Jonathan Cott Quote
There's a theme that appears in much of your work, I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen].Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…What is this one obsession?I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it.There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'Inside the rain?When it's raining outside, I explain, I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well.It's strange you say that, Maurice answers, because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…
There's a theme that appears in much of your work, I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen].Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…What is this one obsession?I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it.There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'Inside the rain?When it's raining outside, I explain, I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well.It's strange you say that, Maurice answers, because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue…
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About Jonathan Cott
Cott grew up in New York City, the son of television executive Ted Cott and Jean Cahan. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1964, and an M.A. from The University of California, Berkeley in 1966. He spent the late 1960s in London, where he began a long friendship with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Cott was the last journalist to interview Lennon, three days before his death.
In 1970, he became a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, where he specialized in interviews, many of which were later collected in his 2020 book Listening. Writer Jan Morris called him "an incomparable interviewer," and Studs Terkel is quoted as saying that "Jonathan Cott, as an interviewer, reveals truths of creative spirits." Cott wrote often about Bob Dylan, eventually producing two books about Dylan. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin called Cott "arguably the most simpatico writer ever to converse with Mr. Dylan."
In addition to rock music, Cott has also written extensively on children's books, editing the 1985 collection Beyond the Looking Glass: Extraordinary Works of Fairy Tale and Fantasy and writing the 1983 book Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children’s Literature. He collaborated with Maurice Sendak on a collection of Victorian picture books, and later wrote a biography of Sendak, There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak (2019).
Cott suffered for years from bipolar disorder. His mother's death in 1988 set off a period of clinical depression, which led him to two years of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). After 36 treatments, he no longer remembered anything from 1985 to 2000. He spent the next years of his life piecing his memories back together, a quest that he wrote about in his 2005 book On the Sea of Memory: A Journey From Forgetting to Remembering. Asked in a Salon interview whether he was shocked by anything he learned, Cott replied, "Well, I was overjoyed to hear about the end of apartheid. I was really upset, but more on a personal level, when I heard that Glenn Gould had died, or that John Lennon had died, or that Bob Marley had died – people whom I cherished, poets I had admired. I found out they had died at the same time. They all died at once."