Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen

by Roger Green

  t) Dantesque commentary (ypsilon) boustrophedon

  u) autoscholiasm (fi) ouroboros

  v) jeu (khi) pandemonic meta-maxi-maxi

  w) fable (psi) evangeliary

  x) angelology (omega) apocalypse

  y) landscape architecture

  z) story

  —or maybe none of these.

  Maybe purely and simply what L. calls “work,” taking down voices out of the air. What I do know is that it has to be the way it is. While it would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have not attempted to shape my material at all, the progression has been inevitable and immutable. Nothing (well, almost nothing) has been orchestrated by me. Even the poem, Fun de Siècle, just happened. All the timing, the entrances and exits of people, ideas and discoveries, the locations, have been imposed from outside. I have to resist tampering—e.g., pretending that I possessed certain knowledge at a certain stage when in fact I only acquired it much later. Mr. Green saw the scene and put it in his magazine. The whole megillah unfolds with the inexorability of a banana-plant.

  Of Angels and Wolves

  I am beginning to know more than is good for me or for the text. Would that I could have retained my first fine careless rapture throughout. Yet I derive encouragement from the thought that what is conscious on one level will always be subconscious or metaconscious on another.

  Just one thing I had no idea of at the outset is to what extent angels permeate the zeitgeist. Popular music and alternative bookshops, for example, are full of works about and allusions to them. Which must be a Good Thing. The more attuned people are to angels, the better. But if anyone supposes that he or she is going to learn “secrets of the universe” through angelic mediation, then I humbly suggest that she or he has not understood about angels.

  My friend Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke of Aigina published ten “Angelic Poems” in 1978. She told me herself that her angels are symbols, and that “god” is a symbol for the answer “No.” We vary the questions, she said, but the answer is always “No.” When I pressed her to try to explain what the angels meant to her, she referred me to her poem (in the Angelic series) with the English title: “Interlude.” It consists of just four lines:

  Honourable, honourable the angels

  Because even when

  They dazzle you with whiteness

  They whisper “I don’t exist.”

  Katerina likes to tell me that she writes “female” poems whereas I write “male” poems, and that this difference has very little to do with our respective genders. But I believe that she writes Aiginetan poems while mine are Hydraean. People on Aigina are much nearer to the big cities of Peiraeus and Athens. They are more urban, cynical, and sophisticated. They have cars and motorbikes. We have donkeys and mules. On Hydra everything is much simpler, quieter, purer, and more metaphysical. Katerina, if you were to live on Hydra for a few months, your angels might begin to whisper: “I exist.”

  KATERINA: “How can you live on Hydra and call yourself a human being?”

  SELF: “By not calling myself a human being.”

  At this point I visited the Banana Princess and told her I had just been writing about angels. She expressed no surprise and simply told me a story:

  I was in Athens one day. There were cars parked on the pavements, so I walked down the middle of a busy street. I was with my sister. Suddenly a car was behind me, hooting. I was terrified. I hadn’t been thinking about the traffic. Normally when I am terrified, I freeze with fear; I cannot move. But now I felt myself being lifted up and set down on the pavement several meters away. If this had not happened, I would have been run over, perhaps killed. My sister says she does not know how I moved. One moment I was in the road, the next on the pavement. I believe it was an angel.

  Her tone totally matter-of-fact—and of course angels are totally matter-of-fact. To be surrendered to. Not wrestled with.

  A couple of weeks ago, I asked the Banana Princess if she wanted anything from Athens. “Yes,” she said. “Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke has written something with ‘Wolves’ in the title. Please bring me that if you can find it.” My fairy-tale task. My less-than-Herculean labor. I am ashamed to say that I had to ask Katerina herself to tell me what I should have known: that her very first collection (1963) was titled Wolves and Clouds.

  It was easy to buy, as all Katerina’s poetry has just been reissued. Katerina inscribed the relevant volume to Yiota for me. She was, of course, as vague about her wolves as she was about her angels. When will I learn to stop asking questions? One of the poems is called “The Story (or History) of My Wolf.” I find it completely impenetrable. Katerina could not, would not, nay, should not explain it. “I wrote it too long ago. Who knows what I meant?”

  Never mind. Yiota was delighted with the book and with the poem and with the inscription. Why had she wanted it? (Why do I keep asking why?)

  Because I love wolves. [Here she stretched her lovely neck and gave a melodious howl.] They are beautiful—much misunderstood. I love foxes too. I like to run with the pack. I do not think they want to hurt people. They kill only when they are hungry. I like the wolves in fairy stories.

  She embodies every fairy story and folk tale and nursery rhyme that ever was. She proves them all true. When I met her with her basket of bananas on her way to the nuns, she was Little Red Riding Hood and the Grandmother and the Wolf all rolled into one. Yes, but she was also the Babes in the Wood, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Tobias with his fish, La Belle Dame Sans Merci to my ailing knight at arms, Beauty to my Beast. All these, but also something or somebody that eludes me for the moment—something child-like and innocent that passes utterly unscathed through a wilderness bristling with potential ordeals.

  For my birthday, she gave me a cassette of Greek songs that she had put together especially for me. My favorite is “The Sleeping Beauty”:

  Sleeping Beauty

  Truly I love you

  Show me the way

  And I will come to find you.

  You are the only journey of my life

  I am approaching forty

  Yet I am still a child. . . .

  A witch looks after it

  A dragon guards it

  How can I enter the castle?

  Tell me the secret

  Ach! Tell me the secret.

  Her birthday falls five days after mine. I gave her a card on which I had written: “I am approaching sixty, yet I am still a child.” How to explain, how translate that Greek “Ach!” which is one of the most vital words in Fun de Siècle? The trouble is that when transliterated, it looks like a German “Ach!” from which it could not be further removed. The sound (formed by just two letters in Greek) contains and expresses all the angst, all the love (requited and unrequited), all the suffering, all the nostalgia, all the regret, all the bittersweet happiness that ever was or ever will be. At least, that is part of what it contains.

  But it is not just the Banana Princess and I who are involved in fairy tales and legends (all of which are true). As I observed ages and pages ago, this whole story of L.’s bananas and garden and house involves every myth that ever was, many of them in unprecedented variations. The wolf theme provides just one clew of thread, just one slender thread of a clue.

  I came to Hydra from Wolvercote, to which I had bidden farewell in my Wolvercote Dreaming. Wolvercote, named for Ulfgar the Saxon, whose name in turn meant Wolf Spear. Wolvercote, whose village hall has two wolves’ heads emblazoned on its wall. Here on Hydra I met Ulf from Sweden, with whom I have had splendid conversation and correspondence about this text, and to whom I gave my last copy of Wolvercote Dreaming, with its performative “I sing.”

  But the wolf that stalks through these pages, the éminence grise behind these paragraphs, is of course that of Margarita Karapanou in Kassandra and the Wolf. The book that, in English translation, sits in the scary basement of L.’s house. The book that, according to Kyria Evangelia, was introduced into the house by L.’s daughter, Lorca,
Luca, Lyca, Lucy. Or else L. gave it to his daughter. Why did Kyria Evangelia volunteer this information? Really, a free copy of The Sleepwalker and of Kassandra and the Wolf ought to be given away with every copy of Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen, for they are supplementary and complementary.

  Clever Karen Van Dyck takes Karapanou’s book as the starting point for her own Kassandra and the Censors and enjoys playing with the fact that there also exists a book called Cassandra by Christa Wolf. But she misses a trick when, having assembled a flock of angels, she fails to round up a pack of wolves. As well as Margarita Karapanou’s animal, she could have had Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s, and Rea Galanaki’s Where Does the Wolf Live? not to mention Manolis Anagnostakis’s To My Child and Zorba’s wolves in the introduction to Zorba the Greek. No doubt there are others. And she could have gone on to consider the origins of the Lyceum, the significance of King Lykaon, and above all the wonderful coincidence (or did Karapanou know about it?) that Lykophron (Wolf-Mind) wrote an epic about the prophecies of Kassandra.

  I believe that Van Dyck misses other tricks too, although I have not read her book from beginning to end. For example, she rightly draws attention to the juxtaposition in Karapanou’s title of mythology and fairy tale (i.e., Little Red Riding Hood), but she fails to consider children’s games such as Grandmother’s Footsteps and What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf? She misses the parallel between Kassandra, who was ignored when she cried “Woe! Woe!” and the anecdotal boy who was ignored when he cried “Wolf! Wolf!” She also seems oblivious of the lupine implications of Ginsberg’s Howl, although she refers to the poem several times. Personally, I don’t miss ogyny, but I do like anthropy. After that, where does one stop? Webster’s wolf? Eliot’s dog? L.’s dead dog? And so back to the dear Banana Princess running with her beloved pack.

  To prophesy the truth, yet not to be believed, like Kassandra and Tiresias, is bad enough. (One might add, like Karapanou herself.) Yet a more bitter curse falls on those anonymous few who comprehend others’ prophecies yet find themselves powerless to act upon them.

  L. himself must have the last word in this section:

  O Solomon, call away your spies.

  You remember the angels in that garden,

  After the man and woman had been expelled,

  Lying under the holy trees while their swords burnt out,

  And Eve was in some distant branches,

  Calling for her lover, and doubled up with pain.

  (From The Spice-Box of Earth, last stanza of “The Adulterous Wives of Solomon”)

  Emergency Exit

  I once wrote a book whose setting was a train—the train. It had nothing to do with railways or timetables or locomotives, yet to this day well-meaning people, like courting grebes, persist in laying snippets of siderodromological minutiae at my feet.

  Now I have made the mistake of attempting to share this enterprise on which I am currently engaged with too many people. Since I do not properly understand it myself, how can I possibly blame them if they do not understand and keep presenting me with items concerning L. and concerning bananas—especially bananas?

  I cannot ignore these items. None of them is irrelevant. Each contributes to the story. Each is part of the story. Each is the story. By writing Fun de Siècle; by writing these notes; by being who I am where I am I have laid myself open to a banana barrage. I have, to put it colloquially, asked for it. Here are a few of these gobbets:

  A word-quiz came up with the term “sigatoka,” “used attributively and absolutely to designate a disease of banana-plants caused by the fungus Cercospora musae, characterised by the appearance on the leaves of elongated spots, followed by rotting of the entire leaves.”

  A narrow escape for me—a new book by Patricia Duncker is titled Monsieur Shoushana’s Lemon Trees (Shome mishtakesh shurely?—Ed) Another author has apparently woven into a novel every known species of eucalyptus tree. Good luck to him.

  In Liverpool, a Japanese (naturally) sculptor named Taro Chiezo has created an enormous yellow ferro-concrete sculpture called Super Lamb Banana. In an associated project, Scouse schoolchildren will be working on their own mini–lamb bananas. G’way!

  Zimbabwe’s former president has gone on trial in Harare for allegedly molesting seven aides, a cook, a gardener, and a bodyguard. His name is Canaan Banana.

  During a heat wave, monkeys at Marwell Zoo in Hampshire were fed frozen bananas.

  In America, BANANA has become an acronym for “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.”

  David Fagan has given me a Chiquita Banana key ring.

  William Pownall brought me a Greek magazine called (in Roman letters) banana.

  Andy Moore, from Cork, writes me letters addressed to: “Banana-Man, c/o Roger Green,” which reach me safely.

  Alison Gold has sent me a postcard depicting “the blessing hands of Cohens” on a gravestone somewhere in Czechoslovakia.

  Steve Sanfield, the one and only Storyteller and Master of American Haiku, has surpassed himself. As well as some interesting Cohenana, he has come up with (a) a newspaper photograph of a man in a suit holding up a banana, with the caption: “Prosecutor Jack Wheaton displays to jury weapon used in shooting.” And (b) an extraordinary piece from the Sacramento Bee about a man who runs an International Banana Museum, which contains more than seventeen thousand items, in a place called Altadena. He is quoted as saying: “I just want to be the Banana Man.” As far as I am concerned, he is very welcome. I think maybe Steve was trying to tell me something. It’s all right, Steve; I understand.

  Mike Mainwaring in Oxford found a birthday card for me with a recipe for a “yummy banana milkshake.” But “you will need to wear an apron to keep your clothes clean”; and “Don’t forget to ask an adult before you start!”

  Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke alerted me to a novel by her friend Nanà Isaïa titled The Story Then and Now, which is set on Hydra in the 1960s. It even contains a figure who vaguely resembles L. I have read only a few pages; it does not seem nearly as wide-awake as Karapanou’s Sleepwalker. But what excited me was the name of the author. “You’re incorrigible,” said Katerina. “As a matter of fact my husband nicknamed her ‘Banana’ twenty-five years ago.”

  I am not a well-organized narrator, for I realize that I have failed explicitly to chronicle the return of Sarah and Steve to America. There are several reasons for this omission, I think. One is that they staggered their departure (Sarah left first and Steve a few days later) so that they disappeared with more of whimper than a bang. Another is that I had a friend staying with me when Steve went, so I was distracted from the full impact.

  Another is that their actual departure is not significant. We always knew they would have to go back sometime. Of infinitely greater significance (for me, at least) was their seven- or eight-month sojourn on this island, in L.’s house, within hailing distance of my terrace. It should be clear from these notes what a huge contribution they made to my life.

  Yet another is that shortly after they had gone the weather became exceedingly hot and remained so for virtually three months on end. Not only did all work cease but all thought was suspended as well. I did not so much as look at this manuscript during that period. At some point I bumped into Katerina the Squaw and mentioned to her that I had been unable to write. “That’s good,” she said. “The Hopi Indians say that if the storyteller tells stories in the summertime, he will be bitten by the snake.”

  At first, I think, I denied their departure to the extent of refusing to reply to their letters or inquiries, but eventually we established a satisfactory two-way correspondence. By the time I resumed work on these pages in the autumn, their absence had become a fait accompli to which it did not occur to me to allude:

  When Kyria Evangelia and I went into the empty house, all we found was a pile of used sheets, towels, and words lying silently in the middle of the floor.

  Evangelia, Koulis, and I spent many forlorn sessions speculating: “Where are Kyrios Steve and
Kyria Sarah now? What are they doing?” Eventually, all Evangelia’s worries and troubles caught up with her and she suffered some sort of cardiac “incident” that necessitated a stay in the hospital. She came out fighting, of course, and with the news that the doctors had forbidden her to eat bananas. They thicken the blood.

  Once communications between California and Hydra had been established, some lovely messages began to arrive:

  “Poet Laureate” he calls again and again

  across the open spaces

  but never a response

  Seven months

  with a bash in my garden

  and not a single bash poem

  Roger, Roger Green

  Laureate, Poet Laureate

  How I miss calling

  out across the garden

  & being hailed in return.

  Steve has a nice line in archaising:

  Truly not a day passes that I do not think of thee. . . .

  ’Tis a quiet summer morning here on Montezuma hill. . . .

  I apologized for the block that had prevented me from writing and added:

  And that block takes a physical form in the shape of L.’s closed house which broods over against and waves its bananas at me like green swords barring me from an Eden I once knew.

  (But beware, O Laureate. Yiannaras in his Commentary on the Song of Songs writes: “The loss of Paradise is never a punishment; it is only self-banishment.”)

  Steve wrote:

  The last two evenings have been given over to your banana notes, a little ouzo, & Greek music. Be careful, Laureate. You’re close to the edge. Thanks for trusting me enough to share/reveal so much. It seems almost too personal at times. There were laughter and tears. What more does a writer need to hear? What next?