Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  “Steve, if I drank, none of this would be happening.”

  And I sit in L.’s kitchen, Suzanne’s kitchen, Marianne’s kitchen, teaching the Master and the Mistress conversational Greek; or I interpret between them and Kyria Evangelia about laundry, horticulture, and life’s vicissitudes. I feel blessed.

  All this stuff is coming off scraps of mostly undated paper that I fondly imagined I would be dealing with within a day or two of my making the notes. I never learn. Now I am typing them out, but I still (probably fondly) hope to flesh them out later.

  The back of an envelope reads:

  Liminal

  Nel mezzo

  Nel mezzanine—

  legend in lunchtime!!

  p. 152—communitas

  If Hesperides, who is

  dragon?

  Ought to destroy my notes

  à la Prospero/Hercules

  Jalousie—the screen is what

  I’m spying on. Voyeur.

  Sea—shield, with it or on it

  Nancy’s letters, S & S’s

  notes & card, all the

  documents.

  Well, as Lawrence Durrell used to say: “I do hope that’s not obscure or anything.” It all seems pretty clear to me. The main theme is, as usual, in-betweenness. The bananas form a more or less effective screen (“jalousie”) between my open shutters and L.’s house. Suzanne, believing herself threatened by the Elder on the other side, wanted to redeploy the banana-screen between the Elder’s jalousies and her garden. The Greek for the act of being a voyeur is banisteri. So what I practice is banana-banisteri. I resemble the man who left a factory every night pushing a wheelbarrow. He was suspected of stealing, but every night his wheelbarrow was searched and nothing was found. Eventually it transpired that he was stealing wheelbarrows. Similarly, what I have under surveillance is nothing and nobody other than the clumps of banana plants.

  “Coupe” means Myth by Laurence Coupe (Routledge, 1997). I chanced upon it in an Athens bookshop. It’s a wonderful antidote to the shelves of works on “Greek Myth.” I need people like Coupe to inform me about what stage contemporary criticism (or certain branches thereof) has reached. Indeed, his book is in a series, edited by a man with a Greek name, called the New Critical Idiom. Coupe, according to the cover, teaches at somewhere called Manchester Metropolitan University, which sounds vaguely mythical.

  Certain other academics also need Coupe and people like him. A few years ago, I attended a symposium at a British university (though some of the speakers were from overseas) called Myth in Modern Greek Literature. We might have been snugly and smugly back in the nineteenth century. I don’t recall hearing mentioned any of the names in Coupe’s long and admirable bibliography. Each participant took a particular text or texts and commented on references to ancient myths to be found therein. One or two, greatly daring, spoke of the absence of references to ancient myths. None gave the slightest indication of awareness of exciting developments taking place in other disciplines such as anthropology, theology, comparative literature, angelology, linguistics, semiology, philosophy, psychology—to name but a few— exciting developments of the greatest relevance to the topic under discussion.

  I digress. Yet I don’t, because whether I belong to the New, the Old, or the In-Between Critical Idiom—or none of them—my subject is myth. I need books like Coupe’s as rungs in my ladder, places to stand in my attempts to move the earth. Advance camps. Cairns. Pitons. But having made use of Coupe, I have to tell him to begone, albeit with blessings on his head, for one main reason, which is that he does not believe. Nor does he believe that it is the done thing for exponents of the New Critical Idiom to believe. This is where we part company. Take but belief away; untune that string, and hark what discord follows. For me, myth is. Angels are.

  Oleg Polunin (Flowers of Greece and the Balkans) has this bald entry:

  MUSACEAE Banana Family

  MUSA M. cavendishii Paxton BANANA is cultivated in the warmest parts of the Med. region particularly in Crete.

  I don’t think I want to know who Cavendish was, or why Paxton named a banana after him or her, but I should have liked some botanical description. Curiously, the banana seems to be virtually the only plant that Polunin does not describe. Does he spurn it for not being native to the region? If so, how insufferably musist of him. My questions: Is cavendishii the only banana found growing in Greece? Are the bananas in L.’s garden cavendishii? Why do dictionaries say that the Latin name for banana is Musa sapientum when there seem to be so many species and cultivars? What, if any, is the relation between cavendishii and sapientum? Was Cavendish wise?

  Steve suggests that L. was attracted to Katerin Tekakwitha “because of the self-inflicted pain.” He doesn’t elaborate. Steve first met L. on Hydra in the early ’60s. George Johnston, the Australian writer, introduced them.

  Yiota, Banana Princess, and her friend were not taking bananas to the nuns as a treat just because the nuns liked bananas. Yiota modified my whole perception of this vignette the other day by explaining that the incident occurred during Lent. The nuns were fasting and perhaps even fainting. The bananas (fruit being legitimate Lenten fare) were therefore not a luxury but a necessity.

  A Banana Princess ought to be good at unpeeling layers of truth, and Yiota certainly is. One day she spotted Laurence Coupe’s book, on the cover of which in prominent capitals is the word “MYTH.” “Ah, you are reading a book about nose!” She exclaimed, thus alerting me to the fact that in the Greek alphabet, “myth” spells myti, which means “nose.” So I’m now collecting material for a monograph on the myth of nose. So far I have Cleopatra, Cyrano de Bergerac, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jimmy Durante, Brasenose College, Grenouille (the protagonist of Patrick Suskind’s Parfum), the Dong with the Luminous Nose, and, of course, Pinocchio. . . .

  Nancy Drew also ought to be good at unpeeling layers of truth, but sometimes I fear she obfuscates more than she reveals. E.g.:

  Roger—

  I just remembered something—I believe Steve Cohen is a psychiatrist based in Eastern Canada (New Brunswick?) & once treated a friend of mine—by complete coincidence—who was suicidal. She liked him.

  Or her P.S. to another note, which begins “Dear M. Poirot”:

  I had a dream yesterday evening you said “Please don’t hesitate . . .” then my watch beeped 6 P.M. (beep-beep) interrupting your message. But you were standing next to a large white horse. . . . What does this mean?

  I dread to think, but don’tcha just love her?

  Outside Gkikas’s shop, discarded boxes read: Chiquitas, Panama, Variety Cavendish. So Cavendish gets around. Musa sapientum becomes more elusive, mystical, and grail-like than ever. I saw in a cookbook mention of a legend that the “fig” of Genesis was really a banana, and that Adam and Eve clothed themselves in banana leaves, which would seem a good deal more practical than sewing fig leaves together. Full banana, rather than full fig. But might we not go even further and suggest that Musa sapientum, Muse of the Wise, was none other than the actual Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

  And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof. . . .

  Sadly, I have no Hebrew. All I can do is point out that the Authorised Version (a) uses the word “wise,” and (b) nowhere gives any hint as to the shape or size of the fruit. It could have been a banana. Furthermore, since the man and woman realized they were naked as soon as they had eaten the fruit, what more logical than that they should have clothed themselves in the nearest leaves, i.e., the leaves of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself?

  Now, I am scanning the early chapters of Genesis as I write this, and I have just observed something I have never been aware of before. Probably everyone else will say scornfully: “Didn’t you know that?” To which I have to reply: “No, I have reached the age of fifty-seven without knowing that.”
“That” being that the serpent was not the only subtil one in the story. The Lord God himself emerges as having behaved just a little bit sneakily and deviously too. First of all he

  commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

  This was sneaky in itself, because they certainly did not die on the day they ate the fruit. And anyway, how could they have known what the word “die” meant? But the full extent of the Lord God’s deviousness is revealed in the last three verses of Chapter 3:

  And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

  Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden; to till the ground from whence he was taken.

  So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

  In other words, the Lord God had been economical with the truth. In his dealings with Adam, he had concealed the existence of the other tree, the tree of life, altogether, apparently gambling on the probability that Adam would either not find it “in the midst of the garden” or, finding it, would not realize its importance. One could go further and suggest that the Lord God made such a song and dance about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to draw attention to it and to distract attention from the Tree of Life, just as Brer Rabbit did with the briar patch.

  Other questions arise. (1) Who was the Lord God talking to when he said: Behold, the man (not to mention the woman) is become as one of us? (2) Who were “us”? (3) If the Lord God was afraid that Adam and Eve would “live for ever” by eating “of the tree of life,” does it not follow that they were never, for an instant, immortal but always mortal? Therefore, eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did not make them die, even slowly, for they were already mortal. Therefore, the serpent spoke the simple truth when it told Eve: “Ye shall not surely die.” Therefore, the serpent was more honest than the Lord God.

  The entire tragedy—or indeed divine comedy—is played out in those first three chapters of Genesis. Arguably, the rest of the Old Testament is superfluous. If you want the first offspring, the first murder, and the flood, you can have another five chapters. The rest is unnecessary. If my theory is correct, the fall was brought about by a banana. The moral of the story is: Never leave a man and a woman alone together in a garden—it is a recipe for disaster.

  I am trying to piece together the fragments as a detective does—but one of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s detectives, not a Poirot or a Nancy Drew. It is just another inevitable synchronicity that in the spring of 1994, Robbe-Grillet (with Dimitri de Clercq) made a film on Hydra called Un Bruit Qui Rend Fou, in one scene of which I was a drunken extra. The “maddening noise” was the clatter of mah-jongg tiles. (I suggested a sequel, with india-rubber tiles, to be called The Silence of the Gommes.) I never saw the film, but I have read enough of Robbe-Grillet’s novels to know that his characters, such as the detective Wallas or the voyeur Mathias, would be at home here, where there is no history; where nothing is as it seems; where everything is done with mirrors; where truth can never be arrived at; where nameless horrors lie buried but restless; where crimes, victims, perpetrators, and detectives may or may not exist; where maddening noises may be only rumors.

  Drunk though I was, when, on set, Robbe-Grillet commented: “Le vent se lève,”1 I was able, like a spy giving the password, to reply: “Il faut tenter de vivre.”2 Much later, sober, I reread Valéry’s “Le Cimetière Marin” and was flabbergasted to find these lines immediately before Le vent se lève:

  Hydre absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,

  Qui te remords l’étincelante queue

  Dans un tumulte au silence pareil.3

  I am naive (in case you hadn’t already noticed). I became so excited that I dashed off a letter to the Master, full of hystericalschoolboyish outpourings. He courteously replied in two sentences, the second of which was:

  Mais vous serez satisfait, en tout cas, de retrouver dans le film cette “hydre absolue” de Valéry, qui constitue la dernière parole du personnage principal!4

  Naturellement. How could I suppose that Robbe-Grillet would miss a trick like that? As for me, as usual I had missed several tricks. Straining at the gnat of “Hydre absolue,” I had failed to swallow at least a couple of camels. First, the “tumulte au silence pareil,” which obviously was tantamount to the “bruit qui rend fou” and pre-empted my sixth-form “Silence of the Gommes.” Second, the water snake or monster biting its sparkling (like a constellation) tail. And third, the poem itself, on which the film, and maybe Robbe-Grillet’s entire oeuvre, appears as a kind of gloss—

  Tout va sous terre et ventre dans le jeu!5

  (Though, having said that, “Le Cimetière Marin” is one of those few poems that say it all, contain everything; therefore, it would be difficult for the work of other writers not to relate to it. Even so, Robbe-Grillet seems to me to come closer than most. It follows that it would take a mad genius to attempt to surpass it and succeed. And, lo and behold, Georges Brassens managed it with his “Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète.”)6

  But to return to the snake. It came as no surprise to find, in my mother’s old copy of Les Gommes, suivi de Clefs pour les Gommes par Bruce Morrissette,7 that Robbe-Grillet has an obsession with Ourobouros, the gnostic serpent that bites or swallows its own tail, and he once projected a novel of 108 parts, based on the 108 sections or scales of Ourobouros. Valéry allows us to make a connection, albeit a tenuous one, between Ourobouros and an “absolute hydra” (Robbe-Grillet uses the lowercase), which, for him, is the sea. Otherwise, sadly (for this lover of connections), none of the three Hydras—monster, island, constellation—shows any inclination to put its tail in its mouth, or mouths.

  And then there is L., who sings, in “Last Year’s Man”:

  But I had to draw aside to see

  The serpent eat its tail

  thus reminding Valéry, Robbe-Grillet, the gnostics, and anybody else who will listen that while it’s all very well to contemplate eternity, time, the universe, reincarnation, or any other grand and vaguely circular topic, without sex, the merriest-go-round of all, we would not exist.

  Meanwhile, in defiance of my reference to their transience, L.’s bananas pursue their patterns as before. Despite looking as smashed as windmills tilted at by Don Quixote, they continue to form fruit. What I have so far failed to ascertain is: What becomes of the fruit? It never ripens, despite assiduous watering by Evangelia and the gods. Does it rot on the branch? Does it fall to earth and rot there? Does it wither? Does it mysteriously disappear? Se fond sans jouissance.

  Have I explained quite how peculiar L.’s garden is? A narrow paved lane (just wide enough for a mule) runs along the south side. The garden is separated from the lane by an eight-foot wall. The peculiarity consists in the garden, the soil, the plants, the trees, being level with the top of the wall. Only from L.’s basement (where Marianne built the fireplace) is there direct access to the garden. The kitchen (the hub) and living rooms stand one story above it. All this helps to explain why I, who also live at the top of a flight of stairs on the other side of the narrow lane, enjoy (if that is the right word) such a ringside seat.

  Hugo Dyson, late great English tutor, you started all this by teaching me to see the connection between the handkerchief in Othello and the napkin in Henry VI, Part 3.

  Honored to be invited to sit in workroom of L.’s house while Steve and Sarah lighted their seventh Hanukkah candle. Steve donned a yarmulke, and they both chanted in Hebrew. A lump in my throat. Konin. Ulysses’ Gaze. Why do I feel this affinity? Why do I feel like the sea under the influence of the moon?

  Later that same evening, Sar
ah served, from a Greek-Jewish cookbook, fried bananas in chocolate—Chiquita bananas from Four Corners.

  A couple of days after this, I left to spend January in England. Steve and Sarah saw me off. At the quayside, Steve quietly pressed into my palm a Hopi Indian turquoise pebble, said to guarantee journeying mercies. Sarah waved until invisible.

  I paused at Aigina to visit Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. Came out of her house into garden to be confronted by a twinkly man followed by a woman and two children. I had never seen any of them before in my life. At least two of them were carrying musical instrument cases. The woman and children stood stock-still and never spoke. A tableau from an Angelopoulos film. The conversation went something like this:

  MAN: “Hello, how are you? What are you writing at the moment?”

  SELF: “That’s a bit difficult to explain.”

  MAN: “Please try.”

  SELF: “Well, it’s a poem with notes.”

  MAN: “Ah! I see. You mean the notes provide an emergency exit from the poem.”

  Katerina later explained that this was a dear friend of hers called Patroklos. Not surprisingly, surrealism is his forte.

  * * *

  1“The wind is getting up.”

  2“One must make an attempt at living.”