Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen Read online

  HYDRA

  and the BANANAS of

  LEONARD COHEN

  Also by Roger Green

  Small Oxford Books: The Train

  (Oxford University Press, 1982)

  Notes from Overground by Tiresias

  (Paladin Books, London, 1984)

  Translation of The Akathistos Hymn by Romanos the Melodist

  (The Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1987)

  Wolvercote Dreaming

  (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 1996)

  With It Or On It

  (Studio Viriditas Productions, Hydra, 2000)

  HYDRA

  and the BANANAS of

  LEONARD COHEN

  (A Greek parabola for us all)

  •

  Roger Green

  Copyright © 2003 by Studio Viriditas Productions

  Published by Basic Books

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  This book contains magical stuff. Names, places, incidents, and characters, including a putative author, are either products of imagination or not. Any synchronicities are entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.

  Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge MA 02142, or call (617) 252-5298, (800) 255-1514 or e-mail [email protected].

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Green Roger, 1940–

  Hydra and the bananas of Leonard Cohen : (a Greek parabola for us all) /

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 0-465-02759-8 (alk. paper)

  eBook ISBN: 9780786746927

  1. Green, Roger. 2. Cohen, Leonard, 1934– . 3. Hydra Island

  (Greece)—Description and travel. 4. Authors, English—20th

  century—Biography. I. Title.

  CT1118.G74A3 2003

  818'.603—dc21

  2003007427

  Text design and composition by Trish Wilkinson

  Set in 12-point Goudy

  03 04 05 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For

  The Mistress of American Math

  and

  The Master of American Haiku

  PROTEROGRAPH

  My mind so muddled

  I think everything

  must have a hidden meaning.

  —Steve Sanfield

  The heterogeneous nature of the material

  reviewed in the preceding pages need

  cause the reader no uneasiness.

  —Mircea Eliade: The Myth of the Eternal Return

  Prologue

  Once upon a time, in England, a mother used to take her small boy across the fields to Mrs. Mansell’s shop. The shop was in the front room of Mrs. Mansell’s red-brick detached house. It never seemed like a proper shop, and Mrs. Mansell never seemed like a proper shopkeeper. Shopping involved a lot of conversation in lowered voices and something to do with a gray book with a crown on it. The boy, whose name was Roger, used to get bored and fidgety.

  One day Mrs. Mansell whispered to Roger’s mother that she had a special consignment of bananas. Roger’s mother produced her gray book with the crown on it and flourished it at Mrs. Mansell. She said something like: “Roger needs bananas. The vitamins are very important for him at his age.”

  Roger knew his mother was making a serious mistake. She must have forgotten that he had once eaten a banana and that the combination of the dead taste and the blotting-paper texture had made him sick.

  “Mummy!” he shouted. “You know I don’t like bananas.”

  Much to his bewilderment, his mother cuffed him round the ear, told him he was a naughty little boy, and remained in a bad mood all the way home across the allotment footpath. She wouldn’t even let Roger go and play in the aeroplane dump.

  Roger wished his father would come home more often.

  Introduction

  Nancy Drew says I have written a story, and if Nancy Drew says I have written a story, then that must be what I have written. Nancy Drew has had at least one novel published, so she should know.

  Steve Sanfield is a professional storyteller. He attends storytelling conventions. He gets paid to stand up and talk for hours about the time he drove 40,000 turtles across the Midwest, or the time he kept a pet ant and learned its language. I am not that kind of narrator. For a start, I seldom get paid.

  My father was known as a raconteur. People used to come up to me and say: “Your father is the finest raconteur I have ever heard.” These people were usually businessmen. My father used to sell them advertising space over expense-account lunches. At home my mother and my father would sometimes invite people to “dinner.” Often lively conversations would develop. The meaning of life would seem to be only just around the corner when my father would suddenly and loudly cut in, saying: “Now, that reminds me of a story.” He would then hold the floor for the next fifteen minutes or so, very often with a story that had been told to him by somebody else over one of his business lunches. As I cringed inwardly, I vowed that I would never become that kind of raconteur.

  I once worked for ten years for the Ministry of Defence. After I left, I tried to write a novel based on my experiences. I wasn’t happy with it. Life is so extraordinary that I can never see the point of inventing characters and situations that have never existed, or of pretending that real people and events are really fictional. Crazy. Being a moderately law-abiding person, I dutifully sent the first hundred pages or so to my former employers, seeking their imprimatur. I was honestly relieved when their reply came, saying: “We wish you well writing on another subject.” I don’t believe I had infringed the Official Secrets Act. But I believe that They could not forgive me for betraying a different kind of secret— namely, that what goes on inside the Ministry of Defence is Not Serious. Be that as it may, it was clear that I was not that kind of tale-spinner either.

  I write poetry and verse, notebooks and discourses. Never have I set out to write a story. Nevertheless, people have attempted to film my notebooks, while others have said: “I liked your story” after reading or hearing one of my poems. All I intended to do this time was to present a short poem of mine as an entertainment for my friends, on the occasion of my fifty-seventh birthday, in the small square that is a natural street-theater outside my favorite restaurant, the Pyrofani (in the area known as Kamini on the Greek island of Hydra), run (after a fashion) by my dear friend Theo, who must be unique among great restaurateurs in that his highly deserved reputation does not rest on his cooking abilities.

  The poem was to be a throwaway piece summarizing my life (a tad cryptically) since I had come to the island as an English teacher four years previously. I was becoming known and even tolerated as the bard of the Pyrofani. I produced verses for birthdays, for the opening and closing of the restaurant, for other occasions. There was no reason to suppose that this poem would be any less ephemeral. What happened? Or rather, what has happened and is continuing to happen?

  When a few friends who had been present at the first rendition of Fun de Siècle (as I called my ditty, partly with reference to the end of an epoch in my own life, partly with a nod toward the approaching millennium, and partly to stress my own phil
osophy that humor is an essential ingredient of everything) requested photocopies of the text, I complied, but I thought it would be helpful to add half a dozen pages of notes.

  Fine. But I could not stop. The scholia, or glosses, or whatever you like to call them, simply kept on increasing. Before I realized what I was doing, I had produced a book-length manuscript, when all I had intended to do was to equip my poem with a few footnotes that I hoped would be slightly more illuminating than T. S. Eliot’s notorious notes to The Waste Land. Indeed, I nurtured an ambition that the whole enterprise would be more fun than The Waste Land.

  If you read on, you can see how things turned out. At one end (of goodness knows what) I wanted to see the poem in its contexts— chronological, mythological, biographical, geographical, discographical, bibliographical, cartographical, anthropological, botanical, physical, spiritual, theological, hagiographical, metaphysical, horticultural, and so forth. At the other end, once written and performed, the poem began to take on a life of its own, of which I wanted to give some sort of account. In between, all sorts of stuff (I know of no better word) started coming at me from all directions and demanding to be dealt with—Orpheus and angels, Rilke and Rimbaud, haiku and Hydra, Red Indians and bananas—that kind of stuff.

  What I have produced seems like a ragbag to me. The best descriptions I could find for it would be names such as galimatias, gallimaufry, salmagundi, hotchpotch, charivari, satura lanx, rigmarole, sooterkin—but only if you promised not to look them up in the dictionary. But Nancy Drew (she calls me Hercule Poirot, by the way) says I have written a story, and if Nancy Drew says I have written a story, then that must be what I have written.

  Fun de Siècle

  I’m just another pilgrim

  From a land of damp gymkhanas

  Led by the warm wind blowing

  Through Leonard Cohen’s bananas

  I’m going on fifty-seven

  So the nymphs had better hurry

  Or they’ll miss their chance to savor

  My less than perfect body

  If you come here with a purpose

  You will not fulfill your needs here

  There are jewels in Dirty Corner

  But the Donkey Shit still leads there

  And Orpheus gathers garbage

  While the angels sing hosannas

  Through the elephant-ear leaves

  Of Leonard Cohen’s bananas

  I went down to the harbor

  I was looking for my father

  But all I found was Jesus

  And he said that he would rather

  Do anything than stay here

  And he asked me which was finer:

  To take a Flying back to Poros

  Or a slow boat to Aegina

  Everywhere our boats are burning

  Torched by winos in bandannas

  As the wind rattles the rigging

  Of Leonard Cohen’s bananas

  There are children in the Salt Mines

  With an Indian squaw singing

  A runic incantation

  Ach, hot tears my cheeks are stinging

  And Bill’s Bar is full of phantoms

  Among the dusty sponges

  Sleepwalkers who’ve forgotten

  Their bends-defying plunges

  And always there’s a danger

  That if the walls prove wonky

  The balladeer’s bananas

  Will be eaten by a donkey

  Et toujours il y a le danger

  Que les rois de l’île, les ânes

  Démolissent les murs pour manger

  De Cohen les bananes

  The Millennial Olympics

  Happened in a hotel suite as

  I prepared to leave the island

  Fortified with margaritas

  And love is what we long for

  And longing can’t discover

  But if we don’t look behind us

  We may yet surprise a lover

  Yes, everybody comes here

  With their personal nirvanas

  Which are as transient as the wind

  In Leonard Cohen’s bananas

  Which are as transient as the wind

  And as Leonard Cohen’s bananas . . .

  Notes to Fun de Siècle

  GENERAL

  1. Bananas. According to Chambers’ English Dictionary, the banana is “a gigantic tree-like herbaceous plant” whose Latin name is Musa sapientum. I.e., it is not a tree because it does not have a woody stem. Musa, it seems, is latinized from the Arabic mauz.

  Sadly, that’s as far as I can go without a reference library. I looked up all of these details after I had written the poem. I find it remarkable that, whatever mauz may mean, the Latin name of the banana translates as “Muse of the Wise”—and beautiful.

  At least, I think and hope that sapientum is the genitive plural of sapiens. Why on earth “of the Wise”? Chambers offers no explanation of this, let alone why such a wise plant gave rise to the expression “bananas” meaning “crazy.”

  Anyway, for this poem the banana was my muse, and I was wise and crazy simultaneously.

  2. Leonard Cohen. A Jewish Canadian singer and writer who frequented the Greek island of Hydra (the setting for this poem) in the ’60s and early ’70s. He owns a house on the island but seldom visits the place. He is said to be living now in a Buddhist monastery in California. His songs are by no means as melancholy and pessimistic as they are sometimes made out to be.

  When I wrote this poem, Cohen’s former partner Suzanne was staying in Cohen’s house. I (and for all I know, Suzanne herself) was under the impression that Cohen’s song “Suzanne” was about his former partner. I have since been assured by several well-meaning people that it was about another Suzanne.

  To add to the glorious confusion, Cohen also wrote a song about a Marianne who, it seems, was a girlfriend of his who also spent time on Hydra. A recent article in the Observer credited Marianne with being Cohen’s wife. Certainly Suzanne’s existence in Cohen’s slightly dilapidated mansion recalls that of Tennyson’s Mariana in “the lonely moated grange.”

  I am also reminded of “The Lady of Shalott” (for “shallot” read “banana”). Whether Cohen’s song is about her or not, Suzanne cannot escape the curse. There is not much to choose between the vicarious fame of being the subject of a song and the negative fame of not being the subject of a song by your ex-husband that bears your name.

  Anyway, I borrowed and adapted the meter of Cohen’s “Suzanne” for my poem. I was aware of this song only as a result of my recent purchase of a cassette of Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits, prompted by hearing people on Hydra speak of the man. At this point in this narrative I was a complete newcomer to the Cohen oeuvre.

  3. Hydra and myself. My acquaintance with Greece goes back to the ’60s but with Hydra only as far as 1993, when I came to teach English at the language school of Mr. Bibendum. Although about thirty years previously I had copied into my commonplace book (Attic Language) these two sentences from Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi:

  Hydra is a rock which rises out of the sea like a huge loaf of petrified bread. It is the bread turned to stone which the artist receives as reward for his labours when he first catches sight of the promised land.

  In the last four years I have learned a lot about the island and have a very strong feeling that I am assisting at the end of an era, a siècle, nay, a millennium.

  I recently moved into a two-room apartment in an area of the town known to the expatriates as “Tirania” because of the large Albanian population. It was pointed out to me that Leonard Cohen’s house and mine overlook each other. I have the added advantage of an unimpeded view of his raised garden with its fine group of banana-plants.

  When Tennyson writes of Mariana that

  She drew her casement-curtain by,

  And glanced athwart the glooming flats,

  he was plainly prefiguring Suzanne gazing out toward my apartment.

 
As I lie in bed, I often hear the wind in the banana leaves. It worked its way into my mind, as did the words “Leonard Cohen’s bananas,” to the point where I had to do something about it.

  THE TITLE

  At first I called the poem “Fun de Saison,” but then I decided that it marked the end of more than a mere season. As for the “fun”— it is a piece of fun, intended to entertain, and I can never resist a pun. But beware—I am always deadly serious behind the farçade.

  When I found out about Musa sapientum, I toyed with the idea of calling the poem Verb. sap., or even Herb sap. I liked the added suggestion of the sap rising in the stems of the gigantic herbaceous plants. But I decided against it.

  STANZA 1

  1. In selecting the term “pilgrim,” I had in mind an article in praise of Hydra by the late Damianos Stroumboulis, which concludes: “Hydra merits pilgrimage, not tourism.”

  2. When I wrote this, I had just returned from England, where I witnessed child and animal abuse combined as parents urged their offspring to attempt to jump obstacles on horseback in a muddy field in pouring rain. The children were all kitted out in velvet riding caps, jodhpurs, and leather boots. Soon after this, some 100,000 British men and women demonstrated in London against a bill to abolish the hunting of animals by equestrians accompanied by trained dogs known as hounds.

  STANZA 2