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