Bob Dylan’s 1965 San Francisco press conference (which I believe is recreated in I’m Not There, though I’ve yet to see the film) was hard to sit through when I watched it for the first time on DVD a few nights ago. Dylan was young, twitchy, quite possibly stoned, and wavering between passive aggression and outright hostility. On a second viewing, I began to appreciate what was actually an extended performance piece that organized itself around the kinds of questions that reporters asked. Questions about the meaning of Dylan’s songs and lyrics were pushed off cagily. Anyone who asked about more practical matters — how many people in the band? do you ever sit in with rock musicians? — got a direct answer. As Dylan’s answers refined the distance between objective and subjective receptions of personality and self-presentation, I couldn’t help but think of 3 other quintessentially American self-promoters: Ben Franklin, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost.
Franklin’s autobiography is ostensibly a document for his own son, William, but in fact came to be seen by some as a model for practical virtue. In the earlier pages, Franklin writes of humility and vanity. As it happens, Franklin is anything but humble: his book by definition is a celebration of himself, and he concludes the autobiography by saying that he should be “proud of his humility.” Like Dylan, who insists that he has no idea why he has become popular, and tells reporters more than once that his aim is to be completely honest, we can’t really take Franklin seriously. We know that he’s a self-promoter, and that much of what he tells readers isn’t completely true, but we accept this as readily as we do any other form of advertising. Whitman and Frost also consciously set out to become famous, if not beloved figures, in spite of such caveats as Frost’s: “It’s for the world to say whether you’re a poet or not.” Frost knew he was a poet, and we should no more doubt that than we should believe that he was a namby-pamby nature lover. Whitman’s performance of himself extended to the open-necked shirt and hat that he wears for the fly-leaf portrait in Leaves of Grass, a demonstration of masculinity that undercuts the traditional image of the effete poet. Dylan’s own careful tailoring belies his image as a rough and ready singer of folk tunes.
Franklin, Whitman, Frost and Dylan I imagine as a motley foursome in a traveling American carnival, promising truth to visitors who line up to take part in what they know will be a confidence game.
