Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me by Blake Bailey-Skyhorse- April 2025-192 Pages

 

“Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book, about accusations of terrible behaviour and their effect on a book and its author, goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience."

Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer

“I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. However, I am also anxious about the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. As a civil libertarian, I am anxious because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.

Philip Roth

“The history of my discontent, as I remember it”

Philip Roth

“The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs up against establishment public opinion can be denounced and dismissed in like manner.”

David Walsh

When Blake Bailey’s excellent 900-page biography of the writer Philip Roth was published in 2021, it should have been the standard work on Roth’s life for some time to come. Unfortunately for Bailey, we were already amidst the #MeToo movement's vilification of Roth, his work and worldview. Roth was cognisant of the fact that some women had been abused, saying, “I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is a publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”[1]

Bailey became a casualty in this war against Roth for essentially defending Roth’s right to his worldview. Bailey fell afoul of his publishers' “morals charge” after accusations of sexual abuse were levelled at him via social media. Some of Bailey’s former eighth-grade students at Lusher High School in New Orleans came forward with allegations that he had groomed them for sex. Two women, including one of his former students at Lusher, subsequently accused him of rape.

Although no formal charges were made against Bailey, it did not stop his so-called friends in the literary scene, who “fell over one another”, disassociating themselves from Bailey. His biography was then pulped by his publisher, W.W.Norton, an act that is akin to book burning carried out by the Nazis in the 1930s.

As David Walsh wrote, “ In a significant act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them has come forward with any evidence to back up the claims. Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the essential works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir. In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” Overnight, Bailey has become a “non-person.” he has ceased to exist.[2]

Most of Bailey’s friends and fellow writers stayed silent when he was made a “non-person. It was not until the World Socialist Website marshalled some resistance that people started to speak out. Several prominent writers, historians, and film people contacted by the WSWS condemned W. W. Norton’s treatment of Bailey. Novelist, memoirist and short-story writer James Morrison wrote, “Even if Blake Bailey were charged, tried, and convicted of a crime, it would still be indefensible for W. W. Norton to pulp his book. Can American readers not have the option to think for themselves? The “#MeToo movement” might have accomplished something if it had facilitated the prosecution of cases involving harassment or assault. Still, it has resulted in something like its opposite: a bizarre spectacle of social panic, moral shaming, and public burning, based on unfounded accusations in the media. Norton’s cancellation of Bailey’s book is not the action of a free institution in a democratic society. It is the procedure of craven functionaries deep in a politburo.[3]

Author, editor and blogger Kathleen Spaltro said, “Thomas Aquinas clarified that the aesthetic value of art has nothing whatever to do with whether the artist is a good person. The artist may be a good person, or not, but that is the moral question faced by the artist as a person, not as an artist.

Film critic, film historian and author Jonathan Rosenbaum: Cancel culture, perhaps the most poisonous and befuddled offshoot of “political correctness,” is a totalitarian expression of impotence, not any real exercise of political power. It’s a way of saying that because one can’t defeat racism or misogyny or abuse in the real world, at its sources, one can pretend to defeat it symbolically, by canceling words, sounds, images and other forms of communication, thus pretending that the people and communicators one disapproves of can be “canceled” (i.e., ignored and suppressed). It’s an insult to the principles of free expression that can only be practised by defeated bigots who’ve given up on free expression and democratic processes, and by gamblers who prefer to cheat.”

It took a while for Bailey to understand what had happened to him. Canceled Lives is his attempt to process and collect his thoughts and to answer his detractors. Patrick Mullins describes the new book's journey: “Originally titled Repellent, it was scheduled to be published in April 2023. Speaking circumspectly, Bailey has explained that the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, objected to the inclusion of Bailey’s conversations with Roth in the manuscript, arguing that the publication of these exchanges, which supposedly made up the bulk of the book, would violate the agreement Bailey signed as Roth’s authorised biographer. And so Repellent was reworked, becoming Cancelled Lives, and Bailey’s dealings with Roth were transformed into an account of his father’s death braided with chapters narrating Bailey’s disgrace.”[4]

There are many themes running through Canceled Lives. One being Bailey’s sexual activity. Bailey was no angel, and some of his relationships were questionable at best. There seems to be a period in his life where his penis did most of the thinking, but this does not mean he deserved what happened to him.

He writes, “The worst of what I was accused of wasn’t true. I did nothing illegal and nothing vicious. I’m not a rapist, I did not deliberately groom anybody; these were long-time friends. You have enterprising reporters calling hundreds of your former students, hundreds of the people you’ve mentioned in your acknowledgements. People, for various reasons, are eager to get their shots”.

A strong theme of the book is death. Bailey discusses the life and early death of his older brother, Scott, who committed suicide in his early thirties after a life of drug addiction and crime. Bailey harshly describes Scott’s suicide as doing “himself and his loved ones a favour ”. Bailey spent a significant amount of time researching his book on Roth, so much so that he must have ended up with deep feelings for Roth.

He tells how he witnessed Roth’s final moments alongside Roth’s former lovers and closest friends surrounding his hospital deathbed. It is not surprising that the book provides little information about his relationship with Roth. Given how much he had to process in his own life and to come to terms with so many devastating attacks on him. Perhaps it is just as well, as he was while Roth was still alive, unable due to disclosure limitations imposed by the Roth estate on Bailey.

As Walsh intimates in his work on Bailey, most of the attacks on Bailey are less about his sexual proclivities and more to do with the fact that he wrote a perceptively objective biography of Roth and, in the end, defended both Roth and his political worldview against his detractors in the #MeToo movement.

In a recent video call, David Walsh spoke with Bailey about his new book, "The Sexual Witch Hunt," and democratic rights, as well as briefly discussing the subject matter of his various biographies. Bailey thanked the World Socialist Website for its support, saying, “You could be speaking for me, and you did, after everything blew up. I was enormously grateful for the courage of it. Very few people spoke up. People wrote me private notes expressing their outrage, or at least chagrin, about how viciously and relentlessly I was attacked. But I can’t think of anyone offhand who was as outspoken publicly as you were. And if I didn’t say it emphatically enough before, let me say now that I was very grateful for that.[5]

It is striking that the Trotskyist movement has been left to lead the defence of Bailey and his democratic rights in the pages of the World Socialist Website. The campaign to defend Bailey has cut across the right-wing attack on him led by the #MeToo movement. It is worth noting that the movement has been ably assisted by numerous pseudo-left media organisations that have joined the attacks on both Roth and Bailey. These so-called leftists have shown their support for banning books and removing them from bookshelves. The next logical step for these organisations will be to join the book burning.

Bailey’s new book, Cancelled Lives—My Father, My Scandal, and Me, is a stunning response to his detractors and slanderers, and it deserves a broad audience. Unlike too many of the #MeToo victims, Bailey has decided to fight and set the record straight. This is an entirely welcome and healthy development, a contribution to the cleansing of the cultural atmosphere. Bailey has the right to see the world as he sees fit.

 

 

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[1] www.the-tls.com/lives/autobiography/canceled-lives-blake-bailey-book-review-nat-segnit

[2] Book-burning comes to America-https:ww.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html

[3] Writers, biographers protest W.W. Norton’s decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth from print-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/04/bail-m04.html

[4] Okay, you’re hired-insidestory.org.au/okay-youre-hired/

[5] A conversation with Blake Bailey, Philip Roth biographer and author of Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me: “I said ... I’m not going to take this lying down”

Hiroshima by John Hersey – Penguin Modern Classics 208 pages 2001

 

“Such clouds had risen that there was a sort of twilight around … The day grew darker and darker,”

John Hersey 

“In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.”

James P Cannon[1]

The appearance of people was … well, they all had skin blackened by burns. … They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance, you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or back. … Many of them died along the road—I can still picture them in my mind, like walking ghosts. … They didn’t look like people of this world.

An eyewitness

“The question now being asked, quietly but nervously, in capitals around the world is, where will this end? The once-unthinkable outcome—actual armed conflict between the United States and China—now appears possible for the first time since the end of the Korean War. In other words, we are confronting the prospect of not just a new Cold War, but a hot one as well.”

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd

The 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima will be commemorated on August 6, 2025. This deliberate act of imperialist genocide will be forever etched in the memory of hundreds of millions of people as a war crime and a day that will live in infamy. However, despite the significant passage of time, the threat of global annihilation has stayed with us, and it is now openly talked about amongst the ruling elites around the world.[2]

Hiroshima is an extraordinarily well-written and vivid account of the complete and total annihilation of the city of Hiroshima. Hersey’s stunning piece of journalism reads like a novel. It is not surprising that it was voted the most important piece of American journalism of the 20th Century and deserves a wide readership as we come up to this 80th anniversary. Hersey was a pioneer of “New Journalism”, a movement that included the use of literary techniques in complex pieces in journalism. With the destruction from the bomb so complete, it must have crossed Hersey’s mind if there were any stories left to tell? Hersey answers in the affirmative. It is far from an easy read.

As Will Hersey (no relation) testifies, “It took me until this January, three-and-a-half decades later, to steel myself to find out. Hersey’s 30,000-word account of what happened to six survivors from moments just before 8.15 am on 5 August 1945 when the US Air Force B-29 Superfortress bomber “Enola Gay” dropped its 9,700lb uranium bomb — somewhat grotesquely nicknamed “Little Boy” — is told almost entirely through their eyes: “Dr Fujii hardly had time to think that he was dying before he realised that he was alive, squeezed tightly by two long timbers across his chest, like a morsel suspended between two huge chopsticks.”[3]

Most of these stories were never told straight away. In the aftermath of the dropping of the bombs, the U.S ruling elite was mindful of the international reaction. Newspaper Editors and columnists throughout America denounced the silence and secrecy that had shrouded the aftermath of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One editorial in the Monterey Peninsula Herald in Northern California called the US government “amoral fools”.

The government issued a complete media blackout and cover-up that even the Nazis would have approved of. No photographs or details of the murderous casualties were allowed to be published. Any reports had to be filed through the War Department. When enquiries were made as to whether the American bourgeoisie had dropped two atom bombs on unarmed civilians, the bomb was downplayed as a “labour-saving device” to speed up the end of the war. When reports came in that people were dying from radiation, they were dismissed as “Tokyo tales”.

This suppression of what happened in Hiroshima could not last for long, and as Hersey’s article came out, it made a massive impact. Newsstands quickly sold out. Excerpts ran in newspapers around the world. Hersey only allowed the serialisation on the condition that newspapers make contributions to the American Red Cross after publication. The article was read on the radio, in its entirety, over four consecutive nights. Albert Einstein is said to have ordered 1,000 copies for distribution.

As Steve Rothman writes, “The direct effect of 'Hiroshima' on the American public is difficult to gauge. No mass movement formed as a result of the article, no laws were passed, and the reaction to the piece probably didn't have any specific impact on U. S. military strategy or foreign policy. But certainly the vivid depictions in the book must have been a strong contributor to a pervasive sense of dread (and guilt) about nuclear weaponry felt by many Americans ever since August 1945.”

The only real opposition to the war crime came from the Marxists with James P Cannon, leader of the American Socialist Workers Party, writing, “In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women and children—they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan... What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbour a Statue of Liberty, enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Long ago, the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilisation with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing humanity is socialism or annihilation!.

Hersey was working for Time magazine during his first visit to Japan to get first-hand reports and interviews. Given the dangers involved, it was a courageous thing to do. Over 50 people were interviewed for the article, which was later turned into a book.[4] Hersey’s talent as a writer is evident in the book. Still, his intelligence and kindness lay in letting people speak for themselves or describing what they witnessed shine through in comments like this, he writes, “Mrs Nakamura stood watching her neighbour, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen … the reflex of a mother set her in motion towards her children. She had taken a single step … when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room, over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

Hersey does not sanitised what happened when the bomb was dropped as this quote shows “He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove like pieces”; “their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”; “abandoned and helpless… beside the woman who had lost a breast and the man whose burned face was scarcely a face anymore”

According to The National WWII Museum, the bomb “engulfed the city in a blinding flash of heat and light. The temperature at ground level reached 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a second. The bomb vaporised people half a mile away from ground zero. Bronze statues melted, roof tiles fused, and the exposed skin of people miles away burned from the intense infrared energy unleashed. At least 80,000 people died instantly. The bomb destroyed 70 per cent of all buildings in Hiroshima, and an estimated 140,000 people had been killed by the end of 1945. Survivors suffered from increased rates of cancer and chronic disease”.

The National Museum of Nuclear Science and History explained the aftermath of the explosion. “One man left only a dark shadow on the steps of a bank as he sat. … Many others in Hiroshima, farther from the Little Boy epicentre, survived the initial explosion but were severely wounded, including injuries from and burns across much of their body. Among these people, panic and chaos were rampant as they struggled to find food and water, medical assistance, friends and relatives and to flee the firestorms that engulfed many residential areas.”

There is only one weakness in the book, and unfortunately, it is a significant one. At no point does Hersey explain the reasons behind the dropping of the bombs or the geopolitical reasons behind the war crimes.

As the Marxist writer David Walsh explains, “The more profound motives behind the bombings involved American imperialism’s goal of terrorising the Soviet Union as part of the already unfolding Cold War. As the recent film Oppenheimer has made clear, “Trinity,” the code name for the first test of a nuclear weapon, was scheduled for July 16, 1945, so that Truman could hold the existence of the bomb over the heads of Stalin and the Soviet delegation at the Potsdam Conference, which opened the following day. According to this line of thinking, the US would not need to make concessions and could force the Soviet leadership to submit to its demands.

When the bomb was developed as part of the Manhattan Project, the Truman administration imagined that its supposed nuclear monopoly would ensure the hegemonic role of the US for years to come. This notion was considered delusional by scientists, who understood that it was only a matter of time before the USSR would develop the bomb. Truman was ignorant enough to assert that “those Asiatics” (in the Soviet Union) could never build so complicated a weapon.”[5]

It must be said that most of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project supported the use of the Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It was only later that some regretted what they had done. A Manhattan Project scientist wrote to a friend, “I wept as I read John Hersey's New Yorker account of what has happened during the past year to six who were lucky enough to survive Hiroshima. I am filled with shame to recall the whoopee spirit ... when we came back from lunch to find others who had returned with the first extras announcing the bombing of Hiroshima. That evening we had a hastily arranged champagne dinner, some forty of us; ... [we felt] relief at the relaxation of security, pride in our part in ending the war, and even pride in the effectiveness of the weapon. And at the exact moment, the bomb's victims were living through an indescribable horror we didn't realise. I wonder if we do yet.[6]

Robert Oppenheimer, who led the bomb project, was disquieted at what he had done, but he never apologised or expressed regret. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan was a war crime in which he fully participated. He did have blood on his hands.

At the moment, Penguin has made no plans to release a new edition of the book to coincide with the 80^th anniversary. This is surprising given that the threat of a new world war and nuclear annihilation is greater today than at any time since the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The fractious nature of world politics as seen in when Trump facetiously traded remarks with Kim Jong Un about the size of his nuclear button highlights that the very existence of these weapons of mass destruction pose a grave danger that at some point, in a time of intense crisis, they would be used against foreign foes or even domestic opposition.

As the historian Gabriel Jackson perceptively wrote, “... the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States—for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of government—blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.”

The recent release of the film Oppenheimer, which has struck a disturbing chord with audiences, shows there is a growing disquiet amongst people regarding the dangers of Nuclear war. The choice between Socialism and Barbarism could not be made starker.[7]

Notes

James P. Cannon-A: A Statement on the War(22 December 1941)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1941/dec/21.htm

The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker-Steve Rothman www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

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[1] James P. Cannon on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “An unspeakable atrocity”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/07/cann-a07.html

[2] How to Survive the New Nuclear Age National Security in a World of Proliferating Risks and Eroding Constraints Vipin Narang and Pranay Vaddi-Foreign Affairs July/August 2025

[3] John Hersey's Hiroshima Is Still Essential Reading, 75 Years Later-www.esquire.com 23 April 2021

[4] www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31

[5] 78th anniversary of US atomic bombing of Hiroshima www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/07/fniq-a07.html

[6] The Publication of "Hiroshima" in The New Yorker-Steve Rothman www.herseyhiroshima.com/hiro.php

[7] Oppenheimer: A drama about “the father of the atomic bomb”https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/27/znjf-j27.html

A Complete Unknown: A Film about singer Bob Dylan’s rise to fame

“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.

Pete Seeger

Even if everyone didn’t admit it, we all knew that he [Dylan] was the most talented of us.

Dave Van Ronk

where “nobody liked rock ‘n’ roll, blues or country” and where “you couldn’t be a rebel—it was too cold.”

Bob Dylan

“In those days, artistic success was not dollar-driven; it was about having something to say.

Bob Neuwith

“If the time becomes slothful and heavy, he [the poet] knows how to arouse it... he can make every word he speaks draw blood. Whatever stagnates in the flat of custom or obedience or legislation, he never stagnates. Obedience does not master him; he masters it. The attitude of great poets is to cheer up enslaved people and horrify despots. The turn of their necks, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other.”

Walt Whitman

Having sat through numerous Bob Dylan documentaries and films of varying quality, including spending eight hours watching Renaldo and Clara, I think it qualifies me to review this latest film about the life of Bob Dylan. A Complete Unknown was the subject of a barrage of publicity, both on television talk shows and in social media. It is well-acted, with Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan especially noteworthy in its remarkably accurate impersonation of Dylan’s singing and speaking voice. It is visually stunning and audacious in its authenticity, but it is ultimately a triumph of style over substance. Despite some excellent performances, each actor had to learn the instrument and voice of their character, which they did remarkably well. The performances, however, remain at the level of skilful impersonation, rather than a profound understanding of the different personalities.

The story traces Dylan's early entry into New York City in early 1961, up until 1964 when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival. Trying to cram into two hours four years of the life of such a critical musician naturally will bring about “evasions and elisions”.

As Richard Broody writes “The details that get sheared off matter, not least because they embody the spirit of the age: how a young musician without a day job finds a place to live in the Village is even more of an emblem of the times than the overwrought precision of the movie’s costumes, hair styles, and simulacra of street life. Without the anchor of material reality, the life of the artist is reduced to a just-so story of soaring above banalities and complications—one that parses easily into its few dramatic through lines as if the stars were aligned from the start. What’s lost is the way a colossal spirit such as Dylan confronts everyday challenges with a heightened sense of style and daring.”[1]

The film is a fictional account of Dylan's early career, loosely based on Elijah Wald's book, Dylan Goes Electric!, as well as on James Mangold's conversations with Dylan. It appears that little to no research has been conducted at the Bob Dylan archive.[2] The director Mangold said that the film is "not a Wikipedia entry", and that he did not "feel a fealty to a documentary level of facts".Mangold’s film does little to examine the political and ideological intricacies of the time. There is no “coherent theory” of the time; it often relies on clichés to move the film along. Mangold’s attempt to portray the events of 1962 through news broadcasts is clumsy and borders on the melodramatic, which forces him to invent things that did not happen.

Mangold spends a significant amount of time in the film examining Dylan’s relationship with Pete Seeger. Alongside Woody Guthrie, Seeger was a considerable influence on the young Dylan. Seeger quickly recognised that Dylan was unlike anything or anyone that had gone before, saying, “I always knew that sooner or later there would come somebody like Woody Guthrie who could make a great song every week. Dylan certainly had a social agenda, but he was such a good poet that most of his attempts were head and shoulders above things that I and others were trying to do.”

According to Wald Seeger and his followers “believed they were working for the good of humanity … but were intensely aware of the forces marshalled against them: the capitalist system and the moneyed interests that upheld it” Seeger was sentenced to one year 1961 for contempt of Congress when he refuses to name names of associates with connections to the Communist Party. Seeger, “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs, or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs.”

The early Dylan was like a musical sponge. As the writer Paul Bond noted, “Dylan was listening to all sorts of music—country, the blues of Muddy Waters, and, eventually, folk. The latter, which had grown in part out of ethnomusicological research into traditional songs as “music of the people,” had been promoted by the Stalinist Communist Party and other left circles as a means of tackling contemporary issues and espousing a broadly progressive political outlook in popular song. In contrast to the banality of such contemporary songs as “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window. At the same time, the American folk scene offered a wide range of performance models, accepting the high-art theatricality of a John Jacob Niles alongside Guthrie's more “home-spun” performances. In the American scene, there was not the same emphasis on formal “authenticity” as there was to be in the English folk revival. Alongside the content of the music, therefore (“Folk music delivered something I felt about life, people, institutions and ideology”), Dylan was also receptive to its forms, describing it as “traditional music that sounded new.”

A Complete Unknown, while telling Dylan’s story chronologically, bizarrely leaves out certain aspects of Dylan’s personality and musical background, shedding very little light on Dylan’s artistic development, and even less on his social and political development. What light it does shed on his inner life seems distorted, concentrating on the singer’s “psychological vicissitudes”. During this period, Dylan’s most crucial relationship, both musically and politically, was with Joan Baez. Dylan was clearly in love with Baez at the time, with Baez frequently calling Dylan on stage, a move that came at a time when she was still more famous than he. Their relationship at this point, in 1964, appears to be a happy and productive one. “We were kids together” for a short time.

The four years covered by the film were marked by significant political turmoil. Mangold's treatment of them is pedestrian at best. As the Marxist writer David Walsh writes, 'In 1961, the British Trotskyists pointed to signs of a break in the American ice block in several key layers of society.' '” Among the youth, there has been growing criticism of the American way of life and an audience for various trends which reflect its cultural barrenness.” (The World Prospect of Socialism) In the end, this discontent pointed toward the unresolved contradictions of American capitalism, the dominant world power and “leader of the free world,” and foreshadowed significant social upheavals.”

The songs Dylan wrote at the time, such as Masters of War, Only a Pawn in Their Game, and Hard Rain reflected his awareness of the falsity of the picture of American life presented in the bourgeois media at the time. For a short time, Dylan became acutely aware of the reality of postwar America, including widespread racism and segregated neighbourhoods, the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, social inequality, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the pervasive anxiety bound up with the Cold War. These events were the source of the discontent and restlessness that gave rise to his protest songs. James  Brewer writes that Dylan, for a period, personified that unease and dissatisfaction artistically and intriguingly.

During the years covered by A Complete Unknown, Dylan was not the only one moving left; significant numbers of young people began to shift left. However, their radicalism was inevitably confused. As James Brewer writes, “The musical protest circles were still primarily dominated by the Stalinist politics of the Communist Party or its intellectual vestiges, along with a witches’ brew of Maoism, Castroism and the New Left. What had once been the Trotskyist movement in the US, the Socialist Workers Party, led by James P. Cannon, essentially broke with Marxism in 1963 and set out on a wretched, anti-revolutionary course.  The circumstances, in other words, for the artist seeking a genuinely anti-establishment, anti-capitalist path, free from Stalinist and other malign influences, were challenging ”[3]

Suffice it to say the British Communist Party were less than enamoured with Dylan. It saw Dylan as threatening their control of “ British Music”.  In 1951, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) published a pamphlet titled "The American Threat to British Culture." The pamphlet outlined the British CP’s hostility to young American folk music. The CP followed that pamphlet with its infamously and thoroughly nationalist British Road to Socialism, a reformist and complete refutation of Marxism, swapping the world revolution with the Stalinist theory of ‘socialism in one country’. The British CP were hostile to any outside influence that would cut across its nationalist path, and that included the American folk scene.

As Frank Riley writes, “ A debate about ‘purity’ and ‘workers’ songs’ raged in the British folk world, with Ewan MacColl being a leading protagonist. He eventually reached the absurd position that if a singer was from England, the song had to be English; if American, the song had to be American, and so on. There were also detailed definitions of ‘traditional’, ‘commercial’, ‘ethnic’, ‘amateur’, etc. This was adopted as policy in those folk clubs (a majority) where MacColl and his supporters held sway. Enter Bob Dylan into this minefield. In 1962, Dylan came to Britain. After some difficulty getting into the Singer’s Club, based in the Pindar of Wakefield pub in London, he was allowed to sing three songs, two of them his own. Contemporary accounts say MacColl and Peggy Seeger, who ran the club, were hostile. As Dylan was little known, one interpretation could be that Alan Lomax had talked to them about him. Dylan did not get on well with Carla Rotolo – a relationship immortalised in Dylan’s Ballad in Plain D: "For her parasite sister I had no respect" – so this may explain it. Or it may be that they did not regard his self-written songs as ‘valid’ folk. Later, when Dylan was pronounced anathema by the CP, MacColl went one step further and announced that all of Dylan’s previous work in the folk idiom had not been actual folk music.”

A Complete Unknown hints at Dylan’s career ambitions and his increasing “bitterness and paranoia”. After his most productive period from 1965 to 1968, Dylan seemed to suffer from a catastrophic social indifference. He was no longer the spokesman of a generation. Mangold’s narrative ends with Dylan returning to revisit Guthrie, as Brewer states that Mangold was trying to tie Dylan’s loose ends in a neat bow. However, as Brewer correctly notes, “Unfortunately, the world is never so tidy.”

It is staggering to see how far the modern-day Dylan is removed from that political and cultural ferment of the early sixties. As Dylan admitted, “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written,“ he told CBS. In his memoir, Dylan said, “You must get power and dominion over the spirits. I had it once, and once was enough.” The musician Randy Newman concurs, saying, “Dylan knows he doesn’t write like he did on those first two records.“ That’s not just a quip regarding the quality; he quite literally doesn’t write the way he used to.

As David Walsh perceptively writes, “Bob Dylan was neither the first nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he could outwit historical and social processes, which threatened to 'slow down' or even block his rise, by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what was best in him.”

 

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[1] www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/a-complete-unknown-shears-off-vital-bo

[2] bdylancenter.com.

[3] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/03/kxvr-j03.html

Lady Sings the Blues by Billie Holiday (Penguin Modern Classics) Paperback – 29 Nov. 2018

 

"I've been told that no one sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'."

Billie holiday

 "Holiday's voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain.

David Ritz

The government has failed us; you can't deny that. Anytime you live in the twentieth century, 1964, and you're walking around here singing We Shall Overcome, the government has failed us. This is part of what's wrong with you — you do too much singing. Today, it's time to stop singing and start swinging. You can't sing up on freedom, but you can swing up on some freedom. Cassius Clay can sing, but singing didn't help him become the heavyweight champion of the world; swinging helped him achieve that title.

Malcom X[1]

"If the anger of the exploited ever mounts high enough in the South, it now has its Marseillaise."

Samuel Grafton[2] On the song Strange Fruit

Lady Sings the Blues is a brutally honest warts-and-all autobiography of Billie Holiday, the legendary jazz singer. Holiday died on July 17, 1959, at the Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem, New York City, due to complications of chronic drug abuse. Holiday had an unbelievably difficult childhood. Born on April 17, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, was 13 years old, and her father, Clarence “Pop” Holiday, was just 15. Her birth name was Eleonora, which she later changed to Billie.

Holiday grew up fast, surviving an abusive childhood; her mother did loads of different jobs, including prostitution. She grew up in Baltimore and Harlem brothels. It has been said that she had a limited vocal range but went on to be a unique singer with an “unsettling emotional wallop”. While it is tempting to see Holiday as a victim, that is not how she saw things. Her memoir was written with help from William Dufty, and according to David Ritz, "Holiday's voice, no matter how the Dufty/Holiday interviewing process went, is as real as rain. She is open about her sexual abuse, her forced imprisonment, her heroin addiction, and in a minimal way, her struggles of being African American before the development of the Civil Rights Movement.

Some facts in the book have been disputed.[3] John Szwed argues in his 2015 study, Holiday, Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth, that most of the book is accurate; however, Holiday's co-writer, William Dufty, was allegedly pressured to suppress material due to the threat of legal action. Writing in the New Yorker Richard Brody said "In particular, Szwed traces the stories of two important relationships that are missing from the book—with Charles Laughton, in the nineteen-thirties, and with Tallulah Bankhead, in the late nineteen-forties—and of one relationship that’s sharply diminished in the book, her affair with Orson Welles around the time of Citizen Kane."[4]

Her untimely death at the age of just 44 ended the career of one of the most important jazz vocalists of the 20th century. While the re-release of her autobiography by Penguin in 2018 went some way in reestablishing her importance. However, the release of the 2015 film by Lee Daniels, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, was a significant misrepresentation of Holiday. According to John Andrews, writing in the World Socialist Website, the film “dishonoured” her work and was a “seriously misguided effort”.

He writes, “The film was populated with historical and entirely fictional characters, blended haphazardly with actual and fabricated historical events, replete with sloppy mistakes and anachronisms too numerous to catalogue. One prominent example from the film: methadone was not used to treat heroin addiction until some years after Holiday died.”[5]

Naturally, Holiday’s autobiography suffers from a substantial fixation on race; this is not surprising given how much racial abuse she suffered, but it is largely divorced from the social struggles of postwar America, as expressed in both the growing civil rights movement and official, state-sponsored anti-communism. Given Holidays' limited political understanding, she cannot place her life struggle within the broader aesthetic developments of that tumultuous period, not only in jazz, but also in film, literature, and art.

"Strange Fruit"

One of those broader aesthetic developments is Holiday’s relationship with the song Strange Fruit. In her 1956 autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday suggests that she worked on the song together with Abel Meeropol. Holiday’s economy with the truth has circulated for decades, with Holiday even claiming that the song was written for her and that she had a hand in writing it herself. Meeropol always denied this claim. David Margolick and Hilton Als, in their work Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song, said that her account “may set a record for most misinformation per column inch". Even stranger was Holidays' response when challenged about the song in her ghost-written book; she said, "I ain't never read that book." 

“Strange Fruit” is not an easy song to listen to and requires several listens to appreciate its complexity.  Peter Daniels, in his article “Strange Fruit, believed it was the original protest song. “It is simple, spare, but effective poetry. At a time when political protest was not often expressed in musical form, the song depicted lynching in all of its brutality. The three short verses are all the more potent for their understated and ironic language. The juxtaposition of a beautiful landscape with the scene of lynching, the smell of magnolias with that of burning flesh, the blossoms more typically associated with the Southern climate with the “strange fruit” produced by racial oppression—this imagery conjures up the essence of racist reaction. Racism in America stands indicted and exposed by these lines, with no need at all for a more didactic or agitational message.[6]

Meeropol was a member of the American Communist Party from 1932 to 1947. When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, he and his wife adopted their two sons; both children took the surname "Meeropol" In 1937, he published “Bitter Fruit” in the New York teachers’ union journal. The song was Meeropol’s response to seeing a photo of a lynching. Like many of his generation, he was radicalised by the Russian Revolution, the threat of fascism, and the Great Depression.

Holiday cannot be faulted for not undertaking a more detailed examination of the issues surrounding “Strange Fruit”. Holiday does not even begin to understand why the poorest section of the white working class would turn their desperation into racist atrocities. The book does not probe the class roots of racism as a means of dividing the working class. Any limited gains made by the black working class were made possible by the militancy of millions of black workers in the industrial struggles of the 1930s.

Also absent from the book is Holiday’s comprehension of the role played by the American Communist Party and its Popular Front politics. The holiday does not mention that socialists and communists were on the front line of the struggle for racial equality.

As Daniels points out, “There was a tremendous contradiction inherent in the work of artists, writers and intellectuals who the CP influenced in the 1930s and ’40s. On the one hand, as part of a leftward-moving working class and intelligentsia, they were attracted by the promise of the Russian Revolution. They articulated, to one degree or another, anger at capitalist exploitation and oppression, as well as hopes for social equality and socialism. Most of this layer, however, identified the Russian Revolution with the regime in the Kremlin. Only a minority agreed with the socialist opposition to Stalinism articulated by Leon Trotsky. Meeropol was one of the majority on the left who aligned with the CP during this period. The creative work of these individuals could not help but be influenced by their blind obedience to the Soviet bureaucracy and its reactionary political stance.[7]

Since the release of the 2018 Penguin version of Lady Sings the Blues, interest in Holiday seems to have waned a little. It is hoped that, with the current protests against the fascist Trump administration, interest in the holiday and the song "Strange Fruit" will begin to take hold. There has already been a limited revival of interest in the music, as evidenced by the many more recent recordings. Her autobiography has significant weaknesses, but it is worth reading, and Holiday, after all, was one of a kind.

 

 

 

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[1] library.gayhomeland.org/0008/EN/malcolmx_speech_1964.htm

[2] www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/16/protest-songs-billie-holiday-strange-fruit

[3] www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Billie-Holiday-s-bio-Lady-Sings-the-Blues-may-2469428.php

[4] The Art of Billie Holiday’s Life-www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-art-of-billie-holidays-life

[5]Great jazz vocalist dishonoured by The United States vs. Billie Holiday—Can’t we do better? www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/06/unit-j06.html

[6] "Strange Fruit": the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html

[7] "Strange Fruit": the story of a song-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/02/frut-f08.html