Dylan's Visions of Sin (12 page)

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.

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.

Blind Willie McTell had no eyes with which to see that of all the eyes out there he could see none.

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.

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”:

– 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.

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.

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.

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?

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