Village Vanguard

...The singer is walking down Jones Street on a cold winter day in Greenwich Village...

...We get to meet other Village characters: Liam Clancy and the Clancy brothers...

...Dylan, she wrote in a diary entry that year, was “an extraordinary writer but I don’t think of him as an honorable person...

...All artists, she writes, move through the path of “imitate, assimilate, then innovate...

...The leftwing audience, steeled in the dogma of the Old Left’s Marxism, expected Dylan to continue the political song tradition of Guthrie...

...the famed sandal maker Allan Block...

...She joined up with a generation of younger Communists who had broken with the party and formed the Maoist group Progressive Labor, and helped them organize the fi rst group to publicly break the U.S...

...What Rotolo brings to the story is something that only she could offer: the coming-of-age story of a young woman thrust into an affair with an intense, ambitious, and artistic genius...

...Rotolo’s book can be read alongside David Hajdu’s Positively 4th Street, Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street, John Cohen’s book of photos and texts of rare Dylan radio programs (Young Bob), and of course, the fascinating chapters on the Village in Dylan’s own memoir, Chronicles: Volume One...

...Later, she worked in the New York offi ce of the Congress of Racial Equality, where she helped coordinate the Freedom Rides...

...She was approvingly seen by Pete Seeger as the “woman behind the great man” and by Alan Lomax as one who would stand “by the poet, the genius [who] unselfishly tended to his needs and desires...

...She cannot comprehend how this supposedly different New Left, that she thought had rejected “the orthodoxy that had kept the left cemented to Stalinism,” acted just the same as the Old Left...

...Now this photo adorns the dust jacket, beckoning to readers who want to know more about Dylan and his life with Rotolo...

...Then Dylan was discovered and signed by John Hammond to Columbia Records, and fame and fortune was on its way...

...Rotolo’s Italian parents were committed Communist party members, making Rotolo one of the ranks of New York’s somewhat unique colony of “Red diaper babies...

...We get vignettes of some well-known personalities: the “Mayor of Greenwich Village,” as the late Dave Van Ronk was called...

...Her mother was, for a time, an editor and columnist for L’Unita, the Italian-American CP newspaper...

...Then it was on to the medieval town of Perugia, in Italy’s center, where she enrolled in art school...

...While in Italy, she read Fran?oise Gilot’s scathing book about Pablo Picasso, expecting to learn about the great painter whom she admired...

...Yet she saw herself as part of a family of likeminded people of the left who intended to change the world for the better and institute what she calls Karl Marx’s good ideas...

...Unfortunately, while she regales us with the drama of going on an illegal trip to Cuba via London, France, and Prague—fl ying fi rst-class—she tells us next to nothing about the answers she found to her questions about the lives of Cuban writers and artists...

...the proprietor of The Folklore Center, Izzy Young...

...Franqui’s interests were the same as hers—art and literature and the graphic arts—and she would have had much in common with him...

...This gave her a sense of identity, but made her feel alienated from her more conventional peers...

...His intensity and dark moods made her feel so trapped, she writes, that “I thought I would suffocate...

...Here she had time to think, refl ect, and develop as an artist in her own right...

...Most of them were starting out, lived in cheap walk-up fl ats, and hung out at bars like The White Horse, which had become famous as the pub where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death...

...and the young political songwriter Phil Ochs, who was in a fi erce competition with Dylan...

...Yet what motivated her was her “preoccupation with the censorship of writers and artists in the Sovietbloc countries” and her desire to see for herself whether Cuba was following a similar path...

...the beautiful folkie Carolyn Hester, who had come North from Lubbock, Texas...

...For years she has been the woman in the background, someone who has kept silent both about Dylan and her own life...

...She found the similarities between Picasso and Dylan disturbing and read the book twice...

...There she personally met both Fidel Castro and Ch...

...Always intrigued by Cuba, she hoped that its Latin culture would “give artists more leeway under Communism … play up the ‘party’ in Communist Party,” and that the Cuban revolution “would add color and soul and a democratic structure to the worthy ideas of Karl Marx...

...A “big Question Mark suddenly appeared over my head,” she writes, and she “began to doubt...

...travel ban to Cuba...

...Dylan may have started out echoing Woody Guthrie and Jack Elliott but “worked hard to learn his craft, to make his art his own...

...An artist “can’t be made to serve a theory,” she writes...

...The end of A Freewheelin’ Time fi nds Rotolo turning back to the leftwing world she had come from...

...She grew up in a narrow and sectarian culture, among those who believed the Soviet Union was the model for a good society...

...Does she know that Castro branded him a gusano—a “worm” and traitor—and claimed he was a CIA agent?Ronald Radosh, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, is the author, most recently, of Red Star Over Hollywood: The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left, with Allis Radosh...

...She needed to become her own person, to learn what she wanted to do in life, and not to live a life walking “a few paces behind, picking up his tossed-off candy wrappers...

...Bob listened, absorbed, honored them, and then walked away,” explains Rotolo...

...She hoped that “the ice-cold rule of Stalinism could not survive the warmth of the Cuban people...

...She loved Dylan, but felt she could not be his muse, follow him around, be there for him when she was needed, put up with his secretive personality, and tolerate his relationships with other women...

...It was diffi cult for Rotolo to do this while her own identity was so unformed and she was still “struggling for permission to be...

...But her fi rst political act was working for Bayard Rustin, the anti-Communist social democrat, helping organize the Youth March on Washington for Integrated Schools, a predecessor to the March on Washington...

...Like Dylan’s, her bent was art, music, theater, and painting...

...Her view of the Communist left was rather na?ve...

...But where, she asked herself, “is it written that this must be so in order to do great work in the world...

...To acknowledge that the book contained diffi cult truths, she writes, was impossible: After all, The God That Failed was praised by anti-Communists, and “you were either on one side or the other...

...He had come to some issues because, as she writes, “I threw those interests out to Bob...

...When the 17-year-old Rotolo met Dylan, she was rather lost...

...The affair began in July 1961 and lasted, with a great deal of turmoil and drama, until 1964, by which time Dylan’s fame and fortune had grown...

...She would, however, receive a stream of cards and letters from Dylan, who wanted her to return to him...

...the singer who fi rst emulated and copied the style of Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who dubbed himself “the last of the Brooklyn cowboys...

...Rotolo was not ready to give up on the possibility of fi nding a Marxist utopia...

...She soon began a passionate affair with the 20-year-old Dylan, another recent arrival who was trying to make it as a folk singer, without a reputation or following...

...Picasso, like Dylan, “took no responsibility . . . came to no decisions and did nothing that would have made it possible or easier for the various women he was involved with to leave him and get on with their lives...

...Her quest even led her to fi nd out about the verboten Italian anarchist and anti-Communist Carlo Tresca, whose “illicit . . . outlaw” status “made him infi nitely attractive...

...Fear of McCarthyism and what might happen to her and her friends’ Communist parents was always in the background, giving her what she calls “an outsider status infl icted on us by the Cold War and our parents’ political beliefs...

...Rotolo read Arthur Rimbaud, and soon Dylan did, too...

...Yet she was inquisitive enough to seek out and read The God That Failed, which she calls the story of six exCommunist writers’ “agonizing journey . . . an examination of the Cold War and Stalinism by these important thinkers,” a book that “made an impact...

...Guevara, and basked in their limelight...

...Dylan loved and missed her, but his prime concern was his art...

...In her book she is very forgiving and shows great respect for him as an artist, despite their diffi cult relationship...

...Rotolo’s strength is that while she knew that even to “raise questions about the Soviet Union and Stalin” might lead to being denounced as “a traitor and opportunist,” she stood her own ground...

...Dylan’s overnight success made Rotolo feel like “a string on Bob Dylan’s guitar,” his “chick...

...She knew the stories told were accurate...

...Hence Dylan refused to accept the torch they sought to hand him...

...Instead, she found it a book of “revelations, lessons, warnings...

...He did not betray anyone when he “went electric” in 1965, she writes: He wrote about what was on his mind, and did not want to do what others wanted, even if it meant “alienating his public, fans, friends, and lovers...

...Walking down East 7th Street with him one night, she simply told him that she had to go, and “turned and walked away without looking back...

...BY RONALD RADOSH Everyone recognizes the cover photo for Bob Dylan’s 1963 Columbia album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan...

...Elliott, she writes, “was the son of Woody and Bob was the son of Jack...

...The heart of the book, as one would expect, is her life with Bob Dylan...

...Did she meet the poet and journalist Carlos Franqui, then Cuba’s major cultural fi gure, who soon went into exile and told the truth about the prison Castro had created...

...The girl was Suze Rotolo, the daughter of Italian immigrant Communist parents, and Dylan’s fi rst serious girlfriend...

...The result was her one last fl ing with the political left: Her trip to Cuba in 1964...

...In between the years with Dylan she went to Italy in search of the education she missed...

...When Suze started going out with Bob Dylan, she introduced him to the civil rights movement and the other left-wing causes of the day...

...Unlike her friends in Queens who headed off to college, Rotolo, a poor student with an artistic bent, headed to the Village...

...She would have to make the painful separation...

...She did not like the belief that art had to be a weapon, and writes that she had “secret and serious doubts” about both the slogan and the advocacy of socialist realism...

...Is she familiar with the testimony he gave in his books and articles a few years later...

...Sadly, she found that the emerging New Left was not much different and “felt equally betrayed by Dylan...

...Hearing his early songs, the press soon dubbed him a “protest singer...

...He may have started singing traditional folk music and blues, but soon began writing his personal interior monologues in a form that captivated the world and transformed American music...

...Yet Rotolo felt, at the same time, that she “was betraying the elders” and so she read it in secret...

...In Florence she soaked in the great Italian artists...

...He is wearing a thin suede jacket and is holding onto a girl wearing a loden coat and boots, a young woman with a nice smile and long brunette hair...

...With the publication of her own memoir, A Freewheelin’ Time, Rotolo, now in her sixties, has come out of the shadows and given us a heartfelt, lyrical, and intriguing picture of not only her life with the enigmatic Dylan but a picture of life in the vibrant folk music community that was emerging in the Village at the time...