And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence
Unforgettably clear sense, this, while at the same time being tricky, hard to parse or to disentangle. “False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin” (Jokerman).
– The judge handed down a six-month sentence.
– The judge handed out to William Zanzinger a six-month sentence.
– The judge punished William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
– The judge came out strongly against William Zanzinger.
But he handed out strongly (for penalty and repentance) William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence? Any disingenuousness in this way of putting it is not to be laid at Dylan’s door. “The courtroom of honor”? Not so, Your Honor.
Dylan’s refusal to commit the sin that is Zanzinger’s anger – however much such righteous anger might have claimed to be all in the good cause of giving a bad man some of his own medicine – is audible in the exquisite self-control of the pause in the singing (the least of pauses and therefore the most telling) after the word “a”, in “with a [. . .] six-month sentence”. The temptation at such a moment must always be to luxuriate in indignation: “With a [pause: For Christ’s sake! Can you believe it?] SIX MONTH sentence!” All he does is just lengthen the toneless a [ə] to a [ei, as in pain], and then bide this micro-second of cold incredulity. Indignation may sometimes be a good servant but is always a bad master. Zanzinger should have curbed his temper; Dylan’s is the timing that can temper steel.
Tempered, and temperate (temperance being another of the cardinal virtues). For it is a mark of Dylan’s cooled control of this incendiary case that he watches his language. Aidan Day has said of Dylan’s “vehement moral sense” that it “cauterised white judges who handed out six-month sentences to white murderers of black kitchen maids”.249 You can sympathize with Day’s indignation (while glad that Dylan didn’t yield to vehemence), but this is overheated, not only in its putting the case into the plural (judges? murderers? maids?) but in its unmisgiving use of a word that Dylan does not use: “murderer”. Back at the time, Sing Out! used such terms (“She was murdered on February 8, 1963, by William Devereux Zantzinger”), though it did then acknowledge, even if reluctantly, that the court found him “guilty of manslaughter, dismissing charges of first and second degree homicide”. The song rightly doesn’t issue a ruling on this point. The police “booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder”, but the song, though it contests the sentence, does not contest the verdict. Far from weakening its cold contempt for the mildness of the sentence, this determination not to enjoy vehemence strengthens the contempt. It was a brutal indefensible killing, but you distort the horror of it all if you insist – without ever going into the evidence – that Zanzinger, in his drunken impatience, will have intended to kill her, that (and this is what we need to mean by murder) he murdered her. Dylan doesn’t respect any such easy appeals to self-gratifying indignation. Think of what is going on in Who Killed Davey Moore? Of all the scoundrels with their excuses, the ugliest may be the gambler who bleats: “I didn’t commit no ugly sin / Anyway, I put money on him to win”. The boxer who killed Davey Moore is, horribly, both right and wrong in his defensive words: “Don’t say ‘murder’” – true, it wasn’t murder in the ring – but “don’t say ‘kill’”? Don’t say murder, do say kill. And don’t, for Heaven’s sake, go on, confident that this is the last word: “It was destiny, it was God’s will”.
The judge “handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance / William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence”. Sentence and repentance were supposed to be how this case would close. The two words constitute an ancient rhyme, and they consummate Dylan’s sentence. As with a prison sentence, there’s a point of timing, of punctuation, here at the very end (which is then no end at all, given the perfunctory legal sentence). The Victorian book Punctuation Personified had characterized the full stop,
Which always ends the perfect sentence
As crime is followed by repentance.
Would that this were not just a true rhyme but true. Dylan in a recent interview quoted four lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem Gentlemen-Rankers, among them “We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung”. The ladder and lawlessness. The thought that comes in Kipling three lines later, immediately after the lines that Dylan quoted, is “Our shame is clean repentance for the crime that brought the sentence”.250
Words of clean truth, exactingly timed and voiced, are Dylan’s throughout this song. He can crucially pivot a line-ending into an immediate rhyme at the head of the ensuing line: “That sailed through the air and came down through the room / Doomed . . .” It’s a sickening rotation-repetition. You think at first that it’s Hattie Carroll who was doomed, but it wasn’t, it was Zanzinger with his cane: “. . . Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle”. In some terrible way, Zanzinger, too, is doomed, isn’t in control not just of himself but of his life. Yet part of the feeling in the word “determined” is that he does will it, too. This is Freud’s antithetical sense of primal words. “Determined” means either that you didn’t have any choice in the matter (determinism), or, on the contrary, that you’ve chosen (determined) it, chosen in a fury to destroy all the gentle.
Richard III, the opening soliloquy again:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determinèd to prove a villain,
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
The repetition at the line-ending, these . . . days / these days, has a grating resentment (Richard the hunchback, a victim of bodily deformity who is on the offensive) that is the counterpart to the defenceless victim’s grind in the table . . . the table . . . the table.
Or take the double negative in the line that immediately follows: “And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”. In its positive power to elicit a simple pathos, this reverts to a child’s sense of injustice, of injustice perpetrated against the powerless. James Baldwin moved this terrible turn of phrase beyond any possibility of condescension to Black English in his play The Amen Corner:
Such a nice baby, I don’t see why he had to get all twisted and curled up with pain and scream his little head off. And couldn’t nobody help him. He hadn’t never done nothing to nobody.
“And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”: it takes you right back to a time when you believed, or hoped against hope, that there surely must be somebody who would see to it that such things didn’t happen. The sadness and pathos are on her behalf, but they touch us all.
All this, though, without that human illusion of feeling that is sentimentality.251 The song opens with a line that takes a risk: “William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll”. But “poor” is saved from any soft pity because it is hard fact. The word is compassionate but it is dispassionate, too, for it does not lose sight of the plain reality that she is poor. Zanzinger, on the other diamond-ring hand, is not poor. He has “rich wealthy parents”. They’re not just rich, and they’re not just wealthy; they’re rich wealthy. Superfluous? You bet. Wasteful? But not a word is wasted.
“Rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him”. Parents provide. True. But parents also provide for you. (When you are a child . . .) No, no: his parents didn’t just provide for him, they provided him. And yet in the eerie way that may be true of these rich families, he both is owned by his parents and owns them in his turn:
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
This doesn’t say, as it might have said, that he is a man “With rich wealthy parents”, but that he “Owns a tobacco farm . . . With rich wealthy parents”.
Who provide him, not just provide for him? Some people say, well, that’s just because Dylan couldn’t get the word “for” in. But Dylan can always get into any line as many words as his art asks
. Talk about Hopkins’s sprung rhythm – this is more than sprung, it’s highly sprung. When he sings “who provide and protect him”, he means it. A poet, as G. K. Chesterton maintained, is someone who means what he says and says what he means.
“Provide” as against “provide for”: a great deal may turn upon the unobtrusive difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb. The judge “Stared at the person who killed for no reason”. There, one of the horrible things is that Dylan doesn’t, as we might have predicted, call Zanzinger “the person who killed Hattie Carroll”. (The cadence would have been fulfilled, after all.) No, it’s just “who killed”. Period. For no reason. Killed as though with no object. The verb “to kill” doesn’t mind being, as is its right on occasion, an intransitive verb, flat, hideous, indifferent.252 The converse is true of the telling indictment of “you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears”. Whereas “criticize” is its usual transitive self, “philosophize”, which is usually intransitive, turns transitive. Usually you just philosophize, that is it. You don’t philosophize something. So Dylan’s sense becomes: you who hold forth and who spin philosophical excuses for what is simply disgrace, you for whom it’s easy to be philosophical about these things since they don’t really impinge on your daily life.253
He has a tobacco farm; she empties the ashtrays. He has parents; she gave birth to ten children. “Gave birth to” is piercing (how many lived?). It just reminds you that if you’re poor, the infant mortality rate does not favour you. Or if you’re black. The song never says she’s black, and it’s his best civil rights song because it never says she’s black. Everybody knows she’s black and it has nothing to do with knowing the newspaper story.254 You just know that she must have been black. But then you know that Zanzinger is white, though it never says this either. It’s a terrible thing that you know this from the story, and from the perfunctory prison sentence, even while the song never says so. It’s white upon black, it’s man upon woman, it’s rich upon poor, it’s young upon old.
William Zanzinger, who owns things, had “twenty-four years”. Hattie Carroll “was fifty-one years old”. It is the simple or even casual word “old” that underscores the difference of age, without underlining anything. We don’t have to be implying that someone is old when we use the phrase “. . . years old”, but we ought to register what happens when you set “twenty-four years” against “fifty-one years old”.255 And, given her life and livelihood, Hattie Carroll is likely to be old at fifty-one. Or there is the way in which nouns are seen as property.
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
It’s not that he had a finger that had a diamond ring on it; he had a diamond-ring-finger. He may well have had, too, an amethyst-ring-finger, an opal-ring-finger, and a ruby-ring-finger. His diamond ring finger has this extraordinary feeling of affluent agglomeration. “At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’”. Add up the nouns like that and you’re really propertied. Nouns are items, and you can possess them, you can own them. It’s partly, yes, the feeling of a newspaper headline, BALTIMORE HOTEL SOCIETY GATHERING,256 but it’s also the way in which the nouns can be felt to bank up so very very powerfully.
Powerfully, and with rich insolence. For William Zanzinger
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking
Not walked out on bail but strolled out on bail: “In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking”. One fine day. There you have it, leisure and freedom and amplitude. Meanwhile that “matter of minutes” anticipates another little lapse of time, that “six-month sentence”. Such numbers are felt to figure all the way through, as with those twenty-four years and those fifty-one years old. Even the scale of the verses plays its scrupulous part. The verses build up. First, six lines plus the refrain. Then seven lines plus the refrain. Then ten lines plus the refrain. And then the same again, for there it must stay, on the same scale, no longer lengthening. The final verse, pronouncing the sentence of (and upon) this court, must not be allowed to trump the life of Hattie Carroll. The scales of justice must hold perfectly level the scale of the two verses, however disgracefully the court failed to be on the level.
Hattie Carroll is a supreme understanding of the difference between writing a political song and writing a song politically. T. S. Eliot knew, and practised, the difference between writing religious poems and writing poems religiously. It is good to be able to write religious poems, but the great thing is being able to write poems religiously, to have religion be not the subject of a poem but the element. Hattie Carroll is one of Dylan’s greatest political songs, not so much because it has a political subject as because everything in it is seen under the aspect of politics. Truly seen so.
One would need many more words of appreciation than Dylan needed of creation to bring out the living perfection, four square and subtle, of this great song. What Dylan said of the album Time Out of Mind should no less be said of the song Hattie Carroll: “There’s no line that has to be there to get to another line.”257 Yet sometimes he is too modest.
Y’know, every one of my songs could be written better. This used to bother me, but it doesn’t any more. There’s nothing perfect anywhere, so I shouldn’t expect myself to be perfect.258
But here is a song that could not be written better. Something perfect everywhere.
Seven Curses
Dylan raised the case of Hattie Carroll to mythic status without ever losing sight of the fact that the judicial hearing was fact: a real particular woman had been killed in 1963, a real particular man had just been brought to trial. So much was history. Dylan’s art ensured that the death of Hattie Carroll was not degraded into either the transcendently mythical or the slang sense of history, something over and done with (forget it, it’s history). But in a different indictment of the law’s corruptions, Seven Curses, the world is not that of historical fact, let alone recent fact, but that of myth. Truth is to be tested and manifested otherwise than in history. Folklore, ancient and modern, is felt to populate a worldly story that is at once that of Shakespeare and of Judy Collins.259
SEVEN CURSES
Old Reilly stole a stallion
But they caught him and they brought him back
And they laid him down in the jailhouse ground
With an iron chain around his neck
When Reilly’s daughter got a message
That her father was goin’ to hang
She rode by night and came by morning
With gold and silver in her hand
When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter
His old eyes deepened in his head
Sayin’, “Gold will never free your father
The price, my dear, is you instead”
“Oh I’m as good as dead,” cried Reilly
“It’s only you that he does crave
And my skin will surely crawl if he touches you at all
Get on your horse and ride away”
“Oh father you will surely die
If I don’t take the chance to try
And pay the price and not take your advice
For that reason I will have to stay”
The gallows shadows shook the evening
In the night a hound dog bayed
In the night the grounds was groanin’
In the night the price was paid
The next mornin’ she had awoken
To find that the judge had never spoken
She saw that hangin’ branch a-bendin’
She saw her father’s body broken
These be seven curses on a judge so cruel:
That one doctor cannot save him
That two healers cannot heal him
That three eyes cannot see him
That four ears cannot hear him
That five walls
cannot hide him
That six diggers cannot bury him
And that seven deaths shall never kill him
The sin is lust. It might have been covetousness, but the judge did not find himself tempted by the gold and silver. The first verse ends “With an iron chain around his neck”. By the end of the second verse, the metal has become more precious, and the hope is to save his neck (the chain will otherwise become the rope around his neck) with the help of what is in her hand: “With gold and silver in her hand”. Appealing to the sin of covetousness. But the judge isn’t excited by money (although he is by her hand, which he wants, though not in marriage), as he makes clear with his nasty half-punning suggestivenesses with the words “free” and “dear”:
Sayin’, “Gold will never free your father
The price, my dear, is you instead”
The nauseating thing here is the travesty of the love between father and daughter: “The price, my dear, is you instead”, enjoying its little libidinous suspension, pausing before and after “my dear” so that it may savour and purr the more. (Not “My dear, the price is you instead” or “The price is you instead, my dear”, but “The price, my dear, is you instead”.) Old Reilly is the older generation, like the judge:
When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter
His old eyes deepened in his head
– sharply seen, this, in the way it catches the deep-set look of lust and of ageing (your eyes will deepen in your head, just as you will get long in the tooth because of those receding gums), so as to mean His old eyes deepened still further in his head. Bed-rheumy eyes. And then Dylan’s sequence is perfectly clear and yet not quite what you expect:
When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter
His old eyes deepened in his head
Sayin’, “Gold will never free your father . . .”
– Sayin’? It is as though his eyes were seen to say this in the split second before his lips did. Not When the judge saw Reilly’s daughter, he said, but His old eyes deepened in his head / Sayin’.
Dylan's Visions of Sin Page 24