As far as I know, Bob Dylan hasn’t spoken much about Nathaniel Hawthorne. For example, he’s not mentioned at all in Chronicles: Volume One. We know that Hawthorne’s friend Herman Melville is a major influence for Dylan, but there is less to go on in the case of Hawthorne himself.

One exception is the cover story of SPIN from December of 1985, the year that Empire Burlesque was released. There, he speaks of Hawthorne by name, saying: “I once read a book of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letters to some girl, and they were extremely private and personal, and I didn’t feel there was any of myself in those letters, but I could identify with what he was saying.”^[1]

What is Dylan talking about here? The most likely candidate is Hawthorne’s love letters to Miss Sophia Peabody, whom he would later marry.

But it is also worth noting that Hawthorne’s most famous work has the word “letter” in the title as well. I mean, of course, The Scarlet Letter. In that connection, what Dylan says immediately after, seemingly having left Hawthorne behind, is extremely suggestive:

A lot of myself crosses over into my songs. I’ll write something and say to myself, I can change this, I can make this not so personal, and at other times I’ll say, I think I’ll leave this on a personal level, and if somebody wants to peek at it and make up their own minds about what kind of character I am, that’s up to them.

Other times I might say, well, it’s too personal, I think I’ll turn the corner on it, because why do I want somebody thinking about what I’m thinking about, especially if it’s not to their benefit.

Compare this to what Hawthorne says about his own authorial persona in “The Custom-House,” which serves as the introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Here is its opening paragraph:

It is a little remarkable, that—though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends—an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the reader—inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine—with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now—because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion—I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years’ experience in a Custom-House. The example of the famous “P. P., Clerk of this Parish,” was never more faithfully followed. The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates. Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader’s rights or his own.

Notice that Dylan and Hawthorne express the same basic dialectic of revelation and concealment, beautifully summed up by Hawthorne’s (as far as I know, unique) description of his ideal and intended audience: a friend, but one who is not too close of a friend, one with whom you share some things–even seemingly personal things–but not too many of them, and not too much, while “keep[ing] the inmost Me behind its veil.” If this doesn’t serve as about as perfect a description of Dylan’s songwriting as one could come up with, I don’t know what does.

But I would go a step further.

Dylan has always cultivated a quintessentially American–and often an old, nineteenth century American–authorial voice. And few authorial voices are more quintessentially American than Hawthorne’s. Thus it would be no surprise if he’s pulling from Hawthorne, whom he had just mentioned, in this instance.

We can restate this as general principle and particular application. There is no art without tradition. That is the general principle. Dylan’s songs often seem to be spoken by revivified ghosts, stepping out from the darkness for a moment like the shades in Homer’s Underworld before disappearing again. That is the particular application.

I think we catch a glimpse of the process by which that general principle is transformed into particular application in Dylan’s statement of his own authorial self-understanding in this interview, where even his comments about what is “personal” seem to be, not “authentic” (to use the parlance of our time), but borrowed from someone else.

Even the revelation, then, turns out to be a further concealment. And maybe that is the key to the “personal” in Dylan’s songs.