by Roger Green
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
