by Roger Green
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 s
ay 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.
