Scott Warmuth, who has written elsewhere in great detail on some surprising apparent sources for certain lines in Bob Dylan songs (e.g., the poetry of Henry Timrod) has written a post at the Expecting Rain forum itemizing some instances in Dylan’s memoir Chronicles where it appears that he was drawing on phrases used in a certain 1961 edition of TIME magazine.

Now, the question that might occur first is: How did he find this out and is it actually true? That other fine writer on things-Dylan, Fred Bals, pointed out in the same message-thread that some word matches can be confirmed through the Google Books database. (Scott later confirmed that this is how he came up with his findings.)

So, the real meat of what Scott has discovered in this case, it seems to me, resides in a number of phrases on pages 87 through 90 of Chronicles: The description of Vietnam’s city of Hanoi as having been turned by the French into the “brothel-studded Paris of the Orient.”(Note: The quotation marks there are in Dylan’s version.) Further description of Hanoi in the present (i.e. circa 1961, under Ho Chi Minh’s control) as grubby and cheerless. The people are described by Dylan as dressing in Chinese shapeless jackets.

Those same phrases all appear in an article about Vietnam in a 1961 edition of TIME magazine, as discovered by Scott. The Google Books database indicates that it was written by Henry Robinson Luce, but I’m not sure that’s the case. (Luce founded TIME along with a man named Briton Hadden in 1923. It seems unlikely that Mr. Luce was writing articles on Vietnam for the magazine in 1961 — though what do I know?)

So what was Dylan doing here, and is it plagiarism, as some people are saying? (I just called Yogi Berra for a comment, thinking he’d have something relevant to say, and he told me: “Deja-vu all over again.” That guy always has the right words.) Let’s allow this: In those particular passages in Chronicles, Dylan has stepped aside from telling his own story to instead inject a little bit of what was in the air circa 1961. He uses these phrases: “in the news,” “there’d be articles,” “the newspapers made it sound as if,” and “the press reported.” It is a different voice he is adopting here; after all, it’s not as if he made a secret trip to Hanoi to report on the latest commie clothes fashions. He is implicitly referring to what he would have been reading in the news.

What he doesn’t tell us is that in writing about this time, he must have been using (somehow or other) that particular 1961 edition of TIME magazine to refresh his memory and provide specifics. Did he visit a libary and look at microfilm, like he describes himself doing in the early 1960s in reading about the Civil War era? Who knows?

The other references to things in that magazine that Scott has ferreted out seem to me to be less weighty than the ones above, but they do support the assertion that Dylan had to have been using that edition of TIME as a resource, and some articles in it also likely jogged his memory on other things.

In the case of the descriptions of Vietnam above, this is my opinion: Dylan was correct to put the phrase “brothel-studded Paris of the Orient” in quotation marks. He should have continued the practice, and also put those other descriptive phrases from the same article in quotation marks. A footnote or reference to the author of the article would also have been appropriate, in my view. The fact that these things were not done indicates a breakdown in the writing and editing process. Since I don’t know exactly what that process was, and how many stages it had, I can’t know where it broke down. I would say that the editor of Dylan’s next volume of memoirs ought to be very careful to pay attention to this kind of thing.

This is different to songwriting, as others have observed, because Dylan here is using someone else’s prose writing in a work of prose himself, and using the words in the same context that the original author did (i.e. to describe Vietnam) but is leaving the impression that they are his own work. I personally think, in this case, that this is a mistake.

If someone took some of my finer phrases (should any exist) and re-used them in this way, I would be, at a minimum, highly annoyed. And I don’t believe it would matter if they did it tomorrow or if they did it forty years from now. In my writing on this very website, I don’t get paid (except for pennies from Google ads, tiny Amazon commissions and the occasional donation from some kind and generous souls) but at least, if you’re going to use my words somewhere, give me credit for them! The author of that article in TIME may not have been Emily Bronté (I’m so tired of using Hemingway in that context) but he or she produced those words through his or her own sweat. The writer may be remembered for little else, forty-eight years hence, but at least give the guy or gal credit for some apt words about Hanoi. It’s not much to ask.

People will disagree about these things as they already are doing, and as they always do. There are different ways of looking at each instance of “Bob’s borrowings.” To me, they’re not all the same. As said, I think these examples amount to a mistake, in more ways than one. On the other hand, a reader who alerted me to this story says that he thinks Bob expects to be found out in this way, and that he’s in some sense joking around with his readers. I think there are ways that can be true when what’s involved is more like an allusion to a relatively well-known work of literature, but I’m not so sure it can apply in a case where he’s taking phrases from an obscure work of journalism published over forty years ago.

It doesn’t destroy my estimation of Dylan, and I hope some of those people who are reacting in that way might reflect (and repent!), because my estimation of Dylan is based on countless brilliant and deeply moving songs and performances that could not ever simply be dismissed as having been “stolen” from others and therefore invalid. He has his influences and his sources, and there is exhaustive information out there on what those have been, but what he’s come up with by combining those sources with his own inspiration is not like anything that anyone else has come up with, and it is in the end his own remarkable creative achievement (with due thanks to his Creator).

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As an afterthought: While focusing on all of these copied phrases, it’s worth remembering again the interesting thing that Dylan was doing in this passage on Vietnam. He’s doing what few enough people have done ever since the days of the Vietnam War protest era, and that is to remember that there was a history in that country before the United States got deeply involved in the war. Vietnam was not a place of sweetness and light before the U.S. soldiers arrived; the problems there had been building for a long time, and the U.S. motives in ultimately getting involved were far from being the most ignoble.

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