So Long, Marianne

by Kari Hesthamar

Chapter 12

  * * *

  A STATION ON THE WAY

  * * *

  Perpetually beset by self-doubt, Marianne had never placed her complete faith in anyone around her either, with the exception of her grandmother. She had told Momo everything, knowing that her confidences would never be used against her. Even to Leonard she couldn’t bare her feelings. Instead, Marianne made it easy for him to leave her and easy for him to come back. Talking to Leonard inside her head, Marianne wrote in English in her diary:

  God, help me get it together. I’m reading and reading — everything from Jung to old letters from Leonard and my own notes from years ago. So where am I? Still empty and confused and sort of dead inside. I don’t go out. I need to be alone. I have little to give to others. I have to dig deep down to find my own soul. If I find it, maybe I could be of some use to the people around me.

  My head is empty, and I’m tired of doing nothing. In a way I wish I could break away from everything, go somewhere and change everything. Live differently. Leave this island once and for all. I’ve been here long enough. It’s all over, Baby Blue.

  In the spring of 1965 Marianne and Axel Joachim accompanied Leonard to London. She didn’t like being left on Hydra every time he went away, and this time they could afford for the three of them to make the trip. As fate, or irony, would have it, Leonard ran into Lena Folke-Olsson — Axel’s girlfriend — in Oxford Street. Marianne soon received a letter from Axel:

  So I heard that you were in London too. But since there are at least five thousand reasons why you didn’t make an effort to meet me I won’t bother you with that. I’m writing for three reasons:

  1/ — Georg Johannesen (in my humble opinion our most significant lyric poet, even though he chisels in stone more than he fingers his lyre) has sent me an SOS from Budapest where he’s staying with his Jewish girlfriend for the time being. He asks if “my” house can be rented (quote) “in the summer and through the autumn, or from August and through the winter.” Is there anyone living there? he asks. It’s not my house, so now I’m asking you …

  2/ — In her zeal to secure a monthly child support payment for Little Axel your mother has found it necessary to go to the Oslo bailiff’s office, which is sending its threat letters to the consulate here in London, ensuring that the name Axel Jensen leaves behind a nice trail for all eternity for the benefit of future literature professors and biographers. Our son will have something to be ashamed of, reading about “Axel Jensen the Evil” in literatary history. Quite frankly, I must say that it’s a shame that it was deemed necessary to go the way of the Philistines. I ought to hire myself a lawyer (if I could afford one) to handle the correspondence between us … Be that as it may, I have no money now and I don’t count on getting any until the manuscript is ready at Cappelen.

  What now. Yes, point three. There was a point three. But now I’ve forgotten what point three was. It must have been something pleasant because otherwise I wouldn’t have forgotten it.

  Right, now I remember! Are you well? That was point three. Are you well?

  Perhaps that should have been point one. But it ended being point three instead.73

  After a short stay in London the little family returned together to Hydra. Decompressing from his deep immersion in his work on Beautiful Losers, Leonard broke down when he finally completed the novel. He came down with a fever, hallucinated and lost weight rapidly. Marianne found it difficult to connect with him.

  When their housekeeper Kyria Sophia came in and saw that all was not as it should be, she took Marianne in her embrace, stroking her and speaking soothingly to her in Greek. Marianne’s Greek was poor, but to Sophia — who was in many ways like her grandmother — she didn’t need to say anything. Kyria Sophia often ordered Marianne and Leonard to sit down to eat something or other she’d prepared for them. The old woman made nettle soup, and the wild greens and herbs that she harvested from the hills and the shore she boiled and served splashed with olive oil. When her husband fell ill Sophia made him a tea from a plant that grew on stones in the sea. Her son-in-law took her out in his little fishing boat. She folded up her sleeves and hung over the edge of the boat as she gathered the seaweed in a big sack. Her husband drank the infusion she brewed and recovered.

  * * *

  People arrived and departed, but Marianne remained on Hydra. She kept the house in order and the walls white and clean. There were plenty of opportunities for excursions and diversions but she didn’t take advantage of them. Leonard cabled eagerly when he was away. “How are you little lost friend?” “We’re getting through on all levels.” “Don’t go to China without me. See you soon. Leonard.”

  Many travelled between Hydra and the East, where they tried to find themselves through experiments with narcotics and meditation. Olivia, Marianne’s neighbour and friend, went to India. Zina Rachevsky, rumoured to be a Russian princess, came to Hydra from New York together with her son Alexander. She had dedicated her life to Buddhism and was on her way to Nepal to become a nun. As before, a steady stream of writers, painters and filmmakers came and went.

  More and more people came to find Leonard, but he shied away from this kind of attention. “I have to make myself invisible tonight,” he told Marianne, before going down to the port in the evening. Leonard didn’t drink much when he was out, though he was partial to Norwegian line aquavit. Marianne didn’t need more than a glass of retsina to loosen up. With a little alcohol in her bloodstream her fear of fluffing her English slackened and she spoke more freely.

  Language often snarled up their relationship. Years earlier, Leonard had looked at Axel’s dusty typewriter and noticed its peculiar Norwegian characters, like å and ø, which barred him from their world. To Leonard, the letters in Axel’s drawers resembled his own yet they were alien to him. He couldn’t understand what Marianne said to her child in Norwegian, and she didn’t grasp the nuances of the English language. The resulting misunderstandings could lead to quarrels. Leonard might ask her if she would help him with something, to which Marianne would reply, “I can manage.” To Leonard’s ears, this hinted that it would take a sizeable effort to oblige him and she wasn’t enthusiastic about it. But what Marianne had meant was that it would be no trouble to fulfil his request and she would gladly do it. They were best when they weren’t talking about themselves and were instead focused on carrying out their daily tasks.

  GLOBE-TROTTING

  Leonard’s career as a singer began in 1966, when he was forced to concede that he couldn’t make a living as a writer. Beautiful Losers had received good reviews but sold marginally. Once, with a smile, he’d admitted to Marianne that he fantasized about making a song that got into jukeboxes.

  Leonard had been away from Hydra a great deal during the last couple of years, and matters between him and Marianne were troubled. In an effort to pull their relationship back together, they decided to go back to Montreal and establish a new base for themselves there. They moved into a modest apartment at 3657 Aylmer Street. Axel Joachim went to preschool in knee-pants and the rest of his uniform. An Indian boy who was in his class lived across the street; the two quickly became best friends. They carried on conversations across the road using the telephone they made out of plastic beakers and a long piece of string. Axel Joachim began to put down roots again. When his beloved pet hamster disappeared from its cage he was heartbroken. Leonard helped the boy search the house but the animal had vanished without a trace.

  Through friends, Marianne landed a job in a boutique that sold tailored women’s clothing. The shop, on Sainte Catherine Street, was run by a fashionista who employed two older seamstresses. In a tailored black dress and hand-sewn white blouse, Marianne was given a dressing down by the boss because she told customers what flattered them and what didn’t. She was informed that her job was to sell clothes, not to advise the ladies who came in about what they should wear. But Marianne’s customers came back and at the end of the
year Marianne was commended for having made more sales than anyone else in the shop.

  In the six years that Leonard had spent mostly in Europe, folk music had been enjoying an efflorescence in New York of which he’d scarcely been aware. During a visit to the city, Leonard bumped into people like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and when he heard them perform it occurred to him that perhaps he too could could be a musician, even though he believed he could barely sing a pure note. He stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, which was frequented by artists like Dylan, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol.74 Marianne joined him in New York once in a while, but he usually kept his family life separate from his life as an artist.

  After some time in Montreal Leonard made up his mind to seek work as a studio musician in Nashville. On his way south, he stopped in New York, where he met the singer Judy Collins. He played her some of the material he’d been writing. Judy thought the songs were quite good and asked him to keep in touch with her. Leonard ran out of money in New York and never got to Nashville. He headed back to Montreal to scrape together more money.75

  In Montreal, Marianne grew accustomed to Leonard switching between his typewriter and his guitar as he worked on the many new songs he was writing. On Hydra he’d played for her long before he’d begun to write his own songs and she’d loved to hear him sing and play. Now Leonard’s words and melodies were about to reach large audiences.

  Spending a long time on everything he created, Leonard didn’t think he ever benefitted much from inspiration. Rather, he was inspired by the idea of making something good. The ideas arose from the work itself, and he kept at it until something better than his conception — better than himself — emerged from it. Deep down he believed he was a writer, not a singer or a musician. But writing couldn’t sustain his life, and other talents within him sought expression.76

  While Marianne and Leonard strove to find a common language, the song “Suzanne” came into being. Leonard rang Judy Collins, picked up the guitar and sang it for her over the telephone. She wasted no time in recording it herself.77

  Leonard was now constantly travelling in connection with his music or his books. The life they’d shared on Hydra — their simple, coordinated daily exertions under the Greek sun — was thousands of miles away. It was as if they were talking past one another: neither of them wholly understood what the other was saying. Living under the same roof became fraught with difficulty.

  In the winter of 1966 Marianne wrote to Axel that she and Leonard needed a break from one another and that she was taking Axel Joachim to visit their old friend John in Mexico. Marianne and Axel rarely corresponded anymore and Axel Joachim had no contact with his father. Axel, who was then living, as he himself put it, in the petit bourgeois paradise of Frederikstad, south-east of Oslo, replied that he was impressed to learn of Marianne’s globe-trotting. He described his own visit to John and their experimentations. According to Axel, Marianne had much to look forward to:

  One day we ate a mushroom, chewed it pensively like a cow and left the rest to chemistry. I discovered that I had testicles in my armpits. The word Oblomov became Vomolbo and then Voffmobloff and ffoblomvoff etc. This kept us going for hours. Suddenly I became Buddha … Oh, mushrooms! 24 hours it lasted. I slept and sang arias. Look forward to Mexico! And give my regards to John.

  Say hello to Leonard and Little Ax.

  Write and keep in touch. If you could get me a sugarcube with LSD25, mescalin or something similar, I’d be more than happy, it appears that my latent psychosis isn’t anything more than gigantic hysterical laughter — then silence, from silence to silence, forever.

  With regards and blessings!

  Axel

  P.S.

  no P.S.78

  MEXICO

  When Marianne and Axel Joachim arrived, John greeted them from his wheelchair on the veranda of his beautiful villa on a banana plantation. An iguana stuck out its tongue at them and John embraced them warmly. The garden was a little oasis full of banana trees and tropical plants. The bus-ride from Mexico City to Oaxaca had taken several hours and now that they’d arrived Marianne could relax. She was happy to go barefoot again, glad to have left urban life behind and to have come to such an exotic and fascinating place. For Axel Joachim it was like a fairy tale. He bounded around the garden, conversed with the Indian gardener and eventually found a playmate his own age.

  John and Marianne enjoyed long conversations while the boy played. Marianne expressed her anxiety about how things would turn out between her and Leonard. John tried to impress on her: “This is here and now. Don’t think about anything else. Don’t run away again.”

  Marianne and Axel Joachim slept in dark brown carved four-poster beds. On the night tables lay antivenin pills to be used in case of a scorpion sting. John’s housekeeper, who lived in an outbuilding in the garden, cooked and cleaned for him and his guests. The devout woman had once walked on her knees up the mountain to the Holy Virgin Mary, where she’d prayed before returning home with bloody knees.

  Under wide-brimmed Mexican hats, the neighbourhood men drank home-distilled tequila. They wore colourful headbands and cropped white pants. The women, whose hair was adorned with beautiful silk ribbons, produced intricate works of art by pressing vividly dyed wool yarn into frames filled with soft wax. Marianne and Axel Joachim visited remote settlements located along narrow roads that wound their way up the mountainside. The houses clung tightly to narrow shelves built on boulders: the rain flowed between the big stones rather than washing away the dwellings. Inside people slept in hammocks. Axel Joachim and Marianne bought live iguanas from some children they passed on the road and ended up eating the lizards for dinner when the animals refused to eat in captivity. When Leonard rang from New York to hear how they were, Marianne was almost incapable of describing her impressions. Modern civilization seemed like a distant echo.

  She thought she’d encountered a culture that had hardly changed in the last century — right up until late one night when she was walking around and she heard a song by Dylan (perhaps at that very moment hanging around with Leonard at the Chelsea Hotel) emanating from a house. At the market they could buy little glow-in-the-dark skeletons and key chains attached to tiny television sets that displayed pictures of nude women. A vast selection of gimcrack souvenirs from the U.S. were arrayed on white cotton sheets on the ground, side by side with horsemeat and home-made cheese. An old woman beckoned Marianne into her primitive shack. The woman pulled a white cotton blouse embroidered with red birds and flowers over Marianne’s head and tied a blue striped wrap-around skirt around her waist. Marianne was sent off with her blue jeans and t-shirt rolled up in an old newspaper. She managed to collect her wits and run back to the shop with money. They visited the local church, where the saints were represented by pink plastic dolls that had been painted and dressed up. Jesus was life-sized, complete with glued-on hair and beard, reposing in a glass case.

  Marianne dropped acid for the first time, with John in Mexico. Axel was involved in a form of psychotherapy that employed LSD — so-called psycholytic therapy — at the London clinic of the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald David Laing. Laing believed that the treatment quickly opened up the unconscious but that without the benefit of a skilled guide the experience could become a nightmare.79 Marianne hoped LSD might open her eyes to solutions to the dilemmas she was facing, some way out of the dead-end in which she found herself. John guided her, assuring her that her arms and legs were where they should be when Marianne grew uneasy. Keep cool, he said — tune in, drop out. Marianne felt distressed as control slipped away from her and her emotions were intensified. It was as if all her senses were as tender and exposed as the petals of a water lily floating open on a pond. The material reality that she knew dissolved. Ceilings and walls were no longer where they had been; the floor vanished. Characters from fairy tales and fables appeared, and she wanted to move into the sunset. Some aspects of her trip were so terrifying that she thoug
ht she would die, but John reassured her that everything was alright: she could let go, move into the colours and talk to the animals. He was her guide, piloting her through the experience so that she came through it in one piece.

  During a subsequent experience with LSD, Marianne watched in the mirror as her face disintegrated. She couldn’t put it together again. Looking at her damaged countenance, she told herself that it was just a bad dream. When she came down from the trip she was forced to acknowledge that the simple solutions she’d hoped for did not exist. She never used acid again.

  * * *

  During that side trip from Montreal, at a point when her world seemed on the verge of crumbling, Marianne surrendered to the awareness of that something greater than herself. She didn’t think she would ever be the same when she came down from those Mexican mountains. She bought herself a beautiful embroidered yellow dress, which she would later wear while Leonard sketched her, sitting on a chair in their house on Hydra. Another purchase was a traditional blanket with the motif of a woman and a man woven in the middle. When she and Axel Joachim came back to Montreal, Leonard and Marianne sat under the blanket in silence. They sat there wordlessly, letting calm settle over them. They had reached a crossroads and the world wasn’t going to ruin after all.

  TO HYDRA AGAIN

  After the trip to Mexico Marianne and Axel Joachim stayed for a short time in Montreal before returning to Hydra. Leonard, who was on tour, wrote in December 1966 from Edmonton that he’d hidden himself away in a little hotel because the crowds were getting too big. During a snowstorm, he’d sought lee from the bitter northerly wind in an entryway. There stood two girls, shivering while they waited for the storm to abate. They had no place to stay. Leonard invited the girls back with him to his modest hotel room. Exhausted from their travels, they immediately fell asleep on his bed. Leonard settled into an old armchair by the radiator. He sat there looking out the window over the frozen North Saskatchewan River and the beautiful northern view. In the double bed the girls slept on. He picked up his guitar and played quietly, so they wouldn’t wake up. For the first time in his life, Leonard wrote a song from start to finish without changing a single note afterward. When the girls awoke the next morning, he played “Sisters of Mercy” for them.80