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ОглавлениеEnvy
Song to Woody
It would have been only too human for Bob Dylan at nineteen to envy Woody Guthrie. His fame, for a start, and (not the same) the sheer respect in which Guthrie was held, his staunch stamina, his being an icon who wouldn’t have had any truck with such a self-conscious word and who had not let himself become an idol. Enviable. Inevitably open, therefore, on a bad day, to competitive petulance.
For ’tis all one to courage high,
The emulous or enemy.71
And yet not so. Truly high courage knows the difference between emulation and its enemy, envy. Dylan was sufficiently secure of his genius, even at the very start, to be able to rise above envy, rising to the occasion that was so much more than an occasion only.
Song to Woody is one of only two songs written by Dylan himself on his first album. (If the song had been called Song for Woody, it would not be the same, would be in danger of mildly conceited cadging as against a tribute at a respectful distance.) The other song by Dylan on the album, Talking New York, also paid tribute to “a very great man”,72 and didn’t even need to tell you that it was again Woody Guthrie to whom Dylan was showing gratitude. Talking New York brings home that there was not all that much to be grateful for, back then, when it was early days:
Well, I got a harmonica job, begun to play
Blowin’ my lungs out for a dollar a day
I blowed inside out and upside down
The man there said he loved m’ sound
He was ravin’ about he loved m’ sound
Dollar a day’s worth
But Song to Woody appreciates a life’s worth, and it knows about gratitude: that, for a start, gratitude is the due of Woody Guthrie, and not of him alone. That to give gratitude is to be the richer, not the poorer, for the giving. And that it is gratitude that sees through and sees off envy. Gratitude is the sublime sublimation of envy. Meanwhile, all this is of course easier said than done. Or, if your doing takes the form of the art of song, easier said than sung. For there is, from the very start, a challenge about how you are going to end any expression of gratitude. The expression of it has to end without ever suggesting for a final moment that the feeling itself has come to an end. The song, like everything human, will have to end, but not because gratitude has ceased.
SONG TO WOODY
I’m out here a thousand miles from my home
Walkin’ a road other men have gone down
I’m seein’ your world of people and things
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings
Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
’Cause there’s not many men ’ve done the things that you’ve done
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
Here’s to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind
I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow, but I could leave today
Somewhere down the road someday
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
How do we sense that the final verse of this simple (far from easy) song is to be the final verse, without there being a cadging nudge? Things would be different on the printed page, because your eye can see that you’re reading the last lines, whereas your ear can’t in the same way hear that it is hearing them.73
You sense that the end is imminent because the song turns back to the beginning (gratitude is a virtuous circle, not a vicious one): the opening words of the final verse, “I’m a-leavin’”, recall the opening of the first verse, “I’m out here”, passing back through – though not passing over – the hailing that heartens the three central verses of the song: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Hey, Woody Guthrie”, “Here’s to Cisco . . . Here’s to the hearts and the hands . . .”.
And there are other intimations that the song, which is not going to quit, is about to leave. For instance, the second line of the first verse, “Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”, is glimpsed in the vista of the second line of this final verse, “Somewhere down the road someday”. Again, this feels like the final verse because of the announcement “I’m a-leavin’ tomorrow” – and yet not obdurately the last verse since it does go on immediately “but I could leave today”, so there may or may not be a little time in hand. The rhyme today / someday has a stranded feeling, reluctant to leave (-day after -day), especially when combined with the wistful effect in the move from the beginning to the end of the line: “Somewhere down the road someday”.
Added to all of which, it feels truly like the last verse, because in the sentence that makes up these two lines (the penultimate line and then the last line) the song concedes what it needs to:
The very last thing that I’d want to do
Is to say I’ve been hittin’ some hard travelin’ too
The singer (the young Dylan, yes, but the point is art, not autobiographical application) is truthful and rueful: I wouldn’t want even to seem to upstage you or pretend that I’ve had your life’s experiences, including the hard travelling of the hard old days. Hard, though, my disclaimer, for I do have some claim to share things with you, don’t I? And then “The very last thing” turns out to be almost the very last thing in the song: that is, it opens the very last sentence of the song but it does not close the song. For the very last line of the song is not where those words occur.
This is an arc completed, not a feeling vacated. Our mind is tipped off – through Dylan’s play with the phrase “The very last thing” – and so is our ear: for this is the first time, the only time, then, that a rhyme has returned in the song: too / you in the one but last verse, and then do / too in these very last lines. (“Travelin’ too”: the word has itself travelled on from the previous stanza: “that traveled with you”.)
I’m a-singin’ you the song, but I can’t sing enough
’Cause there’s not many men ’ve done the things that you’ve done
– so Dylan sings, finding a way of making this truth of gratitude’s benign insatiability ring true. Some of the tribute’s authenticity, and its being so entirely an envy-free zone, must come from the reluctance to make an inordinate claim even for the singer whom you are honouring, audible in “not many men”. Any men, really, when it comes to the world that Dylan is evoking? Let us leave it at not many men.
“Walkin’ a road other men have gone down”: and other men than both Guthrie and Dylan are to be the beneficiaries of the song’s gratitude. Not only as being thanked both personally and on behalf of us all, but because of the nature of gratitude itself, which appreciates – even in the moment when it is grateful to genius – that genius is not solitary and can thrive only because of all the others that keep it company, “all the good people” that travel with it – and with the rest of us.
Here’s to Cisco an’ Sonny an’ Leadbelly too
An’ to all the good people that traveled with you
This is full of respect, even while the names themselves are duly differentiated: Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Leadbelly are spoken of famously and familiarly, though not impudently. Woody Guthrie is Woody in the title, Song to Woody, but in the song proper he is treated with a propriety that is saved from being too deferential by the affectionately chaffing lead-in: “Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song” (that might seem cheeky of young me, but honestly it isn’t), and
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That is quite something to say, and to sing, and it asks – as art, I mean, not as a personal plea – a substantiated trust that we will take it in the spirit in which it is offered: not as false modesty but as true tribute. For the song has not moved, as it so easily might have done, from the words of the first verse, “I’m seein’ your world”, to something along the lines of “Now I’m goin’ to show you my world”, but to a world that is neither yours, Woody Guthrie, nor mine (as yet . . .), “a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along”. And “I know that you know” can, on this happy unenvious occasion, have nothing of the icy negation of Positively 4th Street with its soured repetition of the word “know”. No?
Positively 4th Street
If you want your good book to get a bad review, have a friend review it. Envy has a way, regrettably and even regretfully, of rearing its sore head. Of course friendship thinks of itself as the enemy of envy, but then there is nothing more embitteredly envious than a friendship betrayed.
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
When I was down
You just stood there grinning
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on
The side that’s winning
But if there had always been positively no two-way street, they wouldn’t now be standing in this acid rain.
For friendship (and Positively 4th Street has to be a song about a friendship that went wrong, that soured) differs most of all from love in this: that friendship has to be reciprocal, reciprocated. I can love you without your loving me, but I can’t be your friend without your being my friend. (My befriending you is something quite other.) “You just want to be on / The side that’s winning”? Careering into envy, are you? The song itself is concentratedly one-sided, and from the very beginning it makes clear that it is going to strike unrelentingly the same note and the same target.
This starts with the immediately metallic rhyme within “You got a lotta nerve”. (Nerve as impudence, but with nerves tautly a-quiver in every arrow-strung line.) Then there’s the re-insistence, promptly, of the entire line repeated, “You got a lotta nerve”, same timing, same placing, pounding with the same instrument – and this with the very next line then saying yet once more “you got a”. (Helping hand to lend? You must be joking.) At once obsessedly repetitive and laconically flat-tongued, the song is a masterpiece of regulated hatred – the great phrase for the key-cold clarity (not charity) of Jane Austen.74 The fire next time, maybe, but the ice this time. Anyway, revenge is a dishing-it-out that is best eaten cold.75
Impact impinges. Repeatedly. The song exercises its sway while swaying (like a boxer), for it has an extraordinary sense of powerfully moving while threateningly not moving.76 “You just stood there grinning”: the song just stands there, not grinning, but grinding. Might it even be said to just stomp there? No, because it bobs a bout. So when we suddenly find (it is a surprise) “surprised” precipitating “paralyzed” –
You see me on the street
You always act surprised
You say, “How are you?” “Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
Why don’t you just come out once
And scream it
– it is that the song has realized its power, tonic and toxic, to paralyze its opponent.
“You say, ‘How are you?’ ‘Good luck’”. Disarming? No, and Dylan declines to lower his guard. For luck invites envy, as is understood in Idiot Wind:
She inherited a million bucks and when she died it came to me
I can’t help it if I’m lucky
You can’t be blamed for being lucky – but you can be disliked for it, and you are likely to be envied for it. All you can do is shrug and propitiate (“I can’t help it if I’m lucky”). It was good of Dylan to wish us well at the end of an interview in 1965:
Is there anything in addition to your songs that you want to say to people?
“Good luck!”
You don’t say that in your songs.
“Oh, yes I do; every song tails off with, ‘Good Luck – I hope you make it.’”77
It is a nice thought that every Dylan song tails off with “Good Luck” to those of us who are listening to it, but what about those whom the song addresses as you?78 Positively 4th Street does not tail off, it heads off, and in any case it does not tail off with “Good Luck” to its interluckitor. Dylan’s farewell in the interview has a cadence that is illuminatingly close to the wording of the cited farewell in this song from the very same year.
“Good Luck – I hope you make it”
“Good luck”
But you don’t mean it
The feeling of paralysis (the root notion of fascination79) is a consequence of the counterpointing – or counterpunching – of the units musical and verbal. Musically, the unit is of four lines, but verbally (as lyrics) the unit has a rhyme scheme that extends over eight lines. Positively 4th and 8th. The effect is of a sequence that both is and is not intensely repetitive. So while musically the song is in twelve verses, rhymingly it is in six. The armour-plated template in each set is simply the rhyming of lines two and six, and of lines four and eight. But Dylan, as so often, loves not only to attend but to bend his attention, and so to intensify, and what we hear within those first eight lines is the not-letting-go of any of the first four lines: “nerve” is repeated in the fifth line, the whole line back again as though in a lethal litany; “lend” takes up “friend”; “on” off-rhymes with “down”; and “winning” is in a clinch with “grinning”. (All the more a clinch in that the final rhyme, here as throughout, is a disyllabic rhyme, all the way from this grinning / winning to the final be you / see you.) As though on probation, not one line of the first four is let off its obligation to report back during the ensuing four.
Whereupon the next set can afford to relax, as though the template should be enough for now (that / at, and show it / know it), yet not quite enough, since Dylan threateningly dandles a rhyme-line from the first verse, whose “When I was down” immediately gets re-charged here:
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
If you’re so hurt
Why then don’t you show it
You say you lost your faith
But that’s not where it’s at
You had no faith to lose
And you know it80
The accuser is the one who had faith to lose. The music and the voice combine to create a chilling thrilling pause after that word “lose”, so that “And you know it”, pouncing, brooks no resistance.
Such an evocation of faith negated is a positive achievement, because it makes sense only as founded upon faith in the possibility of something better. For every Positively 4th Street about faith misplaced in friendship, there is a Bob Dylan’s Dream about friendship’s solid solidarity for all its pains and losses. And in any case the vibrant anger in Positively 4th Street does itself directly convey what friendship ought to be and can be. For how could there be a true indictment of false friends that didn’t call upon and call up true friends?
But now it settles into third, fourth, and fifth sets of verses, all in the sedate template. First, my back / contact, and in with / begin with:
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
Then, embrace / place, and rob them / problem:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
“Understand” is irresistible (“Don’t you understand”), an unobtrusive triumph, mindful both of “You just stood there” at the beginning and of the undeviating repetition of “You could stand inside my shoes” at the end.
But the problem / rob them rhyme is something of a problem. The rhyme is a touch far-fetched, and is it worth the carriage? Perhaps, but that would have to be the point, for the other rhymes are living near at hand, and are simply telling: friend / lend, grinning / winning . . . The rhyme problem / rob them precipitates a different world or mood, suggesting the uneasy bravura of half sick / traffic in Absolutely Sweet Marie (absolutely sweet there). Nothing wrong with one pair of rhymes asking a different kind of attention (not more attention, really) than do the other rhyme-pairs in a song, and this would be congruent with the perplexity of the syntax in this verse. For whereas elsewhere in Positively 4th Street the syntax is positively forthright, advancing straight forward, here it is circuitous, and it pauses for a moment upon “Perhaps”:
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
What is it (the phrase is cryptic) to embrace heartbreaks? To enjoy one’s own sufferings? To be sicklily solicitous of other people’s suffering, creepily commiserating away? And do these tangents amount to one of those mysterious triumphs of phrasing that exquisitely elude paraphrase (like “One too many mornings / And a thousand miles behind”), or is this one of those occasions when something eludes not us but the artist? Dylan is a master of living derangements of syntax81 but even he must sometimes let things slip. Dr Johnson ventured to characterize as an imperfectionist that Dylanesque writer William Shakespeare:82
It is incident to him to be now and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he cannot well express, and will not reject; he struggles with it a while, and if it continues stubborn, comprises it in words such as occur, and leaves it to be disentangled and evolved by those who have more leisure to bestow upon it.83
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I’d rob them
It must be granted that if these lines induce queasiness, they do make a point of saying “No, I do not feel that good”. So an unsettling rhyme such as problem / rob them might rightly be hard to stomach, especially given the tilting “Perhaps”. And given what a problem is: not just “adifficult or puzzling question proposed for solution; a riddle; an enigmatic statement” (the song takes care to couch these “problem”-lines enigmatically, riddlingly), but a forcible projectile, “lit. a thing thrown or put forward”. The song throws out and puts forward its weaponry.
But again, “Perhaps I’d rob them”: what does this enigmatic phrase mean? “I’d steal them” (these heartbreaks)? Then what would you do with them? And wouldn’t that have to be “I’d rob you of them”? Rid you of them? Not rob them, the heartbreaks, presumably – except that rob is sometimes used to mean “to carry off as plunder; to steal” (The Oxford English Dictionary, 5, “Now rare”), as in “rob his treasure from him”, or “Passion robs my peace no more”,84 so Dylan wouldn’t have to be taking or stealing much of a liberty. Especially as there may be a suggestion of heart-breaking and heart-entering (or exiting). And yet the lines, like nothing else in the song, continue to rob my peace. Not that the song offers itself as a peace-maker. A truce at most.
On and on and on and on the song weaves, and yet with a left and a right or a shifting of weight all the time pugnaciously, combatively. But we can sense that the round must be drawing to an end, or may be nearing a knock-out, when the pattern of the opening re-emerges. There, the line “You got a lotta nerve” had opened two successive quatrains, and now the reminder that even this vituperation must come to an end is brought home to us when we hear, as we have not heard along the way, such a repetition again at the head of two successive quatrains: “I wish that for just one time” / “Yes, I wish that for just one time”. (Relentless, this pressing home twice the words “just one time”.) But then there is a further compounding of the shape in which the tireless tirade had been launched, for back then it had been only a matter of repeating the first line, whereas now that there is to be a complete dismissal of the ex-friend, it is not one but two lines that will be repeated to begin the excommunication:
I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment
I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time
You could stand inside my shoes
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you
Usually the idiom about wishing that someone could stand inside your shoes is a movement inviting sympathy (see it my way, please); here it swings round into antipathy. And Dylan gives voices to these feelings so that at the end of each verse – and consummately at this very end – the few syllables are held, stretched on a rack all the more frighteningly for there being nothing of a scream at this end.
Until this unpalliated ending you feel that Dylan could have gone on pounding for ever (Eternal Circle of hell), so that the challenge was to arrive at a conclusion that could bring proof and reproof to an end. And then, for the only time in the song (truly “for just one time”), there is a shrewd little tilting of the stress within the disyllabic rhyme, with “be you” not having exactly the same measured pressure as “see you”, the first asking slightly more emphasis upon “you” than does the second:
And just for that one moment
I could be yóu
You’d know what a drag it is
To sée you
There is a famous poignancy in Hardy’s poem The Voice:
Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me; yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!
F. R. Leavis brought out how Hardy’s rhythms escape the “crude popular lilt” that might endanger the poem: “you that I hear” is set in contrast with the hope “Let me view you then”, asking that there be some emphasis on “view”, whereas in the line that rhymes with this, the antithesis is of “now” as against “then”, so that there has to be a touch tilting it away from a lilt. As Leavis saw and heard, “The shift of stress (‘víew you then’, ‘knew you thén’) has banished the jingle from it.”85
Positively 4th Street was never going to succumb to a jingle, or even to a jingle jangle, but it is the deadly precision of the emphasis that consummates the act of banishment, giving the unanswerable last word to this song that is not I and I but You and I.
It has the hammering away at words, and with words, that characterizes a quarrel, and one word above all others: know. About this friend or “friend” we know nothing except what the song declares through and through. If I now quote something that Dylan himself said, it is not in order to invoke whatever biographical facts might exist outside the song, or to adduce Dylan’s own character – it is the character of his songs that matters to me. But Positively 4th Street is an act of retaliation, and it gives some warrant for stressing know in the song that Dylan makes much of the word in this context. “I’m known to retaliate you know; you should know I’m known to retaliate.”86 You know; you should know I’m known . . .
You say I let you down
You know it’s not like that
You had no faith to lose
And you know it
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
When you know as well as me
You’d rather see me paralyzed
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
You’d know what a drag it is
To see you87
It’s all over, then. Envy has shown itself to be one of the corrosive agents (but only one, for this is a song that compacts a good many bad impulses).
And now I know you’re dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Don’t you understand
It’s not my problem
Your envy (of what you seem to imagine my position and my place to be) is your problem. Sorry about your dissatisfaction with your position and your place (your standing), but it’s not my problem, “Don’t you understand”. You don’t understand (and that’s your problem).
The song is sharply shaped when it comes to questions. The first two quatrains don’t have any questions in them and the last two don’t have any either. But the middle of the song is a quartet of questions, most of them such as are not really questions at all, any more than is “Who do you think you are” or “Can I help you”. Dylan doesn’t print them with question-marks or sing them very interrogatively:
Why then don’t you show it
Do you take me for such a fool
Why don’t you just come out once And scream it
Don’t you understand
The only question in the song that is manifestly sung (and printed in Lyrics 1962–1985) with a question-mark is the one that is treacherously considerate, the inquiry in the street from the friend: “How are you?” Not “You ask, ‘How are you?’”, but “You say, ‘How are you?’”
It may seem a bit late for this commentary to raise the question of whether the friend is a man or a woman. Not to be raised as a biographical or historical matter – it’s clear that the friend could be a compound ghost, and many candidates have been proposed over the years, with Joan Baez appearing in the company of half a dozen men in David Hajdu’s annals Positively 4th Street (2001). Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares? But much of the song’s power may lurk in its decision not to decide this for us. In a Dylan song it is usually clear whether a man or a woman is being addressed. This time, not so. “Just talking to somebody that ain’t there.” What matters is that a friend has let you down. Badly. Because of envy and rivalry and . . . And is still capable of unctuating (“Good luck”) unconvincingly.
A question at a press conference in 1965:
In a lot of your songs you are hard on people – in Like a Rolling Stone you’re hard on the girls and in Positively 4th Street you’re hard on a friend. Do you do this because you want to change their lives, or do you want to point out to them the error of their ways?
Answer: “I want to needle them.”88
It was a needle that injected the songs back then; now it is more likely to be a laser beam.
For my part, I have always taken the no-friend-of-his to be a man. Friends of mine, it seems, have taken a woman. At one point, the force of the lines would have to be taken differently if the irritant were not a he but a she.
I know the reason
That you talk behind my back
I used to be among the crowd
You’re in with
Do you take me for such a fool
To think I’d make contact
With the one who tries to hide
What he don’t know to begin with
I envisage the friend himself as despised here, to his face, as “the one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with”. And I take this to be the formally aggressive mock-incredulity or distancing (“one who . . .”) that says “he” even while speaking to “you”: “Now he tells me!” This, with “know” as yet another of the occurrences of a word angrily bandied between the two of them throughout the song. I get more from this than from the other interpretation, the one that travels out, via the third-person pronoun, to a third party who forms part of an obscure narrative that ripples into further rivalries. For I have always thrilled to the immitigably binary set-up for the song. You and I, not You and I and He.
Oh, there is a crowd you’re in with, but for the duration of the song the crowd is outside the ring, and inside the ring there are just the two of us, with no referee to boot. So I’d like to continue to hear “one who tries to hide / What he don’t know to begin with” as contemptuously third person – especially if “third” be pronounced in the Irish fashion. But I can understand the feeling (and I value the reminder) that a woman could well have proved to be just such a friend.89 And I’d grant that the word “heartbreaks” (“the heartbreaks you embrace”) might consort better, albeit prejudicially, with a woman. Not that heartbreak need be sexual or amatory – there is no end to the things that break hearts. (In Among School Children, Yeats saw how different are the images that nuns, as against mothers, worship: “And yet they too break hearts”.) Heartbreak, like so much else in the song, could have a root in envy. Bursting with envy. Jealousy is not the same, but bear in mind the words set down in 1586: “Shun jealousy, that heartbreak love”. It may be a valuably unsettling thing about the song that the sex or gender of the friend is not settled. In an interview in Spin, Dylan said:
Outside of a song like Positively 4th Street, which is extremely one-dimensional, which I like, I don’t usually purge myself by writing anything about any type of quote, so-called, relationships. I don’t have the kinds of relationships that are built on any kind of false pretense, not to say that I haven’t.90
Two-dimensional, not one-dimensional, this 4th Street, and although one-sided, it is two-edged, a two-handed engine that stands ready to smite more than once and smite some more. As to sex or gender: the canting word “relationships” (“quote, so-called”), though these days it does suggest lovees and lovers more than friends, can’t be denied its applicability to friendship, or to ex-friendship. Catharsis, the ancient critical metaphor in Dylan’s phrase “purge myself”, would be one way of getting rid of the catharsole and of the waste matter that is pretence.91 The metaphor in “purge myself ” is critical, but Dylan’s target isn’t formally a critic. “Some would later think the vitriolic lyrics were addressed to the critics of his new style. Dylan denies it. ‘I couldn’t write a song about something like that,’ he said, ‘I don’t write songs to critics.’”92
I don’t envy the imagined or imaginary “friend” in this song. One other candidate as the sin of the song would be anger. But the power and the threat are felt in the very restraint: there is no yielding of any kind in the song, and that includes yielding to anger (as against understanding what anger might yield). Anger is a sin resisted or at least curbed by the song. But if I ask what sin might have tempted the artist himself here, the answer isn’t going to be envy. When it comes to sin, the song is all the more ample in that its position and its place are not circumscribed by envy. The song looks searchingly into those who, having opted for emptinesses, now want to co-opt someone back into their misvalued ethos and pathos. Pity for the infected, as Pound said, but preserve antisepsis.
They tell me to be discreet for all intended purposes
They tell me revenge is sweet and from where they stand, I’m sure it is
(Dark Eyes)
What sin, come to think of it, might envy incite? Why, pride. My position and my place. Pride in being envied, even sometimes (and this is the very bad bit) if it is being envied by creeps. And then pride’s further pleasure: contempt for the envious flatterers. But Dylan does not flatter himself – again, not a biographical point but an artistic accomplishment. He can be proud of the song, not least because he is not proud in it.
Blind Willie McTell
Gratitude to a fellow-singer, no less than in Song to Woody (1962), is the life of Blind Willie McTell (1983), of which the burden is both a happy refrain and the possibility of an unhappy weight, the burden that would be envy, were it not that the song goes free from it.
Song to Woody had acknowledged something without sounding as though this were only conceding or admitting, let alone grudgingly admitting:
Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I’m a-sayin’ an’ a-many times more
That I’m saying and that I’m singing. It may cost a singer a good deal to say this unenviously about another singer, but the cost is gladly paid by a solvent artist, for it is not so much paid as repaid, and is a debt of honour. And gratitude doesn’t run to ingratiation. The refrain of Blind Willie McTell is likewise happy to do some acknowledging. The earlier “I know that you know” becomes this:
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
This might sound negative, know no (no, no), but then that is how to convey that nothing could be more positive. Or more compacted (I know that no one can, and I know no one who can). Gratitude is called upon and called for, as it is in the warning voice (O . . . no . . . know . . . know . . . no) above Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost:
Sleep on,
Blest pair; and O yet happiest if ye seek
No happier state, and know to know no more.
(IV, 773–5)
After Guthrie in Dylan’s creative life, though before Guthrie historically, there comes – welcomed – a new arrival who is a newer rival. The rivalry has its chivalry.
BLIND WILLIE McTELL
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, this land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, I heard that hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Was his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There’s a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He’s dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There’s a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There is a road that runs for twenty years from the one travelling song, Song to Woody, to the other, Blind Willie McTell. Take, for instance, Dylan’s sequence “This land is”, moving on to “from New Orleans / To Jerusalem”. Guthrie didn’t own the franchise on this sequence of words, but it has a way of summoning him. This Land is Your Land was his.93
The land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
Dylan puts his own grim spin on this by having the phrase “This land is” be consummated not by “your land” but by “condemned”. It is a withering word, once you think of how much it might compact: “condemned” as blamed, censured, judicially sentenced, doomed by fate to some condition, pronounced officially to be unfit for use (we often hear of a house as being condemned, but a land?), or – and this is an odd twist – just the opposite, not unfit for use but so fit for use that the government claims the right to take it over: to pronounce judicially (land etc.) as converted or convertible to public use. (“The condemnation of private lands for a highway, a railroad, a public park, etc.”) All these might be seething in the word “condemned”, and so perhaps – since the train of thought is “Seen the arrow on the doorpost / Saying, this land is condemned” – might be the application to “a door or window: to close or block up”. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady: “the door that had been condemned, and that was fastened by bolts”.
“This land” was all the more Woody Guthrie’s because not his alone. Behind it there is an inheritance that is respected in Blind Willie McTell, too. The phrase “this land” has its own substantial entry in Cruden’s Concordance to the Bible, and the phrase’s being more than a casual pointer in Dylan’s song will be clear if we recall the word in whose company “this land” repeatedly appears in the Bible: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7, repeated in 24:7); “Unto thy seed have I given this land” (Genesis 15:18); “I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of I will give unto your seed” (Exodus 32:13). “The stars” rise in Dylan’s second verse, but the song then bides its time, and it is not until the final verse that “this land” meets the word that is sown so often in its vicinity: “seed”.
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
The indeflectible internal rhyme greed / seed then has “seed” succeeded immediately by “Seem” rounding the corner of the line, and this with a two-edged effect, compounding the insistence (clinched by this assonance and consonance) and yet at the same time mitigating it. For to give emphasis to “Seem” must be to hold open some hope. This final verse does not say that power and greed and corruptible seed are all that there is. Only (only!) that they seem to be all that there is. At which point one realizes the conjunction of the Old Testament’s “this land” and “seed” with the New Testament’s offering its hope: “being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever” (the First Epistle of Peter 1:23). So the song’s “corruptible seed” cannot but call up the affirmation that makes divine sense of it by antithesis: “not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God”.
This final verse of Dylan’s has begun with a repudiation of hopefulness, for the line “Well, God is in his heaven” does not follow through to the naivety of the famous moment in Victorian poetry (dramatized naivety, there, for Browning’s poem Pippa Passes is darkened by the larger older sadder story within which it has its young hopes):
God’s in his heaven –
All’s right with the world!
When Dylan moves from “Well, God is in his heaven” to “And we all want what’s his”, he ignites a flash of doubt. We want to seize what is not ours but his? Or we do want what he wants, want what is his wish? It is an equivocal line to take, and furthermore the benign reading is itself equivocal, since not necessarily to be taken straight. Do we genuinely pray, “Thy will be done”? Or is our prayer lip-service? (We kid others and ourselves that we all want what’s His.) But Dylan’s run of lines does keep open the respectful colouring of “And we all want what’s his”, since he moves at once to a chastening “But”, where otherwise the rotation of “But” wouldn’t fit:
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
Dylan does not go along with the blitheness of “God’s in his heaven – / All’s right with the world!” But his song does not rebound into All’s wrong with the world, it proceeds as “power and greed and corruptible seed / Seem to be all that there is”. Blind Willie McTell, which contemplates cruel injustice (“Hear the cracking of the whips”, cracking its rhyme with “the ghosts of slavery ships”), does not succumb either to hopefulness or to hopelessness. Try hope. (And while you’re at it, try faith and charity.) Remember that those verses of the Epistle of Peter proclaim “the word of God, which liveth and abideth for ever”, and remember that this hope is immediately reasserted there in the face of mortality and loss:
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: but the word of the Lord endureth for ever.
Yet not only the word and the voice of the Lord, but the words and the voice of a great singer.
Well, God is in his heaven
And we all want what’s his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I’m gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
What kind of answer can those last two lines of this final verse, the enduring refrain, be to its first four lines? Only an answer at once partial and heartening; McTell’s singing is one of the things that there is. And we arrive at this conclusion, at art’s being a glory of man that does not wither, via the two lines about the singer of this song itself: “I’m gazing out the window / Of the St. James Hotel”. I admire and love the way in which this claims so little, even perhaps claims nothing, does no more than report one of those moments when, abstracted from evil, you gaze out of a window in contemplative regard that is not self-regard.94
It is as if the question of envy doesn’t even arise. And yet it is knowing this, knowing that envy does not even arise, that plays so generous a part throughout this lucid mysterious song.
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
If Dylan were someone who never sang the blues (someone who limited himself to Living the Blues), then this might be a comparatively easy generosity, rather as someone who is a tennis champion might have little difficulty in granting that no one can play table tennis like A. N. Other. And if Dylan were someone who sang only the blues, then this might be demanding too much of him – or of us when it came to trusting his self-abnegation. The refrain is perfectly pitched and poised. And even the form that the magnanimous praise takes –
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
– is one that very humanly and decently combines the utmost praise with a somewhat different inflection, one that emphasizes McTell’s uniqueness, not simply or solely his superiority. That no one can sing the blues like him: this endearingly combines the superlative and the highly individual, without having to enter competitively into the proportions of the one to the other. Perfectly judged, and determined to do justice to McTell. More, determined to see and hear justice done at last to him.
After the final refrain, there is no more to be said. Or sung. But there is more to hear, the fully instrumental that is yet an end in itself.
It was the repudiation of envy that brought the hoot owl into the picture or into the soundtrack. This, with a courteous comedy. Keats had assured his nightingale that the poet’s heartache was not caused by envy: “’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot”. Dylan’s night bird sings beautifully in its way, and its way is one with which neither Blind Willie McTell nor Dylan is in any way in competition. The owl doesn’t fuss about how big or how enthusiastic his audience is:
Well, I heard that hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Was his only audience
Like the rain in Lay Down Your Weary Tune, the hoot owl “asked for no applause”. Hooting, the opposite of applause, is how they drive you off the stage. The hoot owl could well be – though it is happily not – pleased with itself. But then so could the others who are good at what they do, whom we now meet:
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
Well, “well” is a word that had opened this verse (as it will again the final verse), and that chimes with Blind Willie McTell. The owl does well, as others do, too – but, come on, admit it,
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Those others have their accomplishments – to wit the owl, and the maidens to woo – but when it comes to the blues . . . And what an accomplishment is the placing of the phrase “Can strut their feathers well”. It doesn’t forget the owl and his feathers (which it is important not to ruffle), and it brings together so much that makes up what it is to strut. There is “to brace or support by a strut or struts; to be fixed diagonally or slantwise”. (I used to hear “Construct their feathers well”.) But plainly this should then be puffed out with “to puff out” (The Oxford English Dictionary quotes “His lady looked like a frightened owl, with her locks strutted out”). Moreover, there is “to walk with an air of dignity” (this, particularly “of a peacock or other fowl”). And given Dylan’s full phrase, “Can strut their feathers well”, there is the performing art: to strut one’s stuff = to display one’s ability.95 The young Dylan strutted his stuff as Blind Boy Grunt.96 I don’t know whether there enters into this tribute to Blind Willie McTell any shade of Dylan’s ruefully remembering this. It is sure, though, that the song takes blindness seriously, tragically. The first word of Blind Willie McTell, inviting us to trust that it is not being insensitive, is “Seen”. There is a shape given to the senses throughout the song. The first verse’s opening, “Seen”, moves to the third verse’s opening, “See” – and then to the last verse as it nears its ending: “I’m gazing out the window”. The second verse brings us to our sense, the one that brings us Willie McTell and which brought him, in his blindness, so much of what fostered him: “Well, I heard”. And this is the sense of which we hear tell in the fourth verse: “I can hear them rebels yell”. The word “yell” is in a different register from the other words in the song (even from “bootlegged whiskey”), and, like a sudden yell, it bursts in on us like Tennyson’s use of the down-to-earth word “scare” in the high heavenly world of his classical poem Tithonus: “Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears?”
But it is the third verse, there at the centre of the song, that is moved to a celebration of the senses’ riches, even while almost all of what the senses yield is a sad business, the wages of sin, the South’s sin, though not the South’s alone:97
See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear the undertaker’s bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
In this verse, the movement See / Hear is extended into See / hear / Hear, hearing being of its very nature the sense that matters most to song and to Blind Willie McTell. The stroke of genius, it strikes me, is the sudden arrival, wafting in along the way, of “Smell that sweet magnolia blooming”. The eye and the ear have been known to put on airs, too confident that they are the two senses that rule; how good that the sense of smell puts in its unexpected claim. Good, too, that the smell of burning does not overpower the sweet magnolia. It is a rich moment, snuffing the air. As Dylan put it in 2001, “There’s a secret sanctity of nature.”98 Even within tragedy the life that is nature may reassert itself. The tragedy could be that of Strange Fruit.99 Smell the sweet magnolia after the lynching:
Pastoral scene of the gallant South, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh, and the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Strange Fruit invokes the magnolia to point a moral; Dylan, to adorn a tale, hauntingly. “See them big plantations burning”.
The fresh flesh of the magnolia, which incited the poet William Empson,100 anticipates the sudden arrival of the four lines about the “woman by the river” and “some fine young handsome man”, no tragedy now but a pastoral moment that thankfully gratifies the remaining two senses (touch and taste, the bodies and the whiskey) that we had not been sure of – a moment that is not rescinded, though it is changed, by what immediately follows, the return of tragedy: “There’s a chain gang on the highway”.
The tragedy of blindness is not lessened, it is widened, in the tradition that sees the blind poets as inspired by their suffering. There is Homer. There is Milton, who calls up as his inspiration not only Homer but three other poet-prophets, and who prays that through his blindness he may “see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight”. And, perhaps even more darkly, there is the cruelty that inflicts blindness upon birds in the belief that they will sing the better. A hideous castration for the caged bird-chorister. This is the suffering behind the lines that open a poem by Dylan Thomas:
Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
– a question that may have combined with a nursery rhyme101 to prompt two moments in Dylan:
This is the blind horse that leads you around
Let the bird sing, let the bird fly
(Under the Red Sky)
The Cuckoo is a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies
I’m preachin’ the Word of God
I’m puttin’ out your eyes
(High Water)
Our pity for the blind horse and for the blinded bird might serve to remind us how free of self-pity is the art of Blind Willie McTell. Dylan:
What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside of them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What’s depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.102
They could look at them: true of Blind Willie McTell.
Ballads love myth, including the myth of love, the blindfolded archer Cupid. Ballads respect legends, including those of the master-bowman: Robin Hood, or (on Desolation Row) “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood”, Einstein who had no time for Time’s Arrow. Eddington: “I shall use the phrase ‘time’s arrow’ to express this one-way property of time which has no analogue in space.”103 The maidens have their feathers; style in literature has been characterized as the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat.
The first words of Blind Willie McTell are “Seen the arrow”. Does this arrow point to the man who gave the world the most famous of all arrow anecdotes? William Tell’s arrow hit the apple on the head of the apple of his eye, his son. Since Mc means “son of”, the son of William Tell may be living in another country under another name: William, or Willie, McTell. There are filaments, strings.
The story of William Tell’s skill in shooting at and striking the apple which had been placed on the head of his little son by order of Gessler, the tyrannical Austrian bailiff of Uri, is so closely bound up with the legendary history of the origin of the Swiss Federation that they must be considered together.104
It seems that the Tell story is first found in a ballad written before 1474, within an oral ballad tradition apt enough to the world of Blind Willie McTell. And “legendary history”, like tyranny, ripples out, too. Not just to McTell himself as legend and as history, but to the cruelly unjust world of the song, tyranny, and dismay at power and greed.
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, this land is condemned
Psalms 11:2: “For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string”. The bow is a stringed instrument, like the guitar that looses its arrow.
I glanced at my guitar
And played it pretendin’
That of all the eyes out there
I could see none
As her thoughts pounded hard
Like the pierce of an arrow
But the song it was long
And it had to get done
(Eternal Circle)
Blind Willie McTell had no eyes with which to see that of all the eyes out there he could see none.
But the song it was long
And it had to get done
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Handy Dandy
On Positively 4th Street, envy was what was coming off the person who had it in for the person who was telling us about it. The retaliation was armed with the word “got”, but not the “got” of possessions that we might envy, and certainly not of an enviable self-possession.
You got a lotta nerve
To say you are my friend
You got a lotta nerve
To say you got a helping hand to lend
Handy Dandy, on the other hand, does have a helping hand to lend, or even to give with, but a sinister hand:
He’ll say, “Ya want a gun? I’ll give you one”. She’ll say, “Boy, you talking crazy”
And the world of the scoundrel Handy Dandy is full of things that invite and excite envy, most of them got hold of with the little envy-catcher “got”:
He got an all girl orchestra and when he says “Strike up the band”, they hit it
Handy dandy, he got a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money
He’ll say, “Oh darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?”
She’ll say, “You got all the time in the world, honey”.
He got that clear crystal fountain
He got that soft silky skin
He got that fortress on the mountain
Handy dandy, he got a basket of flowers and a bag full of sorrow
– at which, at last, we might be tempted to thank our lucky stars that we haven’t got what he’s got, for who would want a bag full of sorrow? Except that the person who’s got a bag full of sorrow isn’t likely to be someone who has a heart full of it, and he’s probably carrying it around in a bag after collecting it or so that he can give it to other people. We might want to think again about all these things that he has got.
Handy Dandy is a sequence of filmy moments, or photo importunities, about the life-and-death styles of the rich and famous. Or infamous. The first thing that we learn about him? “Controversy surrounds him”. The song summons the celebrities (the lavish people before whom we are slavish) about whom we yearn to learn the worst so that we will not be eaten up with envy about their having on the face of it the best, the best of all impossible worlds.
The sin of envy, along with its sibling sin covetousness, is gleefully activated by the gossipy glossies such as People or Hello!, while at the same time these glamorous journalistic evokers know that they would do well to bring home to all us ordinary readers that these extraordinarily affluent famosities are gratifyingly in trouble, in danger, and even, with any luck, in despair. Do you really want to be them? No, or Nope. But the envy is still there all right, skilfully played upon, and the form of lust that is envy may often enjoy itself most as prurience, all prying and clucking.
Handy dandy, controversy surrounds him
He been around the world and back again
Something in the moonlight still hounds him
Handy dandy, just like sugar and candy
The words, the melody, the voicing, all have a swagger to them, an exultation that is partly that of Handy Dandy himself and partly his infecting us with the wish to go along with it. But concessions to us are proffered straightaway, so that we may enjoy safe sexploitation, flirting with the thought of being him in his world, or being with him there, without actually wanting to be. Controversy, eh. Lucky dog, though: “He been around the world and back again”. There’s luxury for you, sheer needlessness, since unless the guy got back again, he wouldn’t have been around the world. An odd way of putting it (unlike, say, He been to the ends of the earth and back again), but having a strong appropriate whiff of redundancy, of extravagance, of a menacing over-insistence: “around the world and back again”. (The world comes back around in “You got all the time in the world, honey”.) But then “around” itself had arrived in the second line of the song by courtesy of “surrounds” four words earlier, and “around” will come back around again in the sound of “hounds him”. (There had been a hint of danger: surrounds him as though cornered.) “Something in the moonlight still hounds him”. That’s nice to know. We wouldn’t want our celebrities to be unhounded. For one thing, this lends them an air of mystery (Something in the moonlight?). For another, it reconciles us to our position and our place (at least we aren’t hounded).
Mystery and detection (and violence) are in the air of the song, so perhaps it isn’t a vacant coincidence that the celebrity hound from the world of mystery and detection did his hounding by moonlight. Within a page and a half of The Hound of the Baskervilles (chapter 2), we meet, first, the hounds “in the moonlight”, and then the “hound of hell”. We hear about the revellers, “some calling for their pistols . . . and some for another flask of wine”. (Handy Dandy: “Ya want a gun?”; “Pour him another brandy”.) We hear of “their crazed minds”, “so crazed with fear”. (Handy Dandy: “you talking crazy”.) “The moon shone clear above them”, “The moon was shining bright” above the “hound of hell”, “shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound”, “the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since”. Plagued the family, and perhaps – since Handy Dandy is something of a gangster (crook? rogue? thug?) – plagued The Family. “Something in the moonlight still hounds him”.
It is his scene. Him he him he he he: so it goes, with other people at his beck-and-call or part of the decor. Handy Dandy is at once so cool and so hot. A shady character. But he has more than a touch of insolent charm, so he may be (in Beckett’s weird phrase) a well-to-do ne’er-do-well. He swaggers well, but he wouldn’t have to be doing this genuinely brave thing if his were not a dangerous world. So, given the incipient violence that is strong in the song, the word “if ” has a way of suggesting “when”: “Handy dandy, if every bone in his body was a-broken he would never admit it”. Phrases that might be innocent in a way, albeit sexually suggestive (“He’ll say, ‘Oh darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?’”), get darkened as though by dramatic irony: how much time has he got? (Before someone from this sleazy world puts paid to him.) “Okay, boys, I’ll see you tomorrow”. Maybe. They are his last words in the song. Might be his last words.
You’ll say, “What are you afraid of?”
He’ll say, “Nothing neither ’live nor dead”.
There is in all this an affinity with T. S. Eliot: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing”,105 and with his poem about killings, paranoia, danger, and finishing drinks, Sweeney Among the Nightingales.
Heated and poisonous, the atmosphere. The erotic surroundings and glamour are agog at the easy brutality with which girls and music may be made: “He got an all girl orchestra and when he says ‘Strike up the band’, they hit it”. There is an air of purchasable sexual favours (“a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money”), and of diffused lust, “soft silky skin”, that sort of thing. It comes as something of a surprise, though a fair cop, when, after his fountain and his soft silky skin, there immediately comes, not “He got that mistress”, but “He got that fortress”. Sensible man.
There is instilling and distilling of fear in this gangsterish world. Question and answer can mount to interrogation or inquisition. A question is countered not with an answer but with a question.
You’ll say, “What are ya made of?”
He’ll say, “Can you repeat what you said?”
You’ll say, “What are you afraid of?”
He’ll say, “Nothing neither ’live nor dead”
That whole You’ll say / He’ll say routine is as if someone is being instructed in a code of behaviour, or coached not to blow it, some meeting with someone scary. And when you are asked to repeat your question (“Can you repeat what you said?”), perhaps asked threateningly, you will wisely substitute, thanks to the rhyme (made of / afraid of), words that just might make your listener think that he misheard you the first time. “What are ya made of?” might have been asking about the human qualities of which a man is made, compacted. (Chaucer: “A man maked all of sapience and virtue” – not our Handy Dandy, clearly.) But “What are you afraid of?” is a set-up, a silver salver with a brandy on it, an ingratiation pretending to be a challenge, perfectly happy with the answer that it knew it would precipitate: “Nothing neither ’live nor dead”.
But say we stay a moment with that first question: “What are ya made of?” One answer is as plain as the hard nose on Handy Dandy’s face: he is made of money. And sure enough, in no time at all the word can be heard to clink and to clinch. “Handy dandy, he got a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money”. The line takes much weight in the song, partly because this is the moment when the hand of Handy Dandy extends itself – and is immediately underlined by and.
“What are ya made of?” Well, this is a song that includes an all-girl orchestra and a girl named Nancy and “Boy, you talking crazy” and “Okay, boys”, so why not summon the traditional question and answer?
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all that’s nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.
Handy Dandy chimes all through the song with “sugar and candy”. This may suggest that he is sexually ambiguous, in with the sugar and spice girls. For there is a whole underworld or undergrowth of sexual equivocation here. The man who “got an all girl orchestra” and who “got that soft silky skin” may or may not be made of sugar and spice. A candy-bar punk is “a convict who has become a passive homosexual in prison”.106 “A girl named Nancy” might make us think of what a nancy boy would be (“an effeminate male homosexual”). “‘Anybody plays a guitar’s a goddamned nancy,’ said Lensky” (Sheldon, 1951). “He got a basket”: “Esp. Homosex. the scrotum and penis, esp. as outlined by the trousers”. And as for that “bag of sorrow”: notum the scrotum, an item there in Evan Hunter (1956), who, like Sheldon, shows us Handy Dandy types: “I was hooked clean through the bag and back again” – which just happens to chime with “around the world and back again”. Whereupon I call to mind that “around the world” is “to kiss or lick the entire body of one’s lover”.
Okay, boys, I’ll pull myself together. But Handy Dandy is an itchy scratchy raunchy song that does have affinities with an earlier world of Dylan’s, that of The Basement Tapes, of Million Dollar Bash and Please Mrs. Henry and Tiny Montgomery. The linguistic underworld may further remind us that the world of Handy Dandy might have a soft spot for hard drugs. Candy all around my brain. Sugar and candy are drug words, and so is crystal (“Narc. methamphetamine in powdered form”), and a stick, and a bag: “Narc. a small packet, typically an envelope or folded paper, containing heroin, marijuana, or the like”. He got “a bag full of sorrow”. Sorrow, not the ecstasy that you were hoping for.
But then candy is wonderfully capacious, happy not to exclude anything whatsoever that is “excellent, easy”: “Fine and dandy. You’re all the candy”.107 A candy kid is “a fellow who is lucky, successful, or held in high favor, esp. with women”, and a candy-leg “a wealthy fellow who is attractive to women”.
The point of all this rooting around in suspect words is not that Handy Dandy tells a clear story about the drug world or the gangster world or the polymorphous perverse world. An unclear story is the point, with sharp vignettes glimpsed within the murk. There is a multitude of sins swilling around in the song: envy and covetousness, plus greed – “sugar and candy”, “Pour him another brandy”108 – and a touch of sloth: “Handy dandy, sitting with a girl named Nancy in a garden feelin’ kind of lazy”. That undulating line is long and languorous, with all the time in the world, honey, and with the participles “sitting” and “feelin’” stretching their legs, and with the rhymes stretching themselves too: Handy dandy . . . Nancy . . . lazy . . . crazy. Many sins, and some guilt perhaps, and all this then set against a disconcerting reminder of innocence. For nursery rhymes – “What are little boys made of?” – recall innocence, even if it is innocence lost. And Under the Red Sky, the album that houses Handy Dandy, is a combination of ancient nursery rhymes and of modern malaise: cursery rhymes (not cursory ones). Such is the title song itself, Under the Red Sky, and such is 10,000 Men, and 2 x 2. Ding Dong Bell: Cat’s in the Well.109
Handy Dandy is a game, one that Handy Dandy is happy to play rough.
A person conceals an object in one of his two closed hands, and invites his companion to tell which hand contains the object in the following words: Handy-Bandy, sugar-candy, Which hand wun yo have?110
Often the game has a further act of hiding in it, hiding the hands behind one’s back before offering them. One oddity is that the figurative application of “handy dandy” gets an earlier citation in The Oxford English Dictionary than does the game itself (1579 as against 1585). Sugar-candy has long been the due rhyme (“Handy pandy, Sugary candy, / Which will you have?”), but other jinglings like “prickly prandy” have found themselves called on.111 “Handy-spandy, Jack-a-dandy, / Which good hand will you have?” The conjunction of this question – “Which hand?” – with that other nursery-rhyme question, “What are little boys made of?”, underlies the run of four questions in the song’s bridge, beginning “What are ya made of?” And it is apt to the atmosphere of the song that “handy dandy” came to have the meaning “Something held or offered in the closed hand; a covert bribe or present.” He got “a pocket full of money”. In his poem The Quip, George Herbert heard this cunning clinking of a bribe:
Then Money came, and chinking still,
What tune is this, poor man? said he:
I heard in Music you had skill.
But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
Money and music and the music of money: Handy Dandy has an ear for all this.
One variant of the game’s jingle goes:
Handy dandy, riddledy ro,
Which hand will you have, high or low?
“Riddledy ro” might remind us that Handy Dandy is himself something of a riddle.
Michael Gray saw what Dylan had got in his hand and up his sleeve.112
He got that clear crystal fountain
He got that soft silky skin
He got that fortress on the mountain
With no doors or windows, so no thieves can break in
Riddledy ro:
In marble halls as white as milk,
Lined with a skin as soft as silk,
Within a fountain crystal-clear,
A golden apple doth appear.
No doors there are to this stronghold,
Yet thieves break in and steal the gold.
The answer to the good riddle is an egg.113 Handy Dandy is a bad egg. And Handy Dandy might be an alias for Humpty Dumpty. I wouldn’t envy him, or them, if I were you. Easy to fall into, though . . .
There is comedy in what Dylan makes of the world of the nursery rhyme. But there is danger, too, and tragedy. For the celebrated instance of “handy dandy” is the one from King Lear. Justice, the cardinal virtue, is everywhere vitiated by corrupt justices. The mad King interrogates the blinded Earl.
LEAR: No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes.
GLOUCESTER: I see it feelingly.
LEAR: What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes, with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond Justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places, and handy-dandy, which is the Justice, which is the thief.
(IV, vi)
If I were a writer of songs, I would prick up my ears at “Look with thine ears”. The merciless indifference of “handy dandy” is set within an exchange that speaks of the world (“how this world goes”, in tune with “all the time in the world” and “around the world”), and of madness (“What, art mad?” – “you talking crazy”), and of money (“There’s money for thee”, “no money in your purse”), and even of “O let me kiss that hand”. All of these might be felt to figure within Handy Dandy, as do both the sin of envy and the sin of lust, which Lear excoriates in this scene. And as does the vision that Lear has of sin and of its wealthy imperviousness to the virtue that is justice:
Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it.
