Review…
The Hydra years: a film
It is my partner’s doing, my getting to watch a TV series. I am in the middle of something when I hear Leonard Cohen’s music and wonder what she is watching on the laptop screen. I go over to discover that it is called So Long Marianne, a biographical film about Leonard Cohen.
Like me, she has listened to Leonard Cohen for years. So have other friends who I don’t need to mention by name because they will know whom I am taking about. The Launceston friend who organised the Leonard Cohen-Jonie Mitchell tribute concert a couple years ago, for instance. She, like Leonard Cohen, is a poet.
So I watch the TV series and I have to admit to liking it. It centres on Cohen’s time living in a colony of writers and artists on the Greek island of Hydra in the early 1960s. The series follows his life as he becomes a popular poet, writer and singer/songwriter. Alex Wolff plays Cohen and Thea Sofie Loch Næss his Norwegian partner, Marianne Ihlen, who had only recently ended her four year marriage to Norwegian author Axel Jensen in 1962.
Of interest to Australians will be the roles played by Australian actors Anna Torv and Noah Taylor. They are the main supporting characters, Anna Torv playing Australian writer, Charmian Clift, and Noah Taylor her partner, the one-time war correspondent then disillusioned detective thriller writer, George Johnston. He is best known as author of the classic Australian novel, My Brother Jack. Characters that might be known to some readers pass through the production as fleeting visitations: Lou Reid, Janis Joplin, Alan Ginsberg, Carol King. I should add mention of the Chelsea Hotel, too.
Echoes
Watching the TV series I was reminded of reading Ernest Hemingway’s early books, A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises, and of the literary and arts scene that was Paris in the 1920s. Forced to live frugally, Hemingway was an aspiring writer living in the city at the time, one of an emerging coterie that included his friend Gertrude Stein as well as James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald, Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. They contributed to the intellectual excitement generated by the artists and authors who lived in the city through that decade and into that following, and who established in Paris at that time something of a literary golden age, the place where authors later to become prominent made their start. It was a much bigger scene than the handful of writers and others who made Hydra their home through the latter 1950s and into the 1960s, but, for me, the Hydra scene was a small echo of the Paris of the twenties.
The Hydra scene also coincided in time with another literary and music emergence, this one over in the USA. That one became the core of a jazz-infused subculture whose leading lights were the writer, Jack Kerouac, and the poet Alan Ginsberg. Kerouac rose to prominence on the novelisation of his cross-country hitchhiking adventure of 1947. Published a decade later as On The Road, the book influenced a generation with the realisation that they did not have to follow the staid life path of childhood > adolesence > school > career > retirement. Other lives were possible. Many set out to find them.
Watching the series, I realised that the Hydra coterie lived on the island only more or less a half-decade before the great transcontinental movement of young and footloose Westerners started to make its way along what was to become known as the Hippie Trail, Europe to India and beyond. I don’t recall Hydra being a stopover nor an enclave for those travellers but I do think the Hydra coterie would have found an affinity with them although they might have resented the invasion of their island had it happened.
As I watched the series I began to see parallels between the characters in the production and people I knew in my younger years. They were not the years of the Hydra scene as I was still in school at the time that Charmiain Clift, George Johnston, Marianne Ihlen and her young son, and Leonard Cohen lived their Mediterranean idyll. Nor were they poets and musicians. It was more their attitude to life and the sense of unhurried freedom they carried as they lived their lives a day at a time. There was no overt focus on the future then. It would take care of itself. Life was to be lived in the moment.
What is it about clusters of like-minded people living in a place that stimulates the production of things that endure? It is probably the example they set to one another, the positive feedback about what they do, the mutual influence, the sense of shared engagement in something worthwhile and the stimulation of the local environment. It can also be the common challenges they face. More than that, enclaves of like-minded people generate both a collective excitement around whatever it is that they have in common, and a sense of belonging.
Hemingway and the Paris literary scene of the twenties. Jack Kerouac and the literary and jazz subculture of the US of the fifties. Leonard Cohen and the literary and music scene of the late fifties-early sixties on Hydra. Clusters of creative people generating cultural products whose echo we still hear today, loud and clear.
Things circle
Things circle and join up, flowing and circulating through our brains, our lives, the lives of those around us. We call that joining-up coincidence. It happens like this. Just as I am writing this, a long-time friend messages from a city in the north. Once, a long time ago in the years following those portrayed in the TV series, we lived in a sharehouse in distinctly downmarket Woolloomooloo, “in our own slum”, as she so poetically put it in one of her stories. There, we would listen to the Songs of Leonard Cohen album which he released in 1967 and that included the song which gives its name to the TV production.
Leonard Cohen described the song as one of forgiveness. It was about his feelings for Marianne. “I didn’t think I was saying goodbye but I guess I was. She gave me many songs…”, he wrote. Their relationship was one of those long-term types that, even when it is over, continues in a different form, like that of the long-time friend from that time and I. I guess it is a sort of evolution, perhaps a maturing from the emotion of partnership to that of long-term friend and confidant.
Songs are embedded in memory as triggers to remembering in the way an audio track is embedded in a film. Inseparable. All it takes is hearing a song to bring memory to consciousness and there it is once again, playing in our head. It’s like coming across an old photograph of someone you knew… you hesitate as you look at it and in that moment the floodgates of memory open and there you are again in some place and some time that still exists in your head although it has long gone from actuality. Leonard’s song, So Long Marianne, is like that.
Marianne Ihlen died on 28 July 2016. Leonard Cohen died three months later on November 7.
“We met when we were almost youngDeep in the green lilac park…”.
Thanks Leonard.
A bit of fiction…
