As Leonard recalled it, it was “an intense family life.”7 The Cohens would get together regularly—at the synagogue, in the workplace and also once a week at Leonard’s paternal grandmother’s home. “Every Saturday afternoon, at around four o’clock, Martha, her devoted maid, would wheel in a tea trolley with tea and little sandwiches and cakes and biscuits,” says David Cohen, two years older than Leonard and a cousin with whom Leonard was particularly close. “You were never invited, and you never asked if you could go, but you knew that she was ‘receiving.’ It sounds very archaic, but it was quite something.” Leonard’s grandmother had a flat in one of the grand houses on Sherbrooke Street at Atwater, which was where all the parades that were held in Montreal would end up—“Saint Jean Baptiste,” says David Cohen, “that was a big one, before it became a very tough political situation in Montreal, and we’d watch from inside from the big, beautiful window in her living room.” Their grandmother was very much a Victorian lady, “but, though it sounds archaic and old-fashioned, she was a pretty hip lady too.” She made quite an impression on Leonard, who would later describe her tea parties in his first novel, The Favorite Game.
In that same book, Leonard described the older men in his family as serious and formal. Not all of them were. Among the more colorful members of the family was Cousin Lazzy, David’s older brother Lazarus. Leonard thought of Lazzy as “a man about town, familiar with the chorus girls and the nightclubs and the entertainers.”8 There was also a cousin of an older generation, Edgar, Nathan’s cousin, a businessman with a literary bent. Many years later Edgar H. Cohen would go on to write Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos, a biography published in 1970 of a seventeenth-century courtesan, writer and muse whose lovers included Voltaire and Molière, and who, after a period in a convent, emerged to establish a school where young French noblemen could learn erotic technique. Leonard and Edgar, says David Cohen, were “very close.”
Leonard’s was a comfortable, secure life during an uncomfortable, insecure time. Days before Leonard’s fifth birthday, Germany invaded Poland and World War II began. Closer to home, in 1942 there was an anti-Semitic rally on St. Lawrence Boulevard—the Main, as locals called it—which was the traditional dividing line between English and French Montreal. It was led by Montreal’s French Nationalist movement, which included supporters of the Vichy regime in France. One particularly risible claim of the organization was that the Jews had taken over the clothing business in order to force modest young French-Canadian girls to wear “improper gowns in New York styles.”9 During the rally, the windows of several Jewish-owned shops and delis on the Main were broken and racist slurs painted on walls. But for a seven-year-old living in Westmount, sitting in his room reading his Superman comics, it was another world. “Europe, the war, the social war,” Leonard said, “none of it seemed to touch us.”10
He breezed through the early years of childhood, doing all that was required—clean hands, good manners, getting dressed for dinner, good school reports, making the hockey team, keeping his shoes polished and lined up tidily under his bed at night—without showing any worrying signs of sainthood or genius. Nor of melancholy. The home movies shot by Nathan, a keen amateur cameraman, show a happy little boy, beaming as he pedals his tricycle along the street, or walks hand in hand with his sister, or plays with his dog, a black Scottish terrier named Tinkie. His mother had originally given it the more dignified name of Tovarich, the Russian word for “ally,” but it was vetoed by his father. Nathan was already aware that in this small, Anglicized, Canadian Jewish community, Masha’s Russianness, her accent, her imperfect English and big personality, made her stand out. “It wasn’t thought to be a good idea to be passionate about anything,” said Leonard, or to draw attention. “We were taught,” says cousin David, “to mind our P’s and Q’s.”
Then in January 1944, at the age of fifty-two, Leonard’s father died. Leonard was nine years old. Around fourteen years later, in two unpublished stories titled “Ceremonies” and “My Sister’s Birthday,”11 Leonard described what happened: “Nursie told us the news.” Seated at the kitchen table, her hands folded in her lap, Leonard’s nanny informed Leonard and Esther that they would not be going to school that morning because their father had died in the night. They should be quiet, she said, because their mother was still sleeping. The funeral would take place the following day. “Then the day dawned on me,” Leonard wrote. “ ‘But it can’t be tomorrow, Nursie, it’s my sister’s birthday.’ ”
At nine o’clock the next morning, six men arrived and carried the coffin into the living room. They set it down alongside the leather chesterfield sofa. Masha had the maid soap all the mirrors in the house. By noon people started arriving, shaking the snow off their boots and topcoats—family, friends, people who worked at the factory. The coffin was open, and Leonard peered inside. Nathan was wrapped in a silver prayer shawl, his face white, his mustache black. His father, Leonard thought, looked annoyed. Uncle Horace, who ran the Freedman Company with Nathan and who had served alongside him in the Great War, whispered to Leonard, “We’ve got to be like soldiers.” Later that night, when Esther asked Leonard if he had dared to look at their dead father, each confessed that they had, and agreed that it appeared that someone had dyed his mustache. Both of these stories ended with the same line: “Don’t cry, I told her. I think it was my best moment. Please, it’s your birthday.”
A third version of the event appeared in The Favorite Game. It was a more poised account, partly due to Leonard’s writing having matured considerably in the time between these abandoned stories and his first novel, and partly from the distance accorded by having ascribed it in the latter to a fictional character (although Leonard has confirmed that it happened as he wrote it in the book).12 This time the episode concludes with the young boy taking one of his father’s bow ties from his bedroom, slicing it open, and hiding a small piece of paper inside it on which he had written something. The next day, in his own private ceremony, the boy dug a hole and buried it in the garden under the snow. Leonard has since described this as the first thing he ever wrote. He has also said he has no recollection of what it was and that he had been “digging in the garden for years, looking for it. Maybe that’s all I’m doing, looking for the note.”13
The act is so weighty with symbolism—Leonard having for the first time in his life made a rite of his writing—that it is tempting to take these words from a 1980 interview at face value, even if it is more likely just another of the many good lines that Leonard always gave his interviewers. Children are often drawn to the mystical and to secret ceremonies. And if Leonard has also said that as a young child he had “no particular interest in religion,” except for “a couple of times when we went to hear a choir,”14 he was also well aware that he was a Kohen, one of a priestly caste, a patrilineal descendant of Moses’s brother, Aaron, and born to officiate. “When they told me I was a Kohen, I believed it. I didn’t think it was some auxiliary information,” he said. “I wanted to live this world. I wanted to be the one who lifted up the Torah. . . . I was this little kid, and whatever they told me in these matters resonated.”15
Still, as a child he showed little interest in the synagogue his ancestors founded. Hebrew school, he said, “bored” him, and Wilfred Shuchat, who was appointed rabbi of Shaar Hashomayim in 1948, appears to confirm this. Leonard “was okay” as a student, says the old rabbi, “but scholarship wasn’t his real interest. It was his personality, the way he interpreted things. He was very creative.”
Leonard did not cry at the death of his father; he wept more when his dog Tinkie died a few years later. “I didn’t feel a profound sense of loss,” he said in a 1991 interview, “maybe because he was very ill throughout my entire childhood. It seemed natural that he died. He was weak and he died. Maybe my heart is cold.”16
It is true that since the previous summer Nathan had been in and out of the Royal Victoria Hospital. If it is also true tha
t the loss of his father had no great effect on Leonard, he was not so young at nine years old that it would not have registered on him. Somewhere inside, something would have changed—an awareness for the first time of impermanence, perhaps, or a sad wisdom, a crack where the insecurity or the solitude came in. What Leonard has said, and written, that he was most aware of during this important episode of his childhood was the change of status it bestowed on him. While his father lay in the living room in the coffin, his uncle Horace took him aside and told him that he, Leonard, was the man of the house now, and that the women—his mother and his fourteen-year-old sister, Esther—were his responsibility. “This made me proud,” Leonard wrote in “Ceremonies.” “I felt like the consecrated young prince of some folk-beloved dynasty. I was the oldest son of the oldest son.”17
Two
House of Women
In his early teens Leonard developed a keen interest in hypnosis. He acquired a slim, pocket-sized, anonymously written book with the lengthy title 25 Lessons in Hypnotism: How to Become an Expert Operator and the extravagant claim of being “the most perfect, complete, easily learned and comprehensive COURSE in the world, embracing the Science of Magnetic Healing, Telepathy, Mind Reading, Clairvoyant Hypnosis, Mesmerism, Animal Magnetism and Kindred Sciences.” On the front cover, beneath a crude sketch of a Victorian lady held spellbound by a wild-haired, mustached gentleman, Leonard wrote his name in ink in his best handwriting and set about his studies.
It turned out that Leonard had a natural talent for mesmerism. Finding instant success with domestic animals, he moved on to the domestic staff, recruiting as his first human subject the family maid. At his direction, the young woman sat on the chesterfield sofa. Leonard drew a chair alongside and, as the book instructed, told her in a slow gentle voice to relax her muscles and look into his eyes. Picking up a pencil, he moved it slowly in front of her face, back and forth, back and forth, and succeeded in putting her in a trance. Disregarding (or depending on one’s interpretation, following) the author’s directive that his teachings should be used only for educational purposes, Leonard instructed the maid to undress.
What a moment it must have been for the adolescent Leonard. This successful fusion of arcane wisdom and sexual longing. To sit beside a naked woman, in his own home, convinced that he made this happen, simply by talent, study, mastery of an art and imposition of his will. When he found it difficult to awaken her, Leonard started to panic. He was terrified his mother might come home and catch them—though one imagines this would have simply added a sense of impending doom, despair and loss to the heady mix that would make it even more exquisitely Leonard Cohenesque.
Chapter Two of the hypnotism manual might have been written as career advice to the singer and performer Leonard would become. It cautioned against any appearance of levity and instructed, “Your features should be set, firm and stern. Be quiet in all your actions. Let your voice grow lower, lower, till just above a whisper. Pause a moment or two. You will fail if you try to hurry.”1
When Leonard re-created the episode in his twenties in The Favorite Game, he wrote, “He had never seen a woman so naked. . . . He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. Then he sat back to stare. This is what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been.”2 Although it is ascribed to his fictionalized alter ego, it is hard to imagine that these sentiments were not Leonard’s own. Decades later he would still say, “I don’t think a man ever gets over that first sight of the naked woman. I think that’s Eve standing over him, that’s the morning and the dew on the skin. And I think that’s the major content of every man’s imagination. All the sad adventures in pornography and love and song are just steps on the path toward that holy vision.”3 The maid, incidentally, was a ukulele player, an instrument his fictional alter ego took for a lute and the girl, by extension, for an angel. And everybody knows that naked angels possess a portal to the divine.
Leonard always complained there were no girls. That he couldn’t get girls,” says Mort Rosengarten. “And it was always a serious complaint.” Rosengarten is a sculptor and Leonard’s oldest friend. He is the model for Krantz, the best friend of the protagonist of The Favorite Game. “You have to remember,” Rosengarten says, his soft voice barely audible over the whirr of the ventilator emphysema obliges him to use, “that at that time we were raised in a totally segregated way. At school the boys were in one part of the school and the girls were in another and there was no interaction whatsoever, and because we didn’t fall in with the conventional Westmount society of our peers in terms of our behavior, we didn’t have access to those women either, because they were on a certain path. But I always thought that Leonard was lucky, that he knew and understood something about women, because he lived in a house of women, his sister, Esther, and his mother. I knew nothing about women; I just had a brother, and my mother wasn’t giving any of her secrets away about what women were about. So we always complained.”
Rosengarten’s home is a small, wonky, two-story terraced house with a bathtub in the kitchen, near to the Parc du Portugal, off the Main. When he moved here forty years ago, it was a blue-collar, immigrant neighborhood. Despite the signs of gentrification—the fancy boutiques and cafés—the old Jewish delis with Formica tabletops that Mort and Leonard used to frequent are still there. It was a world away from their privileged Westmount origins. Mort grew up on Upper Belmont, five hundred yards and another economic stratum above the Cohen family’s Lower Belmont home. Though the money is long gone now, the Rosengartens had been extremely wealthy; they had two Cadillacs and a country estate in the Eastern Townships, some sixty miles outside Montreal. Leonard and Mort met and became friends on neutral territory, when Mort was ten and Leonard nine years old. It was at summer camp in June 1944, five months after the death of Leonard’s father.
The Cohens had long been accustomed to spending the season together at the seaside in Maine, in the U.S. But in the summers of 1940 and ’41, when Canada was at war with Germany but America had not yet joined the battle, the U.S. imposition of currency restrictions made it more sensible for Canadians to take their holidays at home. A popular spot was the Laurentians, north of Montreal. The writer Mordecai Richler described it as “a veritable Jewish paradise, a minor-league Catskills,”4 with hotels and inns where old men in yarmulkes gossiped in Yiddish across the road from the “Gentiles only” bowling green. For those at Leonard’s end of the age spectrum there was a proliferation of summer camps along the lakes around Sainte-Agathe. Camp Hiawatha offered its young charges the usual menu of fresh air, cabin dorms, communal showers, arts and crafts, playing fields and biting insects, but “it was terrible,” says Rosengarten, with feeling. “Their biggest concern was to reassure the parents that you would never get into any kind of adventure whatsoever. I was stuck there for a few years, though Leonard only went for one summer; his mother found a more sensible camp where they taught you to canoe and swim”—swimming being something Leonard did enthusiastically and well. An itemized bill from Camp Hiawatha in 1944 appears to confirm Rosengarten’s dim view of the activities on offer: Leonard’s allowance was spent on the tuck shop, stationery, stamps, a haircut and a train ticket home.5
Leonard and Mort had more in common than their prosperous Westmount Jewish backgrounds. Neither had much of a father figure in his life—Leonard’s was dead and Mort’s often absent—and each had a mother who, certainly by 1940s Westmount Jewish society standards, was unconventional. Mort’s mother came from a working-class background and considered herself “modern.” Leonard’s was a Russian immigrant and had been considerably younger than her late husband. If Masha’s accent and dramatic nature had not ensured a certain separateness from the other mothers in the young boys’ small, insular community, being an attractive, strikingly dressed young widow most likely would. But Leonard and Mort’s friendship would really deepen four years later, when they both attended th
e same junior high school.
Westmount High, a large gray stone building, with lush lawns and a crest with a Latin motto (Dux Vitae Ratio: “Reason Is Life’s Guide”), looked like it had snuck out of Cambridge and onto a plane to Canada in the dead of night, having grown tired of spending centuries shaping the minds of well-bred British boys. In fact it was relatively young, a Protestant school founded in a far more modest building in 1873, although still among the oldest English-speaking schools in Quebec. At the time of Leonard’s attendance, Jewish pupils made up between a quarter and a third of the school population. A general mood of religious tolerance, or indifference, reigned, and the two groups mixed and socialized, went to each other’s parties. “We took our Jewish holidays when they came up and we celebrated the Christian holidays,” says Rona Feldman, one of Leonard’s classmates. “A lot of us were in the choir and the Christmas plays.” Leonard’s Catholic nanny, who walked him to school every morning—no matter, as Mort Rosengarten pointed out, that “it was a block away; Leonard’s family was a very formal kind of scene”—had taken him to church with her in the past. “I love Jesus,” Leonard said. “Always did, even as a kid.” He added, “I kept it to myself; I didn’t stand up in shul and say ‘I love Jesus.’ ”6
At the age of thirteen, Leonard celebrated his bar mitzvah, his Jewish coming of age. Watched by his uncles and cousins, a battalion of Cohens, he climbed onto a footstool—it was the only way he could see—and read from the Torah for the first time in the synagogue his ancestors had founded and presided over. “There were lots of members of his family,” recalls Rabbi Shuchat, with whom Leonard had taken his bar mitzvah class, “but it was very difficult for Leonard, because his father was not there” to speak the customary prayer of release. But since the war began, everyone seemed to have someone, or something, missing. “There was the rationing and coupons for certain things like meat,” Rona Feldman remembers, “and they sold war savings stamps in the school and some of the classes competed with each other for who bought the most war savings stamps each week. There was a girl going to school with us who was part of a program of children sent to different places to keep them safe during the war, and we all knew families who had members overseas in the army or the air force.” And when the war was over, there were the nightmarish photos of victims of the concentration camps. The war, said Mort Rosengarten, was “a very big thing for us,” meaning Leonard and himself. “It was absolutely a very important factor in our sensibility.”
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 2