Sugar and Candy
The sunset streets unfold around me as I move towards the freeway listening to Handy Dandy and thinking about America. He has long been a favourite of mine this insouciant protagonist full of braggadocio and vulnerability in equal measure whose very name itself means simple and easy. He’s a guy who would feel at home in the Godfather or the Sopranos. As the sun slips, I turn onto the 405 and become one with the slow moving wave of red lights. Another of the movie scenes of Los Angeles life begins and I let the music and the lyrics run right through me, thinking again about this most elusive of characters.
I have always loved the song Handy Dandy, since I first listened to it back in 1990. For many years this affection was based upon the interdependent effect of the music and the words, it’s a song that gets your feet tapping and draws you into the story with its light hearted swing. Without any sort of close analysis, which to be honest I resist with many Dylan songs, I heard tell of a devil may care anti-hero, an archetype of the American mobster whose past, present and future are far from crystal clear. This piece is the result of taking that affinity several levels deeper, of listening to the song repeatedly, musing, reading more widely, in particular Christopher Ricks and Michael Gray, and then listening again and feeling my way through the mysterious terrain with which Handy Dandy has surrounded himself. I hope you enjoy it.
‘Dylan has always had a way with words. He does not simply have his way with them, since a true comprehender of words is no more their master than he or she is their servant. The triangle of Dylan’s music, his voices, and his unpropitiatory words: this is still his equilateral thinking’ (C. Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin)
‘It’s not just pretty words to a tune or putting tunes to words, there’s nothing that’s exploited. The words and the music, I can hear the sound of what I want to say.’ (Bob Dylan In His Own Words p.61)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that Dylan’s work has this trifecta of interdependence. It is of the utmost importance for the song under discussion. If we look at Handy Dandy on the printed page we lose something of Dylan’s own connection with the character which is conveyed both the the music and through the medium of his voice. The printed page has an impersonality which the performed song does not and without the upbeat, easy swing of the music half of the song would be missing. A crucial part of the song’s effect resides in the fact that while our ears listen to the ease of the music, which of course the name of the hero confirms, it’s handy dandy after all, they are also confounded by the lyrics. Handy Dandy’s experiences are sometimes very far from simple and yet it is a crucial part of his character to maintain this facade of ease right up until the last possible moment. Before proceeding further it must be said that I was fortunate enough to have alighted upon an excellent recording of the only time Dylan played the song live in Vigo, Spain in 2008 which can be found on YouTube. I would recommend listening both to the studio version of the song and the live version. I am currently in love with the more relaxed swing of the live version. It seems to me to be the perfect rendition.
Who is Handy Dandy? He’s one of those shape shifters of literature and Dylan uses this to his advantage in the song. He creates for his character a new identity but makes very sure that his audience hear all the voices of his previous incarnations along the way. While Handy Dandy holds centre stage as a mover and shaker in Dylan’s world of gangsters we know he’s been around in different guises long before that. His most modern interpretation seems to be in the sense of ‘wonderfully convenient’ first used in a newspaper from Texas, the Galveston Daily News in the 1920s. We see him stealing into the middle of children’s games and nursery rhymes in eighteenth century England and earlier: ‘Handy-bandy, sugar candy, Which hand wun you have’ being the key line in a guessing game played by two children.
If you stay patiently on his trail you find references to Handy Dandy earlier even than this. His earlier nature is darker, meaning a covert bribe. We can go all the way back to the fourteenth century when William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, his allegorical narrative poem; we find Handy Dandy hiding there being used with this very meaning:
‘Thanne wowede Wrong
Wisdom ful yerne,
To make pees with his pens
Handy dandy paid.’ (Passus IV)
(At that Wrong was worried and he worked on Witwell
To pay the right bribes to purchase his peace,)
Then there is his appearance in Act IV Scene 6 of King Lear:
Lear: ‘What art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?’ (Act IV Scene 6 lines 146-150)
The mad king’s words here speak of the topsy turvy nature of the world. Who is the truly just man? Handy Dandy may occupy a shadowy world in Dylan’s song which we shrink from but how should he be judged? One must not be blind to the visual foreshadowing present in this scene: Lear is wearing his crown of flowers in this scene when he utters these words and of course later the Handy Dandy of Dylan’s universe will be carrying a basket of them. ‘He got a basket of flowers and a bag full of sorrows.’ It is perhaps this aspect of the song’s lineage which has had the single biggest effect upon me: I cannot listen to Handy Dandy’s easy swing without re-experiencing all the sorrow and understanding of humanity which Shakespeare has on display in these scenes between Lear and Gloucester. Even before we begin to take our exploration a level deeper, Handy Dandy is infused with the water of sorrow, those ‘lacrimae rerum’ to quote Virgil.
‘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’
Our swaggering hero bursts into the first verse of the song larger than life. We hear immediately that he is a man who courts the limelight and doesn’t play by the rules, ‘controversy surrounds him’ He is a person of immense wealth who is utterly dissatisfied despite his acquaintance with luxury. I love Ricks’ note on the ‘extravagant’ redundance of ‘He’s been around the world and back again’ and I’m haunted by that ‘something in the moonlight’ which is troubling him. Is it the moonlight itself which brings him no peace; as if there is something about the very nature of the world which cannot let him rest. One immediately thinks of a F. Scott Fitzgerald character here. Or perhaps the note is more one of terror- night terrors.
Both this verse and the two final verses of the song close by pairing Handy Dandy with sugar and candy. We think of a world of childhood innocence ‘sugar and candy’ This is territory which seems to be lost and forsaken in Handy Dandy’s case. Nonetheless Dylan keeps it in play throughout the song, continually bringing us back to a recognition that Handy Dandy was once a little boy brimming with childhood innocence. Not only do we have the echo of Handy Dandy himself as the player of childhood games and nursery rhymes there are also another entrances in the song through which Dylan ushers in this vision. ‘What are you made of?’ Handy Dandy is asked at the beginning of the first bridge. As we’re already in the word of rhyme and childhood it impossible not to hear that childhood refrain which begins, ‘What are little boys made of’ And then there’s that further rhyming refrain,
‘Handy dandy, just like sugar and candy
Handy dandy, pour him another brandy’
closing out two of the verses. As Ricks illuminates, Dylan has pulled this straight from Charley Over the Water a nursery rhyme which features among Walter Crane’s illustrations:
‘Over the water and over the lea
And over the water to Charley
Charley loves good ale and wine
And Charley loves good brandy
And Charley loves a pretty girl
As sweet as sugar candy’
And so images of childhood, innocence and carefree games abound as the song and the beat move on.
We are in the realm of Dylan and nothing is but what is not. There are darker meanings here that we ignore at our peril. A medical definition of candy reads as follows, ‘slang, an illicit drug, especially one, such as cocaine, that has a sugary appearance or a drug in pill form, such as MDMA’ Within the first verse of the song we are in the criminal underworld. Does Handy Dandy have his fingers deep in illegal pies? As this rhyme also closes out the last two stanza of the song, it’s an emphatic statement to say the least. Ricks also pursues the line of questionable sexuality which is raised by this reference and several others in the song. Pairing Handy Dandy with sugar and candy pushes us back into nursery rhyme territory but this time looking for why Handy Dandy is paired with girls ‘sugar and spice’ and then there’s that girl called Nancy later….
As I listen to this song, time and again I am struck by how one could make a movie out of virtually every verse. Dylan sets down markers, if you like, but one could take a stanza and run with it. Much is left unscripted, nothing is clear- which of course is exactly as Dylan intended ‘an unclear story is the point, with sharp vignettes glimpsed within the murk’ to quote Ricks
Let’s look again at the first bridge for example:
You say, ‘What are ya made of?’
He says, ‘Can you repeat what you said?’
You’ll say, ‘What are you afraid of?’
He’ll say, ‘Nothin’ neither live or dead.’
What is going on here? Are we in the middle of an interview scene? Is Handy Dandy some questionable celebrity being interviewed by some pushy journalist? Perhaps somebody is being coached for an interrogation, or are we already in the middle of more frightening action: is the room smaller, darker, a holding cell perhaps. Are there instruments of pain close by, is Handy Dandy showing that heart breaking toughness he displayed in the preceding verse. ‘..if every bone in his body was broken he would never admit it’ If we believe it then we have a character impervious to physical pain who fears nothing. All is handy dandy and the beat moves on. I just don’t buy the act however. To me, Dylan undercuts his protagonist’s seeming imperviousness to human frailty with his unspoken link to the Lear of Act IV. The king who wears the crown of flowers and offers Gloucester his eyes is not the terrifying monarch of the early scenes of the play:
‘If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.
I know thee well enough, thy name is Gloucester.’ ( Act IV Scene 6 lines 172-3)
For sure Handy Dandy might not admit it if every bone was broken, but he would feel the pain. Similarly, the statement that he fears nothing is simply a lie to cover up his very human worries. It’s a tension that makes for a great song, and for great movies too. I heard these verses in my head when I was watching the Many Saints of Newark recently. ‘Nobody ever says what they mean’ says Dickie Moltisanti. Ain’t that the truth!
Dylan spares no little pains to flesh out his character. When we look at the song on the printed page- always an important way to forage for clues- although not the final resting place for a true Dylanist, we can see how Handy Dandy is a man around whom the world revolves and who lacks for nothing in material terms. He is clearly guilty of seeing the world in terms of things which he owns, and what a range of objects he possesses! When one contemplates them, one can be in no doubt of Handy Dandy’s mobster connections or his gangster like behaviour. We are dealing with a Tony Soprano rather than a Jay Gatsby it would seem. Handy Dandy is a user of brute force he has a ‘stick in his hand’ and a ‘pocket full of money’, he can get the girl a gun anytime she wants and then there’s that bag of sorrow. Whether it’s his own or somebody else’s sorrow, the life of a mobster only ends in tragedy. And then there’s the wonderful, wonderful second bridge which expresses in a such a perfectly compressed way both the advantages and the perils of Handy Dandy’s situation:
‘He’s got that clear crystal fountain
He’s got that soft, silky skin
He’s got that fortress on the mountain
With no doors, no windows, no thieves can break in’
For sure there is the immense wealth, and the possibility for beautiful things which that brings. He’s got a fountain made of pure crystal ands clearly the finest aesthetician on speed dial. One might be lulled into a sense of security, we’re just listening to a cataloging of Handy Dandy’s assets here. However the mood suddenly changes from one of comfort and luxury to one of isolation, terror and threats. All the while he must live inside a compound so secure from attack that it lacks both doors and windows. As Michael Gray says, it’s an image ‘which invokes a castle built out of ice and snow of the heart.’ Perhaps we could also think of the paranoia of a Tony Montana as Scarface moves towards its inevitable conclusion here.
In fact we never really see Handy Dandy as anything other than a lone individual. For sure he has people who will do what he wants, he’s got that all girl orchestra, just like Dylan himself had, as Seth Rogovy points out. He also has people with whom he passes time- as delightfully crafted by Dylan in the seemingly impossibly elongated line where even the words themselves appear to carry extra syllables, as indeed the final word of the line does the way he sings it!
‘Handy Dandy, sitting with a girl named Nancy in a garden feelin’ kind of lazy’
Even here though the threats intrude. We’re in a garden enjoying an impossibly long summer afternoon and then out of nowhere, ‘ya want a gun? I’ll give you one’ What can Handy Dandy see that we and Nancy cannot?
He lives a solitary existence in that mountain top fortress and in the final end, as Dylan slyly indicates to us, the one thing he really needs, he can’t have,
He says, ‘Darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?’
She says, ‘You got all the time in the world, honey’
A reply which by its very hyperbole, betrays the deceit of its utterer.
Handy Dandy strides through everyone of our scenes, each time at centre stage. His existence is relentless, the pressures endless and still he keeps going and that music simply swings. His life is far from perfect, the opposite of perfect some might say. He is a man of immense wealth, power and highly dubious enterprise. Vices and enemies abound, corruption is in his very being. And yet.. And yet the stage was set before the song opened, our sympathy for this happy man of constant sorrow was brought into being before we even started listening. He walks with a lightness that belies the realities of his environment, he carries with him the lost innocence of youth, of all our youth perhaps and he walks within the echoes of one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations. With every beat and bar of the song Dylan uses the music to encourage us in our empathy, to say nothing of the manner in which he sings the words.
A fitting place to conclude, perhaps, is the final verse. And final indeed it is. I’ve already commented on the front half and so it’s the last image of the song with which I’m concerned here, although it’s worth noting that the rhyming pair, ’sorrow and tomorrow’ is one which Dylan uses very often indeed, as do other poets when you take the time to look!
‘Handy dandy, he got a basket of flowers and a bag full of sorrow
He finishes his drink, he gets up from the table, he says,
‘Okay boys, I’ll see you tomorrow’
Handy dandy, handy dandy, just like sugar and candy
Handy dandy, just like sugar and candy’
Notice how our ears and our mind’s eye are ruthlessly drawn to the details here; finality litters the scene. Brandy has been poured throughout the song, now Handy Dandy has finished his drink. He gets up from the table to leave and he bids goodbye to his men. Notice again the solitude, he leaves alone. As if to force our shrinking ears open, Dylan has Handy Dandy utter the words, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ Of course it’s the space around and between the words that give this final stanza its power. For by having Handy Dandy say them our consciousness is immediately sent rushing into the gaps, the no man’s land of words unspoken. We are left bereft, contemplating the very real possibility that Handy Dandy has quite simply run out of tomorrows. There is no decisive shoot out, the screen merely goes to black for ten seconds….
And amidst the lazy insouciant swing of the music the bag full of sorrow now belongs to us as we mourn for the fate of this character which is headed towards him with inexorable intent.
