“That’s my story, but not where it ends.” — Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”
Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in the American story. But it is, of course, a narrative of second chances. And there’s no more of an American story than Bob Dylan, whose second act may be more memorable than his first.
Robert Polito — poet, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning biographer, and former director of creative writing at the New School — has written what may be the (anti) definitive book on Dylan’s second act. After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace covers the years from “Time Out of Mind” in 1997 through “Rough and Rowdy Ways” in 2020. It’s structured as an abecedarium — twenty-six chapters, A to Z — because Polito explains, he wanted a form that acknowledged the limits of what anyone can know about Dylan. There is no rosebud sled buried in the Tulsa archive. So an alphabet book as good as we are gonna get.
Digging into Dylan’s Tulsa archive, Polito found much blood on the tracks — multiple drafts for every work, songs ripped up and redistributed line by line. The freewheeling spontaneity of Dylan’s first act, Polito suggests, was replaced by something more deliberate: an American folk process merging into literary modernism. A hostage to his own memory palace, Dylan weaves Civil War poetry, Ovid’s exile poems, Homer, and nineteenth-century speeches into songs that know more than any single listener can interpret.
Polito argues that “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is Bob Dylan’s real Nobel Prize speech — his self-reflection on his own art, delivered in his own forms and idioms. This pinnacle of Dylan’s second act is his story, but not where it ends.
