Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  And she leads you to the river . . .

  While Suzanne holds the mirror

  Which brings us back to Tennyson and “The Lady of Shalott.” Since I made the initial connection, I have managed to secure an annotated selected Tennyson and have discovered, among other things, that “Shalott” is the poet’s alliaceous anglicization of the original Italian “Scalotta.” There is no particular line or passage in Tennyson’s poem that can be picked out and applied to Suzanne and Leonard Cohen’s house on Hydra. Yet the whole atmosphere of (what I imagine to be) Suzanne’s drifting existence in the moldering mansion seems to my perception to be redolent of that surrounding the Lady of Shalott. Island, mirror, shadows, gray walls, a space of flowers (and bananas), a curse . . .

  “Mariana in the South” is also germane, with its “house . . . close-latticed to the brooding heat, and silent in its dusty vines” (and bananas). “At eve a dry cicala sung, there came a sound as of the sea.” Fascinating that Tennyson realized that the despondent isolation of a Mariana was equally feasible in a southern climate. But how much more fascinating that, according to Hallam, cited in Aidan Day’s notes,

  the essential and distinguishing character of the conception requires in the Southern Mariana a greater lingering on the outward circumstances, and a less palpable transition of the poet into Mariana’s feelings, than was the case in the former poem.

  This raises the whole question of how far the melancholy of expatriates stems from external causes such as not being able to obtain the section of the Times that contains the Listener crossword. (Cf. John Betjeman’s brilliant pair of sonnets—sadly not to hand—about superannuated Britons attempting to live in Spain “with scorpions in the bath.”)

  But how could I not have perceived from the outset an even more compelling analog—the apocryphal History of Susanna? It is often referred to as “the story of Susanna and the elders”; in this case we have Suzanne and the elder (myself with binoculars). Susanna, “a very fair woman,” was married to Joacim, “a great rich man” who “had a fair garden adjoining unto his house.” There is even the detail of “two maids only” (i.e., the Irish girls or Sisters of Mercy).

  The elders lust after Susanna. They hide in the garden and emerge when she is naked and alone. They threaten to announce that she had a young lover with her if she will not let them lie with her. She opts for death rather than dishonor, and screams. The elders duly denounce her. In court she is found guilty and sentenced to death. But a young man called Daniel comes forward and cross-examines the two elders, who condemn themselves by not being able to agree as to the kind of tree under which they saw Susanna and her lover “companying together.” One says “under a mastick tree,” while the other says “under an holm tree.” Susanna goes free. The elders are executed. And Daniel is promoted to Detective Superintendent.

  Since the translators of the Authorised Version are often shaky on flora and fauna, I see no reason why one of the trees might not have been a banana tree. We have a Breeches Bible. Why not a Banana Apocrypha?

  Curious that it never occurred to me to exploit the Susanna-banana, Suzanne-banane rhymes. They are implicit throughout.

  The two Irish Catholic girls (not sisters, as far as I know) came to Hydra for the summer, intending to find work to pay for their holiday. Suzanne learned about them and employed them. This spying elder only saw them shifting stones and dirt all day every day, so his impression was that they found work to pay for their work. I dubbed them “The Sisters of Mercy” after Leonard Cohen’s song of that title. But the song is full of innuendos, and I hasten to add that I know nothing whatever of the previous personal lives of the Irish girls. The song contains a nice crypto-banana allusion:

  If your life is a leaf

  That the seasons tear off and condemn

  They will bind you with love

  That is graceful and green as a stem.

  Now Suzanne has left. The Sisters of Mercy have left. Half the garden is lumpily cobbled, with a centerpiece that looks like the kind of well that ought to have gnomes fishing in it and plastic frogs sitting around it. The banana-plants, looking a little tired, are still standing. But one day before her departure, Suzanne stood in the garden speaking to a Greek woman via an interpreter. The only word I could catch on the wind was “bananas.”

  Don’t know where the angels singing hosannas in my song come from, but they tie up with Cohen’s “Marianne”:

  I forget to pray for the angels

  And then the angels forget to pray for us.

  Always and everywhere there are angels in the superstructure and in the subtexture.

  Pandias Skaramangas is a key to many things on and off Hydra. (He introduced Dimitri de Clercq to Alain Robbe-Grillet. But that is almost another story. “Almost” because Le mystère Cohen, Le voyeur anglais, Le jardin aux bananiers, L’année dernière à Hydrabad are all straight from the pages or the celluloid of M. Robbe-Grillet.) Pandias claims that without him, oh yes, we would have no bananas. The raised garden, he says, belonged legally to Cohen, but somebody else had appropriated it. Cohen wanted to go to court. “But I told him: don’t go to court. Offer to buy the land. I myself have bought my own garden three times. It is much less trouble and expense than going to court. So this is what he did.”

  Well, now I know where the angels came from—or at least one provenance for them—Bermuda. Bill Pownall, painter and guitarist, tells me that he once wrote, while living on Bermuda, a short story called “Green Angels.” The story concerned banana-plants whose leaves, of course, resemble great verdant wings. Angels by Jacob Epstein, perhaps.

  Bill Pownall says an English couple who rented the house next to his in the summer were by chance at the Pyrofani on the evening of my birthday party. Willy-nilly, they heard my rendition of the poem and amazingly were not appalled (I would have been, in their place). So Bill sent them a copy of the poem, and they have written back to say that they now perform it in the privacy and comfort of their own home.

  There used to be (maybe still is) an all-girl pop group called Bananarama. What I enjoy from my terrace is a bananorama.

  Apparently Leonard and Suzanne produced a brother and a sister called Adam and Lorca. If Rainer Maria Rilke and Lamorna Birch can be men, why shouldn’t Lorca be a woman? One of the main female characters in Margarita Karapanou’s The Sleepwalker is called Luca. Since the whole thing is a kind of 1970s roman à clef, with names and identities freely swapped around, why shouldn’t there be a hint of Lorca in Luca?

  Incidentally, I’ve just finished reading for the first time Karapanou’s Cassandra and the Wolf, some scenes of which are also set on Hydra. (Greek for “wolf” is lykos, which could be transliterated lucos; the feminine would be luca, which also happens to be the name of Karapanou’s spaniel.) She handles with kid gloves a horrific, brilliant tale of child abuse, seen through the eyes of a little girl. In some ways the story foreshadows The Sleepwalker. Once again Karapanou perfectly catches the sinister, yet elusive, side of the island’s character. In one elaborate scene, involving a banana, the little girl refers to herself as “Queen Banana.”

  Chambers’ laconically states that “banana” is Spanish or Portuguese from the native name in Guinea. One longs to know more. Under “hand,” Chambers’ gives as one definition: “a division of a bunch of bananas.” I hope I shall be able to look back on this whole preoccupation as a five-finger exercise preparing me for a more sustained concerto or symphony.

  Hydra is by no means a desert island. I have not only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare but also quite an eclectic little library, which, however, is a bit weak in the dendrology section. The Tree of Life by Roger Cook sadly contains no explicit references to banana-plants, but it does have a full-page color reproduction of an early-nineteenth-century Indian miniature from the Punjab Hills of a woman embracing a tree. This “tree” is unmistakably a banana. The commentary tells us:

  Alone on the terrace of the palace, the beloved pines for her departed
lover. Clasping the trunk of the tree, she longs for the joys of love in union.

  Mariana in Asia, perhaps.

  A couple of Leonard Cohen’s banana-plants exhibit a strange, dark object that looks like a kind of fruit but nothing like a banana. It is rounded at one end and pointed at the other and hangs from a swaying, wrinkled stem. The whole ensemble looks like some dinosaur’s pizzle, and—to my eyes at least—is a lot more sexually suggestive than your common or garden banana. Curiously or not, some of the more recondite and potent trees in Cook’s book—world trees, dream trees, alchemical trees, mystic trees, trees of knowledge, trees of good and/or evil, trees of life— display fruits resembling these mysterious, virile-looking objects.

  As I now seem to be attempting—an absurdly impossible task— to catch every echo, to map every lane in the labyrinth, I had better observe, before anyone else does, the mildly curious fact that the Hydra novelist par excellence, Margarita Karapanou, shares her name with the cocktail recommended by Bill, who appears in her novel The Sleepwalker. How fortunate that he did not suggest a screwdriver, a Long Island iced tea, or even a banana daiquiri.

  Wrote a long letter to my old friend Paul Surman. Before I left England, Paul presented me with a marvelous poem he had written for me, titled “South.” Here it is:

  Returning from the north,

  I think of you as the motorway

  Calculates our journey in junction numbers

  And stops at service stations, the cars ahead

  Draining away down the grey light of the road

  Towards a vaguer south, and realise

  Your south has always been further south than mine.

  If not an actual south, a state of mind.

  By now you will be there, travelling done,

  Location secure again. After all there is only

  A notional north, a relative south, and we may still

  Communicate across these distant lands, nevertheless

  I know your south is further south than mine

  And this makes a difference I do not completely understand.

  It’s not just a matter of north and south, but day and night.

  I have always loved the night, where everything is incomplete

  And might be something else. Like a vampire

  I decline the day where possible and just manage to survive

  The average murk of the English light, but you have gone where

  Light works loose the bare simplicity of things that would

  Straightway tear me down to bones and instant ancient dust.

  But it’s not just a matter of day and night, there’s summer

  And winter too. My being still records the springtime surges,

  The hedgerows filling up with names of plants,

  The starlings filling our eaves with noise again

  And I too now greet the returning warmth, but the long day

  Wearies me with too much explained by seeing,

  Too much exposed, you I know could not feel like this.

  Yet it’s not just a matter of summer and winter, but stay or go.

  We have lived in this same latitude side by side for years,

  But now you are returning to your south, your home adopted

  By choice and chance in which you yet belong. I too

  Live in a place that is only partly mine, my birthplace,

  Homeland that I love, in whose familiarity I am only half at home.

  The rest is what I do not understand, where we meet

  In that foreign land where the language is the unexplained.

  I hate your going to your further south but hope you hear

  In this lament my thanks for being what I am not.

  I reread his poem before writing to Paul, and this is part of what I said:

  What a poem! What a lucky dog I am to have a friend like you and a poem like that written for me! But I’m still having trouble with that last line. I don’t think I deserve any thanks. What I believe you really mean (I’m probably wrong, as usual) is something like: “I hope you hear in this lament my gratitude to the powers that be (however conceptualised) that Roger is what I am not.” Would you go along with that? After all, I personally deserve no credit for being different from you.

  Apart from that quibble, the rest of the poem is spot on and very moving, damn you. My eyes are moist as I write to you from “that foreign land where the language is the unexplained.” I think you speak the language of that/this foreign land better than I do. Your poem and my situation tie up with Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Mariana in the South.” I’ve been scrutinising these two poems lately for reasons which will become apparent, and have found (in the Penguin Classics selection) an amazing note quoting Arthur Hallam:

  It [“Mariana in the South”] is intended . . . as a kind of pendant to his former poem of Mariana, the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness, but with this distinctive variety in the second that it paints the forlorn feeling as it would exist under different impressions of sense.

  In other words, as the poet sings, “Light works loose the bare simplicity of things.” I.e., you and Tennyson realised long ago what has taken me a lifetime to discover—that in the South (literal, but especially metaphorical and metaphysical) the outward circumstances say it all to those who can bear to look. (Here one could go off on another tangent relating to mirrors, gorgons, “The Lady of Shalott,” Orpheus losing Eurydice by looking back etc. etc.)

  I think I’ll start a new paragraph. I don’t know where this comes from (the Marx Brothers?):

  I met a man from the South

  He had a big cigar in his mouth

  That’s how I knew he was from the South.

  Exactly. There is no need for the writer to attempt “a palpable transition” into the feelings of this Man from the South, because “the outward circumstances” (in this case, the cigar) say it all. This is the secret of my “Happiness” poem about the boat and—though less obviously—of the “George” (about another boat, or the same boat—the one that you and I find ourselves in). The trouble is (as you know) that, wherever you may be—North, South, East, West, playing bridge, on the bridge—it doesn’t matter—very few people UNDERSTAND. They say things like: “OK, you’ve described the boat. So what? You’ve described Wolvercote. So what? If your father is dead, how could you have been looking for him?”

  Just as I wrote that, I suddenly had the realisation that Wolvercote Dreaming [a long poem that I published “about” a small community on the edge of Oxford, England] is a poem of the South. Indeed, all my work is of the South. Thanks. It took a man of the North to lead me (maieutically) to this realisation. And yours is of the North. But we’re both speaking the language (different dialects, perhaps) of the unexplained, which is why many people are equally perplexed by your darkness and my sunlight. As that great poet of the South, Lawrence Durrell, wrote:

  If truth were needles

  Surely eyes would see.

  Writing to Paul helped me to grasp a little more clearly this whole North-South business. At first this motif crept in via my relating Suzanne Cohen to Mariana. It wasn’t until I had hammered out those paragraphs to my friend that I realized how firmly implanted the idea is in Fun de Siècle itself. From damp gymkhanas to bananas in one easy lesson. And realized how I’ve always— even when living in England—been a South writer, a South paw, of the South Southy. I bring things out into the sharp, white light (so white that it is black, as George Seferis has observed)—bananas, for example. I set them on a sharp, white page and sit back, believing my work to be done. Then I am surprised when people do not see—and immeasurably delighted when they do.1

  Returned from swimming to find that Nancy Drew had left for me a review of a book called Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen by Ira Bruce Nadel.

  Idiotic title, even if one ignores the schoolboy sexual innuendo.2 It would make sense only if Cohen had worked at lots of different jobs or changed political or religiou
s allegiance many times. Be that as it may, what really struck me was how both the reviewer and (as far as I could tell) the author took for granted the idea that Leonard Cohen was somebody famous and important.

  When I wrote the first set of notes to Fun de Siècle, I thought it necessary to explain who Cohen was. In my perception he was a minor ’60s pop singer with poetic pretensions; most people in the world had never heard of him and were none the worse off for that; he was (I thought) a phenomenon more transient than his own bananas.

  It is difficult for me now to recapture my first fine, careless rapture, my prelapsarian innocence when I sang, like Milton, of a garden and of fruit. But I believe I’m being honest when I asseverate that while I was composing Fun de Siècle, past or present inhabitants of the L-shaped house scarcely impinged at all upon my awareness. I was not your man, or last year’s, or any other kind of man. I was my own man. I sang my own song. But now I find myself being drawn into the clutches of a Hydra-headed monster, guardian of the bananas that I innocently attempted to possess in verse.

  Yes, I am struggling, Laocoön-like, with every myth that ever was—the Labors of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the Garden of Eden, Oedipus, Proteus, Orpheus, the Grail Quest, Geth-semane, the Arabian Nights—i.e., with the only myth that ever was and is and shall be.

  What I am doing wrong is struggling, and, according to the critique of Various Positions, this has been Leonard Cohen’s error as well: “What are facts when dealing with Cohen, whose life has been one long battle for custody of his own myth?” inquires the rhetorical reviewer. “What,” asks the present autoscholiast, “are facts when dealing with Cohen’s bananas who are fighting for custard to go with their own pith?”

  There is seriousness in all this, believe me. As Lawrence Durrell remarked, life is too serious not to be taken lightly. I have been reading Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, and there I learn how rapidly history can become myth—thank goodness, because history terrifies us whereas myth redeems us. Humankind (albeit mostly unconsciously) constantly yearns to pass from profane time (becoming) into mythic time (being). Now, I understand that, in my—my what? My dialogue? My commerce? My intercourse? My transactions?—my engagement (that will serve) (or maybe engagement) with Leonard Cohen’s bananas, I am operating in mythic time, in the realms of nonordinary reality.