Book Review: Lost and bound

Published on Friday 9 January 2009 14:06

Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript

Text by Bob Dylan, Photographs by Barry Feinstein

Simon & Schuster, 141pp, 14.99

THE BOB DYLAN ARCHIVES ARE like an enormous attic so full of odds and ends that even Dylan himself doesn't know what's in there. Just when you think the place has been emptied out, something new – a bootleg tape, some video footage, a collection of sketches and doodles – comes to light. The newest unboxing, which Dylan, in characteristic fashion, had forgotten all about, is a series of 23 poems he wrote in the early 1960s to accompany a collection of Hollywood photographs by Barry Feinstein.

Either half of this collaboration would be worth having, but combined, under the quizzical title Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, they add up to one of the oddest coffee-table books to come along in a while.

That "f" in "foto-rhetoric" leads you to anticipate a volume in tabloidy, Hollywood Confidential style, and there are a couple of glimpses of weird Kenneth Anger-like Hollywood. But most of the photographs are more moody, even arty, than they are leering or sensational. Feinstein went on to become the court photographer of rock'n'roll royalty, but in the early Sixties he was working as a studio flunky for the mogul Harry Cohn, and he took these pictures backstage on movie sets or driving around town after hours.

They're suffused with a kind of anti-glamour that was probably meant to be tough and unflinching at the time but now seems almost tender. There are pictures of discarded props, spoiled film, headless mannequins, out-of-work actors and actresses. They include a gaunt and weary Judy Garland; Bette Davis, trowelled with makeup, dragging on a cigarette between takes; and Jayne Mansfield, blowsy and overweight, not many years before she died.

The dust jacket, in case you missed the message, shows the crumbling "Holly-wood" sign in the Los Angeles Hills photographed from behind. Feinstein's Hollywood is a land of make-believe, and now, in the bleached-out sunlight, its best days are clearly past.

What Dylan brings to this vision is a kind of antic surrealism, at times reminiscent of the liner notes he wrote for Highway 61 Revisited. In an introductory Q&A, he is reluctant to call the text poetry. "If they are poems, or if they are not poems ... does it really matter?" he says. "And who would it matter to?" But they certainly look and read like poems, in tense, narrow lines, of just one or two beats sometimes, that stack on the page, Billy Collins says in the introduction, like "a teetering column of poker chips". The style seems learned partly from the Beats, terse and jangly, with no capitalisation and lots of dropped letters:

off an runnin

runner up

bound t go

bust the top

just t find out

what i'm missin.

But the voice is reliably Dylanesque:

from the outside

lookin in

every finger wiggles

the doorway wears long pants

an slouches

no rejection

all's fair

in love and selection.

Occasionally a poem will explicitly comment on the accompanying photograph. The one next to a picture of a heartbroken Marlene Dietrich at Gary Cooper's funeral, for example, reads:

t dare not ask your sculpturer's name

with glance back hooked, time's hinges halt

as curiosity's doom inks beauty's claim

that sad-eyed he shall turn

t salt.

More often the poems take off on the theme of a photo or enact a scenario (a casting-office interview, say) suggested by it. And sometimes the relation of text to picture is pretty oblique. Without Luc Sante's explanatory note in the foreword, you would probably never guess that the last poem, illustrating several pictures of Academy Award-winning actors holding their Oscars, was inspired by the time Dylan, receiving an award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald.

The poem next to a photo of a dancing Judy Garland imagines, for some reason, a fight between a man and the husband of a woman he has been ogling. Go figure.

Most of these poems, it must be said, read like the work of just a few moments. They lack the complexity and emotional power of some of the great Dylan song lyrics, which, as Christopher Ricks demonstrated in Dylan's Visions of Sin, really can stand comparison to Marlowe, Keats and Tennyson. They're mostly riffs, the poetic equivalent of scale playing. On the other hand, you can read these little verses without humming the tune in your head, and they allow you to appreciate Dylan's verbal dexterity – his gift for rhyme and free association – in isolation, as it were. This is the kind of quickness and improvisatory brilliance that allowed those great lyrics to happen.

Nor is the text of Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric entirely rhetorical. The best poems add up to a wary meditation on fame and celebrity, on the disguises we all put on – themes to which he would later return. When Dylan wrote these poems he could not have guessed that he would become one of the most photographed musicians ever, and yet his engagement with Feinstein's comfortless vision of Hollywood may explain why in photographs Dylan himself so seldom smiles, so often looks wary, so rarely looks unposed. He's like those Plains Indians who feared that the camera could steal your soul.