth of how sweet life can be
But she ain’t gonna make a move, I guess it must be up to me.

And yet while realising that writing and performing are his true love, and acknowledging his desire for fame, his contempt for what goes with success and fame. In a song addressed to fame:
Heard your songs of freedom, and man forever stripped
Acting out his folly while his back is being whipped
Like a slave in orbit he’s beaten till he’s tame
All for a moment’s glory and it’s a dirty rotten shame.

Lady Luck who shines on me will tell you where it’s at
I hate myself for loving you, but I’ll soon get over that.

(As he demonstrated in his various ‘career moves’ that damaged his popularity.)

The pressures of ambition in the music business:
Oh the hours I’ve spent in the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wasting time.
Oh those mighty kings of the jungle I can hardly stand to see em
Yes it’s sure been a long hard climb.

The temptation, while still married, to rejoin the gypsies of touring musicians:
I went down to the lobby, to make a small call out
A pretty dancing girl was there, she began to shout
‘Go on back to see the gypsy, he can rid you of your fear
Bring you through the mirror – he did it in Las Vegas, he can do it here.’
Oh the lights were on the river shining from outside
I contemplated every move, or at least I tried.

In the ‘Basement Tape’ sessions he works through old songs, new songs. The anguish of the time (or perhaps the anguish that is Dylan) expressed in “I’m Not There (1956)”, a song summed up, exactly, by Google AI Overview(!), ‘incoherent yet profound, the words touch themes of being lost, changing identities, and feeling like a ghost, aligning with Dylan’s complex persona’. Each listener hears different words. Many think it his greatest song.

With Blood on the Tracks in 1975 he left the marriage and resumed his lifelong commitment to his art. Above all to being a touring musician. “He isn’t on stage for you to look at him; he’s on stage so he can look at you.” Which is why he’s still on the road at 84.

“Blind Willie McTell” was recorded in 1983, for Infidels, but left off the album. Unknown until it appeared in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volume 1-3, it was quickly acknowledged as one of his finest songs. Asked why he left it off the album, he said, he ‘didn’t think I recorded it right’, although there are two excellent contrasting versions, on Volume 1-3 with Mark Knopfler on acoustic guitar, and on Volume 16 an electric version with Mick Taylor on slide guitar. He has also said ‘it never came out for me’, and ‘it was never developed fully.’ He has compared its release to going to Monet’s house and grabbing a half-finished painting and selling it to Monet fans. And yet he has acknowledged its finishedness by performing it live 257 times.
Perhaps he could imagine how this panoramic depiction of American history in five verses (fifteen lines) might have developed.
As it is, it incorporates the Mexican war, the ‘Indian’ wars, Native American dispossession, slavery (in two devastating lines), tent shows, Black women (so important to Dylan), bootlegging, the penal system through which so much of American song tradition has come, religion …
Equally, perhaps he was acknowledging that he could never perform it as well as he imagined the sweet-voiced blues man singing it.

I seen the arrow on the doorpost saying, ‘this land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem.’
I travelled through east Texas where many martyrs fell.
And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Wille McTell.

Well, I heard that hoot owl singing as they were taking down the tents.
The stars above the barren trees was his only audience.
Them charcoal gypsy maidens can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

See them big plantations burning, hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming, see the ghosts of slavery ships.
I can hear them tribes moaning, hear that undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

There’s a woman by the river with some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire bootlegged whiskey in his hand.
There’s a chain gang on the highway I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

Well, God is in His heaven and we all want what’s His
But power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.
I’m gazing out [at?] the window of the Saint James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

I’ve no idea if Dylan has read The Confidence-Man. But he references Melville’s “Captain Arab” (sic) and the whale in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”. And of course (writing now) his Nobel Prize Lecture refers to the influence of Moby-Dick on him.
He writes in Chronicles (p184), of spending hours in the early 60s in the New York Public Library, reading newspapers “from 1855 to about 1865”. The Confidence-Man was published in 1857.
I believe there are enough parallels and echoes for these two great critics of the society in which they lived, both of them popular and then misunderstood, rich, complex, baroque in their styles and vocabularies, funny, deadly serious, and pessimistic, to be considered together.

Look at the full title: The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. At his Philharmonic Hall concert in 1964, after stunning his adoring audience with a new song, “Gates of Eden”, as if fearing he’s losing them, Dylan ad-libs, ‘Don’t let that scare you. It’s just Halloween.’ (Laughter.) ‘I have my Bob Dylan mask on.’ (More laughter.) ‘I’m mask – erading.’ (Applause, he’s got them back.)
On the album’s booklet is a photograph of Dylan in front of a joke-shop window advertising “Large Selection of Masks and Wigs”.
Of ‘Tangled up in Blue‘ he says he was dealing with ‘the concept of time, and the way characters change from first to third person and you’re never sure which character is talking.’
And of course in his appearance and persona, through his career, Dylan has out-shape-shifted Melville’s shapeshifter.

The first verse:
I seen the arrow on the doorpost says “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem.”

Why ‘Jerusalem’? Of course Dylan is proudly, if questioningly, Jewish. (Most startlingly in Key West (Philosopher Pirate), when he compares his bar mitzvah to being ‘forced to marry a prostitute’, referencing the Book of Hosea). Michael Gray, in The Song and Dance Man III, p542, connects the line with the marking of Jewish houses in pogroms, and at Passover.
But for this most American song, I suggest an American source.
On p.43 of The Confidence-Man, the shapeshifter tries to interest a wealthy young man in investing in New Jerusalem, ‘“the new and thriving city, so called, in northern Minnesota. It was originally founded by certain fugitive Mormons. Hence the name. It stands on the Mississippi. Here, here is the map,” producing a roll. “There – there, you see are the public buildings – here the landing – there the park – yonder the botanic gardens – and this, this little dot here, is a perpetual fountain, you understand. You observe there are twenty asterisks. Those are for the lyceums. They have lignum vitae rostrums.” “Are all these buildings now standing?” “All standing – bona fide.”’ Of course it doesn’t exist. When he sees the sophomore isn’t interested, he congratulates him for his sagacity, and for having purchased stock in the Black Rapids Coal Company – a questionable stock which the trickster, in another of his guises, had just sold to him! The trickster must always be shifting the ground.

But, to Dylan.
The Mississippi rises close to Hibbing. This utopian fantasy place is located near Dylan’s home town.
And running the length of the Mississippi is “the great river road”, “the blues highway”, Highway 61. That Dylan had memorialised in the title of his sixth album, against the incomprehension of the Columbia executives.
So, “Blind Willie McTell” is the song “Highway 61 Revisited”, revisited!
But instead of the larky, sixties’ sick humour of the original, it is a lament, like a New Orleans funeral dirge.
It closes the book (‘I’m closing the book on the pages and the text, I really don’t care what happens next’, he sings in 1974; by 1983 he does care) on sixties’ utopianism, and opens it on our times, when ‘power and greed and corruptible seed seem to be all that there is.’

But why does the arrow say this land is condemned? In Dylan’s (and my) childhood, the arrow thudding into the doorpost was the signal, in films, for the Indian attack. Followed by a cut, to smoking ruins and sprawled bodies.
One of the central tales in The Confidence-Man is ‘The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating’, an allegory in which the Indian represents the devil. It connects to the founding-father Puritans’ set belief that the Indians were snakes and devils. (See Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, 1702.) This was a necessary characterisation in order to justify America’s original sin, the displacement and destruction of the Native American population by the ‘Manifest Destiny’ (a term first used in 1845) of the immigrants’ right to the continent, from sea to shining sea.
Melville was in a minority in 1857 in regarding the indigenous population as people, with dignity and rights. Dylan, a keen student of Native American culture, recognises that original sin.

Another echo. In “I and I” (a song recorded in the same sessions as “Blind Willie McTell”, it’s title referencing both Ras Tafari (Jamaican Sly and Robbie are the drum and bass on the sessions), and Dylan’s embrace of Rimbaud’s ‘I is another’), the line: ‘I’ve made shoes for everyone, even you, while I still go barefoot.’
Which reads like a standard trope of the sensitive artist, suffering for the gifts he brings us.
But, return to The Confidence-Man, and the tale of China Aster, a candle-maker, “one whose trade would seem a subordinate branch of the parent craft and mystery of the hosts of heaven, to be the means, effectively or otherwise, of shedding some light through the darkness of a planet benighted.” (p178.) (Allegory alert!!)
China, honest but poor, is tricked and seduced into taking a loan by his wealthy friend Orchis, which leads to China’s bankruptcy and death. The treacherous Orchis is a shoemaker, “one of those whose calling is to defend the understandings of man from naked contact with the substance of things.” (p178.)
Yet another of Dylan’s many warnings not to trust him too far.

In “Gotta Serve Somebody”, the refrain: ‘It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody,’ echoes this exchange between a tough Missourian, speaking first, and the confidence man:
‘Who is your master, pray; or are you owned by a company?’
‘My master?’
‘Aye, for come from Maine or Georgia, you come from a slave-state, and a slave-pen, where the best breeds are bought up at any price, from a livelihood to the Presidency.’ (p97.)

The usual critical reading of The Confidence-Man is that he is the devil, or at least his representative. And indeed at the end of the book he snuffs out the last light and leads the gullible man into the darkness. However, a couple of the confidence man’s marks elude, and even best, him. I prefer to see him as an ingenious figure who tests every man, and every idea, to the limit. As Melville did, to his ultimate despair.

And I wonder if that isn’t now [written in 2013] the role that Dylan has adopted? His riverboat gambler get-up, his menacing gang (in the video for “Duquesne Whistle”).
And after the most recent concert of his that I saw, Bournemouth, October 2012, without thinking of writing this piece, I wrote in my diary: “On stage he’s both the old vaudevillian, playing the stage villain, and the dark magician, who knows the devil’s ways, and acts devilishly; not to engineer our fall, but to point them out, and give us at least a chance of evading his clutches.’

And although in his more recent songs and appearances he has adopted a late-Whitman patrician persona, specifically in this song, and more widely across his career, I see him as heir to Herman Melville, and The Confidence-Man.