Each Saturday, Harper’s Magazine editors will share a free reprinting of a piece. To gain access to our fully digitized archive, subscribe today. Ahead of Father’s Day, read Sam Sussman’s 2021 essay, which served as inspiration for his novel Boy From the North Country.
The Silent Type
On (possibly) being Bob Dylan’s son
By Sam Sussman
In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish artist Norman Raeben (the youngest child of the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem). One day, Bob Dylan showed up unannounced. They were painting abstracts at the time, and when it was my mother’s turn to comment on Dylan’s work she just shrugged. At first, that was the sum of their relationship: her quiet refusal to adulate Dylan’s celebrity.
One evening, after a particularly long session, Dylan abruptly asked my mother whether she wouldn’t mind hosting a party. It didn’t make much sense: she lived in a third-floor walk-up in the East 70s; he was Bob Dylan. He came to her apartment in red cowboy boots. People drank and chatted and left around 2 am. Dylan closed the door behind the last guest with a flick of his boot and turned to face my mother. So began a year of what she would later politely refer to as “dating.”
In that East 70s walk-up, they painted and read poetry, and talked very little about the fact that he was married. He often called at odd hours to play the music he was assembling into what would become Blood on the Tracks. Once, she read him Petrarch while they smoked, which is the only time she seems to have made it into his lyrics:
She lit a burner on the stove
and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello,” she said,
“You look like the silent type.”
Then she opened up a book of poems
and handed it to me
written by an Italian poet
from the thirteenth century
and every one of them words rang true
and glowed like burnin’ coal
pourin’ off of every page
like it was written in my soul
from me to you
tangled up in blue
Eventually, the relationship lost its allure. She must have known there were other women. (It’s now a matter of record that Dylan was tangled up in those days with Ellen Bernstein, a twenty-four-year-old employee of Columbia Records, and the actress Ruth Tyrangiel.) My mother never told him things were over; she just changed her phone number and stopped responding to his letters. In the years that followed, she left acting to start a business, married my father, passed the lease on the walk-up to a younger sibling, and relocated to rural Orange County, New York.
