American Lonesome

The Work of Bruce Springsteen

Gavin Cologne-Brookes

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780807169476
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la música

American Lonesome: The Work of Bruce Springsteen begins with a visit to the Jersey Shore and ends with a meditation on the international legacy of Springsteen's writing, music, and performances. Gavin Cologne-Brookes's innovative study of this popular musician and his position in American culture blends scholarship with personal reflection, providing both an academic examination of Springsteen's work and a moving account of how it offers a way out of emotional solitude and the potential lonesomeness of modern life.Cologne-Brookes proposes that the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, which assesses the value of ideas and arguments based on their practical applications, provides a lens for understanding the diversity of perspectives and emotions encountered in Springsteen's songs and performances. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy from William James to Richard Rorty, Cologne-Brookes examines Springsteen's formative environment and outsider psychology, arguing that the artist's confessed tendency toward a self-reliant isolation creates a tension in his work between lonesomeness and community. He considers Springsteen's portrayals of solitude in relation to classic and contemporary American writers, from Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson to Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. As part of this critique, he discusses the difference between escapist and pragmatic romanticism, the notion of multiple selves as played out both in Springsteen's work and in our perception of him, and the impact of performances both recorded and live. By drawing on his own experiences seeing Springsteen perform—including on tours showcasing the album The River in 1981 and 2016—Cologne-Brookes creates a book about the intimate relationship between art and everyday life.Blending research, cultural knowledge, and creative thinking, American Lonesome dissolves any imagined barriers between the study of a songwriter, literary criticism, and personal testimony.

My life’s the same story, again and again

I’m on the outside looking in.

—“OUTSIDE LOOKING IN”

People really invest themselves in you
and you invest yourself in them.

—SPRINGSTEEN, INTERVIEW, 2004

1

LONESOMENESS TO COMMUNITY

The narrative Bruce Springsteen has created during his career contains a tension between lonesomeness and community. This tension never subsides. The loner aspect of Springsteen’s personality and worldview has always been apparent. But there’s also an impulse toward community both in the journey from youth into artistic maturity, and in characters’ stories across the decades. Springsteen’s work articulates the American lonesome while equally qualifying him as an American pragmatist. “It’s always public and personal simultaneously for me,” he says.1 Driven ultimately by social engagement, he’s mined his experience of solitude to create an oeuvre of significance to his era. To use Wendell Berry’s description of Springsteen’s fellow New Jersey writer William Carlos Williams, his career amounts to decades of practicing “citizenship,” by which Berry means “the unceasing labor of keeping responsibly conscious” of his time and place. He’s accomplished, as Berry writes of Williams, “a sustained and intricate act of patriotism in the largest sense of the word—a thousand times more precise and loving and preserving than any patriotism ever contemplated by officials of the government or leaders of parties.”2 His instincts have kept him on this broad path from early in his career.

Related to these two ideas, and to facilitate investigation of Springsteen’s significance as an American writer and musician, this chapter sets up two definitions and a narrative. The definitions are of American lonesomeness and of the passionate pragmatism at the heart of Springsteen’s work, and the narrative is of his journey from a deep-rooted sense of alienation to a community-oriented perspective. All creative output is uneven, and the art is not the artist. In choosing “to trust the art and be suspicious of the artist,” Springsteen echoes D. H. Lawrence. The human being is likely to be as much of a “stumbling clown” as everyone else (TAD 314).3 There’s our image of the artist, the artist’s self-image, and there’s the messy life lived.4 Barack Obama is supposed to have joked to Michelle
Obama that he opted to become president because he couldn’t be Bruce Springsteen. “Sometimes,” Springsteen once said, “I wish I was Bruce myself” (TAD 318). Like all of us, the artist himself is flawed and has floundered at times in shaping his mature vision, but few who read the interviews, ponder the songs, or attend concerts are likely to question his professional integrity. Through his work, we get the best he can offer, and the broad sweep of that is built on opposing impulses that construct a narrative from youth to maturity.

As Walker Percy evidently indicated to Robert Coles, in seeing Springsteen as “a writer, as well as a composer,” he “knows how to improvise through music, through poetry, through his public talking: he’s able to connect with, communicate with, us hearing him. You feel what he’s saying is his very own, deeply felt letter being sent to you—and there he is: putting it on the line the way writers do.”5 Springsteen’s lyrics and interviews illustrate his concern with literary as well as compositional craft in creating song storylines as well as a loose narrative within and between albums. The result has been an evolving parallel universe that sustains both artist and audience. In a 2010 interview, he reflected on an early decision to do this. Already successful as a performer, he grew aware that when it came to recording more was needed. There would always be plenty of other bands and others who “play guitar well” or “front well.” To stand out he concentrated on “the imagining of a world,” the creation of a personal “fingerprint” that would affect the lives of members of that audience. “All the filmmakers we love, all the writers we love, all the songwriters we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination and in your heart and on your soul” (SOS 350–51). “Inspired” by the work of others, he wanted “to inspire” (TAD 262).

Yet for all this, Springsteen’s writing contains a strong sense of the lonesome. Kevin Lewis argues that “lonesome” is a notably American word and that “the American lonesome” is a state of mind peculiar to the national culture. Lonesomeness has connotations of loneliness but also of solitude conducive to reflection. “In part the word has created the experience,” he writes, “and the experience has come to be reflected in the word.” “Where the meaning of ‘lonely’ is uniformly negative,” the “meanings of ‘lonesome’” can “layer a positive upon the negative.”6 Lonesomeness involves a sense of “taking confident possession of oneself on a crest of savored, transcended melancholy.”7 It’s obvious from what he talks and sings about that Springsteen has used music to fill a void and believes he can connect with his audience by having the void facilitate the connection. “I know how deadly important my job is to me,” he told Bob Costas in 1995. “What if I didn’t have that job? Or what if I couldn’t do that job after I did it for 20 years or 25 years?” (TAD 186). “If you don’t have that underlying emotional connection,” he told Chet Flippo in 1984, “then you don’t have anything” (TAD 144). In the same interview he talks of his own experience of solitude. Explaining Nebraska, he reflects on characters suffering “a spiritual crisis” that renders them “isolated” from society, job, family, even friends, “to the point where nothing makes sense.” “That loneness,” he says, is “the beginning of the end” (TAD 145).

One explanation for a preoccupation with this feeling is personal. Springsteen is describing symptoms of depression, a tendency to which he’s been open about in recent years and explicit about in the autobiography.8 Such feelings of isolation produce many metaphors, from William Cowper’s eighteenth-century description of being “buried above ground” through Sylvia Plath’s bell-jar image to William Styron’s portrayal, in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), of depression as “a storm of murk.” Springsteen’s mixture of metaphors surpasses any of these in its nightmarish depiction of the illness. Depression brings with it “torrents of self-loathing.” It has him “face up against the wall” he’s been “inching toward for a long time.” It spews “like an oil spill all over the beautiful turquoise-green gulf” of his “carefully planned and controlled existence,” a “black sludge” that threatens “to smother” him (BTR 308–9). It’s “a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track” (BTR 484). Horrifying as these images are, the severity of his condition unless controlled by antidepressants is not unexpected. His lyrics are full of references to deathly isolation, from two mentions of suicide in “Born to Run” to the pilgrimage to the dry riverbed in “The River” to a dream of dying in “Valentine’s Day,” to imagining being buried in “We Are Alive.” For Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation, “Stolen Car” captures “the essence of depression.” It’s easy to think of the characters in Nebraska in terms of Styron’s observation that, subject to a madness “chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain,” the person’s “aggrieved, stricken, and muddied thought processes,” while usually “turned agonizingly inward,” can induce “violent thoughts regarding others.”9 This may help explain the “Nebraska” protagonist’s response that he did what he did because “there’s just a meanness in this world.” Similarly, when in “State Trooper” the driver pleads that no trooper stop him an implication is that to do so might lead to murder, suicide or both.

Indeed, Nebraska, as Dave Marsh and Springsteen himself have suggested, for all its political concerns, is laceratingly personal. Marsh refers to Springsteen’s “private demons,” while Springsteen told Mikal Gilmore that he’d always considered it his “most personal record” because it captured the “tone” of his childhood.10 With regard to solitude, two pertinent songs are “My Father’s House” and “Highway Patrolman.” In both, the speaker’s focus on a loved one highlights his isolation. There can hardly be a more forlorn song about father-son alienation than “My Father’s House,” not least in the son’s inability to penetrate the father’s angry pride. The house stands “shiny and bright,” “so cold and alone,” and the song ends with no suggestion that either the father’s or the son’s sins will be atoned. Something of that same yearning for an elusive closeness is apparent in “Highway Patrolman,” the story of Joe Roberts, the good brother (as he sees himself) and Frankie, a Vietnam veteran and petty criminal. After a car chase to the Canadian border, Joe pulls over and watches Frankie’s “taillights disappear.” As with the “lunar landscape” of a New Jersey morning on “Open All Night,” this is a depiction of personal and cosmic loneliness akin to Joyce Carol Oates’s image, in her 1996 novel of a father’s banishment of a daughter, We Were the Mulvaneys. As the father drives away, Marianne watches his taillights shrink and fade. “Smaller and smaller,” they resemble “rapidly receding suns.” Whatever your personal relationship with a family member, especially where circumstances keep you apart, to view the matter in terms of a human lifespan set against the eternity and immensity of the Cosmos concentrates the mind.11

Springsteen refers not only to isolation but also to feelings in youth of being an outsider and of having to work things out for himself. “An outcast weirdo misfit sissy boy,” even aged seven, he received “the bullying all aspiring rock stars must undergo,” that “playground loneliness that is essential fuel for the coming fire” (BTR 15). He experienced a basic rite of passage for those who are troubled by their place in society and by their sense that others expect them to conform. Nor is it self-deprecation. In an unpublished reminiscence, Joe de Pugh, the model for the pitcher in “Glory Days,” describes how he and his teammates nicknamed Springsteen “Saddie,” because the cool and the outcasts were known as the Bad and the Sad, and Springsteen sat on the bench and “hardly ever played.”12 Hard as it is to assert your identity, and harder still when you’re labeled a loser, one way to achieve this is to escape the world you’re brought up in and find a new one. This needn’t mean physical travel, though since, in Saul Bellow’s words, “travel is mental travel,” it often does. But equally, one can stay put yet, the brain being wider than the sky, burrow deep within oneself. “Had I not been lonely none of my work would have happened,” said British painter L. S. Lowry. Art provides both the opportunity to express isolation and to escape it.13 If Bellow found it through travel, Dickinson through poetry—her letter to the world that never wrote to her—and Lowry through painting, Springsteen found it through music.

But expression of iso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Looking in on Asbury Park
• Introduction: Rock and Rembrandt
• 1. Lonesomeness to Community
• 2. Classic Solitudes
• 3. Contemporary Solitudes
• 4. Of Time and The River
• 5. Pragmatic Romanticism
• 6. Multiple Selves
• 7. After Springsteen
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bruce Springsteen Discography
• Selected Bibliography
• Index