Positively 4th Street

Dear Erik,

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Let me just say that, for a man of your advanced years, you're remarkably sharp.

You did, however, omit Dylan's response to Fariña's advice that "all you need to do, man, is start screwing Joan Baez." "According to Neil," Hajdu writes, "Dylan joked, 'That's a good idea--I think I'll do that. But I don't want her singing none of my songs.' " She did, of course, on stage with him and on record by herself. He might have had a point, but to my ears her Dylan covers are among her most interesting (and least irritating) work.

Underneath Hajdu's lucid, scrupulously reported, and sometimes maddeningly detached fusion of biography and cultural history, you can glimpse a tangle of relationships worthy of Henry James, if Henry James' characters wore blue jeans and work shirts and frequented hootenannies rather than formal dinner parties and afternoon teas. At the time of his death, Fariña was apparently set to begin writing "a memoir of his experiences with Mimi, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan," and one imagines that it would have been a lot kinkier and more revealing--if infinitely less trustworthy--than Positively 4^th Street.

Though she is, as you say, something of a cipher (I might have said ingenue--a Maisie or a Daisy Miller, to continue the James analogy), Mimi Baez Fariña is the most sympathetic character in the book. In his acknowledgments, Hajdu singles her out for special thanks ("only my wife, who lived with this book and me for the past five years, was more essential to its coming to be"), and he writes about her with a warmth and protectiveness missing from his ironical, acid-tinged portraits of her husband, big sister, and quasi-brother-in-law. But I agree that the Richard-and-Bob pas de deux of camaraderie, artistic rivalry, and (implicit) sexual competition is the narrative core of the book. The two of them are like twin magnetic charges oscillating between repulsion and attraction. Both appear as absolute egoists and prodigious bullshit artists. Fariña, a Brooklyn boy of Cuban-Irish descent, claimed to be an ex-IRA gun-runner with a metal plate in his head. Dylan, a shopkeeper's son from Hibbing, Minn., spun out all kinds of guff for credulous journalists and hangers-on: "he was an orphan, born in Chicago or raised in a New Mexico orphanage or in various foster homes; his Semitic features were the mark of Sioux Indian blood in the family; one of his uncles was a gambler, another a thief ... he had played the piano on Elvis Presley's early records."

Now the Elvis reference is interesting: This was not a name to drop in the anti-rock 'n' roll, ideological climate of the Village folk scene. But Dylan had grown up obsessed with Buddy Holly and James Dean, and one thing he and Fariña shared--which most of their pious peers did not--was a respect for the vitality of pop culture. They were not, to use a phrase from the period, moldy figs. Hajdu quotes Fariña: "We all grew up with ... radio music--it was not traditional music. Only when popular music was in its very worst period did we turn to folk music . ... The '30s, the highways and open and open roads, the Big West, the southern mountains, the blues, labor unions, Childe [sic] ballads--all ... made their mark, almost as if Chuck Berry and Batman had really nothing to do with who we were. But the paradox was implicit: What the hell were rebels doing looking for roots? And how long would people with contemporary poetic sensibilities be content to sing archaic material?"

Dylan, in his cryptic manner, makes similar points in the interviews Hajdu quotes. So these two guys knew something was happening, and, more than a lot of their peers and fans, they did know what it was. But that hardly made their relationship harmonious. Each suspects the other of dilettantism: Fariña, struggling to get a contract for Been Down So Long, is dismayed to see Dylan waltz into the Macmillan offices and snag a contract for his mishmash prose poetry on the strength of his reputation as a singer. (The result was Tarantula, which only a truly hard-core Dylanolator will claim to have read.) After that, Dylan starts styling himself a writer first and foremost, and Fariña, to Dylan's eventual irritation, picks up the dulcimer and starts making like a folk singer.

Like any premature death, Fariña's leaves some lingering and unanswerable questions. His albums with Mimi strike me as charming period documents studded with a few memorable songs ("Pack up Your Sorrows"). His novel seems to me very much in the shadow of William Gaddis, Pynchon, and the Beats, but it's a lot of fun to read, and you wonder what he might have done if he'd lived long enough to find a mature voice. It's possible, of course, given his Peter Pan-ish fecklessness, that maturity would have evaded him.

And there I must end. Everybody's gone but you and me, and I can't be the last to leave.

Erik, this has been fun.

And may you stay forever young.

Tony

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This week, Slate's Book Clubbers assess David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña. Click here for an explanation of our format and here to buy the book.

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