I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  “They were not bound to anything. They could sample all the possibilities. They flashed by trees that took a hundred years to grow. They tore through towns where men lived their whole lives. . . . Back in the city their families were growing like vines. . . . They were flying from the majority, from the real bar mitzvah, the real initiation, the real and vicious circumcision which society was hovering to inflict through limits and dull routine,” Leonard wrote, re-creating these night rides with Mort in fiction. “The highway was empty. They were the only two in flight and that knowledge made them deeper friends than ever.”20

  Three

  Twenty Thousand Verses

  The streets around McGill University were named for august British men—Peel, Stanley, McTavish—its buildings constructed by solid, stony Scotsmen in solid Scottish stone. There was an Oxbridge air to the grand library and the grander Arts Building, on whose dome the McGill flag flew at half-mast when one of their number died. The spacious quadrangle was outlined by tall, thin trees whose posture remained perfectly erect even when weighed down by heavy snow. Beyond the iron gates there were Victorian mansions, some converted into boardinghouses where students lived. Had someone told you the British Empire was run from McGill, you’d be forgiven for believing them; in September 1951, when Leonard started at McGill on his seventeenth birthday, it was the most perfect nineteenth-century city-within-a-city in North America.

  Three months earlier Leonard had graduated from Westmount High. Vox Ducum, the yearbook he had helped edit, contained two photos of him. One was a group shot in which the sixteen-year-old Leonard beamed from the center front row, above a caption that read, with unfamiliar familiarity, “Len Cohen, President of the Student Council.” The other, more formal photograph, which accompanied his yearbook entry, showed Leonard wearing a suit and a faraway look. As yearbook tradition dictated, Leonard’s entry opened with a stirring quote: “We cannot conquer fear yet we can yield to it in such a manner as to be greater than it.” It went on to list his pet aversion (“the coke machine”), hobby (“photography”), pastimes (“leading sing-songs at intermissions”) and ambition: “World Famous Orator.” Under “Prototype” Leonard summed himself up as “the little man who is always there.” It closed with an impressive list of his high school activities: presidency of the student council, a place on Vox Ducum’s publishing board, membership in the Menorah Club, the Art Club, the Current Events Club and the YMHA (Young Men’s Hebrew Association) and cheerleader.1 To all appearances this was a sixteen-year-old with a good deal of self-confidence, tempered with a large dollop of the requisite Canadian self-mockery. All in all, though, an achiever. It was only to be expected that the next step would be McGill, the foremost English-speaking university in the province.

  During his first year at McGill, Leonard studied general arts, moving on to math, commerce, political science and law. More accurately, according to his own report, he read, drank, played music and missed as many lectures as possible. Judging by his average grade on graduation—56.4 percent—this was not one of his customary understatements. Leonard performed underwhelmingly in his favorite subject, English literature, and did no better in French—a class he took, according to his friend and fellow student (now chancellor of McGill) Arnold Steinberg, “because both of us had heard it was an easy course to pass. I failed the course and Leonard’s French was certainly minimal. We never took it seriously.” The curriculum offered no Baudelaire or Rimbaud; instead they spent the whole year studying a book about a young, aristocratic White Russian couple who had been forced to move to Paris after the revolution and work as servants for a French family. Written by the French dramatist Jacques Deval, it was titled Tovarich—the original name of Leonard’s Scottish terrier Tinkie.*

  This insensitivity to the language of half their hometown’s population was by no means exclusive to Leonard and his friends. Montreal’s Anglophones—particularly residents of a privileged enclave like Westmount, of which McGill was a privileged extension—had few dealings with the Francophone population other than the French-Canadian girls who had started pouring into the city from the countryside in the thirties, during the Great Depression, to get work as maids. The general attitude to bilingualism at that time was not a lot different, if less deity-specific, from that of the first female governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson: “If the English language was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for everybody.” To English-speaking Montrealers of that time, French would have felt as much a foreign language as it did to any English schoolchild, and likewise would have been taught by an English-speaking teacher, because French-speaking teachers couldn’t work in English-speaking schools (and vice versa).

  “The French were invisible,” says Mort Rosengarten. “At that time we had two school boards in Montreal, the Catholic, which was Francophone, and the Protestant, which was Anglophone, and the Jews—who had their own school board at one point—decided to throw in their lot with the Protestants. Not only were they in different schools, they had different school hours, so the kids were never on the street at the same time, so you never really had contact with them. It was very strange.” Mort had already been at McGill for a year, studying art, and Steinberg studying commerce, when Leonard arrived. Where Leonard excelled at university, as he had at Westmount High, was in extracurricular activities. Like a trainee Grandfather Lyon he amassed committee positions, society memberships and presidencies.

  Along with his fellow McGill students, Leonard was enrolled automatically in the Debating Union. He shone in debate. He had a natural flair, as well as a taste, for using language with precision. He took easily to composing a statement that might or might not reflect his innermost thoughts but that, with his poet’s ear, sounded convincing, or at the very least good, and could win over an audience. For a shy young man Leonard had no trouble getting onstage and talking in front of people; oration was the one subject at McGill for which he was awarded an A. In his first year at McGill Leonard won the Bovey Shield for his university’s debating team; in the second year he was elected the Debating Union’s secretary; in the third he rose to vice president and in his fourth and final year, president.

  Leonard and Mort joined a Jewish fraternity house on the campus, Zeta Beta Tau, and Leonard became president of that too, and a good deal more swiftly. A certificate confirms his election date as January 31, 1952, only four months after his first day at McGill.2 Like the other fraternities, ZBT had its own songbook—celebratory marching songs of the type improved by alcohol—and Leonard knew the words to all of them. Fraternities and presidencies might appear surprisingly pro-establishment for a youth who had shown himself to have Socialist tendencies and a poetic inclination, but Leonard, as Arnold Steinberg notes, “is not antiestablishment and never was, except that he has never done what the establishment does. But that doesn’t make him antiestablishment. Leonard, of all the people I knew, was the most formal by far. Not formal vis-à-vis other people; he had a very winning way, very, very charming. But in his manners, his dress, his way of speaking, he had a very conventional approach to things.”

  Leonard’s summer camp reports had described him as clean, tidy and polite, and he was. “That’s how we were brought up,” says David Cohen, Leonard’s cousin. “We were always taught to be well mannered and say ‘yes, sir,’ ‘thank you,’ stand up when an adult came into the room and all that good stuff.” As to his sartorial formality, Leonard had a reputation even then for being dressed to the nines (although, master of understatement that he was, he would have insisted he was dressed to the eights). Mort shared Leonard’s love for a good suit. Both having families in the clothing business, they could indulge their tastes.

  “We would design our own clothes in our teens and they were very distinctive,” says Rosengarten, “and generally more conservative than the popular fashions at the time. I had access to a custom tailor who would make them according to my idea of what the suit should be and Leonard told them what he want
ed. I even had my shirts made, but mostly because I had a very thin neck and couldn’t get adult shirts in my size.” David Cohen recalls seeing Mort hanging out in the pool room at the student union, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, the sleeves of his made-to-measure shirt held up with armbands. “In some ways,” Rosengarten continues, “the conformist part of the Westmount Jewish community were very hostile to the fact that we were artists and not conforming and doing the right things—but we always had a good suit. And Leonard was always impeccably dressed.”

  Leonard’s unconventionality showed in other ways, Steinberg says. “He was always writing and drawing, even in his teens, and he never went anywhere without a notepad. He would draw sketches endlessly, but mostly he wrote. He would have ideas and he wrote them down, and he would write poems. Writing was his passion and so much a part of him. I remember sitting next to him in the French class on one of those double desk benches and there was an English woman named Shirley who we thought was the most beautiful girl. He was madly in love with this Shirley and he would write poems in class inspired by her.”

  Girls and writing tied for top place in Leonard’s teenage preoccupations, and in each of these areas his performance showed marked improvement over Westmount High. One more markedly than the other: love was not yet the victory march he described in The Favorite Game, his alter ego walking home, exultant, from his first lover’s arms, eager to brag about his conquest, piqued that the citizenry of Westmount hadn’t risen from their beds to organize a ticker-tape parade. But this was the early fifties, a time when underwear white as a picket fence came up to the chest, where they met brassieres as impenetrable as fortresses. A boy’s options were limited. “You could eventually hold a girl’s hand,” said Leonard. “Sometimes she would let you kiss her.” Anything more was “forbidden.”3

  His writing had no such constraints and was quite promiscuous. Leonard wrote poems “all the time,” Rosengarten recalls, “in a kind of journal he always carried with him, and which once in a while he would lose or leave somewhere and the next day he would frantically try to find it, very upset, because there was all this work in there and he had no copies.” At home Leonard had started to use a manual typewriter, tapping away at the keys while his grandfather Rabbi Solomon Klonitzki-Kline wrote in the next room. Masha’s father had moved in for the year, and he and Leonard would often sit together of an evening, going through the Book of Isaiah, which the rabbi knew by heart and which Leonard came to love for its poetry, imagery and prophecy. More than anything though, Leonard loved sitting with the old man, who would express “solidarity and pleasure”4 that his grandson was a writer also.

  Despite his poor showing in English classes (he did far better in math), it was at McGill that Leonard really became a poet—indeed was knighted a poet in a spontaneous ceremony by Louis Dudek, the Polish-Canadian Catholic poet, essayist and publisher. Dudek taught the thrice-weekly literature course that Leonard took during his third year. The class of fifty would meet Monday, Wednesday and Friday at five P.M. in the Arts Building; the curriculum included Goethe, Schiller, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky, Proust, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

  Dudek’s agenda, as described by Ruth Wisse, one of Leonard’s fellow students and subsequently professor of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard, was to teach his students two important things: “The first was modern poetry and literature, which had evolved fully abroad but which had barely started in Canada, with small groups of poets having a limited audience. . . . The second program was the massive movement of European literature and thought since the eighteenth century, with its profound practical implications, which students’ minds had still to experience, like buckets of cold water thrown at them from a high lectern.” Leonard, she said, “was launched by the first.” Confident even then of his inclusion in this world of modern Canadian poets, he “did not treat his teacher with [Wisse’s] kind of deference but more like a colleague, on equal terms.”5 Leonard agreed. “Back then I was very self-confident. I had no doubts that my work would penetrate the world painlessly. I believed I was among the great.”6

  Lagging a little among Leonard’s interests and pursuits, though still firmly in the race, was music. Intriguingly, considering his propensity for joining societies, Leonard was not a member of the McGill Music Club (despite the presence on the committee of an attractive blonde named Ann Peacock, whose name could also be found among the editorial staff of The Forge, a literary magazine). But in 1952, between his first and second years, Leonard formed his first band with two university friends, Mike Doddman and Terry Davis. The Buckskin Boys was a country and western trio (Mort had not yet taken up the banjo or it might have been a quartet), which set about cornering the Montreal square-dance market.

  A square-dance band? What possessed you?

  “Square dances were popular at the time. We would be hired for high school square dances and church square dances—those being the social occasions that were affirmed and encouraged by the elders. There was really no slow dancing, not much touching, you just join arms and twist around for a while. Very decent. [A wry smile] And we all found out we had buckskin jackets—I had inherited mine from my father—so we called ourselves the Buckskin Boys.”

  The only Jewish country and western band in Montreal?

  “It was actually an eclectic religious group. Mike was a neighbor of mine who played harmonica and Terry, who was a friend of Mike’s, knew how to call the dances and played a bucket bass” (a washtub, rope and hockey stick). “We played the traditional songs, like ‘Red River Valley’ and ‘Turkey in the Straw.’ ”

  Were you any good?

  “We never thought we were very hot, we were just happy that people hired us. I think if I heard the music now I would probably appreciate it. But there was never any sense that this would have any future, that there was anything but the moment. No sense of a career involved at all. The word ‘career’ always had an unattractive and burdensome resonance in my heart. My idea mostly was to avoid participating in that activity called career, and I’ve been pretty much able to avoid it.”

  The band would practice at the Davis family house, in the basement playroom. “They always seemed to have a great time together, with a lot of friendly kibitzing going on,” remembers Dean Davis, the late Terry Davis’s brother; Dean ran the phonograph at their shows and acted as soundman. “I know my parents thought of Leonard as being very polite and a gentleman for his age. My mother always thought it was pretty funny that their trio consisted of a Protestant, a Jew and a Catholic.” Recalls Janet Davis, Terry’s widow, “If she was giving them dinner, which happened to be pork on a Friday, she would say it was lamb if they asked.”

  Leonard also played in a second band, this time all Jewish, part of McGill’s Jewish student society, Hillel. They provided the music for a play whose crew included Freda Guttman and Yafa “Bunny” Lerner, two of Leonard’s college-years girlfriends. Mostly, though, he played guitar—alone, in the quadrangle, at the frat house, or anywhere there was a party. It wasn’t a performance; it was just something he did. Leonard with a guitar was as familiar a sight as Leonard with a notebook. Melvin Heft, who was at several of those teenage parties, says, “After a while, when he thought the mood was right, Leonard would take out his guitar and play songs and sing to us. He was not a braggart or trying to be a big shot—‘I’m going to sing to you’—he just did it, no fuss at all; it was a natural thing for him. He was always there, singing. He was enjoying it and so were we.”

  On weekends the action might move to Mort’s house in the Townships—half a dozen students piling into one car and heading for the countryside. Mort’s parents weren’t there and the place would be empty, except for a man who worked on the property and a woman who acted as concierge, neither of whom was in any position to stop their partying. The crowd might include Leonard; Arnold Steinberg; sometimes Yafa and
Freda; Marvin Schulman, one of the first of their set to be openly gay; and Robert Hershorn, a close friend of Leonard’s who came from an even wealthier family. They would sit around drinking and talking. When it got dark they would drive to the Ripplecove Inn on Ayer’s Cliff, above Lake Massawippi, and drink and talk some more. At closing time they would go back to the house and put a record on the phonograph or play music themselves—Leonard on guitar, running through the folk songs he had learned at the Socialist camp or the pop songs he had absorbed from the jukeboxes of Saint Catherine Street.

  “We used to listen to music a lot,” says Rosengarten, “and Leonard, even before he started to write his own stuff, was relentless. He would play a song, whether it was ‘Home on the Range’ or whatever, over and over and over all day, play it on his guitar and sing it. When he was learning a song he would play it thousands of times, all day, for days and days and weeks, the same song, over and over, fast and slow, faster, this and that. It would drive you crazy. It was the same when he started to write his own stuff. He still works that way. It still takes him four years to write a lyric because he’s written twenty thousand verses or something.”