Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  And, just by the way, this man founded and has edited since 1964 a journal called Angelus Novus. He also happens to be mayor of Venice. Has everybody heard of him except me? And if not, why not?

  I thought of quoting some passages, but that would do little good. The only thing to quote is the whole book. I reserve the right to refer to it later. For now, suffice it to say that with integrity, humility, and good humor, it indicates (I thought a lot about what verb to put there)—to me, at least—what I have been reaching out toward—and am still reaching out toward—ever since I embarked upon this wildly serious piece of frivolity.

  And Orpheus gathers garbage

  While the angels sing hosannas

  Through the elephant-ear leaves

  Of Leonard Cohen’s bananas.

  As dear Lawrence Durrell wrote: “If truth were needles, surely eyes would see.” Surely. Surely.

  Meanwhile, my friend Geoff Holdsworth and I met over huge cafetières in an establishment called the Cock and Camel. He brought me precious material from dictionaries as well as an old paperback of L.’s The Favorite Game, his first novel. Saving the book for later, I eagerly seized on the lexical stuff. Sure enough, the first quotation under banana was from William Dampier, who in 1697 made the enigmatic observation that “the Bonano Tree is exactly like the Plantain.” Although he seems to have been the first writer in English to mention the tree or plant, the fruit was mentioned a hundred years earlier by somebody called Hartwell, who said: “Other fruits there are, termed Banana, which we verily think to be the Muses of Egypt and Soria.” But as early as 1563, one Garcia de Orta, in his Simples e Drogues, wrote: “Tambem ha estes figos em Guiné, chamam Ihe bananas.”

  Geoff’s researches threw up far too much information about everything from banana boats to banana splits, including an aviary of banana birds from South America and the West Indies. But what fascinated me most was this entry from The Oxford English Dictionary:

  muse, n. Obs. Forms: 6 mose, mouse, (? pl. mowsies), mouce, 6–7 muse. Ultimately a. Arab. mauz, mauzah banana.

  The fruit of the plantain or banana (see musa). Also attrib. 1578 Lyte Dodoens vi. xxxviii. 704 Of Musa or Mose tree.

  The Mose tree leaues be so great and large, that one may easyly wrap a childe . . . in them.

  1585 T. Washington tr. Nicholay’s Voy. i.xvi. 17b, Apples of paradice, which they call muses.

  1588 T. Hickock tr. Frederick’s Voy. 18 Laden with fruite, as with Mouces which we call Adams apples. Marg. The Mowsies is a kind of fruite growing in clusters and are 5 or 6 inches long a peece.

  c 1602 in Purchas Pilgrims (1625) II.1617 At Damiatta . . . are great gardens, full of Adams figs, . . . these are also called Mouses.

  There was a time—a few short months ago—when I would have waxed extremely excited about all the connections there. I mean, Adam, paradise, apples, figs. But now I can take them calmly. Of course there are bananas in paradise. Of course when Genesis speaks of figs, it intends bananas. Of course Koulis had to plant bananas in Adam’s garden. (Why, in English, do we refer to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as an apple?) None of this surprises me, although I love the language and the orthography. Hurrah for lexicographers once again!

  I must admit I could be led astray (but I promise to resist) by the mere hint of a link between Mose and Moses, bulrushes and bananas. I must confess that, at some point in all this, there flashed or flickered before my inward eye a vision of green flames, of the bananas as the burning bush. I thought I made a note about it, but if so, I have, perhaps fortunately, lost it. Naturally there was an angel in the bush before the Lord spoke. . . .

  Geoff, bless him, also copied this, from the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origin by John Ayto:

  banana comes from a West African language—possibly Wolof, a language of the Niger-Congo family, spoken in Senegal and the Gambia. The original European discoverers of the word—and the fruit—were the Spanish and Portuguese, who passed them on to England. The term bananas “mad” is 20th century, but its origins are obscure; some have compared banana oil, a 20th century slang term for “mad talk, nonsense.”

  Possibly. It is all splendidly vague and mythological.

  It is January. I am still in England. All the time I am reading Ira Bruce Nadel. I scribble notes first on a torn scrap of newspaper, then on a postcard of the Trout Inn, Godstow. They just give a page number and one or two words.

  “85 scary b.” In a letter to his sister, L. writes: “‘I wander through the rooms with a candle like Rebecca’s housekeeper, upstairs, downstairs, the scary basement.’” There is something scary about the basement. Even the normally fearless Kyria Evangelia would not go down there alone at night to switch off a light that had been left on. The windows have bars.

  “86 light.” L. even manages to say something original about the light. “‘There’s something in the light that’s honest and philosophical. You can’t betray yourself intellectually, it invites your soul to loaf.’” Plenty of people have remarked upon the Southy honesty of the Greek light, and some have cynically noted that not all Greek citizens reflect this honesty. Where L., it seems to me, is original is in his second sentence. As I understand it, he is saying that loafing souls can’t be bothered to betray themselves intellectually. You can lie here; you can be unfaithful; you can cheat others; but you can’t betray yourself.

  “101 products.” L. writes that the products of Hydra are “‘sponges, movies, nervous breakdowns, and divorces.’” Totally accurate, except that the sponges are now pieces of decor gathering dust below sepia photographs of the industry in its dangerous heyday. Unvenerated relics in the ghost of Bill’s Bar; as surreally out of place as the silver urn (like a football trophy) in the museum, said to contain the heart of Admiral Miaoulis.

  Blackwell’s again. This time the French department. I don’t know what I was really hoping to find. Valéry’s Carnets, perhaps, or Wallace Fowlie on Rimbaud. I noticed a school edition of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. Text in French with English notes and introduction by B. G. Garnham. I started idly to leaf through it. Next moment there was a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes. These words had suddenly hit me: “a banana plantation in an unspecified tropical country.” Yes, a banana plantation formed the setting of the novel.

  Never apologize. Never explain. If anybody has bothered to read this far, I hope I have already given them the keys to understanding why I was inundated with joyful emotion. Later, in tranquillity, I remembered Jacques Derrida in the Bodleian Library (just across the street from Blackwell’s) when at last he came face to face with the original manuscript illustration of Plato and Socrates, which he had hitherto known only as a picture postcard and which he had pursued as relentlessly as I have been pursuing bananas, angels, squaws, monsters, and the rest.

  Derrida’s epiphany occurred on July 19, 1979, some two years after he had first begun to explore the ramifications, reverberations, and implications of a simple postcard and when he had already written some two hundred pages of his monumental La carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. He describes the moment, writing to his friend:

  Finally I’ve got them, everything stands still. I hold the book open with both hands. If you only knew my love how beautiful they are. . . . What a couple! They could see me cry, I told them everything. The revelation, enough to make your heart pound like life and truth, is the colour. . . . It was too much. I was stupefied, speechless.

  Even though my little apocalypse had taken me only some six months and sixty pages, I identified completely with Derrida. Moi, je suis Derridian avant (après?) la lettre. His postcard is absolutely to my address. We correspond in the au-delà.

  Of course I added La Jalousie to my swag. I haven’t read it yet. But I did discover that Alain Robbe-Grillet, the very same who once plied me with veritable Metaxa brandy, trained as an agricultural economist and, in 1949, “joined the Institut des fruits et agrumes coloniaux, on whose behalf he undertook journeys to
Morocco, Guinea, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.” I know that everything connects; but I never cease to be surprised when it all connects so perfectly, like the X that marks the spot, the quincunx:

  Another of my heroes, Lawrence Durrell, like Tiresias, foresuffered, foresaw it all when he visited Stratford-on-Avon and discovered X; and in his final, wonderful, quintessential, quincuncial quintet.

  Oddly, I have a nagging feeling that Derrida too has written somewhere about jalousies. Yes, I know that they are strictly speaking what the English call Venetian blinds, but I think it permissible to extend the term to cover any kind of slatted shutter or screen. According to Nadel, incidentally, L., in his The Energy of Slaves, has two poems titled “I threw open the shutters.”

  But how splendid that Derrida cried. Jacobus wept! Mon semblable, mon frère! If he were here I would give him one of the big bear hugs that Steve and I exchange from time to time.

  And, in Blackwell’s secondhand department, next to one or two titles by Robbe-Grillet, I noticed a book called Ourobouros. I was so disappointed to find that it had no connection with R.-G. that I failed to make a note of the author, whose name presumably began with R—an alphabetical synchronicity.

  Nadel again. On pp. 208–209 are no fewer than three references to “the garden,” all from texts by L.:

  “I hope I can leave the garden soon.”

  “I am here to work in the garden.”

  “I am a funeral in the garden.”

  Then comes, on p. 210, the passage I have already quoted:

  “The garden is ruined and this vigil is coming to an end.”

  All refer without doubt to the Hydra garden, to the garden that I can see through my window as I type this on my Olivetti Lettera 22. I can only reiterate that when I wrote my poem, when I began these notes, I had no idea:

  A. that L. was a writer

  B. that L. was a thinker

  C. that L. had thought and written so much on and about Hydra

  D. that L.’s garden was so much of a metaphor and symbol for him

  E. that L.’s garden was so steeped in anguish

  F. that L.’s garden contained mysteries

  G. that L.’s garden asked questions

  H. that L.’s garden did not offer answers

  I had no idea, and yet subconsciously I knew all this and more. I knew instinctively, for instance, that the garden carried much more importance and significance than the house. That the garden was mainly positive, while the house was mainly negative. What I did not realize, on any level, was how completely I was about to be possessed by . . . by what? Not by L. himself. Not by the house. Not by the garden. Not even by the bananas. By, let us say, the urge to tell a story, the urge to listen to a story. By the imperative need to chronicle this stage of my quest—but not even “my” quest: a quest, the quest. By, oh so many things. For now, let me just say: by an impulse to let go—and leave it at that.

  With all this stuff whirling around in my head, I went and caught flu. My temperature climbed, and I entered the kind of delirium where you think you are perfectly sane because you know that you’re delirious, when really the supposed sanity forms an element of the delirium. I lay in bed in an Oxford loft conversion beneath a skylight offering a variety of programs, including stars, swans, geese, vapor trails, ghostly galleon moons tossed upon stormy seas, gray, blue, black, little fluffy clouds, showers, lightning, nothing, a police helicopter. Anything less like the skin for a drum that I would never mend, I never saw.

  At some point, in the middle of a feverish night, I had a vision. It involved, or rather it included, two comfortably entwined angels and something to do with Paul Klee. There was much more. I knew that all I had to do was fumble for a pen and my notebook and jot down a few key words. I would have the answer to everything. Needless to say, I didn’t stir. Perhaps I was not even awake. I have no regrets; omniscience can be a burden. I am simply grateful to remember two elements of the vision. Yes, Cacciari had led me to Klee, whom I had never understood. So yes, I now knew something—though not nearly enough—of Klee and his paintings of and writings about angels. But that is not the point. This vision was not a Hugo Dyson type of literary connection; it was much more of an alchemical conjunction. Everything fused, and the retort filled with gold. No wonder that, if vouchsafed such glimpses, the alchemists so dedicatedly persisted.

  My journey was drawing to a close. My elder son, Nicolas, gave me a cassette of himself reading with musical accompaniment his text Warriors. For him, at twenty-six, it constitutes a kind of Story So Far. Recovered from my fever, I lay beneath the skylight listening to Nick’s voice on my headphones. With a shock, I heard him rattle off:

  And so it is, my first wet dream in brown pyjamas, a packet of chocolate biscuits lost in Leonard Cohen’s bananas, a barrel tipping water into a narrow street, a shower outside the architect’s house, jets of water fall into my mouth and coke with whisky burns through my fight and dogs walk me home, past the empty prison where someone plays electric guitar from deep within.

  Nick, I am with you in rock-land. My journey was drawing to a close, but the bananas were just setting forth on theirs. I was going home: home to the South; home to Greece, to louely Greece; home to Hydra. And so it is, Nick, and so it is.

  * * *

  1 Just as my father reached the far side of the island before me.

  Homecoming

  The time is 5:45. Exhausted but contented, I am sitting in a café on Peiraeus harbor waiting until I can board the Eftykhia, the Happiness, which will sail for Hydra at 8:00. Plato’s Symposium starts here. Kazantzakis first met Alexis Zorbas here. I take Death of a Lady’s Man out of my bag and begin to read. After half a dozen pages I come to “The Café.” L. writes:

  The notebooks indicate that this café was situated near the waterfront in the port of Piraeus. I could not find it. Upon inquiry, I discovered that it had been demolished, and the marble tabletops thrown into the harbour.

  Why should I evince any surprise at this stage? For better or for worse, L., or an avatar of L., now accompanies me. The café where I sit now, with its plate glass and plastic, might easily be on the same site as the one where L. or Kazantzakis or Plato once sat.

  I don’t mean “avatar.” I don’t know what the right word is. An aspect of L. accompanies me, perhaps. My age and his youth coexist in mythic time. I cannot relate to the photographs of a rotund Friar Tuck figure alleged to be living on a mountain with the improbable name of Baldy. Fatty would have done just as well. Or Oldie. In calendar time, L. seems to have abandoned his quest in his midthirties, at a point when he had already gone further than most people ever do. Was he frightened of something? I have no right to inquire. All I can do is thank him for his researches, as I, in my late fifties, attempt to plant another stone or two on the cairn that L. has left.

  Came home to find the banana-plants neatly trimmed and trussed. Steve and Sarah were away traveling but had left me a candy banana from Four Corners, plus cassettes compiled by Sarah of songs by L. and others and two tapes of Steve telling stories. These were accompanied by a welcoming note with a haiku:

  Across the water

  Scattered lights

  —others living quietly.

  At the post office waited a postcard from Sarah and Steve, which opened:

  Because of his teacher

  he answers the Spaniards

  in Greek.

  How I dote on these two people!

  A sheaf of envelopes from Nancy Drew, now returned to Canada. One enclosed a photocopy of yet another interview with L., the most interesting thing about which—perhaps the only interesting thing—was that it took place “in a small beachfront hotel called Shutters . . . with elaborate arrangements of fresh-cut sunflowers.” Les jalousies strike again, as do, slightly disguised, the yellow daisies of Hydra, one of the themes of Death of a Lady’s Man. Nancy ended her first letter:

  Merci, mon cher Hercule, de toutes vos gentillesses. . . .

  In her next
letter, she wrote:

  I’m not too worried about your sanity as you seem to be the sanest person there.

  She suggested that L. was running out of steam and added:

  The new star on the world stage is the weathergirl. Please tell Steve Sanfield I said that!

  Her letters teem with I-would-if-I-could hints and innuendos, with suggestions of grown-up skulduggery, not just Nancy Drew knockabout.

  I began my reply by quoting from another recent discovery, L.’s song “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy”—“In the House of Mystery there was no one at all.” L.’s song is quite as cryptically sinister as anything dreamed up by my Nancy. I asked her if she could seriously imagine me saying to Steve: “Oh, by the way, Nancy Drew says that the new star on the world stage is the weathergirl.” This was how my letter ended:

  And what am I to say about your remark about me? Oh dear. What am I doing wrong? How can I convince you and others that I am truly mad? I thought writing about bananas might do the trick, but evidently not. On the other hand, you do say “sanest person there.” As we are all mad on Hydra, there may be, after all, some hope for me.

  As my father used to quote: “Everyone in Mandrake Falls is pixillated”; and, as I typed that, I realised that we even have Mandraki, where some very pixillated people live (it’s from a film called Mr. Deedes Goes to Town, I believe). Perhaps a good sign that I really am mad (and I want to be, really) is that I think you may be right—I can’t think of anyone saner than me, apart from Steve and Sarah (who I truly love), and they don’t count because they don’t live here.

  Sure I’ve forgotten lots of things. Never mind. I miss our vicarage tea-parties, perhaps more Miss Marples than Nancy Drew. . . .