Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen Read online

  1. The poem was written for my fifty-seventh birthday.

  2. “Nymphs”—a pleasing classical term that here signifies practically any female crazy enough to come near me.

  4. An echo of references in Cohen’s “Suzanne” to a “perfect body.”

  STANZA 3

  3. Dirty Corner was the expatriates’ name for a dark, cramped bar near the Salt Mines. It had various official names, including Vegera and—in a vain attempt to shake off its image—the Corner. But to the drinkers, it was always Dirty Corner, not only metaphorically but also literally, for wind and rain deposited all kinds of detritus outside, and sometimes inside, the door. It eventually closed because too many of its regulars either left Hydra or went mad or became sane or died or got married or joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Its latest manifestation is as Zoë’s Jewellery Shop.

  4. There are no cars on Hydra. The street leading to Dirty Corner is known as Donkey Shit Lane. After a sighting of a British prince, there was an attempt to change the name to Royal Donkey Shit Lane, but the new epithet never caught on. Hydra remains indifferent to so-called celebrities.

  STANZA 4

  1. This line alludes to Thanasis, a dust-cart driver, who used to play both guitar and bouzouki brilliantly in Dirty Corner. He sang well too. “Garbage” also echoes “Suzanne.” As for Orpheus, like Tiresias in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, he is “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest.” Really.

  STANZA 5

  1–2. After I had sojourned on Hydra for a few months, I discovered that a Greek who had been a close friend of my late father ran a waterfront bar there. For my first meeting with this Greek, I wore a straw hat that my father had bought in Jamaica. It emerged that the Greek had helped him choose it. It further transpired that the Greek had taken my father in his yacht for swimming off the mysterious, uninhabited side of Hydra. I had not known that my father had ever visited the island. Our family name is Green. As the Greek handed me the manuscript of a song written by my father for the Greek to sing, the radio above our heads blared out the refrain of an ecological song: “Green, Green, Green.”

  3. Jesus also features in “Suzanne.”

  STANZA 6

  3. “Flying” (more accurately flaïgk) is Greek for a Flying Dolphin, or hydrofoil. The hydrofoils are quicker but much less charming than the larger ferryboats. They seldom call at Aegina.

  STANZA 7

  This stanza refers to the annual Hydraean festival of the Miaoulia. This jamboree is held at the end of June to honor all the island’s seafarers, but especially Admiral Miaoulis, who is credited with making a decisive contribution to Greek victory in the War of Independence against the Turks with his fireships. The celebrations always include the combustion of at least one boat.

  On the occasion referred to here, at least two of the men (clad in costumes worthy of Captain Hook’s crew) charged with setting fire to the boat were heavy drinkers. One fell into the harbor and had to be hauled out. His name was Philemon. He used to wear a look of annoyance and bewilderment, as though he had received an incomprehensible epistle from St. Paul. He died just after this poem was completed.

  STANZA 8

  1. The two original classrooms of the English Language School, or Schola Bibendorum, on Donkey Shit Lane were dubbed “the Salt Mines” by the Squaw (see below).

  2–3. The “Indian squaw” was and is Katerina Andritsopoulou, who used to round off her lessons with the younger children by getting them to join in chanting, “Ten little, nine little, eight little Indians,” etc. She possesses—to my perception at least— something of a Native American aura. Thus, I bestowed the sobriquet on her, with her approval. According to Chambers’, it is a Massachusett Indian word and therefore has a fine pedigree.

  “Runic incantation” because of the chanting and because Katerina is the repository of a certain mystical power, or dynami. To catch from afar—for the sound carried—ces voix d’enfants, chantant together with their teacher, was a magical experience.

  I wrote her these lines, which she graciously accepted:

  SQUAW

  Red Indians in your songs

  Prairies in your eyes

  Strong medicine in your touch

  Braves in your blood

  A continent in your head

  Desert flowers in your voice

  Unbroken ponies in your stride

  Their manes in your hair

  The path beside the waves

  Is not your path

  The steps of stone

  Are not your steps

  Better you return to your tribe

  Taking back those dreams

  Of peace among wigwams

  Of love under totems.

  4. Somebody had carved in Greek on one of the desks: “Summer ’93. Ach!”

  STANZA 9

  1. “Bill” is Bill Cunliffe, who lived on Hydra for some three decades before returning to England in the mid-’90s. He was a figure full of booming bonhomie and gallantry. Behind a façade of awesome namedropping lay gentleness and generosity.

  Bill ran his eponymous bar (mentioned in at least one Leonard Cohen song) in a converted sponge warehouse not far from the port. The place still exists, but only as an unloved corner of an impersonal hotel complex. Huge sponges quietly soak up dust.

  3. Bill and his bar also feature in a brilliant and disturbing novel set on Hydra called The Sleepwalker by Margarita Karapanou. In one scene she depicts Bill clapping customers on the shoulders and urging them: “Drink up old chap! Good for the heat!” before ordering the doors to be closed “to keep out the beast!” (i.e., the insufferable heat wave).

  4. As already implied, Hydra was for a while an island of sponge divers before the inhabitants discovered that an easier and safer way of making a living was to import cheap jewelry from the Far East and sell it to Japanese tourists. But, here and there, victims of the bends still make their painful progress past the glittering gold and silver shops. And at the far end of the island stands a memorial to a young man who died as recently as 1996 of the same cause—he went too deep.

  STANZA 10

  At the entrance to Hydra harbor stands a bronze statue of Admiral Miaoulis. It should be replaced by the figure of a donkey, as suggested by the late, lamented Marko Fondse. The island could exist without admirals but not without donkeys and mules. Margarita Karapanou appreciated this.

  STANZA 11

  Cohen occasionally breaks into Montréal French. Et pourquoi pas?

  STANZA 12

  Despite the proleptic printing of slogans and logos on postage stamps, shopping bags, and airport windows, Greece keeps failing in its attempts to host the Olympic games.1 Be that as it may, on the eve of a significant departure from Hydra, I spent what was left of the night in a hotel bedroom with an Australian-Greek girl called Olympia. As I was drunk and she had a broken collarbone, our games more properly resembled paralympics. “Limp” was the operative word.

  At daybreak, I dressed, finished a bottle of vodka, and picked up a poetry anthology that fell open at Conrad Aiken’s “Morning Song of Senlin,” which contains lines such as:

  It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning

  When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,

  I arise . . .

  I will think of you as I descend the stair.

  The earth revolves with me, yet makes no motion . . .

  I ascend from darkness

  And depart on the winds of space for I know not where . . .

  I laid the book, open at the incredibly apt poem, beside the soundly sleeping Olympia and left, finding my way eventually to Dirty Corner, where Bill Cunliffe (these days a customer in other people’s bars) prescribed the margaritas of line 4.

  I once published a book under the pseudonym “Tiresias.” Weeks later I tracked down a copy of Olympia’s anthology and found that it prints, on the page opposite the Aiken poem, a poem by Vernon Watkins titled “Discoveries,” which includes the couplet:
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  Motionless motion! Come, Tiresias,

  The eternal flies, what’s passing cannot pass.

  I have never seen Olympia again. I had a telephone number for her in Athens, which I used to call and hear a recorded message in Greek that told me: “Tomorrow is preparing your future today.”

  SUBSEQUENT EVENTS

  A day or two before I finished the poem, I had had Suzanne Cohen pointed out to me in the street, so I knew she was on Hydra and I knew what she looked like. That evening, at the Pyrofani restaurant in Kamini, Valerie (a longtime resident) introduced me to Suzanne, using only first names and explaining me as “our resident poet.” I didn’t let on that I knew (or thought I did) who Suzanne was; I merely shook her firm, small hand, explaining that I had to catch up some friends and asking whether she had noticed which way they had gone.

  SUZANNE (enigmatically): “There is only one way. We can only go upward.”

  SELF (nonplused): “But there are different ways of going upward.”

  I was greatly tickled by the whole encounter. At this point I was still under the impression that the flesh-and-blood (albeit slightly ethereal) Suzanne, whose perfect body I had just touched, was identical with the Suzanne of the song. I was chuffed at being called “our resident poet,” and I loved the irony that nobody in the world, least of all she, could possibly know that I had just completed a poem about her ex-partner’s bananas.

  This was the kind of delicious synchronicity that Hydra has taught me to expect. It was only later, recollecting the incident in tranquillity, that I began to suspect that “We can only go upward” was not a profound utterance worthy of Heracleitus but the most complete bunkum.

  My birthday falls on July 15. I set about inviting thirty or so friends to help me celebrate at the Pyrofani that evening. At the Pyrofani I have a reputation for declaiming doggerel, usually in (dis)honor of the inimitable Theo Triandafyllou, who runs the place. I decided that I would indulge myself to the extent of performing my new work before my guests. This performance would have to include some sort of stab at singing or chanting, even though I had never in my life sung solo and unaccompanied in public. At every opportunity I listened with headphones to Leonard Cohen’s rendition of “Suzanne.” I managed one rehearsal in front of a Greek couple, who were convinced that the piece had to be sung rather than recited.

  On the evening of July 15, my friends gradually arrived and seated themselves at tables scattered around the open space outside the Pyrofani. I took up a strategic position with the Greek couple at one end of two tables placed together. Several friends attempted to sit next to me but were told conspiratorially by the organizers that the seats near me had to be left vacant. I was sad because I would have enjoyed the company of any or all of these people. One person, a fellow poet, had, I am happy to say, the courage to refuse to budge despite repeated requests.

  At last, with the party already under way and myself cut off from everybody else by a kind of cordon sanitaire of empty chairs, Valerie (she who first introduced me to Suzanne Cohen) suddenly appeared with Suzanne, who had her bald cicisbeo, Piero, in tow, exclaiming, as if she were delivering a choice concubine to a feasting pasha: “Here, Roger. Here is your special guest for the evening.” They plonked themselves down on the vacant seats.

  You could have knocked me down with a banana. I was simultaneously pixilated, gobsmacked, and banjaxed. My worst nightmare had been that Suzanne might turn up to eat at the restaurant that evening and thus witness my pathetic attempt to emulate her ex-partner. And here she was actually sitting next to me—worse than my worst nightmare! I decided to take an assertive line:

  SELF: “Er—hello.”

  SUZANNE: “Good evening.”

  SELF: “I have a confession to make to you.”

  SUZANNE: “Really?”

  SELF: “I’ve-written-a-poem-about-the-bananas-in-your-garden- and-I-was-planning-to-try-to-sing-it-later-on.”

  SUZANNE: “Never mind. Perhaps you can say it quietly to me another time.”

  SELF: “But you don’t understand. . . . ”

  SUZANNE: “I’m going to have those bananas cut down, anyway. I don’t like them. Perhaps I will have the smaller ones moved. I need a screen—a man is watching me.”

  SELF: “It’s probably me. Ha ha ha. Er—ha?”

  SUZANNE: “Do you have binoculars?”

  SELF: “But of course.”

  SUZANNE: “Oh.”

  Urged on by the Greek couple, Nikos and Ourania, I did perform the poem in a sort of singsong with a tuneless tune vaguely reminiscent of “Suzanne.” It was (though I say it myself) very well received, even by an Austrian string quartet that had to stop playing while I did my party piece. My friend Peter the Painter told me that he had watched Suzanne the whole time and noted only “a slight tightening of the jaw muscles.” I would describe her as be-mused, deriving the term from Musa, “a banana.” Foolhardy to the end, I dared to ask her: “Were you more embarrassed than I was?” To which she answered coldly and simply: “No.”

  One of my presents was a small folding table that the guests all inscribed, using a felt-tipped pen. Suzanne wrote: “IF WAR DOESN’T KILL YOU—LOVE WILL—(AN ENGLISH EXPRESSION FOR US ALL . . .)—Suzanne.” My impression was that she wasn’t present at all—just as well for both of us. She belonged in a different anecdote and a different song.

  As she was leaving, she graciously wished me a happy birthday, took a couple of paces, turned, and added: “and accumulations,” leaving me shouting to her retreating elegant shoulder blades: “of bananas!”

  Later, trying to think of an analogy, I decided that it was as though somebody, believing that I liked the painting Mona Lisa, had tried to please me by foisting the wife of Francesco del Giocondo on me for the evening. Then it struck me that behind both vicariously famous women lay a Leonardo.

  * * *

  1Written before Greece was vouchsafed the dubious blessing of responsibility for the 2004 Olympic Games.

  Singing South

  There were never meant to be any more notes, but I was powerless. The bananas, like benign triffids, refused to relinquish their hold on me. But it was not just the bananas. Material came flying at me from all directions, demanding to be transcribed. I lost myself in a state of heightened unawareness. Stuff—I don’t know what else to call it—poured out of the ether, through the overworked customs house of my head, and out onto sheets of paper via my fingertips and the keys of my Olivetti portable manual typewriter.

  All through the summer, practically ever since the performance of the poem, until the beginning of September, Suzanne toiled in the garden, aided by two Irish girls (the Sisters of Mercy), cementing unhewn stones into the soil in the area by the bananas (which so far have survived). On an island where productive earth is at a premium, they effectively succeeded in taking out of commission a previously fruitful plot, in rendering the fertile infertile.

  It was rumored that Suzanne was thus venting her annoyance with a middle-aged Greek couple who had tended the garden for years and had taken the opportunity to grow a few vegetables for themselves. There’s a myth in there somewhere. The Wicked Witch meets Baucis and Philemon?

  But as I listened to the thud of stones, day after day, from dawn till dusk, I began to fantasize that there might be something buried there, something that needed battening down as securely as Hercules once secured the Hydra’s immortal head beneath a huge rock, or a precious terma to be exhumed only by the initiated.

  Figured that my song would be enhanced by a chorus of swaying, semiclad girls holding bananas and making rhythmic donkey noises. Then discovered that Cohen’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” has such a female choir in the background, who appear to be singing:

  Bum banananana, bum banananana

  again and again, while he sings:

  I loved you in the morning

  Our kisses deep and warm, etc., etc.

  Have been told that one of Cohen’s albums had a picture on the cover of
him eating a banana, and that bananas became cult objects for a while among his fans.

  One day I met my friend and former English language pupil Yiota in the maquis outside the town. She looked like a Byzantine ikon of a saint, if not of the Virgin herself, against a background of jagged rocks, gorse bushes, and scrub. An ikon, alas, to be venerated only spiritually. She was carrying a bag of bananas. She explained that she was taking them as a gift to one of the island nunneries. Later we were able to have a pleasant little dialogue in English based on the question: “Did the nuns like the bananas?”

  “Suzanne” again—“Jesus . . . spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower.” Goodness knows what Jesus is doing either in Cohen’s song or in my poem. Not for a moment do I see myself as resembling Jesus, but my little house, parts of which are of wood, certainly resembles a tower. It is perched on top of my landlord’s living quarters and could have been built specifically as a hide for observing the comings and goings and doings in Cohen’s garden. Beside my house stands a taller, unfinished tower, one side of which is formed of weathered, vertical wooden planks. I am told that, in the Tarot, the blasted tower or the tower struck by lightning represents hubris. I have been warned.

  My own wooden tower, by the way, is not lonely but solitary— an important distinction.

  Now Suzanne takes your hand