Clinton Heylin thinks the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” (from 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan) are not very good.^[1] I disagree. But that’s not important right now.

Every verse of that song, later unforgettably covered by The Byrds, ends like this:

Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Where did Dylan get the idea for that? Did he make it up? Heylin connects Dylan’s earlier version of these lines (“Ah, but that’s when I was older, I’m growin’ younger now”) to the old Scottish folk song “Young but Daily Growin” (also know as “The Trees They Grow So High“).^[2] Maybe, though that wouldn’t apply so well to the final form of the lyrics; and in that song, the man does not grow younger in any case, but the opposite. He’s young, and growing older. That is the customary order of things. It’s the reversal of the normal order that is surprising in Dylan’s song.

However, there is an interesting parallel for that reversal of expectations–not in a folk song,^[3] but in an interview T.S. Eliot gave in 1958. Here, too, there is a Scottish connection: The interview (with Henry Hewes, Saturday Review of Literature, 13 September 1958) occurred in Edinburgh on the occasion of the staging of Eliot’s new play, The Elder Statesman, at the Edinburgh Festival.

In the second paragraph, we find the following:^[4]

“Love reciprocated is always rejuvenating,” Eliot says, leaning forward in his armchair. “Before my marriage I was getting older. Now I feel younger at seventy than I did at sixty. Any man if he is alone becomes more aware of being lonely as he ages. An experience like mine makes all the more difference because of its contrast with the past.”

The piece concludes with Eliot’s statement that he does not take himself so seriously anymore:

“At seventy I laugh at myself more than I did when I was young,” he says, “and conversely I am less and less worried about making a fool of myself.”

The first of these quotations is quite close to Dylan in wording and sentiment: The paradox is one of aging into greenness. “Now that I am older than I was, I am actually younger than I was.” This results, for both of them, in what is expressed in the second quotation: “I don’t feel like I have to be such a Serious Person now.” This was certainly Dylan’s desire in 1964; he no longer wanted to be anyone’s political spokesman (if he ever did).

(Commenting on the cover of the album, Paul Williams says that “[Dylan] looks exactly like a painter contemplating a completed canvas, brow furrowed, serious about his work, meditative and quietly proud–and where’s the child-face of the last three albums? This is the adult Dylan. He’s ‘younger than that now’ because he no longer needs to pretend to be old.”^[5] I’m not sure this gets at what is going on. Yes, Dylan is “serious about his work,” but not as he had been before. We might we say he’s “serious about his work,” but less serious about himself and how others view him. And “not pretending to be old” doesn’t make one young, so there must be more to Dylan’s paradox than that. See further below.)

“Come on,” you may be saying. And, sure, I grant that the Eliot bit in question would be a pretty obscure allusion for Dylan to make on “My Back Pages.” But is it possible? Actually, I think it is, and not just in the way it’s technically possible that Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert will make a funny joke tonight.

Dylan, as is well known, explicitly name-checks Eliot the next year in “Desolation Row” (“And Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot/Fighting in the Captain’s tower”). But Sean Wilentz notes the influence of Eliot already in 1964 on the album in question, writing that

Another Side of Bob Dylan is not uniformly successful in its experiments with what Ginsberg described as “join[ing] images as they are joined in the mind”–efforts influenced by sources as diverse as Japanese haiku and what T. S. Eliot called the “telescoping of images.”^[6]

And in Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan, discussing his collaboration with Archibald MacLeish, says,

(In his letter, he made mention of some lines in a song of mine that places T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound symbolically fighting in a captain’s tower.) “Pound and Eliot were too scholastic, weren’t they?” he says. What I know about Pound is that he was a Nazi sympathizer in World War II and did anti-American broadcasts from Italy. I never did read him. I liked T. S. Eliot. He was worth reading.^[7]

His familiarity with Eliot, it seems likely, predated his arrival in New York in 1961. In reminiscing about John Pankake (a founder of the zine Little Sandy Review) elsewhere in Chronicles, whom he knew from his Minnesota days, Dylan refers to “intellectual types…discussing poetic differences between T. S. Eliot and e.e. cummings.”^[8]

In yet another passage in Chronicles, Dylan even uses Eliot’s poetry to describe his feelings during his early days in New York:

It was freezing cold. I put my hands in my pockets and we headed off towards 6th Avenue. There was a lot of action and people on the street and I watched them go by. T. S. Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to and fro, and everybody taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away. That’s what it looked like that night and often would for some time to come.^[9]

The referent is not clear, but one might take it as a recombination of “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo” from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the last section of Part I of The Waste Land, with the latter being the more prominent:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.[10]

As it happens, this passage Chronicles actually alludes to “My Back Pages” via Nietzsche just after what I quoted above:

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche talks about feeling old at the beginning of his life…I felt like that, too.”

And this, in fact, is more or less what Eliot says in his own youthful poem, the aforementioned “Prufrock”: “I grow old…I grow old…/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Like the Dylan of Another Side, Eliot was in his 20s when he wrote that.

So Dylan was thinking in the 60s and continued to think into the 2000s about T.S. Eliot. Fine. But where would he have found the article from the Saturday Review? According to Chronicles (84), Dylan was spending a lot of time in the New York Public Library in the early 60s. In particular, he mentions reading (old) newspapers on microfilm. Maybe he came across this issue while browsing through the other periodicals. Even before that, he mentions going to the Minneapolis public library to look for Folkways records (246). His Minneapolis period began in 1959, the year after Eliot’s play was staged and the interview came out, and the same year that the play was published. Maybe he came across it there, and it lodged in his steel-trap memory to emerge a few years later.

We may never know, of course. But even without the biographical details, the verbal parallel noted at the outset is suggestive of allusion to Eliot’s words, and with the biographical details there are plausible paths to reconstruct how Dylan might have come across them. Furthermore, they are thematically similar enough to the repeated lines in “My Back Pages” to warrant reflection.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s good enough to think with.

Update

Paul Keers of the T.S. Eliot Society of the United Kingdom has pointed out to me the real source of the Eliot allusion in Chronicles discussed above (“T. S. Eliot wrote a poem once where there were people walking to and fro, and everybody taking the opposite direction was appearing to be running away”). It’s from his play, The Family Reunion, Part II, Scene II, where Agatha says to Amy:

In a world of fugitives
The person taking the opposite direction
Will appear to run away

There is perhaps a bit of Dylanesque misdirection here, calling the play a “poem,” though, on the other hand, it is a verse play, so it is a poem after all.

Mr. Keers is indisputably correct about the attribution. Or could we say “the primary attribution”? I wonder about secondary echoes. For not all the words in the allusion come from The Family Reunion. “[T]o and fro” is not there, and sounds, curiously like the “come and go” of “Prufrock.” An allusion to The Waste Land seems less likely, though the idea of watching an urban crowd is memorably stated there, and is not present in The Family Reunion.

In any case, I’m very grateful to know the source. Looking into it made me want to say a bit more about Dylan and The Family Reunion, which I hope to do in a future post.