Dylan's Visions of Sin (13 page)

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:

Money and music and the music of money: Handy Dandy has an ear for all this.

One variant of the game’s jingle goes:

“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

Riddledy ro:

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:

Covetousness

Gotta Serve Somebody

There is a story of a country squire who, leaving church after having heard tell (once more) of the Ten Commandments, took some comfort to himself: “Well, anyhow I
haven’t made a graven image.”
¹¹⁴

Only one of the seven deadly sins is granted one of the Ten Commandments to itself. For although anger may lurk within “Thou shalt do no murder”, and lust within “Thou shalt
not commit adultery”, these Commandments neither identify nor identify with one particular sin. But the sin of covetousness has its very own Commandment, the Tenth, no less. “Thou shalt
not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Do not covet his wife or his maid, even though you may happen to find
your pleasure in somebody’s mistress or in having women in a cage. Do not covet his servant, and do remember that you yourself are going to have to serve somebody. You may be this, that, or
the other,

The Old Testament concurs with the New Testament in the warning against covetousness that is
Gotta Serve Somebody
. “Lay not up for yourself treasures upon earth,” Christ urges
in the Sermon on the Mount.
¹¹⁵

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other, or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life,
what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than
meat, and the body than raiment?

The Victorian provocateur Samuel Butler put in a word against the word of the Lord, that we cannot serve God and Mammon.

Granted that it is not easy, but nothing that is worth doing ever is easy. Easy or not easy, not have only we got to do it, but it is exactly in this that the whole duty of man
consists.

If there are two worlds at all (and about this I have no doubt) it stands to reason that we ought to make the best of both of them, and more particularly of the one with which we are most
immediately concerned.
¹¹⁶

Gotta Serve Somebody
is unrelenting, and this in itself presented its creator with a challenge. How do you vary the unrelenting? And how, once you have started on
the infinite possibilities of
You may be
anything-you-care-to-name
but you’re gonna have to etc.
, will you ever be through with instances and remonstrances? You are assuredly
characterizing all these people most vividly, with no end of styptic scepticism, but you’re gonna have to serve notice on the song sometime.

But the first thing of which to take the force is the combination of the song’s inexorable speed with its radiating deftness of sidelong glances, sly touches and chances. Take the opening
verse, which opens, very diplomatically, on to the summit of the social world:

What’s going on here? Everything.

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” Such was the straightfaced definition given by the seventeenth-century ambassador Sir Henry Wotton.
An ambassador is a servant of his country (as a minister is supposed to be), and the word “ambassador” is from
ambactus
, a servant. To England or France: old sparring partners,
and – in their European culture – constituting a rival to the United States of America as to who should be the heavyweight champion of the world.

So to the second line, where at once we can’t help wondering whether the move has immediately been to two other very different worlds and
Yous
, or whether there aren’t
mischievous intimations that the second line has not lost touch with the first.

Being an ambassador is a bit of a gamble, for you and for your country, and it often asks a poker face. Moreover, you had better like to dance all right, not just because of all
those social occasions at the Embassy but because the diplomatic soft-shoe shuffle is one name of the game. Anyway, “gamble” makes its way smilingly across to “dance” on the
arm of
gambol
. “You may like to gamble, you might like to dance”: one “You” after another, presumably, and yet the two halves of the line are perfectly happy either
to be dancing partners or to form a onesome. The world of the song is socially gathering:

England and France have become the world – but then these are the two countries that were (formerly) the ones most in danger of supposing that they
were
the world.
Not just the social world, although the social world is there as the string that connects the ambassador and the long string of pearls. The heavyweight with a long string of
successes
¹¹⁷
turns into the socialite with a long string of pearls, lite on her feet. The long string of
pearls helps to
reinforce, with a glint, the point that she is a socialite, not a socialist.
¹¹⁸
She is a lightweight champion of her world, not with a towel but with
pearls around her neck.

Dancing, whether on the international ambassadorial stage or in the ring, turns now to prancing, bringing on some more of the worldly successes who keep forgetting something:

The initiating ambassador has given way to a rock ’n’ roll performer, but then a performer – like a heavyweight champion – is often presented as an
ambassador of a kind. (Never forget that you are an ambassador for our way of life, representing your country abroad . . .) The “rock ’n’ roll addict” is apparently addicted
to his own rock ’n’ roll (the fans are another story), though not only to rock ’n’ roll: “Money, drugs at your command”. Is it truly the case that, thanks to
money, the drugs are at his command, or is he at theirs? As printed in
Lyrics 1962–1985
, the next line was straightforward, “You may be a business man or some high degree thief
”, but I hear what he sings as askew and buttonholing: “You may be in business, man”, with a sudden addressing of “You”, and with the further suggestion that things
are proceeding apace, you’re in business, that’s for sure, man, you’re not just some business man.

The high degree is wittily succeeded by “They may call you Doctor” – now,
there’s
a higher degree for you, not just a high degree (of whatever).
“If I were a master thief”, Dylan had sung in
Positively 4th Street
. But even a Master thief would have to yield to a Doctor thief.

From England or France, things have dwindled (or not, given states’ rights) to a state trooper, with the geographical allocations then receiving a
comic twist from “a young Turk”. (You might be an ambassador to Turkey or France? Or even to “another country”?) Meanwhile, the state trooper is keeping communications open
with both the ambassador and the rock ’n’ roller addict prancing on a stage, each of whom is a trouper in his way.

This starts by coming a long way down the social ladder from that ambassador (slumming?), with the two successive work-words here establishing the daily grind: “May be a
construction worker working on a home”. “Worker working”: that is what it feels like (work, work, work), with the redundancy not being of the luxurious kind, simply repetitive and
a bit blank. But up the scale again, at once, into that “mansion” and into “you might live in a dome”. Living
in
a dome is a combination of the grand and the offhand.
The usual thought is that it is very nice to have a dome over one’s head again.

Perhaps this verse seems for a moment tamed, compared with its predecessors, but not for long, for it swings into a different kind of action as it makes a place for the word that until now has
exerted its energies only within the refrain, the word “somebody”. The power here is felt in the momentum from the verse into the refrain: