So Long, Marianne

by Kari Hesthamar

  In 1972 she and twelve-year-old Axel Joachim were back on the Greek island for the last time as residents. The boy was being tutored privately and they lived in the old house they’d shared with Leonard, who was there very rarely.

  One day there was a knock at the door. Marianne opened the door to a young woman with an infant in her arms. The woman wanted to know when Marianne and her son were moving out, so she and her child could move in. It was Suzanne and the baby was her and Leonard’s son Adam. Looking at the younger woman, Marianne felt older and stronger, untroubled and strangely relieved. It was time to free herself and get started on her own life’s journey.

  A little voice inside her said, “Turn back now. Put on your sandals and go home.”

  Days of Kindness

  Greece is a good place

  to look at the moon, isn’t it

  You can read by moonlight

  You can read on the terrace

  You can see a face

  as you saw it when you were young

  There was good light then

  oil lamps and candles

  and those little flames

  that floated on a cork in olive oil

  What I loved in my old life

  I haven’t forgotten

  It lives in my spine

  Marianne and the child

  The days of kindness

  It rises in my spine

  and it manifests as tears

  I pray that loving memory

  exists for them too

  the precious ones I overthrew

  for an education in the world

  Hydra, 198590

  AUTHOR’S EPILOGUE

  Marianne has spread out her past on the dining table. She hunts for her glasses and dives into an old cardboard box. It smells of cellar and yellowed, faded sheets of paper. Leafing through piles of photographs and thin light-blue airmail envelopes — letters from family, friends and old lovers — she reads and mumbles half-aloud. Remembering and piecing together far-off times.

  “It hasn’t been that easy putting myself back in the fifties and sixties. A lot of water has gone under the bridge in half a century. Some things I swept under the carpet back then because they were too difficult to face, and other things I’ve just plain forgotten until now. For many years I swallowed everything that happened in my life without self-awareness.”

  The years spent in Greece are distant. More than fifty years have passed since Marianne met Axel and Leonard. When Marianne moved back to Norway for good at the beginning of the 1970s she quickly found work and Axel Joachim began school. The Norwegian Oil Fairy Tale had begun and Marianne landed a job with Norwegian Contractors, a company that built off-shore oil platforms. She worked in the personnel and foreign departments. The bulk of her working career has been in the oil branch, a great contrast to her life on Hydra, where Marianne filled roles as muse, mother and housewife and lived out the love that her writer friends wrote about.

  Marianne met her husband Jan Kielland Stang while she was employed at Norwegian Contractors. He was an engineer in the same company and had three daughters from an earlier marriage. They married in 1979 and have been together ever since.

  As she approached retirement, Marianne worked with actress Juni Dahr, who toured with her solo shows Ibsen’s Women and Joan of Arc in the U.S., Japan and Europe. Marianne was responsible for making travel arrangements and liasing with the embassies.

  “It would take many years before I got hold of my own creativity and began to make pictures. Many with titles from Leonard’s songs. I find a lot of unusual things washed up on the shore at Larkollen and I’ve mounted these in glass cases with small, beautiful gifts I’ve received through the years.”

  Now she spends much of her time at her house in Larkollen, where she lived as a little girl with her grandmother.

  With a quick motion she opens the door to the little garden and walks toward the sea. Stops before a little green tussock and bends forward. In a moment she shouts:

  “Know what I found? Two four-leafed clovers! Hey — here’s another one!”

  “That means luck, doesn’t it?”

  “It does. It’s rare to find them and it’s loaded with them here! Maybe it’s just that I see more clearly in my old age?”

  MARIANNE’S EPILOGUE

  My wonderful grandmother once said: “You will meet a man who speaks with a golden tongue.” As always, she was right. I met, in fact, two such men.

  If the transition to life in Norway was difficult for me, it was even more problematic for my son. Axel Joachim was swept along on my turbulent journey, but as a child with a sensitive, impressionable mind, he lacked the tools to cope with his experiences in the same way that I could. The difficulties that have persisted into his adulthood have compelled me to question myself continually, and to ask whether the price he paid for my insecurity and vulnerability was too dear. Jan, my husband during the last thirty-four years, developed a close relationship to Axel Joachim and has been an inestimable support for him. For this I am deeply grateful to Jan.

  A seed was planted on Hydra. Something germinated, and emerging from grief and loss, at last, I found my way back — home. At the Centre for Growth in Denmark, established by Jes Bertelsen and Hanne Kizach, meditation became the tool that brought me to my inner self, as my grandmother had tried to teach me as we sat feeding the birds at the threshold of the big house in Larkollen during the war. While Leonard went the Zen Way, I took the Tibetan Way.

  We never let go of Hydra, our “second home,” nor all the people who had meant so much to us. At first we communicated by “snail mail.” Later there were meetings in Oslo and Hydra, a place to which I must return every year. So many of us have gone and a new generation has taken over the island. Things change but remain the same.

  When I first met the highly accomplished radio journalist Kari Hesthamar in May 2005 the time had finally come for me to delve deeply into the past — that part of my life when I was young, naive, beautiful and vulnerable, with little grasp of myself. Some acts of my Greek drama were so painful that I wished I could forget them. Yet my mature voice came through in the radio documentary that was aired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation in September that same year. The responses I received from friends and strangers showed me that I was not alone: others recognized themselves in my story.

  Marianne Ihlen

  Oslo, 28 November 2011

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you, Marianne, for so generously sharing your story and your time. This book could not have existed without your indefatigable help.

  Thank you, Leonard, for answering my questions with such patience and for letting me use your previously unpublished letters, telegrams, poems and doodles.

  Thank you, Prathiba Jensen, for allowing me to reproduce Axel’s old letters. It has been like diving into a treasure chest.

  A big thanks to the publisher of the Norwegian edition of this book, Frode Molven, for asking me if I would write this after hearing the radio documentary about Marianne and Leonard that was aired by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation.

  I thank the Norwegian Non-fiction Writers and Translators Association for a writing grant.

  Thanks to everyone else who has, in some way, contributed to this book.

  And to Knut — my warm gratitude for all your support.

  Kari Hesthamar

  Oslo, 18 August 2008

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  When Marianne rang me a few years ago I had neither seen nor spoken to her since I’d been a small girl living on Hydra with my Danish mother, my American father and my little sister. I had come to the island as an infant in 1966; when we left for the U.S. in 1972 I’d finished first grade under the stern-but-kind supervision of Kyria Eleni, who taught at the one-room schoolhouse where I was the only foreigner. I returned to Hyd
ra many times yet I never crossed paths with Marianne. And suddenly there she was, in Oslo, calling me at my adopted home in northern Norway, on an island hundreds of kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, asking if I remembered her.

  I’m so grateful that Marianne tracked me down. Working on Kari Hesthamar’s book has transported me back to my childhood and to the youth of my parents, when in my eyes they sparkled with the gold dust that Leonard Cohen so eloquently observed to be the property of the young, beautiful, talented people who settled on Hydra in that period.

  For their help, I thank my husband, Jon Winther-Hansen; my sister, Johanne Rosenthal; my mother-in-law, Marit Winther Hansen; and my friends Ivar Stokkeland, Alison Leslie Gold, Michaela Hermann and Vicky Ioannidou.

  My greatest debt is to my mother, Ane Marie Torp Albertsen. Rie (as she was known) placed her knowledge of Hydra and the Norwegian language (in particular, the “New Norwegian” version of the language, in which Kari wrote So Long, Marianne) at my disposal. She collaborated tirelessly and enthusiastically with me until the morning her life was cut unexpectedly short. I have completed the work by carrying Rie constantly in my heart and mind.

  Helle Valborg Goldman

  Tromsø, 9 June 2013

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Page 14, A Girl I Knew. Axel Jensen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

  2. Livet Sett fra Nimbus. Petter Mejlænder. Oslo: Spartacus, 2002.

  3. Niels Christian Brøgger, “Litterært eksperiment,” Nationen, 21 December 1955.

  4. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  5. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  6. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  7. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  8. Livet Sett fra Nimbus.

  9. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  10. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  11. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  12. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  CHAPTER 2

  13. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  14. Delphi, accessed on the internet at www.abrock.com/Greece-Turkey/Olym­.html.

  CHAPTER 3

  15. Funerary customs — Bli Kjent med Hellas. Ingunn Kvisterøy and Johan Henrik Schreiner. Oslo: Forlaget Hera, 1987.

  16. Page 55, The Colossus of Maroussi. Henry Miller. San Francisco: Colt Press, 1941.

  17. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  18. Private letters of Else Berit and Per Schioldborg.

  19. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  CHAPTER 4

  20. Private letters of Else Berit and Per Schioldborg.

  21. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  22. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  23. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen, used with permission of Prathiba Jensen.

  24. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  25. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  26. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005, and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. Ira B. Nadel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

  27. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  CHAPTER 5

  28. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  29. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  30. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  31. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  32. Private letters of Leonard Cohen.

  33. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  34. “Dress Rehearsal Rag,” on Songs of Love and Hate, released by Columbia Records in 1971.

  CHAPTER 6

  35. Various Positions.

  36. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  37. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  38. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  39. Page 82, Various Positions.

  40. Published with permission of Leonard Cohen.

  CHAPTER 7

  41. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  42. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  43. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  44. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  45. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  CHAPTER 8

  46. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  47. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  48. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  49. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  50. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  51. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  52. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  CHAPTER 9

  53. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  CHAPTER 10

  54. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  55. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  56. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  57. Published with permission of Leonard Cohen.

  58. Hjertets Kulturhistorie. Frå Antikken til i Dag. Ole M. Høystad. Oslo: ­Spartacus, 2003.

  59. Rembetiko, hash dens — Bli Kjent med Hellas. Ingunn Kvisterøy and Johan Henrik Schreiner. Oslo: Forlaget Hera, 1987.

  60. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  61. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  62. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  CHAPTER 11

  63. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  64. Page 107, Various Positions.

  65. Various Positions.

  66. Interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  67. Page 106, Various Positions.

  68. Pages 83–84, Various Positions.

  69. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, accessed on the internet at www.biographic.ca.

  70. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  71. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  72. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  CHAPTER 12

  73. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  74. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  75. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  76. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  77. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  78. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  79. Letters from Axel Jensen to Marianne Ihlen, and Wikipedia article on R.D. Laing, accessed on the internet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing.

  80. Author’s interview with Leonard Cohen, Los Angeles, October 2005.

  81. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  82. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  83. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  84. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  85. Private letters of Leonard Cohen.

  86. Page 241, Charmian and George: the Marriage of George Johnston and ­Charmian Clift. Max Brown. Sydney: Rosenberg Publishing, 2004.

  87. Private letters of Marianne Ihlen.

  88. Private papers of Marianne Ihlen.

  89. Private letters of
Marianne Ihlen.

  CHAPTER 13

  90. “Days of Kindness,” © Leonard Cohen. Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.

  SOURCES

  This book is based primarily upon interviews and conversations with Marianne Ihlen as well as her private letters, notes and diaries from 1954 to 1972. The story also draws upon interviews with Leonard Cohen, undertaken during three days in Los Angeles in October 2005, and makes use of his private letters, unpublished poems and other material. Marianne Ihlen’s and Axel Jensen’s friends, Else Berit and Per Schioldborg, have contributed letters and information. Axel Jensen’s widow, Prathiba Jensen, allowed me to quote from Axel’s letters. Some material has been gathered from old newspaper articles in the archives of the National Library of Norway. A visit to Hydra together with Marianne in the autumn of 2007 was important for the story to come together.

  Other sources that have provided information and inspiration:

  The published works of Leonard Cohen, starting with his debut book, Let Us Compare Mythologies (Montreal: McGill Poetry Series, 1956), to his 2006 collection of poems, Book of Longing (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart).

  Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen. Ira B. Nadel. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.

  Ikaros. Axel Jensen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1957.

  Line. Axel Jensen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1959.

  Joachim. Axel Jensen. Oslo: Cappelen, 1961.

  Trollmannen i Ålefjær. Axel Jensen om Axel Jensen. Jan Christan Mollestad. Oslo: Cappelen, 1993.

  Axel Jensen. Livet Sett fra Nimbus. Petter Mejlænder. Oslo: Spartacus, 2002.

  Hjertets Kulturhistorie. Frå Antikken til i Dag. Ole M. Høystad. Oslo: Spartacus, 2003.

  Bli Kjent med Hellas. Ingunn Kvisterøy and Johan Henrik Schreiner. Oslo: Forlaget Hera, 1987.

  Charmian and George: The Marriage of George Johnston and Charmian Clift. Max Brown. Sydney: Rosenberg, 2004.

  Peel Me a Lotus. Charmian Clift. Hutchinson: London, 1959.

  Ikke til Salgs. Melina Mercouri. Oslo: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1971. (Originally published as I Was Born Greek. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.)