You probably know the Coen Brothers as brilliant, relatively high-profile film-makers whose affectionate celluloid depictions of daft Americans have earned them ‘cult+’ status in the US and UK. But did you know that Ethan Coen is also a poet of sorts? He’s had two collections published, neither of them particularly well-received, but someone has drawn my attention to the following from The Drunken Driver Has The Right of Way and I think it’s intriguing, in a good way:
“Mr. Sands”
He had an accent, “Mr. Sands;”
Was fond of wearing four-in-hands;
His friends, like him from parts unknown,
Wore four-in-hands much like his own.
They’d jabber loudly in his room
But mumly smile at lodgers whom
They’d genuflect past on the stair;
Some had soup stains on their neckwear.
Our Mr. Sands was neat at tea
But, finished, he’d rise instantly
And bow, adjusting his cravat,
Then fly up to his third-floor flat.
He puttered quite a bit up there.
He’d much the neatest facial hair
Of any roomer; we surmised
That that absorbed him, or his ties.
We left him to his own affairs
Until the bomb blew up upstairs.
We tie his ties now; Mr. Sands
Cannot knot knots, not having hands.
– Ethan Coen, ca. 2001
I had to look up ‘four-in-hands’ – it’s a common type of tie knot (and obviously ironic in Mr. Sands’ case); I also had to look up ‘genuflects’ – it means to bend ones knee to the ground in a gesture of servility – and is the perfect word to describe the extreme civility which Mr. Sands’ terrorist friends use to cover their uncivil intents. I assume “Mr. Sands” is in quotation marks because it’s an assumed name, and one which the speaker of the poem has more than enough reason to doubt following the explosion in the final stanza.
The intensely economic manner in which the plot of “Mr. Sands” is communicated is one of its most appealing features, as is its use of homophones (words which sound the same even though they’re spelt differently) – consider, for example, the exuberant and blackly comic last line, “Cannot knot knots, not having hands.”
The poem does float around in time and space quite a bit – words like ‘mumly’ and references to taking tea suggest an English setting, but ‘puttered’ putts the mind back firmly to the US of A. It’s not possible to be exact, but I’d say that the boarding-house setting (implied by references to ‘lodgers’ and ‘roomers’) dates the story told by the poem to between 1900 and 1950. This assessment is supported by the depiction of terrorism in the poem, which is more ‘domestic’ than that associated with Islamic extremism in the popular imagination.
As some of you may have already realised, it’s all very reminiscent of an Ealing Comedy. The Coen brothers’ films reveal a strong Ealing influence and they even went so far as to remake The Ladykillers in 2004. It’s a safe bet that Coen wrote this having just gone on an Ealing Comedy viewing spree in preparation for that remake in the early Noughties.
Reading this poem gave me a richer appreciation of Ethan Coen’s talent; hopefully it’s done the same for you. However, if it has and you want to preserve that gain, I’d recommend you don’t read the rest of the collection; it’s possible to be too fond of limericks.
Colin's Commonplace 