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The tune that they were playing changed, and the tone of the music changed too. There came into it - but it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note: in his mind Winston called it a yellow note. And then a voice from the telescreen was singing:

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold mc:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.

The three men never stirred. But when Winston glanced again at Rutherford's ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing AT WHAT he shuddered, that both Aaronson and Rutherford had broken noses.

Orwell G. (2004). 1984. 1st Time Publishing. p. 98

* * *


UNDER a spreading chestnut tree  
  The village smithy stands;  
The smith, a mighty man is he,  
  With large and sinewy hands;  
And the muscles of his brawny arms
  Are strong as iron bands.


  
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,  
  His face is like the tan;  
His brow is wet with honest sweat,  
  He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,  
  For he owes not any man.  
  
Week in, week out, from morn till night,  
  You can hear his bellows blow;  
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge
  With measured beat and slow,  
Like a sexton ringing the village bell,  
  When the evening sun is low.  
  
And children coming home from school  
  Look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge,  
  And hear the bellows roar,  
And watch the burning sparks that fly  
  Like chaff from a threshing-floor.  
  
He goes on Sunday to the church,
  And sits among his boys;  
He hears the parson pray and preach,  
  He hears his daughter's voice,  
Singing in the village choir,  
  And it makes his heart rejoice.
  
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,  
  Singing in Paradise!  
He needs must think of her once more,  
  How in the grave she lies;  
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
  A tear out of his eyes.  
  
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,  
  Onward through life he goes;  
Each morning sees some task begin,  
  Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,  
  Has earned a night's repose.  
  
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,  
  For the lesson thou hast taught!  
Thus at the flaming forge of life
  Our fortunes must be wrought;  
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped  
  Each burning deed and thought!



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Village Blacksmith. // Lounsbury, Thomas R., ed. Yale Book of American Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912; Bartleby.com, 1999. URL: www.bartleby.com/102/59.

* * *

Ironically, the best-known chestnut reference—Longfellow's famous poem "The Village Blacksmith," which begins, "Under a spreading chestnut tree/ the village smithy stands"—does not refer to a chestnut at all. The tree to which Longfellow paid tribute was a horse chestnut—a wholly different genus (Aesculus) from the American chestnut (Costarica). Longfellow was well aware of that fact, but decided to sacrifice botanical precision—"under the spreading horse chestnut tree"— for poetic meter.

Freinkel S. (2007). American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree. University of California Press, p.15.

* * *

Although Jimmy Kennedy wrote almost exclusively with Michael Carr during the last two years of the 1930s he also co-wrote a very popular novelty dance, The Chestnut Tree, with Tommie Connor and his younger brother Hamilton. It became the dance sensation of 1938.

Kennedy J. (2011). The Man Who Wrote the Teddy Bears' Picnic: How Irish-Born Lyricist and Composer Jimmy Kennedy Became One of the Twentieth Century's Finest Songwriters. AuthorHouse. P. 133

*

Conceiving a guaranteed dance sensation out of the blue was a tall order and Kennedy, Connor and Kennedy struggled to find ideas for several days. In the end inspiration came from a photograph the elder Kennedy had puzzled over in the newspaper a few months earlier. It had shown a youthful King George VI at a Boy Scout jamboree and it was an unusual picture because the King and the scouts around him all had a hand on their heads. When he asked his wife Peggy what they were doing, she said she thought it was probably a Boy Scout game. Back at the office, Kennedy showed the picture to Tommie Connor, who remembered it as the Scouts doing their version of The Village Blacksmith. The Longfellow poem was well known to every schoolchild and began 'Under a spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands..' It was a long shot but could they turn the game into a dance?

Ibid. P. 134-135

A 1939 article shows the three songwriters in the Peter Maurice offices, smoking furiously, collars and ties loosened, laughing their heads off as they tried to brainstorm a lyric based on the Longfellow poem with the dance steps to go with it: 'We wanted something that was fun, that anyone could do - a dance for the non-dancer, if you like, - said Jimmy Kennedy at the time. Eventuallythey came up with a jointly composed tune and some rudimentary steps, inviting Adele England, who had choreographed The Lambeth Walk, to make them more professional. She knew how to invent movements to fit in with the Heinmann philosophy of creating actions that were so simple and fun that anyone could do them straight away.

Ibid. P. 135-136

<...>weeks later, The Chestnut Tree sheet music was on sale in the shops, complete with all the steps and hand actions and with the strict warning that 'this dance must not be performed until the evening of Tuesday, 15 November 1938'. That was the day the bands would have their parts and the dance could be rolled out simultaneously across the country. Adele England coached the Locarno dance instructors so they could show customers the steps when the tune was played for the first time, and she was also up with the band, leading dancers at the first performance in Streatham.

Soon The Chestnut Tree was selling over 10,000 copies a day - taking the British dancing public by storm. It was recorded by Ambrose and all the other bands - including Jack Hylton, Joe Loss, Oscar Rabin, Harry Leader and Victor Silvester. American band leader Hal Kemp gave it a boost in the US where it reached No.12, adding it to his repertoire at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and making it an instant hit with the smart set there. Later it was taken up by dance halls all over America. Glenn Miller's big band version was later featured in the film classic, Memphis Belle.

Ibid. P. 135-136



Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree
I loved her and she loved me
There she used to sit upon my knee
'Neath the spreading chestnut tree.

There beneath the boughs we used to meet,
All her kisses were so sweet
All the little birds went tweet, tweet, tweet,
'Neath the spreading chestnut tree.

I said, I love you, and there ain't no ifs or buts'
She said, 'I love you.' And the Blacksmith shouted, Chestnuts!'
Underneath the Spreading Chestnut Tree
There she said she'd marry me
Now you ought to see our family
'Neath the Spreading Chestnut Tree.

Ibid. P. 137

*

One early Chestnut Tree rhyme took up the air raid precaution/ ARP theme: Underneath the spreading chestnut tree /Mr Chamberlain said to me/If you want to get your gas mask free /join the blinking ARP. According to the Opies, this same rhyme was still being used 14 years later in 1952 in Aberdeen, where schoolgirls who had not even been born when the Munich Pact was signed in 1938, used it to count the bounces when 'playing balls'. During the War, many other versions of the dance circulated among youngsters. Underneath the churchyard six feet deep / There lies Hitler fast asleep/ AH the little micey tickle his feet / 'Neath the churchyard six feet deep. This was collected in 1954 in Stockton-on-Tees. Another, which was very similar, from Tunstall in Staffordshire, went Underneath the water six feet deep / There lies Hitler fast asleep / All the little tadpoles tickle his feet / 'Neath the water six feet deep".

Ibid. P. 138

* * *

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer.
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance
How can wc know the dancer from the dance?40

Yeats W.B., 1927. (W.B. Yeats, "Among School Children," in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1961))



These lines occupy a privileged place in twentieth-century literary criticism, delebrated by the New Critics as an image of unity, the inseparability of the tree's parts analogous to that of the dancer and the dance. New Criticism sets up Yeats's dance as a symbol of wholeness, and critics have followed, surveying dance throughout his poetic and dramatic oeuvre as offering a model of coherence, a source of identification with the dancer's perfection, a mind/body balance, ritual origins, androgyny, and an association with immortality. As an interwar dance poem, "Among School Children" would seem to indicate a modernist's embrace of dance as therapeutic and restorative, aligned with a shocked society's quest for health.

Just as important as the New Critical reading, and a crucial retort to it, is Paul de Man's deconstructive version of the same lines in Allegories of Reading." Dc Man famously reads the final couplets as literal rather than rhetorical questions, and as expressing anxiety rather than reassurance. If we cannot tell the dancer from the dance, what arc the status and authority of knowledge, interpretation, and understanding? We are catapulted into lack, an urgent not-knowing, instead of being embraced by an affirming wholeness.

Social Dance suggests an alternative reading, one informed, to be sure, by the post-deconstructive turn of Anglo-American literary scholarship towards new historicist, materialist, and contextualist concerns. In the context of the intcrwar period's dynamics of shock and recovery and the imbrication of social dance with cosmopolitanism and modernized gender relations, the meaning of the dancer and the dance shifts. The merger of dancer with dance now appears as symptomatic of destabilized individual identity and points towards established traditions and rituals meant to provide group solidarity or collective pleasure. The dance is analogous to the chestnut tree, alluding to a song popular in campfire and community singing, a popular nursery rhyme, and to Longfellow's poem "The Village Blacksmith".



Memorization of Longfellow's meter was embedded in the English education system; Queen Victoria claimed that Longfellow was the only poet her servants knew. When the Musical Times published in 1940 a brief article on the origins of "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree," the author described it as a traditionally preserved Old English tune which had somehow become popular with the Boy Scouts and among social dancers; "The Village Blacksmith" provided background in her investigation because of a turn-of-the-century Manchester minstrel show with comic recitals of Longfellow's poem, accompanied by hilarious gestures of a man with a wooden arm. In 1984, a dystopian version of the song is played on a telescreen in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, suggesting that the song's symbolism might be carried forward into sinister versions of the triumph of collective over individual identity. Yeats's dance, compared to the chestnut tree, takes on particular resonances in the context of intcrwar culture. The dance alludes to popular practices of music hall performance, to tradition carried down from one generation to another, to practices of memorization and recitation, to communal singing as a form of bonding, and to the gestural comedy of awkwardly repaired bodies.

Zimring R. (2013). Social Dance and the Modernist Imagination in Interwar Britain. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. Pp. 27-28.

* * *

Something changed in the music that trickled from the telescreen. A cracked and jeering note, a yellow note, came into it. And then - perhaps it was not happening, perhaps it was only a memory taking on the semblance of sound - a voice was singing:

'Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me

The tears welled up in his eyes. A passing waiter noticed that his glass was empty and came back with the gin bottle.

Orwell G. Op.Cit. P. 366