Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  The crickets are singing

  The vesper bell’s ringing

  The cat’s curled asleep in his chair

  I’ll go down to Bill’s Bar

  I can make it that far.

  “Ah, there you are!” As Bill himself used to remark, and I hope still does. “Ah, there you are, dear boy.” I’ve been looking for you ever since I mentioned you in the first installment of these notes. Are you still in Amersham? I’d love to have your angle on all this stuff. I never forget how, when I read my poem “The Happiness” in Dirty Corner that day, primed by the margaritas you recommended, you went straight to the nub of the matter. “Where’s the albatross?” you asked.

  It was in the sad relic of your bar that I heard that song for the only time in my life until just now, when it ambushed me through my headphones. George Khristodoulakis—remember him?—was playing it to stave off boredom and drew my attention to the lyrics. “That’s Leonard Cohen,” he said. The name meant virtually nothing to me. I’m not sure at what point in my life Cohen’s music passed me by. But hearing a song that referred to the very bar in which it was being played made a lasting impression on me. Especially as I knew the eponymous bar owner personally. Carry on.

  After I’d gotten over the excitement of tracing the reference to Bill’s Bar, the bar “full of phantoms among the dusty sponges,” in the poem that started all this off, I was struck by another line in the same song:

  We were locked in this kitchen.

  The same kitchen where I have enjoyed so many happy times with Sarah and Steve, sharing food, listening to the grace in Hebrew, laughing. The same kitchen where, at this moment, hangs the mock banana that I bought from Banana Princess Yiota. For me, a happy kitchen. Yet for L. the same kitchen that he sings of in “Hallelujah”:

  She tied you to a kitchen chair

  She broke your throne and she cut your hair.

  The same kitchen that recurs in Death of a Lady’s Man:

  THIS MARRIAGE

  He hangs a crown over his filthy kitchen and expects us to put our hands together and say Grace.

  The room is no longer filthy. We say grace happily. But the shriveled remains of a May Day garland still hang there. The same kitchen of which L. writes:

  That’s how it will come, your forgiveness. You will be sitting at the kitchen table.

  Whose forgiveness? The reader’s? L.’s? Suzanne’s? Mine? It doesn’t matter. What comes across is the claustrophobia (locked, tied), the powerlessness, the sordidness. Suzanne’s revenge for not being the Suzanne of the Song has been to be implicitly present in just about every other song that L. has ever written.

  Moved on to Aigina for celebrations of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s birthday. After the guests had departed, we had a long conversation about all the usual topics, “the well-known unknowns,” as the Greeks say. Made the mistake of trying to explain to her about Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen. Mistake— (a) because it’s always a mistake to try to explain work in progress; (b) because this particular work is inexplicable. Anyway, Katerina, rather like Bill asking about the albatross, inquired: What is the moteur? “There has to be a moteur,” she said. “For example, sometimes the moteur can be the eyes of a lover.”

  As usual in such circumstances, I spluttered and gave no satisfactory answer. I loved her use of the French moteur, that same word that the Belgian film crew of Robbe-Grillet and De Clercq had used where Hollywood would cry: “Shoot!” But what does it, what did she, really mean? I don’t think her “lover’s eyes” were a good example. The “lover’s eyes” are simply the poet’s cry of “Shoot!” that starts the verbal cameras rolling. In that sense the bananas are my moteur, my launch pad, my trigger—and very potent they have proved.

  But I think Katerina meant something else. She found my explication unsatisfactory. She couldn’t understand why I was spending so much time and effort on such an exercise. What she really wanted to know about was not the ignition (to keep for a moment the rocket metaphor), nor the nature of the powerful engines that would keep the craft in space, nor even the specifications of the craft itself, but the purpose, the motive, of the voyage. Was I bound for the moon?

  If that were the question, I would reply along these lines: No, I am not bound for the moon or for any nameable destination. I have been boosted into a musaceous orbit, and I am in the process of chasing, perhaps devouring, my own tail. Voyage and destination are coterminous. The journey is the eternal arrival. I am exploring an outopia and sending back crackly messages disrupted by static. I have discovered a garden of lunar bananas. The moteur is the message. The message is the messenger. The messenger is the angel. That is the good news.

  Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Angels has proved full of riches. As with Massimo Cacciari’s Necessary Angel, the entire text is relevant to my pages, and the illustrations, naturally (or supernaturally), are out of this world. I shall mention only two or three items.

  First, he reminds me of the phrase hortus conclusus, which he refers back to the Song of Solomon:

  A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. . . .

  Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

  Curious how I have felt all along that the Song of Solomon was significant, and I was told that L. admires it too. That was long before I had read Death of a Lady’s Man, which now seems to me to be written very much in the key of the Song.

  Most gardens are enclosed, but for some inscrutable reason, the Latin hortus conclusus gives the concept a mystical dimension. Here be unicorns. L.’s hortus is well and truly conclusus. It has no garden gate. The only access lies through the scary basement or from the terrace, the deck, as Steve calls it. From my vantage point it defies perspective. The narrow lane lies invisibly between my gaze and L.’s garden like a ducal ha-ha. What I behold is the garden propped up, as it were, at an angle for my better contemplation, like some medieval engraving illustrating, say, one of the works of Sir Thomas Browne. As sometimes occurs with such pictures, not only the perspective but also the scale is charmingly awry. The fruit trees—orange, lemon, apple, olive, pomegranate, grapefruit—have been drawn too small and placed too far apart, with too much bare earth and stone between. A few flowers have been sprinkled around the borders as an afterthought. Ah, I know what it resembles—one of David Hockney’s backdrops for The Rake’s Progress, with lots of cross-hatching. And the banana-plants look as if they have slipped in by mistake from Hockney’s illustrations of Cavafy’s poems. One thing is certain—everything looks unreal because everything is unreal; we are in the ontic realm all right.

  Next, Lamborn Wilson declares that “the natural motion of Angels is upwards. Milton tells us that it requires an effort for them to go downwards.” When I next find myself in the presence of a Milton, I must check that reference; meanwhile I hear a soft voice murmuring in my ear: “There is only one way. We can only go upward.” Suzanne takes you down, but she takes me up. Some have entertained angels unawares. Is she an angel too? Does she represent the ultimate hieros gamos, or reconciliation of opposites, between wicked witch and good fairy, Lilith and Eve, Siren and Angel?

  O Suzanne, how idiotic of me to mock you because I thought that your utterance was bunkum and not worthy of Heracleitus! Please forgive me. I spoke from profound ignorance, from an ignorance that peels off in never-ending layers like a banana pizzle. Ignorance, of course, is no defense. The simple way always to circumvent it is by not judging. I forgot this. I’m sorry. Now I see that, when you said: ‘We can only go upward,’ the vital word was ‘we.’ You were telling me (in your ambiguous, oracular way) that spirits of the genus to which you belong are only capable of going upward. I cannot claim to understand fully—such an assertion would constitute hubris—but at least I have moved, penitently, a little bit further forward, or even upward.

  However, Peter Lamborn Wilson does add this rider:

  Not every journey is a journey to the Angel, and not every way lea
ds up in the strict sense of the word. Some seekers travel with the Angel, and across the face of an earth transformed by symbolic insight into a horizontal mirror image of the celestial or vertical ascent.

  Of course, except that I would simply delete the three words “by symbolic insight.” He also reminds me to stress the importance of rejoicing, of constant hosannas and hallelujahs (as in L.’s song) and khairetes, the regular Greek greeting. Through celebration and praise—thus the plants flourish.

  Home to Hydra on board the Happiness—the best way to travel. Reunion with Steve and Sarah. We have all been reading a novel called Fugitive Pieces by a Canadian called Anne Michaels, mainly because parts of it are set on an island called Hydra, which, however, turns out to be a Hydra of the mind. It reads like the first novel of a bright twenty-year-old but turns out to be the first novel of a forty-year-old. Curiously, my notebook contains a quotation from the book, evidently copied about a year ago from a review:

  Translators and poets, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what’s between the lines, the mysterious implications.

  I had added, in parentheses, “(‘identify’ is wrong).” And so it is. I guess I copied the sentence because it alluded to my beloved theme of in-betweenness. But in my humble opinion, and in John Keats’s too, if it comes to that (and it does come to that), if one is not prepared to remain in a state of uncertainty, if one tries to identify the invisible, to analyze the mysterious, one will come a cropper and discover, when one wakes, that one’s dream was a nightmare.

  Steve and I discovered with delight that we had both marked the same passage:

  Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.

  In my case that means Hydra and Wolvercote. But both extracts illustrate Anne Michaels’s problem—she is too damn serious for her own good. Either that, or she is a genius who manages to suppress her own sense of humor in order to create characters who ponderously pontificate their way through life.

  What a relief it was to turn to another first novel by another Canadian writer, L.’s The Favorite Game, published when he was twenty-nine, in 1963. Both books concern Jewishness. For Anne Michaels the Holocaust makes laughter impossible; for L. it makes it essential. I know which approach I prefer. L. manages to be funny and profound. He also—if one accepts that his protagonist, Breavman, is a thinly disguised version of young L. himself—lets slip some trade secrets:

  The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.

  Do you know what the ambition of our generation is? We all want to be Chinese mystics living in thatched huts, but getting laid frequently.

  . . . moment-to-moment creation in the face of annihilation.

  . . . the Mosaic bush each of us grows in our heart but few of us care to ignite.

  L. may have thought that he was hoaxing the world, but he was hoaxing himself as well. We can burn our boats, but only a god or an angel can burn our bushes.

  Birthday of the late, great Lawrence Durrell and of charioteer and soothsayer Sarah Sparks. In one of the shops on the harbor I found her a card with a long, complex mathematical formula that added up to Love. Also bought her two arithmetic books for use in Greek primary schools—the teachers’ versions. In the evening about ten of us ate at the little Paradosiakon (Traditional) restaurant. I stood up and delivered this Genethliac Ode, otherwise titled “Eureka” (ancient) or “Evrika” (modern).

  A goddess is among us

  Pythagoras, yield the path

  For this goddess is the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  O Euclid, all your knowledge

  Shrinks to a slender lath

  In the shadow of the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Enough to silence the ravings

  Of the craziest psychopath

  Are the equations of the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  All the learning of the ancients

  But paltry value hath

  Beside the wisdom of the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  More effective than the traction

  Of a qualified osteopath

  Is the algebra of the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Ted Hughes would have squared up better

  If, subtracted from Sylvia Plath

  He’d been added to the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Imagine what Archimedes

  Might have thought of in his bath

  If he’d beheld the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Wherever she goes, admirers

  Fall prostrate in a swath

  Before the radiance of the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Trying to praise such a paragon

  Is like conveying owls to Athens,

  gilding the lily, the Mistress

  Of American Math.

  Come hither, Nymphs and Graces

  Restrain your envious wrath

  At the beauty of the Mistress

  Of American Math;

  And tell it to the Hydraeans

  Proclaim it even in Gath:

  “Happy Birthday to the Mistress

  Of American Math!”

  One of Steve’s dicta is that “a good poem is one that can be read aloud in a bar”; of course it doesn’t follow that all poems read aloud in bars are good.

  Diary: Taught Sarah (not Steve) using her arithmetic books & a leaf from a calendar for 27 Feb. Traced “Tell it not in Gath”—ashamed I’d forgotten it.

  The arithmetic books proved charming. The teacher’s notes kept stressing that children who did these exercises would be learning “in a happy way.” Sarah and I certainly waxed very happy counting bananas and adding and subtracting as frogs jumped into and out of ponds. (The sound of one frog splashing.)

  The Greek calendar had a quatrain to the effect that the writer would rather be loved by the recipient for a few minutes than live for many years. It also named the saint for February 27 as Saint Asklepios. I explained to Sarah how many minor Orthodox saints have classical names and how this helps to build a bridge between B.C. and A.D. She was especially excited because she and Steve had been reading about the healer Asclepius in Robert Graves only the night before.

  The Gath passage (Samuel 2:1) is one of the most beautiful in the Bible, where David laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan:

  Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon. . . .

  I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished!

  Such is the power of rhyme. I was only playing a little game to see how many rhymes I could find for “math” (all pronounced, of course, with the American short a) and found myself being led very quickly from the ridiculous (Ted Hughes) to the sublime.

  Became briefly excited by door-knockers after noticing that L.’s fine brass one took the form of a woman’s left hand with a flower at the cuff and a ring on the wedding-finger, resting on a plate decorated with two stars of David.

  Thought L. must have imported it specially. But quickly started noticing similar specimens all over town. Even those that do not have stars are nearly all left hands. Wonder what their significance is.

  Steve told me to go and look at the bananas in the Maragkos supermarket down by the post office. When I returned and told him I had noticed nothing special, he sent me forth again like Arthur and Bedivere. This time I observed that presiding over the sloping rack of bananas was a large, cuddly toy in the form of a chimp
anzee.

  L.’s bananas at last have two or three limply hanging new leaves, green gonfalons of spring, verdant tongues of flame.

  “Panache” is the word Robbe-Grillet keeps using of the bananas in La Jalousie. Chambers’ tells me that a panache was originally a knight’s plume; hence the word came to mean “splendour, swagger, grand manner, theatricality, sense of style.” Not terms that everyone would immediately associate with banana-plants, but I, following my initiation, certainly do.

  Have found La Jalousie fascinating. Must beware of pushing parallels too far, but it does concern people in a house with a terrace in a banana plantation in a hot country, and particularly the jealousy and suspicions between a husband and a wife, which are themes of Death of a Lady’s Man.

  One could be excused for supposing that Robbe-Grillet chose the title La Jalousie, with its seductive double meaning, to distract attention from the true moteur of the book, the bananas. They predominate. He describes them again and again—their appearance, their dispositions, their cultivation—until one would not be surprised if they began to move like triffids or Birnam Wood. What a potent symbol his own bananas would have made for L. if he had known about them when he wrote Death of a Lady’s Man. Nimis fortunatus Leonardus si suas bananas norit!

  Hugo Dyson would have been delighted to note that there is a centipede in both. Robbe-Grillet’s mille-pattes keeps appearing, to be ground underfoot by the forceful Franck. Here is one of its manifestations: