Sometimes the crowd would assemble at Leonard’s family home on Belmont Avenue, although on these occasions his family would be there. Esther would drift in and out—mostly out; her little brother and his friends did not hold much interest—but Masha would preside over everything, making a fuss, making food, entertaining. “His mother was a dramatic lady,” says Rosengarten. “She was Russian, and she could be very, very dramatically unhappy about something and then burst into laughter and send it all up. Sometimes we would be going downtown at about nine o’clock in the evening and Masha would have a fit and say that it was no time to be going out and get all upset, but other times, when we would leave a bar with eight friends at three in the morning and go to her house and start carrying on, and she would come downstairs and greet everyone and offer them food, totally at ease with it; there was no telling how she was going to react.” Steinberg concurs: “Masha was very volatile, but everybody loved her because she was basically a lovely, warmhearted person and she adored Leonard. I don’t think she mixed much with the other mothers, so she hadn’t picked up the worrisome habits, and so it seemed to me that Leonard was very free. It was always fun just dropping in. I would sit there and listen and Leonard would play his guitar. He never thought of himself as a good musician or performer, but he was always playing, and always learning to play the guitar.”
From the midfifties, the guests at Leonard’s parties were starting to include poets and writers, older men, often teachers from McGill. “There were no barriers, no master/student relationships,” Leonard said. “They liked our girlfriends.”7 Among the most influential of these teachers were Louis Dudek; Frank (“F. R.”) Scott, McGill’s dean of law, a poet and a Socialist; and Hugh MacLennan, author of the celebrated 1945 book Two Solitudes, an allegory of the irreconcilable differences between Canada’s French- and English-speaking populations. MacLennan joined McGill the same year as Leonard, who took his classes in the modern novel and creative writing. But the man who would prove the most crucial was an assistant political science teacher, a poet whom Leonard met in 1954 after inviting him to read from his new work, The Long Pea-Shooter, at the fraternity house. “There was Irving Layton and then there was the rest of us,” Leonard would say almost a lifetime later. “He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry.”8 Irving Layton would have readily agreed, and added even more laudatory adjectives of his own. Layton was larger, and louder, than life, a bullish man who looked like he’d been hewn from the same Scottish stone as McGill, only with less attention to detail. Layton was a hothead; his eyes blazed, there was an inner fire. Leonard, as did a succession of extraordinary women, loved him.
A dating agency would have been very unlikely to have introduced these two as potential life mates. Twenty-two years Leonard’s senior, Layton’s brazen, iconoclastic, self-promoting style could hardly be more different from Leonard’s modest, self-effacing demeanor. Layton, with his wild mane of hair and disheveled clothes, looked like he had stepped out of a hurricane; Leonard looked like his clothes had been sewn on him every morning by a team of personal tailors. Layton was proudly belligerent; Leonard, despite a long attraction to machismo, wasn’t. Layton had fought in the Canadian Army, attaining the rank of lieutenant, the same as Leonard’s father; Leonard as a young child had hoped to go to military school, but that dream had died with his father. Still, Leonard had his father’s gun; his mother had argued with him about it, but in the end, Leonard won. Then there was the class difference. Layton was born in a small town in Romania in 1912 (his name was Israel Lazarovitch before his family emigrated to Canada) and raised in Saint-Urbain, Montreal’s working-class, Jewish immigrant neighborhood. Leonard’s upper-class Westmount background was at the opposite end of the Jewish social spectrum. What they had in common was a love of honesty, a taste for irony and a skill in the art of debate (in 1957, Layton appeared in a nationally televised debating series called Fighting Words, which he invariably won).
Layton openly despised bourgeois Canada and its puritanism, and so did Leonard, if more covertly—as befitted a man who considered his own family bourgeois—such as when he worked behind the scenes to overturn the rule banning women and alcohol from students’ rooms at his fraternity house. Layton was powerfully sexual—which Leonard liked to think he was too, or might be, given half the chance—and so was Layton’s poetry: flagrant, unabashed, happy to provide names and details. Layton was passionate about poetry and the beauty and melody of the word—as was Leonard. Layton had become a poet, he said, “to make music out of words.” But he also wanted his poetry “to change the world,” to which the idealist in Leonard related strongly.
As Rosengarten explains it, “The [Second World] War had been a very important factor on our sensibility; people you knew were going off and getting killed, and there was a possibility that we would lose the war and the Nazis would take over America or Canada. But the other thing was that, while this was going on, the word was that if we did win the war, because of the great sacrifice everybody had made, the world was going to become this wonderful utopian place, with all this collective energy that had been dissipated in the war directed toward its creation. I think for us it was somewhat disillusioning that, at the end of the war, the first thing they did was kind of repudiate the collective aspect of the society and maintain this idea that it was really good for business to produce things instead, and sell people products as substitutes for this collective spirit. And the enormous numbers of women who worked and did things during the war that were considered unfit for women were packed up after the war and sent back to the kitchen. Leonard and I, these were things we were shockingly aware of.” That sense of a lost Eden, of something beautiful that did not work out or could not last, would be detectable in a good deal of Leonard’s work.
“There was a very interesting poetry scene in Montreal,” says Rosengarten, “and it was centered around Irving Layton and Louis Dudek, who were good friends at the time.” (They fell out later; their feuds over poetry became famous.) “There were lots of parties where they would read, many of them at Irving’s house in Côte-Saint-Luc,” west of Montreal. It is a large suburb today, with a street named after Layton, but in the fifties the farmhouse in which Irving lived with his wife and two children stood alone, surrounded by farmland. “At these parties people would read their poems to one another and discuss them and criticize stuff; it was pretty intense, and it would go sometimes most of the way through the night. There were many times when Leonard and I might quit the bars downtown at three in the morning and go over there to Irving’s, and there the scene would be going on. Leonard would show his poems at these parties. They took it seriously. They had a little magazine they mimeographed, two hundred and fifty copies, called CIV/n, because at that time the bookstores didn’t carry Canadian poets, you couldn’t buy a book with any of that contemporary poetry in a bookstore in Montreal; it was pretty grim. But, looking back on it, I realize now that that poetry scene had more influence on me in terms of aesthetics than all the art schools I attended in England with all these people who became important sculptors. I think the gang in Côte-Saint-Luc were way ahead of all of them.”
“We really wanted to be great poets,” said Leonard. “We thought every time we met it was a summit conference. We thought it was terribly important what we were doing.”9 He looked on these evenings as a kind of poetry boot camp, where “training was intense, rigorous, and taken very seriously.” Leonard would always have an attraction to such regimens. “But the atmosphere was friendly. Once in a while there were tears, someone would leave in a rage, we would argue, but interest in the art of writing was at the center of our friendship.” He considered it an apprenticeship and he was an enthusiastic learner. “Irving and I used to spend a lot of evenings studying poems by someone like Wallace Stevens. We would study the poem until we discovered the code, until we knew exactly what the author was trying to say and how he did it. That was our life; our life was poetry.”10 Layton bec
ame, if not Leonard’s life coach, then his guide, his cheerleader and one of his dearest friends.
In March 1954 in the fifth issue of CIV/n Leonard made his debut as a published poet. Alongside poems by Layton and Dudek (who were on the editorial board) and others of the Montreal poetry scene were three works credited to Leonard Norman Cohen: “Le Vieux,” “Folk Song” and “Satan in Westmount,” the last of the three about a devil who quoted Dante and “sang fragments of austere Spanish songs.”* The following year Leonard won first prize in McGill’s Chester Macnaghten Literary Competition with his poems “Sparrows” and the four-part Thoughts of a Landsman, which included “For Wilf and His House,” a poem that was published in 1955 in The Forge. A remarkably mature work, erudite and moving, it began,
When young the Christians told me
how we pinned Jesus
like a lovely butterfly against the wood
and I wept beside paintings of Calvary
at velvet wounds
and delicate twisted feet
and ended,
Then let us compare mythologies.
I have learned my elaborate lie
of soaring crosses and poisoned thorns
and how my fathers nailed him
like a bat against a barn
to greet the autumn and late hungry ravens
as a hollow yellow sign.
Layton had started taking Leonard with him to his book readings, where Leonard reveled in his friend’s showmanship, his grand gestures and braggadocio, and the passion that his performance induced in the audience, the women in particular. In the summer of ’55 Layton brought Leonard along to the Canadian Writers Conference in Kingston, Ontario, and invited Leonard onstage, where Leonard read his own work and played a little guitar.
The guitar had done nothing to hurt Leonard’s success with women—and he could offer them hospitality now that he and Mort had taken a room on Stanley Street. “We weren’t really living there, we were just hanging out there, we’d have friends over,” said Rosengarten of the old-fashioned double parlor in a Victorian boardinghouse. Leonard’s mother was not well pleased at this development, but she found it hard not to indulge him. Their relationship appeared to be very involved, even beyond the usual mother-son attachment, let alone an archetypal Jewish mother and son—and Masha, according to no less an authority on Jewishness than Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat at Shaar Hashomayim, was “very Jewish.” When Nathan died, Leonard became the object of her indulgence, castigation and utter devotion. She was a vital, passionate woman, with an infirm husband, something of an outsider in Westmount circles, so it was hardly surprising that her only son, her youngest child, became her focus.
Leonard loved his mother. If she smothered him, he smiled or made wisecracks. He learned to shrug off emotional blackmail and her insistence on feeding him and his friends at all hours of the day and night. “My mother taught me well never to be cruel to women,” Leonard wrote in an unpublished piece from the seventies. But what he also learned from Masha was to count on the devotion, support and nurturing of women and, if and when it became too intense, to have permission to leave—if not always completely, and rarely without conflicting emotions.
Aviva Layton, née Cantor, is a vivacious blond Australian, sharp as a pin. She was raised in a “small, stifling, middle-class Jewish community” in Sydney that she couldn’t wait to leave, and the minute she turned twenty-one she did. She wanted to go to New York. When they wouldn’t let her in, she went to Montreal. Friends had given her the name of someone to call, Fred Cogswell, the poet and editor of the Canadian literary magazine Fiddlehead. Cogswell, it turned out, lived in Nova Scotia, some eight hundred miles distant. “But,” she says, “he told me there was a whole covey of Montreal poets that I should look up,” and he gave her the names of half a dozen of them, including Dudek, Scott and Layton. The first person she called was Layton—“I wasn’t going to look up anyone whose name sounded vaguely Jewish”—who invited her to come to the house in Côte-Saint-Luc where he lived with his second wife, the artist Betty Sutherland, and their children.
Aviva arrived to find he had company. “All the big names in Canadian literature were there,” including those on Cogswell’s list—“except they weren’t big names then, they were a small fringe group. I thought, ‘This is marvelous.’ ” She intended to become part of the group. This intention was thwarted when, soon afterward, she and Irving began an affair. It would last twenty years and produce a son, but its more immediate result was to cut her off from everyone. “I couldn’t go back to his house. This was the fifties, and you had to be very careful about scandal; Irving was teaching in a parochial school and he could easily have lost his job. So I lived in Montreal mostly in isolation, with Irving coming to visit me two or three times a week. The only person Irving ever trusted to know about us was Leonard, and he brought him to my small, basement apartment.
“Irving was in his forties then, twenty-one years older than me, and Leonard was twenty, one year younger than me. I can see myself opening the door to that apartment and there was Leonard on the other side, looking very young, slightly chubby, but there was something absolutely special about him. Irving had said, ‘Somebody called Leonard Cohen is going to come and have coffee with us and he is the real thing.’ I’ll never forget him saying that—and with Irving ‘the real thing’ meant he’s a real poet. And this was late in 1955; Let Us Compare Mythologies was about to come out.”
The three met up at Aviva’s apartment on a regular basis. In spite of the large age difference between Leonard and Layton—Layton was old enough to be his father—they behaved, Aviva says, “like equals. A lot of people say Leonard was Irving’s student—some think he was his actual, literal student, which is absolutely incorrect—or that Irving was his mentor. No. Leonard thought, and still does, that Irving was the great writer and poet and man in his life, as well as friend, but I would not say that Leonard was the junior partner in that enterprise.”
Leonard, Layton said, “was a genius from the first moment I saw him. I have nothing to teach him. I have doors to open, which I did—the doors of sexual expression, of freedom of expression and so on and so forth. Once the doors were opened, Leonard marched very confidently along a path . . . somewhat different from my own.”11 Says Aviva, “Leonard famously said that Irving taught him how to write poetry and he taught Irving how to dress. I think Leonard wrote better poetry and Irving was a better dresser, but they taught each other things.” As to the class difference, she says, “That was interesting. Leonard came from the Bel Air of Montreal, absolutely exclusive, and Irving was born in the slums, but when Irving and I came to rent a house we went to as close to where Leonard had been brought up as possible, and when Leonard wanted to buy a house or rent or live, he came right back to Irving’s old part of town. Irving wanted to be where Leonard wanted to escape from, and Leonard wanted to be where Irving wanted to escape from.”
Irving would later say of Leonard that “he was able to find the sadness in Westmount. That takes genius. He was able to see that not all rich people, not all comfortable people, not all plutocrats, were happy.” Genius, Layton said, is “the ability—a very rare ability—to see things as they actually are. You are not fooled.”12 Leonard had taken Irving and Aviva to Belmont Avenue on several occasions. “He used to go there frequently and still had his room there and lived there I think in between places. One time when Masha wasn’t around we had a huge party, one of those mad parties you had in those days, and somebody vomited on her damask, heavy curtains. The place was an absolute shambles. I remember going in the kitchen with Leonard and he would open up the kitchen drawers and show us that Masha would keep every paper clip and nail and little bit of string that had ever come through the front door.”*
When Aviva first met Leonard, he told her something, she says, “which he might not remember but which I remember absolutely clearly. He said he’d
been studying law at McGill, and that one day while he was studying, he looked into the mirror and it was blank. He couldn’t see his own reflection. And he knew then that the academic life in whatever form whatsoever was not for him.” The following year, armed with a BA degree; another literary award, the Peterson Memorial Prize; a cover line on the March 1956 edition of The Forge and, at the top of the pile, his first published volume of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University and left Montreal for Manhattan.
Four
I Had Begun to Shout
Let Us Compare Mythologies was published in May 1956. The slim hardback, containing forty-four poems written by Leonard between the ages of fifteen and twenty, was the inaugural release of a new imprint that aimed to introduce the public to new young writers of merit. It was funded by McGill University and edited by Louis Dudek. Leonard himself designed the book, which was illustrated by Freda Guttman, his artist girlfriend and the muse for several poems. Her mysterious pen-and-ink drawings are Edenic at times and at others tortured; the image on the front cover is of a cowed, misshapen human, who looks to be under attack from doves or miniature angels. On the back, in the author’s photograph, the twenty-one-year-old Leonard gazes unflinchingly at the camera. In spite of the sober expression, the stubble and those deep lines running from nose to mouth, he looks very young. In the poems, by contrast, he appears a much older man—not just the maturity and authority of his language and his command of poetic technique, but the “raging and weeping”1 of the kind that suggests a man who has lived long, seen much and lost something very precious. Leonard dedicated the book to the memory of Nathan Cohen. His father’s death is the subject of the poem “Rites”:
the family came to watch the eldest son,
my father; and stood about his bed
while he lay on a blood-sopped pillow
I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen Page 5