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 j.mccrary@perseusbooks.com.

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 philosophy 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

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:

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

And she leads you to the river . . .

While Suzanne holds the mirror

Which brings us back to Tennyson and “The Lady of Shalott.” Since I made the initial connection, I have managed to secure an annotated selected Tennyson and have discovered, among other things, that “Shalott” is the poet’s alliaceous anglicization of the original Italian “Scalotta.” There is no particular line or passage in Tennyson’s poem that can be picked out and applied to Suzanne and Leonard Cohen’s house on Hydra. Yet the whole atmosphere of (what I imagine to be) Suzanne’s drifting existence in the moldering mansion seems to my perception to be redolent of that surrounding the Lady of Shalott. Island, mirror, shadows, gray walls, a space of flowers (and bananas), a curse . . .

“Mariana in the South” is also germane, with its “house . . . close-latticed to the brooding heat, and silent in its dusty vines” (and bananas). “At eve a dry cicala sung, there came a sound as of the sea.” Fascinating that Tennyson realized that the despondent isolation of a Mariana was equally feasible in a southern climate. But how much more fascinating that, according to Hallam, cited in Aidan Day’s notes,

the essential and distinguishing character of the conception requires in the Southern Mariana a greater lingering on the outward circumstances, and a less palpable transition of the poet into Mariana’s feelings, than was the case in the former poem.

This raises the whole question of how far the melancholy of expatriates stems from external causes such as not being able to obtain the section of the Times that contains the Listener crossword. (Cf. John Betjeman’s brilliant pair of sonnets—sadly not to hand—about superannuated Britons attempting to live in Spain “with scorpions in the bath.”)

But how could I not have perceived from the outset an even more compelling analog—the apocryphal History of Susanna? It is often referred to as “the story of Susanna and the elders”; in this case we have Suzanne and the elder (myself with binoculars). Susanna, “a very fair woman,” was married to Joacim, “a great rich man” who “had a fair garden adjoining unto his house.” There is even the detail of “two maids only” (i.e., the Irish girls or Sisters of Mercy).

The elders lust after Susanna. They hide in the garden and emerge when she is naked and alone. They threaten to announce that she had a young lover with her if she will not let them lie with her. She opts for death rather than dishonor, and screams. The elders duly denounce her. In court she is found guilty and sentenced to death. But a young man called Daniel comes forward and cross-examines the two elders, who condemn themselves by not being able to agree as to the kind of tree under which they saw Susanna and her lover “companying together.” One says “under a mastick tree,” while the other says “under an holm tree.” Susanna goes free. The elders are executed. And Daniel is promoted to Detective Superintendent.

Since the translators of the Authorised Version are often shaky on flora and fauna, I see no reason why one of the trees might not have been a banana tree. We have a Breeches Bible. Why not a Banana Apocrypha?

Curious that it never occurred to me to exploit the Susanna-banana, Suzanne-banane rhymes. They are implicit throughout.

The two Irish Catholic girls (not sisters, as far as I know) came to Hydra for the summer, intending to find work to pay for their holiday. Suzanne learned about them and employed them. This spying elder only saw them shifting stones and dirt all day every day, so his impression was that they found work to pay for their work. I dubbed them “The Sisters of Mercy” after Leonard Cohen’s song of that title. But the song is full of innuendos, and I hasten to add that I know nothing whatever of the previous personal lives of the Irish girls. The song contains a nice crypto-banana allusion:

If your life is a leaf

That the seasons tear off and condemn

They will bind you with love

That is graceful and green as a stem.

Now Suzanne has left. The Sisters of Mercy have left. Half the garden is lumpily cobbled, with a centerpiece that looks like the kind of well that ought to have gnomes fishing in it and plastic frogs sitting around it. The banana-plants, looking a little tired, are still standing. But one day before her departure, Suzanne stood in the garden speaking to a Greek woman via an interpreter. The only word I could catch on the wind was “bananas.”

Don’t know where the angels singing hosannas in my song come from, but they tie up with Cohen’s “Marianne”:

I forget to pray for the angels

And then the angels forget to pray for us.

Always and everywhere there are angels in the superstructure and in the subtexture.

Pandias Skaramangas is a key to many things on and off Hydra. (He introduced Dimitri de Clercq to Alain Robbe-Grillet. But that is almost another story. “Almost” because Le mystère Cohen, Le voyeur anglais, Le jardin aux bananiers, L’année dernière à Hydrabad are all straight from the pages or the celluloid of M. Robbe-Grillet.) Pandias claims that without him, oh yes, we would have no bananas. The raised garden, he says, belonged legally to Cohen, but somebody else had appropriated it. Cohen wanted to go to court. “But I told him: don’t go to court. Offer to buy the land. I myself have bought my own garden three times. It is much less trouble and expense than going to court. So this is what he did.”

Well, now I know where the angels came from—or at least one provenance for them—Bermuda. Bill Pownall, painter and guitarist, tells me that he once wrote, while living on Bermuda, a short story called “Green Angels.” The story concerned banana-plants whose leaves, of course, resemble great verdant wings. Angels by Jacob Epstein, perhaps.

Bill Pownall says an English couple who rented the house next to his in the summer were by chance at the Pyrofani on the evening of my birthday party. Willy-nilly, they heard my rendition of the poem and amazingly were not appalled (I would have been, in their place). So Bill sent them a copy of the poem, and they have written back to say that they now perform it in the privacy and comfort of their own home.

There used to be (maybe still is) an all-girl pop group called Bananarama. What I enjoy from my terrace is a bananorama.

Apparently Leonard and Suzanne produced a brother and a sister called Adam and Lorca. If Rainer Maria Rilke and Lamorna Birch can be men, why shouldn’t Lorca be a woman? One of the main female characters in Margarita Karapanou’s The Sleepwalker is called Luca. Since the whole thing is a kind of 1970s roman à clef, with names and identities freely swapped around, why shouldn’t there be a hint of Lorca in Luca?

Incidentally, I’ve just finished reading for the first time Karapanou’s Cassandra and the Wolf, some scenes of which are also set on Hydra. (Greek for “wolf” is lykos, which could be transliterated lucos; the feminine would be luca, which also happens to be the name of Karapanou’s spaniel.) She handles with kid gloves a horrific, brilliant tale of child abuse, seen through the eyes of a little girl. In some ways the story foreshadows The Sleepwalker. Once again Karapanou perfectly catches the sinister, yet elusive, side of the island’s character. In one elaborate scene, involving a banana, the little girl refers to herself as “Queen Banana.”

Chambers’ laconically states that “banana” is Spanish or Portuguese from the native name in Guinea. One longs to know more. Under “hand,” Chambers’ gives as one definition: “a division of a bunch of bananas.” I hope I shall be able to look back on this whole preoccupation as a five-finger exercise preparing me for a more sustained concerto or symphony.

Hydra is by no means a desert island. I have not only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare but also quite an eclectic little library, which, however, is a bit weak in the dendrology section. The Tree of Life by Roger Cook sadly contains no explicit references to banana-plants, but it does have a full-page color reproduction of an early-nineteenth-century Indian miniature from the Punjab Hills of a woman embracing a tree. This “tree” is unmistakably a banana. The commentary tells us:

Alone on the terrace of the palace, the beloved pines for her departed lover. Clasping the trunk of the tree, she longs for the joys of love in union.

Mariana in Asia, perhaps.

A couple of Leonard Cohen’s banana-plants exhibit a strange, dark object that looks like a kind of fruit but nothing like a banana. It is rounded at one end and pointed at the other and hangs from a swaying, wrinkled stem. The whole ensemble looks like some dinosaur’s pizzle, and—to my eyes at least—is a lot more sexually suggestive than your common or garden banana. Curiously or not, some of the more recondite and potent trees in Cook’s book—world trees, dream trees, alchemical trees, mystic trees, trees of knowledge, trees of good and/or evil, trees of life— display fruits resembling these mysterious, virile-looking objects.

As I now seem to be attempting—an absurdly impossible task— to catch every echo, to map every lane in the labyrinth, I had better observe, before anyone else does, the mildly curious fact that the Hydra novelist par excellence, Margarita Karapanou, shares her name with the cocktail recommended by Bill, who appears in her novel The Sleepwalker. How fortunate that he did not suggest a screwdriver, a Long Island iced tea, or even a banana daiquiri.

Wrote a long letter to my old friend Paul Surman. Before I left England, Paul presented me with a marvelous poem he had written for me, titled “South.” Here it is:

Returning from the north,

I think of you as the motorway

Calculates our journey in junction numbers

And stops at service stations, the cars ahead

Draining away down the grey light of the road

Towards a vaguer south, and realise

Your south has always been further south than mine.

If not an actual south, a state of mind.

By now you will be there, travelling done,

Location secure again. After all there is only

A notional north, a relative south, and we may still

Communicate across these distant lands, nevertheless

I know your south is further south than mine

And this makes a difference I do not completely understand.

It’s not just a matter of north and south, but day and night.

I have always loved the night, where everything is incomplete

And might be something else. Like a vampire

I decline the day where possible and just manage to survive

The average murk of the English light, but you have gone where

Light works loose the bare simplicity of things that would

Straightway tear me down to bones and instant ancient dust.

But it’s not just a matter of day and night, there’s summer

And winter too. My being still records the springtime surges,

The hedgerows filling up with names of plants,

The starlings filling our eaves with noise again

And I too now greet the returning warmth, but the long day

Wearies me with too much explained by seeing,

Too much exposed, you I know could not feel like this.

Yet it’s not just a matter of summer and winter, but stay or go.

We have lived in this same latitude side by side for years,

But now you are returning to your south, your home adopted

By choice and chance in which you yet belong. I too

Live in a place that is only partly mine, my birthplace,

Homeland that I love, in whose familiarity I am only half at home.

The rest is what I do not understand, where we meet

In that foreign land where the language is the unexplained.

I hate your going to your further south but hope you hear

In this lament my thanks for being what I am not.

I reread his poem before writing to Paul, and this is part of what I said:

What a poem! What a lucky dog I am to have a friend like you and a poem like that written for me! But I’m still having trouble with that last line. I don’t think I deserve any thanks. What I believe you really mean (I’m probably wrong, as usual) is something like: “I hope you hear in this lament my gratitude to the powers that be (however conceptualised) that Roger is what I am not.” Would you go along with that? After all, I personally deserve no credit for being different from you.

Apart from that quibble, the rest of the poem is spot on and very moving, damn you. My eyes are moist as I write to you from “that foreign land where the language is the unexplained.” I think you speak the language of that/this foreign land better than I do. Your poem and my situation tie up with Tennyson’s “Mariana” and “Mariana in the South.” I’ve been scrutinising these two poems lately for reasons which will become apparent, and have found (in the Penguin Classics selection) an amazing note quoting Arthur Hallam:

It [“Mariana in the South”] is intended . . . as a kind of pendant to his former poem of Mariana, the idea of both being the expression of desolate loneliness, but with this distinctive variety in the second that it paints the forlorn feeling as it would exist under different impressions of sense.

In other words, as the poet sings, “Light works loose the bare simplicity of things.” I.e., you and Tennyson realised long ago what has taken me a lifetime to discover—that in the South (literal, but especially metaphorical and metaphysical) the outward circumstances say it all to those who can bear to look. (Here one could go off on another tangent relating to mirrors, gorgons, “The Lady of Shalott,” Orpheus losing Eurydice by looking back etc. etc.)

I think I’ll start a new paragraph. I don’t know where this comes from (the Marx Brothers?):

I met a man from the South

He had a big cigar in his mouth

That’s how I knew he was from the South.

Exactly. There is no need for the writer to attempt “a palpable transition” into the feelings of this Man from the South, because “the outward circumstances” (in this case, the cigar) say it all. This is the secret of my “Happiness” poem about the boat and—though less obviously—of the “George” (about another boat, or the same boat—the one that you and I find ourselves in). The trouble is (as you know) that, wherever you may be—North, South, East, West, playing bridge, on the bridge—it doesn’t matter—very few people UNDERSTAND. They say things like: “OK, you’ve described the boat. So what? You’ve described Wolvercote. So what? If your father is dead, how could you have been looking for him?”

Just as I wrote that, I suddenly had the realisation that Wolvercote Dreaming [a long poem that I published “about” a small community on the edge of Oxford, England] is a poem of the South. Indeed, all my work is of the South. Thanks. It took a man of the North to lead me (maieutically) to this realisation. And yours is of the North. But we’re both speaking the language (different dialects, perhaps) of the unexplained, which is why many people are equally perplexed by your darkness and my sunlight. As that great poet of the South, Lawrence Durrell, wrote:

If truth were needles

Surely eyes would see.

Writing to Paul helped me to grasp a little more clearly this whole North-South business. At first this motif crept in via my relating Suzanne Cohen to Mariana. It wasn’t until I had hammered out those paragraphs to my friend that I realized how firmly implanted the idea is in Fun de Siècle itself. From damp gymkhanas to bananas in one easy lesson. And realized how I’ve always— even when living in England—been a South writer, a South paw, of the South Southy. I bring things out into the sharp, white light (so white that it is black, as George Seferis has observed)—bananas, for example. I set them on a sharp, white page and sit back, believing my work to be done. Then I am surprised when people do not see—and immeasurably delighted when they do.[1]

Returned from swimming to find that Nancy Drew had left for me a review of a book called Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen by Ira Bruce Nadel.

Idiotic title, even if one ignores the schoolboy sexual innuendo.[2] It would make sense only if Cohen had worked at lots of different jobs or changed political or religious allegiance many times. Be that as it may, what really struck me was how both the reviewer and (as far as I could tell) the author took for granted the idea that Leonard Cohen was somebody famous and important.

When I wrote the first set of notes to Fun de Siècle, I thought it necessary to explain who Cohen was. In my perception he was a minor ’60s pop singer with poetic pretensions; most people in the world had never heard of him and were none the worse off for that; he was (I thought) a phenomenon more transient than his own bananas.

It is difficult for me now to recapture my first fine, careless rapture, my prelapsarian innocence when I sang, like Milton, of a garden and of fruit. But I believe I’m being honest when I asseverate that while I was composing Fun de Siècle, past or present inhabitants of the L-shaped house scarcely impinged at all upon my awareness. I was not your man, or last year’s, or any other kind of man. I was my own man. I sang my own song. But now I find myself being drawn into the clutches of a Hydra-headed monster, guardian of the bananas that I innocently attempted to possess in verse.

Yes, I am struggling, Laocoön-like, with every myth that ever was—the Labors of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, the Garden of Eden, Oedipus, Proteus, Orpheus, the Grail Quest, Geth-semane, the Arabian Nights—i.e., with the only myth that ever was and is and shall be.

What I am doing wrong is struggling, and, according to the critique of Various Positions, this has been Leonard Cohen’s error as well: “What are facts when dealing with Cohen, whose life has been one long battle for custody of his own myth?” inquires the rhetorical reviewer. “What,” asks the present autoscholiast, “are facts when dealing with Cohen’s bananas who are fighting for custard to go with their own pith?”

There is seriousness in all this, believe me. As Lawrence Durrell remarked, life is too serious not to be taken lightly. I have been reading Mircea Eliade’s The Myth of the Eternal Return, and there I learn how rapidly history can become myth—thank goodness, because history terrifies us whereas myth redeems us. Humankind (albeit mostly unconsciously) constantly yearns to pass from profane time (becoming) into mythic time (being). Now, I understand that, in my—my what? My dialogue? My commerce? My intercourse? My transactions?—my engagement (that will serve) (or maybe engagement) with Leonard Cohen’s bananas, I am operating in mythic time, in the realms of nonordinary reality.

In most of the rest of the world (I cannot speak for places such as Montréal), Leonard Cohen has passed/is passing quietly into history. Among the expatriate community on the Greek island of Hydra, he has already become myth. Many of the denizens of this elephants’ graveyard (Margarita Karapanou’s Greek expression for us all) claim to have walked with Cohen, talked with Cohen, slept with Cohen, drunk with Cohen, inspired Cohen, understood Cohen, advised Cohen, loved Cohen, hated Cohen, KNOWN Cohen. Each will tell you (or tell me, at any rate) that only he or she really appreciated Leonard’s sense of humor; only he or she was aware of Leonard’s darkest, most unnatural vice; only he or she knew why he espoused Zen Buddhism; only he or she had had the lyrics of a particular song explained to them by the Master; only he or she knows which wire the bird sat on; only he or she knows the salacious story behind the photograph on a certain album sleeve; only he or she . . . Any Hydraean cult of Cohen would need far more than four gospels as well as an Acts of the Apostles as fat as the whole Bible, not to mention an apocalyptic apocrypha.

“Myth is the last—not the first—stage in the development of a hero,” Eliade tells us, quoting Chadwick, and continues:

But this only confirms the conclusion reached by many investigators: the recollection of a historical event or a real personage survives in popular memory for two or three centuries at the utmost. This is because popular memory finds difficulty in retaining individual events and real figures. The structures by means of which it functions are different: categories instead of events, archetypes instead of historical personages.

And so on. Well, I have news for “many investigators.” Hydra has never known history, remains unpolluted by it. Just occasionally the ripples of a historical event have been brought up short by its solid rock. But it has no history of its own. History takes place on the sea, or across the strait on the Peloponnese, but never actually on this island. Hydra has no history of its own. So for “two or three centuries,” read “two or three decades.” That is all the profane time it takes for a figure like Cohen to slip into myth.

Nobody owns or has custody of a myth any more than a man, say, owns or has custody of a woman, or a woman owns or has custody of a cat. If I were the historical Leonard Cohen, I would cease to kick against the myth and pray to become entirely mythical as quickly as possible. Historical singers and bananas are transient. Mythical ones are transcendent.

For me, one of the functions of Fun de Siècle is to help create the landscape I inhabit. I cannot (yet) make banana-plants dance, but I can snare them with song and set them in their significant place, just as Wallace Stevens did with his jar in Tennessee. By singing I settle more comfortably into my environment—i.e., not an environment that in any way belongs to me but that which environs me. I know of few things more exciting or fulfilling than to approach a place that I have hymned on board a boat that I have sung.

In profane time I haven’t a hope in hell of being Orpheus. But in mythic time, everyone who has ever attempted to sing partakes of the Orphic essence. Thanasis the dust-cart driver is an Orpheus. Leonard Cohen is an Orpheus, albeit apparently one who turns and rends the Maenads before they can rend him. Katerina the Squaw is an Orpheus. Paul Surman is an Orpheus. Yiota, the Banana Princess, is an Orpheus. Katerina of Aigina is an Orpheus. We are not talking about verse here, or even about poetry; we have entered a realm of magic incantation, a realm of muse-ic, a realm of the Muses of the Wise and the Foolish, a realm of angels, a realm of song.

Wolvercote Dreaming, which I mentioned a little while ago, was a song. It was another exercise in landscape creation by Incapability Green. Each section ended with a refrain that varied slightly but basically said:

These had I sung

Yet I had more to sing.

An old local man, when he heard that I was moving to Greece, said: “Don’t stop singing, Roger.” And after I had performed Fun de Siècle at the Pyrofani, Valerie wrote on my birthday table: “Keep on singinging!”

I’m fifty-seven (as the song says), yet I’m only just beginning to learn the meaning of “song,” “sing,” “singer,” “singing.” Rilke had it all sussed by the time he died at age fifty-one. Gesang ist Dasein, he said. I have seen that translated as “song is existence,” but my O-level German tells me that that is not the whole story, and that the phrase is untranslatable anyway. Rilke wrote it in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus, which a crazy Austrian told me the other day are very easy to understand. Maybe they are for crazy Austrians.

Marina Tsvetayeva, writing to Rilke, commented: “Song is existence (to be there; anyone not singing is not yet there, is still coming!).” I know what she meant, but I feel unhappy about it. Unhappy because singers are few and far between (so-called poets are not necessarily singers), and I wouldn’t like to think that perhaps 99 percent of the world’s population “is not yet there.” For the time being, I shall circumvent this problem by explaining away Tsvetayeva’s remark as a rather arrogant let-them-eat-cake sort of comment indicative of an I’m-all-right-Rainer attitude—as right as Rainer, indeed. As for Gesang ist Dasein, what it does not posit is that singing is the only form of existence. It does not say Dasein ist Gesang. Thus, it allows for other equally valid, equally intense forms of existing.

Ten days before my birthday I sat down and wrote:

Everybody comes here

With their personal nirvanas

Which are as transient as the wind

In Leonard Cohen’s bananas.

Then I sat and looked at it. A god knows (as the Greeks say) what I thought I was doing. (They have so many more gods to choose from than we do.) A “personal nirvana” is in itself something of a koan. If I thought anything, I guess I imagined I was writing verses about bananas and transitoriness. Now, it seems to me, I was writing a song about singing and singers, not forgetting the angels. A song of songs, indeed. Odd how the Bible keeps making its presence felt—could this have something to do with Leonard Cohen’s rabbinical roots?

(Have just reread the Song of Solomon. It is all there. It is the dénouement.)

In writing the poem, I sang metaphorically. On my birthday, I sang literally. Not in the least competently, but I sang and immediately became one with singers everywhere. Nikos’s video exists to prove it. I watched it. The actor who was playing Roger Green definitely looked as though he had found the secret of passing from becoming to being. He seemed to be on some kind of shamanic journey. He kept reminding me of somebody, not myself. Now I believe his movements and posture were those of my elder son, Nick. I was looking for my father—and I found my son.

I sang. Imagine being Leonard Cohen, a professional who must constantly monitor his voice and his breathing, who must always keep his emotions under control, must never, while singing, show what he is really feeling. Nikos had wired me for sound, and the little microphone betrayed every uncertain tremor of my voice, every hesitant intake of breath. Nikos says there was tension. Yet I was somewhere beyond or above all this. I sang my song. And when I heard that someone called Harvey had subsequently sung my song in London with his wife, I was probably even more thrilled than Leonard Cohen when he heard people singing “Suzanne” on a ship in the Caspian Sea.

Gesang ist Dasein certainly doesn’t mean “song is existence.” “Singing is being” comes closer. I wish I knew more German. It seems to me that the Ge in Gesang has a past force. If so, Gesang, strictly speaking, must mean “what has been sung.” In that case, the phrase implies that once something has been sung, it takes on a life of its own; it enters beingness. But what, then, happens to the singer? I need a crazy Austrian to enlighten me.

The Greek woman glimpsed and overheard talking, through an interpreter, to Suzanne in the garden has come into sharper focus. She is none other than Kyria (i.e., Mrs.) Evangelia, who looks after the property for Leonard Cohen and whose duties include tending and watering the bananas. Moreover, it emerges (insofar as anything remotely resembling a fact ever emerges on Hydra) that she and her husband, Koulis, are the targets of Suzanne’s frenzied and petrous antigardening efforts. It transpires that I knew Kyria Evangelia all along because we used to meet and chat while taking our early-morning swims from the Virgin Beach (so called because Richard Branson has his beady developer’s eye on it). But she never referred to her enormous responsibilities as Guardian of the Bananas, not to mention various hesperidia that also adorn the garden.

On the same beach at the same time, we would quite often see the novelists Margarita Liberaki and her daughter Margarita Karapanou, but I never made their acquaintance. Karapanou mostly preferred to lie on her back, fully clothed, while Liberaki plunged fearlessly into the sea. Luca the spaniel trotted to and fro. One day I overheard somebody ask the daughter why she didn’t swim. She replied: “I leave that to my mother. She goes much deeper than I do.”

On another occasion the two Margaritas, Kyria Evangelia, and I were all at the beach together, along with some other people. The sky was dark and menacing. The billows heaved constantly without crests. On a big stone, weighted by a smaller one, lay an unclaimed towel. As I swam, my knee came into contact with something soft yet firm, heavy, slow, sinister. I thrashed away wildly and landed as quickly as possible. Two women said there had been a dead bird in the water. It didn’t feel like a bird. An albatross? At the same moment, Kyria Evangelia called out: “What’s the time, Margarita?” and I remembered the childhood game: “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?”

Aidan Day, in his notes on “The Lady of Shalott,” has a quotation from Northrop Frye that seems to me apropos:

Northrop Frye, commenting on Romantic views of the imagination and on the interiority of Romantic metaphorical structures, observes: “the attempt to turn around and see the source of one’s vision may be destructive, as the Lady of Shalott found when she turned away from the mirror. Thus the world of the deep interior in Romantic poetry is morally ambivalent.”

Which brings me back to Orpheus and Eurydice—as if I ever left them.

Yet have I more to say, which I have thought upon; for I am filled as the moon at the full (Ecclesiasticus 39:12).

[1]I now perceive that this whole oeuvre is in the nature of a reply to Paul’s poem—a contribution to a continuing amoebaean contest. Eh, old horse?

[2]As I work on my second draft, I am constantly tempted to change things in the light of all I learned or experienced later. But I steadfastly resist. This text comprises several stories, and one of them is the story of how the fool who rushed in at the outset gradually received knowledge, and even a little wisdom. Various Positions is a far from idiotic title, but I did not know it at the time.

Banana Update

This banana thing won’t go away. I have a huge amount of material waiting to be dealt with but meanwhile have had to grab a fresh sheet of paper to report that today I have, for the first time, been in the presence of Leonard Cohen’s bananas, touched Leonard Cohen’s bananas, scrutinized L. C.’s bananas, and come away with a gift of half the casing of one of those mysterious pizzle-like objects.

The tiny little bananas, like baby’s fingers, grow inside the pizzle end as a bird grows inside an egg. When they reach a certain size they poke their way out, and the beautiful grayish pizzle casing, lined with a sort of blood-red lacquer, falls away. I can’t think of any other fruit or vegetable that does this. Even beans and peas have to be shelled by human hand. Most plants that I know release their seeds thus, but not their fruits.

If the donkey is (unjustly) called the devil’s walking parody of all four-footed things, then the banana-plant could be called a god’s standing parody of all stemmed things.

Kyria Evangelia had told me that Leonard Cohen’s “uncle” was staying in the house. I have, over the past couple of weeks, observed a genial man with curly gray hair and a beard and what I would call “a stately paunch,” accompanied by an attractive older woman. I’ve seen them in the Pyrofani. I’ve spoken to them in the Hydranet office. We’ve discovered each other’s names—they are Steve and Sarah.

Today I spoke to Steve by Four Corners shop and learned that he had some unposted mail. I offered to take it for him (and did). He in return offered me lunch. In such undramatic wise did I for the first time enter Leonard Cohen’s property—right foot first, of course.

Despite Kyria Evangelia’s asseverations that “he even looks like Leonard Cohen,” it emerged that Steve Sanfield is not related to Cohen in any way; they are simply old friends. Over lunch—globe artichokes with pita bread and spicy, garlicky dips and salad—I learned too much and also, probably, gave away too much.

I learned, among other things, that the original Sisters of Mercy came from Calgary and, much more relevantly, that there were two of them. I learned that Evangelia’s husband, Koulis, had planted the bananas with the hope of having a large enough crop to sell (improbable). It was confirmed that Suzanne is not the Suzanne of the song. The S. of the s. was from Montréal, whereas Suzanne is from Miami and lives in France. It seems probable that Suzanne did indeed initiate the paving in order to frustrate Koulis and Evangelia’s gardening efforts. (No wonder she spoke of cutting down the bananas.)

Steve writes children’s books and witty antihaiku with a world-weary tone. He has lent me a couple of his poetry books. I don’t think he mentions bananas. Sarah teaches math.

Steve lived here for two years in the early ’60s, even pre–Bill Cunliffe. He wrote a novel called Away Is Not a Place and entrusted the only copy to a woman called Olivia, who he says was Aldous Huxley’s niece. She took it to London, and it was never seen again. Meanwhile, because of the Huxley connection, Sandoz in Switzerland sent them a big bottle of liquid LSD with the request that they try it and let Sandoz know the results. Steve also made one or more hashish runs to Turkey. He lived in Morocco too. One of those guys.

Sarah has a habit of asking very forthright questions, such as: “What are you trying to live without?” I feebly replied: “Television.” But then said: “My wife, I suppose, and my two sons.” (On reflection I have decided that this living without my wife or any partner is like being an anthropologist. Sometimes I am desperate to have a Jules around to tell all this amazing [as it seems to me] stuff to. But if I had a Jules around, the amazing stuff would either not happen or else would take a completely different form. Like an anthropologist, I cannot help disturbing and influencing my field of study, but I have to use my professional skills to influence it and disturb it as little as possible.) Sarah also asked: “Whom do you get mail from?” When I replied that today I had received mail from Brenda and the bank, they both agreed that I seemed to have all fronts nicely covered. If only!

Steve swears he will not touch the bananas. He likes Evangelia and does not want to do anything to upset her. Steve is very alert to what is going on. He loves to watch a blind man with a white stick moving so freely around the harbor. He differentiates between the neighborhood dogs.

Hardly noticed anything in the house except a guitar hanging on the wall in the room Steve uses for writing (no typewriter or computer). Everything painted white.

So I told them bits of my banana story. They accepted it all and liked it and were amused by it. Now, having read some of Steve’s haiku that he has lent me, I can see that our mind-sets are not a million miles apart, at least in some departments. For example, he seems to be into Bash and shamanism, or even bashamanism, which makes a nice change from Betjemanism. He got excited when I made a pun. Happily, I’ve forgotten what it was.

Anyway, he understood that after all those months of seeing the bananas from afar, what I needed now was to experience them from close at hand. He showed me first how a gap in the terrace wall had been made so Evangelia could pass through to the garden without, as formerly, going through the house, which used to disconcert Suzanne.

We went down onto the extraordinary humpy, lumpy, and bumpy stones laid down and cemented by the Sisters of Mercy with never a thought for symmetry. What I had thought looked like a wishing well turned out to be more like a crude mounting block.

The bananas themselves are bedraggled and forlorn at the moment. I don’t think the infants’ hands ever reach maturity. But the most exciting moment was when Professor Sanfield discovered signs of a previous civilization. In the church in the village where I grew up, on a stone in one of the internal pillars, is carved a layout for the workmen to play nine men’s morris. In exactly the same way, on the stem of one of the bananas was scratched a frame of nine squares for what Steve called ticktacktoe and I called noughts and crosses. The one game had been won very easily with a diagonal of three X’s before half the other squares had been filled in. By whom? By the Sisters of Mercy, by Albanian plasterers, or by the Lady of Banana herself whiling away the hours?

He insisted that I take away a memento—the pizzle casing. I have it to prove that I wasn’t dreaming. In shape it really is exactly like, well, a pizzle casing, i.e., one of those plastic cups that cricketers wear to protect their genitalia. But no way am I going to bring cricket into this. Steve, who has not yet seen any of this stuff, says it sounds like the Talmud, which, apparently, consists of long, rambling notes that explore every avenue of a subject.

In the middle of the night I had an Archimedean éclaircisse-ment. Funnily enough, my first thought, when I made the connection, was: Thank a god I got there in the end by myself and didn’t have to have it pointed out to me. Bash In his haiku-type poems, Steve alludes to Bash which led me to joke about bashamanism. But I too have been a great admirer of the Japanese poet for years, especially of his Narrow Road to the Deep North— can’t think why I haven’t got a copy with me. Bash has personal significance for me

A. because when I made the index to my premeditated notebook, Notes from Overground—which has 208 pages—I included the entry: “Bash, p. 209 ff.,” meaning that he begins where I leave off. And

B. because when I was undergoing treatment for alcoholism, Peter, my counselor (for want of a better word), after several intense sessions, said: “You know, you ought to read a Japanese poet called Bash.” And

C. because he was originally introduced to me by my dear friend Paul Surman, who wrote the “South” poem for me. (I am definitely on the Primrose Path to the Shallow South. But I guess Bash was essentially Southy too. He was a past master at letting details speak for themselves. But maybe European North-South distinctions are inapplicable to the Japanese.)

In other words, I know and love Bash and therefore knew all the time that Bash was not his real name but a pseudonym meaning . . . banana-plant. Thank you, Steve—you who clearly are a reincarnation of Bash and who represent, as you haiku away there beside the bananas, a fine example of the cackle of toucans in the place of toucans (Wallace Stevens).

So—I said my library was eclectic. All I can find in the Japanese poetry section is a beautiful book: On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan, by Lesley Downer. This is what she writes about visiting Bash’s hut:

There was a gate to push open, then a cobbled path leading to a small house, with walls of clay embedded with rice straw, a wooden door, a latticed window. In front was a tree—“A basho tree,” said Hisae importantly. . . . It looked tropical to me—and rather sad in this chilly climate—with a thick furry trunk like a palm tree and enormous frayed leaves that creaked and flapped forlornly in the wind.

Banana tree in autumn gale—

All night hearing

Rain in a basin . . .

Basho took his name from the basho tree, the banana tree. He liked to compare himself to it: “Broken in the wind, the leaves flutter like a phoenix’s tail and torn by the rain they are like a tattered green fan. Although there are flowers, they are not bright; and as the wood is completely useless for building, it never feels the axe. But I love the tree for its very uselessness.” (p. 6)

(And I described the Cohen bananas as “forlorn” before reading this passage. Can’t wait now to observe a banana flower. I’m a bit worried about the “thick furry trunk.” Maybe Bash’s bash was not Musa sapientum—though how appropriate that would be—but a relative. Leonard Cohen’s bananas have graceful and green stems, sturdy enough, but by no stretch of the imagination could they be called wood. Useless, yes. The rest of the description is spot on—or would be if I knew what on earth Bash meant by a “phoenix.” Is it a mistranslation? Or does it simply mean “palm tree”? Do bananas immolate themselves on pyres and rise from the ashes? Maybe Leonard Cohen’s bananas are not so transient, after all.)

A few pages later in Downer’s book, Bash says of his friend, pupil, and close neighbor, Sora: “He lives almost under the very leaves of my banana tree.” You can’t get much closer than that.

Interleaves

Have just spent a fortnight or so in Monaco, France, and Switzerland. This material is nothing if not international. In Monte Carlo, in a park opposite the Casino, all the trees and plants were neatly identified. The banana label read Bananier des Sages. Nearby grew Strelitzia, a lower plant, with leaves indistinguishable from those of the bananas. Perhaps I shall become an expert, invited to lecture at banana conventions all over the world. A banana taxonomist. A bananologist.

Flaubert’s parrot—Cohen’s bananas. Bunches of five—pieces of eight.

Scattered around the Monte Carlo park was a fine exhibition of sculptures; nevertheless, the trees and shrubs stole the show. The banana grove, set in a sheltered corner, formed a splendid exhibit. Unbattered by tearing winds, each perfect leaf comprised a single giant green feather. Angels, of course, dispose of a limitless supply to make up their cooling wings.

The leaves first appear like furled flags or enormous cigars. They open rapidly like something out of a speeded-up nature documentary, or the film of a cigar being rolled played backward fast.

Stayed with my friends Gordon and Ursula Grange in Alsace. Gordon pooh-poohed the idea that the backing vocals of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” could possibly contain the chant “Bum banananana.” He had heard the song many times, he said, and would have noticed something as bizarre as that. However, concentration on the left-hand speaker of his fine sound system soon turned the skeptic into a delighted convert. For the rest of my visit, he kept muttering the refrain under his breath.

He reciprocated by giving me a copy of Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers. I read it with close attention, looking, in my obsessive way, for clues and finding an elegantly written piece of soft ’60s porn. Of course, I also found more grist for my mill in the same way that a Baconian will find evidence that his man wrote the works of Shakespeare, beginning with Ham-let.

On page 23 Cohen is speaking of a woman’s mouth:

I always hoped it would fasten somewhere perfect and find its home in my ecstasy, but off it slipped after too brief a perch, in search of nothing but balance, driven not by passion but by a banana peel.

And on page 136 we find “wafer banana skins of vaudeville.” In other words, as the painstaking and painful critic Greenbaum observes, both references to the banana allude to the notorious lubricity of its outer integument and the comical, and sometimes dangerous, associations thereof. All of which reminds me that my friend Nancy Drew reports that her friend Ann Smithers remarked: “Roger had better take care not to slip on a banana skin.”

See what this quest is doing for me, Leonard. It now finds me trawling through your excellent prose with a banana net and coming up with all manner of trove, from gold doubloons to old boots. And it is a quest, albeit antiheroic. But never mock the heroic. Oh, no. I was never more serious in my life, though few will read me and even fewer believe me. They say that initiates into the Mysteries of Eleusis were ushered into an adytum containing nothing but an ear of wheat. Is a banana any less cryptic or more apocalyptic?

On page 116 the narrator is being interrogated by his friend F. (I like F. I like his being referred to by an initial. He reminds me of my friend Gordon, who was once asked by a class of Greek children whether he had a relationship with god. Gordon, like F., has always been streetwise and fly where I have been innocent and ingenuous.) The narrator says: “I have nothing to confess. . . . It’s too early for your cheap koans.”

I am reminded of dear, wise Peter, the counselor at the drying-out clinic. He called himself a Daoist and was (and I trust still is) a great believer in koans. He claimed that when he and I talked together, we constituted a koan. I still have a scribbled note from that period of therapy to the effect that “koans are about becoming.” I want to be all the time, like Rilke’s Gesang. But Peter was telling me that I could not be before I became any more than I could run before I could walk. More than that, he was attempting to resuscitate my fuddled mind, tossing it tidbits to tempt it to think.

Of course Gordon, or G., would have a first British edition of Beautiful Losers, London, 1970, in original d.w. He probably knew about it when it first appeared in Canada in 1966, whereas it has taken me an additional thirty years or so to discover it. No wonder friends like G. and F. are so exasperating—and so precious.

By the way, there’s a lot of marvelous stuff in Beautiful Losers, which, it seems, everyone except me has known about for years. Even Terry Rigelhof knows about it. Stuff about God and history and interstices and ecstasy and silence and the wilderness and the whirlwind. Wonderful, but not germane at this moment to my self-imposed, pedantic, Anglo-Saxon banana picking. Sorry, L. I see myself as the Nicholson Baker of the banana—forever poking around in the mezzanine. Vox et praeterea nihil.

Germane for me is the minor coincidence that one of the only footnotes in the novel (p. 189) contains the injunction: “Think of yourself as a sponge diver, darling.”

Incredibly, amazingly germane—so much so that I’ve saved her till last—is Catherine Tekakwitha. Also referred to as Kateri or Katerine. Her names are the first two words in the book. Her story is one of the book’s major themes. And who is she? Who was she? She was a historical person (whatever that means)— Nancy Drew has sat on her grave. (And my Nancy Drew is also a historical person.) (Help! I think I’m becoming influenced by L.’s prose style.) She was a seventeenth-century Iroquois girl converted to Christianity by Jesuits and eventually canonized. She was a Red Indian saint. She was a squaw called Katerina.

Well, I find it amazing.

With an Indian squaw singing

A runic incantation.

The Jesuits could so easily have decided to baptize her Madeleine or Cunégonde. L. could so easily have decided to write about Saint Constantine of Hydra. Never did I dream that there could possibly be or have been another Indian squaw called Katerine or Katerina. After all, it is not an Indian name. Never did I dream that my fortuitous interest in L.’s bananas would lead me to this illustrious homonymous forerunner of the as yet unsainted Katerina Andritsopoulou.

As yet unsainted but, as I have already observed, “the repository of a certain mystical power” and capable of generating “magical experience.” The “strong medicine in her touch” is in fact what the Greeks call dynami, the root of English words such as “dynamo” and “dynamism.” It passes from her to you with the same kind of tingling buzz you experience if you unwittingly touch an electrified cattle fence.

Catherine Tekakwitha became, according to one of the Jesuits, “la Thaumaturge du Nouveau-Monde.” Miracles and magic are two more of L.’s themes. F. exhorts the narrator: “Here is a plea based on my whole experience: do not be a magician, be magic.” In my opinion that is exactly what the sister thau-maturges, the Indian Christian and the Christian Indian, are— they are magic. Not, of course, in the sense that you use when you tell somebody: “You’re magic,” but meaning that these two Katerinas in some mysterious way personify magic, become incarnations of mageship. Thank you, L., for yet another connection.

My friend Janie, whom I stayed with in Burgundy, on being apprised of the banana story, said it reminded her of Prosper Mérimée’s L’Arlésienne, which revolves around an absent protagonist. In this instance, she sees L. as fulfilling that role. It is certainly a valid perspective. Authors (if they exist at all) are notoriously bad judges of their own work, but personally I consider L. to be incidental, peripheral. Although, having said that, Richard Branson’s or Mick Jagger’s bananas would predicate a whole different ball game.

As news of my apparent interest in bananas spread, people kept coming to me with snippets of banana lore. Brian Sidaway volunteered that Donovan’s song “Mellow Yellow” had to do with the alleged hallucinatory properties of bananas.

William Pownall sadly abandoned his first avowed intent to supplement my notes. But he did send me this (I suspect edited) song:

Chiquita Banana, down in Martinique,

She dresses in bananas with the modern technique.

Chiquita Banana, down in Martinique,

In only her bananas she’s a sight that’s unique.

On Monday she starts off by wearing a bunch.

On Tuesday she has one for breakfast or lunch.

By Thursday or later, she’s traveling light,

But men like to date her on Saturday night.

He notes: “The above song performed by Edmundo Ross and his Rumba Band, circa 1952. Chiquita bananas are regularly available on Hydra, and some have labels to prove it.”

I hope Bill will not be offended if I say that I prefer his envelope to its contents. It is addressed to “Roger Green, Banana Parade, Hydra.” Bill has altered the word AEROPORIKOS (By Air Mail) to BANANAPORIKOS. Best of all, he has added a trompe l’oeil stamp depicting two horizontal yellow bananas, one above the other, with the black stalks at opposite ends.

Everything in my press-clippings section is bizarre. The next item is a color photograph depicting half a dozen stout matrons in national costume with flower-bedecked bosoms. The caption informs us that these are “Bavarian farmers’ wives on their way to pray to the patron saint of animals during the St. Leonhard Day celebrations at Bad Toelz.” (Saint L.’s Day is November 6.)

Then we have a book review under the headline: “Pirate Pioneer of the Banana.” Sara Wheeler is writing about The Devil’s Mariner: William Dampier, Pirate and Adventurer, by Anton Gill. She notes:

Gill is a committed apologist; but none the less, Dampier emerges from these pages as a hopeless leader, a drinker and a man deficient in moral scruples. He was the first person to tell us about bananas though.

Don’tcha just love that “though”? The reviewer does not seem to have noticed the title of the book. (How could anyone worthy of the sobriquet “the Devil’s mariner” possibly not be “deficient in moral scruples”?) She generously concedes that the man’s banana information may redeem him just a little bit, though.

But what does “the first person to tell us” signify? Who is “us”? Who, indeed, are we? It seems that Dampier was active between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Presumably at that period there must have existed an invisible line on one side of which people knew about bananas (them), and on the other side of which they did not (us). Perhaps Dampier proceeded, like Odysseus with his oar, with a bunch of bananas on his shoulder until he reached a place where the natives asked him: “Why are you carrying as a trophy the phalluses of your enemies?” And he, setting down his burden with relief, began: “Let me be the first person to tell you about bananas. . . .”

May the angels grant that I may one day receive as sympathetic a reviewer:

Green emerges from these pages as a hopeless writer, an ex-drunk and a man completely lacking in the spirit of adventure who never even went to Spetses. He was the first person to tell us about Leonard Cohen’s bananas, though.

Another item, sent to me by Rachel Coulter, is a photocopy from an unspecified publication of some rather feeble verses by Martin Newell titled “Laughing Len,” “in homage to the new collection More Best of Leonard Cohen.” The lines encapsulate what seems to be a very general idea of L.’s songs: that they convey unrelieved doom and depression and are the ideal accompaniment for suicide. Right at the start of these notes (before I had any idea what I was getting into), I wrote: “His songs are by no means as melancholy and pessimistic as they are sometimes made out to be.” I am more convinced of the truth of that statement than ever. I am not a music critic. I am not a critic, thank a god. But I possess a cassette of More Best of L. C., and sometimes, as I lie in bed, when I weary of the sound of the wind in the bananas, I slip on my headphones and let Laughing Len lull me into the most blissful of slumbers.

And now, still with the press clippings, here is L. himself—“A Life in the Day of” from the Sunday Times. Sure enough, the piece confirms that L. is living, at least some of the time, in a Zen monastery in California. What strikes me as odd about the article— presented as a monologue by L.—is that it describes the harsh regimen of a day in the monastery with scarcely a mention of any spiritual aspect. But maybe that is how Zen works—by mortifying the flesh and leaving the spirit to take care of itself.

From the point of view of these notes, two passages caught my attention. The first describes him as “unmarried, with two children.” Does that mean that he never married Suzanne or anyone else? Or simply that he is divorced? And while he speaks of his son, Adam, saying that he is a musician who sometimes comes to L.’s cabin to seek his advice, he doesn’t mention the daughter, Lorca, who does, however, appear, next to Adam, in a long list of credits on the new album. Not my business.

But Hydra is my business, and in the middle of the interview L. says:

Back in the 1960s I lived on the Greek island of Hydra for a while. And people said exactly the same thing: “How can you isolate yourself?” But I never felt isolated there either. I was living with the villagers, seeing people every day, sitting on the porch and having a glass of ouzo with the neighbours.

What interests me is the implicit analogy between life on Hydra and life in a Zen monastery. I know Hydra has changed since the ’60s, but if anything, it has become quieter. Yet even now one has to exercise a certain ruthlessness to gain time to write or think or meditate or pray. I recently calculated that I had had between twenty and thirty meaningful conversations with different people that day, and that was by no means atypical. I hope, for the sake of L. and his fellow monks (he has been ordained, he tells us), that life in the Zen monastery is just a little bit more isolated and isolating than life on Hydra.

A friend from Oxford helpfully adds a little more to the confusion by writing: “By the way, I am told that L. Cohen’s ‘Marianne’ song was written about a street in whichever Canadian city he comes from, not a woman.” Certainly the author of Beautiful Losers is capable of reaching the outer limits of surreality and beyond. Also Nancy Drew points out that in some of the songs, L. blithely shifts the perspective without telling anyone, so “Marianne” could be about a woman and a street simultaneously or coterminously.

“I see that you’ve gone and changed your name again” could very well be addressed (ha!) to a street. But would, could, even L. reminisce about a street in these terms?

We met when we were almost young

Deep in the green lilac park

You held on to me like I was a crucifix

As we went kneeling through the dark.

Silly question. The answer has to be yes. Come back, L. I’ve always thought a good refrain for a song would be: “Down on Donkey Shit Lane.”

Chambers’, so seldom disappointing, prevaricates when it comes to defining a “vegetable.” “A plant or part of one used for food, other than those reckoned fruits,” it says. Pedant that I am, I would have thought that something that grows on a “herbaceous plant,” albeit a “gigantic” one, would have to be a vegetable. (That “gigantic” in the banana definition hadn’t really struck me before. From whose perspective? An ant’s? A Borrower’s? A Lilliputian’s?) Anyway, the other day an Athens bookshop was displaying a whole series devoted to those edible objects “reckoned fruits,” among which was the banana.

Excitedly I seized the banana volume, but it turned out to be largely filled with colored plates illustrating a remarkable variety of banana recipes. I came away with two facts new to me. First, that there are hundreds if not thousands of varieties of banana. Second, that these include the plantain.

Back to Chambers’, who this time did not disappoint:

Strelitzia. A S. African genus of the banana family, with large showy flowers . . . (From Queen Charlotte, wife of George III, of the house of Mecklenburg-Strelitz.)

Plantain. A musaceous plant: its fruit, a coarse banana: in India, a banana.

Plantain-eater. An African bird (Musophaga) of a fam. Musophagidae, a touraco. (Origin—i.e. of “plantain”—doubtful.)

Musa. The banana genus, giving name to a family Musaceae, order Musales, of (mostly) gigantic tree-like herbs.—adj. musaceous. (Latinised from Ar. mauz.)

Touraco. An African bird (Turacus) of the plantain-eater family, with a horny shield on the forehead and remarkable pigments in its feathers. (Supposed to be a W. African name.)

Turacin. The soluble red colouring matter of touraco feathers, containing copper.

Turacoverdin. A pigment in touraco feathers, the only pure green pigment found in birds.

Well, a god bless the Times-Listener crossword, on which I have wasted hours of my life, but which is the sole reason why my island retreat happens to be equipped with a copy of Chambers’ English Dictionary.

Hail to the compilers! To Sidney I. Landau, W. S. Ramson, Catherine Schwarz, George Davidson, Anne Seaton, Virginia Tebbit, Pandora Kerr Frost, Rachel Sherrard, Mary Jane Kelly, and Fergus McGauran! Worthy successors, with your hints and your ironies, to the Grand Cham himself, Dr. Samuel Johnson.

Perhaps it is just as well for my sanity that the scent went cold after Turacoverdin. My mind was already overheating. Yet doubtless there lurk within the 1792 gigantic pages further felicitous musaceous entries, if one only knew where to begin to look. (I did, by the way, glance at toucan, to be informed that it is a South American bird that does indeed eat fruit. We know, from Ina, that bananas grow in South America. Therefore, the toucan might very well eat bananas. But one could just as well modify the Wallace Stevens line to: “The pigments of touracos in the place of touracos.”) For a start, observe how the team manage to hint at

For a start, observe how the Chambers’ team manage to hint at their own opinions and preferences—“showy flowers,” “a coarse banana,” “remarkable pigments,” “supposed to be,” “(mostly) gigantic.” Next, marvel at the breadth of their erudition—not only do they define turacin accurately but they throw in for good measure the information that it contains copper; not only do they know what turacoverdin is but they have ascertained to their satisfaction (and, surely, to ours) that no other bird in the world boasts a pure green pigment.

An idiot like me would naturally imagine some connection between the name Strelitzia and the word immediately preceding it— strelitz, a soldier of the Muscovite guards, abolished by Peter the Great, a term derived from a Russian word meaning “bowman.” But the Chambers’ gang saves me from perpetrating such a gaffe. Strelitzia is connected with Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Alas, they stop short of telling me why. But I trust them implicitly, especially because they admit that the origin of plantain is “doubtful,” and that touraco is only “supposed” to be a West African name.

Apart from the embarras de richesses of incidental nuggets, consider how, in the space of a few brief definitions, they have enlarged my store of banana information. I now know:

1. That Strelitzia and plantains are members of the banana family.

2. That representatives of this family can be found in, among other places, South Africa, West Africa, and India.

3. That some bananas are coarser than others.

4. That there is a bird that eats bananas.

5. That the sadly underused adjective meaning, presumably, “banana-like,” “banana-ish,” “banana-y,” “pertaining to bananas,” “of bananas,” and so on, is “musaceous.” (E.g., “Pele scored directly from the free kick with a shot of musaceous trajectory”; “I fear we shall have to send my uncle to an institution if he becomes much more musaceous”; “This split is a bit too musaceous for me”; “The musaceous humor of the music-hall.”)

That’s enough to be going on with.

Steve Notes

It is now December—five months after I wrote Fun de Siècle— and I see quite a lot of Steve and Sarah Sanfield. In fact, I frequently visit them in L.’s house.

I try hard not to pump Steve for information (a) because it would not be polite, and (b) because I really do not want information. But when he started talking about “Mariana,” I must admit I did prick up my ears. It emerges that the real name of the Marianne of the song was pronounced Mariana. She was a very beautiful Norwegian girl, originally married to a man called Axel, who eventually became L.’s woman and lived in L.’s house for several years, together with her child by Axel. She antedates Suzanne and evidently lived in the house for much longer, continuously, than Suzanne ever did. In other words, the moated grange did have its Mariana.

Steve confirms that the album I’m Your Man does have on the cover a photograph of L. eating a banana, despite Steve’s advising L. that the picture was unsuitable. L. insisted on wearing his banana on his sleeve.

Incidentally, Steve has a son who sells Harley-Davidsons. A neat division of labor—the father takes care of the Zen, while the son attends to the motorcycle maintenance.

My offering to Steve:

No PLAY

No frog

No pond

No water

Bananas

Ina, a German woman who lives on Hydra, insisted on viewing the bananas. She had a particular interest: she wished to compare them with the bananas she used to eat fried while on location in the Amazon jungle. I looked across from my house as Ina, Steve, and Sarah made a stately progress through the fruit trees. “I can see Adam and Eve,” I shouted, “but who is the third one?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Steve replied: “The Lord God herself.”

Steve and I hope that Ina is the first of many to show more interest in the bananas than in L. and that we can make a killing with guided tours, poetry readings, and all manner of spin-offs, e.g., a museum or an amusement park. Have forgotten to mention to Steve that my friend Yiota (the very same one who takes bananas to nuns) already sells banana souvenirs in her shop on the harbor. These take the form of large, soft, yellow bananas made out of some sort of fluffy synthetic material. They have three zippers that you can open to reveal a white banana made out of the same stuff. Believe me, they have no innuendoes. Each one has two eyes and a mouth, but they are as innocent as the day. What you see is what you get—imitation banana. A unique instance of a souvenir anticipating demand instead of following it. We hope. Yiota—banana princess. (And as long as it has princesses like Yiota, Hydra cannot be a banana republic.)

I have a much clearer idea now, after closer, prolonged inspection (thanks to Steve, who leads me gently to the bananas as though he were my guardian in some kind of Care-in-the-Community scheme), of how the “pizzle” operates. The whole procedure is miraculous. No wonder engravings of various magical and mystical trees seem to be modeled upon it. The pizzle head resembles a pointed, ripe-fig-colored cabbage with layer upon layer of tightly packed leaves or sheaths. The growing bananas push a pair of leaves open like wings until the leaves finally fall to the ground.

What I did not appreciate at first is that this process is repeated almost ad infinitum. Bananas work on the principle of perpetual motion. As soon as one bunch of babies’ fingers is happily growing in the open air, immediately below them on the pizzle stem another set is bursting free, and below them another is waiting, and so on. No wonder the insides of the casings are lacquered like Chinese boxes or babushka dolls.

Curiously—or perhaps not so curiously—my writing of these notes (or, better, my transcription of these notes from some mysterious dictation) seems to me to emulate or parallel the banana process. Every time I think I have finished, the next casing silently eases itself open, like the doors of a secret weapon silo, to reveal yet another thought-missile ready for firing—to fall to earth I know not where, or maybe never. Perhaps this inexhaustible fruitfulness was Bash’s true and hidden reason for liking the banana so much.

Steve has written out some quotations for me. One, which I assume is from Bash, says:

My poetry is like a stove in summer

or a fan in winter.

It runs against the popular taste

and has no practical use.

Although it sounds rather too explicit for Bash, he certainly admired uselessness in the banana, or bash, tree, which perhaps, like Leonard Cohen’s bananas (apparently), never bore completely ripe fruit. But it would be a bold person who asserted that neither poems nor banana-plants have any use at all.

I do after all have with me the Penguin Classics edition of Bash’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa. It too translates the passage used by Lesley Downer, quoted in Chapter 4, in slightly different words, and, after “I love the tree, however, for its very uselessness,” adds: “I sit underneath it, and enjoy the wind and rain that blow against it.” I like that. Dear Bash.

Yet how can I write “dear Bash” when I have only the vaguest idea of the man and his writing? When I read in Downer’s book:

Banana tree in autumn gale—

All night hearing

Rain in a basin . . .

I thought I had got the picture. But the Penguin Classics has:

Tonight, the wind blowing

Through the Bash tree,

I hear the leaking rain

Drop against a basin.

So now I have two pictures, each probably an approximation of the original. It doesn’t matter. I know that, as I lie in bed and hear the wind blowing through L.’s bananas, I have an affinity with a seventeenth-century Japanese poet, through whom I am linked to L. himself (for I have heard that L. admires Bash) and to Steve listening to the same wind in the same leaves and dreaming in haiku as the rain sneaks into both our houses.

Steve is reading my commuting book Notes from Overground, which is published under the name Tiresias. “Hey, Roger,” he says, “what does this mean? ‘Mermaid in high banana shock’?” I am startled, if not shocked, in my turn. I explain that I simply put together to form a joke headline the names of four railway trucks that I used to notice out the train window—Shock, High, Mermaid, and Banana. Thanks, Steve; I had completely forgotten the existence of rolling stock called Bananas and the fact that they had insinuated themselves into my work.

It seems almost incidental that one day, sitting in one of L.’s first-floor rooms, I calmly gave Sarah and Steve a rendition of Fun de Siècle. I will show them these notes one day but at the moment am reluctant to divulge work in progress.

Somebody has just told me that there is somebody on the island who has the entire Encyclopedia Britannica on compact disc. I DON’T WANT TO KNOW! For me half the pleasure of writing these notes and collecting the material is my totally haphazard and aleatory way of procedure. The Encyclopedia Britannica would be soul-destroying enough. Imagine accessing the Internet. ’Tis too horrible.

According to the blurb on one of his books, Steve has been “hailed as ‘the master of American haiku.’” Really? Do people actually shout at him as he passes: “Master of American haiku!”? Be that as it may, I hail him from my house if I have a question, and he and Sarah hail me from L.’s terrace if they need a Greek interpreter. Now, that’s what I call hailing. (I.e., I shout: “M.O.A.H!”)

If Steve is—and he probably is—the master of American haiku, then, on his own testimony, he owes his extraordinary status to one book—Haiku, by R. H. Blyth, in four volumes: Vol. IV, Autumn–Winter, Japan, Hokuseido, 1952. Why Vol. IV? Because that was the sole volume to be found in L.’s house when Steve first stayed there some thirty-five years ago. And that very same volume was still in L.’s house when Steve returned this autumn of 1997. But it is not in L.’s house now. It is sitting on my table as I write, and I feel inestimably honored that Steve has allowed me to borrow it.

I cannot speak of volumes I, II, and III, but Haiku, Vol. IV, Autumn–Winter, or at least the copy thereof beside me now, is clearly a device primed to explode inside the mind of anyone who so much as sees it and handles it, let alone opens it and reads it. It is a chunky little object, eminently heftable, lightly bound in what I would describe as sack-colored sackcloth, which even smells like a sack in a granary. Stamped into the cover, as well as the English title, are two graceful Japanese ideograms. Inside, paper, Roman type, Japanese type, delicate illustrations with transparent explanations—the whole design attracts irresistibly. Again, smell predominates. I cannot describe the odor that emanates from the pages. It must be the product of the operation of some forty alternations of Greek heat and Greek damp upon the original Japanese glue. It is a hauntingly subtle fragrance. How could the young Steve, LSD bottle at his elbow, not have been influenced by such an explosive package?

The key word is love. Compositors, binders, editors, publishers, plate-makers have lovingly produced this volume. As for R. H. Blyth himself, his love for every aspect of his subject radiates from every page. According to yet another book that Steve has lent me, The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, Blyth’s book contains “flaws and mistakes.” How dare the editors suggest such a thing? What un-Zen-like impudence. The Roaring Stream stinks—so there! It is so shoddily put together—a mishmash of other people’s translations—that it doesn’t even have an index. (In American, I suppose I should say The Roaring Stream sucks.) Anyway, Blyth is the man, and his section (yes, a whole section) on “the banana-plant” is sublime.

Blyth’s selection begins, naturally, with Old Banana-plant himself:

Having planted a bash,

I feel spiteful now

Towards the sprouting bush-clover.

Here is Kyria Evangelia. “Will you give this to Mr. Steve, please?” It is a fat envelope from Senegal, plastered with exotic stamps and addressed to

Leonard Cohen

Hydra

Greece

And here am I trying to be clever:

One hand

Clapping

A banana leaf.

The first time I visited L.’s house, Steve lent me two of his books of haiku, and Sarah put them in a brown paper bag from Maria and Dimitris Kondopitharis’s Four Corners shop. When I got home I observed that the bag bore the English words “Greek Fruits,” plus a drawing of several kinds of fruit, including four bananas.

Steve keeps pressing on me grapefruit from the garden. Leonard Cohen’s grapefruit? Now, there’s an idea.

Voyeur

Steve and I inspect banana storm damage together. Cracked stems. Ripped leaves—but the leaves are designed to rip—has anyone ever thought of designing a yacht’s sails to tear along dotted lines in gales? Imagine the huge threshings and moanings if banana leaves (not to mention birds’ feathers, not to mention angels’ wings-vans) resisted the wind instead of submitting to it! I got excited about seeing at close quarters the kind of assembly-line system that produces the fruit.

“Hey, Steve, you can see the flowers turning into bananas!”

“Calm down, Roger. Bananas aren’t unique. All fruit comes from flowers.” Yes, but the difference here is that while apples, pears, oranges, etc. blossom, then the blossom falls and the fruit begins, on a banana stem everything is happening at once and continuously—a factory, a fructory. Above the first ring of flowers you have a ring that is half flower, half banana; above that a ring of tiny fruit; above that a ring of larger bananas. And so on—all emanating from the pizzle at the tip of the stem. A conveyor belt. A force constantly driving through a green fuse.

After more storm the bananas have taken a tremendous bashing (no pun, for once, intended). Steve offers me remnants, but what would I do with them?

Steve says he’s too much in awe of Bash, respects him too much, to presume to attempt a banana (Bash) haiku. Says he can’t understand why Bash’s frog-pond haiku is considered the greatest of all time. I reply: “If you can’t, who can?” All this in the very shadow of L.’s or Koulis’s bananas.

Steve has given me a copy of his American Zen, mainly haiku, as a New Year’s present. He wrote in it: “For Roger G. in the long smile of it, with admiration and affection, Steve S. at the turning, In One Year & Out The Other.” (The last seven words were my suggestion for a title for a new collection of his.)

Am constantly amazed at where this Fun de Siècle banana jeu d’esprit keeps taking me. Even the order of events seems somehow preordained. And now I am a frequent visitor in L.’s house and garden. Steve, Sarah, and I, in a relaxed, informal way, exchange visits, food, books, ideas, poems, gossip, newspaper clippings, bananas. Although I must admit that most of the food traffic is one-way. “What a bloody pity it is that you don’t drink, Roger.”

“Steve, if I drank, none of this would be happening.”

And I sit in L.’s kitchen, Suzanne’s kitchen, Marianne’s kitchen, teaching the Master and the Mistress conversational Greek; or I interpret between them and Kyria Evangelia about laundry, horticulture, and life’s vicissitudes. I feel blessed.

All this stuff is coming off scraps of mostly undated paper that I fondly imagined I would be dealing with within a day or two of my making the notes. I never learn. Now I am typing them out, but I still (probably fondly) hope to flesh them out later.

The back of an envelope reads:

Liminal

Nel mezzo

Nel mezzanine—

legend in lunchtime!!

p. 152—communitas

If Hesperides, who is

dragon?

Ought to destroy my notes

à la Prospero/Hercules

Jalousie—the screen is what

I’m spying on. Voyeur.

Sea—shield, with it or on it

Nancy’s letters, S & S’s

notes & card, all the

documents.

Well, as Lawrence Durrell used to say: “I do hope that’s not obscure or anything.” It all seems pretty clear to me. The main theme is, as usual, in-betweenness. The bananas form a more or less effective screen (“jalousie”) between my open shutters and L.’s house. Suzanne, believing herself threatened by the Elder on the other side, wanted to redeploy the banana-screen between the Elder’s jalousies and her garden. The Greek for the act of being a voyeur is banisteri. So what I practice is banana-banisteri. I resemble the man who left a factory every night pushing a wheelbarrow. He was suspected of stealing, but every night his wheelbarrow was searched and nothing was found. Eventually it transpired that he was stealing wheelbarrows. Similarly, what I have under surveillance is nothing and nobody other than the clumps of banana plants.

“Coupe” means Myth by Laurence Coupe (Routledge, 1997). I chanced upon it in an Athens bookshop. It’s a wonderful antidote to the shelves of works on “Greek Myth.” I need people like Coupe to inform me about what stage contemporary criticism (or certain branches thereof) has reached. Indeed, his book is in a series, edited by a man with a Greek name, called the New Critical Idiom. Coupe, according to the cover, teaches at somewhere called Manchester Metropolitan University, which sounds vaguely mythical.

Certain other academics also need Coupe and people like him. A few years ago, I attended a symposium at a British university (though some of the speakers were from overseas) called Myth in Modern Greek Literature. We might have been snugly and smugly back in the nineteenth century. I don’t recall hearing mentioned any of the names in Coupe’s long and admirable bibliography. Each participant took a particular text or texts and commented on references to ancient myths to be found therein. One or two, greatly daring, spoke of the absence of references to ancient myths. None gave the slightest indication of awareness of exciting developments taking place in other disciplines such as anthropology, theology, comparative literature, angelology, linguistics, semiology, philosophy, psychology—to name but a few— exciting developments of the greatest relevance to the topic under discussion.

I digress. Yet I don’t, because whether I belong to the New, the Old, or the In-Between Critical Idiom—or none of them—my subject is myth. I need books like Coupe’s as rungs in my ladder, places to stand in my attempts to move the earth. Advance camps. Cairns. Pitons. But having made use of Coupe, I have to tell him to begone, albeit with blessings on his head, for one main reason, which is that he does not believe. Nor does he believe that it is the done thing for exponents of the New Critical Idiom to believe. This is where we part company. Take but belief away; untune that string, and hark what discord follows. For me, myth is. Angels are.

Oleg Polunin (Flowers of Greece and the Balkans) has this bald entry:

MUSACEAE     Banana Family

MUSA M. cavendishii Paxton BANANA is cultivated in the warmest parts of the Med. region particularly in Crete.

I don’t think I want to know who Cavendish was, or why Paxton named a banana after him or her, but I should have liked some botanical description. Curiously, the banana seems to be virtually the only plant that Polunin does not describe. Does he spurn it for not being native to the region? If so, how insufferably musist of him. My questions: Is cavendishii the only banana found growing in Greece? Are the bananas in L.’s garden cavendishii? Why do dictionaries say that the Latin name for banana is Musa sapientum when there seem to be so many species and cultivars? What, if any, is the relation between cavendishii and sapientum? Was Cavendish wise?

Steve suggests that L. was attracted to Katerin Tekakwitha “because of the self-inflicted pain.” He doesn’t elaborate. Steve first met L. on Hydra in the early ’60s. George Johnston, the Australian writer, introduced them.

Yiota, Banana Princess, and her friend were not taking bananas to the nuns as a treat just because the nuns liked bananas. Yiota modified my whole perception of this vignette the other day by explaining that the incident occurred during Lent. The nuns were fasting and perhaps even fainting. The bananas (fruit being legitimate Lenten fare) were therefore not a luxury but a necessity.

A Banana Princess ought to be good at unpeeling layers of truth, and Yiota certainly is. One day she spotted Laurence Coupe’s book, on the cover of which in prominent capitals is the word “MYTH.” “Ah, you are reading a book about nose!” She exclaimed, thus alerting me to the fact that in the Greek alphabet, “myth” spells myti, which means “nose.” So I’m now collecting material for a monograph on the myth of nose. So far I have Cleopatra, Cyrano de Bergerac, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jimmy Durante, Brasenose College, Grenouille (the protagonist of Patrick Suskind’s Parfum), the Dong with the Luminous Nose, and, of course, Pinocchio. . . .

Nancy Drew also ought to be good at unpeeling layers of truth, but sometimes I fear she obfuscates more than she reveals. E.g.:

Roger—

I just remembered something—I believe Steve Cohen is a psychiatrist based in Eastern Canada (New Brunswick?) & once treated a friend of mine—by complete coincidence—who was suicidal. She liked him.

Or her P.S. to another note, which begins “Dear M. Poirot”:

I had a dream yesterday evening you said “Please don’t hesitate . . .” then my watch beeped 6 P.M. (beep-beep) interrupting your message. But you were standing next to a large white horse. . . . What does this mean?

I dread to think, but don’tcha just love her?

Outside Gkikas’s shop, discarded boxes read: Chiquitas, Panama, Variety Cavendish. So Cavendish gets around. Musa sapientum becomes more elusive, mystical, and grail-like than ever. I saw in a cookbook mention of a legend that the “fig” of Genesis was really a banana, and that Adam and Eve clothed themselves in banana leaves, which would seem a good deal more practical than sewing fig leaves together. Full banana, rather than full fig. But might we not go even further and suggest that Musa sapientum, Muse of the Wise, was none other than the actual Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof. . . .

Sadly, I have no Hebrew. All I can do is point out that the Authorised Version (a) uses the word “wise,” and (b) nowhere gives any hint as to the shape or size of the fruit. It could have been a banana. Furthermore, since the man and woman realized they were naked as soon as they had eaten the fruit, what more logical than that they should have clothed themselves in the nearest leaves, i.e., the leaves of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself?

Now, I am scanning the early chapters of Genesis as I write this, and I have just observed something I have never been aware of before. Probably everyone else will say scornfully: “Didn’t you know that?” To which I have to reply: “No, I have reached the age of fifty-seven without knowing that.” “That” being that the serpent was not the only subtil one in the story. The Lord God himself emerges as having behaved just a little bit sneakily and deviously too. First of all he

commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

This was sneaky in itself, because they certainly did not die on the day they ate the fruit. And anyway, how could they have known what the word “die” meant? But the full extent of the Lord God’s deviousness is revealed in the last three verses of Chapter 3:

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden; to till the ground from whence he was taken.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

In other words, the Lord God had been economical with the truth. In his dealings with Adam, he had concealed the existence of the other tree, the tree of life, altogether, apparently gambling on the probability that Adam would either not find it “in the midst of the garden” or, finding it, would not realize its importance. One could go further and suggest that the Lord God made such a song and dance about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in order to draw attention to it and to distract attention from the Tree of Life, just as Brer Rabbit did with the briar patch.

Other questions arise. (1) Who was the Lord God talking to when he said: Behold, the man (not to mention the woman) is become as one of us? (2) Who were “us”? (3) If the Lord God was afraid that Adam and Eve would “live for ever” by eating “of the tree of life,” does it not follow that they were never, for an instant, immortal but always mortal? Therefore, eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did not make them die, even slowly, for they were already mortal. Therefore, the serpent spoke the simple truth when it told Eve: “Ye shall not surely die.” Therefore, the serpent was more honest than the Lord God.

The entire tragedy—or indeed divine comedy—is played out in those first three chapters of Genesis. Arguably, the rest of the Old Testament is superfluous. If you want the first offspring, the first murder, and the flood, you can have another five chapters. The rest is unnecessary. If my theory is correct, the fall was brought about by a banana. The moral of the story is: Never leave a man and a woman alone together in a garden—it is a recipe for disaster.

I am trying to piece together the fragments as a detective does—but one of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s detectives, not a Poirot or a Nancy Drew. It is just another inevitable synchronicity that in the spring of 1994, Robbe-Grillet (with Dimitri de Clercq) made a film on Hydra called Un Bruit Qui Rend Fou, in one scene of which I was a drunken extra. The “maddening noise” was the clatter of mah-jongg tiles. (I suggested a sequel, with india-rubber tiles, to be called The Silence of the Gommes.) I never saw the film, but I have read enough of Robbe-Grillet’s novels to know that his characters, such as the detective Wallas or the voyeur Mathias, would be at home here, where there is no history; where nothing is as it seems; where everything is done with mirrors; where truth can never be arrived at; where nameless horrors lie buried but restless; where crimes, victims, perpetrators, and detectives may or may not exist; where maddening noises may be only rumors.

Drunk though I was, when, on set, Robbe-Grillet commented: “Le vent se lève,”[1] I was able, like a spy giving the password, to reply: “Il faut tenter de vivre.”[2] Much later, sober, I reread Valéry’s “Le Cimetière Marin” and was flabbergasted to find these lines immediately before Le vent se lève:

Hydre absolue, ivre de ta chair bleue,

Qui te remords l’étincelante queue

Dans un tumulte au silence pareil.[3]

I am naive (in case you hadn’t already noticed). I became so excited that I dashed off a letter to the Master, full of hystericalschoolboyish outpourings. He courteously replied in two sentences, the second of which was:

Mais vous serez satisfait, en tout cas, de retrouver dans le film cette “hydre absolue” de Valéry, qui constitue la dernière parole du personnage principal![4]

Naturellement. How could I suppose that Robbe-Grillet would miss a trick like that? As for me, as usual I had missed several tricks. Straining at the gnat of “Hydre absolue,” I had failed to swallow at least a couple of camels. First, the “tumulte au silence pareil,” which obviously was tantamount to the “bruit qui rend fou” and pre-empted my sixth-form “Silence of the Gommes.” Second, the water snake or monster biting its sparkling (like a constellation) tail. And third, the poem itself, on which the film, and maybe Robbe-Grillet’s entire oeuvre, appears as a kind of gloss—

Tout va sous terre et ventre dans le jeu![5]

(Though, having said that, “Le Cimetière Marin” is one of those few poems that say it all, contain everything; therefore, it would be difficult for the work of other writers not to relate to it. Even so, Robbe-Grillet seems to me to come closer than most. It follows that it would take a mad genius to attempt to surpass it and succeed. And, lo and behold, Georges Brassens managed it with his “Supplique pour être enterré à la plage de Sète.”)[6]

But to return to the snake. It came as no surprise to find, in my mother’s old copy of Les Gommes, suivi de Clefs pour les Gommes par Bruce Morrissette,[7] that Robbe-Grillet has an obsession with Ourobouros, the gnostic serpent that bites or swallows its own tail, and he once projected a novel of 108 parts, based on the 108 sections or scales of Ourobouros. Valéry allows us to make a connection, albeit a tenuous one, between Ourobouros and an “absolute hydra” (Robbe-Grillet uses the lowercase), which, for him, is the sea. Otherwise, sadly (for this lover of connections), none of the three Hydras—monster, island, constellation—shows any inclination to put its tail in its mouth, or mouths.

And then there is L., who sings, in “Last Year’s Man”:

But I had to draw aside to see

The serpent eat its tail

thus reminding Valéry, Robbe-Grillet, the gnostics, and anybody else who will listen that while it’s all very well to contemplate eternity, time, the universe, reincarnation, or any other grand and vaguely circular topic, without sex, the merriest-go-round of all, we would not exist.

Meanwhile, in defiance of my reference to their transience, L.’s bananas pursue their patterns as before. Despite looking as smashed as windmills tilted at by Don Quixote, they continue to form fruit. What I have so far failed to ascertain is: What becomes of the fruit? It never ripens, despite assiduous watering by Evangelia and the gods. Does it rot on the branch? Does it fall to earth and rot there? Does it wither? Does it mysteriously disappear? Se fond sans jouissance.

Have I explained quite how peculiar L.’s garden is? A narrow paved lane (just wide enough for a mule) runs along the south side. The garden is separated from the lane by an eight-foot wall. The peculiarity consists in the garden, the soil, the plants, the trees, being level with the top of the wall. Only from L.’s basement (where Marianne built the fireplace) is there direct access to the garden. The kitchen (the hub) and living rooms stand one story above it. All this helps to explain why I, who also live at the top of a flight of stairs on the other side of the narrow lane, enjoy (if that is the right word) such a ringside seat.

Hugo Dyson, late great English tutor, you started all this by teaching me to see the connection between the handkerchief in Othello and the napkin in Henry VI, Part 3.

Honored to be invited to sit in workroom of L.’s house while Steve and Sarah lighted their seventh Hanukkah candle. Steve donned a yarmulke, and they both chanted in Hebrew. A lump in my throat. Konin. Ulysses’ Gaze. Why do I feel this affinity? Why do I feel like the sea under the influence of the moon?

Later that same evening, Sarah served, from a Greek-Jewish cookbook, fried bananas in chocolate—Chiquita bananas from Four Corners.

A couple of days after this, I left to spend January in England. Steve and Sarah saw me off. At the quayside, Steve quietly pressed into my palm a Hopi Indian turquoise pebble, said to guarantee journeying mercies. Sarah waved until invisible.

I paused at Aigina to visit Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke. Came out of her house into garden to be confronted by a twinkly man followed by a woman and two children. I had never seen any of them before in my life. At least two of them were carrying musical instrument cases. The woman and children stood stock-still and never spoke. A tableau from an Angelopoulos film. The conversation went something like this:

MAN: “Hello, how are you? What are you writing at the moment?”

SELF: “That’s a bit difficult to explain.”

MAN: “Please try.”

SELF: “Well, it’s a poem with notes.”

MAN: “Ah! I see. You mean the notes provide an emergency exit from the poem.”

Katerina later explained that this was a dear friend of hers called Patroklos. Not surprisingly, surrealism is his forte.

1“The wind is getting up.”

[2]“One must make an attempt at living.”

[3]Absolute Hydra, drunk on your own blue flesh,

You who devour again your sparkling tail

In the midst of noise tantamount to silence.

4“But in any event, you will be pleased to find again in the film this ‘absolute Hydra’ of Valéry’s, which constitutes the last words of the protagonist!”

[5]“Everything goes under the ground and enters the game again.”

[6]“Plea to be buried on the beach at Sète.”

7“The Erasers, followed by Keys to The Erasers, by Bruce Morrissette.”

My Journey

My journey to England—to Oxford and London—more or less revolved around L. and bananas. I must have spent hours in bookshops, museums, libraries, art galleries, music shops. And further hours trying to explain to friends what I was up to, when I hardly knew myself. Honorable mentions go to Paul Surman, Geoff Holdsworth, Douglas Duff, Antony Green, Chris Athey, and Renée Hirschon, who listened, understood, and helped. Everyone else decided, kindly, that I was obsessed, and less kindly, that I was mad. If I were, it wouldn’t matter, because not for a long time, if ever, have I had such a ball. I was going to write “intellectual ball.” But that gives quite the wrong idea. My intellect, such as it is, does come into play. But this ball that I’m having thrives on not being defined, on transcending categories. It is a ball in the sense of a dance, a merry dance, a mystical dance. But if visualizing it as the other kind of spherical ball, I would say it comes closest to a dandelion clock.

Soon after my arrival, I telephoned Steve. He told me that at the weekend, they were going to help Evangelia tidy and truss up the battered banana-plants. I said I hoped Sarah would take some photographs. Afterward it hit me that I had made an international telephone call to L.’s friend in L.’s house mainly in order to discuss L.’s bananas.

For better or for worse, I began to discover more about L. himself—always bearing in mind that even in absentia, L. remains a denizen of Hydra and, as such, is as difficult to grasp as Proteus and Nereus. (May the gods preserve us from verifiable facts!) One of my first acts was to borrow from the public library (I subsequently secured my own copy) Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen, by Ira Bruce Nadel. Nancy Drew finds it too hagiographical; Steve Sanfield declares it too inaccurate; therefore, it must be doing something right. As for me, I found it a rich source of collateral.

But first, I have to return to what I first said about the book when confronted with Nancy Drew’s review. I could easily expunge what I wrote then, but that would be to destroy the point. One of the exciting features of this banana quest is the way new material constantly gives new illuminations, grants new perspectives. I started off writing notes to a poem and have graduated to keeping a log of a journey. Maybe I’ll even end up telling a story. At all events, nothing must be lost.

So I have to say that according to my current state of perception, Various Positions (which I now know to be the title of one of L.’s albums) is a perfectly valid title for a life of L.; L. himself is somebody famous and important; the guardian of the bananas is not a Hydra-headed monster; it was only during my stay in England that L. really began to impinge on my consciousness for the first time.

One of the first things I learned from Nadel was that L. used to work on an Olivetti Lettera 22. Photographs of L. on his Hydra terrace confirm this. Sadly, recent pictures show him with a computer. I’m proud to say that I’m typing this on my Olivetti Lettera 22. It jumps a bit, but that’s excusable in a machine nearly forty years old being operated by a man who is nearly sixty.

When I first took Nadel out of the library, I became very excited. I later read the book slowly and carefully, but first I gutted it in about half an hour and rushed to photocopy some half a dozen pages that struck me as especially significant.

The opening sentence of Chapter 1 reads:

Leonard Cohen buried the first thing he ever wrote.

That had me reeling. The further revelation—that this ritual burial of an unspecified text was connected with his father’s death— had me on the ropes. What I read on the next page put me out for the count. L. is quoted as saying:

“I’ve been digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”

Had I not written (pp. 20–21):

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?

Had Suzanne been attempting—with the unwitting collusion of the Sisters of Mercy—to make it impossible once and for all for L. to exhume his past?

Page 46 includes part of a statement made by L. on December 27, 1956:

“I want to continue experimenting with the myth, applying it to contemporary life, and isolating it in contemporary experience, thus making new myths and modifying old ones. I want to put mythic time into my poems, so they can be identified with every true fable ever sung, and still be concerned with our own time, and the poems hanging in our own skies.”

Forgive me, L., I didn’t realize where you were coming from. Your serious singing career begins almost exactly halfway through Nadel’s biography. Prior to that you were a novelist, a poet, and the white hope of Canadian literature. I had no idea. I’m sorry. There was I blahing away about mythic time and profane time and how Hydra has no history and exists in nonordinary reality, and all the time you were there before and beyond me. You were there.[1] I didn’t think that what I was doing had anything to do with you. You just happened to own the garden in which grew the banana-plants that prompted my poem. How wrong could I be?

You were probably sitting in your cabin up on Mount Baldy monitoring my progress, or lack of it. But I had to proceed in my own way, at my own pace, in my own time—and I still do. But you are there! You are Orpheus. I know I said you were, but I didn’t really feel it. Now I feel it. You are the fabulist. I had to find out for myself that this story involves every myth that ever was. You knew it already. There is Orphic magic in your song. If there is any in mine, it will be because I have plugged in to your magic without realizing it. But of course we are both plugged in to a greater magic. There is power. There is mystery.

How did you understand in 1956, when you were twenty-two? Come to that, how did you know with such certainty what you were doing at the age of nine when you sewed a message into one of your late father’s bow ties and buried it? By 1965, at thirty-one, you were a wise old man when you inserted into Beautiful Losers the famous “God is alive. Magic is afoot” passacaglia that reached even Terry Rigelhof. You sensed the need for ritual incantation. You perceived the dynami in your Indian Katerina that I was to perceive so much later in mine—Tekakwitha and Andritsopoulou— names to conjure with on the conjuror’s island.

We are the laborers in the vineyard—or at least in the banana garden. We shall each receive our penny. It doesn’t matter a toss (heads or tails) that it took me fifty-seven years to get here. I’m here now. That’s all that matters—dasein. No, that isn’t all that matters. I can speak only for myself. I can’t speak for you or Orpheus or Rilke or anybody else. From here where I am now, I have to reach out as far as I possibly can. Then, like the shaman that I am not, like the sham shaman that I am, to return and report on what I touched or what I glimpsed just out of the reach of my groping fingers. Please hold me steady, L.

Paramythi is the Greek for “fable,” a paramyth, something beside myth. Nikos Kazantzakis wrote:

If only I too could avoid opening my mouth except at that moment when the abstract idea reaches its highest peak—when it becomes a fable!

He wrote that in his book about Zorba, and in that very book he realized his ambition. Strangely—I’ve just remembered—the Greek title of that novel implies that Kazantzakis is writing the life of a saint, just like you with your Saint Catherine. Nadel quotes you as saying of Beautiful Losers:

“The book is really a long confessional prayer attempting to establish itself on the theme of the life of a saint. . . .”

“Because I could not write or believe in a book called Cohen’s Meditations, I had to make a story out of a prayer.” (p. 134)

Precisely. Once when I delivered a lecture on Kazantzakis, a lovely Greek woman nicknamed me the paramythas, the storyteller. If only. In this banana story perhaps the only true storyteller is dear Steve, but if I am writing a story, then the reason why it is a story is that it contains characters like Steve.

I started to find references to Steve in Various Positions, but definitely not to Steve in various positions. There’s no point in my picking any of them out. I am neither a biographer nor a chronicler. But it was cheering to meet my new friend in Nadel’s pages and to hear about the way Steve, L., and others would sit around discussing various texts, such as the I Ching and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, no doubt under the influence of various substances.

On p. 210 of Nadel, I felt a frisson when I read that L. had written, apropos of Suzanne:

“I planted and watered and sang to the seeds of revenge . . . the garden is ruined and this vigil is coming to an end.”

I knew that he was referring to the garden on Hydra. I, who have always failed in the past to detect any vibrations even in the most haunted or mystical of places.

I felt a frisson of a different kind when I reached pages 245–247. Here was a story I had been prepared for by people such as Brian Sidaway and Nancy Drew, but this was my first confrontation with the details:

At a Los Angeles warehouse to watch the filming of the Warnes’ video “First We Take Manhattan,” Cohen was photographed by publicist Sharon Weisz in his dark glasses, charcoal gray pinstriped suit, and white T-shirt, eating a banana. For him, the image was precise and revealing.

Sharon showed it to me later and it seemed to sum me up perfectly. “Here’s this guy looking cool,” I thought, “in shades and a nice suit. He seems to have a grip on things, an idea of himself.”

The only thing wrong, of course, is that he was caught holding a half-eaten banana.

And it suddenly occurred to me that’s everyone’s dilemma: at the times we think we’re coolest, what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana. . . .

He admired the photo so much that it became the signature image for his 1988 hit album I’m Your Man, and the poster image of his 1988 world tour.

(It would be churlish to add that some people might also see a guy who thinks he’s cool committing the social blunder of wearing a T-shirt with a suit.)

I still can’t get over it. There was I thinking that I must be the only person in the world who had made a connection between L. and bananas, and lo and behold, I was the one who ended up with banana all over his face. The connection had already been well and truly made in 1988, or thereabouts, on a global scale, even including fans wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the banana—or more correctly, half-banana—emblem. Nadel prints the photograph with a caption that begins: “Cohen and his banana. . . .” Not just any old banana, mark you, but his banana. Which is perfectly valid. A man cannot possess angels, but he certainly can possess a particular banana, and this one was L.’s— is L.’s for all time. Even though le fruit se fond en jouissance, it remains for ever suspended in eternity.

So there I am in Oxford, reading Nadel and getting éclaircissements every few minutes. But also rushing around as though I had won a competition entitling me to fill a shopping cart within a limited time. To my amazement, there were only two entries in Granger’s Index to Poetry under “Banana.” One I never managed to follow up. The other was by Richard Edwards and went simply:

When I was three I had a friend

Who asked me why bananas bend.

I told him why, but now I’m four,

I’m not so sure.

I can identify with that. When I was fifty-seven it seemed a simple matter to entertain my friends with a little ditty about L.’s bananas. But now I’m nearly fifty-eight, I marvel at the turns of Fate. . . .

Paul Surman has made me a copy of a remarkable poem by Wendy Cope, written to accompany a painting by Giorgio De Chirico titled The Uncertainty of the Poet. It is just another of those oddities that my mother’s old paperback of Les Gommes has on the cover Place d’Italie by De Chirico. I visited the Tate Gallery but, like a fool, was so busy thinking about Paul Klee that I forgot to buy a postcard of De Chirico’s Uncertainty of the Poet. As I remember it, it contains a very prominent bunch (or bunches) of bananas, a stone torso, a train, a desert, and maybe the odd arch or two, similar to those on Robbe-Grillet’s novel. We are definitely in a Southy world, a world of Mediterranean light where no object can hide, a world of absolute visual clarity where, paradoxically, everything is infinitely suggestive. Nothing can be more certain than a banana-plant; yet nothing can be more uncertain than a poet.

Confronted by the conundrum, Wendy Cope responds with a little enigma of her own:

THE UNCERTAINTY OF THE POET

I am a poet.

I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.

I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.

I am very fond.

A fond poet of “I am, I am”—

Very bananas.

Fond of “Am I bananas?”

Am I?—a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!

Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.

I am fond of a “very.”

I am of very fond bananas.

Am I a poet?

Any of those couplets could furnish me with an epigraph, not to mention an epitaph.

Another visual hare I was chasing was Andy Warhol’s banana. Despite the fact that Warhol’s banana is better known than L.’s banana and appears reproduced in countless glossy coffee-table books, I was unable (in the short time at my disposal— about fifteen minutes) to discover its origins. It graced (or disgraced) the sleeve of a Velvet Underground album. I don’t know the title of the album, and I don’t know whether Warhol created the banana specifically for the record cover or what was his thinking (if any) behind the image. A fascinating (at least to me) connection is that according to Nadel, L. had a long-lasting and unrequited crush on Nico, the female singer with the Velvet Underground. Warhol’s banana is big, brazen, and entire. L.’s, on the other hand, is half consumed with its peel hanging down in disarray. The L. I have been discovering does not miss tricks.

The scene changes. Now we follow the possessed poet into the tall greenhouses of the Oxford University Botanic Gardens. When he has wiped the condensation from his spectacles with a red spotted handkerchief, he peers about him and beholds the Musaceae and their relatives. He sees Ensete ventricosum from East Africa, Musa velutina from southeast India. Musa X paradisiaca (edible banana), and a fine lofty specimen of cavendishii that comes all the way from China, among others. No one to answer his unasked questions. The names form a little poem in his notebook. Already he has forgotten what each one looked like. Could L.’s bananas be paradisiaca? Outside it is bitterly cold. He pees in a clump of bamboo.

In the wonderful, alternative book department of Tower Records on Piccadilly Circus, London, I bought L.’s Death of a Lady’s Man and Book of Mercy. In Blackwell’s Music Shop in Oxford, I obtained an anthology of L.’s songs and a biography of L. by two people called Dorman and Rawlins. I haven’t read the latter yet—perhaps I never will. It has no index, but the few pages I have so far managed to find referring to Hydra talk about Steve Sandown for Steve Sanfield and Anthony Kingsville for the painter Anthony Kingsmill; elsewhere a reference to the “beautification” of Saint Catherine Tekakwitha caught my eye.

But Blackwell’s main bookshop in the Broad was my happiest hunting ground. No longer the magical place of my childhood and undergraduate days (too many concessions to commerce and computers), it remains surely the best bookshop in the world. Day after day, I browsed in different sections—Cookery, Gardening, Secondhand, various languages (I bought Lorca’s poems, hoping for clues), Anthropology, Theology, Literature, Philosophy, Travel, Art, Music, Biography, Reference.

One day I was on the second floor, somewhere around Comparative Linguistics, when I noticed a slim black spine bearing the title The Necessary Angel. I could see at a glance that it was not by Wallace Stevens, so who had pinched his title? An Italian, it transpired, called Massimo Cacciari who duly quoted and acknowledged Wallace Stevens at the beginning. Someone called Miguel E. Vatter, who deserves every award there ever was, had somehow managed to translate the book into English. It seems it was first published in Italian in about 1986.

What can I say about it? It consists of ninety-three pages plus thirty pages of notes. It is, quite simply, the most “difficult” text I have ever read, making Deleuze and Guattari look like Doctor Seuss. And yet I devoured it, I absorbed it, I basked in it. I knew it all already. I didn’t know any of it. I didn’t understand it, but it made perfect sense. (Sudden illumination: Deleuze and Guattari’s nomads are angels.) It rendered, I’m sorry to say, Wallace Stevens’s book of the same title completely unnecessary. It was more poetry than prose. It didn’t explain anything. Cacciari knew that he couldn’t explain anything—nothing needed explanation. He was taking dictation like Saint John the Divine. He was presenting. That’s it. There is this awful term in modern business, “the presentation.” Lord, what would all the yuppies praised for their snappy presentations say, should Massimo Cacciari walk their way? His is the presentation to end all presentations and to begin them all. He is not selling anything. He doesn’t have a product. He just says: Here it is; this is it. Presentation. Revelation. Apocalypse here and now.

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. . . .

From the sanest person here to

the craziest person there, with love,

Roger XX

P.S. Valerie came up to me and in all seriousness said: “Roger, you would know this—when is the best time to harvest bananas?” I have become a recognised expert, a bananologist, a musologist! Pas si mal pour un pauvre Belgian detective, non?

I also begged her: “Please don’t reply too quickly, or I’ll have to write another letter!” Almost by return of post, I received not one but two letters, one labeled on the envelope “Therapy” and the other “Real letter.” “Therapy” proved to be just that, and best forgotten, though I liked her description of herself as a “tall, blonde Shiksa.” “Therapy” was the kind of logorrhea that computers encourage, whereas “Real letter” seemed to have been written on, and under the benign influence of, a good old-fashioned typewriter. It contained at least one passage germane to these notes:

It has occurred to me recently that people’s souls can be like deep dark basements filled with God knows what “accumulations.” . . . Suzanne may have got that word from the Tibetan Buddhists. . . . I saw it in a chant recently when I went to their centre to meditate. It’s something to do with “merit” and enlightenment gained through a lifetime. I think that’s what she was wishing you.

Nancy has certainly read Ira B. Nadel, so consciously or subconsciously she would be aware of L.’s reference to the “scary basement” of his Hydra house. But she appears to be confusing the soul with some part of the mind. Anyone who writes “God” with a capital G, goes to a center to meditate, and ends up reading chants (rather than chanting them) is bound to be a little confused. And, incidentally, how do you chant the word “accumulations”? Isn’t something like “om” simpler and more profound? Is the lotus full of accumulations But seriously, g-d or god or God bless Suzanne. Did I not already advert to her skill with words? I don’t think I went far enough. Her pronouncements are oracular. In this gallimaufry of myth, fairy tale, legend, and fable, she plays, among other roles, the Sphinx, the Sibyl, the Pythoness, and, maybe, Cassandra. They reckon ill who leave her out. Thank you, Nancy, for drawing my attention to the potential intensity of her wish. And thank you, Suzanne, for your valedictory benediction. I shall attempt to prove worthy.

I certainly prefer Nancy Drew’s interpretation to that offered by Gordon Grange of Alsace, who scribbled semilegibly on his Christmas card:

Are the Cohens adherents, perhaps, to the teachings of Wilhelm Reich? Does Leonard’s house conceal an orgone accumulator? Were you perhaps invited to ecstatic and hard wired longevity?

Maybe orgone energy and enlightenment do not, in fact, lie so far apart.

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch . . .

Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen . . .

In the orchard of the minstrel, the bananas steal the show.

The sadness of clowns. The pathos of bananas.

Finished fabulous (i.e., like the best kind of fable) The Story-teller by Mario Vargas Llosa. Could understand why Nick is drawn to this magically real Latin American world. And so it is. Decided to read it in the first place because of Steve. Had never before met a professional storyteller (let alone a Master of American Haiku). Now realize that without such people, the real world could not survive. Cockerels who crow the sun up every morning. Novelists miss the point, and so miss greatness. Storytellers belong with bards, seannachies, and ollavs. Skylarks who chant the world up from the well of darkness. Won’t you lead me there?

I suppose magical realism or realistic magic is essentially Southy; that is why books like The Lost Steps and The Storyteller (proper fables or parables thinly disguised as novels) chime so harmoniously on Hydra. These two sentences of Vargas Llosa’s perfectly sum up my situation vis-à-vis this island:

Here I came back without having gone.

That’s how I began to be what I am.

After reading Death of a Lady’s Man, I almost feel as though either I wrote it or L. is writing these pages, or at least leaning over my shoulder like Plato in Derrida’s postcard. Death of a Lady’s Man contains everything my work contains, but treated from a viewpoint some twenty years and twenty yards distant. That is, it contains everything except the bananas. Kyria Evangelia is not named, but she is implicit throughout. The extraordinary thing is that L. may not even know about the banana-plants in his own garden, and the even more extraordinary thing is that it does not matter.

I was about to say that sooner or later, I had to read Death of a Lady’s Man. But that is patently wrong. I could only read it later. I could only read it exactly when I did in the inevitably unrolling course of this story. If, instead, I had read it sooner—if, for example, following my Pyrofani birthday party, Suzanne had handed me a copy of Death of a Lady’s Man, bound in human skin stuck full of pins with angels dancing on the head of each one, and said: “Here is a Jewish Book of the Dead for us all; if life doesn’t kill you, death will.”—If something like that had happened, it would have nipped my constructed narrative in the bud, like a banana stillborn.

Instead I remained in ignorance until now, so that, unhampered by a little dangerous knowledge, I was able to try in my way to be free. From now on, whatever I write must be written in full awareness of the contents of Death of a Lady’s Man, even if I am able to relegate them most of the time to my subconscious. In full awareness of L.’s obsessions with, among other beings and things:

1. Suzanne

2. Sex

3. The Garden

4. Angels

5. The Basement

6. The Kitchen

7. Children

8. The Yellow Daisies

9. Lilith

10 Burial

11. Weeds

12. Scripture

13. Writing

Copying out passages would be to miss the point, would be beside the point. I could easily work myself up into a frenzy of excitement, jumping up and down and shouting: “Look! Look here! This is just what I said! This is just what I suggested! He even names the little church between my house and his! And here, when he says ‘Steve,’ he means Steve Sanfield! Wow!” That is not it at all.

Any sort of critique or judgment of the book or of L. would be disastrously misguided. Liftoff or coniunctio could only take place—and even then by no means with certainty—if we had— would that we did have—a parallel text by Suzanne called Birth of a Man’s Lady. Not to mention scholia by Adam and Lorca. Suffice it to say that L. and I converge in some places and diverge in others. Some of my themes form his obsessions, and vice versa.

Having read L.’s book, I can peer through my jalousies and know that what I am looking at is a small battleground in the war of opposites; something analogous to the marble threshing-floor of Greek folklore. Several of those thirteen headings above could be paired antithetically. My partial exegesis would be as follows:

The House (moated grange) stands for evil, guilt, remorse, darkness. The Garden represents good, innocence. The Yellow Daisies are light, that light which “works loose the bare simplicity of things” and which, given half a chance, tears people down “to bones and instant ancient dust” (Surman). In Death of a Lady’s Man, L. mentions these daisies more than any other symbol (if symbol is the right word); they obviously disconcert him. Fortuitously or not, Ira Bruce Nadel’s book cover has a photograph of a youngish, tortured-looking L. framed by four sunflowers (my British paperback edition does, at all events).

The yellow Hydra daisies are not sunflowers, but they usher in the sun. They are heraldically rampant now, as I write these words toward the end of March. They are virtually the last of the spring flowers to appear. They announce the climax of spring and the advent of summer. Curiously, in L.’s own garden they have been almost entirely eradicated.

The Children are ambivalent. Sometimes they are L.’s own children. Sometimes they are other people’s. Sometimes they are his own seeming like other people’s.[1] Sometimes they mock him through the bars of his basement dungeon. Sometimes they steal his poppies. Evidently they trouble him too, like the daisies. In my exegesis they are truth. The hidden laughter of children in the foliage. A touch of Brueghel. The children and the daisies reproach but then forgive. The garden contains the possibility of absolution. Redemption through light—from photosynthesis to photolytrosis.

1Sometimes they are ten-year-olds making love under the windmill.

Enclosed Garden

From my diary:

First the clue of an open window, then the Master of American Haiku and the Mistress of American Math—they arrived late last night. Spent about two hours with them in the workroom talking about L., Spain, Portugal, my trip, storytelling, Jews, culture, sons, etc. Bear hugs. I love that man. He gave me little Bash haiku book.

The Ruled Notebook supplements the above:

Coffee with S & S. Steve speaks of Evangelia’s enormous strength when holding three or four banana stems together to be trussed up. Koulis had to appear to be in charge, but really Evangelia had everything—strength, knowledge, and command. Oh, and speed.

The Greeks have two words for it: kanei koumando. Evangelia sometimes uses the expression of herself, and it is exactly right. It means something like “she fends for herself.” Kanei signifies “(he/she) makes or does.” Koumando may simply mean “command”—“ she takes command.” Personally, I prefer to derive it from “commando”—the Greeks acquired a lot of expressions from foreign troops during the war—“she acts like a commando,” “she does what a commando would do.” And, by Zeus, Evangelia does. When necessary she will attack with all guns blazing, but equally, like a good commando, she plans, she watches, she waits; she knows the value of silence and stealth, of camouflage and surprise.

Diary:     More Greek with Steve and Sarah, and laughs. They gave me banana photographs. Evangelia burst in bearing two teeth she’d just had out.

There are four magnificent photographs, as requested by me on the telephone from Oxford, of Evangelia and Steve in the green toils of the banana-plants, the ravaged leaves looking like Bash’s phoenix tails and tattered green fans. They show everything— a pizzle, clusters of young fruit, Steve as a satyr-like deus loci, Evangelia becoming one with the plants, the whitewashed wall, and even a sample of the uncomfortable handiwork of the Sisters of Mercy. They also—at least to my perception—convey something of the rough, wild magic inherent in the site.

On this day I left for a quick visit to Athens and Aigina. Steve gave me a cassette to deliver to the Jewish Museum on the edge of Plaka. He and Sarah came to see me off on the Eftykhia, the Happiness.

Diary:     Bought Angel book from window of occult shop. Delivered package for Steve to Jewish Museum, Nikis 39. Group from Israel having guided tour in English. A sense of belonging. Pitiful relics. Temporary stigmata from clutching in pocket Katerina’s star key ring from Jerusalem. Outside, pruned mulberry candlesticks.

I stayed in the apartment of Rodney and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke off Asklipiou (i.e., Asclepius) Street. Not far from there is a magical (accurate word for once) bookshop called Pyrinos Kosmos, or Fiery World, which specializes in alternative stuff, with much of which I cannot be doing. But I often browse here, especially in the good foreign section, which stocks, among other things, the classic Thames and Hudson series Art and Imagination. I had already decided to buy Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Angels in this series and was pleased to see it in the window. I was even more pleased when it turned out to be the last copy in the shop and they let me have it.

From Peiraeus I made my way directly to Compendium, the English-language bookshop in Nikis Street, not far from the Jewish Museum. Here I heard two poets, a Serb woman and a Greek man, read their works. Afterward people from the audience were invited to read their own poems. I stood at the lectern and delivered (no chanting this time) Fun de Siècle rather nervously.

Two women came up to me afterward, one to say how refreshing it was to hear rhyme, and the other one to tell me that she once pursued a personal nirvana to Hydra and lost it after a month—at least she must have been listening.

I actually forgot to record this nonevent in these notes and have had to go back to insert it. My memory wisely suppressed it. But it has to be mentioned because this was the first—and very likely the last—truly public performance of Fun de Siècle. At the Pyrofani, I knew everyone present by name; here I knew nobody. A strange occasion, but a minor landmark, nevertheless.

Katerina had given me a spare set of keys attached to a solid, heavy brass star of David with an inscription showing that it had been presented to participants in some international poetry festival in Jerusalem. In the semireligious atmosphere of the Jewish Museum, tears welled in my eyes as I gazed at exhibits connected with the mass murder of Greek Jews in the concentration camps. But I also enjoyed reconstructions of daily life in the old Greek Jewish communities. I once again felt this strange sense of identification.

Only afterward did I discover that in the intensity of my emotion, I had been clutching Katerina’s key ring in my jacket pocket so hard that the metal points had impressed themselves deeply in my palm. I wish I could say they had drawn blood, but, no, the symbolism was quite sufficient. Why do I wish I could say they had drawn blood? Because it would have been more poetic? Because I have masochistic tendencies? Because I want to be a martyr? I don’t know. Anyway, when I next raised my gaze I beheld the totally poetically satisfying sight of the mulberry trees that line the streets, freshly pruned, with all the branches curving up to a level top, thus evoking the splendid menorahs I had just seen in the museum.

Menorahs also feature in The Tree of Life by Roger Cook, another in the Art and Imagination series that I already had in my eclectic library before ever I became enmeshed with L.’s bananas. It is another of those books that make what I have been striving toward saying in these pages seem almost too obvious. For instance, when Cook speaks about Carl Jung’s studies of alchemy and the arbor philosophica, everything once more connects:

He had found that it (a symbolic image of the Tree) most often appeared in dreams at critical periods in an individual’s life, times when there was a pressing need for a supporting image of growth and integration. At times like these, this image answered the situation of the dreamer in a way that all the well-meaning advice in the world would have been unable to do.

Precisely. And I didn’t even have to dream. (At least I don’t think I’m dreaming.) At a critical period in my life, the tree or banana-plant simply materialized to answer my situation; although, strictly speaking, we are dealing with an entire mise-enscène of which the bananas form the central element.

Just after this passage he continues:

For the yogi and the mystic, who have overcome the guardians and gained mastery of the “serpent power” that guards the Tree of Knowledge and Wisdom, the traditional images of Paradise become transparent symbols for the achieved state of interior ecstasy and bliss.

“Tread softly, for here you stand on miracle ground, boy” (Durrell). I know—and I stand on it only occasionally; the rest of the time I am a privileged spectator ab extra. I am no yogi or mystic. As Durrell himself said somewhere, I am not a bonze. And yet, and yet. Perhaps I’m deluding myself, but sometimes the symbols really do seem to “become transparent.”

Cook quotes Meister Eckhart:

To find nature herself, all her likenesses have to be shattered; and the further in, the nearer the actual thing.

My friend Jules once reproached me for always skirting issues in my writing, for not going for the “jugliar.” “One day, Dodger,” she said, “if you go straight in to the center, you’ll amaze ’em all.” I’m not there yet; I may never get there; but I believe I’m further in this time than I ever was before. Further in, and counting. Nearer the actual thing. Cacciari has another marvelous and relevant quotation from Eckhart:

All creatures are green in God, but the foliage of the great Tree of creation is the Angel.

I cannot resist mentioning that on the next page to the one where he talks about Jung, Cook notes that the Celestial Tree of Islam is called the Sidra. Curiously, Sidra was an old name for Hydra, which survives in the name of the Hotel Sidra. Once one has started to play this game, one notices that the Scandinavian World Tree, Yggdrasil, conceals the Greek name of Hydra, Ydra. Yggdrasil is watered by Norns (of whom Kyria Evangelia is clearly one) using the Well of Urd, which again looks similar to Hydra and to the ancient Greek hudor, “water.” While in India, as Mircea Eliade tells us, for Creation to take place, Indra had to kill a serpent called Vrtra that had “confiscated the waters.”

Whether these connections are linguistically valid or not, there is no disputing that many people have sensed exceptional energy in Hydra. It is a Center where more lines meet than mere ley lines. Although, as Eliade explains, “every consecrated place coincides with the centre of the world,” it is implicit in his writing on the subject that some Centers are more potent, more deserving of a capital C, than others.

The Centre, then, is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality (trees of life and immortality, Fountain of Youth, etc.) are also situated at a centre.

It would not surprise me in the least to learn that a wooden peg passes straight through the middle of L.’s garden (the center of the Center) down into the head of the dormant Hydra. What am I talking about? It does.

In Athens, in a record shop near Omonoia Square, bought a cassette of L.’s Various Positions. Eureka, I have found it, after all this time, after all these adventures, after such a roundabout quest, which, pace Jules, is the only way to get anywhere. In “Night Comes On,” he sings:

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 leads 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 chimpanzee.

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:

It is gigantic. . . . With its long antennae and its huge legs spaced out along its body, it covers nearly the whole surface of an ordinary plate. . . .

Franck, without saying a word, gets up grasping his table napkin; as he approaches silently, he crumples it into a ball and crushes the creature against the wall. Then, with his foot, he crushes the creature on the floor.

While here is L.’s:

My dark companion presents me with a plate containing a stunned and hideous centipede, “scissors” as they call them here, the ugliest creatures that I know. I would like not to want to kill it, but I want to, so I do. I slip it onto the ground and I pound it with a rock.

And here are a few of Robbe-Grillet’s banana-plants. (Sound is more important than meaning.)

Leurs panaches touffus de large feuilles vertes.

La masse verte des bananiers.

Le plant lui-méme, avec son panache de larges feuilles, vert clair, d’où sort l’épaisse tige courbée portant les fruits.

L’enchevêtrement des feuillages et les nombreux régimes bien formés.

The antepenultimate sentence of the book is:

Au flanc du vallon, les panaches des bananiers s’estompent dans le crépuscule.

I greatly regret that the former member of the Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux did not see fit to describe the pizzle and the way in which the fruit is formed. How could he speak of the épaisse tige courbée (thick, curved stalk) without mentioning what hangs at the end of it? The few descriptions I was able to unearth during my stay in England all spoke of an “inflorescence” as if that were the technical term for the pizzle. But Chambers’ defines it as “a mode of branching of a flower-bearing axis,” which doesn’t sound remotely like what I call the pizzle. Still, I am grateful to Robbe-Grillet for régime (bunch) and enchevêtrement (tangle).

My school edition of La Jalousie is edited by B. G. Garnham, a solid sort of name that for me evokes a plodding policeman. Indeed, B. G. Garnham’s notes are of the kind one might expect to find in a constable’s notebook, e.g.:

The long description of the banana plantation is remarkable for its geometric precision, and for its apparent objectivity. The husband is emotionally uninvolved with it (hence the lack of colour) and unable to penetrate beneath the surface of what he sees.

(I should mention in passing that of course, the banana-plants are laid out in quincunxes.) Would Police Constable Garnham’s comments stand scrutiny in a court of law? “What do you mean by ‘apparent’ objectivity? Do you mean to suggest that the description is not as objective as it appears? Certainly your next remark seems to support this interpretation as you imply that if the husband were more emotionally involved, he would be able to penetrate beneath the surface. Incidentally, I cannot understand what you mean by ‘lack of colour’—there can only be a limited amount of color in a mass of green banana-plants, surely.”

But Garnham has unwittingly hit on something important, I think. I believe that Robbe-Grillet himself intended the bananas, like the jungle, to be perfectly neutral; to be a symbol of a nature completely detached from the human emotions in the house; to be an empty mask. But, despite all his efforts, he has managed to suggest that the objectivity is only apparent, that for those who have eyes to see, there is something going on beneath the surface. Willy-nilly, with his inscrutable mass of green panaches, Robbe-Grillet has added extra tension and another dimension to his narrative. However much he protests to the contrary, his feuillages are teeming with nuances.

I cannot help observing that in my own modest case, the more I have become emotionally involved with the whole mise-en-scène of L.’s bananas, the more I have been able to penetrate beneath the surface of what I see—of what I see as I sit in my kitchen with Robbe-Grillet’s novel and, looking up, glance across the divide to L.’s house, L.’s bananas, L.’s jalousies and jealousies. Or do I trump myself?

Death in This Book

Evangelia, despite her dying mother, her invalid husband, and her unemployed son (to name but three of her problems), continues to rustle up treats for Steve, Sarah, and me, such as loaves baked in a ring, stuffed aubergines, wild bulbs from the hills, taramosalata, rice with spinach, and small fishes. She also constantly tends the garden.

Today Steve gave me a book called Twelve Stories by one Guy Davenport. It looks very promising. I certainly don’t fear Steve bearing gifts, but I suspect him of having ulterior motives. He also allowed me to photocopy some correspondence. This was the first exchange:

HYDRA, GREECE

L. S. Dorman & C. L. Rawlins.

Just finished Prophet of the Heart. A fine piece of work, but for the record & any future editions:

1. Evans-Wentz was never, ever on Hydra. By the time we were studying his work he was quietly living out his last years in California.

2. The Steve Sandown you refer to is really named Steve Sanfield. Trust me.

All best,

Steve Sanfield.

From Clive L. Rawlins

EAST LOTHIAN

Dear Mr Sanfield,

Thank you very much for your letter regarding my book on Leonard Cohen. I am glad you enjoyed it.

Please accept my apologies for the mispelling of your name, which will indeed be corrected should it go to another edition. . . . (No plans at present.) Of course, were Leonard to make a major change, that might alter things.

Yours sincerely,

C. L. Rawlins

“My” book. Whatever happened to poor old L. S. Dorman? The misspelling “mispelling” shows the extent of the man’s problems, especially if he thinks that “Sandown” is a “mispelling” of Sanfield. I dread to think what “major change” L. would have to make to prompt a second edition of the book.

The haiku correspondence was much more entertaining. The president of the Haiku Society of America wrote to Steve on the society’s letterhead in part thus:

Michael Welch recently gave me a copy of your He Smiled to Himself. On the back cover it says that you have been “Hailed as the master of American haiku.” I hope you will forgive me for asking you who said this and whether you consider yourself such? (Please believe that I am not asking this ironically. . . . I have always been fascinated by cover blurbs, even more so now that I am writing them myself!)

He added the following as a kind of Pee Ess:

what to do?

a penny face up

in the urinal

Steve replied, explaining that it was Michael McLure who so hailed him, and quoting Bash: “If a man writes two or three haiku in a lifetime, he is a poet; if he writes ten, he is a master.” Steve also suggested two possible courses of action for the person faced with a penny in the urinal (we never could work out the significance of “face up”)—either “drop in a gold coin” or “close your eyes.”

The president replied on plain paper:

Thank you for your good-humored reply to my inquiry. Yes, how can one disagree with old Bash? I look forward to seeing the complete quote from Michael McLure (is he the one that wrote the blurb?), though perhaps when you send it you would be kind enough to tell me who he is and what he knows about haiku? Getting back to Bash. I assume he is referring to HAIKU rather than just “haiku” when he says “if he writes ten, he is a master.” In any event, it seems that he is saying a master rather than the master?

“What to do?” Never thought of dropping in a gold coin (to keep the penny company?), but then I didn’t happen to have one on me at the time. As to closing one’s eyes, that makes other things difficult.

His Pee Ess this time read:

dancing to my tune

cricket

in the urinal

Worthy of John Arlott on a rainy day at Lord’s. Steve decided that the correspondence had gone quite far enough. At least it now contributes to the subtext whenever I shout across the divide: “Hail, Master of American Haiku!” and Steve rumbles back: “Hail, Poet Laureate!”

Steve and I wandered over the house together again. A paucity of clues. Not so much an old bird’s nest as one of those that wrens build and never use. I was just thinking how dead the place seemed when Steve said: “It doesn’t feel as though lives have been lived here, does it?” No meaning. The meaning is in the garden.

Steve and I were walking up Donkey Shit Lane when we spied a small boy drawing something vaguely phallic on a wall. Steve yelled at him so fiercely that he desisted even though he didn’t understand Steve’s words. “Tell him in Greek,” urged Steve, but I declined to become involved.

O Master chide not

young penis artist—

perhaps it was a banana.

Having skipped over the rough hills like a young mountain goat, Sarah seriously sprained her ankle as she turned suddenly in a smooth Hydraean street. L.’s old friend George Lialios soothed her with techniques learned from a Sri Lankan healer. (George fled to the Far East to escape from the monstrous potations demanded by Bill’s Bar.)

Sarah and Steve departed, on board the Happiness, to visit, among other places, Mytilene and Constantinople. Before they left, I picked some banana flowers, which I later scrutinized. Interestingly nondescript, they yielded no secrets. All I can say is that they plug into their slots in the pizzle as snugly as fuses into a lighting panel. The green fuse becomes the flower. The mystery remains. No amount of babbling of bracts or inflorescences can explain the banana.

Brian S. again tried to engage me in technical banana talk. When was the best time to pick them? Probably while they were still green. He prattled of different varieties and used the expression “banana cultures.”

Brian meant societies that cultivate and consume bananas. But surely there must exist or have existed somewhere banana cults—i.e., groups of people who venerated bananas. The plants are so primitively mysterious and mysteriously primitive that they seem to demand worship. How could people fail to grovel before a “tree” formed from an inexhaustible succession of leaves (what can banana roots be like?) and a fruit produced by the perpetual motion of the pizzle method?

And what a fruit! Suggestive of the membrum virile but far more so of the crescent moon glowing in the green shade of the enormous leaves. Luna. Lunatic. Could this resemblance have given rise to the idea that “bananas” denotes “craziness”?

I prefer to suppose that there were banana cults, the details of which, for whatever reason, have been lost or suppressed. (I have already mentioned a tradition that Adam and Eve dressed themselves in banana leaves.) Might not the Golden Bough itself have glistened with bunches of yellow bananas? Might there not have stood somewhere sacred groves of bananas? With priests, priestesses, nymphs, muses indeed? With rituals, mysteries, hymns, initiations—sacrifices even?

Surely all this is far more probable than not? Even in the few books available to me, I have found hints. Figure 2 in Joseph Campbell’s Occidental Mythology, also reproduced on p. 114 of Roger Cook’s The Tree of Life, shows, we are told, the World Tree, taken from an Elamite bowl of between 200 and 650 A.D. The leaves of this tree could easily be banana leaves shredded in a gale, while the two “fruits” greatly resemble banana pizzles. On one side of the tree, a banana-moon lies on its back; on the other side, a sun (if that is what it is) contains a curious flower pattern that might just be the cross-section of a banana.

Another illustration that appears in both books shows an “early Sumerian seal” depicting a tree that Campbell calls a “mythic date palm” but that, once again, looks remarkably banana-like or musaceous. Campbell describes a figure sitting beside the tree as wearing “a horned lunar crown.” For the moment, I rest my case.

Still living off scraps left by Sarah and Steve. Letter from Paul Surman enclosing a newspaper clipping: “Cohen tops misery charts.” The Band magazine asked readers “which albums drove them to depression,” and Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits topped the list. As I have said before, I am clearly missing something. In the last year or so, during which time I have become acquainted with the works of L. (musical and otherwise) for the first time, I have derived nothing but pleasure and enjoyment from them. Greatest Hits seems to me to contain a particularly cheerful selection sung in a more sprightly manner than L.’s later, admittedly more lugubrious style. Perhaps many people pay insufficient attention to the words.

The Annunciation (Evangelismos) today, and therefore Kyria Evangelia’s name-day. Visited Evangelia to wish her “Many Years!” and was rewarded with the tidbit of information that L.’s garden is situated on top of the ruins of a house. According to her, the foundations and a cistern still exist beneath the soil and under the humpy, lumpy, bumpy stones. “I’m too young to remember, but they say that an old woman used to live there who sold fava [something like pease-pudding] during the war. She used to make the fava in a cauldron, which she stirred with a special stick that had a kind of cross-shaped piece of metal at the end. She would sell it to the hungry for a few lepta [a few hundredths of a drachma].”

Who knows? Perhaps the cauldron and the stick are buried there too. Of course, there is almost too much imagery in the little story, but perhaps the most amazing thing is that Evangelia mentioned the war. Hydraeans hardly ever refer to the war, or the civil war that followed it. Indeed, they hardly ever allude to the past, except once a year when they commemorate Hydra’s famous son, Admiral Miaoulis, the wizard of fire-ships.

No one knows who built the superhuman walls; who terraced remote hillsides; what the ubiquitous solid, square ruins represent—watchtowers? No one speaks of the dead. I must return to this theme like the wolf that’s foe to men and uneasy friend to women like Cassandra. Why was the old woman’s house buried under earth and rubble?

Evangelia promised me that next time she and Koulis killed and cooked one of the rabbits they keep on the roof, she would bring me a portion.

Today and tomorrow, the weather, which I try to keep out of these pages at all costs, managed to power its way in. We had a biblical downpour, a Shakespearean tempest. The rain found out the cracks in everything and inundated everybody. The electricity supply failed. I lay in my bed as on a dry island surrounded by water, covered in layer upon layer of blankets and clothes, listening on my Walkman to the soothing voice of dear Steve telling me outlandish Jewish stories. Afterward my little house was as scoured as the Augean stables.

The bananas were ravaged, pizzles rudely ripped off, stems snapped, leaves shredded.

Evangelia reported that the rain had poured through a crack in her roof and flooded the corner where her nonagenarian mother lies gently dying. The most horrific cataclysm story that she could find to tell me was that a hutch full of rabbits (not hers) had been swept out to sea and drowned. “Oh, Mr. Krins! Oh, the poor creatures!”

Today was a historic day in the banannals of this text because I read for the first time—or registered for the first time—Rilke’s Thirteenth “Sonnet to Orpheus” in the First Series. It begins, as I observed with amazement:

Banana and pear, plump apple,

gooseberry. . . .

So Rilke too had “his” banana!

Poulin’s laconic note tells us that “C. F. MacIntyre has suggested rather convincingly that these two sonnets (13 and 14) are indebted to Valéry’s poem, ‘Le Cimetière marin.’” Well, of course. Given the way everything in this narrative interconnects, it would be much more surprising if, having happened upon Rilke’s banana, I found that it didn’t lead anywhere. But naturally it leads to all the two-and-thirty palaces, including “Le Cimetière Marin,” with its fruit that “se fond en jouissance,” its “anges curieux,” its “Hydre absolue,” and its own connection with Alain Robbe-Grillet. . .

. . . whose extraordinary La Jalousie I had just finished. In his introduction, B. G. Garnham quotes Robbe-Grillet on Sartre:

“He knew what his books meant. He knew what he had to say. And this alone is what prevented him from being a writer.”

I like that very much. Many things may prevent me from being a writer, but knowing what I have to say most certainly is not one of them. I also, incidentally, seldom know what I am saying or what I have said. I spread my tentative nets to ambush meanings.

T. S. Eliot—at least the Eliot of Four Quartets—gave eloquent expression to a lot of dubious thoughts, as, for instance, when in “East Coker” he writes:

one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.

I guess Robbe-Grillet would not approve. My own experience is the complete opposite. First, I would never presume to claim that I had “gotten the better of words”—they always get the better of me, thank goodness. Second, when I look back on practically everything I have written, I see that each text was saying (the text, not I) things that I might have to say in the future; that I might be disposed to say in the future; that I might, with a bit of luck, begin to understand in the future.

If it didn’t sound a bit presumptuous, I would say that even (especially!) when I think I am in control, actually I am taking down dictation from a power or powers (Muses?!) outside myself. I never catch myself thinking: What have I got to say? What am I disposed to say? Equally, I never ask myself if what I am writing is “correct” or will be acceptable (to whom?). Came across this (to me) incomprehensible passage in Jonathan Griffin’s introduction to a Penguin selection of Fernando Pessoa’s poems:

Pessoa’s heteronyms coped with a problem which afflicts everyone writing now (1974). “I must say that,” one thinks, “and yet how, in this day and age, can I? It is me, but only a part of me. A part, but still essential. It will be false if I write it as I.” Any honest writer now has at times to make so many qualifications that they either overload his art or inhibit it, unless a persona enables him to explore without hedging.

“Exploring without hedging”—and indeed without hedges— describes very well what I try to do. I am as honest as I know how to be. But it never occurs to me for a moment that something I put down is going to be false if I write it as I. What is Jonathan Griffin on about? And why does he stress the contemporaneity of this hypothetical problem so much—“now,” “in this day and age,” “now”? How did the mid-1970s differ from previous ages? All I can hope and believe is that if the problem did exist, and whatever it was, by now it has blown over, and it is safe for honest writers everywhere to come out of hiding and say what they like, each in his or her propria persona.

Rang Jules, just returned from a Bohemian rhapsody in Prague and surrounding countryside. People she spoke to there loved the idea of L.’s bananas. Hydra; Aigina; Athens; Oxford; London; Alsace; Prague; Colorado; Peru; Montreal—the word is spreading. I almost wish it wasn’t. I have broken one of my own cardinal rules by telling too many people too much about work in progress. I have published it in Gath, and now I fear reprisals from the Philistines.

In the Times, an article headlined “The Murky Secrets of Venice Canals” alleges that Venice is in peril from “toxic pollution and radioactivity.” But

the Mayor, re-elected in November, played down the reports. “There is no danger to residents or tourists. We know about the pollution levels, we don’t need anyone to raise the alarm.”

He has overseen the restoration of Venice’s churches and palaces, installed anti-flood defences and reversed decades of neglect by beginning to dredge canals.

In a photograph this mayor looks like a cross between Che Guevara and D. H. Lawrence, with bushy black hair and beard, twinkling eyes, and a noble nose. He is, of course, none other than angelologist Massimo Cacciari. From the photograph, he could easily have just hijacked an airliner, but then he probably does not need wings. Indeed, this genial guerrilla, who “knows about the pollution levels,” also knows that

the wings of the Angel pertain to contemplation. But not even the wings of angelic intelligence, the quickest of all, attain to the identification with the Point of their desire.

And much, much more. What’s a little radioactivity sub specie aeternitatis?

Evangelia tending to bananas wounded in the tempest. She knows when houses hurt and when bananas bleed. Felt like a character from La Jalousie as I spied on her labors. She was joined by Koulis (the only time, I think, that I have seen him in the garden) in tank top and cap. With a very sharp knife, he deftly severed three or four fronds, glowering defiantly as much as to say: I’m still boss around here. Poor bananas—paucity of panache.

For the second time in my life heard the death-rattle as Evangelia’s mother gargled and gurgled her way through her last day on earth. The first time was when my father and I kept vigil beside my mother’s hospital bed as she too made the journey. My father kept pestering the nurses with “intelligent” questions such as: “That’s Cheyne-Stokes breathing now, isn’t it?” After it was all over, he insisted on putting on his cycle-clips and riding home by himself. I went down to the harbor; I was looking for my father. I haven’t even started to look for my mother yet. Evangelia’s mother died in the middle of the afternoon. I saw Evangelia around that time gathering flowers in L.’s garden.

The Mistress of American Math shouted the news across to me. I went to Evangelia’s house and had a coffee beside Granny as she lay beflowered in her open coffin.

In the afternoon, Steve, Sarah, and I went to the funeral in All Saints’ Church. As the procession left the house, somebody deliberately smashed a plate by the corner of L.’s garden wall. (To release Granny’s soul? To frighten demons?) As we passed Four Corners general store, I noticed that all the fruit and vegetables displayed outside had been covered with cloths as a mark of respect. Steve: “I’ll bet that the fact that the bananas were covered up will appear on page 326 of your book.” Yes, Steve.

It was a day of the dead—a day for the dead. In the morning, Kyria Pagona had told me of the death of her uncle. “He was a sea-wolf, Mr. Green, who feared nothing, not even Falkonera. Yet he drowned in calm water near the Tselevinia. They think a wave made by a passing ship washed him off his own boat, which went on without him.” (The Tselevinia are two islets between which most boats pass on their way to and from Hydra. I call them the Clanging Rocks.)

In the evening, I went down to the harbor and spoke with Koulis, standing there alone. A very pretty woman approached me, smiling, and kissed me. She turned out to be Ingeborg, onetime fiancée of Villy. The late Villy, sometime master of Dirty Corner, accomplished painter, sea-urchin gatherer, and momentary vicarious paparazzo. Villy, who had an impossible photograph taken of himself with Princess Diana of Britain, who sold it to the Greek press for a large sum, and who, a few weeks later, was found dead on board a boat at Spetses.

That same evening, as I was passing Villy’s old house, I saw that they were chucking all his possessions out onto the street. I helped myself to a cushion, a book about Russian landscape, and two leather belts.

Rag-and-Bone Shop

What am I doing. Here. Probably a mistake even to pose such an uninterrogative question. What have I been living with—to what have I been allowing house room, headroom—for the past fifteen months or so? Ever since I so unsuspectingly, insouciantly, nonchalantly wrote a poem called Fun de Siècle?

The best answer remains the one I came up with near the beginning— I have been writing a story, a parergon, a paramyth, a parable, a banana-shaped parabola. Or rather it has been writing me. But two or three items encountered by chance along the way have helped me to see the process a little more clearly.

1. An interview with V. S. Naipaul in the Observer in which he says, among other things:

The books I write now, these inquiries, are really constructed narratives. There is the narrative of the journey and within that there are many little narratives that are part of the larger pattern. It is a very taxing kind of writing as a lot of it occurs during the actual travel; it is not cooked up later. . . .

I hate the word novel. I can no longer understand why it is important to write or read invented stories.

These words excited me. I too hate the idea of the novel. (I don’t hate the word “novel,” though—why should I?) I too feel that I am writing a constructed narrative containing many “little narratives.” And, yes, it is the narrative of a journey. But if you substitute “living” for “travel”—“a lot of it—nay, all of it—occurs during the actual living” (which, of course, is true)—sadly, you begin to suspect that V. S. Naipaul is doing what the poet John Wain used to call “spitballing.” And, yes, writing is taxing—we all know that.

And even more sadly, when I rushed to Naipaul’s nonfictional writings, hoping to find something akin to what I am trying to do, suffice it to say that I couldn’t find anything that struck the faintest kindred spark. Yes, I am writing an inquiry. Yes, I am writing a constructed narrative. But, on reflection, are not all narratives— even the most art-less—constructed? And are not all narratives in the nature of inquiries?

So all I get from Naipaul is confirmation that I am constructing a narrative that is not a novel (though I hope it may be novel). I also obtain endorsement of my gut feeling that writers who choose to be known by their initials are somehow unreliable, unsound.

2. I am not, as you will have noticed by now, a theoretician. I leave the theory to others, like my friend Ulf Cronquist of Göteborg, who assures me that Roland Barthes on “the text” has much that is relevant to my work.

3. Much more directly helpful to me have been Guy Davenport’s wonderful Twelve Stories, given to me by Steve Sanfield, Master of American Haiku, whom I miss like mad every day. Not so much the stories themselves, which, brilliant though they be, are a tad too factional for me, as Guy Davenport’s “Postscript,” in which he refers to his pieces as “imaginative structures.” I like this expression. I certainly use my imagination, though more to connect than to invent. I swear that virtually none of my bananarrative is invented. Likewise, I believe I am producing a structure, with the proviso that it is not a dead structure like a building or a vehicle but an organic structure like, let us say, a banana-plant.

Which brings me to a fascinating parenthesis of Davenport’s in which he mentions that “a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne calls them ‘fractal assemblages.’” My normally reliable Chambers’ (7th ed.) remains silent on “fractal,” but even before I discovered the meaning of the word, I instinctively felt that the phrase “fractal assemblage” applied to what I was doing. (While hoisting in, in passing, that Davenport, of whom I had never previously heard, was considered worthy of at least one Gallic doctoral thesis.)

Imagine my excitement (you would not be reading these words, I think, if you could not) when, on June 29, 1993, I read this paragraph in an article in the Times by Anjana Ahuja titled “The Nature of Numbers”:

For example, each snowflake is not only a unique ice sculpture, but also a perfect hexagon. A cauliflower is a version of a fractal—a mathematical pattern that repeats on different scales. The vegetable is made up of florets which are made up of florets, which are—you’ve guessed it—made of florets. The same can be said of trees, because branches and twigs look like miniature trees.

Even if bananas do not have twigs and branches as such, surely the pizzle alone, with its perpetual-motion principle, must contain innumerable fractals. Therefore, my narrative, with its narratives within narratives, is not only a fractal assemblage in its own right but is also a fractal assemblage concerned with fractal assemblages, i.e., banana-plants. Magnificent!

The whole of Davenport’s “Postscript” offers food for thought, food for comparison, and food for melancholy, if not for tears. He speaks of “dithering around on the boundary between the demonstrable world and the inviolably private world of our minds.” (All right, but my contention would be that such a boundary does not exist. But I do not mean that the only world is the world inside an individual’s head. Far from it. Simply that everything is outside and inside, all the time, simultaneously. Something like that.)

Davenport goes on to tell an anecdote of a contingent of the Peace Corps who made a film in an African village to demonstrate the virtues of hygiene. The film was a tremendous success with the villagers, but only because in one or two frames it inadvertently showed a chicken crossing the picture. Everybody wanted to see Ntumbe’s chicken again.

Davenport comments: “For thirty years I have been writing stories in which Ntumbe’s chicken has riveted the attention of too many of my few readers.” Who is he to complain? If Leonard Cohen’s bananas (or anything else in my fractal assemblage) rivet the attention of anybody at all, I shall be more than delighted. Davenport is clearly a good Guy, but he takes himself just a teeny bit more seriously than I take myself.

Of course there can be no surprise that Steve, master of haiku and adulator of Bash, gave me a book that contains a beautiful piece about Bash, that even brings in Sora, who traveled with him and, I believe, gave him the original banana-plant that prompted him to change his pen-name to Bash. Of Sora Davenport writes: “When he wrote his haiku for Mount Kurokami, he was not merely describing his visit but dedicating himself to the sacredness of perception.” Precisely. I suddenly call to mind that it was my dear friend Paul Surman who first introduced me to The Narrow Road to the Deep North. And what did I do to repay you, Old Horse? I fled South.

4. In Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s house on Aigina I happened across an article that criticized a certain writer for having no metaphysical hunger. It might have been simpler to single out the few writers who do have metaphysical hunger. But it made me realize that this is the quality I look for before all others in what I read; it exists in spades in the works of the writers I admire most. It is also, I hope and believe, an attribute that nobody could accuse me of lacking either as a writer or as a person.

5. I am ashamed to say that I did not know until I came across the information by chance the other day that Dante annotated his own poems. The Oxford Companion to English Literature (4th ed.) tells us that in the Vita Nuova,

Dante brings together thirty-one poems, most of them relating directly or indirectly to his love for Beatrice. A linking prose narrative and commentary tells the story of his love and interprets the poems from the standpoint of one who has come to see his beloved as the instrument of his spiritual salvation. The Convivio, or “Banquet,” is an unfinished philosophical work, planned as a series of fourteen treatises, each in the form of a prose commentary on one of Dante’s own canzoni.

I hasten to emphasize that I do not see myself as a latter-day Dante, though would that I could be, if only to elevate the Banana Princess onto the Beatricean pedestal she so richly merits. But I am gratified to learn that I have such an illustrious predecessor in the field of extended autoscholiasm.

At this moment I cannot call any other exemplars to mind, apart from T. S. (what did I tell you?) Eliot’s scrappy and probably deliberately misleading notes on The Waste Land. Of course, of the making of many commentaries by scholars there is no end. But why should writers’ meditations on their own works, and specifically poets’ thoughts on their own poems, be so rare? (Have just thought of Seferis on “Thrush.”) If it was good enough for Dante, then it’s good enough for me.

Besides, I don’t see this particular text on which I am engaged as comprising a commentary on Fun de Siècle. I see the whole thing (for want of a better technical term), poetry and prose, as a seamless garment, as one work; I dare to hazard a guess that Dante saw his Vita Nuova and Convivio similarly.

Why does it not seem to occur to poets in general to lucubrate upon their own works? Indeed, in Britain at any rate, it appears to be very much Not the Done Thing. If and when poets foregather, they prefer to discuss ale or sport or gossip or anything rather than their own works. Which strikes me as strange. If I had written The Waste Land (with or without the collaboration of Ezra Pound) I would have wanted to talk and write about nothing else, to spend my life trying to get to the bottom of what on earth I had perpetrated. What had I put into it? How an earth did such-and-such an element get in? My metaphysical hunger would know no bounds.

What I would not assume for a moment would be that I was certain to be the best commentator on my own work. I would expect to be constantly surprised by my discoveries, as indeed I have been while working on this current assemblage. I would expect to be excited from time to time. But I would not expect to be objective, or even to have the best understanding of my work. That, anyway, would not be the point. Exegesis—understanding and explanation of, for example, a poem—is not the point. I am not an exegete. I am a storyteller, telling, among other stories, the story of how my poem made its way in the world after I had launched it, the story of how my postpoem life continues to be affected by the existence of the poem, and the story of how the poem has impinged on the lives of others—to name but three.

At this point I went to visit Yiota in the Leto Hotel, full of excitement about and enthusiasm for what I had just been writing. I foolishly expected her to endorse my feelings and my findings. Not a bit of it. She let a fire-ship loose among my fleet. “A poem is a child. You will always love it. But if you give it too much attention it becomes spoiled. Too little, and it dies of neglect. But once you have made it, you cannot change it. You have said what you wanted to say. If you start entering into explanations, that implies that your poem has not been successful, cannot stand by itself. If you cannot stop talking about your poem, you are an egoist. Perhaps you are not a poet. What is all this about Dante? You haven’t seen the works in question, so you cannot talk about them. When I write a poem, I know when it is finished. I don’t want to comment on it or add to it. Perhaps I don’t understand what you are trying to do, but from what you have told me so far, I don’t think that I will like it.”

Of course I tried feebly to fight back. But I was shaken by her onslaught. Later that same day, I wrote on a table napkin at the Pyrofani: “I forgave her because of her beauty.” But then I realized that that was (a) sexist and (b) false. So I added: “and because of her great and gracious ways,” which was more accurate. Even as she was uttering her puncturing tirade, I was marveling at the sound of her voice, the tilt of her head, the whiteness of her teeth, the movement of her lips, the light in her eyes, the sheen of her skin. . . . But even more than all these exteriors, I love the interior of her head, even when that interior turns its guns upon me. A garden enclosed is my princess; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed; her plants are an orchard of bananas with pleasant fruits.

So what I am doing here is, among other things:

a) inquiry

(alpha) pilgrimage

b) constructed narrative

(vita) myth

c) chasse spirituelle

(gamma) cryptogram

d) apostil

(dhelta) open network

e) narrative of a journey

(epsilon) carnet intime

f) parable

(zita) premeditated notebook

g) parabola

(ita) parterre

h) parergon

(thita) litany

i) paramyth

(yiota) doxology

j) veritable metaxy

(kappa) liturgy

k) koan

(lamdha) sursum corda

l) text

(mi) lenga-lenga

m) imaginative structure

(ni) musing

n) bananarrative

(xi) kontakion

o) chronology

(omikron) hikayat

p) fractal assemblage

(pi) interlinear

q) metaphysical hungering

(rho) palimpsest

r) Ntumbe’s chicken

(sigma) flowchart

s) metonymic montage

(taf) spreadsheet

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?

I replied:

All I will say about the Banana Notes is, à la Whitman: Do I go close to the edge? Very well, then, I go close to the edge. But thank you for reading the stuff. P.S. What edge?

What edge, indeed? In the blurb of Charles Stewart’s Demons and the Devil, I find this:

Like the medieval cartographers’ fantasies, which were placed on the “edges” of the physical world, Greek demons cluster in marginal locations—outlying streams, wells, caves. The demons are near enough to the community, however, to attack humans—causing illness or death.

Who is to say that the medieval cartographers were fantasizing? I am aware of a strong medieval undercurrent throughout this narrative, throughout the living of it. Here be dragons. Terra ignota. Alchemy. Angels. Wolves. Bards.

Stewart’s “edges” is a concept I can relate to, even though, as I have said elsewhere, I do not really believe in boundaries but rather in some sort of continuum. L.’s house is not “outlying,” yet it is an astonishingly liminal place as I perceive it, particularly the garden. Maybe I am not guilty so much of going too close to any edges as of neglecting to pay due homage and propitiation to the demons. I herewith contritely apologize for neglecting them and concentrating on the equally ubiquitous angels. Like Dylan Thomas’s shepherd, I’d be a damn fool if I didn’t offer the demons some ritual observances.

Not sure to what extent Saint Tykhon protects L.’s house and mine from demons, but the Banana Princess says that because the church was once seriously split by an earthquake (a long metal tie-beam testifies to this), the saint now protects the neighborhood from quakes. She also reports that his ikon has eyes that move. L. (Death of a Lady’s Man) says:

Over the daisies, across the lane, fifty feet away is the chapel of Agia Tichon [sic]. The prayers of others wash over me. I will defend the chapel. I have been placed at the foot of this heap of daisies to defend whatever is in my eyesight and under my nose. (p. 98)

Bravo. Really. Bravo. Bravo. Bravo. This means that L., when he was here (and possibly even now from his Californian mountaintop), was defending not only the long, low chapel of Saint Tykhon but also the very house where I am this minute typing these words. Just as I have been placed in my compact oionosko-peion to defend the banana-plants of L.

In the wall of Aghios Tykhon, which I can see when sitting under my vine on my back terrace (the root of the vine is in the churchyard itself), is a niche that contains an old carved stone. I have scrutinized this stone through my elder’s binoculars. It appears to depict an ornate cross springing from what could be the curving branch of a tree (the whole thing is well weathered). Sitting on the branch is a bird, a common or garden bird like a robin or a sparrow. Flying underneath the branch is what looks like a swallow, while a vague shape in the top right-hand corner might well be another bird. Much of the left-hand side remains empty. The whole piece seems to have been executed by an artist with a penchant for asymmetry. It is tempting (for me, at any rate) to suppose that L.’s song “Like a Bird on the Wire” might have been influenced by this carving; but I have to admit it is unlikely that L. ever beheld the chapel from this side.

From Oslo comes a packet containing a cassette from a young Norwegian singer-songwriter-guitarist called Dag who frequently visits Hydra and has become a friend. His girlfriend just happens to be the niece of L.’s old flame Marianne. This summer Dag was here with a pianist friend of his called Ronald. I gave him a copy of Fun de Siècle, and lo and behold, Dag has made a recording of it. He writes:

Now you might not like it at all and that’s all right because I know you had another tune in mind when you wrote it. I won’t release it or anything like that, it is just to be regarded as a small token of appreciation towards a good piece of writing. Now I’ve even taken out some of the verses in order to get the dynamics right, so you’re perfectly entitled to forget all about it. . . . “Fun de Siècle” was recorded at Ronald’s house (he does the piano by the way) using his home-made equipment. . . . Give my regards to the Indian and keep doing those long walks man, they’re good for the soul.

Well, I found it and find it mind-blowing, man. Ronald’s piano playing is out of this world—how Dag could mention it so casually in parenthesis, I don’t know—and Dag’s singing is beautiful too. Dag’s version is completely and utterly his and has absolutely nothing to do with L.’s “Suzanne,” which makes it all the more unexpected and poignant.

The stanzas Dag omits are “And Bill’s Bar . . . ,” “And always . . . ,” “Et toujours . . . ,” and “The Millennial Olympics.” I forgive him because this way “And love is what we long for . . .” follows straight after the Indian squaw singing (with a long drawn out “ruuuuuuuunic incantation”) and the effect is magical, as if love has been summoned up by the incantation. As if post hoc were propter hoc. If only . . . I fancy myself as a sannup.

As soon as I had listened to the song once, I rushed straight around to where I knew Katerina Andritsopoulou was working, clamped my headphones onto her elegant ears, and made her listen. Hot tears my cheeks were still stinging. I wish I could report that “the Indian” also burst into tears and fell into my arms. Alas, she was less than impressed and thought Dag’s version much too slow and melancholy. Nor was she half as excited as I was that the man was singing about her. Never mind. Subsequently both my ex-wife, Julie, and the Banana Princess, Yiota, responded far more enthusiastically and emotionally.

(To give Squaw Katerina her due, I must say that when I told her about Beautiful Losers and her namesake, Katerin[a] Tekak-witha, and added: “Some people think I’m mad,” she retorted: “I don’t. I’m on the same wavelength as you.” As Private Eye likes to remark: Katerina is twenty-eight and Yiota is twenty-three. Ach! They are both so fair and so wise.)

I replied to Dag in capital letters: “YOUR VERSION OF ‘FUN DE SIÈCLE’ IS MARVELLOUS!!!” and urged him to release it, saying that I should love to be Number One in Norway. Goe litle lay. Goe litle boke.

A curious and slightly disturbing (because it demonstrates my failing mental powers) story is that of Neville and the Observer. Neville, an urbane and cultured visitor to Hydra, passed on to me a section of the Observer containing an account of a week spent with L. on Mount Baldy by one Pico Iyer. As he handed it over to me, Neville mentioned that some woman friend of L.’s had described L. as half angel, half wolf. I became very excited at this and explained to Neville that one of the sections of my “palimpsest” (Neville’s own preferred term) is entitled Of Angels and Wolves.

When I read the interview, I found that the paragraph in question said:

I felt disconcerted by his very niceness, his openness, his courtesy. He kept thanking me for “being kind enough to come here.” This was the seasoned seducer whom his friend Anjelica Huston called “part wolf, part angel.”

Well, this was exciting. That these two themes that had swum up out of nowhere, as it were, into my narrative came together here in the very person of L., the phantom of the opus. Stark, staring obvious as it now seemed, it would never have occurred to me to make the connection. Perhaps for the very reason that it was too obvious.

So far, so good. But when I started to consider the rest of the interview, I realized that the material was familiar and soon traced it back to a glossy magazine called Shambhala Sun, sent me by Steve Sanfield. Sure enough, there was a longer version of the same article. And depressingly—because I had no recollection of it at all—the “wolf, angel” reference had been heavily marked and underlined by me. Oh dear. At all events I am grateful to Neville for helping me to reestablish what I see as a very significant link. The oddest part of this little tale is the unanswered question of why Neville, having no idea of my special interest, chose to mention that one particular item from a long and interesting piece.

Somebody told me that L. used to call his female backing chorus his “angels.” This does not excite me. It has nothing to do with the true angels inside and outside L. L.’s “angels” are a snare and a delusion: ’ell’s angels.

To be borne in mind: the emergency exit can sometimes provide an entrance for rescuers.

I was sitting with P. the other evening at the Pyrofani. At the café opposite, a group of musicians, including Thanasis the garbage-truck driver, were jamming prior to playing at a wedding. Knowing that P. was familiar with Fun de Siècle, I quoted:

And Orpheus gathers garbage. . .

P.: “What do you mean?”

SELF: “Well, there’s Thanasis playing his bouzouki, and he’s Orpheus in my poem.”

P.: “Why? Does ‘Thanasis’ mean ‘Orpheus’? Is it a modern version of the name Orpheus?”

SELF: “No. I just meant that Thanasis is a musician like Orpheus.”

P.: “But what’s garbage got to do with it?”

SELF: “Well, Thanasis drives the garbage truck, doesn’t he?”

P: “It’s no good. I guess I’m thick or something. I just don’t understand.”

It would be a rash person who agreed that P. is thick. She just has a completely different way of looking at things from mine. And there are plenty of people like P. They are not better or worse than me, just different. They will not derive any enjoyment from these pages. Occasionally they make me wonder whether I might be the one who is thick.

Whose is this garden? is a very good question. To call it L.’s garden is a convenient shorthand. But it does not belong to him in reality any more than it belongs to Suzanne or Kyria Evangelia or Lorca or even Adam. I think the answer is that gardens, like women and cats, cannot be owned by anybody. If anybody can be said to own anything, then the garden possesses L. and all who come within its force field.

I am suffering from a severe case of iotacism, defined by the dictionary as “excessive use of the Greek letter iota” but defined by me as “powerful affection for the modern Greek Yiota.” Impossible for my (y)iotacism to be excessive. It is a happy state which would be even happier if reciprocated.

Feel that I haven’t stressed enough the paradox (or parallax) by which here, although (or because) “light works loose the bare simplicity of things” and tears everything down “to bones and instant ancient dust” (Surman), mystery remains and is even strengthened. As Henry Miller says, “a metaphysical bliss . . . makes everything clear without being known.” Was reminded of all this by one of the characters in Nanà Isaïa’s The Story Then and Now who observes that “there exists in things which have been totally exposed to the light a certain un-transparency” (opacity is not quite the right word). No matter how much I, or others, “expose” L.’s house and garden, they will always stand there enigmatically mocking, mockingly enigmatic, ultimately inscrutable and impenetrable.

Did L. and Margarita Karapanou know one another?

When unoccupied, L.’s house and garden are constantly swept and garnished, dug about and dunged, for we know neither the day nor the hour wherein their lord or his representatives may come.

Brenda’s sketches of L.’s banana-plants; a strange, jagged tree-person that the astrologer Ourania drew on my birthday table; and a mystical tree that Lawrence Durrell executed on the front endpaper of a copy of Quinx—all seem more like the bananas than the bananas themselves. As much fauna as flora, like heraldic pterodactyls.

Grist for Karen Van Dyck’s mill—the Dictatorship of L. or L. and the Censors. People on Hydra who never mention the regime of the “colonels” do refer to the time when L. lived on the island as if it was (and, indeed, it was) a specific historical period. It was historical but is rapidly passing into the mythological. We are not dealing here with timid pygmies (no doubt it is no longer politically correct to use the term “pygmy”) who try to censor themselves before the censors censor them, who play games in order to smuggle their petty ideas past the thought-customs, but with the old work of giants whose sole censor is time itself.

What Milton actually wrote:

Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden . . .

Sing, Heavenly Muse . . .

Points of interest:

1. “Paradise Lost” is probably the only epic to take as its cosubject a fruit.

2. Some sixty years before the completion of “Paradise Lost,” we find T. Washington in his translation of Nicholay’s Voyage (1585) writing: “Apples of paradice, which they call muses.” Therefore, it is far from implausible that Milton was aware that his words could mean that he was invoking a fruit to sing about a fruit.

3. As I have already pointed out, even a cursory perusal of Genesis shows that Adam and Eve were created mortal, that God lied to them, and that God expelled them from Eden before they could eat the fruit of a tree that would render them immortal. Therefore, Milton’s entire epic is based on a faulty premise, a rotten banana on whose peel Our Lady of Christ’s slipped up.

Bash (at least in its English transliteration) contains great dendritic potency. Not only does the whole name signify “banana-plant” but also in it Buddha’s holy bo tree embraces Yg-gdrasil, “the ash-tree binding together heaven, earth, hell, and extending its branches over the whole world and above the heavens” (Chambers’), the tree which itself conceals Ydra).

I hope my work proves to be a piece of esemplastic bananotechnology.

Another letter from the Master of American Haiku:

Just returned from a three day visit to Mt. Baldy Zen Center to see my old teacher. At 91 he looks and thinks frighteningly young. Spent some time with Leonard. . . .

I brought a copy of “Fun de Siècle” which I had him read aloud to the tune of Suzanne. He particularly liked the verses, or was it the rhymes, “And Bill’s Bar” & “The Millennial Olympics.” Rhyming “margaritas” with “suite as” is remarkable.

His comment on your commentary, which I only told him about, was “I hope he doesn’t spend too much time on it.”

Just another letter, which, naturally, arrived on my birthday, i.e., on the exact anniversary of the day I first unleashed Fun de Siècle on an unsuspecting audience that included L.’s ex, Suzanne. Difficult to read aloud to a tune—I imagine L. delivering the poem in a kind of growling Sprechgesang. If only he would record it. . . . (A pity that Dag, who did record it, cut out L.’s two favorite stanzas.) I wrote and asked Steve to tell L. that I was quite prepared to share the proceeds fifty-fifty.

Bananas need a lot of irrigation, but the time to close the sluices approaches. Who is to say how much time is too much? I hear you, L., up there on your holy mountaintop, and I appreciate your concern, but my feelings are that I have spent exactly the right amount of time on this piece of ramification. Or rather, that it has spent precisely the right amount of time on me.

What can I say? What can I do? For a start I can stop being the bloody restrained Englishman, with the stiff upper lip and the fair play and the phlegm, and dance up and down and shout with excitement because I really am thrilled, chuffed, amazed, honored, flattered, overcome with emotion, that my poem has reached the ears and the mouth of L., and that news of the existence of my bananarrative has reached him as well.

But don’t misunderstand me. I am not a groveling groupie. I am not a hero-worshiper. L.’s fame cuts no ice with me. My excitement is for my child, my poem. I marvel at how far it has traveled/is traveling. The thrill lies in the fact that the poem has now reached the cell of a Buddhist monk in whose garden, thousands of miles away, grow the banana-plants in whose elephant-ear leaves I first became aware of the wind blowing some fifteen months ago. Ach, that wind, perhaps the most mystical and mysterious of all the words in the poem or in this text. Air, spiritus, breath, pneuma, animus, anima, ruach, prana. That wind . . .

Suzanne

The day that Fate first put our heads—Suzanne’s and mine—together, she certainly had her imagination about her. My grizzled scalp full of poetry and symbols. Suzanne’s ageless countenance concealing obsessions with mosquitoes and mosquito nets, chair covers, and cryptic expressions for us all.

A book of Irving Layton’s poems in L.’s house has the inscription:

For Suzanne

for when your petite attractive nose grows cold and numb.

Much love,

Irving

Hydra, Greece

He had the right idea, to concentrate on her physical features and not to attempt to probe beyond them. L. tried to exorcise her in a book, but I don’t think he completely succeeded. As he says himself, there is not enough death in his book, and too much art and artifice.

The man’s lady clamors for inclusion. I met her for the first time on the day I finished writing Fun de Siècle. She was foisted upon me on the evening I first performed the poem, when I still mistakenly supposed that she was the same Suzanne who takes you down and gives you tea and oranges. She has been with me ever since, either as a vengeful presence thumping down uneven stones with the aid of the Sisters of Mercy or as an enigmatic absence.

A year after the first rendering of Fun de Siècle, as this text was nearing its conclusion, she returned, right on cue, and came into sharper focus. Sharper but never sharp focus. She carries a kind of invisible force field around her that always blurs attempts to see her or to depict her with any clarity.

I’m not sure how that phrase sneaked past my inner censor— “as this text was nearing its conclusion.” If ever there was an inconclusive, unconcluded piece of writing, this is it. A section from an endless tape.

Orson Welles apparently said: “If you want a happy ending, it depends on where you stop the story.” He might as well have said: “If you want an ending, you have to stop the story.” This is a story, all right, but I am powerless over where to stop it, when to stop it, how to stop it. Even death won’t do the trick. Especially not death.

This is a story, and Suzanne is in it. I am glad she is not the Suzanne of that song. If she had been, she would not have provided me with nearly so much rich material. One Greek neighbor’s nickname for her is I Pendámorphi, “the five-times beautiful one,” which is how Greeks refer to the Beauty in the tale of Beauty and the Beast. Just to complicate matters, in The Spice-Box of Earth, which he published long before he met his future mate, L. has a poem titled “The Sleeping Beauty” that contains the lines:

“You don’t understand what story I am from,”

she said,

“we both know who lives in this garden.”

To this day, nobody understands what story/anecdote/song/ myth Suzanne is from, but we all know who lives in L.’s garden.

SELF: “I haven’t set eyes on Suzanne yet. I haven’t seen her in the garden.”

EVANGELIA: “You wouldn’t see her. She’s like a part of the garden. She’s like a locust among the leaves. Not like me— big and shouting ‘Hello!’”

Maybe she is Kassandra, opening wide her saucer eyes and murmuring her unheeded truths. Kassandra to L.’s wolf, forever cutting short the prologue with her cries of “Woe!”

Once Suzanne hung “a phantasm with horns” on the door of the children’s bedroom. Evangelia took it down, saying it was not good for the children. But Suzanne berated her and put it back up.

Scene: the Hydranet office, where David presides over computers that are supposed, like Rumpelstiltskin, to spin gold out of straw. Enter Suzanne. She is trying to send “the first e-mail I’ve ever sent in my life” to an uncertain address in Thailand. She hopes the recipient will visit her on Hydra bringing “tapes of flute music.” Exit, with a reference to the fable of the Princess and the Pea.

Another of Suzanne’s personae is that of Goldilocks—“Who’s been opening my cupboard? Who’s been tampering with my door?” Except, of course, that although she ought to be Goldilocks, she behaves more like a bear. She cannot help standing all myths and folk tales on their heads. In this instance, she suspects those three ursine characters, Sarah, Steve, and, especially, Evangelia, “who creeps around.”

This summer we had been having what could pass for “normal” exchanges when we met in the street or on the harbor. Much to my disappointment, I must confess, as I prefer to create my own Suzanne who is not of this world and speaks only in oracles. We had even reached the point where she seriously asked my opinion about her transplanting some of the banana-plants. “I understand bananas,” she told me. “I grew up in a banana culture—in Florida.” What could be more normal than that?

One night I had just had a shower and was stark naked when I heard Suzanne’s voice calling me from below. I hastily flung on a dressing gown and stepped out onto my balcony.

SELF: “Let’s do a Romeo and Juliet in reverse.”

SHE: “That’s not such a bad idea.”

I explained to her how to come around to where I was. She tripped lightly up my fourteen metal steps, and there she was, on my terrace. Straightaway she was transfixed by the lamplit view of “her” garden and “her” bananas. There was no suggestion that I overlooked “her” property too much or infringed her privacy (for which, incidentally, there is no word in Greek). She simply marveled at my splendid prospect, my bananorama.

She told me she’d been pruning today. Talk about the dread fury with the abhorrèd shears. But the main purpose of her visit was to ask me to interpret between her and Evangelia.

She launched into a huge tirade. She alleged that Evangelia is skilled in the art of using sob stories to extract money from people. She claimed that she (Suzanne) had handed over a fistful of dollars toward the dowry of Evangelia’s daughter so that said daughter could marry her policeman boyfriend. All the thanks Suzanne received, she maintained, was to be shopped by Evangelia for using drugs, and the son-in-law policeman used the bust to advance his career.

(I have now heard many versions of this story. What is extraordinary is not that they are all different but that they all agree on one point—i.e., that L.’s house was awash with drugs. Whatever the drugs were, they were more serious than cannabis. Nobody has tried to deny this. Yet everybody expresses enormous indignation that the house should have been raided.)

L. had told Suzanne that Steve had said that the stones in the garden were difficult to walk on. (They are.) “Only if you’re a paraplegic,” snorted Suzanne. She made no reference to Koulis’s and Evangelia’s vegetables, only claimed that that part of the garden had needed “paving” because it was full of weeds and dust— and Evangelia never weeded. She expressed a hope that the cement would acquire a patina with time.

She came out with one of her splendid one-liners: “Do you smell the incense from the little chapel?” (Aghios Tykhon). I don’t. Much.

SELF: “So now you can understand the poem about the wind in the bananas.”

SHE: “I would have thought it was too far to hear the wind.”

SELF: “Not when it’s a strong wind.”

Leaving behind floating pockets of a surprisingly crude scent, she departed. I felt as though I had entertained something unawares, not an angel exactly but a combination of Eve, Lilith, the Serpent, and a Cherub with a flaming sword—to name but a few of the ingredients.

A day or two later, for about an hour and a half, I interpreted between Evangelia and Suzanne. We sat in the once beautiful kitchen with doors and windows closed to keep out the beast. We wandered round the house. We walked in the garden. Everywhere we talked.

I felt like a cross between a boxing referee and one of those pathetic international negotiators who fly around the world going through the motions of arbitrating between parties who will never be reconciled. I had to keep reminding myself that I was only the interpreter and not to allow myself to be influenced by the barrage of propaganda coming from either side. Detachment came more easily if I kept reminding myself how this improbable situation had started with a wind, bananas, a poem.

We inspected windows, rice-paper lampshades, rubbish heaps, doors, plants, trees, the Sisters of Mercy’s hobbling cobbles. We discussed the lavatory, the small oven, the bamboo chairs, the cushion covers, Steve and Sarah, L.’s money, workmen. . . .

The two women circled each other, looking for openings. Suzanne again alleged that Evangelia had misused L.’s contributions, and that that was why inferior work had been done on the house. Evangelia countered with claims that Suzanne was easy prey for workmen who cheated her by, for example, charging her huge sums of money to remove sacks of garden rubbish and rubble, which they then transported only a few yards.

Suzanne said she wanted some plants removed from pots on the terrace and replanted in the garden. Evangelia hissed in my ear: “It’s to stop me going onto the terrace to water them. She thinks I spy on her.” Suzanne’s latest obsession was that all flowers must be gray or white—“I have a thing against red.” She pointed out a particular gray-leaved foliage plant that she said she loved and wanted everywhere.

Mostly Suzanne was very meek. She said she respected Evangelia because she was getting older and had a heart problem—she tried not to overwork her. Evangelia (aside to me) pooh-poohed all this, saying that Suzanne was simply paving (!) the way to dismissing Evangelia.

Evangelia went on and on about how Suzanne had allowed everything in the garden to dry up—“people are talking”—and how Suzanne had been watering trees, particularly the bananas, in the wrong way, pointing the hose downward so that soil was washed away from plants instead of toward them. As soon as she muttered to me that the garden would never have dried up if Koulis had still been looking after it, Suzanne pounced on the name “Koulis” and demanded a translation. Evangelia believes that Suzanne speaks good Greek and only pretends not to understand and to need an interpreter.

Suzanne took us down to the scary basement to demonstrate how she plans to lock all her most precious possessions, such as wineglasses and mosquito nets, in the two small rooms so that nobody can get at them. To show how valuable her belongings are, she mentioned that she had paid excess baggage charges of three thousand French francs in order to bring the correct accessories for her dinner parties. She will retain the only key.

I am beginning to think as deviously as Evangelia. It rapidly occurred to me that on the pretext of protecting her bits and pieces, Suzanne would be rendering inaccessible most of the books in the house, meaning that I would no longer be able to browse among the dog-eared, heterogeneous collection and finger such gems as the poems of Nazim Hikmet (a Turkish poet dear to the Banana Princess), an 1890s volume on the Jesuits in Canada, or Nick Germanacos’s English translation of Margarita Karapanou’s Kassandra and the Wolf.

I can see that that way madness lies. I can hear Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke yelling at me: “You think the universe revolves round you, don’t you?” The trouble is that, since I’m happy in my paranoia, I see no reason to fight it. It’s harmless, and more sanity would mean less creativity. There may well be a universe that does not revolve around me, but these pages are about the one that does.

The parts of the house that I saw seemed exactly the same as when I last saw them a few months ago, before Sarah and Steve left. It felt very strange to be back as an interpreter in a house where I had been so welcome as a friend. But even stranger to be aware that Suzanne’s was the face that had launched a thousand notebook entries in Death of a Lady’s Man.

I could scarcely contain my thrill of recognition when, as we stood on the terrace, Suzanne gestured with a bony hand toward the roof, saying: “I’m going to have something done about the eaves.” I was remembering this passage from page 163:

Yesterday my dark companion told me to come quickly and quietly, but I missed what she tried to save for me: two sparrows mating in the eaves. “Have you ever seen them fuck?”

She used her fingers to evoke the shuddering tail-feathers.

It is curious that another passage (p. 108) also connects Suzanne with a bird:

She said, Leonard, whenever you leave the room an orange bird comes to the window.

At certain times of year, black redstarts with their rufous tails frequent L.’s garden. In this one sentence, L. has managed to combine Suzanne’s evident interest in birds with her capacity for making enigmatic, Delphic pronouncements. She is not only a Kassandra but also a female auspex, or bird-seer, an oionistria. Indeed, she herself is more bird than locust, with her petite beak and claw-like fingers—a leaf-warbler or a wren, perhaps, flitting among the foliage.

As impartial interpreter, I managed to remain aloof until Suzanne offered Evangelia, as a peace token, a five-thousand-drachma note to pay an Albanian woman who had done some work in the house. I insisted that a very reluctant Evangelia accept it. But it would take more than that to make peace. Evangelia, in her turn, insisted on my translating: “You don’t understand about bills because you’re not used to paying out money.”

Having had the last word, Evangelia still wanted the last last word. As we were leaving, she embarked on a scathing attack on the manner in which Suzanne, with the assistance of an Albanian, had transplanted two or three banana trees. Suzanne insisted that she does have horticultural expertise—she demonstrated how she had deftly pruned various other fruit trees. The punch line came with Evangelia uttering, and me translating, the immortal words: “There is no banana problem.”

When I got home to my Olivetti, I hammered out in capitals: I CANNOT BELIEVE ANY OF THIS IS HAPPENING.

Evangelia commented to me: “It’s such a pity they broke up. They could have become one of the leading families on Hydra.”

The following morning, I met Suzanne for coffee at her request. I took her to one of my favorite places, a café called the Veranda, high up above the port. She said she had never been there before. We had some pleasant conversation about:

A. How she works as a copyist at the Louvre. I resisted the temptation to ask her if she ever copies the Mona Lisa. Security is tight, and the chief rule is that a copy must never have the same dimensions as the original. I suppose this is to discourage copyists from hanging their own work on the wall and walking out with an original. But I still couldn’t see how it deterred an expert copyist from forgery. I tried, unsuccessfully, to question her about this. It seems a curious profession (if profession it be), but it would be hard to dream up one more suitable for the mysterious Suzanne.

B. How she was brought up as a Christian and found herself unable to bring her children up in the Jewish way L. wanted. He supplied the Law, she said. Not clear what she supplied.

C. How her son, Adam, has made a record of his own songs. (I later discovered that the album has the imaginative title “Adam Cohen.” If he makes another one, what will he call it?) How her daughter, Lorca, used to work as a pastry-cook but gave it up after a chef shouted at her for dropping a tart. Lorca now has a boutique in Los Angeles that sells furniture from the 1930s.

D. How she believes in the Divine in everything, and that you can only make art if you have an idea of the Divine as you work. She hesitates to criticize Campbell’s soup cans, but she cannot see the Divine therein. In her copying work she returns again and again to the old masters. She is slowly attempting her own original painting. She is working on pictures here on Hydra. A nomadic New Zealander is teaching her gilding techniques. Lily, gild thyself!

E. How, if only she had money, she would love to carry out major work on the Hydra property. To build up walls, to dig out earth, to expose the buried ruin as a “feature,” to open up a big window in the basement, to redecorate the interior. It seems that after all, Suzanne and Evangelia may be sisters under the skin.

I was enjoying all this, more than happy that Suzanne showed no inclination to ask me any questions about myself, when suddenly a woman with a little girl came and plonked herself down beside us. It became abundantly clear that Suzanne had asked this lady to join us for a specific purpose.

She turned out to be an American-Greek, married to a Hydraean, who had done interpreting for Suzanne in the past and said she was very glad to relinquish the job. At Suzanne’s prompting, they both launched into a comprehensive effort to blacken Evangelia’s name. Suzanne called Evangelia a liar and a thief. The other woman dutifully backed up everything Suzanne said. I did my best to say as little as possible.

Suzanne returned yet again to the subject of the notorious drug raid. She claimed that there was no question of any old man or “elder” spying on her. The whole thing, she alleged, was the work of Evangelia, with the help of and in order to help her policeman son-in-law. Suzanne and her man friend escaped jail by paying fifty thousand dollars. After the payment of the money, Suzanne said the police destroyed the drugs they had seized.

I had the happy thought, while she was wittering, that the fact that the whole affair culminated in a court case strengthened the parallel with the story of Susanna and the Elders—I had not consciously made this connection before. But, as with most analogies in this bananarrative, the story is turned upside down by the fact that this Suzanne was guilty as charged. It almost tempts one to reopen the original case. Maybe it was not as open-and-shut as clever Daniel made out.

(Jane, who used to live in one of the topmost houses on the hill overlooking the harbor, painted a surreal picture of how, one scorching summer afternoon when everyone and everything was asleep, years ago, she happened to look down from her terrace and saw that L.’s garden was swarming with little men in dark suits carrying briefcases. It was the bust.)

Suzanne departed uttering threats that Evangelia was going to receive her marching orders as soon as possible from either Leonard or Adam or both. . . .

A day or two later, Evangelia and I had another session chez Suzanne. Evangelia was still seething beneath the surface, although this time Suzanne was all sweetness and light. She was dressed in a minuscule black one-piece with no sleeves, terminating in exiguous shorts. She is tiny. No wonder Evangelia says you could mistake her for a locust among the leaves.

There was no hint of her wanting to have Evangelia fired. She asked Evangelia to do some cleaning for her before she leaves. She consulted her about which workmen to employ. Evangelia was actually telephoning a workman in the back room when the man Suzanne had been waiting for for five weeks arrived to work on windows and doors.

Evangelia hastily put down the telephone. But making the call had given us the pretext to go into the back room—L.’s workroom, where Steve used to sit writing, when he was here, in the “Marianne” chair. I just had time to notice some huge canvases of Suzanne’s laid out on the floor. She said it didn’t matter if we walked on them. They looked vague and abstract.

While Suzanne was talking to the workman, Evangelia told me that a year or two ago, Suzanne had produced a truly wonderful painting of L. playing the guitar under some trees (bananas?). It was for one of L.’s birthdays. “You see,” commented Evangelia, “they still have friendly relations.”

Suzanne told us that for the replacement of a window, she would have to get an estimate from this workman that she would then send to L. for his approval.

EVANGELIA: “But I thought you said that you had already given him the money for the window?”

SUZANNE (sheepishly): “Oh yes, I forgot. Thank you for reminding me.”

EVANGELIA (aside to me): “You see, this is what she is like all the time. By the time the workman has finished, she’ll probably have forgotten again.”

Suzanne had been watering the garden during her sojourn here, but now she asked Evangelia to take over the task again. Evangelia said she would do it, but (pointedly) in the evenings, not in the early mornings like Suzanne, when the sun quickly dries everything up. At night the water has time to sink in and do good.

Suzanne stressed that Evangelia was not to prune anything or plant anything. This despite her instructions last time to plant the gray-leaved thing everywhere. What a georgic! What an eclogue! What a back-to-front idyll!

Suzanne thanked me profusely for my help and promised to buy me a meal the following evening. . . .

Staggered home to reflect again on the utter strangeness of finding myself on the inside of a scene I had started off contemplating from the outside. The analogy occurred to me of Alice Through the Looking-Glass. Furthermore, Suzanne is Alice. That doesn’t mean that she can’t be Kassandra, Susanna, Eve, Lilith, Medusa, and the rest as well. But she is definitely Alice spaced out on magic mushrooms; Alice adrift in a world of White Knights and Red Queens; Alice shrunk after drinking the labeled bottle.

Sadly, I don’t have the Alice books to hand. I can never remember what comes in which. But it doesn’t matter because Suzanne inhabits both Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world. L.’s garden even looks like Tenniel’s drawings—flamingoes, hedgehogs, and playing-card people would not be out of place. Evangelia is either the Duchess or the Red Queen or both. Goodness knows who I am. Roger the Dodgson? Roger White Rabbit? Old Father Roger? An Anglo-Saxon Interpreter?

But, yes, it is a question of breaking through a glass or a membrane to enter a world where everything works, if not backward, at least according to unaccustomed, surreal rules. As I keep trying to stress, there are no boundaries; there are no barriers, no glass, no membrane; but we have to pass through them to discover their nonexistence. And Suzanne holds the mirror. Ultimately, Suzanne is also Suzanne.

We are in the realm of the Metaphysicals, of Thomas Traherne’s puddle—“When that thin skin is broken”—and George Herbert’s:

A man that looks on glass

On it may stay his eye,

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass

And there the heaven espy.

Of Vaughan’s “I saw eternity the other night”—completely casual and matter-of-fact. Isn’t it obvious? We are in Lorca’s pastry shop. She is the Queen of Hearts making tarts. We are also in Lorca’s Garden of Lunar Grapefruit—which are, of course, bananas.

Everything means. I’d love to be able to explain my vision so simply that an adult could understand it. (Children, of course, understand it anyway.) But I can’t. Who said: A poem should not mean, but be? Whoever it was missed the next vital step. A poem means by being; by being a poem means; by being everything means. You can come here to search, as I have. You can leave here to search, as L. has. It is here, and here is everywhere.

The following evening, Suzanne was waiting for me in the courtyard of the little restaurant. Another surprise, I must confess. I had expected her at least to be late, at most to forget altogether. Again she asked me nothing about myself. She was not feeling very well. On the one hand, she said, this could be because she had drunk some iced tea made with tap water; on the other hand it was possible that Evangelia had bewitched her.

Suzanne said that a mirror had been placed in the street opposite her house door, so that when she stepped outside, she was confronted with her own image. She suspected Evangelia of doing this. She said she had now moved the mirror. She didn’t say whether it had cracked from side to side, or whether she had beheld anything else in it—a knight in armor, say, or an angel— besides herself.

Mirror, mirror, in the street,

Whose nose is the most petite?

(One of the things I enjoy about this narrative—and oh, how much I enjoy it!—is that while I am busy straining after gnats, dirty great camels amble in and make themselves comfortable without my noticing.)

“Ask Evangelia,” Suzanne urged me. “Ask her whether she knows anything about black magic. Don’t mention me, of course. Just tell her casually that you are having a problem with somebody and wonder whether she knows any charms that would help.” (Yes, Suzanne. And what about yourself, my dear? Would you happen to know any?)

She ordered a lot of food but ate very little and fed as much as she could to passing cats. She told me that even as we were speaking, she was being plagued by mosquitoes, although I couldn’t see any. She placed a small plastic device on the table with a glowing red light. She said it was emitting a high-frequency noise that was supposed to keep mosquitoes away. She was also wearing four different kinds of repellent. (Talk about the princess and the pea.) I dared to suggest that possibly covering up her exposed areas of skin might be more effective, whereupon she produced a shawl that she draped around her shoulders, complimenting me on my good idea.

Mainly to make some conversation (which was in short supply), I told her that my wife (my second wife—we are separated but not divorced) was coming to visit me tomorrow. Suzanne livened up a bit at this news and (again without asking anything about the background) predicted that I might be amazed at the outcome. “Men always credit women with being more subtle than they really are. She just wants to see you.”

Inevitably we ended up talking about L.’s garden. For this reader of Death of a Lady’s Man (which, of course, I did not mention—I wonder whether she has read it), it was extraordinary to sit and listen to the Man’s Woman expatiate on how the garden used to be full of weeds and daisies. She even admitted that the bumpy stones might have been a mistake. “But the Irish girls had nothing else to do that summer. At least they keep the weeds away.”

She spoke about how she has transplanted (with the help of Albanians) two or three of the banana-plants. (I had noticed that this had been done but sadly did not witness the actual process— they must be ten to fifteen feet tall. Evangelia, naturally, alleged that the plants had been deliberately repositioned to block her view.) “I wish I had seen them on the move,” I said. “It must have been like Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Everything is symbolic, isn’t it?”

A day or two later, in the cool of the evening, I saw Evangelia watering the garden and called out to her. She beckoned me over. On the broad terrace (the deck, as Steve calls it): two big sofas with cushions, three or four large bamboo armchairs ditto, and a table. An arrangement out of La Jalousie that M. Robbe-Grillet could have spent several pages describing.

Quivering with indignation, Evangelia took me on a quick tour of the garden. “SHE has ruined MY garden”, she kept saying. “It was beautiful when Koulis and I looked after it. Now it is a mess.” She claimed that by inexpert watering, Suzanne had washed away the stones surrounding the trees in little whitewashed circles. (The other day Suzanne ordered Evangelia: No more whitewashing of trees or stones.) Angrily she led me to a vine arbor where Suzanne had been “pruning” (mainly picking off shriveled grapes) and had left the debris on the ground. “Who does she think is going to pick all this up? Anyway, it’s the wrong time of year for pruning.”

Up on the terrace, Evangelia shouted in a peremptory way for Suzanne to come out. Suzanne appeared and remained calm and courteous while Evangelia rumbled on. I translated: “You have ruined her garden.” (Whose garden? I kept thinking of Under the Volcano.) But miraculously the threat of eruption passed, and talk turned to the comparatively safer subject of cushion covers.

Ralph (Steve’s name for it, even though it appears to be a bitch), the mangy poodle confined to the roof opposite, started to bark and then had a crap in full view. We all three united in criticizing Ralph’s owners. Suzanne observed that there was an unfortunate tendency among Greeks to keep poodles as status symbols (what status?)—only she said “doodles” by mistake and gigglingly corrected herself.

While all this was happening, Evangelia suddenly rushed down to the street without explanation. Looking over the wall, we saw her groveling in the central gutter to uproot a small, nondescript plant. She rushed breathlessly back up the stairs, presented the specimen to Suzanne, and told her to plant it. Suzanne and I were bewildered. (More black magic?) Evangelia departed in dudgeon. Suzanne behaved perfectly throughout.

I stayed on a little longer, although declining the offer of a glass of wine. This time we did talk about the Mona Lisa, as there had been some articles in the press about the pros and cons of restoring it. It transpired that it is not one of the paintings that Suzanne copies in the Louvre, but she loves it and believes it could not be restored without being ruined.

Although almost nothing in this bananologue is contrived, I have to confess that I deliberately raised the subject of La Gioconda: (a) recalling how I had brought in the theme right at the beginning of this text before I had any idea what I was embarked upon (I still don’t) and (b) because I could not resist the secret kick of hearing Leonardo’s lady speak of another lady by another Leonardo.

Let alone (c): (c) is the most exquisite pleasure of all, known only to perverts like me—that of manipulating an unwitting person to say something while, at the same time, you are nursing the secret that you will go home and make the conversation part of a rambling construction you are engaged upon. No wonder most writers take refuge in fiction. No wonder most writers of nonfiction are so unpopular. I am unrepentant. Giving the narrative a nudge is all part of the story.

My wife had duly made her visit. While she was here, we bumped into Suzanne in the street, and I introduced them. Now Suzanne and I stood chatting amicably about our relationships with our ex-partners. She said she now gets on well with L. I said I now get on well with Jules. She thanked me again for all my help.

Later I had to face an inquisition from Evangelia and made at least two errors. One (I plead in mitigation that I was under intense pressure): I admitted that Suzanne had said uncomplimentary things about Evangelia. But after that I dug my heels in and refused to detail them. Interestingly, Evangelia’s first question was: “Did she say that I was the cause of the breakup between her and Leonardo?” At least I was able to say “No” to that, hand on heart.

Two: I mentioned that Suzanne had said that “the spying old man” in the house of the other Suzanne had never existed, and that it was Evangelia herself who had shopped her to the police. Evangelia, smart as any lawyer, seized on the fact that this meant I had revealed to Suzanne that Evangelia and I had been talking about the “bust.” I ought not to have done this.

Evangelia and Koulis then revised their story, saying that it was an elderly couple in the house next door who had spied on Suzanne and reported her. The windows, they explained, had been differently sited at the time. Evangelia kept asking: “Why would I report her? What had I got to gain?”

Evangelia continued at length about how she believes that what people do in their own homes, even if it is illegal, is sacred. She gave some graphic examples of the kind of thing she alleges that Suzanne and her friends used to get up to in L.’s absence, adding that she (Evangelia) was always loyal to Leonardo and would never have violated his trust.

As I was leaving, Evangelia lent me a copy of Takhydromos (Postman), a glossy Greek magazine, for April 7, 1988, containing an interview with L., translated into Greek, conducted in Paris on the occasion of the launch there of his album I’m Your Man. She lent it to me because of this passage:

I speak a little Greek. I have friends. I have neighbours on Hydra whom I know very well. Koulis and Evangelia who live next door to me, are my family.

Evangelia didn’t need to demonstrate to me the love that obviously exists between L. and herself and Koulis. She knew that. But she was justifiably proud of having that affection testified to in print.

Lovely stuff. But I was thunderstruck by an illustration that accompanied the article. It was a photograph of the poster used in France to advertise I’m Your Man. Under the headline “The Masterpiece of Leonard” (Le chef d’oeuvre de Léonard) is a picture of the record sleeve, complete with the inset of L. eating “his” banana. It is being held up and displayed by none other than La Gioconda herself, wearing the enigmatic smile of Suzanne.

L. continues ruminatively munching, oblivious of the Mona Lisa peering hugely over the top of the record like an inscrutable Chad who might be asking: “Wot, no bananas?” He imagines that at worst, “what everyone else sees is a guy with his mouth full of banana.” Little does he know that what we spectators actually observe is a guy with his mouth full of banana who, without knowing it, is in the grip of a Sphinx asking impossible riddles. Behind you! Behind you!

Suzanne left without saying good-bye to Evangelia, who says Suzanne has never set foot in her house and never wishes so much as a “good day” to anyone in the neighborhood. Evangelia summoned me from L.’s garden to inspect the house with her. She wanted me to translate little labels in English that Suzanne had stuck around the place.

On the refrigerator: “I have been painted with a new kind of paint for which we do not know the formula. Please do not place hot or scratchy things on me or on the table.”

On the small electric oven: “Please clean me after each use.”

On a line of books on the work table: “Please return the book by A. Huxley. It is an important book for this house.”

On the door of the small downstairs room in the scary basement: “This door is locked. Please do not force it. Only personal possessions are stored here.”

Suzanne clearly thought (a) that Steve and Sarah had taken the (unspecified) book by Huxley and (b) that they were going to come back and read all her notices. Whom else could they possibly have been directed at?

Again, we are back in the world of Alice, where everything carries an instruction such as “Eat Me,” “Drink Me.” And where does that line come from—somewhere in Betjeman, surely— “That was writ by A. Huxléy”? Why, asked Evangelia, doesn’t she just write to “Uncle Steve” and ask him if he has the book? And, she inquires, did she really go through all those old books and decide that just one, that one, was missing? I regret to report that Evangelia called Suzanne a fasina, a word not in my dictionary. Apparently it means a kind of floor-cloth.

Evangelia was not pleased because Suzanne had departed leaving all the aforementioned furniture on the terrace as well as a sort of uncollapsed collapsible cupboard just inside the front door. She complained that she would have to find workmen to deal with all these and other things.

Suzanne had put practically every glass, plate, dish, spoon, etc. behind her Bluebeardian locked door as well as many important books for this house. In the workroom she had left the old guitar hanging on the wall, a strange old musical instrument on top of the glass-fronted cupboard, and a new painting (probably by her, as it displayed much gilt work) of some sort of sacred Asiatic face. Evangelia meant to suggest Buddha, but, by a slip of the tongue, she named Judas.

Sleepwalking

Death is wonderful and beautiful. It happens to each one of us, yet we do not celebrate it sufficiently. We rage against the dying of the light when we ought to rejoice. It is a mystery like the Eleusinian mysteries. It is a mystery in the sense of a sacrament. Go accepting. Go great and gracious. Do go gentle.

I saw Death in a shining lane

Jolly, not grim;

In one hand a delicate sickle—

By that I recognised him.

(Death also, more enigmatically, carried a Greek translation of Studies in European Realism by George Lukacs. He asked me if I thought it was any good. Death is not omnipotent, let alone omniscient. He is a supreme expert, with a monopoly in his field, but of course the poor creature [not sure if that is the right word] needs advice on matters outside his absolute, but narrow, territory. He is pathetically grateful to those few who will even give him the time of day—or the timelessness of eternity.)

It all began with L., Steve Sanfield, George Lialios, and maybe one or two others passing the Swiss LSD and poring over Evans-Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. (When Steve took me to visit George in his haunted Schloss on the hill, I was privileged to handle the very same two volumes of Evans-Wentz that used to spark their debates and meditations.) Elsewhere, slightly earlier, the young Lawrence Durrell had discovered and been excited by the same text.

It began with death. But death as in-betweenness. Death as life. Death as positive. Death as a journey with maps. (Death has been far more thoroughly charted than Hydra ever has.) Death as a trip. It began not with birth but with burial. “Everything goes underground and rejoins the game!” With Herakles/ Hercules burying the Hydra’s immortal head. With L. burying the first thing he ever wrote, sewn into his dead father’s bow tie. With the buried foundations of the house of the woman who sold pease-pudding during the war. (If war doesn’t kill you, love will.) With her buried cauldron and stirring stick with cross-shaped end.

Again—as throughout this bananarrative—the myths become mixed. L. himself, as I now perceive, contains more than a little of Prospero. Yet the staff that may or may not lie buried in his garden belonged to a sort of Sycorax figure. (Canine Caliban lives just around the corner.) Magic is afoot. The spagyrical reconciliation of opposites is at work.

There comes to mind John Wain’s visionary poem “Prospero’s Staff in the Earth,” one fragment of which reads :

The most important thing was the forgiveness.

The staff was buried because the quarrel was.

The magic died with no one left to hate.

It was the cheated man who studied runes:

On the atoll of his rejection he brooded over spells. . . .

(A runic incantation!) And the conclusion of which goes:

So on the island of Prospero’s rough magic

the polished staff put knowledge in the earth,

the highest knowledge and yet the commonest. . . .

While off the rocky point, the book sways down

to the sea-bed, and the magician’s house

feels once again the pulse of life, the warmth,

the healing flesh, the young man and the girl.

(The old man and the young girl. Banana Princess. If only . . . )

Meanwhile, Death of a Lady’s Man constitutes one long brooding over spells, with frequent temporal reversions to the burial theme: “the buried fig-tree,” “the cemetery of love,” “a funeral in the garden,” and so on. I think of Sir Thomas Browne, with his Urne Burial and The Garden of Cyrus, with its mystical quincunxes. The Garden of Leonardus.

L.’s book speaks to me in an uncanny way. He wrote much of it on his portable Olivetti Lettera 22, sitting on his terrace, looking over the imbricated roof tiles of the chapel of Aghios Tykhon to where I now sit writing this on my portable Olivetti Lettera 22, looking over the imbricated roof tiles of the chapel of the Cypriot saint Aghios Tykhon toward L.’s garden, L.’s bananas, and L.’s terrace. Through the looking glass. Through an endless hall of mirrors.

It is mid-September. One of the banana-plants that Suzanne transplanted in the summer looks very sick. The main clump is flourishing with panache, and has produced a new pizzle. Yesterday the woman who looks after the chapel of Aghios Tykhon (she calls him “the grandfather”) asked me to cut a heart out of paper for her son to stick on his fishing boat. I produced one out of red cardboard, and she was delighted. When I asked her why she couldn’t have done it herself, she just said: “I couldn’t.” Witchcraft? Black magic? Have I given my heart away?

It began with death. It continued with burying and burial. With cemeteries and cimetières. With koimitiria and nekrotapheia. Here is Rilke again, from Orchards:

The Angel’s view: perhaps the tips of trees

are roots that drink the skies;

and in the earth the beech’s deepest

roots look like silent summits.

For them, is not the earth transparent against

a sky full as a corpse?

In L.’s orchard, it is not so much that the tips of the bananas are roots, and the sky is “full as a corpse,” as that everything stands on its head. The sky becomes the earth, the earth the sky, and we all become the ocean. L.’s house is a reflection of the house of the woman who sold pease-pudding. His floor is her ceiling. His scary basement is her hospitable attic. The angels sing hosannas in her secret yellow daisies.

Things slide in all directions, will not be categorized or pigeonholed any more. L. himself is the field commander above the battle, an Olympian aloof from the fray. Suzanne ought to be Hera to L.’s Zeus; instead she becomes Eve to her son’s Adam. Adam himself ought to be Cain, yet his mother, the Witch of Elrod, turns out to be the one with the instinct for suppressing life.

Evangelia holds the answer to the riddle:

When Adam sided with Suzanne,

Who then was the gentleman?

“Why,” she says, “Kyrios Leonardos was always a gentleman. Of him I can say nothing but good.” Evangelia and Koulis ought to be Baucis and Philemon, Adam and Eve. Attempts are made to cast them out of the garden, but Evangelia fights back in her capacity as guardian angel-dragon, custodian of the bananas of the diasporades. An actual Philemon, on the fringes of the story, is tempted by a virgin and dies drunk.

Suzanne of Shalott refuses to accept that a curse has come upon her. Instead she lays curses on others. Mariana turns the moated grange into a domestic home with a child and a fireplace. All the women L.-Zeus-Orpheus has ever been involved with, including Danaë of the secret mulberries, form a shrill chorus of maenads, longing to tear him limb from limb but for ever frustrated because he has granted himself asylum in that place where they don’t let a woman kill you—the Tower of Song.

It began with death and cannot be concluded without death. (Although it cannot really be begun or concluded at all.) Slipping the d-word into the title—as L. does with Death of a Lady’s Man—doesn’t count. L. acknowledges this:

SHE HAS GIVEN ME THE BULLET

There is the bullet but there is no death. There is the mist but there is no death. There is the embrace but there is no death. There is the sunset but there is no death. There is the rotting and the hatred and the ambition but there is no death. There is no death in this book and therefore it is a lie.

My book contains death and, by the same token, is true. L. has become a Buddhist monk on a Californian mountaintop, where, I imagine, when he is not reading Fun de Siècle to the tune of “Suzanne”(as reported by Steve Sanfield), he is continuing the meditation on mortality that began on Hydra with The Book of the Dead, while I conduct my meditation on mortality and immortality, time and eternity, here in my oionoskopeion overlooking L.’s bananas. Neither of us could have done otherwise. We are both fulfilling our destinies as gregarious hermits, altruistic egoists, sedentary nomads. At least, I am. I can speak only for myself.

Ça marche. In my head I am trudging dusty roads of happy destiny, like Lawrence Durrell’s French tramps:

really at heart peripatetic philosophers who had opted out of ordinary society in order to make an almost religious retreat, perhaps to “redefine their deaths” while there was still time.

(Why is that marvelous phrase “redefine their deaths” in quotation marks? Is Durrell citing an even greater sage?) Yes, and by redefining our deaths, only by redefining our deaths, we validate our lives. The longer we postpone the attempt (the attempt is all-important; success is irrelevant), the more invalid we become.

Here on Hydra the dead are recalled by the appearance of their names at longer and longer intervals on telegraph posts and electricity poles that carry their own “Danger. Death” warnings. The printed notices that advertise funerals and memorial services are always appropriately fringed with gold. In the cemeteries, the graves are often embellished with photographs of the recently arrived. I pop in from time to time to be updated and to greet old acquaintances: “Ah, here you are! No wonder I haven’t bumped into you on the harbor lately!”

Last summer I became aware that more and more of the names and faces were familiar to me, as I became ever more embedded in the various communities of this island. Just before the annual Miaoulia festival, I decided to do something about this. I wrote a “Hymn for Miaoulis,” thinking of the silver urn in the local museum that contains Miaoulis’s heart; thinking of Herakles slaying the Hydra; thinking of those who had died in the past year; thinking of all Hydra’s dead; thinking of my own parents; thinking of earth, air, water, and, especially, fire.

I had had grandiose ideas of declaiming it, amplified by loudspeakers, at the harbor on the Saturday night of Miaoulia week, just before the boat-burning and the fireworks. Meester Grin would become famous and respected overnight. The mayor very kindly allowed me to read it on a Monday evening in the Melina Merkouri Hall, in English and in a Greek translation by my friend Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke (also, incidentally, a translator of Irving Layton), to a startled group of parents who had assembled to hear their children demonstrate their prowess on the piano. They took it very well. I now perceive that it was an act of homage that should have been an offering of love. Never mind. It was one more stage in the process of definition.

I’m bad at love, but I hope I may be improving. Yiota. Banana Princess. Yiota, purveyor of three-zippered bananas. Yiota, Little Red Riding Hood, tripping through the wilderness with a basket of bananas for the fasting grandmotherly nuns. Yiota, lover of misunderstood wolves. Yiota, running with the pack. Yiota. Ach!

Many months after I had written: “Have just reread The Song of Solomon. It is all there. It is the dénouement,” Yiota asked me to buy for her in Athens Khrestos Yiannaras’s Commentary on the Song of Songs. I duly did so, and she paid me for it. She read it and marked in pencil passages that seemed significant to her. Now she has insisted on giving the book to me, enriched with her delicate markings.

The text stretches my Greek—and my mind—to the limit and beyond. I marvel at much of it. But what I cannot agree with is Yiannaras’s ruthless setting in opposition of Love and Death. If it were either a whodunit or an alchemical work, I would expect the two to be happily united at the end. I fear that Yiannaras does not subscribe to the reconciliation of opposites—so he will have to depart, albeit with blessings on his head.

Not for nothing does L. have representations of the conjunction of opposites on the cover of Death of a Lady’s Man. Not for nothing does the name “Death” feature in the title, even though “there is no death in this book.” Not for nothing does L. constantly suggest that this book is based on a much larger, much more amorphous text, which he refers to as “My Life in Art.” Not for nothing do his conjoining spirits have wings, because they are in a state of volatile angelic fermentation. No generation without corruption. No life without death. And, pace Yiannaras, no love without death or death without love.

In the context of this story, at least, the most important thing about Yiannaras is that one exemplar of his book became a token of exchange between me and the Banana Princess. But his Commentary is not the dénouement. On the contrary, it is stubbornly nodose. The Song of Songs or The Song of Solomon remains the only true dénouement.

Yiota would not allow me to begin to discuss Yiannaras’s Commentary with her until I had finished reading it. I was tempted to penelopize, to go back to the beginning and start again in order to postpone the moment of discussion. Why? Because Yiannaras’s main theme is love for the Other, and I knew that I was going to have to tell Yiota that for me, she is the Other, and face the consequences. I was nervous.

In its ultimate manifestation, the Other is some sort of divinity. Our ideal aim, according to Yiannaras, is to love what he calls “God” as the Other. But we approach this aim by making another human being the Other first. Even this secondary level is almost impossible to attain because a lot of what we suppose to be love is actually egotistical desire. If I want the Banana Princess to be mine because she is young and pretty and intelligent and Greek, I am living in what Yiannaras calls “the way of death,” and no good will come of it. I swear I do not desire Yiota in that way. For me she is nearer to becoming a divinity.

Here is a specimen of Yiannaras on song:

Reality can only be articulated in the language of love. You divest yourself of the panoply of meaning and plunge, annihilated into the void, the nothing. Then the freedom of ignorance proves “beyond all knowledge.” “Beyond” is not the void, it is the leap. For every worthy diver there always waits the revelatory swallowing by the whale. There, “in the depths of the heart of the seas,” in the abyss that is the belly of the whale, God is eponymous bridegroom. His truth is “the whole of love.”

It has taken all this time, and all this scribbling, for me to realize that I too am a diver of Hydra. May I prove a worthy one. When I wrote the lines:

Sleepwalkers who’ve forgotten

Their bends-defying plunges

I thought I was talking about other people. I didn’t realize I was talking also about myself. In order to catch oneself off one’s guard, one must remain constantly alert. We have to dare to make an exodus, says Yiannaras; we have to risk a relationship with reality. If we do not, we remain in the “way of nature,” the “way of death.”

Despite my reservations about Yiannaras because he doesn’t appear to attempt a reconciliation between death and love, a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage between opposites, it has to be said that his extraordinary book contains some mighty fine thoughts and phrases. Yiota and I could probably have passed the whole winter debating his philosophy and theology. But it didn’t happen like that. Nor should it have happened like that.

As I approach the grand climacteric, I am aware that my physical death cannot be that far away. I believe that I am not afraid of it and that I am preparing for it and redefining it constantly. But Yiannaras made me conscious of and, yes, afraid of, another kind of death, “the way of death” that is inhabited by those who live alone without love.

Yiannaras makes it plain that a fearful man is to be despised, but I was still afraid. I thought (past tense) that if I told the Banana Princess that she was my Other and that I loved her, and she then sent me packing (I hardly dared hope that she would do otherwise), I would be inexorably consigned to “the way of death.” Oh, how I tied myself in rational knots!

Like a timorous adolescent, clutching the Commentary on the Song of Songs, I sought out Yiota in the hotel where she works. She opened the proceedings by handing back to me Barry Unsworth’s Pascali’s Island, saying she had found the English too difficult. She brought me coffee. She moved and spoke and existed with her customary grace. We started to discuss Yiannaras. Finally, I blurted out: “Yiota, my problem is that I love you. For me, you are the Other.”

Of course she behaved beautifully while making it clear that she did not love me in that kind of way. She doubted whether she loved anyone in that kind of way. She thought she probably loved only God. How objective was I being? Was I perhaps really being egotistical and seeing her as an object of desire? I couldn’t concentrate on her fusillade of questions. I felt detached and tingled all over as if from mild, not unpleasant, electric shock.

Did I love her as a god might love her? (I babbled that I could not do that; I was not a deity.) Why had I said that my problem was that I loved her? The fact that I saw it as a problem proved to her that I did not love her properly. (Can you imagine Beatrice haranguing Dante like this? Yes! What a pain he must have been.) I spluttered that for me, there were problems within problems. “Yes,” she retorted. “Just like your beloved bananas!”

Mister Bowles and Mister Green

Life continued. In the evening, I ate at the Pyrofani with two woman friends of my own age to whom I confided all. They said that I had been courageous to declare myself and opined, from their own experience, that Yiota was probably pleased to receive such a declaration, even without wishing to reciprocate. Possibly. Possibly.

But the two ladies then suggested that my problem might be that I am too cerebral and am only really happy with books, whether reading them or writing them. Oh dear; I fear they have me sussed. The subject of my discussions with Yiota is often books. We play Scrabble together, which is tantamount to selling doves in the Temple. It was the mutual—almost ritual—exchange of a book that led to my avowal of love. Now here I am putting the unclassifiable Banana Princess into my text like a botanist drying and pressing a specimen of what a guidebook calls “Hydra’s Florae.”

For all that, I am in love, and I do have real unbookish feelings, feelings that have undergone pleasantly surprising changes since my rejection as a lover but my retention, thank the gods, as a friend. I feel myself to be in what I can only describe as a state of grace. Instead of feeling wretched (as I expected), I feel blessed. I wander around with a warm feeling of elation inside me. By uttering my love I have raised it to a new level of intensity and made—at least for this aging, twice-married man—an extraordinary discovery, viz.: that one can be happily in love without having that love reciprocated.

I confirmed all this on my first visit to Yiota after the showdown. Over coffee we just talked and talked. She (I confess to being gratified to notice) gabbled a little nervously—maybe I did the same. But she made me as welcome as ever, met my gaze, smiled her fetching smile and laughed her lovely laugh.

I gazed back into her eyes, basking in the knowledge that she knew now that I loved her, even if she was not certain how I loved her. Discovery number two: I had all unwittingly strengthened the power of my love by voluntarily forbidding myself to speak about it. I suppose also the fact that Yiota appeared to be happy (naturally, I could not ask her if she was) added to my happiness.

So I rejoice in the discovery of all these new and different feelings. (I rejoice in the discovery that I have feelings at all.) All this is much more exciting for me than just popping into bed with somebody. If you do that, the Other goes out the window. But I do have to admit that my old habits are still flourishing and that I have been discovering and rediscovering literary parallels and texts to support and reinforce my experience—to redefine it, indeed—and to give me admonishments. First there is Yiannaras himself warning that “we come to know God by cultivating a relationship, not by comprehending a meaning.” For “God” read “the Other,” or just “Life.”

My dull brain has a nasty habit of perplexing and retarding its owner just when he ought to be leaping boldly into the abyss. Instead of the viewless wings of poesy, I opt for the visible scaffolding of prose so that the Banana Princesses (a plural to conjure with) of this world (if indeed she is of this world) may not accuse me either of not being a poet or of ruining my poem with explanations.

I still hope to have the last laugh. Once this text is completed, it will be seen for what it is: a seamless garment where prose and poetry merge, which really will require no further commentary— from me. Yiota will be right because the finished work will require no scholia. I will be right because the poem (Fun de Siècle) and its scholia together comprise the finished work. All shall be well because the Banana Princess and Mister Green will be reconciled.

(But yet again I have to remind myself that “once this text is completed” is merely a façon de parler. There can be no completion, only an arbitrary pause. Only a lifting from the loom. Only a casting off of stitches. But the weaving, the knitting, continue for ever. Isn’t that right, my contrary friend? Isn’t that how your garden grows?)

After Yiannaras comes Barry Unsworth. Having returned home in a daze after my confrontation with Yiota, I began to leaf through Pascali’s Island again. I had forgotten just how much my book it is. It is specially directed at cerebral pen-pushers who live alone on small Greek islands, observing more than participating, thinking too much and feeling too little. Quotation is unavoidable. In each of these extracts Pascali is speaking of himself:

My sense of impunity gradually flowered into art, into control of illusion, making me see myself and the island and the people on it as things which in my reports I could create.. . .

I am a believer in signs and portents. The world of sense signals to us, but all messages are encoded.

The island and all the people on it are my inventions. I have even invented a persona for myself. But when these fictional persons come for me they will have real knives.

I must have lent the book to Yiota with the arrogant supposition that it would help her to understand me better. Was Unsworth’s English really too difficult for her? Pascali, c’est moi, except that I seem to have invented not one but several personae for myself. I am a master of the art of self-elusion. Pascali identifies with another of the characters; and so do I:

Mister Bowles has lost, or perhaps he never had, essential familiarity with things, ease, custom. So of course he simulates, but badly, and this gives him a strange sort of dignity, power even; he imposes himself. Like a critical visitor. Or like a god, a minor god. A god would not, after all, move at ease among the inhabitants and artifacts of this world. He would be characterized by just this kind of hampered grace. (p. 67)

So, as Yiota and I bandied words, and as she asked me if I loved her as a god might love her, the answer was all the time lying there on the table between us in the pages of Pascali’s Island. No doubt a literary reply would not have helped at the time, but now I understand that I could have replied: “Yes, I love you like a minor god, with hampered grace.”

Unsworth’s characters are doomed in a classically tragic way. He probably had Aristotle’s Poetics on his desk as he wrote. That is why he describes their aspirations in the kind of elevated terms that wishful thinkers like myself want to identify with. In The Sleepwalker, on the other hand, Margarita Karapanou’s characters are also doomed, but in a sordid modern way that owes more to the tabloid press than to the dramatic unities. Karapanou cuts the crap. Her omniscient Police Inspector speaks of the expatriate writers of Hydra thus:

Yes, they come to the island and shut themselves up in houses with their paper and their typewriters and indulge in verbal masturbation. Haven’t you noticed?

There, but for the dubious hampered grace of a minor god, go I.

The day after my fateful meeting with the Banana Princess, I went as usual to teach Greek to my pupil Carol. We had just started reading Kazantzakis’s Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas (Zorba the Greek) together. This was the first book I ever read in modern Greek, and it made such a profound impression on me that I thought I remembered every word. But, as I found out with a jolt on this particular morning, I had forgotten Kazantzakis’s introduction and, in particular, this passage:

When I consider what nourishment books and teachers had offered me for so many years of trying to appease a hungry spirit, and then what a lionlike mind Zorbas offered me for nourishment over the space of a few months, only with difficulty can I contain my anger and my sorrow. Just by chance my life had been wasted—I had met up with this “spiritual father” much too late, and what remained inside me that was capable of being redeemed was insignificant. The great turn-around, the complete change of battle-front, the ignition and renewal did not take place. By then it was much too late. And so Zorbas, instead of becoming for me a lofty, commanding example for life, was debased and became instead, alas, a literary subject for me to use to smudge a few sheets of paper.

This wretched privilege, the ability to turn life into art, has been the ruin of many a carnivorous spirit. Because in this way, vehement passion, finding an exit, leaves the breast and the spirit is lightened. It no longer suffocates, no longer feels the need for hand-to-hand combat, the need to plunge straight into life and action. Instead it rejoices as it admires the way its vehement passion makes a few smoke-rings in the air and is extinguished.

Kazantzakis was about as old as I am now when he wrote Alexis Zorbas, but he was much younger when he met Zorbas and spent a few months with him playing at mining lignite. Was it really too late? Or did Kazantzakis, for reasons of his own, simply persuade himself that it was? Is it ever too late? Maybe it would be better, in the spirit of this narrative, to turn the proposition on its head and to aver that “this splendid privilege, the ability to turn life into art, has been the salvation, the redemption, of many a pusillanimous scribbler.” Maybe it is only too late when, like the Kazantzakis narrator at the end of Zorbas, you receive the telegram saying: “Have found finest green stone; come immediately!” and you do not go.

One word connects Yiannaras, Unsworth, and Kazantzakis— the Greek word tipota, nothing, nada, which can be made into a concept by the addition of an article: “the nothing.” Yiannaras speaks of “plunging into the nothing.” Unsworth’s epigraph is from Dimitrios Kapetanakis, a brilliant Greek who died young:

Nothingness might save or destroy those who face it, but those who ignore it are condemned to unreality.

“The nothing” and “the abyss” are constant themes throughout the work of Nikos Kazantzakis. Yet perhaps, as he himself implies in the preface I have just quoted, therein lay his problem (“I have a problem; I love you”): that he wrote the urge, the desire, the necessity to take the plunge, to make the leap, out of his system. He let “I dare not” wait upon “I would” like the cat in the adage and so never caught the fish that might have turned out to be Tobias’s fish, or even Jonah’s whale, which vouchsafes apocalypse to every worthy diver whom it swallows.

My friend and sometime wife, Jules (the one who reproached me for not going straight for the “jugliar”), would have sorted Kazantzakis out in no time. Jules, a Scouser from Kirkby, would have said: “Hey, Kazzer la’. That’s enough of turning life into art; get out there and show ’em—all hands to the guns; pull yer knickers up and go in fighting.” No doubt she would have reprimanded L. himself in a similar vein—“What’s all this nonsense about ‘my life in art,’ then, Cozzer? Too much art and not enough life. Go for it, la’.”

I once took Jules all the way from England to a remote village on a remote island in the far north of Greece. Instead of relaxing in this beautiful spot, all she did was pester me to take her to the other, even more remote side of the island. When I demurred, she rounded on me and shouted: “Do you know what the trouble with you is? You’re not adventurous enough.” Ah, Jules, ain’t no women, ain’t no women, been coming ’round here quite like you.

Jules floated to the surface of my thoughts at this moment because I fondly thought that she might have approved my declaration of love to the Banana Princess. I could almost hear her saying: “Well done, Dodge; at last you’re being really adventurous.” But the delusion did not last long. When I tuned in more carefully to her wavelength, I heard: “What did I tell you, Dodger? You think you’re being adventurous, but you always reach a certain point and then stop. You were quite courageous to tell Yiota that you loved her, but then you were pathetic to retreat because she did not encourage you. She was waiting for you to go on. She was waiting for you to cross her central range to discover her other side. All women are islands, waiting to be explored.” Yes, Jules, I hear you. (I can hear Olympia too: “Explore, explore. You’re all wimps.”) If there were more people like you in the world, there would be fewer great works and more great men.

Am I then too cerebral? Am I too bookish? I plead in self-defense that texts seek me out; they lie in wait for me. There are countless examples in this narrative. On that particular morning, as I sat in Carol’s house while she worked her way through Kazantzakis’s complicated prose, I was only half listening. Half of me—at least half—was full of Yiota and love and what my women friends had said to me the night before. When I came to and realized what exactly it was that Carol was so painstakingly translating, I shed a tear or two.

Was that bad? Was that too literary? Just because a text had triggered my emotion? The text ambushed me. Am I to blame? I think not. Maybe Pascali is a bad role model, but I am with him all the way when he says that “the universe is crammed with symbols and portents, for those who have eyes.” I was simply, happily, open to the message, the warning. That’s all.

In Between

It began with death, and it ends with death—except that there is no end and no beginning, only the serpent Ouroboros eating its tail. The neat trick to being dead is that you cannot die. “As long as life lasts, so long lasts death” (Karouzos). “As long as rain lasts, so long lasts sunshine” (Prasinos).

Orate pro nobis: Antonia, Villy, Philemon, Nikos Hatzikyri-akos-Gkikas, Tasos Weber, Aghios Tykhon, Saint Constantine of Hydra, Nicolas Jorge, Antonios Manikis, Stavros Boufis . . . Transient as the wind. Wrinkles on the earthy ground of memory.

The earthy ground and layers of L.’s garden, surrounded by the island of Hydra. The rocky ground of Hydra, surrounded by the sea. The strata of Hydra. First, there is what you see—the details that a Southy writer concentrates on. Second, there is what you are told—a stratum in which facts are as rare as gold nuggets.

Third, there is the secret, not altogether commendable, life of the place—freemasonry, satanism, drug culture, child abuse, wife beating, occultism, parapsychology, crime in general, New Age, illicit affairs, witchcraft.

Fourth, nonordinary reality or mythic time, the ontic realm. Fifth—I have not necessarily gotten them in the right order and am well aware that there are more of these strata than I wot of. Fifth, “the scary basement”—the hollow beneath the rock where Herakles consigned the one immortal head of the Lernaean Hydra. The little white chapels scattered all over the island and on outlying rocks represent stones of infinite weight keeping the canopy of rock and earth securely in place so that the horror may be oppressed, suppressed, depressed, and pressed down for ever—and never expressed. Such is the theater in which plays the drama of Fun de Siècle. “Fun” because laughter, the language of the angels, triumphs over evil, while seriousness and high moral tones prove the flimsiest of ramparts, disdainfully swept aside.

Sixth must be everything else in the universe, and beyond, which is not Hydra, yet which could not exist without Hydra. Everything from the nearest land and the surrounding sea to the heavens, the galaxies, space. There ought to be a splendid word for this. Maybe there is. Allosympan? Antisympan? Ectosympan? Aneupan? Perhaps it is simply the small boy’s perpetually producing magic porridge saucepan.

Seventh—surely there must be seven or a multiple thereof? Seventh is my favorite, a stratum in between the strata, a mezzanine. What Robert McGahey calls “the veritable metaxy” and Massimo Cacciari “the world of the metaxy.” It is an outopia much frequented by angels; the “crack between the worlds” (Tom Cowan)—as L. himself sings, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”—the Orphic moment.

Undoubtedly one of the subconscious impulses that prompted me to title my poem Fun de Siècle was this sense of in-betweenness. Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return) confirmed for me the significant in-betweenness of the twelve days (sometimes intercalary) that include the end of one year and the beginning of the next.

Even though nature does not count in years, and a millennium, a thousand years, is an arbitrary cycle imposed by humans, it seems to me that there must be some significant parallel between the days around New Year’s Day and the years (maybe twelve of them, just like the twelve days) preceding and following the start of a new siècle of a thousand years.

I am a poet, not a philosopher. I have no pat theory of in-betweenness. I cannot account for it or explain it. I just have a strong sense of its importance and its truth.

Si on vit dans l’entretemps

On évite tout contretemps.

(If in in-betweenness your life’s course you steer

Of obstacles of all kinds your path will be clear.)

That’s my recipe for success. The problem, of course, is how to live in the in-between, the mega-maxi-maxi metaxy. Any discussion of that goes beyond the scope of these jottings.

All I set out to do was to write a commentary, a few apostils, on my birthday poem. It soon struck me that in the verses themselves I had produced, at an in-between stage in my own life, on Hydra—an in-between place par excellence—an in-between ditty that offers an interim statement about in-betweenness. What only really strikes me now is that, in these notes, I have carried this process to the nth degree of in-betweenness.

I’m trying to make my own summing-up, and I don’t know how to. It is a pleasantly triste, damp early-September day. I have drawn back my lace curtain so that I have a view, as I type, of the thickly leaved bananas waving softly in a gentle breeze. L.’s whitewashed house behind is untenanted. I can discern a couple of pizzles.

I keep getting up and fetching books, searching for the clinching quotation. What terrifies me is that I see I have marked up in pencil all manner of sublime stuff that could save my soul many times over if I could only remember it. But already the bulk of it has passed into oblivion. Oh, the struggle to navigate the fragile ship of thought through the Symplegades of failing memory!

The perfect quotation, it seems to me, would be at least Sections IV and V of “It Must Change” from Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction by Wallace Stevens—maybe the whole poem. It is full of surprises. But I shall not append it here, partly for fear of invidious comparisons and partly because, if any readers are still with me, they will have a wonderful time seeking out old Wally and gasping at the insights relating to the foregoing pages.

The trouble with Wallace Stevens (as I think I have already more or less said) is that although he understood better than most the necessity of the angel, he thought that the angel and the angel’s sphere had no existence outside the poet’s head. I stress again that what I have been writing about is outside my head.

Call it what you like—nonordinary reality, mythic time, the ontic realm, the area journeyed in by shamans. It exists outside, beyond myself. I can’t prove this; I just know it. I’d be a damn fool (as Dylan Thomas implied) if I took the enormous risks involved merely to reach a place inside my own skull. A man’s (yes, and a woman’s) reach has to exceed his grasp, because to stay is to be nowhere.

We all meet in the in-between, in what Charles Segal calls “the poet’s precarious place between reality and dream, actuality and potentiality, the timeless and the transient.” One might add: between the wind and the banana. In between is where it’s at in images of elsewhere. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to scuttle back there before night falls. I have taught my tale. When you return from bathing, I shall be gone, but not before making several deep bows of gratitude to my muses, to those gigantic treelike herbaceous plants that gave me this voyage—those Bash trees, the bananas of Leonard Cohen.

Works Cited

NOTES TO FUN DE SIÈCLE

Alfred Lord Tennyson. Selected Poems. Ed. Aidan Day. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

Miller, Henry. The Colosseus of Maroussi. New York: New Directions, 1958.

Karapanou, Margarita. O Ypnovatis (The Sleepwalker). Athina: Ermis, 1988.

Aiken, Conrad. Morning Song of Senlin.

Watkins, Vernon. Discoveries.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land.

Chambers’ English Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1990.

SINGING SOUTH

Betjeman, John. The Costa Blanca, Two Sonnets.

The Books Called Apocrypha: The History of Susanna.

Karapanou, Margarita. Kassandra and the Wolf. Trans. N.C. Germanacos. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Cook, Roger. The Tree of Life: Image for the Cosmos. Thames and Hudson, 1974.

Surman, Paul. South. Unpublished poem.

Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History. Trans. from French by Willard R. Trask. London: Arkana Books, 1989.

Nadel, Ira B. Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

BANANA UPDATE

Downer, Lesley. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989.

Bash, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Trans. from the Japanese with an introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1966.

INTERLEAVES

Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.

STEVE NOTES

Blyth, R.H. Haiku. vol. iv, Autumn-Winter. Hokuseido, Japan, 1952.

VOYEUR

Sanfield, Steve. American Zen: by a Guy Who Tried It. Monterey, Kentucky: Larkspur Press, 1994.

Coupe, Laurence. Myth. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Polunin, Oleg. Flowers of Greece and the Balkans: A Field Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

The Holy Bible, Old Testament, Genesis.

Valéry, Paul. Le cimetière marin.

Brassens, Georges. Supplique pour être enterré è la plage de Sète.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Les gommes. Paris: Les éditions de minuit, 1953.

MY JOURNEY

Cope, Wendy. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis. London: Faber and Faber, 1986.

Edwards, Richard. When I Was Three I Had a Friend.

Cacciari, Massimo. The Necessary Angel. Trans. by Miguel E. Vatter. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

The Oxford English Dictionary.

Ayto, John. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origin.

Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card, from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Durrell, Lawrence. Spirit Place: Letters and Essays on Travel. Ed. by Alan G. Thomas. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.

Green, Nick. Warriors. Badger Publications, 1997.

HOMECOMING

Cohen, Leonard. Death of a Lady’s Man. London: Black Spring Press, 1995.

Llosa, Mario Vargas. The Storyteller.

Carpentier, Alejo. The Lost Steps.

ENCLOSED GARDEN

Wilson, Peter Lamborn. Angels, Messengers of the Gods. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994.

Michaels, Anne. Fugitive Pieces. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. La jalousie. Ed. B. G. Garnham. London: Routledge, 1995.

Cohen, Leonard. The Favorite Game. London: Black Spring Press, 1964.

DEATH IN THIS BOOK

Davenport, Guy. Twelve Stories. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1997.

Dorman, Loranne S. & Rawlins, Clive L. Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart. London, New York, Sydney: Omnibus Press, 1990.

Sanfield, Steve. He Smiled to Himself (as recorded by the Old Man). Berkeley: Shakti Press, 1990.

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. New York: Arkana, 1991.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnets to Orpheus.

Eliot, T.S. East Coker.

Pessoa, Fernando. Selected Poems. Trans. by Jonathan Griffin. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982.

RAG-AND-BONE SHOP

Naipaul, V.S. Interview in the Observer.

Harvey, Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th ed, revised by Dorothy Eagle.

Dante Alighieri. Vita Nuova; Convivio.

OF ANGELS AND WOLVES

Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina. Angelic Poems. Athens, 1978.

Van Dyck, Karen. Kassandra and the Censors: Greek Poetry Since 1967. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Cohen, Leonard. The Spice-Box of Earth. New York: Bantam Books, 1968.

EMERGENCY EXIT

Stewart, Charles. Demons and the Devil: Moral Imagination in Modern Greek Culture. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Iyer, Pico. Interview with Leonard Cohen in the Observer.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost.

SUZANNE

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Through the Looking-Glass.

Traherne, Thomas. The Puddle.

Herbert, George. Teach Me, My God and King.

Vaughan, Henry. I Saw Eternity the Other Night.

Lorca, Federico García. In the Garden of the Lunar Grapefruits.

SLEEPWALKING

Evans-Wentz, W.E. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957.

Wain, John. Open Country. London: Hutchinson, 1990.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Orchards.

Durrell, Lawrence. Caesar’s Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Yiannaras, Khrestos. Skholio sto Asma Asmaton. Athina: Domos, 1995.

MISTER BOWLES AND MISTER GREEN

Unsworth, Barry. Pascali’s Island. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1988.

Kazantzakis, Nikos. The Life and Times of Alexis Zorbas. Athens: Kazantzaki Editions.

Isaïa, Nana: I Istoria Tote kai Tora. Athina: Delphini, 1997.

IN BETWEEN

McGahey, Robert. The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet—Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarmé. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Stevens, Wallace. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

Segal, Charles. Orpheus, the Myth of the Poet. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote from their work:

Katarina Arghelaki-Rooke

Leonard Cohen

Nick Green

Steve Sanfield

Paul Surman

As well as those who have generously given permission for quotation from their work, I am very grateful to others who have helped me in various indispensable ways, some of whose names appear below:

Barbara Lapek

Kelsey Edwards

Sarah Sparks

Bruce Walter

Antony Green

Liz Maguire

Harriet Edwards

William Pownall

Janet McGiffin

Geoff Holdsworth

Rowland Bongard

Julie Brennan

Alison Gold

Megan Hustad

David Fagan

Neville Shack

Tina Bennett

Theo Triantafyllou

Christina Vlachoutsikou

Elizabeth Joyce

Katerina Andritsopoulou

Gordon Grange

Aghios Tychon

About the Author

Roger Green is an English poet living on the Greek island of Hydra. Among his publications are several books of poetry, including Wolvercote Dreaming, assisted by a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain. Notes from Overground by Tiresias, subtitled A Commuter’s Notebook, saw the light in 1984. His translation of The Akathistos Hymn by Romanos the Melodist was published by The Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1987. A further collection of poetry, With It Or On It, appeared in 2000.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Proterograph

Prologue

Introduction

Fun de Siècle

Notes to Fun de Siècle

General

The Title

Stanza 1

Stanza 2

Stanza 3

Stanza 4

Stanza 5

Stanza 6

Stanza 7

Stanza 8

Stanza 9

Stanza 10

Stanza 11

Stanza 12

Subsequent Events

Singing South

Banana Update

Interleaves

Steve Notes

Voyeur

My Journey

The Uncertainty of the Poet

Homecoming

Enclosed Garden

This Marriage

Death in This Book

Rag-and-Bone Shop

Of Angels and Wolves

Emergency Exit

Suzanne

Sleepwalking

She Has Given Me The Bullet

Mister Bowles and Mister Green

In Between

Works Cited

Notes To Fun DesiÈCle

Singing South

Banana Update

Interleaves

Steve Notes

Voyeur

My Journey

Homecoming

Enclosed Garden

Death in This Book

Rag-and-Bone Shop

Of Angels and Wolves

Emergency Exit

Suzanne

Sleepwalking

Mister Bowles and Mister Green

In Between

Acknowledgments

About the Author