Polly’s Theatre For Dreamers
Do I know you Marianne?
Do I know you Joan?
I can’t be sure I do.
I wish to.
But then, do I really know Leonard?
Perhaps a little.
There are instances when a piece of this world fits into a hole in you, a hole you never knew you had in your heart.
I had come across the book only through Romany and David’s covers of Leonard’s songs in the live-streams organised as a replacement for the actual book launch events stalled by the pandemic. I am not very confident about finding the book if there would have been no pandemic. Does that make me a sadist?
[I am also not very confident whether I could have started writing this piece had it not been Joan Baez slipping into the auto-generated playlist for Damien Rice singing “She Moved Through The Fair” or continued with the piece without the last 15 minutes of “Sleep Don’t Weep”.]
The quarantine did no good to my senses, let alone my already panic stricken heart. So, it was kind of a relief and wonder that David and Romany can sing Cohen’s songs so well; the seemingly wholesome family they have and the fact that Polly had brought to life the early years of Leonard (as an artist). It would be a complete misrepresentation to make the book all about Leonard. It was not all about Marianne or Charmian as well. I guess it was an attempt to peer into their days spent at Hydra through Polly’s eyes. Or was it Erica’s ?
The way Polly has been able to blur the lines between reality and fiction in her book is not very comforting. It makes you question the reality that we seem so sure of.
The book starts with Erica with the heart shaped stone in her pocket. The stone given to her by Marianne. Days after completing the book, I came across a video of Leonard’s neighbor leaving a heart shaped stone on the steps of Leonard’s house. Although the former has been inspired by the latter, I stubbornly refuse to dismiss Erica’s version as fiction. The places where Leonard and the other real people have conversations with Erica feel too real to dismiss Erica as a piece of Polly’s imagination. There are other pieces in the book which has been blended with the popular reality like Leonard reciting the poem about the hair museum, at the roof of Gordon’s house, which has been placed verbatim from the documentary.
There was a time, a time before the music streaming services came into existence that I had downloaded the entire discography and spent my time passing through Leonard’s career, sometimes happy, sometimes blue, picking up songs or pieces of them on the way. There are pieces of Leonard’s songs which come and go effortlessly throughout the book, that I was able to pick up. I smiled a wistful grin when Polly chose to include my favorite lines from Stories of the Street, in a conversation. There were several others that amused me in a way that I tried imagining the amount of fun Polly must have had in the process. There might have been many others that I missed.
The story follows Erica and it is through her eyes that I got to see the happy accidents of Marianne meeting Leonard and the other not so happy ones teeming with passion or the lack of it. The way Erica and the women around her were being reduced to mere muses are not lost on me. More often than not, we find these dehumanizing exercises of justifying sacrificing a whole human life in servitude of the artist. The exercise is gendered to say the least.
Our pop fiction seems to glorify the idea of how behind every successful man there is a woman. Isn’t this sexist for both the genders? Why are we so eager to reduce women to selfless devotion and men to incompetence?
Widening gender wage gaps and the prevalent disregard for serious body of work made by women seem to hold more puzzle pieces than answers. It was only recently that I realized some of the best known pieces by Arnob were in fact not his but those written by Sahana or that High Hopes was written by Polly!
There were repeated references to the authors being served sandwiches and flowers on the table while they were absorbed in their writings. This has been acknowledged by Leonard himself (was there a hint of guilt in his eyes or was it pride?).
The power struggle in the household and specially that of Charmian’s, pushed me towards rooting for Charmian and half-expecting her to land a slap hard and square on her husband’s face and moving out with her children. But then reality struck me. It was the sixties. Even today, women find it hard to be financially independent, not only on paper but more for the society around her which drives her to compromise with a dead and rotting power structure and sacrifice her life towards keeping the family together and bringing up the kids on her own. To make matters worse, we find Marianne and Charmian being slandered in the books written by the men they had served, Axel and George respectively. It is only with Leonard coming into the scene and changing things for Marianne and her kid that we come to a set of contradictions.
Marianne seemed to love dedicating her soul to Leonard, typing spare copies of the novel when Leonard’s carbon copies get blown away or directing Leonard to the birds on the wire for a song which might have helped him in his way to be free.
If I come to think of it, Baba brings a bowl of raita to my desk everyday in the afternoon and has just brought one now, while I am writing this piece. Does that make him my Marianne the way Polly mentioned Romany being hers while she was working on this book?
Coming back to Marianne, she seemed to love being a muse in contrast to Charmian who was eager to hold on to her voice and write her books in the time and space that George left for her. Thanks to Charmian that we have her book which in turn was the driving force behind this one.
The other contradiction is about the times they were in. How the liberal mindset of the people inhabiting the island where people had the autonomy to wear or not wear clothes while they swim in the seas or hop from bed to bed like fleas, was in stark contrast to the aforementioned gender roles. In the next few decades that followed, we have become more liberal towards gender but less towards bodily autonomy. There is always a seesaw of liberal vs conservative that we operate. A ceaseless negotiation.
This book also gives me a strange kind of hope and wishful thinking that perhaps it would not be a bad idea to move to a place in the hills or anywhere remotely as beautiful as Hydra, at least for a few years to sort things out in my head. It also makes me think about the untapped potential that we keep coiled inside us. Inside me.
The strange stickiness of familiarity fixes us to the floor before the mouth of the opportunity closes and time, like a pitcher plant, sucks out the life and leaves behind the exoskeleton which we don with a smile of defeat for the world to see.
Leonard when he had arrived on Hydra, was not the singer-songwriter I am familiar with. He had no idea that he would start singing songs and publishing records when he arrived to the island. He was down with the writing of his novels which did not work out well with the readers. It is a strange sense of self-awareness to exactly know when to leave everything familiar behind and venture out to the unknown.
While reading the book and going through the places where Leonard has been placed, none of them seem to glorify him. They at best paint a human side of him, one that got impatient longing for a letter from his publisher or the hopeless romantic who never seemed to cross the line with women other than Marianne but came precariously close.
Why did I like the book?
I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Perhaps it was for the later part of the book when Erica, with all the Hydra days behind her, returns to the island to scan for the last remnants of her life.
Don’t I feel the same way every time I visit my hometown after years?
Don’t I look out for the weird relics I had stored in places all around the old house as a kid?
It is not the growing up that concerns me. We have no control over time. It is the coming to terms with the growing that takes most of the courage.
This book is hardly autobiographical but I find Polly in Erica in the very end when she talks about her son and her failed marriage and how she finds her son tugging at her heart while she moves about through the ghosts of her memories in a ghost town lined with the houses haunted by her memories of the people who lived in them.
I have changed homes more than once in my life and I know how it feels to walk beside a building which has come up on the playground I used to frequent as a kid or to pass by the house where I had spent years living in, adjusting to the nuances of its surroundings.
When the book ended, so did my trip to the sixties. It felt like I was there with Erica, watching her negotiate terms with her youth and with Charmian. I will miss the summers in Hydra although I have never been there.
Is it possible to miss a place and time you have never been in?
Now when I look at videos of Hydra, I seem to find the characters in them.
Did I hear “Bye Axel” in the video I mentioned earlier?
Was that Marianne’s orange dress flowing in the wind and Erica swimming naked in the sea in the video for Moving On?
I am happy for Polly for having written this book.
For Charlie. For the father in David. For the Marianne in Romany.
I am happy for the music David and Romany made for this book. I think I might listen to the audio book Polly and David is so excited about.
For my ghosts.
For the Leonard and Marianne in me.
So long, Erica.
