The leading US critic Greil Marcus is a man of passions, one of which is the music of Van Morrison. But his new book on the Belfast enigma doesn't shy away from his subject's failings, writes JOE BREEN
GREIL MARCUS, one suspects, doesn’t shuffle about with small talk. Fit and compact, with a serious face that is heavily lined with the contours of his 65 years, he gives the impression of wanting to get down to the heart of the matter, in this case his new critical appraisal of Van Morrison and his co-editing of the monumental New History of American Literature, both of which have just been published on this side of the Atlantic.
At UCD's Clinton Institute recently to give the keynote speech at the European Association for American Studies conference, Marcus received a standing ovation for his fascinating musical travelogue on Bob Dylan's protest song Masters of War, titled One Song, 47 Years.
“Today I’m going to talk about how meaning is generated in culture, over time,” he began. “I’m going to talk about how it is that bad art, a bad song, can make its way through time so persistently that questions of good and bad may become absolutely moot. I’m going to talk about a very old song by Bob Dylan.”
It was a typically bravura display by the San Francisco writer, academic and critic. His journalism, and books such as Mystery Train, Lipstick Tracesand Dead Elvis, are widely considered to be key texts in the developing critical analysis of popular culture – and are challenging and entertaining reads into the bargain.
As such, Listening to Van Morrison is in good company, though whether the notoriously tetchy subject would agree, given Marcus's critical dismissal of a large body of his work, is seriously open to question. In the US the book is called When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison, but Faber, Marcus's British and Irish publisher, insisted on the shorter, more functional title, he says, as few over here cared for the song referred to, from Morrison's 1997 album, The Healing Game.
According to Marcus, this album marked the end of Morrison’s prolonged slump after an initial decade or more of remarkable music, dating from his time with Them, in the mid-1960s.
"There was this long fallow period that lasted until 1997 – that's now 13 years ago. Starting with Common One in 1980 and going on to Days Like This, you had 15 albums . . . The break comes with The Healing Game, which is absolutely one of his greatest pieces of work. But his very last album, Keep It Simple , has this marvellous song, Behind the Ritual, where again you find that magical dance going on. I think what was going on during that long period of time was personal. It had to do with a religious quest that he was pursuing in his music and, probably in a completely different manner, in his life. I actually don't know much about his life, but I do know that these albums, for me anyway, are like a glass of water – you can see right through them. They are not that interesting. Every time he goes into a room where the answers aren't clear, where the map isn't drawn, he pulls back. And, to me, it is when the answers aren't clear and the map isn't clear and he pushes ahead that his music really happens."
It is clear reading through the 23 short pieces that make up the book that, for Marcus, this is not an academic exercise: it is reflexive and personal. Van Morrison “is someone whose music I have loved since the moment I first heard it, someone with a voice like no other, an expressiveness like nobody else. I’ve always been captivated by his music even when I’ve been bored to death or utterly frustrated by it. He is someone who I will always listen to; who will take me to places I otherwise would not have gone to. I’m a fan.”
In his introduction to the book Marcus hones in on what makes Morrison so special, citing a review of his Moondancealbum in which American critic Ralph J Gleason recalled what John McCormack explained was necessary to make a voice exceptional: "You have to have the yarragh in your voice."
Marcus then elaborates: “The yarragh is version of the art that has touched him, of blues and jazz, for that matter of Yeats and Lead Belly, the voice that strikes a chord so exalted you can’t believe a mere human being is responsible for it, a note so unfinished and unsatisfied you can understand why the eternal seems to be riding on its back.”
Culture critics, at their best, can help clarify the complex and reveal hidden depths in the obvious. There are some sections in this book that hum with the sound of a sharp mind in top gear. Marcus's chapter on Morrison's landmark 1968 album, Astral Weeks, is worthy of its subject: "It was 46 minutes in which possibilities of the medium – of rock 'n' roll, of pop music, of what you might call music that could be played on the radio as if it were both timeless and news – were realised, when you went to the limits of what this form could do. You went past them: you showed everybody else that the limits they had accepted on invention, expression, honesty, daring, were false . . . Life can be lived more deeply – with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined."
Marcus understands and is even sympathetic to his hero’s failings – “Nostalgia pulls down like quicksand, and it’s always had Van Morrison in its grip” – but he is relentless in his search for the performances, be they in concert, in the studio or on bootlegs, when something special happens. This intellectual doggedness has served him well in his search for meaning in the work of Bob Dylan, and his comments on the differences between the two artists are worth noting.
“I think the difference is that Morrison has a different kind of musical gift from Dylan,” he says. Morrison “has this rich expansive voice”, he says. “Elvis Costello was talking about Van Morrison recently, and he said that he couldn’t sing like Van Morrison even if you put him up against a wall and threatened to shoot him. It’s not physically possible. And that is true. Dylan works with far more limited natural musical abilities, and maybe because of those limits he has to create in a much different manner.
“Whereas Morrison can take this table and sing about this table, and the table suddenly begins to change shape and begins to smile. It can give you a dirty look; it can fly up to the ceiling. And so it is very different. Morrison’s transformation of all this stuff around himself is different because, at its deepest level, you can barely be aware of it and you can’t trace anything back to its source.
“But, at the same time, he can be literal-minded in a way that Bob Dylan isn’t. Van Morrison will make a country album, he’ll make a blues album, he’ll make a skiffle album, he’ll make a corny nightclub jazz album and each one will be specifically within that genre.
“Bob Dylan doesn’t do that. Everything he does becomes an aspect of his music. And so they are very different in that way.”
Greil Marcus thrives on such differences. Explaining what keeps him listening, writing, lecturing, he says that he has “enough ignorance to keep me busy. Right now what I’m listening to the most is a 36-CD history of the blues that’s put together by an American musicologist named Allen Lowe. It starts in the 1890s and goes to the 1950s. There’s about 25 songs on each CD and there are 36 CDs, so that’s hundreds of songs. And there’s so much that I haven’t heard, that I never imagined existed, so many strange voices and unexpected themes and combinations.”
His search for another yarragh goes on.
Listening to Van Morrison, by Greil Marcus, is published by Faber, £12.99
Making literary history
While Van Morrison is close to his heart, Greil Marcus's other big new project has used a fair amount of his head's resources. A New Literary History of America, which he edited with the Harvard professor Werner Sollors, is a sprawling tome that, in the words of one US review, "ventures to remap the expanse of American history through five centuries of literary and cultural landmarks".
Marcus and Sollors began by meeting a 10-person advisory board, “so people came in with about 500 suggestions. We knew the book had to be about 1,000 pages and that each entry would be about 2,500 words, which meant that, roughly, we had room for about 200”. Many arguments later they had culled the list to 240 entries, ranging from the porn star Linda Lovelace to Huckleberry Finn.
He says that what “the book became for us was speech, all different forms of speech, where people are trying to explain what America is, whether it really exists, whether it ought to exist, who is a real American and who isn’t. These are the fundamental questions in America. American speech, American literary speech, is a question about the country itself. So that as the book took shape, any form of speech had as great a capacity for lucidity and discovery as any other. So we didn’t say that we will have the novel at the top and then maybe poetry, and way down here we’ll have songs, and somewhere in the middle we’ll have classical theatre. There was not going to be a hierarchy. The book has a literary core, but the idea is that it is a literary history of a country but it is not a history of American literature.
That also gave us the freedom to leave out all kinds of figures we didn’t consider as interesting or as compelling as others who maybe are much less known.”
They also adopted a novel way of selecting contributors: avoiding experts. “We did not want somebody who has written books on the subject, who would then just boil down their book and tell us what everybody already knew . . . We wanted the writers to surprise the reader, surprise us and surprise themselves.”
A New Literary History of Americais published by Harvard University Press, £36.95; newliteraryhistory. com
