I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen

by Sylvie Simmons

  his heart half-rotted

  and his throat dry with regret . . .

  but my uncles prophesied wildly

  promising life like frantic oracles;

  and they only stopped in the morning

  after he had died

  and I had begun to shout.

  The themes and content of much of the poetry would feel perfectly familiar to those who would come to know Leonard as a singer-songwriter. There are poems—some of them titled, in Lorcan fashion, “Song” or “Ballad”—about religion, myth, sex, inhumanity, humor, love, murder, sacrifice, Nazis and Jesus on the cross. There are echoes of Joan of Arc and the Holocaust in “Lovers,” where a man has erotic feelings for a woman who is being led to the flames. Several poems contain naked women and wounded men, the two conditions not unrelated. In “Letter,” a poet armed with only his pen and his indifference claims victory over the femme fatale fellating him:

  I write this only to rob you

  that when one morning my head

  hangs dropping with the other generals

  from your house gate

  that all this was anticipated

  and so you will know that it meant nothing to me

  The poems have a sense of timelessness, or of multilayered time. Ancient wrongs are juxtaposed with modern-day atrocities, and archaic language—courtly, biblical, Romantic—with contemporary irony. Leonard employs both the traditional poetic form and prose poetry. Like a twentieth-century troubadour, or a nineteenth-century Romantic, he places his own inner experiences and feelings at the center—often feelings of failure and despair. The epigraph comes from William Faulkner’s novel The Bear and refers to a comment a young man makes during a conversation on the meaning of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “He had to talk about something.” As Leonard explained later, when a writer “has some urgency to speak,” the subject matter of what he writes “becomes almost irrelevant.”2 Leonard had that urgency.

  The original print run for Let Us Compare Mythologies was around four hundred copies. Ruth Wisse, Leonard’s fellow student in Louis Dudek’s class and editor of the McGill Daily, took on the role of head of Leonard’s sales team and sold half that number on campus. The book received a handful of reviews in Canada, largely positive. Queen’s Quarterly called it “a brilliant beginning.”3 The Canadian Forum’s critic Milton Wilson wrote, “He knows how to turn a phrase, his poems at their best have a clean, uncluttered line, and he writes ‘about something.’ ”4 Fiddlehead’s Allan Donaldson found Leonard’s virtues “considerable” but had problems with what he described as Leonard’s greatest weakness, “an overuse of images of sex and violence, so that at its worst his work becomes a sort of poetic reductio ad absurdum of the Folies Bergères and of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horror. It was, I believe, Mr. Harry Truman who remarked of the Folies Bergères that there was nothing duller than the protracted spectacle of a large number of bare breasts.”5 Leonard and Truman would have disagreed. The criticism appeared to be less about the quality of the work and more a reflection of the conservatism and puritanism of Canadian literature, against which Irving Layton had so loudly raged. Leonard’s book contained a poem to Layton, titled “To I.P.L.,” in which he described his friend affectionately as

  . . . depraved

  hanging around street corners

  entertaining hags in public places.

  “I felt that what I wrote was beautiful and that beauty was the passport of all ideas,” Leonard would say in 1991. “I thought that the objective, open-minded reader would understand that the juxtaposition of spirituality and sexuality justified itself entirely. I felt that it was that juxtaposition that created that particular beauty, that lyricism.”6 Later still, on the publication in 2006 of a fiftieth-anniversary facsimile edition, Leonard said, “There are some really good poems in that little book; it’s been downhill ever since.”7 The coda might well be one of his familiar self-effacing tics—it is hard to argue that Leonard has not produced better work since. But there was something in this first book that Leonard would often, subsequently, seem to long for—the innocence, the confidence, the prolificacy and hunger of his youthful self.

  Let Us Compare Mythologies won Leonard the McGill Literary Award. It also brought him attention from the Canadian media. The Canadian Broadcasting Company invited him to participate in a project titled Six Montreal Poets, a spoken-word album. The other five were Irving Layton, Louis Dudek, A. M. Klein, A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott, the leading members of the so-called Montreal Group—prestigious company for a new, young writer. The album, studio-recorded, was produced by Sam Gesser, a folklorist and impresario who founded and ran the Canadian division of the American label Folkways and promoted Pete Seeger’s and the Weavers’ first Montreal shows. Leonard made his first-ever appearance on record on side one, between Smith and Layton, reading eight poems from Let Us Compare Mythologies: “For Wilf and His House,” “Beside the Shepherd,” “Poem,” “Lovers,” “The Sparrows,” “Warning,” “Les Vieux” and “Elegy.” Listening to it today, Leonard’s voice sounds high and forced, somewhat British. The last of these he blamed on “the influence in the [Canadian] universities” during that period. “That accent was meant to dignify the poem. The declamative style that the Beats introduced hadn’t quite gotten there yet.”8

  It had, however, gotten to New York. In 1956, the same year that Leonard published Let Us Compare Mythologies, Allen Ginsberg, an American Jew and Columbia University graduate, published his visceral, personal poetry book Howl. In 1957, the same year that Six Montreal Poets was released in the U.S. on the Folkways label, Jack Kerouac, an American Catholic of Quebec ancestry who had gone to Columbia on a football scholarship, published his landmark autobiographical novel On the Road. These two books were sacred texts of the Beats, a literary movement dedicated to personal liberty, truth and self-expression and influenced by bebop jazz, Buddhism and experiments with drugs and sex. The Beats were hard-core. Howl had been banned for obscenity, before a celebrated court case put it back on the shelves, and Kerouac had conducted a private, backyard ceremony before sending out his first manuscript, in which he dug a hole, inserted his penis and mated with the earth. Though it was not quite the same as Leonard’s interment of his first piece of writing in his father’s bow tie, Leonard felt a kinship. In December 1957, when Kerouac made an appearance at the Village Vanguard in New York—a bohemian Greenwich Village speakeasy turned jazz club—Leonard was there. Kerouac, extremely drunk—he found drinking helped with his shyness—read to the accompaniment of jazz musicians. Leonard, who was also shy, and who claimed to have “never really liked poetry readings; I like to read poetry by myself,”9 was impressed. If poems were to be delivered publicly, this was a fine way to do it.

  Leonard liked the Beats. They did not return the sentiment. “I was writing very rhymed, polished verses and they were in open revolt against that kind of form, which they associated with the oppressive literary establishment. I felt close to those guys, and I later bumped into them here and there, although I can’t describe myself remotely as part of that circle.”10 Neither did he have any desire to join it. “I thought that our little group in Montreal was wilder and freer and that we were on the right track, and we, in our provincial self-righteousness, felt that they were not on the right track and that they were getting some kind of free ride, that they weren’t honoring the tradition as we felt we were.”11

  It is interesting that someone who in high school and university had seemed keen to sign up for, even lead, any number of groups should choose not to join this particular club at such a pivotal moment for poetry. In the fifties, the Beats made poets the counterculture spokesmen, the rock stars, if you like, of their generation. It’s interesting too that although Leonard was younger than Ginsberg and Kerouac, they viewed him as part of the old guard. In the sixties, when rock stars would become the counterculture spokesmen and
poets of their generation, Leonard would once again be considered old—if with better reason this time; he was in his thirties when he made his first album—and would feel himself to be an outsider.

  Leonard did not appear at all troubled at his outsider status. In fact, a certain sense of isolation seems to have set in toward the end of his years at McGill and his first term at Columbia University, which seemed to coincide with Leonard’s first bouts of serious depression. “What I mean by depression isn’t just the blues, it’s not just like a hangover from the weekend, the girl didn’t show up or something like that,” said Leonard, describing the paralyzing darkness and anxiety he experienced. “It’s a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next.”12 Leonard took to spending “a lot of time alone. Dying,” he said. “Letting myself slowly die.”13

  Leonard’s first address in New York was International House, at 500 Riverside Drive, where Columbia billeted its foreign students. It was on the Upper West Side, a stone’s throw from the Hudson River. At nights Leonard would head downtown, much as he had done in Montreal, and seek out the city’s netherworlds, of which New York had many. Greenwich Village was a particular draw. Leonard’s days were not devoted to studying; at Columbia, as at McGill, Leonard was not much interested in academic study. He was less interested in reading than in writing himself—or writing about himself, as he did when one professor, knowing when he was beaten, allowed Leonard to submit a term paper on Let Us Compare Mythologies.

  In his room, sitting at the table by the window from which he could watch the sunset turn the gray river gold, he wrote a number of poems and short stories. One story, “The Shaving Ritual,”14 was inspired by a piece of advice his mother had given him. Whenever things got bad, she said, he should stop what he was doing and have a shave, and he would feel better. It was counsel he found himself taking often, as the episodes of depression increased.

  Leonard had gone to New York to be a writer—a serious writer, but also a popular writer. Even at this early stage, when the Canadian literary world was starting to talk about him as Canada’s best young poet, he wanted his work to be read and liked by more than just Canadian literati, the small group that Irving Layton used to refer to as the “Canuckie Schmuckies.” Enrolling at Columbia had really been a cover, something to keep Leonard’s family happy. Going to America to do postgraduate studies at a renowned university was an acceptable activity for a young man from a conservative, upper-middle-class Montreal Jewish background; going to America to become a writer, not so much. Mort Rosengarten explains, “It was not, and still is not, encouraged by that community. They don’t want their children becoming artists. They’re very hostile to it. They don’t want to know about themselves. But Leonard got away with it.”

  How Leonard got away with it had a lot to do with having lost his father when he was nine years old. “I never had to come up against that powerful male influence that a young man meets as he grows older,”15 he says. The powerful influence in his childhood was female, his mother, who was “a generous Chekhovian spirit, very accepting in her way. She was alarmed when she saw me running around Montreal with a guitar under my arm, but she was very kind in her observations. She would occasionally roll her eyes, but that was about as far as it went.”16 His uncles would step in now and then with “indications and suggestions and advice and lunches held, but very subtly. Considering the tales one hears of the tyrannies of family, mine was very gentle in that respect.”17 Nevertheless, the other big reason for going to New York was to get away from Montreal, to put space between himself and the life his upper-class Montreal Jewish background mapped out for him: from Westmount to McGill, then on to studying law or commerce, and finally taking his place in the family business.

  Leonard was writing in New York, but he was also floundering. After the euphoria of his first publication and the attention it brought him in Canada, now he was in a place where no one knew who he was, and if they did, they wouldn’t have cared. For New Yorkers, Canadian literature was a dot on the cultural map barely visible to the naked eye. As a means of making contact with fellow writers—and having some status among them—Leonard founded a literary magazine, The Phoenix, but it was short-lived. Leonard was lonely. He missed his old crowd in Montreal; he really did believe that they were special. “Each time we met we felt that it was a landmark in the history of thinking. There was a great deal of fellowship and drinking. Montreal is tiny, it’s a French city and the number of people writing in English is small; it didn’t have any prestige prizes at the time, not even any girls. But a few of us were on fire and we would write for each other or any girl that would listen.”18

  And then, in New York, Leonard met a girl. Her name was Georgianna Sherman; Leonard called her Anne, or Annie. A year and a half older than Leonard, she had already been married once, briefly, at a very young age and was now working as the program coordinator at International House. Sherman was tall and very attractive, with long, dark hair, soulful eyes and a modulated, aristocratic voice. She came from a patrician New England family; her grandmother was a Daughter of the American Revolution. “Irving and I had heard so much from Leonard about this Annie and how beautiful she was,” says Aviva Layton, “that she almost became a legend in our minds before we met her. But she really was exquisite, a beautiful soul, from very, very good American blood. She was an extremely cultivated young woman—great cook, wrote poetry, played piano—and here was this little Montreal Jew, Leonard. She had never met anyone like him before and he’d never met anyone like her, and they just fell for each other.” Leonard moved into Sherman’s upper Manhattan apartment.

  “Annie was very, very important in Leonard’s life at that time,” says Aviva. “It was when he was just starting out on the enterprise of being a writer and he had moved to New York—this at a time when Canadians weren’t crossing the border and going to the U.S. to make their careers—and Annie was in the thick of things in New York. She introduced him to a lot of people. And Leonard began to see that there was a whole other world outside of the world of Montreal.”

  In the summer of 1957, Leonard took Annie to Quebec to show her off to the Laytons, who had rented a summer cottage in the Laurentians. “Leonard and Annie would follow us, then find a lake and pitch an ordinary little tent and that was where they would stay. They would read to one another—they’d brought along lots and lots of poetry—and Leonard would play his guitar. They would go to bed when the sun went to bed and get up in the morning with the sun. Sometimes they’d row across the lake to us and spend a couple of days in our cottage. Annie was Leonard’s first great love.” She was also a muse, inspiring the poem “For Anne,” in The Spice-Box of Earth, and the character Shell, the lover, in The Favorite Game.

  The relationship did not last. It was Leonard who left; it had started to head down another path Leonard was keen to avoid in his life, which was marriage. As he wrote in The Favorite Game, “Supposing he went along with her toward living intimacy, toward comforting, incessant married talk. Wasn’t he abandoning something more austere and ideal, even though he laughed at it, something which could apply her beauty to streets, traffic, mountains, ignite the landscape—which he could master if he were alone?” In other words, he had work to do, man’s work. However much a woman’s love might ease the loneliness and darkness, still it disturbed him, “as generals get uneasy during a protracted peace.” The breakup was painful for Annie. It was for Leonard too. Being the one to end it did not mean that he did not miss her terribly. Years later, as he sat at a wooden table in a white house on a hill on a Greek island, staring out at the solid blue sky, he would write her letters, asking her to come and join him there. When she declined, he wrote her poems.

  With Annie gone

  Whose eyes to compare

  With the morning sun?

  Not that I did compare,

  But I do compare

  Now that she’s gone.
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  “For Anne,” SELECTED POEMS 1958–1968

  Annie went on to marry Count Orsini, the owner of Orsini’s, the famous New York restaurant. In 2004 she published a book, An Imperfect Lover: Poems and Watercolors. In the poem “How I Came to Build the Bomb,” she describes falling in love with “a wandering Jew” and learning that for “a traveling man, love / was a burden he couldn’t take on.”19

  Having spent one year in New York, Leonard moved back to Montreal and into 599 Belmont Avenue. So did his grandfather Rabbi Klonitzki-Kline. The old man was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease; once again Masha became the caregiver. To a fly on the wall it might have looked much like the old days—Masha in the kitchen, making food; Leonard tapping away on a manual typewriter; the old man poring over the dictionary he was trying to write from memory, and all the while his memory was disintegrating.

  Leonard was working on a novel titled A Ballet of Lepers. It opened with: “My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain.”20 It was a depressing way to begin a book, and Leonard acknowledged this: “But I must not be too gloomy at the beginning or you will leave me, and that, I suppose, is what I dread most.” After putting the novel through several drafts, Leonard sent it out to publishers in Canada. For a while it looked as if Ace Books might take it, but in the end, along with all the other publishers, they turned it down. A Ballet of Lepers was not, as some have thought, an early version of The Favorite Game. In Leonard’s view it was “probably a better novel. But it never saw the light.”21 Leonard filed the manuscript away.

  The rejection did not stop Leonard from writing. He continued to take a notebook with him everywhere. His friend from McGill Arnold Steinberg recalls, “Of all the things about Leonard, the first thing that comes to mind was he was constantly, constantly writing—writing and sketching. One always sensed that there was an inner need—pushing out words and pictures, never ending, like a motor running.” Phil Cohen, a Montreal jazz musician and music professor, remembers seeing Leonard sitting, writing at a table in the corner of a drugstore at the intersection of Sherbrooke and Côte-des-Neiges. “I’m guessing it was just a place where nobody knew him and he could sit and do what he wanted. A couple of times he looked up, and he looked like he was totally out of it—not drugged, just in a totally different world, he was so into what he was doing. From my experience of working with a lot of performers, there was this sense of almost desperation that I picked up from the look on his face that said, ‘Don’t disturb me.’ I said to myself, ‘This guy is very serious.’ ”