No one can dish out an insult like a writer. That’s what two acclaimed authors of books on Bob Dylan are quickly learning, as they become embroiled in a bitter row over whose work is more authentic and accurate.
Howard Sounes and Clinton Heylin have lashed out at each other over their respective biographies of the Nobel-winning singer-songwriter.
Sounes says he has been outraged by insulting comments made about him and his 2001 bestselling Dylan biography in the pages of Heylin’s new Dylan biography.
In his introduction, Heylin calls Sounes a “professional dirtdigger” who had written a “semi-literate” book.
Sounes told the Guardian: “It’s not really polite to tell other writers they’re bad writers, because they tend to fling it back to you. In response, I would say he’s a clunky, self-indulgent writer … His books are all very long and baggy. They’re about his interpretation of Dylan songs … and it’s incredibly boring.”
He added: “He seems to be very upset that, in 2001, I got a lot of publicity because I revealed that Dylan had a secret second marriage, to a woman called Carolyn Dennis, which made headlines all over the world and helped make the book a bestseller.
“He just knows how to tell me what [the song] Visions of Johanna means in his mind. Frankly, I don’t care what he thinks Visions of Johanna means. I just want to know what [Dylan] was like.”
Sounes, a former Mirror news journalist, has written biographies on the poet Charles Bukowski and the musician Paul McCartney, among others.
His Dylan biography, titled: Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, has sold nearly 200,000 copies. It draws on hundreds of interviews with Dylan’s closest associates in tracing the story of one of the most iconic figures of contemporary culture. It has been reprinted repeatedly over 20 years and an updated edition is released this month by Doubleday, ahead of Dylan’s 80th birthday in May.
Heylin’s new book, titled: The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol 1 1941-1966: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, is published by Bodley Head. One critic noted that “Heylin has long been Dylan’s most accomplished biographer”, and another observed that his obsessiveness has unearthed “some fascinating revelations”.
Sounes says he bought Heylin’s book reluctantly after hearing that it contained disparaging comments about himself. He was taken aback to find eight listings under his name in the index, beginning with page 3, where he is attacked as “a former tabloid reporter aka professional dirtdigger, name of Howard Sounes”, whose Dylan biography is “a depressingly well-trundled, semi-literate stroll”.
Sounes joked that Heylin’s index has more page references to him than to Bruce Springsteen: “The introduction is all about how great [Heylin] is and then how awful everybody else is who’s written about Bob Dylan …
“One of these people emailed me the other day saying how upset he was. He said: ‘Why does he write about fellow writers like this?’ I agree…
“At the same time, … he uses my material for his own purposes … He does acknowledge it, [but] he gets the title of [my] book wrong, which is either childish or sloppy. It’s called Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan. He calls it A Life of Bob Dylan. He can’t bring himself to say it’s The Life.”
Sounes added that even Dylan’s own account is criticised: “The most amazing bit is on page 5. Heylin … seems to suggest that Dylan read my book and embroidered upon what I’d written about him. It’s in the realms of madness.”
In that passage, Heylin writes: “What Dylan made of his most recent chroniclers he wasn’t about to say, save by embroidering a couple of the more outlandish stories in Sounes’s skim-read till they collapsed ’neath the cumulative weight of his and his biographer’s disinformation.”
Sounes described Heylin’s first Dylan biography as “significant”, but noted that he “has written 13 Dylan books, I believe, by his own account, which appears to me to be obsessional”.
He added: “He seems to object to the fact that I’m a professional journalist and author. I used to work in Fleet Street and I know what a story is. I think he’s frankly just jealous of the success of my book over the years … His books are really for fans, the sort of fans who stand at the front of Bob Dylan concerts writing down what the songs are.”
Heylin declined to comment.
